Quotulatiousness

August 27, 2020

Make a portable chopping-block workbench

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

[Note: the premium plane deep-dive video Rex refers to for “next week” got posted earlier instead – https://quotulatiousness.ca/blog/2020/08/20/will-a-premium-plane-really-cut-out-of-the-box/]

Rex Krueger
Published 26 Aug 2020

From backyard to workbench; make your own chopping-block!

More video and exclusive content: http://www.patreon.com/rexkrueger
Get the FREE leg plans: https://www.rexkrueger.com/store/chop…

Need a workbench? Build my Joiner’s Bench for about $250 including hardware and vise!
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcq1L…
Plans: https://www.rexkrueger.com/store/join…

Make the Low Japanese Sawhorses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7O7E…
Get the plans: https://www.rexkrueger.com/store/2d7p…

Tools/materials in this video (affiliate):
Japanese Ryoba Saw: https://amzn.to/2Qq3lZN
F Clamp: https://amzn.to/2Qtbddb
Screw Clamp: https://amzn.to/3gCa5i8
(This is not the cheapest screw-clamp, but it’s a good brand.)
Lag Screws: https://amzn.to/32w7PUi (I bought mine at the home-center, they were cheaper.)
Washers: https://amzn.to/2QnM8Ap (This is a 100 pack, but you can’t beat the price!)

Sign up for Fabrication First, my FREE newsletter: http://eepurl.com/gRhEVT

Wood Work for Humans Tool List (affiliate):
Stanley 12-404 Handplane: https://amzn.to/2TjW5mo
Honing Guide: https://amzn.to/2TaJEZM
Green buffing compound: https://amzn.to/2XuUBE2
Cheap metal/plastic hammer for plane adjusting: https://amzn.to/2XyE7Ln
Spade Bits: https://amzn.to/2U5kvML
Metal File: https://amzn.to/2CM985y (I don’t own this one, but it looks good and gets good reviews. DOESN’T NEED A HANDLE)
My favorite file handles: https://amzn.to/2TPNPpr
Block Plane Iron (if you can’t find a used one): https://amzn.to/2I6V1vh
Stanley Marking Knife: https://amzn.to/2Ewrxo3
Mini-Hacksaw: https://amzn.to/2QlJR85
Blue Kreg measuring jig: https://amzn.to/2QTnKYd
Blue Handled Marples Chisels: https://amzn.to/2tVJARY
Suizan Dozuki Handsaw: https://amzn.to/3abRyXB
Vaughan Ryoba Handsaw: https://amzn.to/2GS96M0
Glue Dispenser Bottle: https://amzn.to/30ltwoB
Orange F Clamps: https://amzn.to/2u3tp4X
Blue Painters Tape: https://amzn.to/35V1Bgo
Round-head Protractor: https://amzn.to/37fJ6oz
5 Minute Epoxy: https://amzn.to/37lTfjK
Dewalt Panel Saw: https://amzn.to/2HJqGmO

Plans, t-shirts, and hoodies: http://www.rexkrueger.com/store

Get my woodturning book: http://www.rexkrueger.com/book

Follow me on Instagram: @rexkrueger

Scots wa huh?

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

An amusing story in The Register from Kieren McCarthy:

In an extraordinary and somewhat devastating discovery, it turns out virtually the entire Scots version of Wikipedia, comprising more than 57,000 articles, was written, edited or overseen by a netizen who clearly had nae the slightest idea about the language.

The user is not only a prolific contributor, they are an administrator of sco.wikipedia.org, having created, modified or guided the vast majority of its pages in more than 200,000 edits. The result is tens of thousands of articles in English with occasional, and often ridiculous, letter changes – such as replacing a “y” with “ee.”

That’s right, someone doing a bad impression of a Scottish accent and then writing it down phonetically is the chief maintainer of the online encyclopedia’s Scots edition. And although this has been carrying on for the best part of a decade, the world was mostly oblivious to it all – until today, when one Redditor finally had enough of reading terrible Scots and decided to look behind the curtain.

“People embroiled in linguistic debates about Scots often use it as evidence that Scots isn’t a language, and if it was an accurate representation, they’d probably be right,” noted the Reddit sleuth, Ultach. “It uses almost no Scots vocabulary, what little it does use is usually incorrect, and the grammar always conforms to standard English, not Scots.”

While very nearly all Scottish people speak English, the Scots language was apparently still spoken, read, or otherwise understood by nearly 30 per cent of Scotland’s population according to those responding to a 2011 census. The language got a memorable boost, too, when Scots-writing novelist Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting became a silver-screen sensation.

Israel Faces U.S. Sanctions – The Second Arab-Israeli War Begins | The Suez Crisis | Part 1

Filed under: Africa, Britain, France, History, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 26 Aug 2020

Israel launches its invasion of Egypt, much to the surprise of America who reacts furiously to the act of aggression. It quickly becomes apparent to America that Israel is not acting alone when Britain and France deliver an ultimatum to Egypt. However, could Anglo-French war plans hit the buffers if the expected American backing does not materialize?

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel and Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel and Joram Appel
Image Research: Shaun Harrison & Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Maps: Ryan Weatherby

Colorizations:
– Mikolaj Uchman
– Daniel Weiss
– Carlos Ortega Pereira (BlauColorizations) – https://www.instagram.com/blaucoloriz…
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/

Sources:
National Archives NARA
Library of Congress Geography and Maps Department
Photo From the IAF website, https://www.iaf.org.il

From the Noun Project:
– telegraph – Luke Anthony Firth, GB
– soldier – Wonmo Kang

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Devil’s Disgrace” – Deskant
– “Searching Through Sand” – Deskant
– “As the Rivers Collapse” – Deskant
– “Crying Winds” – Deskant
– “Where Kings Walk” – Jon Sumner
– “Dreamless Nights” – The New Fools
– “Call of Muezzin” – Sight of Wonders
– “Dunes of Despair” – Deskant

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 days ago
Some of the military history buffs out there no doubt know about B.H. Liddell Hart and his contribution to interwar strategic theory. Well, he reportedly referred to the Israeli invasion here, code-named Operation Kadesh, as one of the finest applications of the strategy of the indirect approach he developed. This is reason enough to watch this episode, but the opening of hostilities in Sinai is interesting for reasons beyond purely theoretical concerns.

From the get-go, military plans are inherently tied to political maneuvering. From the secrecy and deception of the IDF’s movements to the delaying of the Anglo-French bombing campaign; politics determine the course of this war. However, it’s easy in limited conflicts like this that are almost academic in their application, to forget that it’s destroying the lives of ordinary people. Not only the soldiers fighting, but also the civilians whose homes and lives are under threat.

Average Egyptian and Palestinians suffered disproportionately in this short campaign. You’ll learn in a later episode about at least one massacre in a Palestinian town, and there was a blatant disregard for civilian life on all sides. You probably all have different opinions on which side deserves to win here and who is at fault. But let’s not forget the real people who suffered as a result of international politics.

Margaret Murray’s highly influential The Witch-Cult in Western Europe

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In First Things, Francis Young discusses the impact Murray’s work had when it was published in the 1920s:

Just under a century ago, in 1921, one of the strangest books ever to be published by Oxford University Press appeared in print: The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Alice Murray. By today’s academic standards — in fact, even by the standards of the 1920s — Murray’s book was filled with transparent flaws in methodology and research. Furthermore, the book’s author (a leading Egyptologist) was not qualified to write it. The few scholars then working on the history of European witchcraft dismissed Murray’s contribution. Yet in spite of this, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe became an instant hit and captured the imaginations of readers. Within three decades, the book had not only profoundly influenced cultural understandings of witchcraft, but also directly led to the rise of neopaganism and the foundation of a new religion, Wicca, that today has millions of adherents throughout the world.

Margaret Alice Murray (1863–1963) was born and brought up in British India — an upbringing that, as with so many Anglo-Indians of the nineteenth century, may have opened her mind to interests beyond Victorian culture. Determined to pursue a career of her own at a time when opportunities for women were limited, Murray tried out both nursing and social work before entering the progressive University College London in 1894, where she studied Egyptology under W. Flinders Petrie. Murray rapidly rose through the academic ranks, and by 1914, she was effectively running the Egyptology department. Her impressive achievements in advancing knowledge of ancient Egypt and higher education for women have, however, been largely overshadowed by her decision to take a detour into writing about European witchcraft.

In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Murray seized on some unusual testimonies in 16th-century Scottish witch trials to elaborate a radical theory: She claimed that what medieval and early modern people called witchcraft was, in fact, the last traces of a pagan fertility cult that originated in the Neolithic period. The witch trials of the 15th–17th centuries represented Christianity’s last attempt to stamp out this cult, which was practiced in secret covens (groups of thirteen people) who worshipped a horned god (who was mistaken for the devil). Knowledge of this cult was passed through families or, occasionally, to new initiates, but kept secret from the outside world.

Murray’s use of a single set of problematic sources from one country (Scotland) to argue that a previously unnoticed religion had existed since prehistory failed to meet basic historiographical and anthropological standards of research. She was given to making huge conceptual leaps on the basis of contentious interpretations of meager evidence. Using a small range of hostile trial records designed to discredit women accused of witchcraft (along with testimonies extracted under torture), Murray reconstructed what she believed were real religious practices lurking behind the demonological construct of the Witches’ Sabbath. In so doing, she brought together traditions of interpretation honed by the anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), the author of The Golden Bough, and the French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874). Murray followed Michelet in arguing that those accused of witchcraft were not the innocent victims of trumped-up charges, but were in fact adherents of a subversive cult; and she followed Frazer in her belief that prehistoric religious beliefs, associated with fertility, had survived into recent times.

How to Make a Poor Man’s Hand Router | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published 10 Dec 2012

Paul Sellers shows how to make a “Poor Man’s Router”. This is a hand router that helps with cutting housings, dados, tenons and other recesses. It helps guarantee a consistent depth of cut. A useful hand tool for any woodworker!

To read more about the router plane, visit: https://commonwoodworking.com/router-plane-guide/

To find out more about Paul Sellers visit: http://paulsellers.com and for more project videos visit: https://woodworkingmasterclasses.com/video-library/

QotD: Racism and the minimum wage

Filed under: Australia, Business, Cancon, Economics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Minimum-wage laws can even affect the level of racial discrimination. In an earlier era, when racial discrimination was both legally and socially accepted, minimum-wage laws were often used openly to price minorities out of the job market.

In 1925, a minimum-wage law was passed in the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the intent and effect of pricing Japanese immigrants out of jobs in the lumbering industry.

A Harvard professor of that era referred approvingly to Australia’s minimum wage law as a means to “protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese” who were willing to work for less.

In South Africa during the era of apartheid, white labor unions urged that a minimum-wage law be applied to all races, to keep black workers from taking jobs away from white unionized workers by working for less than the union pay scale.

Some supporters of the first federal minimum-wage law in the United States — the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 — used exactly the same rationale, citing the fact that Southern construction companies, using non-union black workers, were able to come north and underbid construction companies using unionized white labor.

These supporters of minimum-wage laws understood long ago something that today’s supporters of such laws seem not to have bothered to think through. People whose wages are raised by law do not necessarily benefit, because they are often less likely to be hired at the imposed minimum-wage rate.

Thomas Sowell, “Why racists love the minimum wage laws”, New York Post, 2013-09-17.

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