Dan Q

Day: 4 May 2018

The Mystery Cable

While rooting through our attic, Ruth‘s brother Owen just found a mystery cable. It almost certainly belongs to me (virtually all of the cables in the house, especially the unusual ones, do), but this one is a mystery to me.

6-of-13-pin plug, believed to be proprietary.
End #1 of the cable is a 13-pin male serial connection with 6 connected pins, spring-loaded. It seems to be designed to screw in at one end. The screw is worn.

The more I look at it, the more I feel like I’m slowly going mad, as if the cable is some kind of beast from the Lovecraftian Cable Dimension which mortal minds were not meant to comprehend. It’s got three “ends” and is clearly some kind of signal combining (or separating) cable, but it doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen before (and don’t forget, I probably own it).

End #2 of the cable: a microphone, perhaps?
On the other side of the split, end #2 of the cable terminates in a fine metal mesh (perhaps concealing a microphone, small speaker, or temperature/humidity sensor). It has a “push-to-talk” style clicker switch and a “tie clip” on it.

Every time I look at it I have a new idea of what it could be. Some kind of digital dictophone or radio mic connector? Part of a telephone headset? Weather monitoring hardware? A set of converters between two strange and unusual pieces of hardware? But no matter what I come up with, something doesn’t add up? Why only 6 pins? Why the strange screw-in connector? Why the clicker switch? Why the tie clips? Why “split” the output (let alone have cables of different lengths)?

End #3: an earpiece, maybe?
End #3 looks like a fibreoptic audio terminator. Or perhaps a part of an earpiece. It, too, has a “tie clip” on (do I clip it to… my ear?)

In case it helps, I’ve made a video of it. You’ll note that I use the word “thingy” more times than might perhaps be justified, but I’ve been puzzling over this one for a while:

Can you help? Can you identify this mystery cable? Prize for the correct answer!

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The Quakers are right. We don’t need God.

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

The Quakers are right. We don’t need God | Simon Jenkins by Simon Jenkins (the Guardian)

The group is considering dropping God from its meetings guidance. This is the new religiosity, says the Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins

The Quakers are clearly on to something. At their annual get-together this weekend they are reportedly thinking of dropping God from their “guidance to meetings”. The reason, said one of them, is because the term “makes some Quakers feel uncomfortable”. Atheists, according to a Birmingham University academic, comprise a rising 14% of professed Quakers, while a full 43% felt “unable to profess a belief in God”. They come to meetings for fellowship, rather than for higher guidance. The meeting will also consider transgenderism, same-sex marriage, climate change and social media. Religion is a tiring business.

I am not a Quaker or religious, but I have been to Quaker meetings, usually marriages or funerals, and found them deeply moving. The absence of ritual, the emphasis on silence and thought and the witness of “friends” seemed starkly modernist. Meeting houses can be beautiful spaces. The loveliest I know dates from 1700 and is lost in deep woods near Meifod, Powys. It is a place of the purest serenity, miles from any road and with only birdsong to blend with inner reflection.

The Quakers’ lack of ceremony and liturgical clutter gives them a point from which to view the no man’s land between faith and non-faith that is the “new religiosity”. A dwindling 40% of Britons claim to believe in some form of God, while a third say they are atheists. But that leaves over a quarter in a state of vaguely agnostic “spirituality”. Likewise, while well over half of Americans believe in the biblical God, nearly all believe in “a higher power or spiritual force”.

What these words mean is now the subject of intense debate…

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