“You were right about Mick Hucknall”
Also well worth reading: A great Wilson/Factory MetaFilter thread from 2002, filled with fascinating reminiscences from People Who Were There.
Bitters end
A while back, Chris twittered about the marvel of precision design that is the Tabasco sauce bottle: his point was that it’s a beautifully engineered piece of fluid management. One drop. At. A time. No more, no less, even when the bottle top’s become caked with dried tabasco remains. Drip, drip, drip: perfect for precisely measuring out the exact amount of sauce needed to add the required zing to whatever you’re making (note: ten drops minimum, or you are weak and feeble.)
I bring this up only because I’ve noticed another piece of bottle engineering that is, in its own way, equally impressive. The makers of Angostura Bitters have somehow managed to craft a bottle that, no matter how gently you tip it, will always send the first drop shooting several inches beyond whatever you were trying to put the bitters into. That it is able to consistently achieve this, regardless of the size of the receptacle or its distance from the bottle, shows an awareness of its surroundings and an ability to make complex calculations on the fly, strongly implying that some form of advanced AI inhabits the glass. And that it is able to propel a drop of liquid a good distance, regardless of the energy already present in or added to the system, clearly has major implications in the world of physics and engineering; initially in the field of inkjet printer manufacturing, but ultimately for space travel as well.