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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

Hand washing. Modern disease control and prevention is borderline magic. Hand-washing is clearly the most important lifesaving and disease preventing invention in modern times.

Materially ... Well, "yourself" precludes anything computerized, unless you mean "program". It also precludes a huge range of materials science advances.

Technically, you can make steel and concrete yourself with enough real-world minecrafting, and good steel or concrete is probably hands down the most important factor in all our chemical, structural, and industrial processes.

Luckily there's a book with the most important inventions to re-engineer a complex, sustainable society called The Knowledge, and just about everything in there is build-able by a determined individual or small group (until you get to modern things). Not suprisingly, it mostly focuses on agriculture, medicine, steel, and concrete.

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This book should be called The Misinformation. It omits crucial safety information and other details about many of the processes it mentions, and the author doesn't maintain a public list of known errata; it's entertainment, not education.

Three better alternatives: the Primitive Technology channel on YouTube, the Boy Scouts Handbook, and Wikipedia, which you can download as .zim files for offline reference. Other relevant YouTube channels include AvE, CodysLab, and Applied Science; in more specific areas you have NileRed, Abom79, Ben Eater, EEVblog, This Old Tony, GreatScott, ElectroBOOM, and NurdRage. Unlike the book you're recommending, they are by people who know how to do the things they are explaining, show their errors, and include the relevant calculations. There are other channels like How To Make Everything and King of Random which do not; they are entertaining but deadly.

General-purpose know-how books have gone out of fashion, though we still have the CRC Handbook and the Machinery's Handbook. In the 19th century there were a bunch of books like Dick's Encyclopedia of practical receipts and processes (ripped off, I think, from Cooley’s, or possibly vice versa) which covers a wide range of topics at a level sufficient to enable you to practice them; you could probably build a fair bit of Victorian technology from the recipes in Dick’s. (You aren't going to get a loom out of it, though; for that, see The Mechanism of Weaving, but YouTube is far superior.) I think the equivalent is more difficult to-day.

Very good references! Thank you!

I do think the author tried to relay concepts and hints, rather than recipes. Given the compactness, a group of people starting largely from scratch and taking the book on faith could figure out a lot of stuff.

If they took the book on faith they would halt progress until they all died of methanol poisoning.

Add The Essential Craftsman and Frank Howarth to that list to round out the woodworking skills.

One point you’re spot on about though, AvE is and will always be the absolute crème de la crème of the yous tubes.

> Hand washing. Modern disease control and prevention is borderline magic. Hand-washing is clearly the most important lifesaving and disease preventing invention in modern times.

I was recently in the hospital and was shocked at how often they used the hand-sanitizers.

The staff at all levels used them after literally everything.

I'm a former commercial pilot so I get the idea of having stuff drilled into your brain.

But I mean everyone from the food staff who delivered breakfast, to the orderlies who made the bed, to the doctors who touched nothing, would instinctively go to the anti-bacterial hand sanitizer on the wall, press it with their elbow, rub their hands, and leave the room.

It was pretty wild.

I volunteered in a hospital. They have competitions with 'secret shopper' nurses and admins. The prizes can be pretty good. A co-volunteer got ~$100.

The benefits of washing your hands depends on a fairly large set of other improvements and inventions.

For most of history the water available was frequently contaminated with human and animal waste, along with whatever your local tanner was dumping in. Fixing that was a prerequisite to making hand washing useful.

And then there is the soap issue. While soap certainly has a long history, it was often unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Cloths were traditionally washed with urine.

Alcohol might be easier than soap in those cases.

I wouldn’t call it a recent invention although it might be recent in the west, but plenty of cultures in South Asia, Iran, and muslim world (at the very least) considered hand washing crucial for basic hygiene.

> Hand washing

Hand washing isn't modern by any stretch of the imagination. Promoting it is modern, though.

Oops, you are correct. The modern connection to germ theory is most important.

Even then... Our Muslim friends have been promoting regular hand washing since the 600's CE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wudu

And before them our Hebrew friends since 1000 BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handwashing_in_Judaism

Lister - the namesake of the (unrelated) Listerine.

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