How to make things

I really enjoyed these mesmerizing videos demonstrating how many types of things are manufactured. Fascinating. Life would be so very different without our factories. Some would say for the better, but I don't agree at all. I don't want to spend the time to make my own food from scratch or create clothes. That would take immense amounts of time away from things I prefer to do. This topic reminds me of Jared Diamond's Germs, Guns and Steel, in which he describes a culture that spends most of every live long day harvesting, mashing and cooking their basic food substance. They can never get to libraries or any sort of technology because every day is a battle to gather enough food. Here's a description from Wikipedia:

The first step towards civilization is the move from nomadic hunter-gatherer to rooted agrarian. Several conditions are necessary for this transition to occur: 1) access to high protein vegetation that endures storage; 2) a climate dry enough to allow storage; 3) access to animals docile enough for domestication and versatile enough to survive captivity. Control of crops and livestock leads to food surpluses. Surplus frees people up to specialize in activities other than sustenance and supports population growth. The combination of specialization and population growth leads to the accumulation of social and technologic innovations which build on each other. Large societies develop ruling classes and supporting bureaucracies, which in turn lead to the organization of nation states and empires.

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Is speeding dangerous?

The media often asks us to assume that the posted speed limits are reasonable. This well-crafted video challenges us to think further on this topic of speeding. Consider this bit of info near the end of the video: In some cases when the speed limit is increased, the number of crashes goes down. The take-home is that authorities should set speed limits that make sense. Well worth watching.

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Stress analysis of a strapless evening gown

Here is a stress analysis of a strapless evening gown.   I just KNEW there had to be a scientific approach to this mysterious ability for nothing to hold up something.  Here is the focus:

Effective as the strapless evening gown is in attracting attention, it presents tremendous engineering problems to the structural engineer. He is faced with the problem of designing a dress which appears as if it will fall at any moment and yet actually stays up with some small factor of safety. Some of the problems faced by the engineer readily appear from the following structural analysis of strapless evening gowns.

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Is this new Pope actually Catholic? Bill Moyers discusses Pope Francis with Thomas Cahill

This is a delightful conversation, in which author Thomas Cahill offers excellent insights into Pope Francis. Cahill's view on Christianity meshes well with the teachings by Pope Francis. Here is how Cahill would describe the important part of Christianity:

I've come to the conclusion that they are really only two movements in the world. One is kindness, and the other is cruelty. I don't think there's anything else, really. You can explain virtually everything by those two movements. The cruelty in religion is so often a form of, "Under no circumstances may you do this, because if you do, we will exclude you. That's not how Jesus spoke. Jesus is the one who, you know, lifted the weeping prostitute off the floor and said, "Your sins are forgiven you." He had no problem with sexual deviancy of any kind. It's we who have that problem. And it's a problem for institutionalized religion as it is for institutionalized anything. The institutions will tend to exclude. ... I'm a believing Christian who finds himself equally at home and equally impatient and equally ill-at-ease in virtually any church. BILL MOYERS: Why is that? THOMAS CAHILL: I just don't think that it matters that much. I think that we've, you know, in the 16th and 17th centuries, we killed one another over doctrine. It was after this period that you finally had in the period of the enlightenment, people saying, "Do we really have to keep doing this? Do we really have to keep-- is it really necessary to kill one another? Couldn't we just agree to disagree?" And then you have the beginning of a new era. And it's time that we got past the largely silly divisions, theological divisions, which really don't count. Because people don't care about those things anymore. BILL MOYERS: What do you think they care about? Or what do you care about? THOMAS CAHILL: "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." That's Christianity. The rest of it, isn't worth a hill of beans.

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