I'm not as into it anymore (i'm sure i'll eventually relapse), but my former obsession with various swaths of semi-forgotten 20th century media i think is pretty well summed up in like, slowly noticing the edges of a brief cultural obsession with radar for a while. when it was new, there was so much excitement to explain it
and then you watch a b movie from the fifties one day and they're like "we can kill the giant ant with radar" and you're like "YES THEY WERE STILL INTO IT"
@heatherhorns i wonder how long it was between the 50s and when the average person would understand just how much that entire concept is nonsensical
-F
@Felthry The fifties, I think, was when people should have known better, which is why it'd be exciting to see some vestigial sign of that in that sort of "i'm scared about science because of recent and current traumas suggesting we're due for some atrocities" attitude
like, playing cultural forensics with just personal vibes from stuff
@heatherhorns yeah i would think people would know better by then too but apparently they didn't
-F
old radar attitudes from what i can tell
@Felthry but holy shit when people don't know what radar is, it's my favorite thing
I get the impression it's kind of like how we understand AI now. There was SO much explanation in stuff I've seen in the 40s, but it was still just so weird to think like "wait so...you can just SEE through things? You can just SEE a jet twenty miles away? What the hell" and so it just like, gets the weirdest fantastical understandings, even if on paper they get it
old radar attitudes from what i can tell
@Felthry sometimes. SOMETIMES it's just completely balls to the wall and radar is a laser you can shoot or something, and that's the best thing ever, it makes me so happy
re: old radar attitudes from what i can tell
@heatherhorns look if it's a laser you can shoot
- that's called a maser, lasers weren't invented yet and didn't have a name
- radar is specifically the use of radio waves for detecting things and sensing the distance to them. use of radio waves for anything else is not radar
-F
re: old radar attitudes from what i can tell
@heatherhorns masers were invented long before lasers, and the first lasers were actually called "optical masers", as they were the same principle but operated on visible light insteead of microwaves/radio waves
-F
re: old radar attitudes from what i can tell
@Felthry the most recent old radio show i've listened to, the first one in ages, is the shadow
please do yourself a favor and give it a listen if you want completely baffling understandings of science or how anything works
re: old radar attitudes from what i can tell
@heatherhorns "x-ray vision"
-F
@heatherhorns giant ant? sure, that's fine
killing things with radar? do you have any idea what radar *is*
-F