Ehy! @captain-brunch - Tumblr Blog

kinda bullshit the English language doesn't have a discrete word for an unlit campfire. you light a campfire, but what is it before you light it? also a campfire, I guess. I need to invent a word that can be intuitively understood as "the arrangement of wood that is intended to become a campfire"

dorian-they

well "an arrangement of wood that is intended to become a campfire" sounds like it's just a bundle of sticks and I think there is a collective word for that maybe

orcboxer

was-once-somewhere-else

I just saw a video title on YouTube that said something like “Why is glass transparent?” And that’s an interesting question and I’m sure it’s great that the video exists but my first thought was like “Because glass is terrible, obviously.” Because it’s unwieldy and let’s out warmth and needs to be heated to hundreds of degrees to be shaped and turns into hundreds of tiny daggers if you drop it. Why the hell would we bother with that if it didn’t have some magical quality like being totally transparent despite being solid? Glass is transparent because if it weren’t, we’d use something else.

was-once-somewhere-else

looking through my “me” tag and this is apparently what I was thinking 3 years ago

totally-a-wizard

If you’re still curious we did not start working glass for its transparency. It was most likely started as a sanitary concern. Glass is easy to clean with soap and water, once it’s cleaned out you can use it again for anything and no germs or flavor from the previous meal or drink will remain.

Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it. That would leak out seemingly at random no less. Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.

Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness. Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation. Also beads. Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.

The fact that it could become see through was a side benefit.

was-once-somewhere-else

this is amazing and I’m really glad I reblogged that old bullshit post because I got to learn this