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Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

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Re: Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

#121

Post by peterwwillis »

ars wrote: post #77
InclinedPlane wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pasta is an amazing invention. It's functionally similar to hard tack except it can be prepared to an edible state very quickly with merely boiling water and also tastes much better.

Can you make pasta with whole grain flour? I'm not sure milling techniques available in those days were able to make the right kind of flour. Also without fortifying the flour pasta is calories without nutrients. It's useful as a suplement, but dangerous to live on it long term.

Could you please clarify why whole grain flour pasta would not have nutrients? Unless you meant white flour pasta. And here is how to make it from scratch:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_wheat_flour

Grind whole wheat into flour with a coffee grinder: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1593906/make_lowcar... (you can also buy an expensive hand-crank version)

Whole Wheat Pasta recipe: http://www.sugarlaws.com/whole-wheat-pasta

Re: Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

#122

Post by toddh »

ars wrote: post #76
toddh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of science itself would probably be more powerful than anything an individual could accomplish. Let a 1000 flowers bloom and all that.

Science is older than you think. Science is making experiments, recording results, and trying to figure out what is going on. The oldest clearest example of science is alchemy. Today we know it's impossible, but back then they reacted a tremendous number of compounds and carefully recorded the results.

Is finding a way to turn dross into gold or purchase eternal life really science? Taoist alchemy may have been more philosophical in nature, but western alchemy was pretty goal oriented without much mindfulness about science as a higher level process. They weren't trying to understand how nature works, they were trying to enrich themselves. Very different.

Re: Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

#123

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

Tsagadai wrote: post #106
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which someone? The average city dweller? Probably. A farmer? Not at all. What they do hasn't really changed; just gotten much, much more efficient. Same goes for a civil engineer; would be very useful in medieval times. Software engineer not so much!

I think you are dramatically underestimating the knowledge of modern farmers. Here are some areas that have changed: irrigation has changed radically in the last 40 years, fertilizers, companion planting, industrialized processes, storage and safer practices. Most farmers would make more difference than an engineer would make because in the past the majority of people were farmers. Don't forget that the main reason f…

Oh, I'm not. I live on a horse farm surrounded by corn/soybean/etc farmers :-)

I just wanted to avoid having to qualify my answer too much to a group of people who are (probably) mostly urban. I agree with everything you say.

Re: Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

#124

Post by jholman »

ramchip wrote: post #72

I remember a cooperative online game, with a mostly text-only interface, in which you could build smelters and tools and climb gradually the tech tree. It was very detailed and interesting but I lost track of its name and URL. Does it ring a bell for anybody?

A Tale In The Desert ( atitd.com ) is a subscription graphical MMO which has some limited properties in common with what you describe.

It's cooperative, it's not graphically sophisticated, and collaboratively climbing a (relatively shallow) tech tree is the main goal of the game.

Re: Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

#125

Post by ars »

peterwwillis wrote: post #121
ars wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you make pasta with whole grain flour? I'm not sure milling techniques available in those days were able to make the right kind of flour. Also without fortifying the flour pasta is calories without nutrients. It's useful as a suplement, but dangerous to live on it long term.

Could you please clarify why whole grain flour pasta would not have nutrients? Unless you meant white flour pasta. And here is how to make it from scratch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_wheat_flour Grind whole wheat into flour with a coffee grinder: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1593906/make_lowcar... (you can also buy an expensive hand-crank version) Whole Wheat Pasta recipe: http://www.sugarlaws.com…

Yes, I did mean the white flour pasta.

Re: Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

#126

Post by kragen »

gaustin wrote: post #120
kragen wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are these people? Do they stop at steel? What should I be Googling?

What do you mean stop at steel? Search for Tai Goo, Tim Lively and Wayne Goddard. Primitive knifemaking is another good term to search. Ariel" rel="nofollow">http://www.aescustomknives.com/>Ariel Salaverria doesn't do primitive as far as I know, but he does have some tutorials for making some things that most makers buy/outsource. Tutorials for resin impermeated handle materials, like denim micarta. This cool post sh…

Thank you!

By "stop at steel", I meant to ask how far their bootstrapping went — did they bootstrap from stone-age materials to just, say, pre-medieval steel metallurgy? Or did they go on ahead to technologies like organic polymers, machine tools, bicycles, internal-combustion engines, vacuum tubes, semiconductors, digital computers, and heavier-than-air flying machines?

I wonder if Ariel Salaverria sells his work at handicrafts markets here locally. Maybe I could go apprentice with him :)

In your second link, I think the fragment ID is broken; did you mean the whole thread at http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/topic/40386 ? Or a particular post in it?

Re: Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

#127

Post by jholman »

btilly wrote: post #65
pyrhho wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Better Bread? Historically bakers had extremely short lives because without mixers they had to breathe in the flour dust all day. And the bread would have been extremely unevenly cooked (no temperature-regulated ovens), as well as being extremely salty (no preservatives). - Pasta? Pasta is absolutely amazing. It is an extremely dense source of calories, which doesn't rot, is super-compact, and only requires water a…

Edit: Also limes for sailors. Actually that's a terrible idea. You want lemons, not limes. Really. See http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm for a discussion of where the myth to the contrary came from, and for the complex history of how the proper prevention of scurvy was discovered, forgotten, proved false, and only later rediscovered again. It also discusses why you really don't want to use limes.

I apologize for this "+1" comment, but this scott-and-scurvy story is really awesome, on all sorts of levels. Science is hard to do correctly!

Re: Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

#128

Post by kragen »

rcfox wrote: post #53
thesteamboat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as to what easy advances there were in cooking. Do you mean something along the lines of better heat sources or do you mean recipes?

Making sure to eat sources of vitamin C to prevent scurvy, having women who intend to get pregnant eat more folate to help their babies' brains...(Not to mention not drinking alcohol while pregnant!)

These might be practically difficult to realize just on brainpower alone.

For example: how do you avoid drinking alcohol if your only sources of drinking water are contaminated? You can boil the water — but you don't know a priori whether the pathogens or toxins in the water can be destroyed by boiling, or how much boiling is needed. If the toxins are things like arsenic, boiling the water will concentrate them, while various kinds of biological processing may filter them out.

And where do you get vitamin C? Tomatoes are a great source of vitamin C, but you can't just go around eating random local tomato-like plants; almost all of them are deadly. Plants like rhubarb have lots of vitamin C, but also lots of oxalic acid. Raw meat is also a good source of vitamin C, but raw meat can harbor many different pathogens. Are you going to build a microscope, synthesize some stains, and inspect a bunch of meat samples to see which ones bear pathogenic bacteria?

And once a couple of your human-subjects experiments go wrong, or just have coincidental unrelated deaths, you're a candidate for a witch-burning.

(Even in the best cases, modern hygiene is not without its drawbacks; the poliomyelitis epidemic is one example.)

Re: Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

#129

Post by ars »

toddh wrote: post #122
ars wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is older than you think. Science is making experiments, recording results, and trying to figure out what is going on. The oldest clearest example of science is alchemy. Today we know it's impossible, but back then they reacted a tremendous number of compounds and carefully recorded the results.

Is finding a way to turn dross into gold or purchase eternal life really science? Taoist alchemy may have been more philosophical in nature, but western alchemy was pretty goal oriented without much mindfulness about science as a higher level process. They weren't trying to understand how nature works, they were trying to enrich themselves. Very different.

You have a "Hollywood" view of alchemy. Most of the people who did it did not realistically expect to succeed. But they continued anyway.

History is full of people who did all sorts of experiments to try to understand how the world works.

It is not necessary to have a goal "understand this" in order to do science, it's enough to have a goal "what happens if I do this". If I do an experiment and find an interesting result, and I publish it, that's still science - even if I have no idea why what I did works.

Re: Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

#130

Post by khafra »

anamax wrote: post #104
dmm wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being a knight no longer conveys the right to carry a sword Come to America. Open/concealed carry is legal for every sane and non-felonious adult in many areas, gentleman and commoner alike.

Be careful - some knives, such as switchblades and dirks/double-edged knives, are illegal/restricted in a lot of places.

I think it's funny that in most of America, someone with a permit can carry a brace of automatic pistols and enough extra magazines to mow through a dozen preschool classes; but brass knuckles and spring-opening knives are still off-limits.
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