Division of Labour is a pretty old concept, popularized by Adam Smith in 1776 or so. Yet when I read through the history of the industrial revolution the more modern concept of divison of labour — that a skilled job can be subdivided into simpler individual steps, which can then be done by any idiot — really didn’t spring up until the latter half of the 19th century. So why the ~70yr lag?
In Technology Review, and C&EN are articles on LS9: a new venture for making diesel using biotechnology (previously). This time the organism in question is engineered E. coli which has been designed for two key things:
So, at the end of the day, the bacteria can be fed a solution of cellulose (from anywhere) and produce oils (which are more easily separated)
e1m1s has some cool videos from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers on youtube. This one is about powder metallurgy: Basically a metal powder is pressed into the shape of the final part, then heated to fuse it into place. This is much more efficient than taking a whole block of metal and machining it it down to the final product.
This is a cool video done by Jeff Grewe of a power plant in Iowa.
This is from an episode of The Day The Universe Changed about, largely, the industrial revolution, the whole episode is here. It is both funny and enlightening, especially thinking about how the painfully banal aspects of our everyday lives trace their way back to slave owning sugar barons.
Over at core77 is a post on sawmills and where wood comes from (via), with some youtube videos such as:
Here’s another one from the vast library on youtube (you can seriously spend >1hr watching all the different videos of all the different kinds of awesome mills on youtube, it is awesome):
The degree of human involvement in the cutting is both surprising — since our modern world rests on the expectation of automation — but also not surprising given the non-uniformity of trees.
From one of my favorite blogs: Making Chewing Gum for American Chewers (Sep, 1914). It has some fun historical factoids about early gum manufacture.
Home-made gum continued as an industry until just previous to the days of the Civil War, when explorers in Central American countries discovered the chicle tree. This name is of Aztec origin, and is the name given to the sap of the sapota tree. It is this sap which is the basis of virtually all the chewing gum used in the United States. Immense tracts of land in Yucatan and Tuxpan Mexico, and throughout Central American republics, are devoted to the culture of the chicle tree, and the entire product of these millions of trees finds its way to the American factory.
Super Phénix: Creys-Malville Nuclear Power Station (France)
Over at BibliOdyssey there are a bunch of awesome wall-charts of nuclear power plants.
So, in last-week’s show antacid tablets were used to bust out of prison. The set-up was to build a sealed jail-cell with some large piles of antacid tablets in it, then flood the cell with water such that the tablets would break down and produce CO2, the build up of gas then busts open the door. Some friends of mine and I were talking afterwards and we couldn’t decide if the pressure build-up (measured at 4psi at failure) was because of the tablets or the addition of water to an otherwise sealed room (displacing the air). I’m going to do some back of the envelope calculations to try and figure out if the antacids really did break the cell, or if it was just the water added Read more
This is the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, an epic mess that started one night when a pesticide plant owned by the American chemical giant Union Carbide leaked a cloud of poisonous gas. Before the sun rose, almost 4,000 human beings capable of love and anguish sank to their knees and did not get up. Half a million more fell ill, many with severely damaged lungs and eyes.
A Cloud Still Hangs Over Bhopal — nytimes
As I watched the marchers start on their multi-kilometer walk, I saw the effigy of Warren Anderson roll unsteadily towards the plant, where it would be burned, I felt sad that for all practical purposes, U.C.I.L. and U.C.C. had perpetrated perhaps the most lethal industrial disaster in history and nothing had really been done about it.
Twenty-five Years After the Disaster, Bhopal Is Still Ill — Vanity Fair
