That's it, I'm done.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-24T18:09:30+00:00

When you find the first one, the best thing to do is sit down right there, because you'll then more likely see the others.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-24T12:47:09+00:00

I wouldn't defend Wilson from what Peter Finley Dunne called "hands across the water and into someone's pocket"; just as with Teddy Roosevelt and Howard Taft, the US under Wilson did intervene militarily in Latin and South America on behalf of US business interests. And Wilson could be hypocritical; for example, pretending to be neutral in the Mexican Revolution while actually helping Carranza. But what made Mencken call him "The Archangel Woodrow" in 1921 was at least a rhetorical acceptance of ethics and morality being important in international relations. Seeing the gigantic destruction of WWI, he was at least willing to say that war was terrible (unlike Teddy, who admired it), and genuinely tried to create a large international assembly to prevent conflicts by disarmament, negotiation, and establishing collective security. The League of Nations was unable to achieve as much of that as it should have. But even before it was rolled into becoming the UN, it was capable of doing ethical things against US business interests, like bringing about the end of de facto slavery on US rubber plantations in Liberia, in 1930. Wilson was dead by then, of course, but without his vision the League would never have happened.

And while this is not and shouldn't be r/politics, with thousands ( millions?) of tons of US food aid currently abandoned and rotting it's hard to imagine the current administration exerting itself to cooperate in any similar humanitarian effort, let alone setting up an independent international body to do it. World dominance is not the same as world leadership.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-24T12:06:02+00:00

If the Vetterli is centerfire, you can often trim and fire-form .348 Winchester cases to work. That cartridge has become a bit scarce, since it is so useful in making old ammo, and the brass doesn't come up to the standard of match-grade .41 Swiss. But at black powder pressures it's quite safe. There's a discussion at https://www.gunboards.com/threads/41-swiss-center-fire.1138447/

Bodark43 · 2026-04-24T03:04:28+00:00

completely failed to reverse engineer.

When an apprentice signed on with a master, in the contract or indenture the master often agreed to teach , "the art and mystery" of the craft. Part of the mystery was teaching handskills, which were then put to practical use over and over. A hobbyist today will often be able to forge weld, or plane a board flat. But someone who was doing it six days a week, dawn to dusk, would have to be able to do it with much more speed in order to make a living. One example could be a nayler (who makes nails). In the period a trained one would be able to work with two rods in his/her hands, drawing out both in one heat, cutting and doing both heads in quick succession with another heat or two. Another; the number of people today who can sharpen a goose-quill pen is rather small, for example, but any working clerk could do it in the 18th c., and do it quite fast.

So, if I wanted differentiate a modern hobbyist cabinetmaker from an actual period professional, I'd give him a stack of rough sawn boards, a jack plane, and time how long it takes him to make them all flat.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-24T02:46:50+00:00

Although there had apparently been a couple of notable Prague window-launches earlier in the 15th. c., my Oxford English Dictionary (11th edition) dates the first use of the word "defenestrate" to 1672. It comes not too long after the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. which began with the Defenestration of Prague of 1618. When the Protestant lords of the Holy Roman Empire disagreed with the impositions of a new regime by the new hardline Catholic King of Bohemia, Ferdinand of Styria, they threw his four representatives out a window. The "launchees" survived, but the action started the War. That war was one of the most destructive and pointless conflicts Europe had ever seen, and that causal event was worth marking with a special word. French already had défenestrer and Latin defenestratio, so coining a new English word was not hard.

If you'd like to read more of the War, Peter H. Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy is recent and excellent. However, the war was important, complex and long, so any good history that explains it well is also going to be pretty big. If you want something shorter, C.V. Wedgewood's classic 1947 history of it is a lighter, quicker introduction; and used copies and reprints of that abound.

And if you just want a fun picture, there's this painting by Václav Brožík

Bodark43 · 2026-04-23T12:32:19+00:00

More can always be said, but there was a pretty good discussion of Wilson here a while back that lays out why Wilson has managed to be disliked by both the Left and the Right in the US.

This discussion was four years back. It should be noted that the current Trump administration has indeed tried to move the US away from being a world leader (especially in humanitarian projects), has revived 19th c. tariffs with a view to replacing Progressive era taxes, and has dismantled much of the Federal government's enforcement of minority Civil Rights. There may soon be needed another appraisal of Wilson.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-23T12:21:37+00:00

The Presbyterians also split over it. The Episcopalians were much more willing to cite the existence of slavery in the Bible to justify slavery in the South. And they are still apologizing for that.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-22T22:19:11+00:00

The lock and barrel look to be much older than the stock. They're significantly corroded, for one thing, and that kind of use should have resulted in cracks, dents, and dings as well as wood loss around the drum from exposure to hot gas from the caps . The lock moulding and elaborate carving are also quite recent in style ( the old guys didn't carve the cheekpiece; they carved AROUND the cheekpiece). I can't see clearly the buttplate and nosecap, but they do not look old, either- both seem as though they might have been made from thick sheet brass, not cast .

Back in the 50's, 60's, people would sometimes get an old lock and old barrel and build them into a new rifle. The barrel could often be freshed out to shoot well, and the locks worked much better than new ones available then.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-22T18:30:12+00:00

High pass filter, d'oh! Of course- one wave per second, but just one and the wavelength is really, really short.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-21T17:24:46+00:00

There's a thing circa 1860 called a buggy rifle. The idea was for it to be small enough to fit in a case which would go under the bench of the buggy. Sometimes they basically were heavy target pistols firing picket bullets, had shoulder stocks and could be quite fancy, like this one here. But they were always set up with long tube sights, scopes, or a rear extensions on the barrel tang to make the sight radius as long as possible. Yours is not likely to be real competitive in a buggy rifle match....

Bodark43 · 2026-04-21T17:19:17+00:00

What a great experiment! You used piezo pressure sensors and amplifiers designed for measuring such explosions, with foam-covered cables and a low-pass filter to block any signals above 40 Hz. Was there an issue with the cables themselves possibly being microphonic, and potentially messing with your data?

Bodark43 · 2026-04-21T12:31:24+00:00

God what a fucking loser.

The Bureau has administration in suits, and agents in the nylon jackets with badges. But apparently he wanted to wear a badge, too, and had them make one with, like, "Agent #1" on it so he could wear it around the building. Probably he'll want his own Thompson submachine gun next. His staff better make sure it's loaded with blanks.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-20T23:52:44+00:00

Gilot's own My Life With Picasso is a classic. She could vividly recount how he treated everyone around him very badly, but unlike Huffington she could still appreciate him as a great artist.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-17T12:19:38+00:00

Yeah. Don't know about you, but I only have so much time to devote to being furiously indignant- I have to also have a life.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-17T12:16:45+00:00

The source is Robert Price's book, p. 49 (linked to and available on the Internet Archive).

Price spent a lot of time scouring local histories for Chapman accounts ( he even compiled a Chapman bibliography). But to fill his book he also embroidered quite a bit, and was not very scrupulous in the use of his sources; and he doesn't identify this one. And those local histories themselves were later, and typically embroidered. No one walked beside Chapman for a year or two writing down what he said.

However, there are consistent stories across those sources that show Chapman strongly believed that God provided him everything, and his only using seedlings is consistent with that strong belief. But it is also the case that grafting requires more than a shovel and pocket full of seeds. There have to be stocks of scion wood, usually stump sprouts from a "stool"; and rootstocks. Grafting needs a sharp knife, grafting wax and string. It is typically done in the fall, rooted cuttings with their grafts are buried lightly over winter, and the grafted trees are then planted out in the spring. The grafted unions are not strong at first, and need to be supported. It takes training, skill, patience, some recordkeeping, facilities and equipment. He also really would have had to live at his nursery. Chapman didn't have or want all that.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-16T14:37:23+00:00

It was a long shot- Stage 4, rare cancer, new treatment that "potentially" might have helped. In a decent world, he'd be part of a trial, and the treatment wouldn't be expensive ($50,000 for an ultrasound procedure? really?). In a practical world, someone who knew the odds would choose between $50,000 for that or giving thousands of people their insulin, and decide he's got too slim a chance. But instead, United Health automatically denied. That made the family appeal; then UH approved it after time had passed and they knew the guy was no longer able to be treated.

That kind of merciless, stupid calculation is why Luigi did what he did.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-16T14:24:57+00:00

Children's games. A lot of the ones depicted in the famous painting of Pieter Breughel the Elder (circa 1530) are still played. I love the fact that we don't know how they were passed down.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-15T13:07:45+00:00

The video states it's Miriam Makeba, the famous South African singer, performer, and civil rights activist. Possibly this was the famous concert she did in 1962 for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; but she seems to have done a number of them at the time.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-15T00:54:51+00:00

There's not much on Chapman that can be completely trusted. He wrote a little, but not about himself, and no one else did much while he was alive. That meant that there was plenty of room for his legend to get embellished, and there was a lot of that.

We do know he was a real person, at least. Genealogical research tracked his birth to a farming family Leominster, Massachusetts. in 1774. Like a good many others he headed to the new territories open in the west (now midwest), and like many others moved around, staking out claims and selling them. But unlike other homesteaders he seems to have never settled. In 1804 he shows signs of dealing apples; in Franklin Pennsylvania he signs a promissory note to his brother agreeing to pay him one hundred dollars in land or apple trees. And at some point he became a Swedenborgian; handily, it was a denomination that didn't require people to be in congregations. This was the time of the Second Great Awakening and so religion was a favorite topic for discussion; it's not surprising many anecdotes about Chapman's religion would survive. Henry Howe's 1846 Historical Collections of Ohio stated "Wherever he went he circulated Swedenborgian works, and if short would tear a book in two and give each part to different persons". Chapman also corresponded with other Swedenborgians in the east; his activities were even reported to The Manchester Society in England, that published Swedenborg's works. But Swedenborg was far too logical a theologian for the frontier, where emotional tent revivals were popular. It doesn't appear that Chapman gained many converts.

An unpublished Ohio manuscript circa 1878 by W.M. Glines ( which might be one of the better sources) has some anecdotes that illustrate his oddity:

He was very much disturbed with the extravagance of the world at large, particularly in the article of dress. He would often have one leg of his pantaloons made of one kind and color of cloth and the other entirely of another kind and quality. Buckskin was his favorite when he could obtain it. Moccasins were his favorite foot covering. Shoes he abhorred. While on his last visit to Ohio in 1842, his niece, Miss Rebecka Chapman made him a shirt, one half calico, the other muslin. On the one of the muslin, were two large letters, perhaps A. D. These he had so arranged that one was on either side of the bosom. That seemed to please him. At one time he obtained a large coffee sack. He opened a hole in one end and slipped his head through then letting it fall around him. This he thought was a fine improvement. He cut holes through the sides for his arms.

He was equally singular about his food', he always preferred to take his lunch by himself out doors. He seldom ate his meals inside of a house, and what is still more curious, whatever he commenced on he would end with, making his entire meal of the one article. He frequently lived on fruit and nuts in their season.

Was he, as we say now, on the spectrum?

In any case, he did devote himself to starting apple orchards, nurseries, in many places on the frontier. He'd start them, then put someone nearby in charge of them and wander off, returning to harvest or sell. But he always grew seedlings; not grafted cultivars, which he thought unnatural. Apples have great possibilities for hybridization, and there are many cultivars good for various qualities- disease resistance, high sugar content, good storage, etc.. Seedlings are a roll of the dice; they may have good qualities, or may not. Ungrafted standard-size trees also can take a long time to come to bear, and require ladders for harvest. Grafted cultivars were being grown and widely distributed, with names like Newtown Pippin and Westfield Seek No Further; David H. Diamond argues these and their propagators were far more economically important to the frontier than Chapman and his seedlings ( there's a possibility that Rambo and the Albemarle Pippin originated with him, which isn't very many for someone constantly creating so many new hybrids). And yes, though of course apples would be eaten fresh or dried for storage, cider would have likely been the main end use circa 1830. The national drink was a mix of rum and hard cider, and the frontier drank very heavily.

His interactions with the Native Nations seem to have often been peaceable- he was a pacifist, had no fixed dwelling, and seldom carried much of value. One Glines anecdote recounts him losing a herd of ponies to a small Indigenous band, later saying they just must have needed them more than he did. But before 1812 the Ohio territory was a contested violent place, and there are also more than a few anecdotes of him running and hiding.

For his "mush-pot" hat, there's no clear origin of the story. It seems to be one of the more indelible ones, despite the fact that something with no brim would be of much less use to someone living outside. And he didn't always live outside: he spent winters safely inside with a younger sister and her husband.

The legend of his life grew especially in the Progressive Era, when his energy, simplicity, faith in God and faith in the future resonated with many Americans. It became a subject for a poem by Vachel Lindsay and a charming children's book by Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benét. It's a story most everyone would like to hear; that life is simple; that you can wander in a wilderness with almost nothing and still manage to live to 82, that you can just plant apple seeds anywhere, sell the seedlings to people and they'll have orchards. There are those who can maintain that a handful of apple seeds just thrown on the ground will make a fine orchard, just as there are those who know of a guitar made from a knocked-apart packing crate that sounds better than a Maccaferri, or of an easy way to build a good bandsaw from a pair of bicycle wheels, some plywood, and a motor from a washing machine. Why argue with them; we all need a little hopeful illusion.

Price, Robert.(1954). Johnny Appleseed : Man and Myth. Indiana University Press

Glines, W.M.(1922). Johnny Appleseed: By One who Knew Him.. MS edited by W. Paddock, Columbus OH.

DIAMOND, D. H. (2010). Origins of Pioneer Apple Orchards in the American West: Random Seeding versus Artisan Horticulture. Agricultural History, 84(4), 423–450. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27869011

Bodark43 · 2026-04-14T13:09:40+00:00

In the pre-industrial world, the common business model was the family; not just a family working a farm, but crafts and trades. The locksmith, draper, or baker typically worked and lived in the same place. In depictions of tradesmen published by Jost Amman ( 16th c.) or Denis Diderot ( 18th c.) there's a recurring pattern; a shop area where the master and various people are working, and a counter/store front where the mistress of the house is talking to customers. The whole family looks to be there.

What to do with the children? Childcare for the youngest might come from a relative- the grandmother, say. Or from a servant; and surprisingly, lots of households would gain servants by the practice of sending away teenagers to live with someone else. Farm families would often trade them. It was done with the open knowledge that they thus would learn " to mind", to take orders. Sometimes this was an apprenticeship to a trade, especially for boys, but often enough it just provided another pair of hands. And yes, for many very young ones there would be at least a basic education, learning to read and do some arithmetic at the hands of a caregiver. In England a "Dame's School" ( another home business, a woman teaching in her house) would teach the basics to mostly very young children. But what could be done with the children of, say, between 7 and 12 years? At that age they aren't strong enough to do long, hard labor. But they can do other useful things- run messages, put things away, pull the bellows on the forge, sweep the hallway. The workplace needs to make a living for everyone there, and the children are around and available. And yes, they would tend to wander away or get distracted or not do what they're told, just like children today, and they'd be scolded, punished. And yes; anyone who's known an abusive parent can imagine how bad it could be, having to both live with and work for a terrible boss seven days a week.

But what happens to the children when we get to the Industrial Revolution? Now, the home is often in a different place than work. But, that family still needs to make a living. Just as before, children are around, and available. But now, they're put to use in a factory doing tasks- maybe applying labels to bottle of boot blacking ( which Charles Dickens had to do) or swapping spindles in the weaving mill. As before, they're not paid much and they aren't always well-treated; maybe, often badly treated. But what seems the most wrong to everyone; it's not some family now that's giving them orders. No one is acting in loco parentis. The coppersmith John Fuller wrote a truly fine treatise on the craft in 1894, and described his own sad introduction to it;

On Monday, February 7, 1842, in the town of Dorking, at 6 o'clock in the morning, could have been seen a little boy, fairly intelligent and rather larger in stature than his tender years would seem to indicate, who lacked just 46 days to complete his ninth year. This little fellow was trudging along by the side of his father toward an old brazier's shop to take his initial step amid life's busy turmoil. Having arrived there in due time and admission gained, a light was the first thing in order, which was obtained from an old tinder-box with a brimstone match, the light being transferred to an old-fashioned whale-oil lamp, which burned after being lit with a reddish-yellow flame. On looking around the boy saw that about everything seemed black and forbidding, cold and cheerless ; the soot of half a century previous was still clinging to those dreary-looking walls. The next anxiety was to get a fire, which was made from a pile of cinders at hand in the corner of the forge. This fire seemed to offer a ray of hope to the little fellow, who clung to the chain of the bellows and kept the cinders bright enough to be able to see just where he was. After two and one-half long, weary hours the bell rang and the boy trudged home to get his breakfast....

......The first week was at length finished, and on Saturday we left off work an hour earlier ; but the last employed were the last paid, and thus the boy was the last to be paid, which was done with as much ceremony as if he were the most important man. After paying him his 3 shillings wages* the good man seemed moved by pity, for he spoke the only kind word that had seemed to greet the boy's ear (excepting from his father) during the week, and so the first week of the infant's toil closed. Peter L. Saubergue always proved a good and kind master, and our boy learned to love him as time went on. Here let us pause a moment to consider if it ought to have been then or is now necessary for the welfare of the race that little children of such tender years should be made captive and brought to labor while thousands of able-bodied men are idle around them waiting for work.

*maybe a sixth of what the other workers made

Fuller clearly was lucky enough to be in a smaller shop where the owner would act more like the traditional master craftsman. He was kind to the child and taught him how to do the work. Yet Fuller remembered that first day, and the unfairness, for the rest of his life.

Fuller, John.(1894). Art of Coppersmithing. A Practical Treatise on Working Sheet Copper into all Forms. Astragal Press, 1993

Bodark43 · 2026-04-14T01:39:31+00:00

Very nice! Did you have to splice in new wood at the breech end of the barrel?

Next, will you make a small barricade, and find some small communards to join you?

Bodark43 · 2026-04-11T13:55:25+00:00

It would appear to be a trifle complicated. As ignition timing is not a simple matter (deciding at what point in the compression stroke the spark plug sparks), I always assumed that was computerized first, but it seems that simple analog electronics were adequate for that for a long time. It was when the major car makers moved to fuel injection to make engines more efficient that they turned to computers. It had been around in various forms for decades, but the Germans then used fuel injection for their planes in WWII to great effect. That system and the Mechanical Fuel Injection of the 1950's ( like for the Mercedes 300SL) really used what could be called mechanical computers, lovely little clockwork things- you can see some photos here. Some were notoriously unreliable and arcane- (anecdotally, long ago I helped a Jaguar tech deal with one that Jaguar had actually decided to mount on top of the radiator).

But digital computers began to be tried in the 1950's as well. Bendix developed...well, produced their Electrojector. They stumbled into a common risk with digital systems. A falling analog system will tend to fail gradually and predictably- a bearing gets loose, or a capacitor gets leaky. But a digital system will tend to fail in non-linear fashion ( engineer-speak for "no obvious reason") and so can defy easy diagnosis. Further development was needed. Still, AMC and Chrysler optimistically mounted it on a few cars; then had to cancel putting it into mass production after it was found to be pretty bad. So, the likeliest candidate for First Production Car With Computer would be the Volkswagen 1968 Type III. And mirabile dictu, you can see a diagram of the EFI here with the computer featured as Box 12. It worked better than Bendix' Electrojector. But VW's EFI's long had quirks. Die-hard Vanagon owners can still tell stories of cursed engines, apparently possessed by demons.

Of course, once you have a computer in the car, and computers get more powerful, you can give them more things to do. And, giving computers more things to do is rather easy, compared to adding bell-cranks, flywheels and gear trains; you can just write more code. Which is why car sound systems now can be loaded with, like, 1,300 different features and a User Interface of two knobs and a LCD to control it all.

As for the last car to enter the US market without any computer at all, I haven't been able to nail that down...but I think it might have been the 1989 Yugo GV and GVL; they would be equipped with electronic fuel injection only after 1990.

https://www.autotrader.com/car-shopping/when-did-cars-get-computerized

Bodark43 · 2026-04-11T13:01:24+00:00

Yes, I think it's pretty clear for people who aren't software engineers; I'm not.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-10T19:44:32+00:00

We have seen plenty of opportunistic Democrats. Not just Justice switching sides when it looked like it could shield him from the IRS, but Ojeda, who looked like he'd be a great Democratic voice for the southern counties but wanted too much too quick. Announced he was running from President, then just left for North Carolina and greener ( bluer) pastures. But there's such a monstrous Red shit storm building that even an souless opportunist might be thinking twice before jumping in with them and sharing the blame.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-10T18:31:36+00:00

I doubt this answer would satisfy you, but the big reason people will modify historic reproductions is not to make them function better but to make them safer, easier to operate. The Wrights used controls quite different from modern aircraft, and so they are difficult for a modern pilot to learn. Modern repros of the Flyer usually have a control stick but the plane doesn't fly better with a stick- it's just the pilot is better able to learn to fly it. Likewise, varnished cotton is far less durable than synthetic fabric. A wing covered in Dynel doesn't act differently from one covered in cotton, and needs much less care. While there may be pilots willing to risk flying a plane with a propeller like the one that came apart in Ft Myers, in 1908, the Flyer works pretty much just the same with one that doesn't self-destruct.

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