So, of course I went down a rabbit hole on this. So far I'm unsuccessful, but I did find out the Smithsonian Institute has a searchable database of all their junk, which is neat.
Anyone with Mastadon or Twitter wanna take a swing at getting their attention? The pic was taken August 31, 2019. Definitely the Natural History Museum in DC, pretty sure it was the geology wing? I'm gonna email them, see what I get.
Also, for posterity, I'm gonna say it's either Doom or the White Album
This is an old pic from the Smithsonian Natural History museum. The geology wing, I think. It was supposed to be an example of gems refracting light or something.
On a side note, if you ever get the opportunity to go to a Smithsonian, fuckin do it. People, they had literal meteorites the size of sedans just sitting there with a sign on it encouraging you to touch it. I touched a fucking hunk of metal that had been careening through the void for a number of years my little monkey brain has trouble grappling with. Sorry. It left an impression. Go if you get the chance
I will never not be amazed at the Sound ID feature. And I have spent a concerning amount of time trying to fake a bird call good enough to fool the app. It is my White Whale
That'll work, but adding a board as a platen is just the first step towards the saw mill proposal. It'll be easier and far better than just sitting him down and going at the poor bastard's skull, and for simplicity and speed that's the way. But if we have the time and resources, I say we do the saw mill thing because at the end of that we have both two halves of a guy and a functioning saw mill.
For pedantry's sake, my shitty jigsaw says I can cut a board just about any way it's sitting. Granted it's dumb, but it's possible. Sorry, the Wellakshuly devil got to me there.
And yeah, I gave up on trying to glean some meaning from client requests. They want a guy bisected and they've got the florins, they're gonna get two halves of a guy. The mistake I see there is that they've obviously tried to save money by hiring a cowboy outfit to do a professional job
Well, it's probably a necessity. First, that saw blade doesn't look long enough to get a enough action to cut a man in half like that. Even if his legs were apart and you only measured from head to hole, there's still probably not a while lot of room to maneuver the saw which is gonna make this grim work even worse: it's also gonna be hard.
Second, it's gonna be harder because you have so much blade in constant contact with your material. I mean, you're not gonna cause any saw burns or nothing, but you're definitely gonna piss off your saw bois. This was a time before power tools and friction makes you sore.
Now I'll admit it's gonna be harder to keep a straight line all the way down, but we had already talked about the need for a clamp, so why not set up a fence alongside it? I mean, if we're optimizing we might as well go for quality, too.
Hell, might as well go all the way. Drag the whole setup out to the mill and (assuming this isn't already a saw mill) build a contraption that reciprocates the saw using the mill to power it. Now, not only do you have the means to easily cut a man in half, you then also have a saw mill.
I suppose, too, it could act as a deterrent for future... Um... What was the condemned is guilty of? Sex out of wedlock? Stealing bread?
Oh! We should put a conveyor at the start of it! I bet we could strap a whole sinners' family to it at once!
I'd add the fact he was let off the hook due to his enormous profits. He beat the treason charges by having an objective measure of how very American he was. This was, of course, a fiction as usually these guys have to pay a fine, some small fraction of whatever was gained. They sometimes even get fingers wagged at them, I hear
I'll have to check them out. If you like teardowns and deep dives on random consumer product engineering, I'd recommend Technology Connections. Dude puts out quality
I mean, the list kinda goes on. Sure, the conduit guys aren't breaking their back, but they're pretty casual in the lift til someone falls out. The guys that do garage floors will be on oxygen in their mid-50's. I know a couple master cabinet makers who can't count to ten.
And absolutely a lot of it can be mitigated (wear your fucking respirator) but the problem with this kind of work as a rule is the damage is additive. You have an expiration date for this kind of work that often falls shy of what the soft hands would consider normal.
I don't know. I think we are in dire need of folks willing to do the hard work of keeping shit running. I love being self-sufficient in a world of services, or being a help to a neighbor in over their head. But those industries need to recognize that 60 hour weeks not counting commute make people unable to live, so they eventually jump careers or take a tumble they can't get back up from
This is true. It's also true the trades will chew you up and leave you burnt out and nearly crippled. In my experience they run through folks like they can just find another and grind whoever they have into paste. It pays well yeah, but I think I'd rather be able to walk like I used to
Cue the downright vicious paleontology blood-feud between the two camps of thought on whether they were tenors or sopranos