Silly stuff for
the silly season
Techno Talk
Mark Nelson
In these troubled times we all need a chuckle or two, so I thought we might examine some of the bizarre
electronic products put on sale by some zany sellers. Or maybe they are deadly serious and it’s their
customers who are the outlandish ones. You be the judge while I entertain you with some playful teasing.
W
ith high summer nearly
upon us, how about some
gardening ideas for electronicists? If that sounds crazy or off-topic,
I invite you to consider a new twist to
your ‘practical electronics’ hobby. It
could even open your mind to a totally different outlook on ‘mindfulness’.
Back in 2018, a BBC television documentary broke the news that the Prince
of Wales regularly communicated with
the plants in his garden. ‘I happily
talk to the plants and trees, and listen
to them,’ explained Prince Charles,
adding that talking to plants kept him
‘relatively sane’. What the plants said
back to him was not revealed – for obvious reasons – but now you can find
out (in a manner of speaking).
I make the qualification, ‘in a matter
of speaking’, because garden plants do
not exactly speak, but ‘sing’ instead.
Perhaps, disappointingly, they do not
sing out loud in an audible kind of way
(be grateful; you might not like their
choice of music). Neverthless, you can
now buy several different biofeedback
devices that fully enable you to ‘listen to
the music of plants’. It’s only a matter of
time before someone reverse-engineers
one of these gizmos and works up a DIY
project for this magazine.
Sales pitch
Probably the slickest and glitziest sales
pitch is that of Data Garden (www.
datagarden.org), which invites you to
‘connect to nature through sound’ by way
of its Plantwave technology. Plantwave
uses electronic hardware that is paired
wirelessly from a pot plant using a mobile app to translate biodata from plants
into music played from your phone. The
positively lush website explains that the
company also makes immersive plant
music installations for museums and
festivals, produces interspecies concerts
(pairing musical artists with plants) and
leads guided meditation providing wellness services with plant music.
Even more ambitious is Music of the
Plants (www.musicoftheplants.com),
which uses high-conductivity electrodes
connected to your favoured plant to
Practical Electronics | July | 2020
drive a music synthesiser – offering a
choice of root note (!) and a choice of
scale (major, minor, harmonic minor,
pentatonic, blues, Dorian, Phrygian,
Lydian, healing, Japanese folk, Chinese,
Damanhurian, Native American, Indian,
Arabic, Persian or chromatic). Even
better, their gadgets are encased in attractive bamboo-wood housings.
Another eco-friendly bamboo-wood
gadget is Plants Play (www.plantsplay.
com). Branded with the slogan ‘Nature
Live’, this is a wearable device that
allows you to listen to the music generated by plants and trees. Through two
electrodes settled on the leaves, Plants
Play converts electrical plant variations
into musical notes, and sends them by
Bluetooth on your smartphone.
Fundamentally similar is the Canadian
PLANTchoir product (https://plantchoir.
com), except this also allows you to record the music that your garden friends
generate. Pitched for both domestic and
business use, the product is promoted as being suitable for garden centres
and floral shops, yoga and pilates studios, massage therapy studios, as well
as acupuncture, chiropractic and other
therapeutic settings. Other beneficiaries
include day spas, medi-spas, nail and
hair salons, together with day care, and
Montessori and primary school establishments. Fabulous! But I must warn you
that serene wellness comes at a price and
you’re looking at three-digit price tags.
Spoiler warning
Is this explosion of wellness for real
or is it all a load of bovine byproduct?
Thanks to the HowStuffWorks website, I can reveal it’s utter tosh (https://
bit.ly/pe-jul20-daisy). This sober assessment quotes plant physiologist Dr
Monica Gagliano, associate professor
in the School of Biological Sciences at
the University of Western Australia, as
saying: ‘Simply put, the machines that
translate the ‘biofeedback’ of plants into
music have nothing scientific about
them — the whole story has nothing to
do with science or the sound of plants.’
For the techies among us, she adds:
‘The apparatus used in many of these
instances is a simple multimeter measuring the electrical impedance of the
plant. The multimeter then transforms
those electrical signals into notes using
a sound chip, like those sound cards in
your computer, which is how the sounds
make sense to our human ears.’ What
a disappointing let-down!
Electrical spaghetti
More plant husbandry matters now, or
maybe that should be more ‘market garden’ related than ‘domestic back garden’.
No matter – the subject is ‘spaghetti’ and
as soon as anyone mentions spaghetti,
my mind flits immediately to the superb BBC Panorama report on a bumper
Swiss spaghetti harvest, narrated by the
authoritative Richard Dimbleby (father
of David and Jonathan). To see what I
mean, take a peep at: https://youtu.be/
tVo_wkxH9dU and only afterwards
view https://youtu.be/MEqp0x6ajGE.
You really must do this if you didn’t see
it when it was broadcast back in 1957.
Say the same word ‘spaghetti’ to many
electronicists and they will reply: ‘Oh
yes, systoflex!’.This was a rather inflexible (and sticky!) kind of fabric tubing
impregnated with something like shellac varnish that you used to slip over
exposed wiring and component leads
before far more flexible coloured neoprene or PVC plastic tubing replaced it.
Dedicated restorers of vintage wireless
receivers either use something similar
made of polyester and sold by CPC as
‘braided sleeving’ or else buy shoelaces
and remove the inner filling. But was
its name systoflex or sistoflex?
Apparently both – according to the 15
January 1909 edition of The Electrician
magazine, the firm of Spicer Brothers
had just introduced its ‘Sistoflex’ trademarked product range of insulating
materials, which subsequent advertisements mentioned as including flexible
insulated tubing. However, the alternative spelling with a ‘y’ appears in British
wireless magazines as early as 1926, so
who made Systoflex and how did they get
away with using such a similar-sounding
name? I have no idea but maybe readers
can come to the rescue!
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