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Who Invented Metal?

MilkmanDan says...

I tend to agree. However, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and Born to Be Wild are really close to tipping the scale in my head from "hard rock" to "metal". The cover of Summertime Blues mentioned in the video, not so much (at least to my ear).

Anyway, it is cool to see/hear some of the early influences that got things going in the direction of the music that I love, even if none of them jump out and make me say "now THAT is metal" like Sabbath.

Mordhaus said:

1970, Sabbath. That is all.

Deadlocked Bench Vice is Perfectly Restored

MilkmanDan says...

I wasn't thinking about including YT ad revenue in the economics, but I guess that certainly could be counted and definitely motivate many people.

However, I guess that confirms that it is passion for the work, the machines themselves, and the feedback that are the primary motivators for him. Would probably still be doing these repairs even if YT income / encouraging feedback wasn't a factor, and even without more traditional motivators like plans to resell or use the repaired devices.

I guess the closest parallel would be repairs and restorations for museum displays. There's a financial element there too, but the people doing the restorations do that job more for the love of the objects and seeing them restored.

eric3579 said:

(edited )

From what i can tell he does this because he's passionate about it and how getting feedback from his videos is what brings him the most joy (his reddit comment). I think it has very little to do with anything financial. Although the yt ad revenue for this video is easily into the thousands (1.6 million views). One of these a week, with those numbers, could easily make him a comfortable living.

Deadlocked Bench Vice is Perfectly Restored

MilkmanDan says...

I got interested in the economics of that refurb.

Looks like a new Gressel vice of roughly the same type can be bought for 550 Francs, which is just very slightly more than 550 US Dollars.

Nothing specific is said about time spent on the repair, other than getting off that one plate took "30 minutes of hammering", which is cut down to roughly 10 seconds of video. I figure that was a particularly time consuming caper to end up being the only thing shown where time spent was specifically mentioned. Some tiny bits of what we saw were roughly real-time, where all the work spent on a specific item was shown 1:1 in the video. But, lots of other stuff was probably somewhere between that 10 seconds : 30 minutes and 1:1 range.

I think a very conservative guess would be that each minute of video represented at least 30 minutes of work. So, 17 minute video x 30 = 510 minutes. Divided by 60 = 8.5 hours. As an extremely conservative estimate -- could easily be five or ten times that, particularly with lawyer-type "billable hours" consideration on what constitutes "work time".

But with that conservative estimate, he worked for (at the very least) 8.5 hours to repair something that could have been replaced for $550. Not including the new replacement smooth grips, etc. That's about $65 per hour. For extremely skilled labor.

I'm not mocking that at all -- I actually agree that it was quite satisfying to watch. But I think that just reaffirms that there must have been some real passion for the work there to decide to go through that very fiddly and skilled labor for what was likely much more than 8.5 hours rather than buying a new one and calling it a day. Not much of that kind of work ethic left these days -- and I sure as hell include myself in that!

This ‘Star Trek’ Actress Changed TV (and NASA) Forever

If English were Spoken Phonetically Consistent

The Harms of Marijuana

MilkmanDan says...

I wondered if your use of the past tense should be taken to mean that they are no longer in business, so I googled. It appears that they are still going.

Interesting stuff in the Wikipedia article. It notes that the Surgeon General warnings about tobacco still apply, and in fact they have to include a disclaimer that says "no additives in our tobacco does NOT mean a safer cigarette".

So now I guess I'm back to being surprised and a bit suspicious about the lack of evidence for smoked marijuana causing cancer, as opposed to tobacco being very clearly linked to cancer...

newtboy said:

That's what American Spirit brand was all about....additive free cigarettes.

The Harms of Marijuana

MilkmanDan says...

Wow. Little to no evidence of smoked marijuana having any connection to lung or other cancers.

I must admit I'm surprised. To me it seems like burning something and inhaling the smoke is "obviously" a bad idea with regards to health.

Since the link between tobacco cigarettes and cancer is well established and agreed on by doctors, it makes one wonder what the difference is. Is it entirely the additives that cigarette manufacturers put into cigarettes? If so, why the hell wouldn't there be massive pressure to mass produce additive-free cigarettes at least as an option for smokers?

Also, I guess one (potential) downside of legalization is that the same sort of corporations that knowingly put cancer-causing shit into cigarettes might expand into marijuana territory, potentially trying to put crap into your pot that dispensaries and dealers never have.

Still, overall this is clearly good news for pot fans out there, and will put further pressure on the double standard between legal-but-far-more-dangerous alcohol and tobacco as compared to illegal-but-relatively-innocuous pot. Congratulations! Light one up in celebration (as if you needed a reason).

Award winning teacher Kerstin Westcott's resignation speech

MilkmanDan says...

I personally can't even begin to imagine wanting to teach in an "at risk" sort of environment. It's awesome that there are people like her that do want to be part of the solution in those kinds of places, but you couldn't pay me enough or otherwise motivate me to voluntarily work in that kind of environment.

That being said, it makes it all the more obvious that if you do have somebody like that on your staff, you'd damn well better listen to every single suggestion or idea that they have and do your utmost to keep them there and happy. If the environment is so bad that it forces someone like that out, that really wants to be there, it is a massive red flag.

I doubt that the school stays open. That might be for the best -- sometimes it is best to put a wounded beast out of its misery.

How to Tell a Realistic Fictional Language from Gibberish

What does this symbol mean? (Manji / Swastika)

MilkmanDan says...

I don't really dislike or get offended by any of the interviewee's thoughts here, but the older gentleman is very well reasoned, logical, and cool about it while also being conscious about the potential for misunderstandings that can be avoided if we know a little history.

Janus (Member Profile)

The Infinadeck Omnidirectional Treadmill - Smarter Every Day

MilkmanDan says...

Very cool.

I sure would have thought that it would be a platform with hundreds of partially inset mouse/trackballs, rather than treadmills on axes 90 degrees apart. I mean ... sure, any 2D vector can be split into a sum of two orthogonal components. But with redundant inset trackballs you could get stuff like spot pivots that are much finer scale than the scale of the 2-3 inch wide secondary axis treads...

On the other hand, these guys actually have a working prototype, so they clearly thought things through and decided that the orthogonal treadmill solution was better. Rubber meats road trumps off-the-cuff theoretical any day!

The True Messed Up Story of Pocahontas

Making Artificial Earthquakes with a Four-Tonne Steel Ball

MilkmanDan says...

Hmm. Seems like an obvious omission to fail to cut to the seismograph reacting on their custom-made soot paper there at the end...

And those extras (how that much steel survived 2 world wars, etc.) are really fun and interesting details. Too bad they couldn't get worked in, but I guess including them in description text works.

Patrick Stewart Looks Further Into His Dad's Shell Shock

MilkmanDan says...

@noims -- My grandfather had about 10 war stories that he rotated through telling, pretty much exclusively after one of my uncles "broke the dam" by asking him to recall things as they were at the Oshkosh air show standing next to a P-47 airplane like he had worked on.

By the time that happened, my grandfather was in his 80's and in very good physical and mental shape (cattle rancher that did daily work manhandling heavy feed bags around, etc.) but had a quirky personality because he was 90%+ deaf. I don't think that was a result of the war, hearing problems seem to run in the family.

Anyway, he frequently used those hearing problems as an excuse for not having to interact with people. He had hearing aids, but he'd turn them off most of the time and just ignore people. I think some of that was being an introvert, and some was probably lingering "shell shock" / PTSD effects. But overall he really adjusted back to civilian life just fine. Got a degree in education on the GI Bill and taught and coached basketball to High School students, then worked as a small-town Postmaster, and eventually retired to work the ranch. I don't think any of us in his family, including his wife and children, thought of him as being "impaired" by the mental effects of the war. But it was clear that some of what he experienced had a very deep, lifelong effect on his outlook.


I wrote out the 3 stories of his above because they seemed to be the ones that had the most emotional impact on him. To me, it was interesting that a lot of stuff outside of combat hit him the hardest. He also had more traditional "war stories" stuff about victories and bravery, like when his unit captured / accepted the surrender of a young German pilot in a Bf-109 who deserted to avoid near certain death from flying too many missions after the handwriting was on the wall that the allies were going to win. But by far, he got more choked up about the other stuff like having to knock that French girl off her bike and seeing starving civilians and being unable to help them much.

Like you said, more banal stuff side-by-side with or against a backdrop of horror. I think it's pretty much impossible to imagine what those sorts of experiences in war are really like and what being in those situations would do to us mentally. And then WW2 in particular just had a massive impact on the entire generation. Basically everybody back home knew multiple people that went away and never came back. Then when some did come back, they were clearly different and yet reluctant to talk about what happened. Pretty messed up time to live through, I guess.



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