![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Treadmills
Nov. 26th, 2006 09:19 amI keep thinking the same things over and over. They don't always come in the same order, but all the thoughts are very familiar and almost entirely unwelcome. This may account for a certain repetitive quality that has crept into this journal.
A treadmill was originally, of course, a mill, which is to say a device for refining grain by grinding the husks off it. A treadmill is powered by walking, as opposed to a wind- or water- mill. It is interesting to note that a modern treadmill is not generally used to provide work, and in fact often includes a feature that enables its user to make operating it more difficult- a curious inversion considering the original use of the device was to extract work with the minimum necessary outlay of human muscle power. (Working treadmills were often powered by draft animals, enabling nearby humans to act more in a managerial than labor capacity.)
The treadmill's most common use in the modern era is as an exercise device, because one salient feature of a treadmill is that you can potentially walk forever without leaving a very small, confined area, such as a gym. This is an interesting application of geometry and mechanics that allows a path of potentially infinite length to be confined ("imbedded") in a very small volume of ambient three-dimensional space.
In the comics of the 1960s, the Flash ("The Fastest Man Alive!") had a wonderful device called the Cosmic Treadmill. It enabled its user(s) to travel in time, but you had to be able to run at pretty near the speed of light to make it work. This represents another curious inversion of the idea of the treadmill, inasmuch as a device ordinarily used to confine effort to a smaller-than-default area instead opened up potentially infinite theaters of action.
I sometimes wish I had a Cosmic Treadmill. Unfortunately, I can't run anywhere near that fast.
A treadmill was originally, of course, a mill, which is to say a device for refining grain by grinding the husks off it. A treadmill is powered by walking, as opposed to a wind- or water- mill. It is interesting to note that a modern treadmill is not generally used to provide work, and in fact often includes a feature that enables its user to make operating it more difficult- a curious inversion considering the original use of the device was to extract work with the minimum necessary outlay of human muscle power. (Working treadmills were often powered by draft animals, enabling nearby humans to act more in a managerial than labor capacity.)
The treadmill's most common use in the modern era is as an exercise device, because one salient feature of a treadmill is that you can potentially walk forever without leaving a very small, confined area, such as a gym. This is an interesting application of geometry and mechanics that allows a path of potentially infinite length to be confined ("imbedded") in a very small volume of ambient three-dimensional space.
In the comics of the 1960s, the Flash ("The Fastest Man Alive!") had a wonderful device called the Cosmic Treadmill. It enabled its user(s) to travel in time, but you had to be able to run at pretty near the speed of light to make it work. This represents another curious inversion of the idea of the treadmill, inasmuch as a device ordinarily used to confine effort to a smaller-than-default area instead opened up potentially infinite theaters of action.
I sometimes wish I had a Cosmic Treadmill. Unfortunately, I can't run anywhere near that fast.
