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WTF Fun Fact 12646 – The Power of the Musical Birthday Card

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Ok, to be fair, there wasn’t much computing power available to the Allied forces during WWII. But it’s really more about something called Moore’s Law.

According to Michio Kaku’s book Physics of the Future:

“Moore’s law simply says that computer power doubles every eighteen months. First stated in 1965 by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of the Intel Corporation, this simple law has helped to revolutionize the world economy, generated fabulous new wealth, and irreversibly altered our way of life. When you plot the plunging price of computer chips and their rapid advancements in speed, processing power, and memory, you find a remarkably straight line going back fifty years. (This is plotted on a logarithmic curve. In fact, if you extend the graph, so that it includes vacuum tube technology and even mechanical hand-crank adding machines, the line can be extended over 100 years into the past.)

Exponential growth is often hard to grasp, since our minds think linearly. It often starts deceptively slowly. It is so gradual that you sometimes cannot experience the change at all. But over decades, it can completely alter everything around us.

According to Moore’s Law, every Christmas your computer games are almost twice as powerful (in terms of memory and processing speed) as they were the previous year. Furthermore, as the years pass, this incremental gain becomes truly monumental. For example, when you receive a birthday card in the mail, it often has a chip which sings “Happy Birthday” to you. Remarkably, that chip has more computer power than all the Allied Forces of 1945. Hitler, Churchill, or Roosevelt might have killed to get that chip. But what do we do with it?  After the birthday, we throw the card and chip away.  Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969 when it sent two astronauts to the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3D situations, use more computer power than main frame computers of the previous decade. The Sony Playstation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.“

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Your cell phone has more computing power than NASA circa 1969” — Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

WTF Fun Fact 12440 – Professional Mattress Jumping

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There are hundreds of mattress companies flooding the market today, and many can even be delivered by mail. However, there are still some artisan mattress makers out there and McRoskey Mattress Works in San Fransicso is one of them. Their classic mattress may run you anywhere from $1,600 to $4,500, but you can be sure it’s been tested well – by a pair of human feet, in fact.

The world took an interest in the factory back in 2012 when SFGATE published a story about them and one of their employees, Reuben Reynoso. Reynoso is the man who jumps on the mattresses to ensure they can stand up to everything from child’s play to…well, whatever else it is you do on your mattress.

While a grown man being paid to jump on mattresses for a living might elicit a chuckle, Reynoso wanted people to understand that his job was an important one. “It’s work,” he told SFGATE in 2012. “It’s not for everybody. There is a right way and a wrong way to do it.”

While we didn’t know there was a “right” way to jump on the bed, Reynoso isn’t doing this for fun and games. It’s his job. “This is not a game. Not to me,” he insisted. And we believe him. After all, even if you were living your dream at your job, after a while it all becomes a serious task. But that doesn’t mean we’re not a little jealous of the free and knee-friendly cardio he gets at work.

To be fair, the task does sound like it can get tedious. As SFGATE noted in their article:

“Jumping on a mattress is one of the final steps in making a handmade mattress…a machine cannot do what Reynoso and his toes can do, which is to expertly compress no fewer than 28 layers of fluffy cotton batting while seeking to detect pea-size mattress lumps or other imperfections…”

While it’s unclear if Reynoso is still with McRoskey or if they still employ a person to test their mattresses “by foot,” we’d like to think it’s all still going strong. The mattress company sure is. They’ve been in business since 1899, surviving the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 and everything that’s come after. –WTF fun facts

Source: “McRoskey mattress jumping is serious work” — SFGATE

WTF Fun Fact 12434 – The Kitchen Toe Kick

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It’s always interesting to find out there’s a reason behind something you’ve totally taken for granted. Unless you’re remodeled your kitchen or are a contractor, you may not have thought much about the design of kitchen cabinets (beyond daydreaming about new ones).

Even those of us who have imagined getting a whole new kitchen rarely look closely at that space between the cabinet and floor and wonder why it’s there. (It’s likely the case in your bathroom as well.)

Between the floor and the cabinet base is something called the toe kick, and it’s meant to do pretty much the opposite of what it sounds like. It keeps us from kicking the bottom of the cabinets with our toes.

The goal of the toe kick is mainly ergonomic – that is, it makes life more comfortable, enabling us to stand for longer without getting fatigued or developing a backache from leaning). And it’s a safety issue as well. Have you ever tried to lean over a surface while using a knife? It’s not so stable. (Trust me, I just tried it, so you don’t have to.)

We’ve always taken our toe kick for granted, and since most of us have a backache most of the time, maybe it doesn’t seem that important. But not having one would only make things worse.

There are no legal requirements or codes for building toe kicks, so you may see super-retro kitchens or hyper-modern ones without this feature. But it’s generally the case that experienced carpenters just know the ideal dimensions and build one into your kitchen.

The standard depth for a toe kick is 3 inches, while the height is 3.5 inches. Most cabinets conform to these measurements (certainly any you buy from the hardware store). However, if you’re having your kitchen remodeled and are very tall or have otherwise larger-than-normal feet, you can always ask your contractor to give you a little extra room down there.
– WTF fun facts 

Source: “Ideal Toe Kick Dimensions and Height for Cabinets” — ThoughtCo