The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast

Tune in Thursday for this week's episode all about Gas Meters. You know we love invisible infrastructure and the gas meter is one of those things that worked for 180 years with very little change...and now natural gas is fading out very slowly in residential use and the meter infrastructure is changing too. Ok, maybe gas meters don't sound fun...but Renee and Marc always bring the laughs and this week is no different. Lots of great...

What started out as a text from Marc's brother turned into an investigation into the hundred year history of monosodium glutamate and how that turned into a durable insulating film for high-end processors. 

The umami taste gave us critical microprocessor coatings. Crazy.

So, coatings for chips...and chips.

This one is a bit weirder than what we normally cover, so you know it's going to be fun. 

We'd love to hear from you. Cli...

What does MSG have in common with microprocessor coatings? You'll have to listen to our new episode "Chips and Chips" coming this week to find out.

Renee and Marc dive into the strange world of food and CPU coatings this week and that's the inspiration for the song. There was a time when MSG was vilified. It was so demonised that restaurants would put signs in their windows saying "No MSG." But you know what? MSG is in every savoury...

A bowling alley looks like the least engineered place you can spend an afternoon. Rented shoes, sticky floors, someone's name spelled wrong (or rudely) on the  display. Underneath the grime, neon, noise, and beer stains is four thousand years of arguing about pin dimensions, a materials-science arms race, and enough instrumentation to describe your delivery as a set of physical parameters.

Before 1952 the cost of running a lane...

Tomorrow's episode is all about the history of bowling technology. Pins, pinboys, automatic pinsetters, rubbers, resins, polymers! Oh, so much chemistry and mechanical engineering. 

But this week's lively soul/funk groove is all about the dreaded 7-10 split. Hope you're enjoying our new Season 3 house band. Lyrics below.

[Verse 1]
Eight went down
Eight
Went
Down
I heard 'em fall
Heard
Them
Fall
Two sti...

For most of history, the top floor was where the poor people lived. Nobody wanted to climb four flights, so the ground floor was the good address and the attic was the punishment. Then a man in Yonkers built a brake, stood on a platform in front of a crowd, and had someone cut the rope with an axe.

The car dropped a couple of inches and stopped. He said "all safe, gentlemen," and the shape of every city on earth changed.
...

Have you ever entered a full elevator car just to ride the elevator one single floor? Did you feel the judgement? Did you feel the shame?

This week's song is a begging, pleading, song about that unforgivable sin. The single floor elevator ride. 

Renee and Marc are back this week after some time off with a brand new season that starts tomorrow. Our first tech topic is...wait a minute, this can't be right...elevators? Elevators. H...

Happy One Year Anniversary! 

Marc and Renee want to thank you for a great year of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. We've been on a bit of a holiday with the summer months, but people are still listening. 

This is just a bit of a behind the scenes and a little discussion about Orcas, Bruce from Australia, Numbers, and a few flubs and redos. 

Just a bit more context on our discussion on numbers and listening stats...while a "...

Renee and Marc grew up in a prime time for television. School House Rock. Newhart. Saturday Morning. Must See TV. 

Somewhere in the twentieth century, a box arrived and everyone in the house started facing the same direction. For a few decades, half a billion people could watch the same moment at the same instant. Then the box multiplied. We cover the story of how TV changed the culture.

This isn't a typical TV story though. Bec...

Tune in tomorrow for a very special episode of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. All about Television. But the nerdy science-y television stuff. 

So, we had to do a song all about the way a tube TV manages to keep the image in sync. Snaps, triggers, latch, return. It was just begging to be a snappy, poppy, funky song. 

Lyrics below:

[Verse 1]
Picture starts to drift
Rolling on the glass
That beam won't fire on time
Ve...

Shout out to Bruce, from Australia for contacting Renee! Feel free to contact us any time. 

A perfect moulded jelly used to be a way to show you had money. Someone spent a full day boiling bones and clarifying stock so you could set a shivering centrepiece on the table and let the room see what you could afford. Then it came in a box for pennies, and everyone could have the shape. This week one wobbling dessert travels from ari...

Have you ever witnessed Jell-O reach that special temperature and just...melt away. Too long in the sun and a once solid, but wiggly, dessert turns liquid once again. 

That special temperature is a just a bit below average body temperature. Right around Ninety-Five degrees F. So, that's our song this week. 

Sorry we're running a bit behind. Schedules and production issues collaborated to keep us a bit late.

Enjoy the song an...

Somewhere in your house, a machine takes a full day of work off your hands every week, and you've never once thought about how that happened.
For most of history, laundry was a whole day, every week. Then we handed the day to a machine. Over a couple hundred years, the washing machine evolved and eventually gave people back a day every week.

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Ma...

Is the washing machine the most important domestic appliance? More important than the refrigerator? Or Renee's favourite call out, the sewing machine? There's a good case to be made for the washing machine. That's what Renee and Marc discuss tomorrow. 

But you know with all that time saved from the washing machine, we also got...the missing sock. The one that got away. The sock that went missing. So, today's song is all about t...

For thousands of years, the colour on your nails marked your rank. Some societies enforced it, and the wrong shade on the wrong person could be a crime. That held for millennia. Then, in about a decade in the twentieth century, it all changed.

Modern nail polish is an industrial product, and it came out of the car business. In the 1920s, carmakers needed a paint that dried in minutes, and the answer was a lacquer made from nitrocell...

This week we cover a little bit of chemistry. Paint chemistry. 

Stay with us on this one. Nail adornment is a practice that stretches back thousands of years, but there was one technical innovation that came out of World War I that changed the status, colours, and cost of nail beautification. Explosives. Nitrocellulose. 

Tune in tomorrow when we discuss the history and chemistry of nail polish. 

Lyrics below:

[Verse 1]

The refrigerator hums in your kitchen and you don't think about it. That hum represents 250 years of people getting laughed at, going broke, and occasionally poisoning the planet.

Frederic Tudor figured out how to ship New England ice to Cuba in 1806, got mocked by Boston newspapers, went to debtor's prison, and eventually got extremely rich. John Gorrie built a refrigeration machine to cool yellow fever patients in 1840s Florida an...

Running a day behind on release schedule, but here's the song for this week's podcast episode. Episode out tomorrow. 

Since we talked about an essential household piece of tech last week, we figured it'd be cool if we talked about another piece of household tech...the refrigerator.

For me, I remember the Harvest Yellow refrigerator in my mom's kitchen, the white boxy fridge on my grandma's back porch, and the avocado green tank ...

Quick note - sorry about Marc's audio. With recording three people, the mic setup wasn't optimal for Marc and his daughter. We'll do better next time. But Marc's audio isn't the important bits of the episode anyway. Enjoy!

The flushing toilet is the most important machine in your house and the one you think about least. We use one six to eight times a day for our whole lives without a second thought, which, when you flush it through...