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Hardware Hacking Technology Build

Building a Telegraph Using Only Stone Age Materials 238

Posted by samzenpus from the from-scratch dept.
MMBK writes "It's the ultimate salvagepunk experiment, building a telegraph out of things found in the woods. From the article: 'During the summer of 2009, artist Jamie O’Shea of the organization Substitute Materials set out to test whether or not electronic communication could have been built at any time in history with the proper knowledge, and with only tools and materials found in the wilderness of New Jersey.'"
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Building a Telegraph Using Only Stone Age Materials More

Building a Telegraph Using Only Stone Age Materials

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  • Disappointing Video (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @08:57PM (#33968810)
    This video is a big let down: all he's doing is showing that it's possible to smelt iron & copper and construct an organic battery. This is not news...

    Furthermore, he uses stone tools and tries (and fails) to start a fire with a friction bow drill.

    For building a telegraph (or any electronic communications medium), the challenge lies in the miles of wire that are needed. The scale of manufacturing for this task is huge and is a long project -- not something you'd set out to do in the wilderness with your stone axe.

    If civilization collapsed and needed to be rebuilt with only stored knowledge and what can be found outside, don't you think we'd start by finding flint and making knives & axes? You know, like humans did thousands of years ago... Not to mention the fact that other needs, like shelter/water/food would take priority -- and once you've met those needs efficiently and adequately, you'll probably already have a nice collection of tools, machines, and furnaces that will let you get started on higher technology.

    I was expecting, and would be much more interested, in seeing documentation on how to build a telegraph using basic midievil technology (i.e. assuming the existence of metal tools, furnaces, and animal/water-powered machines)

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "If civilization collapsed and needed to be rebuilt with only stored knowledge and what can be found outside", what we'd find outside would be a whole shit-ton of wrecked infrastructure waiting to be salvaged. Anyone considering primitive tech without aluminum-age wreckage is already so far removed from any practical hypotheticals, they may as well be on mythbusters (no offense, Mr. President).

      So for me, that they started from stone-age vs. bronze or better tech is not particularly disappointing, just mildl

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

      If civilization collapsed we would not bother with flint. We have lots of metal all around us.

      Besides making steel is not that hard, even if he failed to start a fire using an old method.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:32PM (#33969078)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Jukeman ( 1522147 )
        Making steel is very hard to do using primitive tools, what you will make, if lucky is pig iron or cast iron, neither of which is steel.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by DamienRBlack ( 1165691 )

      I was expecting, and would be much more interested, in seeing documentation on how to build a telegraph using basic midievil technology (i.e. assuming the existence of metal tools, furnaces, and animal/water-powered machines)

      You're right, midi was evil. I sincerely hope no human ever has to return to evil midi technology to make anything.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by RealGrouchy ( 943109 )

      I was expecting, and would be much more interested, in seeing documentation on how to build a telegraph using basic medieval technology (i.e. assuming the existence of metal tools, furnaces, and animal/water-powered machines)

      Is 1684 [wikipedia.org] close enough for you?

      - RG>

    • Re:Disappointing Video (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tverbeek ( 457094 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:59PM (#33969242) Homepage

      "If civilization collapsed..."

      Interesting as a premise as that is, it isn't the concept behind what he was doing. This wasn't a DIY hard hack demonstration in the sense that those usually show up on /. This was a conceptual activity, intended to explore an idea. Think "art" not "science". His idea was that this example of technology could be built from nature without any preceding technology at hand, just the knowledge of how to do it. He wanted to to stand on the shoulders of the giants who'd come before him, but not take along any of their tools.

      The fact that ultimately he did use one of those tools (a lighter) is why (IMHO) this exercise failed. I understand his reasoning: He could have started the fire without the lighter, and on previous occasions he had started fires without it. But once he made that argument, he could say that he could have have built a battery, and on another occasion he did, so he used a prefab one... and you might at well just leave it as a thought experiment. The performance itself was incomplete, and all that was left was a proof of concept rather than the execution of a concept.

      • Making Fire Is HARD (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Iskender ( 1040286 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @11:13PM (#33969552)

        The fact that ultimately he did use one of those tools (a lighter) is why (IMHO) this exercise failed. I understand his reasoning: He could have started the fire without the lighter, and on previous occasions he had started fires without it. But once he made that argument, he could say that he could have have built a battery, and on another occasion he did, so he used a prefab one... and you might at well just leave it as a thought experiment. The performance itself was incomplete, and all that was left was a proof of concept rather than the execution of a concept.

        Your first paragraph about this being more art than it was many other things was very good, and I almost moderated you up. But I decided to reply to this paragraph instead.

        This isn't the first time I've heard someone being unimpressed when someone else fails to light a fire using only plant parts. I can see where this comes from, but since I've seen attempts myself it instantly becomes different.

        There are many, many problems with doing this. A basic problem is that of most friction: how do you get the most friction? By rubbing wood against wood. However, that way you very quickly bore into the wood because you're using so much force, and then the point of most friction has no oxygen. This is of course assuming nothing else breaks from the huge stresses on all parts of the device.

        Smoke is reasonably easy to produce and it's even possible to burn oneself. But fire, that takes a totally disproportionate amount of skill. I wouldn't be surprised if building a hut to live in year round is an easier challenge.

        So my take-away message is this: there's one disproportionately hard task involved among many others which make the point quite well too. He basically showed that if you have fire you can jump straight to the iron age. Personally I thought any kind of iron production required a sealed furnace of some sort.

        • Re:Making Fire Is HARD (Score:5, Insightful)

          by tverbeek ( 457094 ) on Thursday October 21, 2010 @12:08AM (#33969828) Homepage

          I know it's hard to start a fire like this. I've tried and tried and tried it unsuccessfully. But as soon as he skipped that step, he was no longer doing what he set out to do: creating dits and dahs without using any post-stone-age gear.

          If I set out to walk across the country, but take a bus from Pittsburgh to Toledo because it's raining, and I know that I could walk between them, I haven't actually walked across the country, have I?

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward

            But if you want to prove it's possible to walk across country and take a bus from Pittsburgh to Toledo, you can point at other people who have walked from Pittsburgh to Toledo to prove your point. I think he proved his point even if he had to cheat, and diminished the "glory" by not having done it all from scratch himself.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by tverbeek ( 457094 )

              Missing the point. He could "prove that it could be done" without going anywhere or doing anything, just by pointing at all of the instructions for doing each step, which he found online.

              Instead he set out to actually do it. But didn't.

        • Knowledge (Score:5, Informative)

          by diablovision ( 83618 ) on Thursday October 21, 2010 @01:10AM (#33970138)

          It doesn't take that much "skill" to make a fire with a bowdrill, honestly. My brother was into this kind of thing. It turns out that the choice of wood, string, and a decent bow make a _huge_ difference. E.g. I saw him get a glowing ember from his drill setup in less than a minute, and in less than 90 seconds had a handful of flames. Impressed by how easy it looked, I traipsed into the woods, found some sticks of various sizes, with no thought whatsoever to their suitability, made a rough bow, carved out a notch, got a rock and started going at it. Half a day later, I could barely get smoke. I didn't know why. He let me use his setup, and within two minutes I too had an ember.

          You need a wood that grows straight, has little resin, and is somewhat dry for the drill, and a flexible but stiff wood for the bow. A soft maple is excellent. It needs to be dead and dry, not green (obviously). You want a good solid leather string that will grip the drill nicely. You want a good amount of tension in the bow, but not too much. The drill should be between 2 and 3 cm wide, around 15 to 20 cm long. For the base you want a somewhat harder wood with a little more resin. Oak is good. Gather good kindling to catch, often by peeling bark into super thin strips and making a little nest of them. The glowing ember will come from the dust of the drill being worn down and getting hot. For the top you want a rock not much bigger than the palm of your hand, so that you can get a good grip on it and put some weight to keep the whole system stable. You want to get a nice point on the drill on the rock side and if possible scratch a bit of a hole into the rock so the point from the drill fits. If you can find some lubrication of some sort for the top that helps.

          After the notch in the base gets worn in and the friction part of your drill gets worn into the appropriate shape, it is not actually that hard to make a fire in less than a few minutes. I've done it.

        • We were having a BBQ and I was having a grand old time watching these people try to start the fire. They were using coal (probably face coal, but still not easy to get going) and they had this solid, kind of waxy fire starter substance as well as a lighter. I think 7 different people failed to getting the fire started. The problem is they would light the fire starter on top of the coals. Then someone came along that knew what they were doing, they layered a paper plate with fire started, then shoved it unde

      • But we KNOW fire has been done before.

    • For building a telegraph (or any electronic communications medium), the challenge lies in the miles of wire that are needed.

      There's also the 'hindsight is 20/20' factor. Once the basics are understood, the 'technology' needed to construct something like that isn't a BFD. Back to the Future III was far more interesting.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If civilization collapsed, everyone in an urban area would starve to the point of violence in about 5-7 days (see Hurricane Katrina), near the time that all food that could be fought over (domestic pets, dog food, etc) was gone (45 days at most), most urban folks would fan out into the surrounding rural areas, but would have no way to survive or support themselves. Rural folks would have to put them down in order to defend themselves. It'd take about 2-3 weeks after that for cannabilism to set in among urba

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nursie ( 632944 )

        "Rural folks would have to put them down in order to defend themselves."

        LOL.

        You like rural folks don't you? Even in your twited anti-city mindscape, they'd be quickly overwhelmed by urban zombies.

    • Besides which, wouldn't it be easier to salvage copper wire from the wreckage of civilization rather than pull new wire?

  • I've always wanted to create an instruction manual/website/makefile on how to make a computer if you were suddenly stranded in a desert island.

  • The "wilderness of New Jersey"? I mean, the Pine Barrens are unpopulated and all, but I'm not sure I'd call it "wilderness". Are they going to build it entirely out of gangster bones and toxic waste?

  • Can't watch video (Score:5, Insightful)

    by guspasho ( 941623 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:10PM (#33968894)

    I really hate being referred to a video in a story. I am never interested in enough to sit through it. So how did they find copper? And a power source?

    • Re:Can't watch video (Score:5, Informative)

      by Alsn ( 911813 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:22PM (#33968998)
      Watched the video. He basically made a small furnace out of clay where he got copper and iron out of ores found in the area(malachite for copper, no idea about the iron, don't remember).

      Basically, the video is just a proof of concept of how you would make a battery to use as a telegraph using only stone age materials combined with knowledge. The video ends after he uses a voltmeter to measure his "battery" made out of clay and the aforementioned iron/copper(he gets like 1V out of it or something).

  • Related: POW radio (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pinckney ( 1098477 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:12PM (#33968914)

    There is a fascinating account [zerobeat.net] of building a radio in a Japanese POW camp during WWII virtually from scratch.

    So we hit upon the idea of taking some tin foil or aluminum foil from the lining of the tea chest from which the Japanese supplied with the rice rations, then by the well known equations for calculating capacity and the relationship of the surface area and spacing of the plates, we built a capacitor or, at least, I built a capacitor which according to calculations should have been about ".01 microfarad."

    • Ha! They actually used bits of string.

    • There is a long and glorious history of making Cat's Whisker Rectifiers [wikipedia.org] out of a bit of wire and a rusty razor blade, or a chunk of pyrite or galena, to build crystal radios that required no external source of power. These were the first semiconductor devices, and were responsible for much if not most of radio receivers from 1900 until the late 1930's, and were regularly constructed in foxholes out of found materials throughout WWII and the Korean war.
  • Well, he says in the video he's built a time machine. Can't he just send back a few shortwave radios?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by maxwell demon ( 590494 )

      Well, probably his time machine has the same restrictions as the time machine I've once built: You can only go into the future, and that only at a speed of one second per second.

  • Well I guess you could easily make the telegraph poles out of something you find in the wilderness.

    • Yep, put one with a little platform on every hill and use torches during the night or flags during the day, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, no electronics needed.
      Even Napoleon still used similar things.
      Heck, even the discworld has clacks.

  • All ads and popups. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:28PM (#33969042) Homepage

    All I got was some site that played video ads, tried to set Flash cookies, and displayed popups. Is this a spam article?

  • Jules Verne wrote about this in one of his novels (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Traf-O-Data-Hater ( 858971 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:34PM (#33969088)
    In Jules Verne's 'Mysterious Island' he writes about how his castaways build a civilisation on a remote pacific island. One of the things they build is a telegraph from scratch. They also build paddle wheels, make guncotton, determine the latitude and longitude of their island, make a secure house out of a cave behind a waterfall, grow wheat from a single husk and a lot of other things. And as a bonus, it has the return of one of Verne's most famous characters (read it and find out who!). This is one of my favourite books, I can definately recommend it to the whole slashdot crowd.

    • I read that ages ago; I remember being most impressed by them making glass. It just seemed useful and fitting, while some other stuff felt superfluous.

      Really good teen read anyways.

    • Project Gutenberg: Jules Verne's Mysterious Island (Score:5, Informative)

      by count0 ( 28810 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @11:40PM (#33969682)

      Like the title says, thought I'd check out the parent's book recommendation: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8993 [gutenberg.org]

    • hmm.. sounds a lot like Gilligan's Island.

      Of course that came afterwords so I guess there may have been some influence.

    • Great suggestion for a read.

      on a tangent... Anyone else think the idiots on Lost should have done just a portion of Mysterious Island? Or heck, even Swiss Family Robinson. After people were stolen from my camp, or a wild boar came into my camp and gored someone's leg, I'd focus on protection. Oh no, let's just sit on the beach, enjoy the waves, and not even post a guard. It's hard to suspend belief on something so obvious..

  • I'd go wireless (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gatkinso ( 15975 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:40PM (#33969130)

    Spinning mirrors possibly. Maybe a strobe of some sort.

    True it is line of sight, but probably good enough.

    One thing I would not do is smelt miles of copper wire.

  • Inventions happen when they are timely (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Inventions happen when the two things come together:
    1 - The technology develops enough to make them relatively easy to implement
    2 - There is a need for the invention

    The interplay between the two conditions is variable. If something becomes easy to do it will be done even if there isn't much use for it. If something is very needed, it will be done even though it is very hard to do.

    Consider Babbage's 'computer'. It was close to being practical to build but nobody really felt the need for it, so it wasn't b

  • If civilization *really* collapses... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:49PM (#33969176)
    This is a cool project and all, but I have to challenge the premise that civilization can collapse to a level where all technology is gone but detailed technical knowledge survives.

    Several tens if not hundreds of thousands of people graduate from college with engineering degrees every year in the US alone. This has been going on for many decades, which means that in the US alone, there are literally millions if not tens of millions of scientists and engineers, many with decades of experience in their professional lives as well as bits and pieces of technical know-how picked up from hobbies and idle curiosity. These people don't all live within one lethal radius. They're spread out all over a big-ass country. Their tools (lathes, mills, computers, smelters, furnaces, etc) are also spread out over a big-ass country. And that's just "post-industrial" America I'm talking about. People with technical know-how and technology and machinery are spread out all over the planet.

    Any end to civilization that takes out *all* technological capability would have to be a planet-wide event that would necessarily take out the geeks as well. Otherwise, if a giant meteor takes out North America, European, Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian engineers would just move in and do the rebuilding with Brazilian or Indian or Chinese or European-made equipment.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tmosley ( 996283 )
      What, you've never fallen through a dimensional gateway into a primitive planet, or into the distant past?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by grantek ( 979387 )

        What, you've never fallen through a dimensional gateway into a primitive planet, or into the distant past?

        I have, and it sucked - I went to all that effort to build a telegraph, but once I got it working I realised there was no one to talk to...

    • I'm not sure his premise was "if civilization collapsed". It's more like a if they had the knowledge, could they have done it. In other words, it's a mental examination of what would have been necessary for advancements that didn't come until relatively late in Human History even though the possibilities/capabilities of them were there.

      What this should make you think about is, what hurdles laid in the way that took so long for the concept of the telegraph to become established to a point it was actually inv

    • I have to challenge the premise that civilization can collapse to a level where all technology is gone but detailed technical knowledge survives.

      Doesn't that rather depend on how quickly it happens? In any case, it'll be a hard climb back up.

      Several tens if not hundreds of thousands of people graduate from college with engineering degrees every year in the US alone. This has been going on for many decades

      They're still a tiny fraction of the total population. And many of them are so specialized that they

  • It's just a battery, not a telegraph (Score:4, Interesting)

    by time961 ( 618278 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:49PM (#33969178)
    What he built is a proof of concept for a BATTERY. Not a telegraph.

    He's an artist, not an engineer. Rigor is clearly not his strong point. But it's an interesting idea. And making pig iron--even a little bit--in an afternoon is a pretty good accomplishment. Copper is a lot easier, since it smelts easily and has a much lower melting point.

    And it's not implausible: after all, there is evidence that better batteries [wikimedia.org] were known in ancient times, and he's certainly right that a Voltaic pile can be constructed from primitive materials. He could have smelted some zinc, too.

    But as others have pointed out, miles of wire is the real challenge. Could that be done under the circumstances? Sure: copper smelting was known in prehistory, and drawing copper into wires just requires hardened clay dies. But it would be a LOT of work. You'd probably have to be an inspiring leader with oodles of acolytes to carry out the grunt work. You'd need some insulated wire for the coils, but that's just an application of fabric, and not too hard.

    A better idea might have been an optical telegraph, like those that were all over Europe in the early 19th century. Make lenses out of ice in clay molds and use it only in the winter, if you don't want to make glass and grind it.

    • I thought also you could look into generating power from wind or water generators. And given the expense of making wire, a crude radio transmitter and receiver might be feasible.

  • Missing a Component (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pgn674 ( 995941 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:49PM (#33969180) Homepage
    He made a battery in the woods, and that's cool. I hadn't realized that copper and iron were that easy to get without digging much. And, I can see how he could get at least some distance of copper wire. However, he did not tackle sensing the voltage that's turning on and off and communicating that to the user at the other end of the wire. At least not in this video. Does anyone have an idea of how to do that?
    • Stick out your tongue and plot tingliness-vs-time in the sand with a stick.

    • Re:Missing a Component (Score:4, Informative)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:59PM (#33969240)

      If you've got copper or iron you can make an electromagnet. The electromagnet pulls on something ferrous and makes it click against something else. That's how telegraphs worked.

      The real problem would be smelting the tens or hundreds of miles of copper wire needed to make this thing even remotely useful. Not to mention building a battery big enough to put a useful signal through that much crappy copper wire.

    • He made a battery in the woods, and that's cool. I hadn't realized that copper and iron were that easy to get without digging much. And, I can see how he could get at least some distance of copper wire. However, he did not tackle sensing the voltage that's turning on and off and communicating that to the user at the other end of the wire. At least not in this video. Does anyone have an idea of how to do that?

      The first telegraphs were made with galvanometer detectors. In fact, one of the first designs used 5 wires and an array of galvanometers that essentially demultiplexed to point at letters -- a sort of ASCII display. Here's a picture [wikipedia.org] of a cooke & wheatstone five-needle display. (and in case you wonder, yes, this is THE Wheatstone who invented the Wheatstone Bridge quad resistor sensor.) The galvanometers were essentially magnetic needles suspended by silk threads with electromagnets at one end, so a

  • Reminds me of a PBS TV series called Rough Science (Score:4, Informative)

    by shoor ( 33382 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:50PM (#33969186)
    This was years ago, and probably it was originally a BBC series since most of the scientists seemed to British, judging by their accents, but I saw it on a local PBS station in the USA. In the various episodes scientists were taken away from their high tech infrastructure and challenged to do things that normally required fairly high tech equipment, like receive radio messages or determine their latitude and longitude.

  • duh (Score:5, Funny)

    by formfeed ( 703859 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @09:56PM (#33969220)

    materials found in the wilderness of New Jersey

    The keyword here is New Jersey
    You could probably build a nuclear reactor out of "materials found in the wilderness of New Jersey".

  • "wilderness of New Jersey..."

    Um, what? This is a joke, right?

  • Semaphore towers (Score:3, Informative)

    by Freddybear ( 1805256 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @10:07PM (#33969310)

    At least as far back as ancient Greece, a few troops stationed on a hilltop ready to light a fire, or wave torches to signal "the enemy's coming".
    And in Napoleonic France, a quite sophisticated optical semaphore line covered the country

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_line [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Spy der Mann ( 805235 )

      I was just thinking the same thing. Take a look at this:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore [wikipedia.org]

      In the stone age, you can have fire. So with a little animal grease or wood, you can have torches. SO far, so good, right? Now, make up a good semaphore code and easily to transmit numbers. Maybe you'd need to use three torches instead of two. Hey, with a little rope, wood you could make a mechanism to make the torches spell binary. (Up: One, Down: Zero. Perhaps you need a "ground" torch to show the zero signa

    • The Romans also had an extensive network of wooden semaphore towers. Roman legions were so well organised they could put up a temporary wooden fort big enough to hold 1000 men in under 12 hours, starting with nothing but trees and some hand tools. The completed fort would be surrounded by a 2 meter trench and a 3 meter wooden wall, it also contained several huts and a 3 storey semaphore tower. They could easily have put up 50km of semaphore towers in the time it would take most of us to light a fire with tw

  • Don't try this at home kids (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ghostdoc ( 1235612 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @10:13PM (#33969344)

    Having actually smelted iron from iron ore in a living history re-enactment, I call bullshit on this entire thing (well, ok, given the metal disks, the root battery might work).

    You need a *serious* air feed to the base of the smelter to get the temperatures high enough to melt the ore. A single bag bellows feeding into the top of a simple depression in the ground with almost no fuel stock just won't do it. We had two bag bellows constantly manned pumping into the base of a big stack of charcoal and only just got the temperatures high enough.
    Oh, and put that kind of heat anywhere near a clay crucible that hasn't completely dried out (at least a day or so of drying using a small fire) and the whole thing will go bang in your face as the residual water in the clay turns to steam and explosively releases.

    And once you've got your iron from the base of the smelt, you can't just bang it with a rock to get it to a usable disk. It comes out of the smelter as a rough mass of iron flakes (called a 'bloom'). You need to very carefully forgeweld it into a whole. Hitting it with a hammer causes the bloom to fall apart immediately into an unusable mess of rust flakes. I know, I made this mistake and we had to start again.

    I can't speak for smelting copper. I believe the process is similar but easier because of lower temperatures.

    And charcoal doesn't come for free. There's a whole involved process for making charcoal, requiring *lots* of wood (and preferably hardwood which burns hotter but is much harder to cut down). It takes about 4 days (plus wood-chopping time, which you just can't do with just a single stone hand-axe and one person) to make charcoal from scratch, and it's a very tricky process requiring a lot of practice.

    There's a reason we spent thousands of years in the bronze age before we started using iron. It's not because we didn't know about iron ores.

  • Do you have any idea how much copper can be found in your average 1950s refrigerator thrown away in the Jersey wilderness?

  • I call bullshit (Score:3, Funny)

    by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) * <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @10:33PM (#33969490) Homepage Journal

    the wilderness of New Jersey

    We all know there is no such place.

  • Make a set of jungle drums or semaphore flags.

    • Kill two birds with one stone and play the drums with the flags- it should double your bandwidth.
  • Did anyone notice the multimeter was not set to measure voltage? The images show the ohms symbol and the beeping of the continuity detector. Maybe it was bad editing, but as shown it seems he didn't know hot to measure volts properly.

  • I'm endeavoring, Ma'am, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone-knives and bear-skins.

    -- Spock to Edith Keeler, "The City On the Edge of Forever"

  • You don't understand. It's a Jersey thing [wikipedia.org] - Jamie O’Shea

  • Does that include Jimmy Hoffa and the barrel that he was buried in? There are lots and lots of things in the woods in New Jersey.

  • AT&T built a wireless 3G network with apparent stone-age materials...

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