That could be part of it. But I think survivor bias generally gets much more credit as an explanation than it deserves, and I strongly doubt that older generations of tools would have been designed like modern tools even if, say, simulation software had been available then.
It could be just relentless pressure to reduce costs, after the people who knew why it should be done a certain way had all retired, and a customer base that changed into one that either didn't know how to recognize quality, or valued it less.
Maybe we can do without heat-treating the surface? Maybe just give a quick grind instead of hand scraping the ways? Maybe outsource the castings instead of doing them in-house using the process we'd honed over decades?
If you dive into the history of Stanley's woodworking hand planes, you'll see a 140 year history of bamboozlement going on. A sort of tug-of-war between consumers valuing quality and Stanley cheapening out on designs. You have their subpar Definance line, their Handyman line, and probably others from them. They possibly sold under other names as well. Their main line also went under various changes through the years. They've been putting out junk hand planes since the 1940s and perhaps earlier.
A modern Lie-Nielsen is easily as good as the best Stanley planes.
Old tools are hit or miss. Sure, the design on a drill press hasn't changed in 50 years. But the newer model probably has less runout and a better motor. Bandsaws are the same. One old tool you could never pay me enough to use is an old table saw, or radial arm saw. I like my limbs, and the only saw worth paying money for right now is a SawStop. It's like asking someone if they want to drive a car without seat belts or airbags.
A rock the size of a human head (or, say, a container of seawater) has just as many electrons, protons, neutrons, photons, and other particles going about their business and doing their little dance, following the same equations of motion as our brains do. They're certainly doing it in different ways, but if you're just looking for complexity, there's no shortage of it. The rock might lack some macroscopic structural change over human timescales, but definitely not the seawater.
I think if you take the perspective that the human brain is conscious but not a brain-sized container of seawater, you need to then look carefully for distinctions between them. "Information processing" or "response to environment" is probably not good enough; the seawater is actually doing all of those, with a unique reaction to any possible input, so you'd have to be more specific.
Probably the only recourse you could look for to make the distinction is to say the brain embeds particular mathematical patterns that the seawater doesn't, such as a compact, stored representation of its environment (or its history of inputs), or a future-looking planning algorithm, or both. I personally take this view (I think of qualia, like "the appearance of a red apple", is just precisely what it feels like to read from the buffered [R,G,B] memory array in my head, filtered through image-recognition networks).
But then if you put your hopes on consciousness originating from those mathematical functions, you have to admit that any analogous expression of those functions in other systems would also be conscious, such as animals and robots.
And worse, once you start thinking about math and how flexible it is, how information is in the eye of the beholder and almost any system that follows certain rules can embed almost any mathematical computation, just like illegible scratches to me are information-rich writing to you, you might have to circle back and that there could be very analogous computations going on inside rocks and seawater. And that brings us back full-circle.
Not sure it's a fair analogy. Even while they were being deceitful, the Soviet Union seems to have at least invested a serious effort into tackling the problem head-on.
Yes, but that also comes with the notion that a wealthy family can become poor by moving to a higher-cost area, or a poor family can become wealthy by moving to a lower-cost area; ie, someone can sell a small house in the Bay area and buy a manor estate in the countryside.
There's nothing wrong with that notion, but some will find it odd that, before that transaction happens, a family owning an upscale countryside home is wealthier than a family owning a cramped Bay area home, but after that move happens, the family that moved in from the Bay area is now the wealthier one.
It means that merely having the option to sell your home and buy a countryside manor doesn't make you wealthy until you actually follow through with it.
There's so many times that an ostensibly international website has rejected me because I don't have a US-formatted numerical zip code. Even when they have a country field.
Every one of the many Taiwanese people I know refer to it as Taiwan, too. It's very rare to hear anyone refer to it as the ROC, unless in the context of specifically making a distinction from the PRC, or in a formal document.
Right, calling the ROC and all of its holdings "Taiwan" just muddies the conversation and gives ammo to PRC shills claiming "Taiwan is a province of China" which deliberately uses the name of a single ROC holding and the ambiguous "China" term.
Do you tell your friends about your summer trip to the Republic of Korea? Or were you visiting the Kingdom of Belgium that year? Do those friends invite you to visit their hometowns in the French Republic, or the Federal Republic of Germany? Maybe you can stop at the Grand Dutchy of Luxembourg along the way from one to the other?
When shills from an aggressor nation in a highly politicized international conflict intentionally inject ambiguity into the names used by the states on either side of the conflict, you should strive to be as articulate as possible to avoid misunderstandings.
People commonly refer to the United States of America as "America" which is odd since there's also Central and South America. Being common doesn't equal being correct, and in this case the ambiguity is used by the aggressor state (PRC) to get people to believe a certain narrative. I'll continue to inform folks where I can as most people aren't aware of the situation between the ROC and PRC. I don't care about downvotes on this site _especially_ if it's because I'm stating facts that people do not like.
Here's the TAIWAN ALLIES INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION AND ENHANCEMENT INITIATIVE (TAIPEI) ACT OF 2019. It starts: To express United States support for Taiwan's diplomatic alliances around the world.
The name "Republic of China" (as opposed to "People's Republic of China") isn't used. However there are sentences like this:
Since the election of President Tsai Ing-wen as President of Taiwan in 2016, the Government of the People's Republic of China has intensified its efforts to pressure Taiwan.
lol, see my first post in this thread. I said I didn't like the fact that the USA calls the ROC "Taiwan", and I think you are overestimating my ability to influence USA foreign policy. The USA doesn't have formal diplomatic relations with the ROC so using "Taiwan" is a kludge.
I don't have any dislike for the fact that the ROC is an independent country, whether my government diplomatically recognizes them as such or not. I'm just pointing out that, if a Taiwanese family invites you to dinner, they're going to be weirded out by you continually saying "Republic of China" throughout the conversation.
I have lots of Taiwanese friends, but I appreciate your concern. I do use 中華民國 when talking about politics or anything related to the government or cross-strait relations. If I'm talking about the island of Taiwan specifically, I have no problem saying "Taiwan".
Because all of them are actually from the island of Taiwan (not Kinmen or other holdings of the ROC), and they generally (and increasingly) do not want to be associated with "the Chinese": https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/course/news.php?Sn=166
"China" is a bad brand name nowadays. I really wish they could formally rename their country with a resumption of the civil war.
Even for Latin, apparently Ecclesiastical (Church) Latin, which is more familiar to most people today, differs in pronunciation from Classical Latin. For example, Ecclesiastical Latin uses a soft 'c', where the ancient Romans would have used a hard 'c' -- Cicero's name would have been pronounced like "keekero" in his day, whereas most people now think of him as "Sissero". Although the Roman empire was large and diverse enough that Latin probably had quite a variety of dialects and maybe Ecclesiastical Latin was one of them.
Hebrew is an unusual case because, like Latin, it was mostly a dead language that for centuries only continued to be used in religious and a few other contexts. It was revived in the 19th century. Because of its long period of cryostasis the parts that were preserved probably haven't changed that much, although necessarily it's expanded greatly into a living language.
Practically, the fastest and easiest way would be to turn a good cylinder and measure the diameter at several points (or roll on a surface plane) to make sure it's not tapered, because the face will sit square to the sides even if the axis cutting the face is concave.
More fundamentally though, you can use a similar method -- start with a surface plate, and make three almost-90-degree right angles. Label them A, B, and C.
Scrape A and B so they perfectly mate with each other while they sit flat on the surface plate. They might be something like 89 degrees and 91 degrees, so scrape C to be a copy of B, and then mate it with B. From that you can tell if they're both acute or obtuse, do the correction, and repeat.
It wasn't nearly so easy. Dan hand-scraped in several surfaces on the lathe; for example the headstock, to get the axis parallel to the ways, and so on.
It could be just relentless pressure to reduce costs, after the people who knew why it should be done a certain way had all retired, and a customer base that changed into one that either didn't know how to recognize quality, or valued it less.
Maybe we can do without heat-treating the surface? Maybe just give a quick grind instead of hand scraping the ways? Maybe outsource the castings instead of doing them in-house using the process we'd honed over decades?