[HN Gopher] What are these bumps on the top of a pull-tab can?
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What are these bumps on the top of a pull-tab can?
Author : mkmk
Score : 254 points
Date : 2025-01-22 03:03 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| dartos wrote:
| Old Reddit vibes
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Yeah I started reading it prepared for it to be fake LLM slop
| a_shovel wrote:
| _xkcd_ "Work": https://xkcd.com/1741/
|
| "Sometimes I get overwhelmed thinking about the amount of work
| that went into the ordinary objects around me."
| Larrikin wrote:
| A former co-worker I knew said a technique he would use on a
| date that was going slow to try and make himself look smart and
| the date curious was to examine the design decisions of objects
| around them. The table, the paint used to make a painting, the
| shampoo that makes the dates hair smell so good, etc. Add in
| some history of the object and discuss until an interesting bit
| was found that could move the conversation else where. Seemed
| like it could work but I never needed to try it.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| I've never had a date going slow that also included me being
| able to smell her hair.
| NikkiA wrote:
| The fact that he got to try this routine multiple times tells
| me it probably didn't work.
|
| He also sounds unbearable.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Then it's a jumping off point to talk about economics,
| perfect date material.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| It's probably fine for conversation but writing it down and
| using it as a tatic definitely makes it strange
| noneeeed wrote:
| I love this comic.
|
| There's an idea in psychology called the illusion of
| explanitory depth. It's the idea that everyone has much more
| confidence in their understanding of how things work, even the
| most mundane and apparantly simple things, than is warranted.
| In turn we tend to hugely underestimate the difficulty,
| complexity and skill in jobs we have never done.
|
| The world is absolutely full of utterly prosaic objects that
| are far more sophisticated that we imagine, either in their
| function and design or in their manufacture.
|
| Most people overestimate how well they would cope in some post-
| apocalyptic world. But I think even many people who regard
| themselves as prepared, underestimate how much skill and sheer
| effort is involved in making really simple things like rope. To
| do more than just scrape by you would need to reconstruct a
| society of specialists, it won't be the rugged individualists.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I hate this take (and every other take wherein one basically
| looks down their nose at the rest of the population and
| claims they all have a bad take on something).
|
| Most things are pretty simply and someone with a basic
| understanding could get them mostly right or at least right
| enough to work. The complexity comes from the many layers of
| refinement over the years. No, your clay molded toilet won't
| flush like a modern one but if you understand the basics of
| how a toilet works it'll probably flush.
| infecto wrote:
| I believe you are overestimating the percentage of the
| population that understand the basics of how a toilet
| works. Not looking down on those folks but in my
| experience, there are folks that think about how things
| work or have some practical experience, the rest don't ever
| think about it and so most likely do not even understand
| the basics. Nothing wrong with it but its fairly apparent.
|
| Inversely, those folks that think about how things work
| tend to be fairly overconfident in their ability to
| recreate/repair/innovate. In reality there are often fine
| details that you miss.
| smitelli wrote:
| Is this hypothetical person going to build a municipal
| water and sewer system for their toilet too? Or will they
| just dig a well, which requires no skills or effort at all?
| /s
| noneeeed wrote:
| This absolutely isn't looking down on people. I didn't say
| that people _couldn 't_ do these things. I am absolutely
| ignorant of how the vast majority of the world actually
| works. I would never look down on someone because they
| don't know something. I get very annoyed with my fellow
| techies and the way they seem to assume that non-technical
| people are stupid for not understanding things that they
| themselves see as simple and obvious.
|
| Of course people can learn anything. It's that we tend to
| not realise that we don't know this stuff, and so we
| underestimate the difficulty/complexity of them. This often
| leads to people actually looking down dismissively on other
| people's jobs, as they assume they must be simple or easy,
| because they have never done them. You get endless
| political commentry on how people doing certain jobs don't
| deserve to be paid well because what they do appears
| "simple". Train drivers are a classic example. It's a job
| that is a lot harder and more involved than it appears at
| first.
|
| For a while I worked in the rail industry. That was full of
| things that were way more complex and involved than I had
| ever realised. Things that seemed simple on the surface had
| decades of refinement and subtlety to them born of
| experience.
|
| Your example is a great one. The principals of the flushing
| toilet with a siphon flush, ballcock and an S-bend outflow
| are not complex, but a lot of people have no idea what
| pressing a flush down actually does to get the water into
| the bowl, how it refills or what the S-bend is actually for
| (it's more than just the smell, sewer gas is explosive).
| It's the reason that a lot of people don't tackle more DIY
| jobs, they suddenly realise they don't understand it. But
| it's also why YouTube is so great, because these things are
| all learnable.
|
| In the event of a societal collapse, I sometimes think that
| preserving all the instructional YouTube videos would be
| our best hope for rebuilding :D
| HPsquared wrote:
| Reminds me of "I, Pencil".
|
| https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Related: The Engineer Guy's "The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum
| Beverage Can" on YouTube https://youtu.be/hUhisi2FBuw
| larusso wrote:
| Damn you beat me by a hair
| boffinAudio wrote:
| Whats crazy is that a significant portion of the aluminium
| minerals comes from a single source of bauxite in the world,
| near Pinjarra Western Australia .. something like 90% of the
| worlds aluminium is sourced from that one mine.
| atombender wrote:
| According this source [1], only about 35% of all bauxite is
| mined in Australia, so I don't think that's true.
|
| What's crazy is how modern shipping has made it economical to
| process this elsewhere, all over the globe. For example, from
| one of the biggest bauxite mines, in Para, Brazil, the raw
| bauxite is shipped across the Atlantic to be processed by
| Hydro in Norway, which refines it into alumina powder, which
| is then shipped elsewhere to be refined into aluminum. You
| would think it would be more cost-effective and energy-
| efficient to centralize this, not to mention more
| environmentally friendly.
|
| [1] https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/profiling-the-top-
| five...
| boffinAudio wrote:
| Yeah, I think this factoid has changed significantly in the
| decades since I learned it during a visit to Pinjarra. ;)
|
| Still, bauxite is pretty weird business.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| Extracting aluminium from bauxite is notoriously energy-
| intensive. During the nineteenth century, European
| aristocrats used aluminium tableware because it was more
| expensive than silverware. (They later switched back to
| silver when the novelty wore off and they realised
| aluminium was too light to feel right in the hand.)
| at_a_remove wrote:
| And you get all of that energy back when you powder that
| aluminium, mix it with rust, and manage (with difficulty)
| to ignite it.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I took a small rabbit hole run into bauxite smelting when I
| found out a local place had their own power plant just for
| the process. It really does require that much energy.
|
| If the Brazil plant is putting out enough ore, I can
| definitely imagine it is cheaper to sell it internationally
| to someone with hydro power than to build and operate their
| own power plant.
| larusso wrote:
| Whenever it's about cans I can only recommend this video from the
| engineer guy [1]. He makes no videos anymore sadly.
|
| https://youtu.be/hUhisi2FBuw
| vlachen wrote:
| I can highly recommend his books, however.
| larusso wrote:
| I also think Technologie Connections filled his spot great.
| He started with sound and video topics but switched to
| household technologies.
| hobofan wrote:
| > He makes no videos anymore sadly.
|
| Has he stated that anywhere? Because looking at the upload date
| (8 months) of the latest video and the gaps between previous
| uploads (sometimes multiple years), it doesn't look
| uncharacteristic for him.
| amyames wrote:
| the pull tab on the right has a divot in it where it makes
| contact with the can, and it concentrates more pressure at the
| point of contact to pop the seal.
|
| That's an attempt to mitigate cans where you'd pull the tab and
| the tab would just break off without opening the can. So the
| person who answered it's usually because of the seal is right.
|
| other half's dad [retired from] Campbell in Ohio and isn't an
| internet let alone a Reddit person, you'd never guess how much
| trivia there is about their #2 can. I'd have commented but a
| brand new account will probably be buried as spam ... and the
| second answer is correct anyway.
| juancb wrote:
| I hope to someday be too good for Reddit. For now I tend to use
| it or at least click on links to it like I do for Twitter.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| Reminds me of something from a few months ago:
|
| Someone on r/HomeNetworking cursed whoever invented the RJ45
| connector, and in the comments, Richard Benett, vice-chair of the
| first IEEE 802.3 task group that wrote a standard around
| RJ-45-style connector, appears and offers to take the blame.
|
| That led to this short documentary: "TWISTED: The dramatic
| history of twisted-pair Ethernet"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8PP5IHsL8Y
| smokel wrote:
| And here's a link to that particular Reddit post:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/1dsfv5f/to_...
| znpy wrote:
| link to the old.reddit.com version for an actually readable
| page: https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/1dsfv5
| f/to_...
| ReptileMan wrote:
| When it comes to connectors in IT the RJ45 and RJ12 are among
| the saner ones.
| voxadam wrote:
| One of my favorite examples of odd connectors has to be the
| massively clunky hermaphroditic Token Ring connector from
| IBM.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/IBM_herm.
| ..
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/IBMtrcon.
| ..
|
| https://imgur.com/found-old-ibm-cable-while-cleaning-up-
| ware...
| unwind wrote:
| Very informative, like so many posts on the /r/whatisthisthing
| sub. It's awesome when random sources pop up, it's very
| rewarding!
|
| I had a similar moment once (I'm a regular reader of the sub)
| when someone asked about about a balise [1] when I was at one of
| the primary manufacturers and operators of them, doing work on
| software handling logs from passages. :)
|
| Also, of course whenever someone on here mentions Nagle's
| Algorithm [2] and gets fun feedback from a particular user,
| that's fun too! :)
|
| [1]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/yrijd9/wha...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagle%27s_algorithm
| dasil003 wrote:
| Remember when every other Quora answer felt like this? In
| retrospect maybe that was peak Web.
| imglorp wrote:
| Further down, paraphrasing a thread, > why is
| the dot spacing different on the left vs right can?
| > When a product design like this gets licensed out to others in
| the same industry, they will often change the design slightly to
| make their version incompatible with other potential suppliers
| > why want incompatibility? > to enforce supplier
| loyalty
|
| Another kind of moat. Everyone is for a free market until they
| can use some form of lock-in to force a transaction.
| cma wrote:
| I can't imagine getting assigned this task and not getting
| depressed, "bullshit jobs" smacking you in the face
| ryandrake wrote:
| I used to think the future would be like Star Trek, but in
| reality, the space ships and space stations won't be able to
| dock with each other because there will be 3-5 oligarchic
| manufacturers, and they will use 20 different docking
| standards in order to segment and lock in their customers.
| We're never going to have Nice Things because shareholders
| want another 0.5% back from their investment.
| thedman9052 wrote:
| I'd imagine something as important as docking would go more
| like USB-C adoption. There will be a standard, but a
| powerful holdout will insist on their proprietary solution
| because it's "safer" or something. Meanwhile everyone is
| shouting at them to just use the standard, until it's
| finally enforced by legislation.
|
| The difference is something like phone ports and docking
| are things which end users readily benefit from having
| interoperability, so it's a selling point and there's
| market pressure to conform. Factories are bespoke
| installations and they often run without major changes for
| many years at a time. There's less pressure for them to
| have interchangeability when they don't move and don't
| interact with each other.
| imglorp wrote:
| There is an international docking standard
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Docking_Syste
| m_Standard
|
| But if ever (hopefully) colonize space, would there be a
| single government to legislate standards? I'm less
| optimistic here: a feudal model seems more likely with
| widely spread, isolated communities.
| johtso wrote:
| It's the pig's eyes of course!
| jonhohle wrote:
| Too bad the post is locked. shout out to Menomonee Falls in the
| 90s!
| kazinator wrote:
| Love the enthusiasm of the top answer! "Pop cans appeared in the
| 1990s; I was there and helped make it happen, bumps and all!"
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