Quotulatiousness

September 19, 2020

Fitting the Drawer | The Cabinet Project #25 | Free Online Woodworking School

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

Matt Estlea
Published 13 Sep 2020

In this video, I show you how to precisely fit a dovetailed drawer into a carcase. The aim here is to achieve a piston fit which is a smooth operation in and out, but without any side-to-side wobble.

Learn how to tackle tricky grain here:
https://mattestlea.com/tutorials/how-…

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My name is Matt Estlea, I’m a 24 year old Woodworker from Basingstoke in England and my aim is to make your woodworking less s***.

I come from 5 years tuition at Rycotewood Furniture Centre with a further 1 year working as an Artist in Residence at the Sylva Foundation. I now teach City and Guilds Furniture Making at Rycotewood as of September 2018.

If you’re interested in studying at Rycotewood, view their courses here:
www.mattestlea.com/rycotewood

I also had 5 years of experience working at Axminster Tools and Machinery where I helped customers with purchasing tools, demonstrated in stores and events, and gained extensive knowledge about a variety of tools and brands. I discontinued this at the start of 2019 to focus solely on video creation and teaching.

During the week, I film woodworking projects, tutorials, reviews and a viewer favourite ‘Tool Duel’ where I compare two competitive manufacturers tools against one another to find out which is best. I also have a Free Online Woodworking School which you should definitely check out!

www.mattestlea.com/school

I like to have a laugh and my videos are quite fast paced BUT you will learn a lot, I assure you.

Lets go make a mess.

Andrew Heaton attempts to talk to people about politics

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his latest missive from deeply singed California, Andrew Heaton expresses some concerns about the American body politic in the late stages of utter emotional breakdown (that is, the last couple of months of the election):

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the political climate is going to “heat up.” Although the heat comes from a different fault line than you might think. The real division in America isn’t between conservatives and progressives. It’s between people who read stuff, and people who TYPE IN ALL CAPS ON TWITTER.

I’m pretty firmly in the “read stuff” camp. Which makes me poorly situated for our current period, as I am a quarter Vulcan on my father’s side, and it’s overwhelmingly in vogue to be emotionally incontinent. Emotionally incontinent people don’t care for us pseudo-Vulcans. Perhaps you can relate?

This is a normal conversation for me:

    Friend: Trump is an evil fascist meat goblin!

    Me: Yeah, I can’t stand that guy. I’m not a big Biden fan, but I definitely prefer him over Trump.

    Friend: But Trump is a racist lunatic!

    Me: Sure. I certainly don’t think he has an ideological core or respect for constitutional rule of law. I have serious misgivings about his leadership. Also he’s horrible on trade.

    Friend: HE’S LOCKING CHILDREN IN CAGES! THE WORLD IS ON FIRE!!! DON’T YOU SEE THAT TRUMP IS THE DEATH OF THIS AND ALL WORLDS!?!?

If you read the above conversation carefully, you might notice that I’m not actually disagreeing with my hysterical friend. In fact we’re broadly in agreement, at least on the 2020 election outcome. So why are they flipping out, like the electoral version of Kermit the Frog flailing his arms in a Muppets sketch?

Here’s why: in political conversations the People Who Read Stuff are interested in exchanging ideas and policies. The ALL CAPS ON TWITTER crowd wants to exchange feelings.

If your hysterical conservative friend is laying eggs about Antifa ushering in the Night of the Long Knives, or your progressive friend is freaking out about Trump ushering in The Night of the Long Knives, what you say or think is immaterial — they are looking for you to match their emotional state. If you don’t, it means you’re probably making a buck selling knives.

This is a problem in my social life. I have learned that my feelings are fickle and easy to manipulate, and so distrust them. I take pride in my Vulcan heritage. When confronted with a big, scary problem, I believe the best response is to get calm and thoughtful. In Vulcan culture we call this “acting like an adult.”

Unfortunately equanimity is not popular on this planet. It’s trendy to experience feelings so hard that neurochemicals seep out of your pores, the way alcoholics sweat vodka.

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History RE-Summarized: The Roman Republic

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 18 Sep 2020

The Roman Republic is a fascinating story all on its own, but it also serves as an excellent object lesson in civics.

This video is a Remastered, Definitive Edition of three previous videos from this channel — History Summarized: “The Roman Republic”, “The Punic Wars”, and “Julius Caesar and the Fall of The Republic”. This video combines them all into one narrative, fully upgrades all of the visuals, and adds extra historical notes and clarifications along the way. Please let me know if you enjoyed this, and are interested in more videos like this. There are many historical miniseries on this channel that would fit neatly into a compilation like this, and I’d be thrilled to make them!

SOURCES & Further Reading: Virgil’s Aeneid, Polybius’ Histories, Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, SPQR by Mary Beard, Rome: A History in Seven Sackings by Matt Kneale, Rubicon by Tom Holland, The Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan, (and also my degree in Classical Studies).

Note for 14:15 — I mention Livy’s History Of Rome (“Ab Urbe Condita“) by name, but made the lizard-brain mistake of showing Polybius instead. Poor Livy, first 75% of his work is lost, and now this.

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The perils and pitfalls of developing open source software

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Diff, Byrne Hobart looks at the joys and pains-in-the-ass of open source software development:

“How university open debates and discussions introduced me to open source” by opensourceway is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

We’re in a strange in-between state where software is increasingly essential, the most important bits of it are built by dedicated volunteers, and there’s no great way to encourage them to a) keep doing this, and b) stay motivated as the work gets less and less fun. That was my main takeaway from Nadia Eghbal’s Working in Public, published this week.

The book is a tour of the open source phenomenon: who builds projects, how they get made and updated, and why. This is an important topic! Almost all of the software I use to write this newsletter is either built from open source products or relies on them: the text is composed in Emacs, on a computer running Linux; I browse the web using Chrome, which mostly consists of open-source Chromium code; my various i-devices run Unix-based OSes (iOS is not open-source, but there are as many open-source implementations of Unix as you want); etc. All of this software Just Works, and I don’t directly pay for any of it. Clearly there are some incentives at work, or it wouldn’t exist in the first place, but generally the more complex an activity is, the harder it is to coordinate without pricing signals. Somehow, open-source projects don’t fall victim to this.

As Working in Public shows, they do face a demoralizing lifecycle. When a project starts, it’s one coder trying to solve a problem they face, and trying to solve it their way. Sometimes, there’s a good reason their preferred solution doesn’t exist yet, and the project languishes. Sometimes, the project catches on, acquiring new users, new contributors, and new bug reports and feature requests.

[…]

Software projects go through this exact cycle: at first, they’re mostly producing and building on “software capital,” code that executes the underlying logic of the process. Over time, more of the work involves integration and compatibility, and as all the easy edge cases get identified, the remaining bugs are a) disproportionately rare (or they would have been spotted by now) and b) disproportionately hard to fix (because they have to be the result of a rare and thus complicated confluence of circumstances). So, over time, a software project falls into the Baumol Trap, where high productivity in the fun stuff produces more and more un-fun work where productivity gains are hard to come by.

This is depressing for project creators. Early on, they have the triumphant experience of building exactly what they want, and solving their nagging problem. And the result is that they’re cleaning up after a bunch of requests from people who are either annoyed that it doesn’t work for them or have unsolicited feedback on how it ought to work. No wonder Linus Torvalds gets so mad. Running a successful open source project is just Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights.

Emphasis mine, not in the original article.

H/T to Colby Cosh for sharing the link.

B.C./A.D. or C.E./B.C.E.? A perfect solution!

Filed under: History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lindybeige
Published 24 Oct 2014

I recall the first time I encountered the modern awfulness that is the terminology ‘C.E.’ and ‘B.C.E.’ — it was in a museum in Europe. Here I present my solution to the non-problem.

I spent a day making this video, and then didn’t like the result. For one thing, it was too long and rambling at four and a half minutes, so the next day I remade it, and I’ve now managed to cut it down to eight and half minutes.

Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.

▼ Follow me…

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.

website: www.LloydianAspects.co.uk

B.C./A.D. or C.E./B.C.E.? A perfect solution!

QotD: Dictatorship of the Cancel Culture proletariat

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This sort of thing is, to put it mildly, not good. There are at least three major problems with cancel culture. First, almost anyone could be cancelled, on the basis of the (claimed) standards prevalent on the modern “social justice” left. Secondly, cancellation tends in practice to be a non-random process targeted at political and ideological opponents, rather than a genuine attempt at a new moral standard. Finally, and most importantly, the declaration by wokesters that many conversations are now simply off-limits prevents the communication of important information that would make it possible for citizens better to judge the arguments of movements like Black Lives Matter.

While not the most important, the first of these points is the most relevant on a day-to-day basis. Without endorsing these behaviours, the plain fact is that the huge majority of people have probably at some point told an ethnic or regional joke, sent a pornographic or un-PC snap, had sex while intoxicated, used a slur tied to sexual orientation / race / gender online or in the lockerroom, worn a St Paddy’s Day or Cinco de Mayo outfit they would really prefer a mulligan on, or committed other Cardinal Sins against Wokeness. As a result of this, many young people are intently aware that Twitter and Facebook wars involving the unearthing of old content generally end with egg on the face of everyone involved. Caucasian NBA point guard Donte DeVincenzo was humiliated in late 2018 by the revelation that – at age 14 – he had described his hoops handle as “ballin’ on these nig*as like I’m Derrick Rose”. He ended up deleting his entire social-media presence. The point of monitoring this sort of thing, for the many people and organisations that do so, is not punishing the tiny minority of real racists and abusers out there so much as keeping normal citizens too terrified by the potential unearthing of past indiscretions to comment lustily on the issues of the day.

The fact that virtually anyone could in fact “legitimately” be cancelled leads into extreme partisan hypocrisy. While anyone who attended church as a lad might correctly suspect that the hard right is capable of similar behaviour, cancellers today are overwhelmingly concentrated on the “social justice” left – and they are, at least occasionally, reluctant to eat their own. This often results in remarkable and hilarious double standards. In February 2018, for example, liberal Virginia governor Ralph Northam – nicknamed “Coonman” – escaped any serious censure after he was revealed to have apparently appeared in a mid-1980s high-school yearbook photo wearing shoe-polish blackface.

To be fully fair to Northam, the same photo included a student dressed in full white robes as a Ku Klux Klansman, and CNN has noted that Northam has never actually said “whether he was wearing the Ku Klux Klan outfit or [the] blackface”. Oh, fair enough. At any rate, he serves as governor of Virginia today. Not to be outdone by any of his neighbors to the south, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was revealed that same year to have worn black- and brown-face several times, and as late as 2001, once apparently painting his entire body to appear in costume as Aladdin at an Arabian Nights revue! He, too, remains solidly entrenched in office today.

Wilfred Reilly, “They can’t cancel all of us”, Spiked, 2020-06-17.

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