Description: The joy of thrift store electronic finds.
In general the ground rule for this blog is that I only write about items I bought used. They don’t necessarily have to come from a thrift store, just that I did not buy them new. I’m going to bend that rule a bit on this occasion because another aspect of this blog is that basically all of these items are frivolous. That is to say I enjoy finding them because I like looking at them and learning about them but they are basically useless.
I’m a big fan of Brady Haran’s YouTube empire of science and technology channels: Periodic Videos , Numberphile , Sixty Signals , Deep Sky , and Computerphile . On a Sunday last September I got up at a leisurely time and happened to check Numberphile. He had just published this video about an enigmatic tabletop device that mechanically displayed prime numbers. I was transfixed.
It turned out that this thing was called a Primer, an electronic kinetic sculpture by the LA artist Karl Lautman who was selling them to the public through a Kickstarter . There is a big red button and when you push the button the counter clicks off to the next prime number. It only displays prime numbers. That’s all it does.