A few of the statues had an abstract look to them and they had metal hooks, very probably for hanging up lanterns.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
A few of the statues had an abstract look to them and they had metal hooks, very probably for hanging up lanterns.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give perfect and objective evaluation of anything, but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.
Last time I visited this theme I mentioned the logic that was presented to us in order to argue that means of production in our socialist country do belong to the people. What was never mentioned, and what took a really long time to me to realize, is the fact that even in capitalism is a lot of people who do indeed own the means of production. I do not mean the corporate overlords, the robber barons of modern era, but people who actually really work.
For example lets say that I either decide that I do not wish to be a corporate drone anymore, or my supervisor finally decides that my expertise is not enough for him to put up with my quirks (like honestly and without beating around the bush telling him when his department designs crap, or being rather cranky when I miss a meal). My backup plan in such a case is to try to make custom knives for sale.
It is possible to make living that way, others have managed it so why not me? However should it come to that, there are three realistic scenarios:
1) I flop and after a time of trying to establish myself on the market I will have no other option than to get employed again.
2) I will get a foothold on the market big enough to live by for reasonable time, perhaps even until retirement.
3) I will get a good foothold on the market to the point that I will not be able to satisfy the demand for Charly made knives on my own, so after a while I might need to employ for example part-time employees to help with some lower-skill jobs whilst I myself would concentrate on the high-skill jobs. Like the Finnish knife-maker about whom I posted a video a few weeks ago.
This example shows the transition between a small-scale producer and a big scale producer. In scenario 2 there is no ambiguity whatsoever – the person who uses the means of production owns them. In the scenario 3 it gets a bit murky – the owner of the means still does work rather a lot, but their employees do not own the means of production at all. And really, would it be fair in such a case for me to give them a portion of my shop in addition to the wages? I do not think it would.
However of course then there is the american dream, where one makes it through the stage 3 to stage 4, where one does only the employing, and not the actual working. I personally would never wish for that, but there are people who do. And then there is the stage 5, where one does not have a hand in making anything ever but simply inherits the company, or buys it wholesale.
Like so many other things in life, this is not black-white, there is actually a nearly continuous spectrum of options.
The problem with the regime was that it dealt with this spectrum by completely ignoring its existence. Any and all ownership of means of production that was not via the proxy of the state was illegal, period. All the little artisans, small shop owners, small farmers etc. who indeed worked their own asses of in addition to perhaps employing a few people were viewed as no different from big factory owners who never lifted a finger to work in their lives. For the regime, there was no difference between Charly making knives in his workshop on his own and Donald Trump cheating his contractors and not paying his employees fair wages. They both were bourgeoise exploiters and both had to be dealt with harshly.
As a result not only the big factories with awful working conditions got confiscated, but also all the little workshops, shops and farms. The whole middle-class was wiped out and made illegal without any nuance.
In the 60s there was an effort to rectify this injustice (along with others), but it was quashed by military intervention from USSR.
As a result, a lot of people rightfully resented the regime, because they were in very real sense of the word robbed by it.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
My new drill press arrived yesterday evening and I just installed it instead of the old cheapo one in my workshop. I must say that my first impression is absolutely great. I cannot definitively say whether it was a good investment or not – ask me again in a few years, because new devices tend to have some crucial mechanical parts (like gears etc.) out of plastic that wears out rather quickly and subsequently the whole machine has to be tossed – but on the surface the machine looks really great. Someone has actually thought about the design and, a rare occurrence in today’s world, the design is very functional and sensible. Use is very intuitive and all levers and settings are easily accessible. I worry a bit that the wheel might be too small to provide adequate leverage for drilling steel, but we will see. That is the only worry I have on first sight though.
The drill has a digital display that actually shows the rpm, which is very nifty – I will not have to guess by the sound. It has two main gearing settings and a continuous rpm regulator, so it covers very wide range of rpm on a nearly continuous scale without me having to flip v-belts. That is probably at the cost of some efficiency, but the max power (710 W) is higher than on other drill presses that I could choose from, so that might not be a problem for actual use, although it might be a problem regarding power consumption. But it is not a device that will run more than a few minutes at a time, so slight inefficiency is not as big of a deal as it woudl be for, say, bench belt sander.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
As a knife maker I fell instantly in love with the quick-span/release chuck that is standard attachment. The chuck is simply ideal for holding down flat stock, something very obviously crucial for a knife maker.
And the laser cross! A LED light illuminating the worked area was just a final bonus on top of that. It was always a bugger to find and hit the tiny black dot on black piece of steel – now those troubles are, hopefully, over.
And of course it does not wobble in all directions so I hope I need not fear anymore drilling tiny holes and breaking two drill bits per each.
All in all right now I have no regrets for spending the non-trivial amount of money for it. I think it is money sensibly spent and I look forward to trying it out as soon as possible. I might indeed regret a bit not spending that money sooner.
When asked about the latest (unfortunately not last) mass shooting in USA, sheriff Geoff Dean said these words: “I don’t know if it happens more in the United States or doesn’t. I would have to read the stats.”
If that is the case, he must have lived in a cave. I wonder if he is telling the truth here, or if he is just feigning ignorance, because to find out that mass shootings are predominantly USA phenomenon takes less than a minute on google.
Further he states “If I knew the answer to that, I would do something to stop it.”, which is also bullshit. It is blatantly obvious that the easy availability of firearms in USA in combination with its violence-glorifying culture leads to this discrepancy, and anyone who takes just a few seconds to think about it honestly knows that.
But the sad truth is that this sheriff could not have done anything about it even if he honestly wanted to, because there is no legislative will in USA to enact sensible gun regulation laws for him to act on. And with SCOTUS packed with partisan conservative judges, I fear that current pace of a mass shooting nearly every day will be the defining feature of American culture for decades to come.
Well, at least in this regard”USA #1!”, a slogan so beloved by MAGAhats is true. Only it is not a good thing.
Shad of the YouTube channel Shadiversity is a bit peculiar fellow. His performance is a bit over the top, but that is his selling point and it has an entertainment value. He has some old-fashioned notions about gender, but that is sadly to be expected, because not only is he male, he is also a practicing mormon. Thus being another proof of the to me totally baffling fact that evidently intelligent and well-educated people can believe the most ridiculous, silly and multiple-times over falsified notions if those notions are under the guise of “religion”.
However his videos on medieval castles are very informative, educational and fun to watch, so I can recommend those with clear conscience.
As I said last time, I am going to make multiple knives in parallel, because I think that a non-trivial amount of time can be saved just by that. I had all my steel already straightened, so I could go right away to drawing, drilling and shaping. First thing to be done was to draw and drill one blade on one half of one steel bar. That I have subsequently used as a template to drill holes in the other half and in all the other steel bars.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
For the drilling I clamped the template firmly with the drilled steel bars and before proceeding to the other side I inserted a steel pin in the drilled hole so the bars do not shift and slide. This has saved some time, despite it being a step with negligible time in the analysis, but my main hope here is that this work on multiple pieces in parallel brings better reproducibility regarding the hole positions and and that better reproducibility could save me some time later on when shaping the handle scales.
I have learned two lessons, one of them rather expensive. First lesson was that for this I have to take the 6 mm drill bits as de-facto consumable material, because I blunted and subsequently broke one towards the end despite using copious amounts of cutting oil. And I do not think it can be avoided.
Second lesson was that I really have to buy a new drill press, and preferably one with continuously regulated speed at that. My jury-rigged press with a very old hand drill has only two speeds and both of them are apparently too high for drilling 16 mm hole in 1,8 mm steel. Towards the end of the work the step drill bit overheated and it got irreversibly blunted on the 16 mm step. Ouch. That drill bit costs 40,-€. I think this investment is unavoidable, if I want to save time I cannot take the bit out and dunk it in water after each drilled hole, slower rotations would be better. And I cannot buy 40,-€ drill bit for each dozen of knives I make – that money be best saved for grinding belts. Hobby or not, at this rate I would spend the price of an acceptable small to middle sized drill press (300-400,-€) on the drill bits rather quickly.
Cutting the blanks in half and roughly cutting the outlines of the blades with an angle grinder did not take long at all. and working on multiple blades in parallel seemed to work comparatively well. But for the sake of precision, next time I will halve the blanks individually – two came out somehow too short and two too long. Not by much, but it is noticeable. The end result were three stacks of four roughly cut blades.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Before this step took me 15 minutes per blade, now it was 10 minutes per blade (teasing out broken 6mm drill bit and fruitlessly trying to drill a hole with blunted 16mm drill bit included). So I would call it a semi-success. I learned some do’s and dont’s and I achieved my two goals – the holes in the tangs align across all 12 blades nicely and I have saved some time without even really trying to.
These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give perfect and objective evaluation of anything, but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.
Current political climate in USA is truly horrendous, but from afar it seems that comedy thrives on Trump news, and it will thrive until comedians start getting shot for making fun of The Leader.
To my knowledge, comedians were rarely shot in former ČSSR, but they did not have easy life – but some of them managed to thrive. In fact, there was really great tradition of comedy both written and in TV/movies. The problem was more often not that comedians made fun of politics – they knew they are not allowed to do that – but that state censors were overtly sensitive. In previous Slavic Saturday I mentioned the comedy evening short stories for children “A je to!”. What I did not mention is that one of the characters had originally red pullover, and this, in conjunction of the yellow pullover of his colleague was seen as a jab at SSSR – China relations and the show was originally canceled. So the duo had to perform with grey and yellow pullovers until 1989, after which the creators could go back to original design.
But some comedians managed to both get past the censors and get a political message across – appearing to support the regime, or being apolitical, but managing to subtly criticise its unsavoury aspects whilst doing it. Especially towards the end of the socialist era, which is of course also the time from which I have the most memories.
One such group was The Jára Cimrman Theatre. You might know the movie “Kolja”, which unfortunately is probably the only Czech movie some Americans probably know. The main protagonist in that movie is played by Zdeněk Svěrák, and he is one of the founding members of The Jára Cimrman Theatre.
I will not go into depth here, but the ensemble of The Jára Cimrman Theatre has also made a few movies, which were all hugely popular. And regarding politics and critique of the regime, one of the movies – The Uncertain Season – was essentially a “Making of” documentary for the theatre group, but made as a full movie. It documents the struggles of the theatre group they had to endure in order to get their humor past the censors – even humor that was definitively and unequivocally not political. Because some censors did not only see themselves as arbiters of what is politically acceptable, but also what is funny.
The Jára Cimrman Theatre is to this day deeply embedded in Czech culture, and some of their quips became part of our wider oral tradition. To its popularity speaks the fact that the titular, fictional, character Jára Cimrman has won the contest for The Greatest Czech in 2005 and great grumbling ensued when it was announced that only real people are eligible and the honor went to Václav Havel instead.
I will part with you with one Cimrmanian quip that sums up the life of comedians in totalitarian culture pretty well:
“We are not allowed to even imply.”
This got past the censors because it is an answer given by Death to a man who is about to die and asks him about the future. But with the context of the rest of the play, the audience got what it really says.
I could not decide between multiple videos, as usual, and last-minute decision fell on this one. It is a nice piece of engineering and the video is reasonably short and packed with interesting information.
It might also be Halloween appropriate? I have no clue, since I originate from and live in a country with no Halloween tradition whatsoever and honestly I do not understand what Halloween is supposed to be about at all. But I read something about murderers and monsters the other day, so maybe an (alleged) assasin’s weapon might fit in.
I have a day off and I planned to do some knife-work, but I have to pass on that since I am still not well.
So White House has published a pamphlet about the evils of socialism. I have not read it in full and I probably won’t since I have better things to do with my life than to read drivel from Trump administration, but on casual glance it seems to insinuate that the disastrous attempt at socialism in former Soviet bloc invalidates everything with the word root “social” in it. Therefore since badly implemented socialism in Ukraine has led to famine in 1921, “socialism” in EU in 2018 is just as bad.
That is of course complete non-sequitur.
The whole document also seems to be rather American-centric and comparing apples with pineapples, or perhaps even bananas. Like this infographic:
Whitehouse infographic about Costs of Owning a truck
Now I admit I have zero personal experience with any of the countries on that infographic except with USA.
But my experience with USA is that people there own pickup trucks in about 80% of the cases just to own them, not because they actually, really need them. I mean, I have seen them used for grocery shopping in big cities, with the deck empty and the groceries being put in a bag on the passenger seat. People commuted daily to work in them. Most owners of pickup trucks in USA could do just as well with only ordinary cars and for those rare occasions where they really, really might need something bigger (like buying building materials for house repairs etc.) the options available in for example Germany (i.e. renting a truck or goods trailer at the shop for a few days) would suffice ample. Further populations in EU are much more tightly knit than they are in USA, there are not many far-off farms and isolated homesteads that really need pickup trucks. I am not sure how this is in Nordic countries, but I still suspect that a real need for big pickup truck there is smaller than in US just due to the USA’s sheer size and wast empty places.
Thus this infographic is used either ignorantly or dishonestly to scaremonger. Or both.
As far as the economic side of the pamphlet goes, I will leave the critique to an expert who says everything better than I ever can:
Are the Danes Melancholy? Are the Swedes Sad?
On the whole I get the feeling that this pamphlet starts with the assumption that everything USA=good and everything socialism=bad and tries to spin evidence to appear to validate those assumptions.
How typically American of them, to ignore all context an only seek ways to put USA at the center of the universe. Again.
I have never watched Fox News when I was in USA, and of course I have no incentive to watch it now. However the stories that I read about it on the interwebs are truly bizarre.
This one trumps them all: Fox News host: ‘Anti-Semitism from the left’ is the real cause of hateful attacks on Jews
Where exactly does this “virulent anti-Semitism from the left” happen? Where do roam these elusive creatures, these leftist antisemites? Where exactly is the land of “fringe of the progressive side.”?
How come that someone spews such a weapon’s grade bullshit on air and is not immediately challenged for providing evidence for it? Any person who says such inane claptrap should be discredited and mercilessly mocked.
First thing first – today I tested the very nearly finished knife when I was cooking shrimp for lunch.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
It handles well and cuts OK, but I really suspect it won’t hold an edge as well as it should. But the cheapo wood looks way more posh than I expected it, ammonia fuming really, really improved its looks.
And now to the boring stuff.
What I am doing here is actually a small-sized DMAIC project – an abbreviation for Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control. It is a process used in industry to bring some logic and use of scientific method into improving manufacturing processes. Although as everything in today’s corporate culture it is used wrongly and heavily abused and misunderstood all over the place, because american-trained managers …. wheef, do not get me started on american-trained managers.
Aaaaanyway, in the first phase, Define, you should either define your problem or your goal or both. In my case, I have a specific goal – to get my manufacturing time of this type of knife under five hours of manual labor.
In the second phase you should acquire all measurements that you need in order to do something about it – in my case I have measured the manufacturing time of each distinct step in the process.
And now, in this post, I am performing the Analysis of said data. Total manufacturing time: 10:46, or 646 minutes.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a picture.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
There are of course multiple approaches one might use, but in this specific case I think that this suffices ample enough – it is so-called Pareto Graph. The balks are actual times in minutes for each step, ordered from the highest to the lowest. The black line is a sum of the relative proportions of these times to the total as one progresses from left to right. As you can see, I have ten distinct manufacturing steps and from those five steps constitute 90% of manufacturing time. These are the steps where I have to concentrate on actually reducing said time, because here my efforts have the biggest payoff. That does not mean that improvements in the other five steps are not worthy pursuing at all, but they are not worth pursuing at this time.
I have done one thing that is not normally done, that is I sorted from get-go the steps into two categories – low hanging fruit, where I think I can do improvements without too much hassle and without obtaining expensive or complicated equipment, and high-hanging fruit, where I can save time only through acquiring new skill or new equipment or where I think saving time is not actually possible in a meaningful way.
Now comes the next phase, which is to improve the process. I will try to implement some of the ideas for that I have expressed and make a batch of multiple (~10) knives with improved process. We will see how it turns out.
What do you think are the odds that the shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburg was performed by someone who is (listed in descending order of probability):
Also, what odds do you think are that the response from the Godawfull Old Perverts will be nothing of use or substance?
Since the talk recently was about the “human-knife interface” I think this video is fitting. Matt Easton talks a bit about the handles of Japanese swords.
