Have you ever used a zipper?
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@ireneista please!! It's the best kind of reply! I love how many kinds of knowledge and teaching threads like this elicit
@grimalkina oh, well, good! yeah that particular illustration was super helpful to us as kids, and it's not a topic that is taught nearly as widely to children anymore, so a while back we decided we wanted to have it handy and went and found a scan
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in re zippers: been studying interwar sewing books, especially 1920s, exactly because they DO NOT deal with zippers. they weren't cheap until after WW2.
the zippered bomber jackets of WW1 were expensive to make at home. it’s why they became a status symbol among the moneyed classes.
on the other hand, after WW2 they were cheap army surplus. hence the 1950s poverty coda of the leather jacket, tshirt & jeans ―which, as cheap surplus clothes, didn't have zippers yet.
so zippers…
so zippers are really interesting as something people take for granted in clothes but they weren't always there.
it’s why i wanted to study the logic of crafting pants in a zipperless world.
well, for starters, pants aren’t trousers because pants are held up by a belt whereas trousers are held up by a fly.
a zipperless world forces you to fit the pants with just enough ease to keep the pants up without a belt or with an open fly.
it’s technique over tech. /🧵
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Also just as a PS, it's neither possible nor very adaptive to ask yourself to have an overwhelmingly detailed explanation of mechanisms for everything you encounter, so that's not the goal. Groups of people need to fluently work at many different levels of abstraction.
The key is matching the level of understanding to the tasks and problems that we have! And often, coordinating different depths of expertise!
But we can benefit from having metacognitive skills!
@grimalkina there was an article I read on this long ago that I can no longer find that talked about how your grandma's recipes are simple, but you can't make them because of the context she left out. She was an expert and wrote down the details she needed to remember the recipe, but not enough that a novice could make it. Then it compared the differences in what would need to be said for the levels of expertise. Really made it hit home for me. Wish I could find the article again.
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Also just as a PS, it's neither possible nor very adaptive to ask yourself to have an overwhelmingly detailed explanation of mechanisms for everything you encounter, so that's not the goal. Groups of people need to fluently work at many different levels of abstraction.
The key is matching the level of understanding to the tasks and problems that we have! And often, coordinating different depths of expertise!
But we can benefit from having metacognitive skills!
@grimalkina no, right, it's not possible to learn everything along with how to explain it, not all that useful to, shouldn't be the goal, shouldn't be a thing people have to do to solve social problems, and all that
nonetheless, it's fun and we've spent our whole life trying ><
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Also just as a PS, it's neither possible nor very adaptive to ask yourself to have an overwhelmingly detailed explanation of mechanisms for everything you encounter, so that's not the goal. Groups of people need to fluently work at many different levels of abstraction.
The key is matching the level of understanding to the tasks and problems that we have! And often, coordinating different depths of expertise!
But we can benefit from having metacognitive skills!
@grimalkina
Delightful thread, thank you!I could explain all of the examples you gave, but for many years I was an apprentice and then an instrument technician, so got a ton of insight into how stuff works - BUT dig a little deeper and there are always more layers and interconnected systems that are familiar by mysterious
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@grimalkina As a result of this thread I went on a binge learning about the history of zipper design.
I am now using graphite pencils to properly lubricate all of my zippers, thank you very much.
@sidereal @grimalkina I learned this from the luthier in my neighborhood: you can put some graphite in the little divots in the nut of a stringed instrument (the part that sticks up as the "zeroth" fret) and that makes tuning less "sticky" (strings much less likely to get stuck and then jump out of tune unexpectedly)
thanks for making me think about metacognition today!
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In this study, the researchers asked about a range of stimuli, which in my humble opinion* are really fun to quiz yourself on. Can you explain:
- how a sewing machine works
- how a can opener works
- how a flush toilet operates
- how the heart pumps blood
- how piano keys make soundSome of these are far more elaborate, haha:
- how the aqualung regulates air-pressure
- how a transistor works*granted...I became a psychologist so maybe my sense of fun is warped
@grimalkina I think I can say yes to all of these, but I'll check by writing down my answers before finding the genuine answers!
I very much enjoy explaining these sorts of things to people, but I have met very few who want to hear my explanations!
Thus I suspect most humans do not know how those things work, not at all.
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Have you ever used a zipper? Odds are you have. Are you pretty good at it? Odds are! You've probably successfully used a zipper many, many times. You probably can't even remember when and where you learned how to operate a zipper. If you're a good zipper user and we sat you down in a room and gave you ten zippered garments, you'd probably fluently and flawlessly be able to zip them up and down.
Now......can you explain how a zipper works?
@grimalkina I think I could, but not because I used them often, bug because I was gifted a book that explained a lot of different technologies using mammoths.
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@jawnsy @grimalkina It's okay, Jonathan, I can't explain where you are either
@ricci @grimalkina Questions that I've spent my life searching to answer:
Who am I?
What am I?
Where am I?
When am I?
Why am I?
How am I?I have gone to search for myself. If you should arrive before I do, please wait for me.
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@grimalkina I love this kind of stuff! I cannot explain how an aqualung regulator works but I know the rest. My special interest is in collecting facts that are entirely irrelevant to my life
SCUBA regulator is absurdly simple, which is good because complex things fail in complex ways, and complex failures underwater all lead inexorably to the same outcome.
There's a rubber diaphragm with one side facing the part that goes in your mouth (mouthpiece). The mouthpiece has some one-way valves so when you exhale, air goes out to the water, but when you inhale, water doesn't come in.
That rubber diaphragm will, thus, move inward when you inhale. The diaphragm is attached to a lever on the other side, so when you breathe in, the lever moves. The other end of the lever is hooked to a tiny needle valve, which lets air from the feed hose into the breathing chamber of the mouthpiece. When you stop inhaling, the pressure on the inside and outside of the diaphragm equalizes, it moves back to the "flat" position, and the needle valve closes. Any overpressure just goes out the vents to the water - sometimes that needle valve will stick and you get way more air than you want, but it's not harmful to you (aside from wasting breathable air and shortening the duration of your dive) because it just rushes out the vents.
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SCUBA regulator is absurdly simple, which is good because complex things fail in complex ways, and complex failures underwater all lead inexorably to the same outcome.
There's a rubber diaphragm with one side facing the part that goes in your mouth (mouthpiece). The mouthpiece has some one-way valves so when you exhale, air goes out to the water, but when you inhale, water doesn't come in.
That rubber diaphragm will, thus, move inward when you inhale. The diaphragm is attached to a lever on the other side, so when you breathe in, the lever moves. The other end of the lever is hooked to a tiny needle valve, which lets air from the feed hose into the breathing chamber of the mouthpiece. When you stop inhaling, the pressure on the inside and outside of the diaphragm equalizes, it moves back to the "flat" position, and the needle valve closes. Any overpressure just goes out the vents to the water - sometimes that needle valve will stick and you get way more air than you want, but it's not harmful to you (aside from wasting breathable air and shortening the duration of your dive) because it just rushes out the vents.
This is referred to as the "secondary" regulator, BTW, because it's fed by a hose with a couple hundred PSI (10 bar) as opposed to the tank, which starts in the 3500 PSI range and drops to a couple hundred.
The primary regulator is a similar setup with a flexible metal diaphragm, it knocks the tank pressure down to a level that the secondary mechanism can handle. Usually a primary regulator will have several high pressure ports (for things like pressure gauges) and several low pressure ports (for secondary regulator, backup secondary regulator, buoyancy vest, etc.)
Now you've got the whole list!
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@grimalkina there was an article I read on this long ago that I can no longer find that talked about how your grandma's recipes are simple, but you can't make them because of the context she left out. She was an expert and wrote down the details she needed to remember the recipe, but not enough that a novice could make it. Then it compared the differences in what would need to be said for the levels of expertise. Really made it hit home for me. Wish I could find the article again.
Take 3 eggs and 1 pound of fujulicated flower.
Persertrate until you reach mildly furnacious consistency influkting raisins with vigour!
Place in an oven preheated to molfious temperature and bake until shanpy !Enjoy!
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@StompyRobot I would think absolutely!!
@grimalkina @StompyRobot And also for the zipper experts to understand that the rest of us don't need to know exactly how zippers work in order to use them - they just work well enough that we can use them. This is a comment on computing ...
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In this study, the researchers asked about a range of stimuli, which in my humble opinion* are really fun to quiz yourself on. Can you explain:
- how a sewing machine works
- how a can opener works
- how a flush toilet operates
- how the heart pumps blood
- how piano keys make soundSome of these are far more elaborate, haha:
- how the aqualung regulates air-pressure
- how a transistor works*granted...I became a psychologist so maybe my sense of fun is warped
@grimalkina As an engineer, I have both
- a surface level grasp of how most of these things work (because I have at one time or another learned it, had to make repairs, or had to figure out whether repairs were possible)
AND
- copies of "The Way Things Work" and similar books, where mammoths explain them with easy to follow diagrams!
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Have you ever used a zipper? Odds are you have. Are you pretty good at it? Odds are! You've probably successfully used a zipper many, many times. You probably can't even remember when and where you learned how to operate a zipper. If you're a good zipper user and we sat you down in a room and gave you ten zippered garments, you'd probably fluently and flawlessly be able to zip them up and down.
Now......can you explain how a zipper works?
@grimalkina
And if you can, did you have David McCauleys The Way Things Work as a kid? -
Have you ever used a zipper? Odds are you have. Are you pretty good at it? Odds are! You've probably successfully used a zipper many, many times. You probably can't even remember when and where you learned how to operate a zipper. If you're a good zipper user and we sat you down in a room and gave you ten zippered garments, you'd probably fluently and flawlessly be able to zip them up and down.
Now......can you explain how a zipper works?
@grimalkina Fifty fans standing in two stadium rows, shaking hands as they do “the wave.”
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so zippers are really interesting as something people take for granted in clothes but they weren't always there.
it’s why i wanted to study the logic of crafting pants in a zipperless world.
well, for starters, pants aren’t trousers because pants are held up by a belt whereas trousers are held up by a fly.
a zipperless world forces you to fit the pants with just enough ease to keep the pants up without a belt or with an open fly.
it’s technique over tech. /🧵
I think I was about 12 when I got my first pair with a zip. Buttons before that.
Mid 1960s England.
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Also just as a PS, it's neither possible nor very adaptive to ask yourself to have an overwhelmingly detailed explanation of mechanisms for everything you encounter, so that's not the goal. Groups of people need to fluently work at many different levels of abstraction.
The key is matching the level of understanding to the tasks and problems that we have! And often, coordinating different depths of expertise!
But we can benefit from having metacognitive skills!
@grimalkina I fear this may be a worldview issue*, but as a (lapsed) physicist my natural bent is to apply methods and processes to develop a hierarchies of abstraction and detailed to describe and model the physical world.
For example, with zippers and crossbows, even with limited prior knowledge. Albeit this works better than politics or literature,
* or it could just be XKCD #793
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@grimalkina I fear this may be a worldview issue*, but as a (lapsed) physicist my natural bent is to apply methods and processes to develop a hierarchies of abstraction and detailed to describe and model the physical world.
For example, with zippers and crossbows, even with limited prior knowledge. Albeit this works better than politics or literature,
* or it could just be XKCD #793
@grimalkina (as in "liberal arts majors may be annoying, but there is no nothing more obnoxious than a physicist encountering a new subject...")
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@grimalkina
And if you can, did you have David McCauleys The Way Things Work as a kid?@grimalkina
Page 15 and 17. Of course, you could be excused for thinking that a mammoth was involved.
