Half of all the people in the world are below average. I know, it's crazy right? Confirmation bias makes us expect others to be like ourselves, but they are not, and you're going to have a bad time when you expect them to be like yourself. This is probably going to sound harsh, but it's true: Children and teenagers innately sneer at others that are not like themselves (so much bullying in schools). Part of maturing as a person is to learn that other people are different and have different needs. Many people don't learn this, and they seem immature as a result, and they are ineffective at dealing with other people.
I spent years having a negative opinion of that same "new math nonsense"; my only experience with it being viral examples of its worst excesses. But then I had kids in elementary school and saw it up close every day. It was weird and frustrating to me as a child of the 80s, but eventually I came to see that it was teaching approaches to problem solving that I was intuitively using myself. There's still rote memorization involved, but that's not the primary focus. As a result, I think it's better positioned my kids than I was at their age.
I think there is a huge problem when parents or other adults can't sit down with the kids and help them with their homework. whomever thought that was a good idea should be bared from all education decisions ever
Nails alone usually won't trigger the brake. The nail would also have to be in contact with something conductive or else there's nowhere for the current to go.
There are LED indicator lights that flash red when it detects a current drop. When the blade is not moving, you can touch it with your finger to see. In theory you could do this with whatever material you're going to cut. If you're cutting metal, it's pretty obvious that you need to disable the brake system. Usually where it's iffy is pressure treated lumber. Sometimes it'll trigger, sometimes not. Really depends on the moisture content of the wood and that can vary greatly. "testing" by touching the material to the blade with your hands on it might or might not indicate that the brake would fire. The points you're contacting could just not be that wet.
Most cheap lumber I see these days has a lot of moisture in it, treated or not. I’m surprised this works at all for anything short of quite-nice stock.
With the right blade, I would think that is possible. When a piece of wood kicks back and hits me it leaves a bruise through the clothing I wear. If a piece of aluminum kicks back and hits me, I imagine it would be nearly fatal.
Iron and steel? Of course not, go get a cold saw for that. But it's no problem and very common to cut soft stuff like aluminum and copper on a table saw.
SawStop saws don't cost what they do just because of the brake technology. They're just, in general, even if you took away the safety technology, built to a high end standard. Certainly the safety tech will add to the cost, but probably not as much as you'd think.
Ah—like how if you glanced at caster-equipped fridge drawers, you might think they add $1,000 to the price of a fridge, because only higher-end ones have them, but if they were (for some reason) legally mandated they’d only add like $5-$10 to low-end refrigerators. But, without the mandate, no option for a $400 fridge with nice drawers.
Appliances are made in groups of 3 - the stripper, the luxury, and the one medium.
1. stripper - gets people into the showroom because of the low price
2. luxury - for the people who are not price sensitive and just want the best. This generates a lot of profit with little added cost to manufacture
3. medium - people see the stripper and upgrade to the medium, but aren't interested in the luxury price. This is where the bulk of the sales and profits come from
This is called "bracketing" and you'll see it all over the place. Airline seats, for example.
I don't know the origin, but it means "stripped of everything but the base functionality".
Base model cars with no options are also called "stripper cars". Collector cars that are "fully loaded" with all the options fetch a much higher price.
I think maybe you've misunderstood what the common knowledge said. Turbulence hasn't ripped an airplane apart at altitude, so yea turbulence alone hasn't caused a crash. But anything near terrain is plenty risky (mountain waves, low-level wind shear). If the turbulence makes you drop a couple of hundred feet that's no big deal at 35,000 feet and no matter how bumpy it gets, the wings aren't going to break off. But if you're near the ground (or a mountain), well....
I guess it depends by what you mean by "at altitude"? Most of these accidents did happen below 10.000 feet yes. And the mountain wave phenomenon in New Zealand in particular reaches pretty high. Some glider pilots use it to get up really high, so high some of them got frostbitten.
The good news is that very strong downdrafts, in absolute terms, simply can't happen close to the ground, because the air in question needs somewhere to go.
* It's tangible. I can put in a couple of hours of work and then step back and see exactly what's been accomplished.
* The techniques are hundreds/thousands of years old. New tools come along (not as quickly as they do in software), but at the end of the day, we've pretty much decided on a handful of best ways to do things. There's always new stuff to learn, but you're very rarely inventing something from whole cloth.
* And my personal favorite: Every project has a definite end. That jewelry box or coffee table is FINISHED. Sure, after a time I might put a new coat of finish on something, but once a piece leaves my shop it's done. I'm not forever tweaking this or that about it, trying to make it something it was never meant to be or tearing pieces of it apart to redo the joinery or whatever.
Covered in sawdust right now from building a pull-out drawer for a kitchen cabinet. It came out square and the joints were tight enough to hold it together for the dry fit. Very satisfying. I am still mostly terrible at this.
> It's tangible.
This is the best part for me. Programming often reminds me of the "I sell air"[1] scene from City Slickers. The down side of this is that there's no undo. You have 300 operations to step through and if you mess one up you probably need to start over.
> The techniques are hundreds/thousands of years old.
Watching Clickspring recreate the Antikythera mechanism[2] has made it obvious to me that loads of secret knowledge was trapped in guilds and missing from the historical record as a result. You can do so much with basic hand tools. The down side is that there's so much temptation to buy expensive shit. Or worse, think you can't build anything because you don't have $15,000 worth of pro tools. I really needed a thickness planer on this project.
>> It's tangible.
> You have 300 operations to step through and if you mess one up you probably need to start over.
This, but ;)
I really like that you don't have undo but you still don't have to start over. You have to learn how to build things and what to do when you inevitably eff up and how to cover it up! And then you go around the house and check how the builders/tradespeople covered up their mistakes or how they were simply never as perfect to begin with as you think you need to be.
The difference being that unfortunately you will know forever where you effed up and even if you cover it up so that nobody will ever notice unless you tell them, you will be able to see it.
I can still see the tile in the bathroom being siliconed in instead of grouted where we opened it up to allow access when re-piping the house vs. the regular grout even though objectively it's exactly the same color and even the texture is close enough. I siliconed it just in case because this was the second to last extra tile, so if we ever need to open it up again, I want to be able to just cut the silicone vs. destroying the tile like the contractor did to gain access the first time.
Same when I do woodworking. I will always remember/see the gap that was too wide after I cut it incorrectly and filled it in with sawdust and glue from the exact same wood. I keep a bunch of containers w/ the different wood types' sawdust for just these cases.
I like that it forces me to really be smart about planning out those 300 operations, plan around constraints like tool/material availability, and then sometimes even re-evaluate mid stream when you realize your plan was off a little
I do 'model engineering' which is mostly metalwork, and it's about the same.
You end up with something tangible but it really hurts when you make a mistake many hours into a part and have to scrap it and start again. Especially if it's not plain old steel, so just cost a lot. You do learn to save a part from some types of mistakes but it's not always possible.
I think it's great that software lets you build castles in the air and mistakes generally only cost time, and fixes or improvements can be incremental but it does get old when many projects are scrapped before being used so you feel like you're just wasting time.
I find the 'no undo' and a perfectionistic streak add immeasureably to the stress of my 'hobby' but now I have finally finished my steam loco after 10 years I do like looking at it and driving it.
I got bitten with the metalwork bug during lockdown.
I spend most of my time making imperfect tools that I could buy cheaper. It's just so satisfying to build something yourself from a design though.
Being able to take soft silver-steel, machine a point, then harden it with a blowtorch is just magic.
Even just staring at commercially made parts and reverse engineering how/if I could make it on my little hobby lathe with the bar stock I have is really fun.
My favourite projects have been small custom parts for my bikes. Nothing is perfect but it all works and you can save loads of money[1].
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1. Such lies! I haven't saved any money because it's always "if I just had this 200 quid tool I could make this one time 20 quid part". Best to acknowledge it's just a fun hobby. :D
I hate making tools rather than models but I know tools is the hobby for many people and enjoy watching other people make them on YouTube.
I agree, being able to harden steel or anneal copper or cut threads is awesome :)
I love having the machines & tools. It's nice to know I can make something, and it's even come in handy for work a few times despite the fact I'm a software developer - brackets or adapters that must be metal and not 3D printed.
You will have saved money at some point... perhaps 40 years from now!
I'll never recoup what I spent on the machines, but other people spend that much on travel and hobbies (like motorcycles) every couple of years so it's not an outlandishly expensive hobby.
It's about 1/11 scale of the real one, so the next size up from what Blondiehacks is building, and a bit more complicated and detailed. But essentially the same thing, a steam loco that runs on coal & water and works just like the real thing in every respect. See https://i.imgur.com/GuHR2j6.jpg
It can haul me and about 8 or 10 other people. It's a pretty popular hobby - look for live steam on YouTube.
> You have 300 operations to step through and if you mess one up you probably need to start over.
Only if you’re a perfectionist. You can always adjust the plan or do some annoying work with glueing. And usually it’s one part of a bigger thing that can be redone individually. Unless you’re sculpting a giant piece of wood like marble
> The down side of this is that there's no undo. You have 300 operations to step through and if you mess one up you probably need to start over.
This is why I love ceramics and wheel throwing in particular. It's relatively quick, but at any step something can go wrong, especially at my skill level. Sometimes you throw the same piece, apply the same glaze and it comes out quite different. It prevents you from getting too attached to any one piece and forces me towards a zen-like attitude. In some way it makes it even more a balanced to software engineering.
Now I want to see a YouTube series where they show how to the same task with different tools. Here is how we use a planer. Now we will do the same thing using a router sled. Now the same thing with some hand planes. And so forth.
Jonathan Katz Moses, Stumpy Nubs, and The Wood Whisperer all have different videos like that. And then there's all kinds of channels that do pro, journeyman, novice builds of the same idea, sometimes as competition.
I actually built the frame from crappy construction 2x4s milled down to 3/4 x 3 because this is mostly a proof of concept and learning project.
You can use a table saw to do a decent approximation of what a planer or a jointer does by fixing the work pice to a sled. This worked kind of poorly for me, but that was my fault, and next time I'll do a better job. I spend a lot of time sanding out saw marks and never got a great result.
Tamar uses a planer in this video for the first side, but I think you can see how you could do it just with a table saw, for small pieces.
Which is exactly the opposite of software development :-). I always liked woodworking and hope some time in the future to have my own space where I can start and build things as well. One drawback I been told many times is that you need a lot of tools and they are not cheap...
It's not lost on me that those are the opposite of software engineering!
>One drawback I been told many times is that you need a lot of tools and they are not cheap...
There's truth to that. You will find no shortage of people in the woodworking community that insist that you can do woodworking with a couple of hand tools in a small space. I don't think they're necessarily wrong, but that's going to be a very limiting situation as far as projects go. Depending on your personality and wants, maybe that would work for you. But it's not for me. At a minimum I want floor space for a decent sized table saw and a workbench. Those are going to take up the most real estate among the core things.
And yes, it's not a cheap hobby. If you buy used tools, you can save a lot. But you've also go to remember that lumber is pretty expensive too. You can save money on lumber by buying rough-sawn stock but then you need to spend some more money on tools to process it (a good investment once you've decided the hobby is one you want to stick with!)
This. These are the exact same reasons why I like the task of lawn mowing! There is a begin state and a clear finished state. The satisfaction of reaching “finished” cannot be overstated.
I spent weeks practicing dovetails with a Japanese pull saw until they fit just right. It was very satisfying. A kind of feeling I could never achieve writing code.
I suppose also the table it rests on stays horizontal, the hands that hold it stay similar enough, and there's no subscription fees to the app store :-D
The page gives very little context. Can someone explain what this is? Is this really trying to catalog every arewe...yet website in existence? Why would you want to do that? What makes that interesting?
Most arewe...yet sites are Mozilla sites. It's useful for Mozillians or other interested parties to be able to access a centralized list of all of them.
They're all/mostly websites about the state of the Rust language ecosystem. For example, can you write games in Rust (https://arewegameyet.rs/) or what's the state of the async (https://areweasyncyet.rs/)
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