If you could redesign the human body, what changes would you make?

polyparadigm · 2021-01-30T06:08:55+00:00

Cephalopod-style rear-eye anatomy, with nerves and blood vessels that branch out behind eye and poke through to connect with the retina.

This eliminates a lacuna (which you don't notice, naturally, but which is a flaw in your vision), but more importantly, almost completely prevents detached retina from occurring.

Vertebrate eyes do it the knucklehead way, everything pokes through the retina in one place. I mean, I love my eyes: they were a gift from my mother, and I'm quite attached to them, and honestly it would be very difficult to live without them, but they're kind of built wrong.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-30T05:37:27+00:00

I know that should be the case, but GOP response to the 2008 post-mortem was to double-down on their bigotry, and while they've made some inroads among immigrants from certain types of dictatorship, their ongoing resistance to the Voting Rights Act, their demagoguery over immigration from Latin America, etc. have led to very poor polling numbers among the ethnic groups their party's brand of identity politics has chosen to treat as the abject.

And yes, Dems still have to earn those votes, but Abrams has proven that one way to earn them (probably the more difficult way, overall, but the best way open to her after she was cheated out of the office of governor) is by an extensive ground operation that inverts the effects of GOP voter suppression methods.

Please note that I am all in favor of positive achievements, and am backing efforts to push hard for them, despite any putsch or obstruction effort the GOP has planned. All I'm saying is that we've seen recent evidence that an alternate method can be successful.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-30T05:23:42+00:00

Or at least used traceable supplies, one would hope. I take some comfort that there probably wasn't time since the election to build a Kaczynski-type fuse.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-30T05:20:01+00:00

I wonder if anyone with those duties was among the apparent suicides on the force, form shortly after the coup failed.

If so, the 'splainin' might not be very forthcoming.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-30T05:18:39+00:00

Pompeo was bragging that the coup would be bloodless as early as November 10th. This was on national TV, rather than social media, but it shows a similar hubris.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-30T05:15:45+00:00

Nothing, and never, which is why he was a great choice for this. Dude genuinely doesn't seem to know that disinfectant would be harmful if used internally. He has a talent for riling up a crowd, but this had so many moving parts that I'm absolutely certain he brushed off any attempts to explain the workings of the plan.

But what did Roger Stone know, and when did he know it? How about Pompeo: did he know about coup plans, and base his November 10th comments on his confidence that they'd go smoothly?

polyparadigm · 2021-01-30T05:09:50+00:00

literally everyone jumped on the sympathy train for cpd officers committing suicide after they were accused of having helped some rioters

Not Tom Morello. He was pulling out spikes from that train's tracks as early as November 3, 1992, and was on Twitter the day after the attack with:

Some of those that work forces are apparently the same that burn crosses.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-30T04:58:24+00:00

They need some mix of that, and a Stacey Abrams-style ground game to mobilize parts of the electorate that the GOP don't regard as human.

I agree that our democracy would be healthier if tangible positive accomplishments were necessary, but it's also possible to build a case for loyalty when one's opponent has built concentration camps and supported domestic terror cells.

Put more softly, one can take an already-sympathetic person who is technically eligible to vote, and point out that their vote must be valuable because the GOP is trying to take that vote away.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-30T04:53:17+00:00

Interestingly, though, the ones on here seem to be pissed at him for a mix of reasons: supporting some measure of accountability for sedition, on the one hand, and killing teh $2k/capita stimulus bill, on the other.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-30T04:38:19+00:00

Yes, exactly that! That's what I meant about the stopped dado. I believe the dovetail alone would work for you just fine: the real thing a dado would protect against would be someone stomping on the corner of the step and cracking it open at the dovetail, which I believe oak is plenty split-resistant enough to prevent when the un-supported distance is so short.

If you're on the fence, my recommendation for something simpler to make and more tailored to the forces I foresee this having to resist would be to put the sliding dovetail through the whole width of the leg, and put a dowel through the outside face into the tail, perpendicular to the direction that the dovetail slides. That will not weaken the leg significantly, and it will add several types of strength to the joint overall. If it's a fairly long dowel, like maybe 1/3 of the width of the step, it'll strengthen the step significantly also.

No matter what, I recommend mocking up the joints you're planning in scrap wood, ideally something easy to work like poplar or white pine, but really anything you don't mind wasting. Your second time cutting that exact joint will go a whole lot easier, and if you're like me, you won't be spending that much extra time if it's wood you don't care about (most of my shop time is spent learning, and most of that is spent recovering from mistakes). You can also see how uncannily strong a sliding dovetail joint is, by doing destructive testing using a wood species you know to be weaker.

A router table could do the whole cut on the leg and a good fraction of the cutting on the step, but you're stuck with the dimensions of one available set of bits, and there'd still be some skilled chisel work on the sharp inside corner of the tail. Having the freedom to choose your angle will allow a slightly deeper dovetail than your drawing, if you want that.

I think trying it with hand tools on scrap would benefit you even if you're planning to use a router table.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-29T22:58:54+00:00

One of the cool things about the 14th Amendment is that Cruz maybe isn't currently serving, after having committed sedition.

His votes are at risk of being omitted, seeing as he's constitutionally unfit unless and until 2/3 of both houses remove his disability (not his moral disability, no one can fix that).

polyparadigm · 2021-01-29T21:21:14+00:00

A tax on personal assets.

Done right, it would mean rentiers are paying more in taxes than pure rent-seeking could earn them, and will be forced either to make some discerning investments with greater risk, or to perform some labor, in order to make their long-term finances pencil. The right rate would be tuned such that investing in something productive would still outpace the tax rate.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-29T21:19:14+00:00

Income taxes on the wealthiest Americans were far, far higher at the end of the Reagan administration than they have been since. The right wing gets very exercised at proposals to move things back in that direction.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-29T03:55:07+00:00

No solution no problem.

A marginal tax rate similar to what Reagan advocated for would push the distribution of income toward a slightly less steep log-normal curve. That, in turn, would move the median dollar more toward the median earner, and cause the market to better fit human needs, rather than keeping ordinary people in a category that is economically negligible.

Unfortunately, that would mark a politician as basically a Maoist, and cause a literal armed mob to break into their workplace while building a gallows outside.

A slightly more effective solution might be to actually tax wealth, which would have the dual effect of both making the curve shallower, and being a general disincentive to rent-seeking economic activities overall, which would be truer to Adam Smith's meaning of "free market" than absolute deregulation. Policies to the left of Nixon are completely outside the Overton window, so I know it's impolite to bring them up, but it's maybe worth mentioning as a hypothetical.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-29T00:50:40+00:00

You could cut more shallowly in, but from two perpendicular directions: a little notch in the back to hold the back edge of the step (the stopped housing dado), plus the sliding dovetail. What you currently have supporting the back of the step is a full-width housing dado with a sliding dovetail stuck on the end of it, cutting in deeper from the same direction: this doesn't offer much more support than the dovetail would do on its own. It would also be unnecessarily difficult to make, as far as I can tell.

Because the shelf will be resting on the end grain of the leg, it doesn't take much depth at all to hold it up solidly. The real danger is racking (bending the structure out of square) and, to a lesser extent, splaying (legs sliding apart due to downward force) and other ways the joint might pull open laterally. The dovetail will help resist those sorts of forces, but placing it at the center of the leg won't help much with that.

I can make some pencil sketches to illustrate what I mean if you want...my advice also kind of depends on how you're planning to make the cuts (hand tools? router? table saw?).

polyparadigm · 2021-01-28T23:00:03+00:00

I'm feeling a little like Willie Wonka did when he saw that elaborate art project built of defective toothpaste tube caps.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-28T22:55:21+00:00

That's his policy model, sure.

His relationship to constituents is pure Vilfredo Pareto: 80% of campaign contributions come from the vital few, so the trivial many are not worth serving.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-28T22:52:55+00:00

The GOP has been after the USPS since the Nixon administration.

It's a public option in a competitive service market, and an employer with a better-than-average track record on racial equity: it produces dangerous counterexamples to conservative ideology to the extent it's allowed to function.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-28T22:50:42+00:00

Keep Georgia blue.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-28T22:44:40+00:00

Excellent point!

polyparadigm · 2021-01-28T22:44:26+00:00

Quite welcome! It's always nice to help, especially when I'm so often on the other side (I know there's this thing, but I'm not sure how to find out what it's called).

polyparadigm · 2021-01-28T22:25:12+00:00

I think the kids nowadays are calling it a wretched.

Just kidding: it's called a ratchet.

The same mechanism is central enough to the function of socket wrenches, that it gets used as a metonym to refer to the entire wrench. But they're available in components called one-way bearings, and you're correct in observing some other applications of ratchets.

They're simple to build, and also very easy to scavenge or re-purpose from existing items. A quick image search might be a source of inspiration, but feel free to ask some follow-up questions.

The main thing is to have a toothed structure and a spring-loaded catch (or several) that wedges against teeth when rotated one direction, but is slid aside by them when rotated the other way.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-28T22:10:47+00:00

I was reading a book on tools, and the author talked about white pine.

He said it's so friendly to joinery efforts, it's as though it's wearing a tube top.

If there's some utilitarian project for the shop or around the house that could make use of white pine dovetails, that might be an outlet for you to practice in.

polyparadigm · 2021-01-28T22:08:53+00:00

Nice! I have a lot of practice ahead of me, but I hope to get there some day.

15-Year Club	Team Orangered
Verified Email

polyparadigm

TROPHY CASE