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Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later

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Re: Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later

#111

Post by m463 »

js2 wrote: post #82
btilly wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mother did something like that, but as a prank on my brother who was at the time in a military hospital. (This during the Vietnam days.) What she did was got an atlas and identified every town whose name was at all romantic. (Things like Loving, New Mexico.) The postcards that she had come back appeared to be from random girls with as different as she could make the handwriting to be. It was all timed to show up o…

During my research I learned there's a Bridal Veil, Oregon which is a ghost town except for a post office, which folks like to use to send their wedding invitations. https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/why-brides-grooms-are-f...

Sounds like Loveland CO where my aunt said they remail valentine's postcards.

Re: Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later

#112

Post by Izkata »

IncRnd wrote: post #47
null_deref wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The third one really got me sad, did you successfully sent it back to its intended recipient?

How would you do that, burn them?

I read it as the sender died (and they were returned to sender) but the recipients may still be alive somewhere.

Re: Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later

#113

Post by vecter »

philwelch wrote: post #97
vecter wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This user is not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Welch

How do you know I’m not? To confirm though, I am indeed not that or any other mathematician and I can’t claim any credit for any contribution to category theory. I’m simply a programmer who knows a little bit about a few things, no one special :)

Going to the website on your profile made it immediately clear, but even without that confirmation, there's a much higher probability of you being a random programmer vs. a specific older mathematician.

Re: Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later

#114

Post by eusebius »

I worked in the mail room of a dorm while in college. Part of the daily routine was mindlessly marking things "return to sender," rarely noticing the postmark date. In one instance (this was 2013) we received a pretty beat up piece of mail that was clearly a Valentine's Day card. The postmark date was "02 Feb 1999." Being very intrigued, I found a CV that seemed to belong to the recipient (the CV indicated that they attended the university around the same time) and emailed them. They expressed their gratitude and mentioned that the card was from their now deceased grandparents. I of course forwarded the mail to them. I've always wondered what kind of journey that piece of mail had... I imagine part of it was stuck behind a desk somewhere.

Re: Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later

#115

Post by codezero »

Spooky23 wrote: post #103
codezero wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never knew they did twice daily deliver, time to google up some more info!

It was more in some places. My grandma and aunt would mail letters like IMs in 1930s NYC.

I guess the telephone was able to replace a lot of those messages - and is possibly the reason they dialed back in the 1950s?

Re: Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later

#116

Post by eru »

philwelch wrote: post #105
sethammons wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

true, percentiles are important for telling you how your system is doing and how typical users experience it. However, I contend that you should also measure max latency, just that is is less important for understanding typical usage. But seeing your max go crazy can signal that there is something else in the stack that needs work. Silly example that I hit: max was consistently 2hr on something that p99'd at like 1mi…

Good points. To my point though, you mention that you noticed a "consistent" max of 2hr. Meaning the consistency was the interesting part. You probably consider this issue to be more important than some other hypothetical issue that caused, say, literally a single request to have a 2hr latency on Tuesday. In other words, if you monitored over a period that was long enough to establish a statistically significant p99.…

In sum: top percentiles are more important than the max; but monitoring the max can still be useful.

Just like monitoring the arithmetic average ain't completely useless either. It's just far from the most important metric.

Re: Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later

#117

Post by judge2020 »

wheybags wrote: post #93

≥ Brittany says if she can’t find the family she’s gonna try and get it put into the museum in Belding. Wtf sort of professional journalist writes "gonna" in an article on a news site?

Might be verbatim, but then again there are no quotes. This is indeed local news so actual writing and proofreading skills might be lesser than those of national outlets.

Re: Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later

#118

Post by eru »

ghaff wrote: post #86
_whiteCaps_ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://500years.royalmailgroup.com/gallery/delivery-frequenc... In the UK it was up to 12 times / day in cities!

To some degree, I'm sure it was a plot device but 19th century English novels often depended on rapid/same-day communications via letter at least in the environs of London.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Penny_Post

Re: Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later

#119

Post by rkagerer »

hk__2 wrote: post #66
marktangotango wrote: post #26

I used to be in the habit of emailing myself links to read later. I once had an email arrive at my gmail account 3 months after I sent it. That's like what 1000 years in internet time? :D

There are a couple services that allow you to write a letter to your future self and get it delivered in X months/years.

I had a substitute high school teacher one day who made us all write letters to ourselves, then sent them to us like 20 years later long after we'd forgotten about it. It was amazing!

Re: Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later

#120

Post by carstenhag »

TuringNYC wrote: post #8

Like many office buildings in NYC, my employer's building had a system of air-pressured mail tubes. I understand (now) that they are kept in some cases as decoration, historical artifact, or due to the building being designated a historical monument (not sure if internals are covered (?). We didn't understand that as first, and several colleagues and I put postcards and some expense reports into them. I can see the p…

I've seen some of those tubes at a Carrefour or Mercadona supermarket back in 2005 or something, in Spain. When they had too much many at the cash register, they sent the money to their backoffice. Super cool!

Nowadays in Germany they just take the cash register part with the money out and walk to the Tresor room, or have sort of wallets and a colleague delivers the money to there. Example taken from a Kaufland.

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