I am wondering if we are building a civilization weakness, where only few can recreate those things. As we produce at scale, and with more and more layers of automation, we need less and less craftsmen... and if those few at the top get hit by a bus, the setback could be huge.
Combined with technology that evolves faster than we can teach it, it feels like the number of experts is shrinking over time. Thoughts ?
A reasonable fraction of machinists could do many of those projects. But it takes forever. You're looking at the hobbyist work of someone who did this as a career.
I like the medium sized milling machine. That's good for parts in the 10cm range. Most mills are either much larger, much smaller, or have poor rigidity.[1]
[1] https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/machinery-tools-supplies/...
https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/the-illustrated-guide-to...
The number of polymaths/jack of all trades types is maybe holding steady or possibly falling as a real number, but agree, as a percentage of the population seems to be decreasing.
Separating from society, and thriving in the process seems to me increasingly unlikely. Another fantastic reason to try and get along with one another and not let the hive die.
The trades have always been seperate skillsets because any one of them takes a long time to become proficient in.
I do wonder about the electricity grid though. That seems our biggest weakness to me. And I get overwhelmed when I think about how many people and machines it takes to make even the simplest thing we use these days. I mean, how do we make something like a mobile phone?
If you want to help avoid the collapse of civilisation, take up model engineering as a hobby :)
If you're going to make a living using science & instruments to solve problems others can not overcome, you would need to constantly stay as sharp as possible to begin with on whatever techniques & equipment might be useful, whether they were considered out-of-date or not. Especially stuff you had never seen before. Just to maintain readiness. There would be an advantage to starting early and never quitting.
You can tell a lot about a culture from their instruments.
Remember some completely lost cultures developed over many more centuries in their time compared to what we have right now in our current shapshot. Not necessarily more mathematically or technologically advanced, just the same higher reasoning and intelligence distribution no different than modern man today.
You can also tell a lot about a culture when so few can display the innate drive to further the human condition in this respect.
Also the way she is more than doing her part, but anyone who has had the realistic opportunity to leverage the full 1% of her technical ability has not lived up to that expectation whatsoever.
This is a person who has taken much more of a lifetime to enable themselves to invent things as necessary whenever needed, compared to others having equal gifts in this area.
IOW over the last few centuries the occasional person who put enough of their life into this type of scientific preservation, maintenance & progress in the most productive way has usually still not put as much of their life into it.
And occasionally some of these people turned out to be well-known like Thomas Edison.
But mostly of course their work has always been lost since applying truly revolutionary solutions to human conditions requires momentum from a wave of popular culture.
The more you can reliably invent solutions to problems like almost no-one else, the less likely by comparison it would be to stop doing that and spend time trying to popularize what you already have since the odds are so much in disfavor. Building brilliant stuff by hand is the foundation of so many factories, someone at the pinnacle of ability should be empowered to never stop no matter what, just in case people want a new kind of factory someday.
If that takes years of concentration before a truly potentially popular product could be developed, most often those potential partners with the resources & desire to build popularity will be even less likely of making a favorable deal with, compared to just going back to the drawing board and solving previously untractable technical problems 1, 2, 3.
Just in case somebody can really afford to bring the full 1% of those hands' technical progress to a wider swath of humanity someday.
If you might be discovered one day and called upon to tour the world with your instrumental ability, it would probably be best the more you stay well-rehearsed at all times.
>These could be the Leonardo da Vincis of this age.
Well maybe somebody thinks that loads of well-known personalities today are just as brilliant as DaVinci all over the place, or ahead of their time.
Or that they're so rare we don't have anything like DaVinci in our time.
You never know.
IMHO I would have to say DaVinci was a hacker of his age.
You can browse Tatjana van Vark's personal website here: http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/projects.html
Somehow the machines look like a cross between steampunk and art-deco styles. I also admire the fact that she explicitly admits that the machines are created for "nothing utilitarian", just for fun following the hacker tradition.
Every single time I see again something about the antikythera mechanism I'm blown away that the ancients greeks came up with such device.
none of those are relevant here
the great advantage of brass over steel is that it's much easier to machine, which is relevant here
if she wanted to use materials to show off, instead of brass she'd use steel, titanium, inconel, nitinol, or granite
i don't see what could be more utilitarian than fun
I wonder how many other women would be awesome machinists if it seemed a viable option. It's like anything else, potentially losing half of the talent available. I guess the US found this during WW II. I assume Germany did too.
I did a welding course and there were only two women in it, and even that surprised me. One lived on a farm so wanted to be able to fix things there but the other was an actual welding apprentice.
I'm seeing a push for women to take up trades but it looks like a long road still.
I think in the end it is simply the inherent interest in people vs things which is skewing female vs male.
Basically if they're neat and tidy they're not being used.
I like my space to be tidy, I don't have the extra bandwidth to remember where I drop things. I have to clean up after every task or I'm less productive.
Her work is like transmissions from an alternate timeline where the transistor was never invented and electromechanical engineering was pushed as far as it could go.
Here is her website
