Because alchemists were afraid of people stealing their recipes. Jabir bin Hayyan (aka Geber) the father of chemistry wrote in his own shorthand which is named after him—-gibberish or jibberish.
So Lead, gold, and quicksilver were not the substances their names suggest. They were codenames. The real processes have never been revealed.
I think there was a bbc documentary where they showed a manuscript of Newton or Kepler with a geometric proof and compared it to one by Al Jazari. They were identical.
In fact even the vertices were labelled the same, and followed the order of Arabic letters.
The availability of (mostly) accurate, in depth information snout any rabbit hole you can think of has certainly impacted some industries. There’s an entire generation of doctors who are infuriated by “Doctor Google” And another generation of doctors who embrace the ability to quickly research topics and fact check suggestions online collaboratively with their patients.
But do you actually do any DIY? And is it more than you would have done without watching hours of it on YouTube?
I have at times watched a lot of videos of people making stuff or doing DIY. I suspect like 99% of the audience of those videos, they are just entertainment.
not OP but I am forced to. Services are too expensive these days and even when you pay, the quality is usually very hit or miss. I have lost count the number of times where a mechanic does the job right but its sloppy. Even my plumber or electrician gets things done but my drive for perfection cringes at the sloppy craftsmanship. I'm not a multi millionaire so I can't get the people that supposedly made things like Apple Park. A DIYer might not be able to do every job but many of the low hanging fruit can be done well.
If you had a ham radio connection and wanted to broadcast emergency bulletins to people, radio fax would be quite useful.
It’s push rather than pull like the web. Email works too, but fax has more utility in an emergency situation. Beats having to download adobe acrobat on every computer….
They talk about so little because that’s what the fcc rules limit them to. Can’t blame people for behaving like Elmer the safety elephant all the time.
What can you do with a license?
Jam live music with other people over the air, in full duplex mode. Thats something only analog radio can do—because the latency is so low.
Yes, discussing politics or broadcasting music is not allowed over ham radio. Basically all we can do is exchange call signs, locations and details about our signals and stations.
I have wondered if you could use the fact that analog radio over short distances has latencies measured in the microseconds, so you could have a jazz band with players scattered over an entire city, but they can play like they are in the same room. Internet comms have too much latency (measured in the milliseconds).
So Lead, gold, and quicksilver were not the substances their names suggest. They were codenames. The real processes have never been revealed.