It’s believed the machine was built 120 years ago in Paris by Blaise Bontems, a well-known maker of bird automata and was recently refurbished by Michael Start over at The House of Automata.
Singing bird boxes were extremely popular in Europe starting from the 18th century, first as a toy for a privileged few and then later as a more affordable item. Watch this video from The British Clockmaker Ray Bates to see how the bird fit in with the box’s innerworkings:
And below, HD video of a singing bird box made by Jaquet-Droz & Leschot, Switzerland circa 1785:
Top Secret Drum Corps is a precision drum corps based in Basel, Switzerland. With 25 drummers and colorguard members, the corps became famous for its demanding six-minute routine performed at the Edinburgh Tattoo in 2003. With its invitation to Edinburgh, Top Secret became one of the first non-military, non-British Commonwealth acts to perform on the Esplanade at Edinburgh Castle.
A farmer milked the cows, and a tanker from the dairy came to collect the milk.
1. In the dairy, cheese makers warmed up the milk…
2. …and added bacteria to make it turn sour and thick.
3. Then they added a substance that animals use to digest milk called rennet…
4. …and it changed again into bits called curds, floating in whey.
5. They drained off the whey, chopped up the rubbery curds, added some salt, and pressed them into blocks.
6. They stored the blocks for months until the cheese was ripe.
Many cheeses also use rennet alternatives, like vegetable rennet, microbial rennet or citric acid. Fresh cheeses like cream cheese, chevre, paneer, ricotta and mozzarella, can be eaten right away. Other cheeses are aged (like in these videos). Aging the cheese can take anywhere from a month for Monterey Jack, to 6 weeks for Camemberts and Bries, 3-6 months for Blue Cheese, and 12 months for some parmesans. Some cheeses take even longer!
Clearly, we fell down a cheese-making rabbit hole. These cheese flipping robots(specifically Gruyere-flipping robots)in Switzerland started it! Via Kottke:
More than half a century of sending objects into space has left the Earth surrounded by junk. Bits of long-dead satellites, spent rocket stages and other debris orbit the planet at almost 18,000 mph, each chunk a potential hazard to working satellites or astronauts.
The Swiss have a plan, however. Scientists at the Swiss space centre at EPFL, the federal institute for technology in Lausanne, want to send a “janitor satellite” into orbit, to sweep up debris and permanently remove it from orbit.
The SFr10m (£7m) satellite, called CleanSpace One, could launch within five years, according to EPFL.
