You are currently viewing all posts tagged with quote.

micro, quote

We may be located far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.

Scientific American proposes a solution to the Fermi Paradox by using the European exploration of the South Pacific as an analog.

When the frequency of occurrence of settleable worlds in a galaxy is intermediate between high and very low, fascinating things can happen. Specifically, ordinary statistical fluctuations in the number and location of suitable worlds in patches of galactic space can create clusters of systems that are continually visited or resettled by wave after wave of interstellar explorers. Think of it as an archipelago, a group or chain of islands. The flip side to the existence of these clusters is that they are typically surrounded by large unsettled regions of space, places just too far and too sparsely distributed to bother setting out for.

via Orbital Index.

micro, gear, quote

Lawson Kline has been manufacturing high-quality outdoor equipment for about ten years.

He’s experimented with a wide range of products, and I’ve bought most of them. These days he’s known mostly for his cordage, which is unique and inovative, but cordage is not a topic I get overly excited about. I do get excited about stakes and Lawson’s aluminum Apex Stakes and Titanium Shepherd’s Hook Stakes are both probably the best on the planet. The titanium stakes are currently on sale, and he sent a description of how they are made to his newsletter today:

We cut, bend, and point each tent stake one at a time in our shop. I usually have to buy a very large quantity worth of Titanium, per diameter. And this is practically me begging them to sell to me. The mills I buy from require very large qty’s in order to sell to us, as they usually sell to big aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Technologies, etc, So it is very expensive to stock a product like our titanium stakes, as it is 100% an aerospace material.

The rods come to the shop in a wooden crate via motor freight. They are usually about 12 feet long. We first start off by using a rod parter to cut the stakes to length to get our blanks. If you have never seen one of these machines before they are very neat. It essentially breaks/shears the rod in a very clean and controlled manner. So they do not have to be saw cut. It’s like a sheet metal shear for round rods. Our rod parter will accurately cut rods from 1/16”-5/8”. There are two parting disc’s used to do all the of the work. They are made from hardened tool steel. So they are cutting like scissors so to speak, but the rod goes through a hole to keep the end round and to reduce the burr as much as possible. There is an adjustable stop on the machine that allows the first rod to be cut as the 10,000th one, with no real measurable difference between any of them. It is a highly precise machine.

Next, they are bent either one, two, or three at a time (depending on the rod diameter) on a custom made bender. This is a bender that I made myself over 10 years ago, and it has probably made 100,000+ tent stakes ever since. Last the stakes are pointed in another machine that I also custom-built. The stake is fixtured into a holder where it advances towards the cutting head and then puts a point on the end using a special end type mill.

There is no machine in the world that you could buy that could make a stake from start to finish, so I had to custom make two of the three machines to make these. This is the reason we are the only manufacturer in the USA making titanium tent stakes. (and probably because I am bad at bean counting…) I do know that it would be far more profitable for me to stock and sell Chinese stakes, but for me, the details matter. And I honestly love making custom machinery that can make products that not many other companies can. BUT as a result, this means I usually have way too many titanium tent stakes in stock as I have to make about a year’s supply at one time. Obviously, if I sold more stakes, then this wouldn’t be an issue, but since I don’t, this is the one product that I have a lot of my working capital tied up into.

micro, food, quote

The cow collapse is nigh.

The Guardian reports on the end of food and the cowllapse:

We are on the cusp of the biggest economic transformation, of any kind, for 200 years. While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life. After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation. This means multiplying particular micro-organisms, to produce particular products, in factories.

RethinkX envisages an extremely rapid “death spiral” in the livestock industry. Only a few components, such as the milk proteins casein and whey, need to be produced through fermentation for profit margins across an entire sector to collapse. Dairy farming in the United States, it claims, will be “all but bankrupt by 2030”. It believes that the American beef industry’s revenues will fall by 90% by 2035.

Story via John Ellis. Cinemagraph via Overhead Compartment.

micro, bicycle, books, quote

I prefer a steel steed over flesh.

But otherwise I agree with the sentiment expressed by Al-Mutanabbi (translated by Gertrude Bell):

The finest place in the world is the back of a swift horse,

And the best of good companions is a book.

Hawk Hill

quote, conflict, blogroll

Import Export Snowmobile

Oblique Strategies

Austin Kleon highlighted a Brian Eno quote on why he stopped touring:

What I really like doing is what I call Import and Export. I like taking ideas from one place and putting them into another place and seeing what happens when you do that. I think you could probably sum up nearly everything I’ve done under that umbrella. Understanding something that’s happening in painting, say, and then seeing how that applies to music. Or understanding something that’s happening in experimental music and seeing what that could be like if you used it as a base for popular music. It’s a research job, a lot of it. You spend a lot of time sitting around, fiddling around with things, quite undramatically, and finally something clicks into place and you think, “Oh, thats really worth doing.”

Which is precisely what Boyd was describing in Destruction and Creation. In his biography, Robert Coram illustrates a specific example:

Boyd’s favorite example in “Destruction and Creation” was a thought experiment that took his audience through his exegesis on the nature of creativity. It went something like this: “Imagine four separate images. Let’s call them domains. Each domain can be easily understood by looking at its parts and at the relation among the parts.”

Boyd’s four domains were a skier on a slope, a speedboat, a bicycle, and a toy tank. Under “skier” were the various parts: chair lifts, skis, people, mountain, and chalets. He asked listeners to imagine these were all linked by a web of relations, a matrix of intersecting lines. Under “speedboat” were the categories of sun, boat, outboard motor, water skier, and water. Again, all were linked by the intersecting lines. Under “bicycle” were chain, seat, sidewalk, handle bars, child, and wheels. Under “toy tank” were turret, boy, tank treads, green paint, toy store, and cannon.

The separate ingredients make sense when collected under the respective headings. But then Boyd shattered the relationship between the parts and their respective domains. He took the ingredients in the web of relationships and asked listeners to visualize them scattered at random. He called breaking the domains apart a “destructive deduction.” (Today some refer to such a jump as “thinking outside the box.” But Boyd believed the very existence of a box is limiting. The box must be destroyed before there can be creation.) The deduction was destructive in that the relationship between the parts and the whole was destroyed. Uncertainty and disorder took the place of meaning and order. Boyd’s name for this hodgepodge of disparate elements was a “sea of anarchy.” Then he challenged the audience: “How do we construct order and meaning out of this mess?”

Now Boyd showed how synthesis was the basis of creativity. He asked, “From some of the ingredients in this sea of anarchy, how do we find common qualities and connecting threads to synthesize a new and altogether different domain?” Few people ever found a new way to put them together. Boyd coaxed and wheedled but eventually helped the audience along by emphasizing handle bars, outboard motor, tank treads, and skis.

These, he said, were the ingredients needed to build what he called a “new reality” – a snowmobile.

quote

Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

quote

Not My Teaching, But My Study

What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me. And yet it should not be held against me if I publish what I write. What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another. Moreover, I am not spoiling anything, I am only using what is mine. And if I play the fool, it is at my expense and without harm to anyone. For it is a folly that will die with me, and will have no consequences.

Montaigne

via Old Man Ellis

micro, quote, books

This past summer a 13-year-old girl shattered my optimism for the future.

In June, The Atlantic published an article discussing the use of Instagram as a source of life advice by (pre-)teens. I do not understand insta-face-tweeting, but what struck me most was 13-year-old Sophie’s justification of her behaviour:

Teens say they’d basically do anything to avoid searching for answers to their problems outside of Instagram. Unlike threads, web pages don’t follow any standardized format, and teens say that navigating the open web, especially sites with ads and pop-ups, was a frustrating waste of time.

“The format is just a lot easier to read than stuff like Google,” says Sophie. “You can read longer things in little chunks. It’s not like reading this giant paragraph at once. No one wants to do that.”

Teens say that another benefit of threads is that you don’t have to waste time searching around – the information is delivered to you based on your interests and whom you follow – and that threads feel more trustworthy than search engines.

I’m not sure what sort of dystopic future we’re in for if we manage to raise a generation of people who are intimidated by a paragraph, but I suppose we’ll find out.