Chiara Vigo: The last woman who makes sea silk | Hacker News Reader

Chiara Vigo: The last woman who makes sea silk

bbc.co.uk

111 pointscallum8514 comments

Interesting as it is, the silk and the history of the family, it seems odd that Vigo teaches weaving it to a few people but not how to make it shine. Or at least it wasn't specifically mentioned about the process of lemon juice and spices.

This strikes me more as keeping it a secret within the family more than protecting people from God. Business failed sure but that's no reason to keep the process of making it shine a secret if she is hit by a bus or drops dead that's it for the knowledge.

And that's the sad dichotomy between the easy species wide success from sharing and the ineffable drive to hoard and compete. I see this played out in the natural world too. Usually you have to twist a species' arm waaay back around it's back to get it to internally share. Bees, termites, naked mole rats. You get it.

Good take. There is some hope from the new information-driven ways of organizing, that at least they can make cooperation more profitable than hoarding http://breakingsmart.com/season-1/the-zemblanity-of-containe...

Seems like a similar thing in quorums of agents playing lots of rounds of The Prisoner's Dilemma. Where Tit-for-tat is the optimal strategy in one on one. But when you have groups of agents that can communicate before rounds and coordinate defaulting instead of cooperating the groups as a whole can score better than tit-for-tat.

After I wrote that I was reminded of a CBC radio program in my region that has a genealogy show.

The expert guest on genealogy said people often hoard family artifacts and if (when) there is a disaster such as a fire in their home it's all lost.

The hoarder would be better off sharing information and some artifacts among relatives but some people feel compelled to hide it as if it were treasure (which it may be).

I always enjoy stories like these. It reminds me of this one on making a panama hat from about a month ago.[1]

[1]: http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/08/08/34068270...

This is an interesting history. And perhaps it's nothing more than uniqueness which makes this interesting; however, ms Vigo seems very well suited as ambassador for this dying tradition. She has the lineage, the myth, and aura to make it interesting for a new crop of artisans now that there is more interest in traditional methods.

Good collection of links on the topic a few weeks ago at Metafilter: http://www.metafilter.com/151993/It-was-necessary-also-to-fi...

Anyone have a video of the silk shining? Would love to see it.

A 15 minutes drive from my birthplace!

It seems somehow profane, but I'd love to get some into a materials lab and see how it behaves.

I'd wager that, at minimum, the U.S. Navy, 3M, and MIT have already done so, pursuant to research on waterproof adhesives.

I know at least that MIT has:

http://news.mit.edu/2014/new-adhesives-stick-in-water-0921

Shouldn't surprise me really, given stuff like this - http://www.technologyreview.com/view/537301/spiders-ingest-n... - there's probably already a group feeding carbon nanotubes to clams on the offchance.

It's a beautiful story. Thanks for sharing it.

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