Experienced wood splitter here. All your points are valid. I had to ruin one perfectly good axe handle before I learned how to swing. However, the sim is still a lot of fun.
> I had to ruin one perfectly good axe handle before I learned how to swing.
Is it really that difficult? Maybe my memory is vague, but chopping wood in autumn/fall for the winter just took a bunch of time, and wasn't very fun, but wasn't that bad, especially compared to other things like harvesting veggies stuff where you have to be on the ground. I'm not sure how you'd manage to ruin a axe handle before understanding how to do it well-enough, takes a couple of swings at max.
I think it very much depends on the wood too, the species and how seasoned it is and how dry it is. Some chunks you can hit it almost anywhere and it will cleave across the entire block, but other woods you will hit a half inch in from the edge of the bark and the board will split under the blade and let it through, but leave a half inch near the edge unsplit that the axe handle hits with full force. Do it enough times and the front edge of the handle can get messed up.
Sometimes you will see wire or something else wrapped up near the top of the handle for that reason to help protect it a bit. But if you get enough practice you can reliably hit with the bottom half or quarter of the axe sticking out of the log so that can't happen.
I spent a summer chopping a whole bunch of wood with a steel handled 10 lb maul. Many was the evening where my hand was numb until the morning, but by the end of the summer my shoulders were ripped.
You quickly learn the differences between locust, pine, maple, oak or, god forbid, cherry.
I see a lot of people that split infrequently use mauls. But personally I think an axe works better once you get a bit of practice. The trick with the axe a lot of people miss at first is to focus on the swing speed, and not as much as delivering force and mass behind the blow. Some species the maul can work better, but 90% of the time I feel like an axe is just a bit less effort and a bit quicker.
I have a few black wattle rounds that have been sitting around for years. I have a go at them whenever I feel like I need to be humbled. There's also a fallen tree at the bottom of our property that blunts chainsaws. It's been there for years and nothing seems to eat it. I harvest what I can from it, and a good sized chunk will burn through the night.
I once took a sledgehammer to work so everyone could take a turn taking a whack at some old prototypes outside. I came to the sad realization that even hitting a particular spot with a sledgehammer is not an inate skill. If you've never done it, you miss!
My experience was a year spent working as a forester. One of our duties was to keep the wood burning stoves supplied. I remember learning that ash got its name from the fact that it burned so well, and willow left perfect charcoal.
As for the axe handle… I was told off by my boss for mashing up the handle by my constant missing. Even now, I am the same with hammers and nails - not nearly as sure with my aim as I should be. On the plus side That was also the time I learned how to replace an axe handle. also the time that
Same. I've only done it a couple times but it takes minutes to learn and you just get into a rhythm and keep going. It's like peeling potatoes.
I wonder if there's a name for the psychological phenomenon of people doing some trivial blue-collar-ish task and then dramatizing it to make themselves sound like a grizzled old hand.
You don't wear it out. You land the head long of your aim point, and splinter the handle on whatever you were trying to hit. It's certainly not hard to ruin a handle if you're learning to swing a sledge by driving steel splitting wedges.
There's a huge difference between say, weilding a hatchet on a camping trip, and trying to get the hang of a splitting axe, with a 3ft or longer handle, when you're a kid. Getting a long, sweeping arc that comes down in the right spot isn't easy and if the axe head's centrifugal force pulls it away from you, you clunk the handle down on the wood. I definitely recall my hands ringing and numb from those kinds of impact. I don't remember ruining a handle, but if it had been my chore, I think I could've come close.
> There's a huge difference between say, weilding a hatchet on a camping trip, and trying to get the hang of a splitting axe, with a 3ft or longer handle, when you're a kid.
Fiberglass handles are now standard on splitting mauls (for this reason).
Rotten hearts, or driving wedges. It is easy to miss a swing by an inch or two when fatigued.
Edit: I also broke my first axe handle. The sibling comments here are wild.
The Cub Scouts in the 1960s were a lot of fun. Each den meeting involved a project. The other one I remember was we each built a kite from scratch.
Mine was a bit fragile, and the first gust of wind shredded the sticks and plastic film.
But it was still fun!
As a teen I built a flame thrower. No, I'm not going to explain how to build one. My dad told me that God looks out for little boys, because otherwise they'd never survive to adulthood.
When I was 9, I found a book of his "Rocket Manual for Amateurs". The opening sentence was something like "if you're fascinated by things that burn and explode, this book is not for you." Who could resist a teaser like that? I promptly read it cover to cover. He wouldn't let me buy any of the necessary materials.
"Rocket Manual for Amateurs" was my favorite book after I found it in 8th grade. In high school I had a chem teacher who would give me chemicals so I could experiment with what I'd read. A great book for budding Raketenkinder.
Dam right. It’s a medium that a reasonably intelligent individual from any time in future/past history could intuitively understand. Let’s not forget that NASA chose a record to store the digital images it sent with Voyager on precisely that assumption.
I believe they indeed do, but for digitizing rare records, they are much better than their physical counterparts. Considering that we can now remove these pops and clicks way better than we did before, it's a worthy thing to have for preservation purposes:
focused around things like laser engraving and phonograph records made of durable materials such that people would be able to read them with whatever technology we have in the future.
Unfortunately, we are unlikely ever to see any of Delecroix’s paintings as they were intended to be seen. Fading pigments and other factors make this true for every painting, but doubly true for Delecroix as he used a lot of new pigments that were very unstable.
There is the story of Degas standing weeping with sadness in front of The death of sardenopolis at the way its colors had faded over time.
I believe that DaVinci’s edge is the excellent masking and node based editing it offers (via the color page) and the insanely powerful hue tools. Neither Lightroom nor Potatoshop has effective hue tools - e.g. selectively change the hue or the saturation of a color except in the most primitive way.
Thanks for pointing that out. You are indeed correct. However, from what I can see DaVinci's tools still have the edge. With Capture One the feedback on what hues have been selected is far vaguer than I would like. Moreover, the node-based workflow is far more suitable for complex adjustments.
Repeating a point I made in another comment: in DV it is possible to edit hue to hue, hue to saturation, hue to luminesce, luminesce to saturation, saturation to saturation and saturation to luminesce. There is also the amazing chroma warp, using which near arbitrary color adjustments can be made. Nothing out there comes even close to that capability. No wonder most Hollywood movies are color graded in DV.
Guilty as charged. However,... from a certain point of view image editing is all about color. I guess the exception would be Adobes new generation of object selection tools, which are hard to best. DaVinci has such tools but they are more suited to editing movies.
Agreed that the photo editing features are killer. AFAIK no other photo editing app allows the user to selectively desaturate a hue and its ability to adjust scoring to restricted lightness range is world class.
Are you referring to Lightroom's masking capability? Indeed, even in Photoshop it is possible to select a color and perform a masked adjustment. Lightroom's selection/masking tools are pretty good and for basic tasks it is fine, but the masking workflow is (IMHO) fundamentally limited. DaVinci's nodes can be stacked on top of each other and the per-hue adjustments are live. Also... I gotta say that the visualization the DV's tools offer is far superior. At a glance I can see the range of hue that have been selected as well as the degree of change they are being subject to.
FYI, In DV it is possible to edit hue to hue, hue to saturation, hue to luminesce, luminesce to saturation, saturation to saturation and saturation to luminesce. There is also the amazing chroma warp, using which near arbitrary color adjustments can be made. Nothing out there comes even close to that capability. No wonder most Hollywood movies are color graded in DV.
Stacked you mean each node works on the input from another nodes output? So I could add a node to make green blue and another node to make blue green again? Because Lightroom mask only work on the base adjustment. Sounds good if I got this right. I wanted to play around with it anyways.
Yes, it would work like that. Moreover, the adjustments concatenate. In other word if a node darkens an image to the point of blackness, the following node can restore the original brightness.
That being said, the new photo editing functionality of DaVinci is not the smoothest. The DaVinci app is a bit of a Frankenstein. The editor is a development laid on top of the original DaVinci color app. The audio page (Fairlight) and the VFX module (Fusion) were purchases which were acquired and 'glued on'. Moving from one to the other can be clunky - though not as bad an experience as Adobe's dynamic links.
I teach digital art and am also a painter. When I was a student I loved filling sketchbooks with drawings - like a collection of ideas. To a large degree my web bookmarks and screen grab library have taken over this function. That being said, if I want to quickly communicate visual ideas to students or craftsmen I much prefer a paper and pencil. It feels so much more nuanced, comfortable and expressive.
I've taught digital art classes too. I was pleasantly surprised at a writing assignment where most students (un-prompted) turned in a hand-written response.
If Mari (texture painting app) and Nuke (vfx compositor) had a baby together it would be the perfect node based photoshop alternative. The brushes of Mari are insanely good and color editing on nuke is a dream.
The vast majority of what people do in photoshop can be done with node based editors that already exist. Most people edit photos and that can be done with roto shapes and manipulation instead of painting.
> Ternary is probably way better at modeling the real world, but the complexity could make code hard to understand. Maybe that can be solved.
Is it not true that the brain process in ternary?
From the point of view of perception, I believe that we process the world in terms of pairwise comparisons. For example, the atomic indivisible of visual processing is figure/ground separation.
Yes. In opposites and in lack of data (null). Ternary thus fits better.
Back in ancient CS classes my prof said that was a Russian attempt of building ternary processors with +1, 0, -1 represented as voltages.
Another strike in for-ternary column is that it's the most efficient in the number of digits for representing numbers. Pi is optimally efficient but non-integer bases would break anyone's brain, I think.
The brain doesn't do any of that. The brain is neural goo.
It can arduously crank through simple logic problems with its ludicrously tiny memory (around 8 bytes). Everything else is intuition and guesswork.
You can try to model those heuristics with various logics. Some logics work better in certain situations. Classical first order logic is actually really bad at modeling brain work, but it's simple to automate, so we use it even where it's wildly inappropriate.
It was ported from the Mac version, along with Illustrator, using a set of libraries called Lattitude that implimented the Mac toolbox on Unix systems.
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