fyi, I softblock new followers unless I think I would actively enjoy being followed by them. Nothing personal, I just need to minimize unwanted attention so I can enjoy Poasting. I don't use tags consistently by default, but if you'd like me to use an organizational or warning tag for something specific, shoot me a message. Blog title is from Sancta by Andrew Grace.
seriously we need a rule that the government can pass one (1) new law for every tragedy, but every six months they gotta delete one (1) old law in exchange.
What was that plan about limiting the gov to something like “10000 lines of law” or whatever, so anytime they wanted to expand the laws, they needed to delete old ones
There’s a really incorrect assumption in here that the length of regulations is a good measure for how burdensome they are. You can decrease burden by making regulations longer and more complicated.
Let me give an example:
Wind turbines are legally required to have highly-visible paint and blinking lights on them, so airplanes don’t crash into them. Thus, there’s a document, FAA Advisory Circular AC 70/7460-1M, explaining just how wind turbines and other tall structures must be painted and lit to avoid being a hazard to air traffic.
But what if you have a dense wind farm with hundreds of turbines, or a long ridgeline with a bunch of turbines. Do they all need to have blinking lights? No, that’s unnecessary (and probably more distracting and dangerous to pilots than having fewer). But how many of them need to have lights? Once you’ve established that it’s not “all” (a regulation with Kolomogrov complexity only slightly above “none”), you can’t just say “some of them”, you have to lay out precisely what “some” means, since long experience tells us that people will seek to interpret an ambiguous word like “some” in whatever manner imposes the least cost on them, regardless of what that implies for air safety. It also makes more compliance burden, as now lawyers and precedent-setting cases have to go around to explain exactly what it does mean.
Thus does FAA Advisory Circular AC 70/7460-1M have paragraph 13.5.2, explaining just how many lights you do need:
If all we wanted was to decrease the length and Kolmogorov complexity of the law, we could delete paragraph 13.5.2 entirely, at which point the law would revert to “all turbines need to have blinking lights”. But this would increase the cost and burden on wind farm operators: they now need to install and power and repair and occasionally upgrade maybe ten or twenty times as many lights as they used to. This lengthy paragraph of bureaucrat-speak is helping them out, and also balancing competing interests in a rational way, which just omitting it would not.
Every time a conservative politician does one of those photo-ops next to a big book where they go “look at all the laws we’re going to cut”, I wonder how much of that big book is like paragraph 13.5.2, where it’s making the law more fair and easier to comply with, even though it is strictly longer.
okay, clicking on it returns a 500 error (internal server error). tacoma come on man you can't let google see this and not share it with the class
okay, going to their main site, that's it: they are trying to implement some kind of automated translation so the site's language dropdown offers dozens of languages, one of which for some reason is Latin. (Also Frisian, Corsican, Esperanto...) All of these return that same error, possibly because someone noticed that the translations are crap (note the untranslated "opportunities" and "procurement" above), but for whatever reason they just left the interface to select them live.
one of the less appreciated benefits of labour-saving technology is that the easier it is to do things, the more likely it is that respectable people and institutions will do really dumb things just because it was so easy that they didn't have to put any thought into it
the easier it is to do things, the more likely it is that respectable people and institutions will do really dumb things just because it was so easy that they didn't have to put any thought into it
I'm obsessed with this chair. The artist takes a flimsy hunk of injection-molded plastic that's been cost-cut to hell and back, and insists that we look at it with fresh eyes and understand its beauty. And they went about it in the most labor-intensive way I can think of.
Absolutely nothing about this design is convenient to execute in wood. Every piece is curved, most have compound curves. This is artisan craftsmanship: it's inherently slow, manual, and skilled. Notice, also, that most features of this chair must be thicker and heavier than on the plastic chairs being imitated. Injection-molded chairs can be produced in this shape in a matter of minutes with far less material at very low cost.
If these flowing, organic curves are so beautiful in polished wood, perhaps they are also beautiful in the mass-produced chairs that are far more accessible. Perhaps we should remember to admire designs that succeed enough to become ubiquitous. I don't know about you, but I'll never see injection-molded chairs the same way again.
I agree with all of this, but YOU HAVE HIT UPON A FORGOTTEN TRUTH OF PLASTIC CHAIRS!!!!!
The standard one-piece injection molded plastic chair is referred to as a "Monobloc", literally just describing it as a single piece. The history of this chair is fascinating, and it all starts back in 1946, with the D.C. Simpson Monobloc.
Douglas Colborne Simpson was an architect mostly active in the 40's and 50's, designing a lot of classic mid-century style buildings in Vancouver, Canada(1). In 1946, as part of a government project to find new uses for materials developed for WWII, he and engineer James Donahue developed the design you see above, simply called the Monobloc(2). Unfortunately, we don't know a lot about this chair as it was only ever a prototype, and no modern examples have survived, nor have most of the records surrounding it(3). To my knowledge, we don't actually know if this was technically injection molded, or crafted some other way. We can't even be sure if it was technically the inspiration for the designs that followed, but no matter the case it has lent its name to the entire genre.
Plastics technology was simply not what it is today back in the 1940's. Most people would have had very little plastic in their homes, most likely just a few pieces of Bakelite (the first commercially viable plastic, made from a formaldehyde based resin in a Bakelizer, the best name for any industrial manufacturing equipment ever). Over the following few decades, however, as a wider variety of plastics were both developed and came down in price to the point of commercial viability, the concept of the plastic chair was revisited, and the first folks to revisit it were Helmut Batzner, in 1964, and Joe Colombo, in 1965.
This, is the Bofinger chair, Batzner's design:
The elements of D.C.Simpson's Monobloc were pretty alien compared to todays mass-manufactured plastic chairs, but here we start to see some more modern elements come into play. The first thing you probably notice is the front legs, which have that characteristic visible 90 degree bend in them for added rigidity, plus a much more comfortably leaned back and slightly scoop-shaped seat. We also see much more support in the back rest, with broad triangles allowing for a more efficient use of materials without losing back support.
Similar to Simpson, Batzner was not an industrial designer, but an architect, and this chair had a very specific purpose. Batzner and his team designed it as part of a project to build a new theater in Karlsruhe, Germany, which required a large amount of additional seating which could be easily packed away into storage or distributed around the theaters rooms by the staff (4). As such, it was designed to be both lightweight and stackable, so several of them could be moved by one person, and they could be stored compactly. This piece of furniture was a huge hit a the theater, and was so popular that 120,000 units would ultimately be manufactured and sold around the world, with each one taking just 5 minutes to produce (4).
Around the same time, Joe Colombo enters the scene with this:
Colombo was an artist in several mediums who, after taking over his families appliance company in the 50's, made the shift towards architecture and interior design, and started designing a wide array of trend-setting furniture(5). The chair shown above is known as the Universale (sometimes referred to as the Chair Universal 4867), designed in 1965. This chair differs pretty greatly from the ones that came after it, it many ways it represents a different path that could have been taken, but it's also very widely referenced as an inspiration for what is broadly considered the origin of the white plastic chair the world over.
Enter: the Fauteuil 300
This is, arguably, the first iteration of the white plastic chair we all know today. Designed by Henry Massonnet in 1972, the Fauteuil 300 and it's imitators are, collectively, the single most widely used piece of furniture in the entire world(6). Before that, however, it was something else entirely: works of art.
What might be hard to recognize in hindsight is that all of these chairs described so far were not everyday objects. They were on the forefront of modern design, they made use of brand new materials and manufacturing processes, and at the time they were each made, they were slick, stylish, and fairly expensive. Despite the speed at which they could be manufactured, these innovative, high-end chairs rose sharply in cost up through the early 1980's due to the sheer demand for them. They weren't cheap spare seating you stuck in the garage, they were placed at dining tables and on fine patios, and they were a wildly popular talking point. That's not to say their expense justified their artistic value, but rather that their expense and popularity was a product of their status as highly contemporary and boundary-pushing designs.
With the price of plastics declining after the 70's, the increasing accessibility of injection molding to manufacturers, and the widespread popularity of these designs, copycats proliferated rapidly, and eventually drove the price down. This era, in the 80's and 90's, is when these chairs became cheap an ubiquitous, and where they became manufactured the world over.
And here is where we reach this piece, "Plastic chair in wood", by Maarten Baas, and a piece of the history I've left out so far. The Monobloc was designed to be made out of wood. Like the the other chairs designed by Joe Colombo, like the chairs that predated the Simpson, the Monobloc was designed with the intention of using laminated plywood, but as the artists and designers behind them began to experiment with new materials they fell in love with the idea of making them from plastic, and so they did. They redesigned and redesigned until they made something that would be impossible to make in wood at a price most people could afford, but which could be made from plastic in mere minutes. The organic curves and thin profiles would take so much time, so much waste material, so much skill and effort to create if made of wood that they could never be furniture, they could only be art. Baas' chair is a perfect, beautiful reflection of that.
That, in brief, is the history of the design of the white plastic Monobloc chair, but it's not all there is to know. In fact, it's kind of just the start. I've linked my sources below, but I would strongly recommend checking out the German documentary Monobloc, by Hauke Wendler. It goes over the history, but it's far more interested with what the Monobloc means, and what it's place is in our world today. The impact it's made, the better and the worse, and what it says about us. It's fascinating, and well worth your time.
will somebody other than Kensington PLEASE make a fingertip trackball with a scroll ring. the orbit with scroll ring is a uniquely perfect form factor for me because I can point and scroll comfortably with any finger(s) with a relaxed posture, but the drivers are AWFUL.
Squatting down to pick things up is generally preferred to bending over for the same purpose. Is that because squats are easier to bodyweight-train than the bend is? The size of the involved muscle groups in each movement would be relevant. The back muscles are smaller, and involve more fiddly bone-connections. But I do suspect that a dedicated bender could perform just as well the squatter for many tasks below some as yet unmeasured, and underestimated, threshold of weight.
Not exactly. You can move a lot of weight safely by bending, as long as you do it by hinging at the hip rather than bending your spine - that's a deadlift, basically, and most people can deadlift more than they squat. With deadlifts or squats, you're relying mainly on the muscles in your butt and thighs to move the load. Those are your largest muscle groups, and they're anchored to your largest bones by massive tendons. When you need to move something heavy, those are the muscles you want to be using.
You can get yourself into trouble by lifting with a rounded lower back. The muscles surrounding the lumbar spine are pretty small: they're effective as stabilizers when lifting heavy, but they don't function well as prime movers under load, especially not in flexion (rounded lower back). That position makes you especially vulnerable to slipped discs. Damage can be cumulative, so the absence of acute pain does not necessarily imply that you're lifting safely - sometimes people will do a bunch of heavy lifting with poor technique and feel fine, then throw their back out lifting something trivial.
Some degree of lumbar flexion is necessary and totally fine when doing core exercises like leg raises, because you're producing force by contracting muscles on the front of your body - your lower back is relatively passive. It's important to train your lower back muscles to reduce your risk of spinal injury, but you generally do so with your lower back straight, training stability (e.g. deadlift), or in extension (e.g. superman). Rounding your lower back to pick something up is probably fine if it feels totally comfortable, but it's not a safe position for anything challenging - best not to make it a habit.
(note: I basically only know as much about kinesiology as I had to learn to unfuck my own body. comments and correction from real muscle understanders are most welcome.)
I love these stories. Two years ago, our best guess of how many renewables the world woutld install next year was only 2/3 of how much we currently guess that we'll install next year. Our predictions of how much we're going to do to fight climate change keep being wrong, and they're wrong because we keep doing WAY MORE than we thought we were going to do.
Click through to see story links
Renewables 2024 - Analysis and key findings. A report by the International Energy Agency.
Did you know there's a researcher whose main focus is tracking installed solar capacity worldwide, and she's really struggling, because so much is being installed so fast that it's really REALLY hard to track it all? I can't find the link to her tweet about it now, but it was in one of the good news posts a while back. But I DO have this:
The image ID above fails to mention that from the green jadeite which forms the top of the cabbage, a grasshopper or locust is carved as well. Because it is carved continuously from the piece, it mimics the camouflage that a real critter would have.
I think they should invite the original creator of Dashcon (who is now a raccoon biologist) to Dashcon 2 (which just so happens to be in Toronto, the raccoon diabetes capital of the world)
Since this post is blowing up, I figured I should go ahead and clarify some questions I’m seeing in the tags
Did you really create Dashcon?
Yeah, when I was like 15. The con happened when I was 17.
Were you the person in the StrangeAeons video?
Yes.
Are you Nessie?
Also yes. Nessie is short for Lochlan. They named me after the Loch Ness Monster.
Are you associated with Dashcon 2?
No, however we did speak a few months back and they gave be a presentation on their business model and plan and honestly it seems pretty legit. They did say I’m welcome to come and would like to have me host a rabies/rabies pride panel (I’m a certified rabies educator), however last we spoke they were trying to figure out their budget for a flight. Obvi they are taking more care with their budget than the original Dashcon did, so I get it.
Are you really a raccoon biologist?
Among other things. I conduct research on interactions between humans and raccoons with support from an accredited institution and IRB approval. Right now I’m studying interactions between tourists and the critically endangered pygmy raccoon of Cozumel. However, as tourism behaviors start in one’s own backyard, I also study wildlife habituation issues in tourist hotspots in the US as well as how humans interact with—and habituate—raccoons in general.
Raccoon diabetes?
Yes. Contrary to popular belief, raccoons are not evolved to safely eat garbage or other anthropogenically sourced food. Raccoons are incredibly susceptible to diabetes, obesity? And kidney problems.
Toronto has a large raccoon population and an over abundance of anthropogenic food sources—garbage cans filled with happy meals and the like—and thus a large number of obese, diabetic raccoons.
What else do you do with raccoons?
Aside from my research, I am also the assistant director of Exotic Pet Wonderland animal sanctuary. We are the only specialized sanctuary for “pet” raccoons in the world, but we also have various species of foxes, wild cats, and mink. I frequently collaborate with various state game departments and local law enforcement on animal abuse and neglect cases and to act as a rabies vector specialist. My director and I are who gets called when cops want to actually do the right thing instead of taking the easy way out and euthanizing the animals.
Can we see your raccoons?
These are my “personal” raccoons. Moonshine (bottom) came to me after she was purchased as a baby to be a pet for a human child. Moonshine was “evil” and bit the baby, and now she is my biological daughter. Alabama Toothpick (top) was handed over in a Walmart parking lot child custody style after being illegally kept and her owners deciding she was “too much” to live in their RV. She is blind due to a disfunction of her tapetum lucidum caused by not being fed a proper diet by her previous owners.
I do have a large raccoon enclosure in my home—complete with a floor to ceiling climbable tree sculpture. Both of my girls are currently at the sanctuary torporing (having a long winter’s nap) outside while I prepare to research in the Caribbean for two months. However, I will be taking in 6-10 raccoon temporarily from a case in working, so I should have more in my home to share soon.
~evidence-based medicine~ sounds like a good thing, but the flipside of "we will only cover this treatment for indications backed by high-quality evidence" is "if you have a rare or understudied disease, go fuck yourself and die"
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