Stone knives

“And of course, if the maker decides to stop manufacturing the sealed transmitters in the future, you will be forced to upgrade and your monitor will become an expensive paperweight.”

--Beyond Fingersticks

In college I had a cool job. I ran the darkroom for the anthropology department. Mainly, I spent many hours printing B&W photos of stone knives and spear points. Each picture had to be to scale. There was a little ruler in each photo. I had to run the massive Omega D2 enlarger up and down its silver track to get each negative to just the right height so that the prints would be to scale.

If you’ve never had the chance to play in a darkroom, I pity you. They’re extinct now, of course, but they were wonderful, magical places. They were bathed in dim orange light, like the rising harvest moon. Water gurgled like palace fountains. The machinery hummed. It was soothing and peaceful and wonderful. And when the pictures formed from white sheets of paper… to dull grey whispers… to ghosts… to pencil-like drawings… and then matured to stark back and white images in the developer tray, you feel god-like for making it happen. Even if the images are only of stone knives.

What drew my mind back thirty years? Well, today I changed my sensor and I decided to snap a picture of the new G4 transmitter next to several others for scale. The resulting image, on my computer monitor with no orange light, no gurgling water, and no ancient magic, reminded me of those anthropology department prints I spent so many hours making all those years ago.

It kind of makes me wish I’d thought to put a little ruler in the picture!

Left to right: the Abbott Navigator’s transmitter;, a Med-T MiniLink; Dexcom Seven Plus transmitter; and the new Dexcom G-4 transmitter.