Published on 21 Dec 2016
Thank you to Mike for helping me with some of the animations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBG-zbNIoy8
How to Make Everything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM3krXtc7Fc&t=1s
Awe Me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EG34YoRHs8&t=75s
Primitive Technology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVV4xeWBIxE
July 20, 2017
July 19, 2017
What is the best British sports car? Clarkson’s Car Years – BBC
Published on 14 Apr 2008
Jeremy Clarkson has all the answers in this clip from Clarkson’s Car Years. His conclusion is typical Clarkson!
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July 17, 2017
How fast & how far do bullets go? – James May’s Q&A (Ep 13) – Head Squeeze
Published on 28 Mar 2013
James May imparts his wisdom on all things bullets.
History of Bullets and How they are Made: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-7/Bullet.html
Bullet Types and Abbreviations: http://www.scribd.com/doc/20889587/A-Guide-To-Bullet-Types-and-Abbreviations
Gun Timelines: http://inventors.about.com/od/militaryhistoryinventions/a/firearms_2.htm
10 Most Expensive Weapons in the World (Including R&D): http://www.therichest.org/technology/most-expensive-weapons/
5 Bullet Facts: http://www.howitworksdaily.com/technology/top-five-facts-bullets/
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July 16, 2017
Woodworking magazines and the lack of safety equipment in photos
I’ve bought hundreds of woodworking magazines over the years, and in almost every one of them they show machine tool operations where the blade guards have been removed “to clearly illustrate the task”. I understand that reasoning, but the cumulative effect of literally thousands of well-posed, clear, and dangerous practices is almost certainly to lessen the background awareness of new woodworkers to safe use of the tools. When I first got into woodworking, I was buying at least half a dozen magazines every month (ShopNotes, Woodsmith, Popular Woodworking, Fine Woodworking, Woodworker’s Journal, etc.) because I hadn’t touched a real woodworking tool since I was in middle school (and I hated shop at that time anyway), and I knew I needed as much help as I could get.
If I hadn’t been a safety wuss, I’d likely have internalized the “common wisdom” that everyone always takes off the blade guard of the table saw — because they so rarely showed up in the magazine articles and when they did, they made the photo less helpful because of the area of the work they obscured. Overheard conversations at woodworking shows often included comments about throwing away the stock blade guard as soon as possible … and not to replace it with an expensive after-market item, either.
Paul Sellers, who generally works with hand tools, has also been irritated by this and his latest blog post takes the magazines to task:
I thumbed through recent issues of wood mags and though I have known it for years, I thought it might be good to tackle the giant issue surrounding machine safety as some woodworking magazines don’t always project the right image. In fact some give the impression that no safeguards or safety equipment is necessary at all, the exact opposite of what the woodworking machine industry teaches altogether. My concern is that the woodworking magazines get most of their support from amateur woodworkers looking for guidance and inspiration. This advertising sector caters to the amateur woodworker industry with only a little crossover into professional realms. Thumbing through the magazines I was not really considering safety at all, just looking for content of interest to me, but I soon became conscious of the lack of safety equipment being used, which started my inbuilt alarm bells started ringing page after page. See if the images below don’t cause the same sense of concern for you.
[…]
So here we are, five images spanning a few pages with not a face shield in sight and only one pair of safety glasses between four of the five images. Then we have zero regard for any dust protection issues and that is of great concern to all woodworkers. Now I know you can say to me that all woodworkers know about machine dust, tablesaw kick-back issues, noise that causes partial impairment and even permanent hearing loss and so on. Of course that is not really true at all. The people in the pictures are all professional-level woodworkers, authors, editors and so on. Evidently they don’t feel the image they convey with regards to safety is questionable. If that is so, why would we expect the amateurs and those brand new to woodworking to be conscious of dangers that are often less obvious and even well hidden.
The trip mechanism in my brain asked the question, why is it that something so unarguably dangerous as machine woodworking is presented with such passivity toward safety and with no need to show industry standards for normal health and safety protocol put together by professional bodies of the woodworking industry itself? Yes, I know all the reasonable arguments. “They are just posing and not really working.” “The machines are not switched on, perhaps, therefore there is no need to wear any safety equipment. Why would you?” Well, actually, in a couple of the images, the tablesaw is running and there is no need for anyone looking in, to believe that the others are not either anyway.
Image 1:
a: The man has no safety mask on at all b: There is no blade guard over the blade c: The man has no safety glasses on. d: The man has no protective dust mask or respirator equipment.
The dangers ever present in this scenario are: 1: He is breathing harmful dust as he works with the machine no matter how good any dust extraction is. 2: Even though there is a riving knife in place my experience has shown that the wood can still close over on the rear upthrust of the blade and and kick-back the wood at his upper body and face. 3: There is no doubt that the small offcut is a missile waiting to catch. The drafts and movement of wood often cause an upthrust on small pieces and can deliver them to the rear upthrust of the blade once detached as shown. 4: The dust from tablesaws is of course extremely fine and circulates in the atmosphere even with the best dust extraction in the world. This dust is some of the most harmful to the whole respiratory system, eyes, nasal passages and throat.
I use a tablesaw sled similar to the one shown in the photo above, and to use it I have to remove the blade guard on my saw. I’ve considered adding a plexiglass strip over the blade opening for quite some time, to provide at least some protection against offcuts being kicked back from the back of the saw blade. I always use hearing protection when using any of my power tools, but I don’t always add a dust mask unless I’m doing a lot of cutting over a short period of time. Perhaps I should reconsider that.
This is the real McCoy. My friend Chris gears up every time, as I and others do.
So why do the editors allow poses that include the faces? As far as information goes the faces or facial expressions give nothing to the reader and are inconsequential. Mostly it’s to do with presenting the acceptable image that down plays the essentiality of safety to its core audience. In my view it is of little value to put a little disclaimer in the corner of a page if the images send another message that woodworking without protective equipment is perfectly safe. No one is exempted from responsibility in this. Not the authors, the photographers, the editors or the publishers. They all have responsibility for promoting unsafe practices. Even with safety equipment things go wrong in a split second. We can take care of our lungs, eyes and faces with very low-maintenance equipment.
My advice to any new woodworker wanting to compliment their work by using machines for dimensioning stock would be to find courses tailored to specific machines. Good online material is available from recognised institutions too. You must be careful of course, as looking for information based on good experience can be hard as some things are based more on opinion than experience. Look for experienced teachers and organisations with the right background. Generally these are information based but then you must put into practice what you are taught and by experience you will gain the experience you need to anticipate potential issues. No one else can substitute for your individual responsibility.
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July 13, 2017
“Each month in the United States—a place with about 160 million civilian jobs—1.7 million of them vanish”
Deirdre McCloskey addresses the fear that technological change is gobbling up all the jobs:
Consider the historical record: If the nightmare of technological unemployment were true, it would already have happened, repeatedly and massively. In 1800, four out of five Americans worked on farms. Now one in 50 do, but the advent of mechanical harvesting and hybrid corn did not disemploy the other 78 percent.
In 1910, one out of 20 of the American workforce was on the railways. In the late 1940s, 350,000 manual telephone operators worked for AT&T alone. In the 1950s, elevator operators by the hundreds of thousands lost their jobs to passengers pushing buttons. Typists have vanished from offices. But if blacksmiths unemployed by cars or TV repairmen unemployed by printed circuits never got another job, unemployment would not be 5 percent, or 10 percent in a bad year. It would be 50 percent and climbing.
Each month in the United States — a place with about 160 million civilian jobs — 1.7 million of them vanish. Every 30 days, in a perfectly normal manifestation of creative destruction, over 1 percent of the jobs go the way of the parlor maids of 1910. Not because people quit. The positions are no longer available. The companies go out of business, or get merged or downsized, or just decide the extra salesperson on the floor of the big-box store isn’t worth the costs of employment.
What you hear on the evening news is the monthly net increase or decrease in jobs, with some 200,000 added in a good month. But the gross figure of 1 percent of jobs lost per month is the relevant one for worries about technological unemployment. It’s well over 10 percent per year at simple interest. In just a few years at such rates — if disemployment were truly permanent — a third of the labor force would be standing on street corners, and the fraction still would be rising. In 2000, well over 100,000 people were employed by video stores, yet our street corners are not filled with former video store clerks asking for loose change.
We could “save people’s jobs” by stopping all innovation. You would do next year exactly what you did this year. Capital as well as labor would perpetually be employed the same way. But then we would perpetually have the same income. That’s nice if you’re doing well now. It’s not so nice if you’re poor or young.
Job protections for the old have in fact already created a dangerous class of unemployed youths in the world — 50 percent among Greeks and black South Africans, for instance.
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Setting-up Your First Woodworking Shop Pt. 1
Published on 7 Jun 2014
http://HomegrownFurniture.com Create your own woodworking shop from scratch. In part one of this video series, woodworker Jim Thompson helps you build your very first woodworking workshop. Jim includes buying tips, craigslist tactics and tool recommendations for a new woodworker on a budget.
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QotD: What are “network effects”?
Few buzzwords are hotter in tech circles than “network effects.” This was so 15 years ago, when I was an MBA candidate grinding through job interviews; it is so today. Probably, when the heat death of the universe is imminent, and our nine-tailed descendants are trying to figure out what to do, some bright Johnny will suggest we can keep things going if we can just add another 2 billion stars to our user base.
Don’t get me wrong: Network effects are important, and I frequently talk about them in relation to everything from media companies to neighborhoods to choices about motherhood. But when I hear the term, the hairs rise on the back of my neck, because it’s often used imprecisely. People say “network effects” when they are really talking about switching costs, or regulatory coordination, or spillover effects, or any number of other things that are at best tangentially related to what the network effect model was built to describe.
Worse, far too many people seem to use the term the way college sophomores deploy the names of philosophers they have just read, in the mistaken belief that a piece of jargon can magically banish disagreement. Your firm doesn’t seem to have a viable revenue model? You’re just saying that because you don’t understand network effects! Someone seems insufficiently worried about the market power of some technology behemoth? It must be because that benighted fool has never heard about network effects!
Network effects are a useful concept, but not when deployed in this slipshod way. Worse, such careless routine deployment actually threatens the concept’s usefulness in conversations where it does offer real insight.
So just what is a network effect? The term describes a product that gets more valuable as more people adopt it, a system that becomes stronger as more nodes are added to the network. The classic example of network effects is a fax machine. The first proud owner of a fax machine has a very expensive paperweight. The second owner can transmit documents to the guy with the pricey paperweight. The thousandth owner has a useful, but limited, piece of equipment. The millionth owner has a pretty handy little gadget.
Megan McArdle, “Facebook Is Big, But Big Networks Can Fall”, Bloomberg View, 2015-10-08.
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July 12, 2017
Triumph Staaaaag – Clarkson’s Car Years – BBC
Published on 14 Apr 2008
Jeremy Clarkson has his say about the wonders and worries of the Triumph Stag. Apparently, it sounds better if you stay on the vowel!
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July 10, 2017
A Canadian Cold War innovation – “floppy” magnets as submarine detection tools
Steve Weintz on an experimental Canadian submarine detection device that was simple, effective, and too difficult to train with:
Desperate planners sought ways of making Soviet subs easier to hunt. Any technology that could speed up an undersea search was worth considering. “A submarine’s best defense is of course stealth, remaining quiet and undetected in the ocean deep,” Ballantyne notes. “Something that could rob the Soviets of that cloak of silence must have seemed irresistible and, at least initially, a stroke of genius.”
A Canadian scientist figured some kind of sticky undersea noisemaker would make a Soviet sub more detectable. He designed a simple hinged cluster of magnets that could attach to a submarine’s metal hull.
Movement would cause the flopping magnets to bang against the hull like a loose screen door, giving away the sub’s location to anyone listening. The simple devices would take time and effort to remove, thus also impairing the Soviet undersea fleet’s readiness.
At least that was the idea.
HMS Auriga against the New York City skyline in 1963. U.S. Navy photo.
In late 1962, the British Admiralty dispatched the A-class diesel submarine HMS Auriga to Nova Scotia for joint anti-submarine training with the Canadian navy. The British were helping Canada establish a submarine force, so Royal Navy subs routinely exercised with Canadian vessels.
Auriga had just returned to the submarine base at Faslane, Scotland after a combat patrol as part of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Other subs of the joint Canadian-British Submarine Squadron Six at Halifax had seen action during the crisis.
Did the device work? All too well:
As Auriga surfaced at the end of the exercise, the magnets made their way into holes and slots in the sub’s outer hull designed to let water flow. “They basically slid down the hull,” Ballantyne says of the magnets, “and remained firmly fixed inside the casing, on top of the ballast tanks, in various nooks and crannies.”
The floppy-magnets couldn’t be removed at sea. In fact, they couldn’t be removed at all until the submarine dry-docked back in Halifax weeks later.
In the meantime, one of Her Majesty’s submarines was about as stealthy as a mariachi band. No fighting, no training, no nothing until all those floppy little magnets were dug out of her skin at a cost of time, money and frustration.
The magnets worked on the Soviets with the same maddening results. The crews of several Foxtrots were driven bonkers by the noise and returned to port rather than complete their cruises.
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July 9, 2017
Getting closer to science fiction technology every day
In Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga novels, one of the imagined technological innovations to play a key part in the story is the Uterine Replicator (spoiler: it’s used to save the life of a premature baby, who grows up — in a manner of speaking — to be the main protagonist of the saga). In Reason, Katherine Mangu-Ward looks at just how close we are getting to the gee-whiz tech Ms. Bujold invented some thirty years ago for her novels:
In April, researchers announced they had managed to keep several extremely premature lambs alive and growing in artificial wombs. After spending up to four weeks in a clear plastic “extra-uterine device” at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, each sheep transformed from a decidedly undercooked fetal specimen to a much more robust critter with long limbs and a fluffy wool coat, the sort of animal you wouldn’t be terribly alarmed to see plop to the ground in a field on a spring afternoon.
The setup strongly resembles a sous vide cooking apparatus: a tiny, tender lamb floats in a large plastic ziplock, hooked up to tubes and monitors. But a video clip posted by the researchers has the emotional heft of feeling a fetus kick when you put a hand on a pregnant woman’s belly. Visible through the clear plastic, the lamb’s hooves twitch gently as it snuffles its nose and wiggles its ears.
The lambs in the experiment were selected for their developmental similarity to human babies born right on the edge of viability, or about four months premature. Babies born that early are equal parts horrifying and marvelous. Tiny creatures with organs visible through their translucent skin, they’re often called “miracle babies.” But there’s nothing particularly mysterious about those little beings curled up in nests of tubes and wires; they live because of the inspiration and hard work and risk-taking and study and pain of hundreds of people.
There are actually more of these struggling newborns now than there were a decade ago, simply because we’ve gotten so much better at keeping extremely premature babies — born before 24 gestational weeks — alive. Yet in the U.S., one-third of all infant deaths and one-half of all cases of cerebral palsy are still attributed to prematurity. Of the babies born that early who survive, more than 90 percent have severe and lasting health consequences, especially with their lungs, eyes, and intestines.
Previous efforts to improve those numbers have been stymied by difficulties duplicating the functions of the placenta, but the device attached to the “Biobag” looks deceptively simple: a pumpless blue plastic box hooked up to the umbilical cord that oxygenates the blood, removes carbon dioxide, and adds nutrients.
In their paper, published in Nature Communications, the Philadelphia researchers are careful to say that human applications of their work are at least a decade away. Yet these little pink lambs are already taking sledgehammers to some of the most precarious coalitions in American politics.
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Why Are I-Beams Shaped Like An I?
Published on 8 Dec 2016
Thank you to my patreon supporters: Adam Flohr, darth patron, Zoltan Gramantik, Josh Levent, Henning Basma, Karl Andersson, Mark Govea
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July 7, 2017
How to Prepare Stock for Joinery | Paul Sellers
Published on 23 Jun 2017
What do you need to do to your dimensioned wood to prepare it for joinery? Often there are undulations or machine marks in the surface of the wood, or movement after dimensioning that needs removing before joinery layout occurs. Let’s work on getting the silky smooth surface and square faces that make for crisp, accurate joinery.
For more information on these topics, see https://paulsellers.com or https://woodworkingmasterclasses.com
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July 5, 2017
Helicopters Won’t Just Drop Like A Rock If The Engine Dies
Published on 6 Jun 2016
Autorotation in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzWw5U3eCok
In this video:
In fact, you have a better chance at surviving in a helicopter when the engine fails than you do in an airplane. Helicopters are designed specifically to allow pilots to have a reasonable chance of landing them safely in the case where the engine stops working during flight, often with no damage at all. They accomplish this via autorotation of the main rotor blades.
Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/05/helicopters-wont-just-fall-like-a-rock-if-the-engine-dies-they-usually-can-be-landed-safely-this-way/
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July 3, 2017
July 2, 2017
James May crossing his Meccano Bridge
Published on 15 Nov 2009
James May crossing his Meccano bridge in Liverpool across the Mersey (actually a canal). He’s nuts! lol…what a star! He then crosses his bridge, but cheats with a harness.
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