None of these joints is novel in the slightest. Still, is it awesome to have them so well documented. Additionally, the CNC makes them much much easier to use!
If the glue has failed, there are some serious craftsmanship issues regardless of the joint type.
With the exception of the joints labeled "...with key" these joints are all very remote from the types of joints used in traditional Japaneses temples which do not use glue.
These are mostly western style joints, which are also very beautiful and useful, but generally expected to be assembled with glue.
Agree that you "can't expect the glue to deal with the forces"
A good craftsman would not choose a joint that would see such high stresses.
Additionally if the glue is chosen and applied properly, the wood that the glue adheres to should fail long before the glue.
That said, glue is not as simple as it may seem. There are many different types and proper surface prep and application makes a huge difference to ultimate strength.
For example, many people will mix 2 part epoxy until it "looks mixed" which for a clear epoxy happens pretty quickly. In truth, the resulting bond strength is far more closely related to the amount of mechanical energy that has been transferred into the mixture than the visual uniformity.
Lots of ways to go wrong with glue... but a good craftsman should be well aware of these.
This goes against the conventional wisdom that a properly glued wood junction is stronger than the wood itself, and that under such forces it is the wood that will fail.
The wood would've failed at the same place if you'd carved a whole chair in that shape out of a solid piece of wood. The problem is that the design concentrates forces at the joint (or the "junction") in a way that no material can withstand.
Personally, I feel your average student is likely to perform quite poorly for the first couple years at a real job regardless of the institution they attended.
It is all about the individuals!
I've worked with so many people who grew up poor or had other disadvantages, went to community college or their local city or state school, and then turned into fabulously productive and insightful people.
Conversely, I've worked with so many people who graduated from elite institutions who have not turned out so well.
I'm the first to admit that the elite institutions generate a higher hit rate, but not nearly high enough for me to discount people coming out of lesser schools.
One of the smartest (and richest!) guys I know graduated from San Jose State.
City College of New York has graduated more Nobel Prize winners than any other institution in the world!
Could the more selective intake account for most of the higher hit rate? I have a hard time believing either education is actually better, except a fancier school helps build a network faster and increase chances of being sponsored/hired by alumni.
The number of people who are in the traditional college age bracket is falling as a result of variations in the birthrate and immigration rate.
Some schools are more effected by these demographic issues than others. Institutions that are focused on educating lots of people economically, like CSU, can be expected to feel the demographic swings far more than places like Stanford or Berkeley which are over-subscribed and are likely to remain so.
It's so good to hear about a scientific organization that is doing excellent, repeatable, high quality work. I wonder how they are compensated/incentivized?
Everything noted by awjlogan is correct in my experience. To add to the question of incentive, Organic Syntheses is a non-profit corporation since its inception. It's worth reading the organization's history page:
Regarding compensation, the model employed for reproduction of experiments is that students associated with the Board of Editors are paid to carry out the checking process:
> Junior checkers (students associated with members of the Board of Editors) now receive an honorarium for their efforts. This change recognizes the more complex and sophisticated procedures that now appear in these volumes. Also, because of the greatly increased cost of chemicals involved in the checking process, checking editors are now reimbursed for their costs; it is no longer reasonable to expect their own departments to absorb these expenses.
The incentives here are so different from a typical chemistry journal in part because Organic Syntheses is not engaging in a race to publish as many articles as possible, nor is it aiming for novelty. They publish about 20-30 procedure papers each year, which would be comparable to a single issue at any other chemistry journal. The subjects are well-trodden areas, but often in need of greater detail than is provided in a typical report.
OrgSyn was/is the absolute gold standard, and partly why I ended up quitting academic organic chemistry. A key metric in organic chemistry is yield, ie. how much of A turns into B. Top journals generally required 15+ examples of yield >85-90% for a new reaction (unless it was really novel). Reference that 90%+ figure against the typical OrgSyn yield and you'll be wondering what a stressed out PhD with limited analytic support knows that a team of real process chemists doesn't.
Process chemistry is not a glamourous field, so people submit their results for at least some recognition and the journal editors replicate the procedures in their own labs independently. Their stipulation is that the single most expensive reagent cannot be more than $500.
The original incentive was the outbreak of World War I, which cut America off from the previously-dominant European suppliers of organic chemicals. This is the first part from the lengthier history linked below:
Prior to 1914, the industrial production of organic chemicals in the United States was very limited both in the number of compounds and quantities. ... Most organic compounds were imported from Europe; research chemicals for use in universities and industrial laboratories were imported from Germany (Kahlbaum's Chemicals), Great Britain (Boots Ltd.), and France. There were only a few small scientific supply houses that distributed small amounts of imported chemicals. Indeed, organic research in universities and industry was limited to a few schools and very few companies. In 1914, the outbreak of the war in Europe led to embargoes, blockades, and destruction of shipping, which meant that chemical supplies in the United States were quickly exhausted. ... Since all the industrial plants and laboratories were in use, the chemistry staff at the universities began to increase their “student preps” to make chemicals needed for research. Clarence G. Derick of the Chemistry Department at the University of Illinois in Urbana, actually initiated “Summer Preps” with about five students in 1914 before the war started. In the summer of 1915, Ernest H. Volwiler, a graduate student, joined Derick's prep group and was placed in charge during 1916 and 1917. Oliver Kamm, a member of the teaching staff after 1915, also helped in the prep work.
The war was also the beginning of organic chemistry for many American chemical businesses. The one I read about most recently was Hooker Electrochemical, which started making materials for high explosives and dozens of other things during the war. Originally it only manufactured sodium hydroxide and bleach. There's a long company-commissioned hagiography (nonetheless containing a lot of fascinating historical information) available here:
"Salt & water, power & people: a short history of Hooker Electrochemical Company"
To me, Hooker is most notable for its contributions to the Manhattan Project and the development of hafnium-free zirconium used in the first pressurized water nuclear reactors. To most people, it's probably most notable (if known at all) for the chemical waste it left buried in Love Canal. It was absorbed into Occidental Petroleum in the 1960s and no longer exists as a separate entity. The history linked above encapsulates a lot of the changes in American chemical businesses between the World Wars even if this company is gone.
Considering how we all seem to be the product of millions of years of hit-or-miss natural selection, it feels almost natural that our advancements have also had a great deal of luck/improbability.
Some homebrewers will wax nostalgic about how the human sense of smell/taste can detect almost all of the ways that fermentation can go wrong and make it toxic.
But we also keep pushing back earliest dates for precursors to civilization, I start to wonder if maybe there aren't graveyards of people who couldn't distinguish thymol from ethanol and selected themselves out of human history via acute liver failure.
To give some more context, Fleming's job was an antibacterial researcher, and also molds were also previously known to have these properties. In some ways, the lucky part was others finding his work and developing it. I found this video on the development of Penicillin a pretty interesting watch:
Also, if you're in constant pain you'll try all kinds of random stuff to make the pain go away. If necessity is the mother of invention then desperation is its father.
Tea and beer are pathogen-depleted and so it makes a ton of sense that they were both imbibed 'to excess'.
History of the World in Six Glasses claims that tea and coffee more or less caused the enlightenment. One, it stopped day drinking by the intellectual class. And two, they were foil for socialization.
More like: This plant has no insect parasites, it must be special somehow, let's try and use it in different, increasingly "close approach" ways. I mean, humans must have figured quite early that on average, inhaling smoke of a poisonous plant has a fraction of the effect of chewing the same. Someone gets really sick after chewing some leaves, their family burns the rest of the "crop" and they get high.
It seems likely to me that any form of smoking was discovered incidentally by burning stuff that smelled nice, repelled bugs, repelled evil spirits, etc. and happening to inhale some of the smoke.
For mushrooms it was probably desperation, but my head cannon for mushrooms is Trial by Mushroom: You can be expelled from our community for stealing, or you can eat this mushroom and if you survive, you get to stay.
The cool thing about tea leaves is that the caffeine is stored in crystals that are not particularly soluble. There's an organelle that contains an enzyme that breaks the crystals down into a soluble form.
There are a couple varieties of tea that are actually fermented, but for most teas it's a misnomer. You aren't causing fermentation, just autolysis (latin: self digestion), which is more akin to the malting phase of beer production. Black tea is left to process longer, while green tea is interrupted sooner. The switch is turned on by bruising the leaves, and off by desiccating them.
From a caterpillar's perspective, a tea leaf is booby trapped. Waiting for mandibles to mix the ingredients and create the insecticide.
I mean history suggests that’s the case. Took centuries for Copernicus to exist.
AI has been an idea for decades. It wasn’t until transformers in the last few years we had big gains.
Google and giant institutions focus on fiat revenue stability over the long term, in line with political ideology. Few big ideas come out of that. I think what Adam Smith is said to have written applies; division of labor taken to the extreme will result in humans dumber than the lowest animal.
We iterated on our current political system over the Boomers lives. Next generations are tired of the threat of brute force from the elders who the kids now see as in no position to back up those threats given their age. They’re abandoning norms of the last 30-40 years, which IMO, is enabled by abandonment of thousands of years of obligation to preserve religion.
There are shorter iterative periods too; 15 years ago comic movies went crazy with Iron Man, iPhone blew up; now we’re iterating on AI generated content and spatial headsets. 15 years prior (with some wiggle room for margin of error) “information super highway” was coming.
On the shorter scales there seems to a pattern of 3-5 year warmup and 7-10 year plateau, with a cooldown of 2-3 years as the masses lose interest. This aligns with neuroscience experiments that show our brains devalue old patterns after roughly 15 years.
Generational churn and lack of generalized sense of obligation to the past (via abandonment of religious buy in by westerners) could free the future to live in cycles that align with scientific measurement versus obligation to be parrots that recite past memes.
Copernicus is a bad example. He proposed a heliocentric system based on vibes. Actual progress required decades of cutting-edge precision measurements by Brahe and then analysis by Kepler. Objections to heliocentrism were on scientific grounds which were resolved by the discovery of inertia, Airy disks, and stellar aberration.
> "Independent Polling" of people living under a repressive regime appears to be 100% impossible to me.
In Russia, it seems to be promoted a culture of ratting those who are against the government, which is also very common in these regimes - and that has a very deep scarring in societies that go over it.
I'm from Portugal and to this day there's still a cultural undertone of not ratting anyone to authorities, even if it is something that's hurting you or everyone, all because of the disgust and hate towards those who ratted people to the government police.
During our dictatorships, there were also the same theatrical displays of polling, voting, having opposing candidates approved by the state, etc. Salazar was always the man of course.
It's impressive that Russia still hasn't had its societal reform away from dictatorships in the XXI century. Sadly we're now paying the consequences of it, but it might be closer than we think!
They explain their methodology, and discuss things like what kind of questions tend to result in respondents terminating the interview.
I don't know how independent they really are; but I haven't seen evidence that they are effectively state-controlled.
If they are independent, then presumably it's true that most Russians are nationalists and Putinists. That doesn't seem implausible; as far as I can tell, a majority of voters in the USA are nationalists and Trumpists.
I've never visited a country while it was under the fist of a dictator. And in a way, Russia is special; in Russian history, autocracy and tyranny have been a constant, except for the ten years after the collapse of the CCCP. Those ten years were miserable for Russians, so it would be unsurprising if they feel safer and more comfortable with autocracy and tyranny.
