Cnidarians. (The sort of animals that includes jellyfish and sea anenomes and coral and such). Theyre so old that the first known predatory animal as far as I’m aware was one of them, and some of them still resemble those ancient versions to a significant degree. Even tho every time theres a mass extinction corals seem to be some of the first things to go, and jellyfish tend to be slow, stupid and not very good at controlling where they go, it somehow works out for them.
Wow, that was an evolutionary dark alley.
Basically the minimal assembly kit of a higher organism.
They need a skin bag to put all that stuff in, and cover it with some pretty scales or feathers or something.
Nah, it’s all modular. No size fits all.
Oxford University started sometime around the year 1100.
Japanese here, it is still crazy people need to bring a big wooden stemp around to sign government documents and contracts. and bringing physical documents around in a suitcase.
How else will I sign for packages in dog form?
Mail man just thinks im a good puppy.
A wooden stamp or is stemp something I’m unaware of?
It’s actually called a hanko! I think they’re pretty neat. You get a custom one that counts as your signature.
Kind of silly in he modern era, but also neat. Maybe they gotta start putting in security chips for like cryptographic signatures.
Speling. It’s spelled speling.
/s
Its \s, actually
*I’ts
I see nothing wrong with a giant wooden stamp.
Bring back melted wax letter seals too.
I made a wax seal last year so that I could be an extra bitch when sending letters to my friends.
I like sending people letters and postcards, because the added friction of the physical process makes it feel more meaningful. It’s almost got a ritual feel to it.
I recently learned that the TOSLINK (S/PDIF) optical ports with the little door that I’ve seen on every game console and AV receiver my whole life and never thought about or used is from 1983. The same port is now used for professional digital audio with a different protocol too.
Shoe horns. My 86 year old father in law still uses one and swears by it. Doesn’t put shoes without the assistance of the horn. I’ve seen it in action, and it seems to work? Even on some tied shoes!
I don’t own a shoe horn, but I use my finger to the same effect on tied shoes. I have one pair that I only tie every few weeks.
Next you’re surprised that hammers still exist?
Im in my 30s and use one daily. I dislike having to tie laces every day and i can slip my feet into my shoes (while perma-tied) like butter.
Yes the laces are slightly looser than a fresh re-tie but not uncomfortably so or slopping around when i walk.I wear faily flexible everyday shoes though, would not reccomend this technique with rigid leather dress shoes or work boots which need to be tied every time.
shoe horns are fucking awesome!
when you get old and it hurts to tie your shoes it’s nice to sit down and just “slip em on”.
I consider any home without a shoehorn to be uncivilized
I have one, I just don’t know where it is. Do I count as civilised?
What a weird take.
Well there was that brief period in time where everyone thought self lacing shoes were the future.
Trump.
“Your mom” jokes.
Also, your mom.
Joe is so old
What’s ligma?
How about dragon?
How about dragon.
Twinings Tea has been in business since 1706.
Zildjian, the cymbal company, was started in 1623.
Combustion engines
Combustion engines are used to ship cargo worldwide, mine all the material for everything we use, among other things that require dense energy storage and quick refills of fuel. They won’t be going away anytime soon
Facebook.
Facebook is not old. It’s barely old enough to drink.
homeopathy. you’d think germ theory would have killed it, but no.
To be fair my old high school acquaintances swear their oils made from magic plants literally healed their child’s cancer and my kid is only autistic because we took her to a doctor one time years ago.
I once told a homeopathy person that my sister had a normal kid, then took the kid to a homeopath and now the kid is badly disabled.
If they can make up shit, we can too.
It’s honestly troubling. I’ve seen homeopathic ‘treatments’ sold right next to real medicine in mainstream stores, with similar packaging, similar pricing, and only tiny fine print on the bottle saying that it’s homeopathic. And you have to know what ‘homeopathic’ means in order for that to have any impact; many don’t. It would be very easy to accidentally buy the homeopathic ‘treatment’ instead of one that actually works. I’ve almost made that mistake before myself, before I read the package more closely.
(For anybody who doesn’t already know ‘homeopathic’ does NOT mean ‘herbal’ or ‘natural’ or anything like that. It’s not alternative medicine – it’s not medicine at all. Homeopathy is old, very debunked, and very bullshit psuedo-science that a traveling conman made up after supposedly having it supernaturally revealed to him in a drunken dream. The idea is that for any ailment, you take what causes that ailment, massively dilute it in water (or another substance) so much that there likely isn’t a single molecule of it left, and then the water will ‘remember’. Homeopathic medication is literally nothing. It’s plain water (or, in stores, often plain sugar pills). It contains no active ingredients of any kind, and it’s – at best – a placebo. It’s always a waste of money and may be dangerous if you fall for it and take it instead of actual, effective medicine.)
Homeopathy is old, but like, not even that old. It was invented in 1796. It’s younger than the united states, and was invented while France was doing their first revolution. They like to frame it as ancient wisdom rather than some German in the late 16th century took one idea off Paracelsus way too far, then retooled it until it stopped actively doing harm (because it did nothing) and came up with some bs to explain why it “works”
Fax machines.
Faxes are common in healthcare facilities and hospitals. I would imagine that they’re safer when it comes to sensitive data.
They are analog modems on a telephone line. There is no encryption at all, because they still need to be compatible with fax machines from the 1970s.
There was also an exploit where someone sent a manipulated image via fax, which would exploit an old bug in a jpg library that is used in the software stack, so you can run your own code.
Not really safer, they just work with the existing infrastructure. Personally, I think there’s still a place for fax, it’s essentially a convenient way to scan and transmit, and these days you can get them to your email or phone (not in healthcare because that’s not HIPAA compliant). Sure, not anybody’s first choice, but I think it’s still valid.
It’s only convenient if you have access to a fax machine, which the majority of us don’t
With a mail-enabled printer, you can send your scan directly to an email address.
I fail to see what you’d need a fax for.
comes to sensitive data.
not really. there’s no encryption to faxing, and the software to fax from pc’s directly (enabling faked records for example) has been ubiquitous since the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFax
THANK YOU.
You know another fun thing that can happen? A doctor moves practices and changes fax numbers, and the old number gets assigned to a new, completely unrelated non-medical group. But no one told the medical entity that sends faxes, and no one updated the relevant records. All of a sudden several months worth of PHI has been getting sent to a women’s clothing store.
Fax in the medical field needs to die. Between the possibility of this happening, higher probability of transmission failure, paper (where offices are still using physical faxes) getting misplaced before getting filed in charts, etc., it’s just a plain bad way to send medical information in 2026.
Edit: OH, and don’t get me started on fancy, marketing-designed lab reports that use colored indicators to communicate treatment-critical information that no one checked for legibility in black and white, yet still get sent by fax. Like, fucking WHAT??
on’t get me started on fancy, marketing-designed lab reports that use colored indicators to communicate treatment-critical information that no one checked for legibility in black and white, yet still get sent by fax. Like, fucking WHAT??
holy fuck
Fax may outlast landline telephony.
It already has. Vast majority of companies still handling fax are using VoIP fax modems with digital receivers that turn it into a PDF. I haven’t seen a functioning copper landline probably since 2015…
Also maddening and frustratingly!
They still have some uses (Invidious: mirror selection or Nadeko).
The amount of “modern” companies I had to fax shit too when my dad died was infuriating! Hyundai, Target, etc etc etc. Email is a thing dumb ass companies! Fuck me.
Many government departments and private companies consider faxed documents as a duplicated “original”, instead of a copy. Because that totally makes sense.
IT MEANS FASCIMILE GOD DAMNIT
Totally… 🤦
I can’t exactly recommend the service which can be a bit annoying but clicksend allows you to send faxes and actually letters for pretty cheap. the letter thing is pretty nice when something demands a physical one. you upload a pdf and it gets printed and mailed out. fax works same way. fax is way cheaper obviously.
winfax.exe is looking at you and sneering…
we did all this, in a cave, with a 14.4 baud modem on windows 3.0
Why would someone need that instead of just printing it and mailing it themselves?
just faster. you have to have a printer and paper for it and envelopes and stamps. with the service you just upload the pdf and put in the address and hit send. I mean I think most could see how it can be useful. Bit cheaper to print and fold and seal and stamp and drop in the box but with as unoften as I need to send a physical letter I like it.
Then you need a printer, printer ink, an envelope, and stamps. If you really don’t send mail out that frequently, I can see the appeal of it. Could easily be cheaper. I also imagine it might have some utility to ADHD folks.
It just occurred to me: I doubt my 26 year old son has ever sent anything in the mail himself. If he wants to send a message, it’s email or text, and if he wants to send a gift, he’ll order it on Amazon and have it delivered. I’ll have to ask him if he’s ever actually mailed anything.
Can’t exactly trusr anyone with such sensitive documents that I’d have to print out and mail.
Why did target and Hyundai need to know your dad died?
He had accounts with them, that’s part of the probate process. Letting them know.
Did you know that it would have been possible for Abraham Lincoln to send a fax to a samurai?
I think the reason I didn’t know it is because it isn’t true.
Unless you’re a Lincoln truther who thinks he wasn’t killed in 1865 way before fax machines were available in the USA and Japan.
there was a period of around 12 years where it would have been possible, given that they had both been in scotland at the time. between 1853 and 1865 it would have to have been an ex-samurai.
I see the potential for a historical fiction masterpiece here
Erotic Lincoln-Samurai Fax Fiction
The first fax machine was invented in 1843.
But of course they had to wait for the second one to be invented…
Wisdom tooth
Me
Came here to say this.
Now that’s rude :(
Film production and development. Yesterday I dropped off a couple rolls of 120 film shot on a 60 year old camera at a lab to develop and print it for me.
Film is infinitely upscalable. No video format has ever been able to touch it. You can take films shot 100 years ago and upscale them to 4K/8K/etc. You can’t do that with any video format.
Not infinitely. I had a film scanned at 14k and it’s starting to look a bit grainy.
We’re in a bit of a renaissance!
Kodak just put out brand new Kodacolor 200 and Ektachrome 100 film
I’ve not even got one developed yet!
Hell I just got my daughter a disposable camera for her school camping trip. No electronics allowed but they encouraged them to bring those. I was surprised to find one. I told her (11yrs) it was a one time use camera. The look on her face was priceless. She looked at me as if I were dumb and said, “so it takes one freaking picture?? That’s stupid, my phone takes all the photos I want!” She got further confused when I explained why there was no screen and how she had to get those photos lol.
Should’ve showed her the clip from The Office where Erin(?) takes a picture with a disposable camera and then throws the it in the trash and wonders why people use them, seems such a waste to throw it away and never see the pictures.
