Quotulatiousness

February 25, 2021

Mortise Basics: Marking, Chopping, Fitting

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 24 Feb 2021

Don’t struggle with your mortises. Learn the simple, traditional methods that get results.

More video and exclusive content: http://www.patreon.com/rexkrueger​
Videos and links below! (Scroll down)

Peter Follansbee’s Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MrFollan…​
Peter’s Mortising Technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyLA1…​
Paul Seller’s Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/PaulSell…​
Pauls’ Mortise Technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBodz…​
Joshua Klein’s Book: https://www.mortiseandtenonmag.com/pr…​
(In which he discusses mortises).

Crown Mortise Chisel (affiliate): https://amzn.to/3axkXOm​
(This is one of the only affordable mortise chisels currently in stock online. I cannot say how well it will last, although the quality appears to be fair for the price. If you can’t find a 5/16 mortise chisel, a 3/8 is just as good. Pick one and forget about it.)

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

Wood Work for Humans Tool List (affiliate):
*Cutting*
Gyokucho Ryoba Saw: https://amzn.to/2Z5Wmda
Dewalt Panel Saw: https://amzn.to/2HJqGmO
Suizan Dozuki Handsaw: https://amzn.to/3abRyXB
(Winner of the affordable dovetail-saw shootout.)
Spear and Jackson Tenon Saw: https://amzn.to/2zykhs6
(Needs tune-up to work well.)
Crown Tenon Saw: https://amzn.to/3l89Dut
(Works out of the box)
Carving Knife: https://amzn.to/2DkbsnM
Narex True Imperial Chisels: https://amzn.to/2EX4xls
(My favorite affordable new chisels.)
Blue-Handled Marples Chisels: https://amzn.to/2tVJARY
(I use these to make the DIY specialty planes, but I also like them for general work.)

*Sharpening*
Honing Guide: https://amzn.to/2TaJEZM
Norton Coarse/Fine Oil Stone: https://amzn.to/36seh2m
Natural Arkansas Fine Oil Stone: https://amzn.to/3irDQmq
Green buffing compound: https://amzn.to/2XuUBE2

*Marking and Measuring*
Stockman Knife: https://amzn.to/2Pp4bWP
(For marking and the built-in awl).
Speed Square: https://amzn.to/3gSi6jK
Stanley Marking Knife: https://amzn.to/2Ewrxo3
(Excellent, inexpensive marking knife.)
Blue Kreg measuring jig: https://amzn.to/2QTnKYd
Round-head Protractor: https://amzn.to/37fJ6oz

*Drilling*
Forstner Bits: https://amzn.to/3jpBgPl
Spade Bits: https://amzn.to/2U5kvML

*Work-Holding*
Orange F Clamps: https://amzn.to/2u3tp4X
Screw Clamp: https://amzn.to/3gCa5i8

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

Follow me on Instagram: @rexkrueger

Malthusian cheerleaders

Filed under: Books, Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Barry Brownstein looks at some of the claims from Malthus onward about the imminent demise of humanity due to overpopulation and how that same concern keeps popping up again and again:

Thomas Malthus.
Portrait by John Linnell, 1834, via Wikimedia Commons

… James Lovelock advanced the Gaia hypothesis that Earth is one “self-regulating organism.” Lovelock forecasts the population of the Earth will fall to one billion from its current total of over seven billion people. Given Lovelock’s cheerfulness about such carnage, it is easy to see why Alan Hall, a senior analyst at The Socionomist, wonders whether “today’s drives to limit consumption and population” are ideologically related to the eugenics movement from the past century. In his essay “A Socionomic Study of Eugenics,” Hall writes in The Socionomist:

    Circa 1900, influential intellectuals in Europe and the U.S. voiced concerns about uncontrolled procreation causing a supposed decline in the quality of human beings. Today, similar groups voice concerns about uncontrolled population growth and resource consumption causing a decline in the quality of the environment … Today’s green advocates brandish images of an overrun, dying planet.

Today, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is working to aid the lives of children living “in extreme poverty.” In his book, Factfulness, the late professor of international health Hans Rosling, reports on critics of the Gates Foundation who reject such efforts. “The argument goes like this,” Rosling writes. “If you keep saving poor children, you’ll kill the planet by causing overpopulation.”

In the face of advocates for such beliefs, no wonder Hall asks us to reflect on whether we “will make the cut” if those seeking to cull humanity are successful.

Malthusian Doom

We’ve all heard the SparkNotes version of Malthusian predictions of doom caused by overpopulation. Malthus thought food production could not keep pace with population growth. In his 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population,” Malthus anticipated the suffering that awaited humanity.

    The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

Unlike Ehrlich and others, Malthus had reason to be a pessimist in his lifetime. If Malthus had been writing history or predicting the near future, he would not have been far from the mark.

Many of the predictions of overpopulation were based on estimates of population growth (especially in sub-Saharan Africa) which were far from accurate, and in every case we know of, increased economic well-being directly impacts population growth so as a country begins to get richer its population growth begins to slow down significantly (most first-world nations are already at or below population-replacement birthrates).

In their book, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson have startling facts for those who believe the population will continue to explode.

    No, we are not going to keep adding bodies until the world is groaning at the weight of eleven billion of us and more; nine billion is probably closer to the truth, before the population starts to decline. No, fertility rates are not astronomically high in developing countries; many of them are at or below replacement rate. No, Africa is not a chronically impoverished continent doomed to forever grow its population while lacking the resources to sustain it; the continent is dynamic, its economies are in flux, and birth rates are falling rapidly. No, African Americans and Latino Americans are not overwhelming white America with their higher fertility rates. The fertility rates of all three groups have essentially converged.

Looking at current trends and expecting them to continue is what Hans Rosling calls “the straight line instinct.” That instinct often leads to false conclusions.

Tank Chats #96 | D3E1 Wheel-cum-Track Machine | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 28 Feb 2020

David Fletcher looks at the experimental inter-war Vickers D3E1, which was conceived to solve the problem of track wear, with wheels that could be used instead where the ground was suitable. In practice the concept proved too complicated.

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#tankmuseum #tanks

QotD: Islam and the impact of the Enlightenment

Filed under: France, History, Middle East, Military, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In private, however, or when addressing his soldiers, Napoleon was contemptuous of the Islamic word. “You have come to this country,” he told his army before the battle of the Pyramids, “to save the inhabitants from barbarism, and to bring civilisation to the Orient.” This was why, in addition to muskets, cannon and cavalry, he had brought with him to Egypt a printing press, a hot-air balloon and a small army of intellectuals.

The blaze of the Enlightenment, although it might seem to have been lit in Europe, was not just for Europeans. All the world had the potential to share in its radiance. Illumination was the same wherever it manifested itself, and this meant that in Peking as in Paris, in Baghdad as in Bordeaux, there were sages more than qualified to rank alongside Voltaire and Diderot.

The Enlightenment, far from ranking as something parochial and culturally contingent, was properly a global phenomenon. These various dogmas, which the philosophes had tended to take for granted, had then been given a new and militant edge by the French Revolution. That religion was superstition; that rights were universal; that equality, individual liberty and freedom of expression were simultaneously natural and sacred: these were the convictions that had inspired in the citizens of revolutionary France their continent-shaking sense of certitude. Thrones had been toppled; abbeys demolished; the detritus of a benighted past erased. And if in Europe, then why not further afield? The Rights of Man were for everyone, after all, or they were nothing. “Any law that violates them,” as Robespierre had put it, “is fundamentally unjust and tyrannical. Indeed, it is not law at all.”

This sense of missionary purpose, which inspired in those who felt it an ambition to bring the entire world from darkness into light, outlasted the execution of Robespierre, the defeat of Napoleon, the seeming triumph of reaction across post-revolutionary Europe. In 1854, when the Ottoman Empire was facing a critical threat from Russia, France joined Britain in insisting as a condition of its entry into the Crimean War that the slave trade across the Black Sea be abolished.

Also abolished was the jizya, a tax on Jews and Christians that reached back to the very beginnings of Islam, and was directly mandated by the Qur’an. Such measures, to the Ottomans, risked immense embarrassment. The effect, after all, was to reform Islamic jurisprudence according to the standards of non-believers. It was, for Muslim traditionalists, an ominous straw in the wind. Over the course of the century and more that followed, the weathering effects of Western hegemony on the practices that Muslims believed they had inherited from Muhammad — the Sunnah — became more and more pronounced.

Tom Holland, “The age-old tension between Islam and France”, UnHerd, 2020-11-02.

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