Medieval Desktops
medievalbooks.nl
medievalbooks.nl
Form memory it was ok to write on, great to read on and terrible to put thing on. But it had a self underneath where you kept things (and could hide novels to read during class).
Check out these images from a Bavarian school museum, showing classrooms from 1875 and 1920: http://www.schulmuseum.org/raeume/
That’s not 45°, but still slightly pitched. Also note that bench and table are one massive combined piece of furniture, with two (or more) students sharing one bench. That makes the classroom layout completely inflexible.
I think flat tables (and individual chairs) in schools can also be explained by an increased desire to reconfigure the classroom on the fly, moving tables around to make working in groups easier.
Absolutely: it probably mirrors (and likely imitated) the thinking about modular, open-plan offices which came into fashion around the same time too. To an extent it probably also reflects the arrival of Stuff on Your Desk into schoolchildren's lives as well: crafting activities and educational toys in the classroom, but also just more books and more papers than before.
(I'm not holding up C20 pitched school desks as a good example of pitched working surfaces: they were often cheap, sometimes even unstable, unadjustable and cramped, likely designed for someone a foot shorter than the poor eejit who was actually jammed into it. They were more like the sad fag-end http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/fag-end-18204918.jpg of a long tradition; I think they may have helped sour many people on the idea of pitched working surfaces.)
A useful visual reference can be found here: http://books.google.com.pa/books?id=mrDgmObwGZcC&pg=PA387&lp...
I somewhat resent the association with a museum. It was in the seventies!
And yes, the purpose of the flat tables that came afterwards was possibly what you say.
I do know that these kinds of classrooms did exist in post-war Germany still (mostly because obviously no one was really investing a lot into schools), but most of those were probably gone after the economic upswing and modernisation in the 50s and 60s (though I do not know how long some held on in some small school in some corner of Germany).
(Ha, but you just reminded me of my first proper work desk I got when I started going to elementary school. That thing was pretty fancy, height adjustable, and, of course, the desk could be pitched up effortlessly, set to any angle between 0° and maybe about 50°. I’m not sure how widespread those were and are, though. Plus, I don’t think I ever set it to anything other than flat when actually working. Since my dad is a civil engineer and he actually had a desk he could pitch up to draw – something mostly relevant when he studied in the early eighties, because in his job now he has assistants doing the drawing and they sit in front of a computer – so that’s how I primarily thought of that function, certainly not for reading or writing.)
Actually it's not only not obvious, but the opposite: there was a heavy investment in schools allied-occupied Germany as part of the denazification program. It is weird to look at some textbooks from that period that look like 1950s US books but are in German with typically German scenes (e.g. der Bäker) -- and copyright notices in English with the copyright belonging to the Allied Control Commission.
This was a patchy process; my mother in law who started school shortly after the war, was in a very poor region and her handwriting was still the old Sütterlin style so I think some of her elementary school books were still from the 30s and 40s. But contemporaries of hers who grew up in Berlin have the same handwriting as my wife or our kid.
(Sorry to have strayed from the also-interesting medieval topic.)
http://ririanproject.com/2013/01/09/what-monks-can-teach-you...
A document "wheel" or carousel would help a lot.
Currently cheaper than some of my hard cover textbooks, and I graduated in 2005, so I imagine its worse now.
So that is expensive in a absolute experimental sense but not excessive in the book industry as a whole.
Also carpentry project expenses can add up if you make things fancy, so I can imagine spending about as much on the raw materials as loading a wheel with kindles.
Yes and no. Text books are needlessly expensive and, to be honest, often superficial content-wise. The information contained in them can be easily gotten from the Internet or, if that doesn't work out, from a good library.
But even if I'd want to use 10 text books at the same time, one kindle isn't going to cut it. I think the biggest problem with using digital documents, for me, is that there's no natural geometrical mapping that I can keep in my head the way I can with books, articles, and stuff scattered around my office. I know that the information on concept A is in that corner, for example, and that going deeper into that pile means going in deeper chronologically. And I put documents on related concepts closer to each other. Somehow, these stacks of documents form a concrete representation of the argument I am constructing.
I tried to do the same with digital documents, I've got thousands of them, but tagging them, or putting them in directory trees, and so on, does not give me the same handle on the the information as I understand it at this moment in my mind. It is quite frustratingly, as digital documents are a lot easier to handle otherwise.
tl;dr [price of kindle] + [price of textbook] > [price of textbook]
My less elaborate solution to a similar problem is to sneak into a lab when I'm making notes on multiple (paper) references. I just shuffle left and right along a bench with all my books and papers spread out.
Unless your "real project" is making a variable height powered automated chair. Which is an interesting idea.
Given an infinite amount of cheap space (coasties need not apply) something like a teeter-totter with a counterweight to lower static torques to practically nothing...
A motionless chair might result in less sea sickness when combined with a moving rack.
COTS is boring but COTS you can buy half racks and lift tables with multi ton capacity for moving machinery (think like, engine blocks) You'd want some kind of shielding to keep kids and pets out of the works. And you'd need some kind of interlocking to prevent forcing a open laptop thru your lap when lowering.
Spin the wheel get your SMD rework station, spin the wheel get your RF test equipment, spin the wheel get your connector assembly workbench, spin the wheel get the fastener screwdriver and wrench shelf.
I enjoy unusual carpentry projects and I'm now thinking about making a 3-wheeler for my library room in my house as a big project. Wouldn't that look interesting? I'm getting a dark stained oak and brass fittings feeling about the whole project.
Maybe start on a much smaller scale with a kitchen spice rack at 1/4 scale.
One operational problem is I read recreational books one at a time on kindle app or real space, not 18 books in parallel, and if I do anything academic enough to require actual citations or verifications that's exclusively browser tabs online. I might end up building something really cool that I won't actually use.