That is how the web is browsed best, in information explorer mode. An agent moving amongst the archives by their own impetus. A tool to satiate their thirst for stories and information.
The alternative is in consumer mode, where you sit and consume anything that shows up on the conveyor belt of feeds, wondering why things aren't as good these days.
As much as I agree, I think the internet also now has expanded to serve a different class of user, one who "wants" or "expects" to consume, vs. the earlier groups who self-selected as knowledge seekers/explorers.
>"We managed to get about 9 lathes out of each 2x4 on average (sometimes 10, sometimes only 8). Remember, in planning for this, that the saw blade has thickness, and that all the sawdust has to come from somewhere."
Maybe it mentions it, but if you only read comments that thickness from the cut has a name - kerf. Don't forget the kerf.
Dimensional lumber is anything but that. I once needed to rip down a stack of 2"x6" lumber to the same width. Some pieces would run through the saw without cutting anything off, others would leave a 1/4" strip of scrap. Take into account the kerf and there was almost a 1/2" difference between some pieces.
Just going to point out here that this kind of article (detailed instructions on how to make something historical, with plenty of exploration into said history) is plentiful in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism). The author was an SCA participant of many, many years.
If you're into this, I recommend the classic book Shelter (https://www.shelterpub.com/building/shelter). It documents the design, construction and use of many styles of shelters around the world (including yurts).
My biggest complaint with plain html pages like this is that they're unpleasant to read on windscreen monitors. If you're publishing something like this, please consider adding "sakura css". It's designed to be tiny and to apply to plain html pages. They also have a bookmarklet.
You don't need to view a page in full screen mode. Considering the site still works unchanged after 23 years I am really happy they did not design it for the 1995 era screens etc.
As the guy who formatted the page you're complaining about, all I can say is that it looked great when I formatted it.
I tried sakura just now on a few of my 1990s webpages, and it trashes a lot of my list-and-table-based formatting. Maybe it works well for other pages, but not mine.
You try out stumpwm. It's a tiling window manager that allows you to take full advantage of your big screen. Simply entering "Control-t s" would vertically split your screen and make that unpleasantly wide page readable.
Still too wide? No problem! Hit "C-t s" again and you get another vertical split.
"c-t r" will undo the last split and "c-t q" will undo them all.
My trick: Hit Ctrl + Shift + I to bring up console on the right, then Ctrl "+" a few times to zoom-in. Takes me less than a second on the keyboard, and makes for a decent experience [1], in my opinion
Are yurts as popular in the rest of the country as they are in the Pacific Northwest? They seem to be a mainstay of many campgrounds out here. Since they were designed according to the needs of the Mongolian climate, I'm wondering what it is about them that makes them suitable for the Pac NW climate.
They're one of the formats of 'glamping' accommodation all over Europe, along with treehouses, gypsy carts, safari tents and tipis. I don't think anyone serious is really claiming them to be 'sustainable', for any mainstream definition of that word.
Yurts are essentially light, durable, relocatable dwellings. Traditionally they were moved between summer and winter pastures - while not 'breaking the ground'.
As you mention an idea of serious sustainability -- which is surely an important concept at this time -- what is it about holidaying or even living in yurts that you find non sustainable?
'Sustainability' (as a mainstream scientific concept) is not about a few people minimizing their direct footprint on their environment. It's (among other things) about scalable systems, how we manage societies' impact on the environment without depleting certain aspects of it. Everybody living full time in yurts or peat huts is not 'sustainable' - for one, the vast majority of people don't want to live in such primitive circumstances (for example, having an (open) fire in a large tent is fun every once in a while, but becomes a serious health hazard when done for extended periods of time). Another aspect is that there are simply too many people (or too little land, depending on how you look at it...) for a nomadic lifestyle to make any sense. 'Sustainable' solutions for today's problems acknowledge that people live and need to live in densities beyond what can reasonably be accommodated for by 'back to the land' lifestyles, and that hundreds of millions of people are clawing their way out of such circumstances - regardless of some (relatively) wealthy Westerners' views on the moral superiority thereof.
Essentially my point is that this sort of 'yurt living' (in an environmentalist context, not a holidaying context) is promoted as part of the, say, permaculture lifestyle - let's all get a few acres of land, grow our own potatoes and lettuce, and make do with whatever primitive methods we had 100 years ago. Completely ignoring aggregate level ecosystem service accounting, or even the basic observation that for most people living in a tent is not acceptable. So it's more a remark on the lifestyle view on sustainability that is associated with 'living in a yurt' than actually living in a yurt (or similar 'alternative dwelling') itself. 'Living in a yurt' isn't just 'I don't live in a house'; it means 'living without running water, sewer systems, insulation or efficient heating in very low population density systems, with a focus on self-sufficiency, in 'connection' with the land and in small-community social contexts.
The aspirations which some people manage to realise of living in modest, simple, more biostable, more biophillic surroundings dont deserve to be categorised as retrograde.
The glamour and possibilities of an intimate experience with natural materials and settings is part and parcel of cultural and technological development towards the goal of mass coexistence with natural systems, through a variety of places and architectures.
Even ignoring the benefit of investing attention and sense of identity in biophillic aesthetic and ideology, the typical enthusiast of yurt living or similar is at this stage no less ecologically viable than the rest of us - who are currently occupying space and resources and polluting directly and indirectly plenty.
Rural biodegradeable cabin dwellers might not be able to live quite as eco-lightly as urban dwellers might be able someday in a specially arranged ecologically optimised municipality, but such optimised municipalities dont exist yet.
Experience reveals we dont all benefit from living with plumbed water and toilets -all of the time. Poverty is more complex than the presence or absence of such facilities.
The history and development of permaculture technology does not deserve special cynicism and is never criticised with representative data.
Not sure which part of the UK you're in but the North of England and South of Scotland have a fair few campsites with them. They can be set up with stoves and comfortable beds so fit into the "glamping" bracket.
Short version: it is an oversized wicket barrel with an added steep roof. Pretty neat. Instead of a ring, a similar structure Can be made by interlacing wickets with the frame. Can be daubed too if you need more insulation and permanence.
This simplicity and effectiveness is why it is ancient yet still used now.
I wonder if modern lightweight tent design can learn something from yurts, since they don't really seem particularly portable by comparison. (I consider a tent "portable" if it can fit in my backpack, not a pickup truck.)
They don't solve the same issues at the same scales as a backpack tent.
Primarily, yurts have to be larger. They need to accommodate entire families and their livestock in harsh winter storms. That can be keeping upwards of several dozen bodies alive in some of the worst weather on the planet. Secondly, they also have to manage the searing summer temperatures/sunlight of the southern deserts, along with incredibly high wind loads. Thirdly, they have to be repairable with the very few natural resources available in rural Mongolia.
That said, regular tents probably could learn from them. Yurts are incredibly modular and flexible designs. You can combine multiple yurts into one larger one, or use them in very different environments. They're also fairly low impact, with the primary damage to the ground being sunlight deprivation and foot traffic. I doubt the design itself could be adapted to backpacking very well though. It's just fundamentally a bit overengineered for what campers require.
Having put up a Mongolian yurt, a Bedouin tent, and many, many hexayurts, anecdotally...
Both of the fabric yurts pack down to more convenient shapes (re: they can fit in more kinds of vehicles and spaces), particularly for the larger amount of enclosed volume. but they're much heavier. It would be a hard job to put them up solo both without tools (aka, ladders) but, I think, doable. They stay decently cool / warm inside, and are decently weather-sealed. They have many more parts and kinds of parts. Every part is completely reusable. I imagine that building one from scratch is a substantial endeavor. Has to be put away dry and is moderately involved to clean.
Hexayurts are a PITA to transpo / store (8ft x 4+ft x N inches, can't be bent, etc), but weight nothing. You can expand the design to be pretty huge on the inside, but it gets increasingly harder to put up. They're easy-ish to modify (you can re-use parts to make one of a different size) and multiple ones can very easily be assembled into larger "complexes". They have amazing isolation from the elements (when put up correctly). You can put the small ones up with minimal help, but it's hard to put the large ones up without many hands. Overall, tho, they're less work to put up. But, they also consume some materials (the tape is consumed). However, you can put together "from scratch" pretty easily, can be stored basically anywhere, and you clean it with a hose.
There's also some interesting aesthetic considerations - you can pain a hexayurt, but fabric is inherently nice; one flashlight can light up the entire interior of a yurt, etc.
If I had to live in something forever I'd go with a Mongolian yurt, but if I had to outfit a refugee camp I'd definitely go with the hexayurts.
Sorry to be completely ignorant here, but what is it with these sites that have absolutely zero styling?
15 years ago I would've put it down to lack of understanding how to write CSS etc. But today it's almost impossible to make a website that doesn't have at least _some_ styling (when using site builders like Squarespace, Wix, etc).
Edit: Turns out this site is from 1994 (see http://www.pbm.com/). How are you guys finding these ancient sites? :P
I'm not your typical JS/CSS hater but for this document, I found the lack of styling perfectly fine. It also works without problems on any mobile device I tested (as expected). IMHO, not every page needs CSS and lots of breakpoints.
That's not a valid design decision. Car seats too small? Lose weight.
Look, I realise now it's a site from 1994, I'm just astounded by the number of people that seem to think this design is still acceptable by today's standards and that I'm some sort of new-age hipster for suggesting otherwise.
Why wouldn't it be? Yes, I certainly can reduce the width of my browser, but that's not the point. Bad design should not put the burden on the user to fix it.
I don't mean styling for the sake of looking stylish, I mean styling for readability. Line spacing, page width (reading text that takes up full width of a 27" is not nice), section grouping/separation, title size, use of colour (e.g. for titles to increase visibility of section grouping, for background/font to decrease stark contrast), sans-serif font (greater readability on a screen vs on paper), etc are all valid design considerations.
Rather I wonder why Browsers display such non-CSS sites in this primitive way. Pretty sure browser vendors could slap on a primitve CSS limiting the text width and tweaking a few defaults when a site does not load any CSS or JS.
I don't mean styling for the sake of looking stylish, I mean styling for readability. Line spacing, page width (reading text that takes up full width of a 27" is not nice), section grouping/separation, title size, use of colour (e.g. for titles to increase visibility of section grouping, for background/font to decrease stark contrast), sans-serif font (greater readability on a screen vs on paper), etc are all valid design considerations.
After reading it, I ended up in a Google Images rabbit hole looking at different kinds of Yurts.