Since I am currently in the process of making a rondel dagger like knife, I think it is fitting to hear bit about rondel daggers from someone much more knowledgeable than I am.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Since I am currently in the process of making a rondel dagger like knife, I think it is fitting to hear bit about rondel daggers from someone much more knowledgeable than I am.
A few weeks ago I had a visitor at my lab from our other plant in Germany. We did not have too much work to do at that time so after i have shown him around we had some time to chat about this and that.
One of the things that transpired was that he is married to a woman who is of US American / German descend. He said her Texan grandfather took it rather badly and commented it along the lines “I was fighting against Nazis in war, and my daughter and granddaughter both married one.”.
I looked at him after this and asked the first question that popped in my mind: “Is your grandfather in law per chance a Republican and did he vote for Trump?” To which his answer was yes on both accounts.
I was astounded at this blatant display of a lack of self-awareness.
I mean, it is not uncommon to hear something similar in CZ. Even some of my close friends sometimes ask me – and only half-jokingly – if I still work “for Nazis” or in “Naziland”. Even I said such things. The German nation will in minds of many Czechs never ever get rid of the black stain the horrors of the WW2 have made on its reputation, not to mention previous thousands of years of mutual enmity between Slavic and Germanic nations and the two hundreds years long attempts at Germanization of Czechs. History cannot be denied or ignored, and its consequences do and will reach far into the future.
There is still also a lot of anti-slavic prejudice (not only) in Germany to this day. When Czech Republic entered in the EU, there was a lot of people near the borders who feared the influx of uncouth Czechs that would lead to a massive rise in crime-rate and stealing of jobs from proper Germans. Which of course did not happen.
It is therefore understandable that some Czechs view Germans as a whole with distrust and dislike, even though not justifying the over broad use of the term “Nazi” for anyone from Germany.
The current rise in nationalism spurred by anti-muslim sentiments, both in EU and in USA, seems to have led to a peculiar situation demonstrated by the Texan grandfather in law of my colleague’s. A lot of people seem to be putting an unqualified equal sign between the words “Nazi” (or “fascist”) and “German” in their minds whilst completely forgetting – or perhaps never even knowing – what this originally was about. And so subsequently they are voting for de-facto Nazis, who spout nazi rhetoric and try to propagate nazi policies, the whole package – unbridled racism and white supremacy, yearning for a golden age that never was, scapegoating and dehumanizing whole ethnic groups, wishing for concentration camps, firing squads and wars to beat opponents into submission (even the “traditional family values” and homophobia are in that package). All the while saying that “Nazis are bad” and thinking themselves opposing Nazis and nazism.
Yes, I know, one could quibble about whether the term Nazi really does fit Trump and the Republican party. One could discuss the minutiae endlessly and talk over differences in definitions and perspectives. There are differences. However I would argue that the term does indeed fit Republicans in general and Trump in particular much, much better than it does a typical German in these days, who most likely would feel ashamed and sorry for what Nazis have done and would despise them.
Lets not forget that not all (not even most) Germans are Nazis and not all Nazis are German. Lets not forget that first victims of first Nazis were Germans – German Jews, German communists, German mentally ill and handicapped and many just ordinary decent Germans. Using the term Nazi as a generic sneer against Germans is morphing into a form of bigotry of its own, an a dangerous one at that. Because as it usually is with such things, it shifts the focus from bad things people do on people who are perceived as bad whatever they do*.
I am not entirely sure, but I think this is female house sparrow. Looking rather somberly at the feeder.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
This is the last drawing in the Anatomy atlas that is about skeleton.
Pelvis is most ingenous in many ways. Not only is the hip joint bearing most of the weight, it is second most flexible joint in human body, with three axes of freedom just like the shoulder joint, only in lesser degree. Further the whole structure must be flexible enough to allow for birth.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Today’s stories ar more sad than interesting and they are both about the skeleton we used for learning.
When teaching assistant brought the box with skeleton in the class her emphasised ” These are not casts, these are real bones. Please be aware that you are handling the remains of a real human being, so treat them with dignity. Memento mori – you too shall perish.”.
I was wondering why he feels the need to say that, we are all adults over twenty years of age, surely we need not be reminded of that like some adolescents? Well, not long after he has left the class one future gym teacher was showing off in front of a few of his laughing female classmates with a femur used as a microphone for pretend singing. My opinion of them all dropped significantly and I never forgot that sight. That was one of many proofs that in every social gathering will inevitably be someone who insist on being an asshole and someone who enables them in being an asshole.
Second story is about the dead man himself. He did not have completely fused os sacrum, with the top vertebra being free. And his whole pelvis was assymetrical and deformed on one side, with the openning for nervus ischiadicus being pinched and ground between that free vertebra and the fused rest. The teaching assistant told us that the man must have suffered from immense pain his whole life and that this was assumed to be the reason why he dies at relatively young age with probable cause of death being suicide by means of unknown poison. Whenever I remember that story I wish he had better options to deal with that problem.
Ein Fachwerkhaus is the German term for what could be considered a typical medieval building – a frame made of beams with the gaps filled with bricks and mortar. They are in many places in CZ, but it seems to me they are much, much more common in Germany. And Idstein is certainly full of them.
What I found most interesting is the fact that some houses were built from straight timber with precise symmetric angles and all the lines straight. And others had completely irregular beams incorporated in the frame, or they were slanted in different directions like they were drunk.
These all are beautiful buildings but I would not like to live in one of them. The hotel at which we resided was not timber frame house, but it was a very old building. This means there were no right angles anywhere and all the floors were wavy and sloped in different directions. I would not mid the odd angles much but I found walking on sloped and uneven floor slightly disconcerting and uncomfortable.
Not to mention the huge amount of work that has to be invested in maintaining these buildings.
©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.
I grew up in a household where a lot of the work was shared between both parents. There was division of labor between them, but it was never presented to me as the “right” thing to do. So while my mother has done indeed most of the washing, cleaning and cooking and my father has done the repairs around the house and the gardening and husbandry, I was never discouraged from doing anything on the basis that it is “unmanly”. And it was not uncommon for my father to do the dishes or cooking. Especially since my mother had higher ranking and better paid job than my father, so mostly when I was sick it was my father who took care of me (which was a lot).
Neither do I remember any such thing from school.
That is not to say that patriarchal ideas were not present or prevalent. They were both. Most party officials were old men, with all the baggage that carries with it. Thousand years of history cannot be denied or ignored, so the ideas about things proper and improper for a woman were still propagated and confirmed to the old stereotypes. It was expected that a woman takes care of the household while the man takes care of most of the income. It was expected tha men will do most of the leading and women will be mostly lead. There were jobs that were considered to be for men and jobs that were generally considered to be for women.
But, even in retrospect, I think a progress was made, and the regime did not approach the issue altogether falsely.
Firstly women were not officially discouraged from any job, with perhaps the exception of the army. Unfortunately the gender pay gap was there (and got further exacerbated after the fall of the iron curtain), but it was not uncommon to see women in leadership positions. Women were officially recognized as a big potential working force. The official stance was to encourage women to take on any job they wish and the regime boasted this officially and a great pride was taken in having the first woman astronaut for example etc. This of course had to work against the aforementioned cultural drag.
Secondly in media there was an effort made at making movies and TV series that either were centered around women, or at least contained some gender parity in both heroes and villains. One of the most popular TV series from my childhood that I remember had the main protagonist and one of the main villains both women. But of course here too was hindered by the enormous cultural inertia.
But the things the regime I think got definitively right (that I knew of at the time) were these two: maternity leave and divorce.
At the time of my life maternity leave was nearly three years and the regime took great pride in that. The reasoning was that taking care of the children is an important work for the society as a whole and should be recognized as such. Low or unpaid maternity leave in some western countries was always presented as one of the most backwards things.
Divorce was also legal and available pretty much on demand, even if it was not swift and there were legal loops to go through. The reasoning here was that to keep a woman in a marriage she does not wish to be in is a form of slavery and as such does not belong in modern society.
In retrospect I think the Iron curtain stopping more progress being made on this front was more in people’s heads than in the regime’s ideology.
The long pause was no pause at all. I worked on the blade every evening and but I could not give it more than half an hour to one hour a day, so the progress at this stage was very, very slow.
After the hardening came tempering, which is rather easy and dull process. I wanted the blade to be primarily tough, not overtly hard, so I gave it two half hour courses at 200 °C in the baking oven. This has removed a lot of the hardness and almost all of the brittleness. It should be easy to sharpen and maintain sharp but it should not snap when hitting something hard. With a kitchen knife I would lower the temperature to 150 °C or perhaps perform differential tempering.
Next step is polishing. This is by far the most time-consuming and dull part of making a knife. Here are all the belts on my belt hanger. Before hardening I went all the way from left where the pink ceramics belts are (P40-P120) through middle blue-green zircon-corund (P120-P320). After hardening I gave it one more pass with zircon-corund P320. Very thorough pass, because the blade was slightly pitted from the failed hardening attempts. After that came the last third of the belts, which are Trizact belts (A65-A6, which is equivalent of P300 to P2500). There are six Trizact belts, and each took approximately one hour. Had I more experience I could perhaps speed it up by 30-40%, but it would still be a lot of time – I want the blade to be as near perfect as I am able to make it. So at each stage it is important to remove absolutely all scratches made by previous belt.
Of course thick blue marker helps here as well, because otherwise I could get easily confused about which facet I am working on. As I learned when doing my previous dagger. To be able to see the marks from previous grind, one does alternate the angle – that is for this facet for example I was grinding diagonally with the point down, so next step will be with point up. Were the facets perfectly straight and not wobbly at all from the beginning, the process would be fast. Alas they were wobbly and I made them wobbly in the process in decreasing degree of wobbliness untill I reached nearly straight towards the end. What I learned here is that I really, really need speed control for my belt grinder, because during polishing slower speed of the belt would speed up the work – I would get better control of the blade and most importantly, the edges of the belt would not make divets and scratches so fast as they do. However even as it is it is working well, but requires a lot of skill that I do not yet have. A lot of eyeballing was involved.
Today I finished on the grinder but I am still not done. For a mirror-finish more work is needed. Kitchen knife would get a few passes on a buffing wheel at this point and that would be it. That would give it nice mirror finish but the scratches from the trizact belts would still be somewhat visible. For this one though now comes excessive use of elbow grease. I will work my way through a series of wet polishing papers P2500 all the way to P7000. For this I use my trusted gizmo that has seen me through multiple blades already. A piece of hardwood board held in a vice, with leather strap glued on it. On the leather I can lay a strip of sandpaper. Sometimes I rely on the adhesion between the wet leather and the sandpaper to hold it in place, sometimes I hold the paper in place with the help of two springs and something made from fence wire I cannot put a name to.
After that I will be done with this phase and I will be able to perform the last step in making a blade – signing it.
I still have not resolved how to do that. I used to have my own maker’s mark consisting of my stylized initials. It was very easy to etch or engrave and I would love to continue to use it. But by purest of coincidences that very same mark was a few years later independently designed as Bluetooth logo. We’ll see what I come up with.
Bumblebee buzzing around a comfrey Symphytum officinale.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Matt Easton is not the greatest orator of all time, a lot of tangents upon tangents upon tangents. However this is still a good point well made and an excellent response to the more and more vocal nationalists and race purists in Europe.
As someone of mixed Germanic/Slavic ancestry who in WW2 had relatives both in SS Waffen* and in Totaleinsatz I can only nod in agreement.
*For the sake of completeness the story as said by my mother:
One of my grandmother’s cousins was conscripted in Wehrmacht and during the war he got transfer order to SS Waffen. That is an offer one cannot refuse, so he has swallowed a bullet, because he just could not follow the orders anymore. However there is no doubt in my mind that I had relatives on that side of the family who fought and slaughtered for the Führer quite happily.
Sorry for the rather poor picture quality, this was before I had money to spare for semi-decent equipment. One of my creations from a few years ago, I think 2011. I cannot say exactly, because in my old camera I had to set up date after every change of battery, so I ended up not setting up the date at all, because it was difficult and annoying.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Shoulder is the most mobile joint in the human body. The ball joint can rotate around 3 axes, so it alone provides our hands with almost 50% of their mobility. This is all the more impressive when one considers that all that movement must not impede blood flow through the appendage.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
One of these bones is not like the others, one of these bones does not belong.
It is clavicle. Clavicle is dermal bone, so it develops by a different process than most other bones. This means it has different internal structure and is therefore more fragile. Broken clavicle is therefore a fairly common injury.
One hast to wonder why filmmakers bother with CGI for Harry Potter movies. There still are towns in Europe which would with maybe just a few touch-ups make a fine Diagon Alley. At least in my opinion.
©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.
Today it seems like protecting the nature has become a leftist issue, and raping and pillaging it is the modus operandi of the right. This amuses me slightly, because the “left” that I grew up with was very different.
Unofficial motto of communist regime was “Poručíme větru, dešti.”. Translated into English “We shall take command of the winds and the rain.”. Humans were central to any policy and it was seen as imperative to take total control of nature and shape it to our needs and wants. In retrospect, some of it resembled christian ideas about humans being given dominion over the Earth.
One of the environmental abominations the communists did whose damage pays heavy dividends these last dry years had three steps.
First was connecting the by then relatively small fields divided by boundaries of bushes and small trees into vast fields. Second was to drain as many marshes and wetlands as possible so they can be ploughed by heavy machinery. Third was to straighten as many rivers and creeks as possible.
The negative consequences were visible within a few years but despite that these things were, to my memory, touted as a sucesses to the very end.
And those consequences?
Destroying the bush covered boundaries admittedly reduced slightly the occurrence of some infections affecting crops (especially the grass rust), and some insects. However it also drastically reduced the birds populations by depriving them of nesting places, and it exposed the soil in the spring and fall to heavy wind and water erosion. That took a few decades to be visible with naked eye, but today there are fields in CZ that have patches completely stripped of all topsoil.
Draining marshes and wetlands brought near to nothing to increase crop production. Thusly gained soil when dried was heavy infertile clay that did not want to take in water from rain and where nothing very much grew. The only things that seemed to prosper there were pioneering plants like birches and chamomile. What was lost almost immediately were multiple species of orchids and other wetland plants, many of which became endangered as a result and to this day grow only in few areas.
Straightening the creeks and rivers was perhaps the most damaging of these all. Together with the first two steps it created a landscape where water retention capabilities of the land are damaged beyond repair. Today we are seeing the consequences in the form of droughts and subsequent flash floods when rain water does not seep into soil, but flows away as quickly as possible across the uninterrupted fields and through the straightened water-bed. Oh, and salmon are mostly gone too.
Anther thing to consider is the regime’s contribution to acid rains and global warming, which were both acknowledged as real and both ignored on grand scale. In school we were taught that the success of a state can be measured in the tonnage of coal mined and steel produced. So coal was mined and steel produced even at a time when western European countries already realized that this is not the right way to go. And this was touted as an example of our magnanimous socialist countries outperforming those dumb evil capitalists.
Our (CZ) coal power plants burned sulphur rich coal and made no effort to filter out the sulphur oxides and fly ash even at a time when in neighbouring Germany many, if not all, such plants have been equipped with both sulphur and fly ash capture. Thus when the wind was blowing from the west, the air was fresh, when it was blowing from the east, it was foul. In a rare occurrence these facts were mentioned at school to us and I have asked the teacher why our coal plants are not equipped with the same devices. surprisingly I got what probably was an honest answer – it is expensive and our state cannot afford it. I did not ask further but I do remember the dissonance I felt thinking about it – we are outperforming those evil capitalists yet we cannot afford to protect our environment like they co?
Last thing I want to mention is the protection of animals against abuse. There was none. As a child I have read an article about this in one children magazine my parents were buying to me. The author somehow got through censors very sincere article talking about this problem, and demonstrated how wild as well as domestic animals are being abused and tortured on regular basis. He mentioned an instance where some state representative was asked why the regime does not try to enact such laws which again were common in many western countries at that time. The answer was “Socialist human does not need laws to be kind to animals.”. The author of the article finished with bitter words “Well, it is evident not everyone deserves to be called (not only) socialist.”.
The problem, like with many other things, was that whatever the regime has decided to do or not to do was correct by definition. The regime had all the smartest people, the bestest people, and was in possession of all the answers. Evidence was only acknowledged when it could not be ignored anymore, and even then very reluctantly. Remind you of something/one?
That made me wary of anyone who claims to have all answers.