Alec Steele is a young British blacksmith who does charming videos about his adventures with making stuff. He and Ford Hallam are single-handedly changing my attitude toward youtube; it’s not entirely a cess-pit: it’s what we take from it.
I wasn’t sure how to approach [stderr]. Serious, or silly? Here’s the silly version:
[Warning: Bees] [Is Apiphobia a thing? I’m going to assume it is]
This is via Atlas Obscura, which is a must-read if you’re a nexus of weirdness. [atl]
There’s one part of my property that’s basically a bog. Things grow really well there, because there are a half-dozen springs that ooze water even in dry summers. So far, anyway; I’m sure eventually the frackers will drain the water-table.
If this was really made in America, that means that someone was employed making it.
I met Matt Melis at a USENIX around 2005; he did a talk on system reliability engineering that started with “my job is to shoot supersonic bullets at diamonds.”
Watching industrial processes is a bit of a hobby of mine. I think we often take for granted the level of difficult effort that goes into producing things we more or less take for granted.
Back when I used to hang out on deviantart, I encountered a few people who were very interested in swords, but had developed a complete misunderstanding of how they work.
There are many videos of sword test-cutting (“tameshigiri”) on youtube and I generally avoid them. A lot of the time, it seems to be someone who got their hands on something katana-shaped and has decided to risk their, and their friends’ lives.
We’ve all seen footage of things going up into space.