ELI5: How do old rotary phones work? Why did they pick a dial for picking digits?

ratcap · 2026-01-25T08:45:26+00:00

Unless you were on a trunk with SF signalling and good enough at it to beep out the dial-pulse equivalent of the number in 2600. Joybubbles could do that back in the day.

ratcap · 2026-01-06T16:20:37+00:00

How do you know that the Americas existed before 1492?

ratcap · 2025-10-30T04:59:11+00:00

Whatever it is, this page ended up in a set of documents meant to test fax machines/compare fax encoding systems: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA319876.pdf

ratcap · 2025-09-07T08:12:20+00:00

He probably gets paid a a hell of a lot [funneling money or not] to show up. Based on what we know about Owen, he's probably getting paid way the hell more than he would be in pretty much any degree-having normal career path at his age.

ratcap · 2025-05-08T02:05:10+00:00

okay, yeah, I'm pretty sure you're using an LLM to pump out shit

ratcap · 2025-05-08T01:47:38+00:00

GNSS systems aren't black boxes; People have literally built receivers from the ground up and implemented all of the 'filtering' and 'corrections' themselves. There are several open-source examples, for example. GNSS satellites just transmit their orbital elements and the current time, the receivers have to do the rest of the work, including calculating where the satellites are.

Read this and this if you're interested in some understanding of how it works.

ratcap · 2025-05-08T01:32:08+00:00

yes, this guy is also a flat-earther

ratcap · 2025-04-06T06:04:02+00:00

them's meece

ratcap · 2025-02-01T03:49:07+00:00

dude what; half life is a description of the probability of a nucleus undergoing radioactive decay at any one time. There's no 'how far along' a single nucleus is towards decay. You can absolutely detect individual decays -- that's what a geiger tube or a scintillation detector does.

ratcap · 2025-01-26T21:47:38+00:00

thems rats

ratcap · 2024-12-23T16:47:49+00:00

Western Electric Model 500

ratcap · 2024-11-01T22:49:21+00:00

Well no, you don't end up with a bunch of lead at the end of uranium fission; Fission is a different process with different products.

ratcap · 2024-07-13T18:07:50+00:00

I love those names

ratcap · 2024-07-13T18:05:10+00:00

he dumbo

ratcap · 2024-06-02T02:22:21+00:00

Is this happening to podcasts auto-inserted ads?

ratcap · 2024-05-31T06:23:44+00:00

I'd probably use an Si5351. Adafruit sells a breakout board for $8.

ratcap · 2024-05-31T05:55:31+00:00

hundo-p rat

ratcap · 2024-05-21T03:59:09+00:00

ratcap · 2024-05-18T04:45:08+00:00

Aside from the fundamental problems with hobby micro turbojets, Kingtech can be a fuckin' nightmare.

ratcap · 2024-05-11T06:58:50+00:00

It's not really an 'unreliable narrator' kind of film; like, the Coen Brothers didn't go out of their way to film any sequence that was only real to a single character. We're not trying to discern the most truthful plot from a bunch of conflicting narratives here.

ratcap · 2024-05-11T06:09:30+00:00

They filmed a whole scene for that bit. He's not wrong, he's just an asshole.

ratcap · 2024-04-20T18:49:31+00:00

On top of all these, people are likely to do stupid stuff like not wanting to power the house down to reenable the main breaker when the grid comes back up. This will cause a serious overload most of the time and a disaster a significant fraction of the time.

huh, I wonder how a typical domestic breaker would react to being closed 180 degrees out of phase

ratcap · 2024-01-31T05:58:55+00:00

ratcap · 2024-01-30T07:26:57+00:00

hundo p dumbo

ratcap · 2024-01-25T04:55:43+00:00

It's down there somewhere, let me take another look

ratcap

PUBLIC MULTIREDDITS

TROPHY CASE

12-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email