Truly mesmerizing. I absolute love the neatness and the quality of the materials that she uses. The way the red lights on the encryption machine turn on and the bronze board itself is delightful.
Somehow the machines look like a cross between steampunk and art-deco styles. I also admire the fact that she explicitly admits that the machines are created for "nothing utilitarian", just for fun following the hacker tradition.
Every single time I see again something about the antikythera mechanism I'm blown away that the ancients greeks came up with such device.
Van Vark is an extreme hacker. Who else among us has a working telephone exchange in their basement? Or a military aircraft navigational system? Much less both. She honors the ancient hacker who made the Antikythera Mechanism with her own fine recreation of it.
I’ve been fascinated by van Vark’s work for years - her craftsmanship is incredible. Even submitted her website to HN a few years ago.
Her work is like transmissions from an alternate timeline where the transistor was never invented and electromechanical engineering was pushed as far as it could go.
This woman is amazing. Math, hardware, mechanics, engineering, metalworking, software, optics, etc. You name it she has the skills and has produced a lifetime's worth of stuff that would take you a long time just to review casually.
She's the real thing alright. Amazing! Cherry Hill is another one.
I wonder how many other women would be awesome machinists if it seemed a viable option. It's like anything else, potentially losing half of the talent available. I guess the US found this during WW II. I assume Germany did too.
I did a welding course and there were only two women in it, and even that surprised me. One lived on a farm so wanted to be able to fix things there but the other was an actual welding apprentice.
I'm seeing a push for women to take up trades but it looks like a long road still.
At the risk of starting a flame war, I have to say "woman" is a gender. Female is a sex. GP said Tatjana is a woman and you're appear to be quibbling with that.
How many on earth can build those instruments from scratch ?
Even one of those instruments ?
What percentage of the global population ?
I am wondering if we are building a civilization weakness, where only few can recreate those things. As we produce at scale, and with more and more layers of automation, we need less and less craftsmen... and if those few at the top get hit by a bus, the setback could be huge.
Combined with technology that evolves faster than we can teach it, it feels like the number of experts is shrinking over time. Thoughts ?
> How many on earth can build those instruments from scratch ? Even one of those instruments? What percentage of the global population?
A reasonable fraction of machinists could do many of those projects. But it takes forever. You're looking at the hobbyist work of someone who did this as a career.
I like the medium sized milling machine. That's good for parts in the 10cm range. Most mills are either much larger, much smaller, or have poor rigidity.[1]
Those are neat. I'd love something in that form factor but CNC controlled, but I also know that once you have that you need to put it to work otherwise it's wasted. And I don't have any real reason just naked greed to have a machine shop at my disposal again. I'm making a bunch of brackets using hand tools just now, it is infuriatingly slow, so I guess I'm more receptive than normal to stuff like this.
Look at the Carbide 3D support structure. Skinny little supports, probably aluminum. If that could hold a tolerance of 0.001in cutting steel I'd be surprised. Now look at the cast-iron frame of the machine van Vark uses, and the size of the slides. Rigidity requires a bulky machine. That's needed for those beautiful smooth finishes.
Haas, which is a serious milling machine manufacturer, sells one of those little desktop things for training use. They rate it for machining plastics and machineable wax only. The Haas mills for metal start around US$40,000, require a serious concrete floor, and have serious coolant and chip removal capabilities.
My toy in Canada was an old Excello, it was roughly the same as a Bridgeport from the 70's, great machine but not practical for 'home' use. I agree that for serious work you need something solid, but then again, at that price I don't think it would be realistic to expect that degree of stability, this clearly looks to be designed for very light duty, steppers not servos, little belts driving the spindle, lots of aluminum.
I also had a big Cincinatti wheel mill, that thing was stable. And so heavy that we never even bothered bolting it to the floor.
The number of polymaths/jack of all trades types is maybe holding steady or possibly falling as a real number, but agree, as a percentage of the population seems to be decreasing.
I think channels like Primitive Technology[1] play with this sense of dizziness, the realization that crafting even basic tools of survival requires a chain of dependencies and non obvious skills to acquire.
Separating from society, and thriving in the process seems to me increasingly unlikely. Another fantastic reason to try and get along with one another and not let the hive die.
People like this have never been common - probably only a vanishingly small proportion of any generation.
The trades have always been seperate skillsets because any one of them takes a long time to become proficient in.
I do wonder about the electricity grid though. That seems our biggest weakness to me. And I get overwhelmed when I think about how many people and machines it takes to make even the simplest thing we use these days. I mean, how do we make something like a mobile phone?
If you want to help avoid the collapse of civilisation, take up model engineering as a hobby :)
I picked up this book about how to invent everything from a little free library recently. It's not a deep dive into anything but it is interesting to see how things build upon each other and what technologies are needed to get to certain points from scratch. https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/about
>For a living, Tatjana worked as a scientific consultant for large technological firms, the government, and military institutions. Using science and instruments as her tools for analysis, she studied complex problems to get to the very root cause, and hopefully offer solutions.
If you're going to make a living using science & instruments to solve problems others can not overcome, you would need to constantly stay as sharp as possible to begin with on whatever techniques & equipment might be useful, whether they were considered out-of-date or not. Especially stuff you had never seen before. Just to maintain readiness. There would be an advantage to starting early and never quitting.
You can tell a lot about a culture from their instruments.
Remember some completely lost cultures developed over many more centuries in their time compared to what we have right now in our current shapshot. Not necessarily more mathematically or technologically advanced, just the same higher reasoning and intelligence distribution no different than modern man today.
You can also tell a lot about a culture when so few can display the innate drive to further the human condition in this respect.
Also the way she is more than doing her part, but anyone who has had the realistic opportunity to leverage the full 1% of her technical ability has not lived up to that expectation whatsoever.
This is a person who has taken much more of a lifetime to enable themselves to invent things as necessary whenever needed, compared to others having equal gifts in this area.
IOW over the last few centuries the occasional person who put enough of their life into this type of scientific preservation, maintenance & progress in the most productive way has usually still not put as much of their life into it.
And occasionally some of these people turned out to be well-known like Thomas Edison.
But mostly of course their work has always been lost since applying truly revolutionary solutions to human conditions requires momentum from a wave of popular culture.
The more you can reliably invent solutions to problems like almost no-one else, the less likely by comparison it would be to stop doing that and spend time trying to popularize what you already have since the odds are so much in disfavor. Building brilliant stuff by hand is the foundation of so many factories, someone at the pinnacle of ability should be empowered to never stop no matter what, just in case people want a new kind of factory someday.
If that takes years of concentration before a truly potentially popular product could be developed, most often those potential partners with the resources & desire to build popularity will be even less likely of making a favorable deal with, compared to just going back to the drawing board and solving previously untractable technical problems 1, 2, 3.
Just in case somebody can really afford to bring the full 1% of those hands' technical progress to a wider swath of humanity someday.
If you might be discovered one day and called upon to tour the world with your instrumental ability, it would probably be best the more you stay well-rehearsed at all times.
Some people just work that way. My father's shop is so messy I get anxiety just walking in there. He says he knows where everything is and when I was still living at home he'd get irritated if I cleaned up.
I like my space to be tidy, I don't have the extra bandwidth to remember where I drop things. I have to clean up after every task or I'm less productive.
You can browse Tatjana van Vark's personal website here: http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/projects.html