What is the new Low Tech like?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris

That this is a myth is news to me. All the sources I have at hand present it as fact. Can you give a citation?

I forget where it was that I found it, but it may have been Needham's Science and Civilization in China. My copy of Cotterell and Kamminga's Mechanics of Pre-Industrial Technology isn't ready to hand, so I can't check if they discuss the issue. Dan was the primary advocate of this revision, but the research I was able to do supported the conclusion that "choking the horse" was at least an oversimplification, and that harnesses that didn't do that were available when they were needed much earlier than is usually supposed.

Bill Stoddard

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris

That this is a myth is news to me. All the sources I have at hand present it as fact.

Not surprising. It's a relatively recent development (as in, during the past couple of decades) and the idea of the choking harness is very well-entrenched, thankyouverymuch Jean freakin' Gimpel.

Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris

Can you give a citation?

This is a pretty good source on the subject, tracing the history of the choking harness theory and bringing out problems with it.

[Whome?]

Gurps Low Tech I'm sure will be a beautiful hardbound full color book that we all will be proud of. I'm also looking forward to Gurps Horror too. I bought OGL Horror - which is a beautiful full color hardbound book and I'm sure Gurps Horror will be quite the read too. I myself perfer full-color hardbounds and really enjoy reading my Gurps 4e books -

"I just think GURPS is worth promoting."

I could not agree more. I myself have gone to playing Gurps via Playbyweb because I can find players that way. Retail stores just are not the place to recruit players to a regular Gurps game they used to be.

There are people who perfer RPG products released as hardbounds or paperbacks or .pdf files - if you use only one delivery method you will please some people - but not all.

[Tzeentch]

Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris

That this is a myth is news to me. All the sources I have at hand present it as fact. Can you give a citation?

-- Keep in mind that Lefebvre des Noettes and other scholars believed that the horse was the primary traction animal in use, which significantly skews how they approached the topic.

-- They also actually found a Roman harness in a 2nd century well and there is a paper published in 2002 that discusses it, so we don't need to completely guess any longer. This is referenced in the recent Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology. I own that book, but the most relevant section is readable on Google Books.

"This [2nd century Roman harness], which bears some similarities with the "yoke saddles" of the Near East, is well adapted to the use of one animal for draft, particularly the ass or the mule. This arrangement has been tested on an ass pushing a reconstructed vallus, and it demonstrated remarkable efficiency in the task of harvesting grain on a slop and in difficult terrain. The lateral "disks" are constantly in use during traction; they respond to all the movement of the shoulder and fore limbs, without hampering them, while transmitting their propulsion force. In summary, this jouguet with swivel joints represents an interesting compromise between high and low traction points and prefigures the medieval shoulder collar specifically designed for the horse."

[Fish]

TL4 ended hundreds of years ago. Ergo, Low Tech is already out by now.

Right? I mean, right?

Can I get an amen?

[Ragitsu]

The new low tech is CD players and CRT monitors.

Amen.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

I had thought there was still some possibility that they were used to plate metals.

Not a chance. They don't provide any way to make a circuit.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Ragitsu

Would it be too much to ask that the book comes leather bound?

I have a cousin who does high-end book-binding. He will happily remove the cover from a book and re-bind it in whatever you want. Perhaps you can find someone local.

[Tzeentch]

-- Researchers don't seem to have poo-pooed the idea it was a battery of some sort in the manner implied here :) I don't see a lot about it in the journals I have access to after the 90's though. Paul Craddock seems to believe the basics at least as of 2002. I'd be interested in the references that conclusively show it wasn't an electrical device.

Vaesen, Krist. Optimality vs. Intent: Limitations of Dennet's Artifact Hermeneutics. Philosphical Psychology 2008 -- Interesting analysis of why it was even considered a battery in the first place.

Keyser, Paul. Parthian Galvanic Cells. Journal of Near Eastern Studies (52:2). 1993. -- Poo-poos the idea they were used for electroplating.

[Grouchy Chris]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

Not surprising. It's a relatively recent development (as in, during the past couple of decades) and the idea of the choking harness is very well-entrenched, thankyouverymuch Jean freakin' Gimpel.

This is a pretty good source on the subject, tracing the history of the choking harness theory and bringing out problems with it.

Well, that article is quite an eye-opener. So now I have this pile of about half a dozen books that, as I was just ranting to my wife, got this wrong. And if they got that wrong, what else did they get wrong? Sigh. Next you will tell me that I can't trust Oakeshott.