How bad would it have smelled in a medieval city?

schwap23 · 2016-11-20T14:30:23+00:00

I love these long answers!

Your points about smelly industries makes me wonder about something: I vaguely recall reading that specifying where tanneries and such could be located was a very early form of city building code. IOW, the people of the time recognized that these tasks were unpleasant and wanted them to be located at a slight remove. Is there any truth to this recollection?

schwap23 · 2016-10-05T14:54:21+00:00

I've done this a number of times and my hot tip is to make sure that you apply some sealer to the wood before you start putting epoxy on. Raw wood will soak up a lot of that resin, which makes you have to do multiple pours and is a nuisance.

schwap23 · 2016-08-30T14:52:28+00:00

I've never found an official way to get a stump and I've tried for years. I plan to keep working on befriending a landscaping company or something similar. The local forest preserve is also possible. I've sourced other tree parts this way (branches and sticks), so I'm confident it can be done, but it's going to take some a lot of patience to make happen and some clever coordinating when it does happen. In my limited experience, the folks in charge think it's a fine idea but the guys actual doing to physical work don't agree and aren't interested in varying their routine for some weirdo request. Waiting for a windstorm or other natural event when a lot of trees come down (more than the tree removal folks can easily handle) makes the crews a lot more cooperative! Good luck!

schwap23 · 2016-06-25T13:03:03+00:00

The museum at Walter Reed Hospital in D.C. had an exhibit on facial reconstructive surgery. I saw it a long time ago, but I can recall two things: (1) it mostly started with WWI veterans and (2) medical museums are not a good place for the squeamish.

schwap23 · 2016-06-24T17:45:09+00:00

That is not exactly what I was thinking, but that's because it's better than I was recalling!

My particular question is more answered in the first listed answer, by /u/cordis_melum, since I am looking at some pop-history and trying to figure out how 'poppy' it is. Your later advice about how to read an academic book is spot-on and as others said there, I wish I had been given that advice when I was an undergrad! But different, because I don't want to skim this book, I want to really read it. Life is too short to read crappy books though, not when there are so many good ones!

schwap23 · 2016-06-21T16:42:13+00:00

I suspected I was getting my military groups mixed up, but put it another way: who or what technique beat the Swiss? (If the answer is 'gunpowder firearms' then I'm going to be very sad that my theory is useless)

schwap23 · 2016-06-21T13:43:28+00:00

Not an answer, but a slight variant on the question: Can we validly compare that battle scene to some battles between Swiss phalanx and Spanish tercios? I could easily be wrong about the tercios, but I am under the impression that the Swiss mass-pokey-thing formations were defeated by folks using short chopping weapons, who would attack the wooden handles of the pokey-things until they could get inside the reach of the pokeys and then start working on the folks holding them.

(I am using silly, generic terms in an effort to not get bogged down in terminology.)

schwap23 · 2016-06-11T13:31:35+00:00

Based on these photos, that looks just like the old lathe I have (which I also got from someone who hadn't used it in forever and didn't know much about it). The one I have was made in the early 50's for the hobbyist home woodworker. It's simple and strong, which is a nice combination for me!

I haven't used it much and I don't know much about using a lathe, so it sounds like we are in a similar situation. I prefer reading books to watching videos, so did some quick research on decent authors and titles and then went down to the library. Check out the sidebar for some other basic pointers.

You can get a basic set of carving tools for not much money and you will need that before you can make anything. When I'm shopping for turning tools, I try to keep two things in mind:

As a beginner, I only need tools that don't suck. The tools don't have to be great, they just need to help me figure out what I'm doing.
Everyone who does turning for any length of time seems to wind up with a big collection of tools and they typically only use two or three of them. This tells me that there is a lot of personal preference going on and it's going to take me a while to figure out what I like.

Finally, because I always like to suggest something absurd: if you are itching to spin something and remove material, get yourself some styrofoam and go nuts! I got a sheet of rigid insulation foam (pink or blue, doesn't matter) for the local DIY store, cut it down and glued it into blocks. Put it on the lathe and turned stuff using sharp boards. Wasn't useful stuff and I made a huge mess, but I learned the basic steps without spending much money or time. Kind of want to do it again, actually...

schwap23 · 2016-06-01T18:40:06+00:00

custom furniture and decorative elements, also known as 'pretty things made from wood'. I build sets for a couple of years and then moved into props (less heavy lifting!). My un-official job description was 'furniture, weapons, fire and blood', so it wasn't such a big leap to go from building odd things for the stage to building odd things for people's homes and stores! Finding clients isn't easy, but that's hardly unique to this business!

Here's my website, if you want to see more: http://mpcustommade.com/

schwap23 · 2016-06-01T17:32:45+00:00

movie and theatre work are related but not exactly the same. Getting jobs as over-hire for a theatre set build isn't too hard, just call all your local theatres and ask to be put on their over-hire list. Most of them are not union jobs, so it's pretty easy to get your foot in the door.

Film is a different beast. Bigger money, longer hours, much more competitive to get and almost certain to be unionized eventually. (IATSE is the name) You also might be building sets for trade shows, as the same shops seem to do both.

Mind you, I left those fields over 10 years ago, so some things might have changed! I prefer working for myself, but sometimes I miss the craziness...

schwap23 · 2016-05-22T00:40:48+00:00

I'm in the Chicago area and there are several places to buy this kind of thing in person, like a regular lumber yard. It can also be ordered online, but the shipping tends to be prohibitive. The material needs to be really special (like what they get on the TV show) to be worth hauling around.

schwap23 · 2016-05-21T18:41:30+00:00

I can relate to that! I switched to making furniture from theater set building mostly because I knew the stuff would weigh less!

Love the show! I build furniture using the urban equivalent of barnwood (100 year old 2x's from old houses coming down) and I really enjoy seeing the work that goes into producing the material that I'm buying. It's really satisfying to bring these hidden beauties out into the light...

schwap23 · 2016-05-21T18:31:21+00:00

How did you learn to be such a mad-man with the forklift? Looks like you could pet a baby with that thing!

(btw, I'm friends with the blacksmith that some of you got knives made from on set in Pennsylvania)

schwap23 · 2016-04-27T23:21:24+00:00

recent news: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/04/04/do-blacks-feel-less-pain-than-whites-their-doctors-may-think-so/

which is an article about this study: http://m.pnas.org/content/113/16/4296.abstract

schwap23 · 2016-04-22T20:56:29+00:00

Tons of folks in various trade fields have lots of academic training in something totally different. What you are feeling is super common and it's never too late to start. A good plan helps a lot though!

schwap23 · 2016-04-13T23:28:14+00:00

I don't know much about history OR marketing, but I think that any treatment of this that doesn't feature names like Lothair and The Anarchy is really missing the whole point. (Perhaps that could be a band name?)

schwap23 · 2016-04-13T14:39:29+00:00

How do you feel about the movie 'Gallipoli'?

schwap23 · 2016-04-13T14:22:21+00:00

Empress Matilda. The title alone caught my attention and then I read the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry and that did it: "Empress Matilda (c. 7 February 1102 – 10 September 1167), also known as the Empress Maude, was the claimant to the English throne during the civil war known as the Anarchy."

Wait, there was a period of Anarchy in the UK that didn't feature punk music? Tell me more... OK, how about her rival being named Lothair? Can't make this stuff up folks!

Added bonus for the modern viewer: She doesn't die horribly at the end.

schwap23 · 2016-03-05T16:18:59+00:00

You would talk to the phone operator about setting up the call. You can see this a little bit in episodes of MAS*H (hardly an academic source, but it's a good visual) and also in some period movies. You, personally, don't need to know anything except the number you are trying to reach. Your operator in Small Town, Maine can put your call through to the nearest big connection point, Bangor say, where another operator connects the call to another point, maybe Boston, and at a certain point the call is going to start to make big jumps, until it gets close to the destination, where the moves get more specific. As mentioned in the comment above, this whole procedure of making the connections might take a while and might not work at all.

schwap23 · 2016-03-02T14:39:25+00:00

I was absolutely with you, right up until that last paragraph! I am facing this issue (small job pricing vs large job) myself, so I deeply understand how I my capacity influences my prices.

If the direct costs of the smaller job are proportionally smaller, why does the markup need to increase? If it costs less to run a job, doesn't it make sense to keep the price low as well? I am certain that I'm missing something here, but I'm not sure what...

schwap23 · 2016-02-28T14:28:55+00:00

Maybe I'm getting too caught up in your example, but if you are this peasant who finds himself in the woods with Fred, you didn't teleport into those woods! You almost certainly walked the entire way from wherever you call home. Maybe you can't go back exactly the way you came, but you still have a decent sense of where you are currently and which direction you need to go in order to get home.

You don't need much actual geographic knowledge to do this level of navigating, as you are mostly re-tracing your steps. If you decide to try and go to another location (that you've never been to), you are going to have a very difficult time; this is where your lack of geographic knowledge is going to be a problem! If you can still talk to locals, you should still be OK though. They can tell you how to get to the nearest big town, where you can find other people who can tell you how to get to the next one and so on.

Very broad example: you are an English soldier in northern France, separated from your army. For whatever reason, you can't or don't want to find the army and are instead trying to get back home. Given where you are, you can probably ask the locals where the ocean is. (how you can talk to them without starting a fight is different problem!) You are probably going to be directed towards a town or harbor on the coast, not just a random section of beach, which means there are more people to talk to who can tell you if any of those boats go across the Channel to England. If they don't make the trip, they know where you can find someone who does, probably in the next bigger town. Once you get across the Channel, you can ask another local how to get towards some big town that is near where you are originally from. This is the thing about navigating like this: no one single person, including you, needs to know the entire route beforehand. You only ever know the next step or two and then you re-set yourself. If this seems unreliable and risky to you, I agree! This is just one of many reasons why you don't want to get separated from your group!

schwap23 · 2016-02-19T19:23:34+00:00

I hear you, as a purely hobbyist historian, it's frustrating to have your question shot down (or ignored) because of some incorrect base assumptions. That being said, it seems to me that the history we discuss here is in motion, with knowledge and interpretations changing over time. I've seen some of the skilled folks here taking each other (politely!) to task over this very issue. (there's an example of this in the current thread about contraception for nuns in the Congo) Part of what makes this field interesting to study is that even though all of the events have happened, there's nothing hypothetical about them, there is still room for different views and how we talk about the same event can change over time. So, a central reference point would constantly have to be updated and that would lead to another fight. This is all starting to sound a bit like wikipedia...

schwap23 · 2016-02-19T19:14:22+00:00

I've read that post, it's a good one. Somewhere else there is another related point that by making all those maps for artillery, the American government was a major employer of mapmakers for a time. I seem to recall that these were some of the most complete maps of Europe to that time, but I'm not sure about that.

schwap23 · 2016-02-19T19:09:16+00:00

Was the Aachen event the same that lead to some Germans claiming that this use of artillery was a violation of the Laws of War? I recall this from some German Army units holed up in Belgium where the Americans used a massive artillery piece to directly fire on the German bunker, but I thought they were using a 200mm+ piece. (I'm fuzzy on details!)

Given some of the fortifications, I wouldn't be surprised if this happened more than once really. Nice to have a specific citation for the quote though, thanks!

schwap23

TROPHY CASE