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Makemakean Does Various Graphical Things!

Something that the other Max may already know of, Municipal government in Sweden was really, really, really fucked up back in the day. During my searching for tax records in the 19th century, I've come across now one situation where a single person in a municipality held almost a majority of the vote.

Note that this was not because the individual (a widowed countess) was the only voter, but because the suffrage was graded after taxation value, and she paid more in tax than almost the entire municipality put together.
 
Makemakean said:
Well this is just astonishingly wonderful. I'm sure @Thande and @Ares96 will appreciate this. Some nice 19th century fellow in 1874 made a graphic map of how much of the population in the different counties of Sweden had the vote in the municipal elections in Sweden in 1871. This is just... WOW:

View attachment 5965
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Reminds me of the early American data visualisation trailblazing around that time, though I think the Americans had come up with more readily apparent hatching-based intensity scales. (It helped that they had more than one colour of course)
 
Redolegna said:
Yes, I will be casting all the votes for the people with the bonnet phrygien, please.
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The actual cap the name refers to is a nightcap. There is an old Swedish idiom that goes ”speaking in the nightcap”, which generally means that one is confused and has no idea what is going on, as if trying to discuss anything with a guy you’ve just awoken. The early Hats would accuse Arvid Horn of doing this after he came up with one explanation after another as to why it was a bad idea for Sweden to interfere in the War of the Polish Succession.

I anticipate however that just like Andrew Jackson went and made the jackass his symbol, so the Caps reinterpret the cap as being the Phrygian one. Fits well with them being a proto-liberal party.
 
Having problems figuring out what to use as symbols for the other parties. An idea I had for Radikale Højre was that as they are founded around the ATL-brother of Hans Christian Andersen, a nice symbol for them to use would be a tinder. Problem is that now that I look at it, I cannot shake the feeling that if it looks like anything, it looks like they have a mustache as a party symbol.

radikale_hojre.png
 
Makemakean said:
Problem is that now that I look at it, I cannot shake the feeling that if it looks like anything, it looks like they have a mustache as a party symbol.
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Instantly brought to mind the placards with moustaches on them that were shared out (along with actual fake moustaches) when Juholt was being elected at the 2011 party congress.
 
Tried going with another design of the tinder. Now it makes it look like Andersen is running some sort of SPECTRE-esque criminal syndicate:

even_worse.png

I think I stylized swan is probably the best. It is a national symbol of Denmark, after all, and there is the Ugly Duckling connection.
 
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Makemakean said:
Tried going with another design of the tinder. Now it makes it look like Andersen is running some sort of SPECTRE-esque criminal syndicate:

View attachment 6015

I think I stylized swan is probably the best. It is a national symbol of Denmark, after all, and there is the Ugly Duckling connection.
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Yeah, this is definitely something worn in Venice during the Carnevale.
 
Must admit I was unaware of that magic lanterns were actually a reasonably big thing in OTL in the 1850s!

lanternslideshow1897.jpg


No need to invent any steampunk machinery here then. This will be useful and nice.
 
Makemakean said:
Spoilers:

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Eller, I know, it's 'or'. 'og', I'm suspecting it's the equivalent in Danish of the Swedish 'och'.

Purely guesswork, Ørsted is saying 'I believe I have found a solution to your problem mumble mumble with the 'electrical osmanian' yada yada following technical something something. And then he describes electrical way of inputing different instructions for this proto-Internet?
 
Redolegna said:
Eller, I know, it's 'or'. 'og', I'm suspecting it's the equivalent in Danish of the Swedish 'och'.

Purely guesswork, Ørsted is saying 'I believe I have found a solution to your problem mumble mumble with the 'electrical osmanian' yada yada following technical something something. And then he describes electrical way of inputing different instructions for this proto-Internet?
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He's showing how you can use relays (in OTL invented in the early 1830s) to make NOT, AND, and OR logic gates. That's the basic components you're going to need if you want to build an electric computer in the first place. ;)
 
Makemakean said:
He's showing how you can use relays (in OTL invented in the early 1830s) to make NOT, AND, and OR logic gates
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Sort of makes me wonder why it took so long to do this OTL.

This is nitpicking horribly, but would they really use the same kind of circuit diagrams? Switch might be obvious and the relay coils match what it physically looks like, but aren't the coils surrounding the switches so they might be shown on top of one another and why would ground have the same symbol?

But yeah, this is really really cool. How big are the 19th century relays?
 
kratostatic said:
Sort of makes me wonder why it took so long to do this OTL.
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The relay was invented in the early 1830s in OTL as well, and it was very helpful in making telegraphy something that worked over great distances.

As for computers, probably because they had no preconceived ideas of what a computer was, and so there was no reason for them to develop electric ones.

In this timeline, Gustav III becomes obsessed with the Turk chess-playing automata (believing it to be a legitimate article), and so he starts paying a bunch of fine watchmakers money to try to build him a working one. They never come even close to accomplishing their tasks, but they do over time manage to reach more and more levels of complexity, and eventually they do put together very rudimentary programmable devices.

They are of course still toys, but now there exists the notion of a "programmable mechanical device". In the 1820s, the Bureau of Tabulations comes across them by accident, and soon begins commission the construction of programmable calculating machines for use in their Stockholm office. These looks very much like "difference engines". It doesn't go long before they start becoming very big and cumbersome to deal with and put together and keep functioning, getting all those wheels to spin.

Consequently, they begin looking into a way to make the wheels turn by electric power, because then you wouldn't need as many cog wheels, and it would be easier and more practical to make changes to the machinery. It is from hearing about this that Ørsted finds out about it.

Ørsted on the other hand feels that they aren't using the promise that electricity holds enough, and one rainy autumn morning, he happens to stumble upon a leaf on the grounds, which is slowly being washed through and inbetween the different cobblestones on the street. Realizing that you don't need the cog wheels at all, you can just let the flow, the current, be the conveyor of information, he comes up with these constructions.

And that's how electrical computing gets a very early kick-start.

kratostatic said:
This is nitpicking horribly, but would they really use the same kind of circuit diagrams?
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Switch might be obvious and the relay coils match what it physically looks like, but aren't the coils surrounding the switches so they might be shown on top of one another and why would ground have the same symbol?[/QUOTE]

Actually, they aren't. (In OTL) What Ørsted discovered was that when he let an electric current run through a wire, it made a compass needle change the direction in which it was pointing. That is, an electric current generates a magnetic field as illustrated here:

magcur.gif


Making the wire into a coil and letting the current run through it, the magnetic field now looks like this:

sol4.png


You put the switch outside of the coil. When the current runs through the coil, the movable part of the switch is attracted by the magnetic field, and so is shut down, closing the circuit and letting another current run through it. (This is of course all explained much better in CrashCourse's Computer Science series of videos on Youtube).

As for the symbols, yeah, they should probably be different, but I just really couldn't come up with anything that didn't seem contrived. I probably ought to revisit those some day. :p
 
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