By Hand and Eye

...lden section, for instance, and the shelf spacing came from an exercise on page 131 of the book. Far from being restrictive, I found the principles in Walker and Tolpin’s book liberating. I now had a starting point for any design project. For modern folks it’s difficult to imagine working without a ruler. Walker and Toplin explain, Instead of asking, “How high is this base dimension in inches?” pre-industrial artisans would have asked, “How tall i...

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Make a Rain Barrel

...n enormous cistern, something with a capacity in the neighborhood of around 10,000 gallons. Ideally houses here, as in the ancient Roman world, would have been built with huge underground holding tanks. A small rain barrel like this makes more sense for those of you who live in places with rain throughout the year, where a small amount of collected rainwater could be used to bridge a gap in rainstorms. I put this rain barrel together as a test and...

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Saturday Tweets: Architectural Screw-Ups, Road Diets and Pet Dragons

..., 2018 Delightful site curates New York Times Sunday Magazine articles from 100 years ago https://t.co/8pMEDbj7QF — Root Simple (@rootsimple) January 13, 2018 If you’re an Earth scientist or other academic trying to fly less, please help shift the culture on academic flying. An easy way to start is to tell your story here: https://t.co/dTN60J6Abv — Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman) January 11, 2018 The average kid can identify 1,000 corporate logos and...

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Black Widow or False Black Widow?

...e kind of dangerous, either. This is not reassuring. But then on the handy page Frequently Encountered Spiders in California, I learned about the False black widow. Another European invasive, this spider seems to be displacing our native black widows in urban areas. This spider is roughly the same size and shape as a black widow, but is brown with a faint purple sheen. I like this false black widow option a lot. The false widows don’t have a dange...

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