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Recreating The Lost Art Of Damascus Steel
YouAreFatMan writes "The Chicago Tribune has an article about two researchers -- a metallurgist and a blacksmith -- who have apparently been able to reproduce the legendary Damascus steel. 'Islamic artisans used it for centuries to make swords that spurred envy and myths among Europeans--including the legend that a Damascus blade could slice a falling silk scarf in midair.'"
The technique of forging the steel was secret: there was no published work that explained it. Thus, there is no prior art.
This is actually a perfect example of why patents were created in the first place: to reveal and create a public record of secret processes to prevent technologies from disappearing. Society gets the secret information in the end, but, the inventor gets a legally-protected monopoly for a reasonable period.
If the Ottoman empire had a patent system, perhaps the secret of Damascus steel would never have been lost!
Cough ... have you ever heard of the Ottoman Empire? With their artillery and other technical military items unmatched by Europeans for a couple of centuries?
... we still fight over the teaching of evolution because so many Americans have a bizarre
...
Yes, eventually their fortunes turned as those of France, Russia and other nations rose. Of course,
those nations found their fortunes wane as well.
Rule Britannia! The sun never sets on the British Empire!
Of course, Bismark and the Prussians brought great power to Germany (and don't forget that the Turks were still a force to be reckoned with in WW I).
And those powers waned as well, leaving the US and
Russia as the two remaining superpowers after WW II.
Now, of course, there is only one. But before we get too full of ourselves and assume we'll remain the world's most dominant force forever, consider that our bizarre unflinching adherance to ancient religious law rivals that of fundamentalist Islams .
Let's see
unflinching adherance to a literal belief in Genesis. That's not the whole story but it's not a bad place to start
Not quite. You're making a common mistake here - confusing the Islam of today with that of yesteryear.
:)
Let's see... ignorance of technology? Umn, that's a pretty big screw you to the people who invented medicine, astronomy, and chemistry as we know it. Don't get me started on mathematics.
Here's a link for the goatse weary: http://www.al-bab.com/arab/science.htm.
The muslims of yesteryear gave us a btter calendar, which we refused; a better number system, which we grudgingly accepted; a better understanding of astronomy and medicine, which we scoffed at; and preserved all of those greek and roman texts - ya know, the canon of western thought?
So where did Islam go wrong? Way too many schisms within the groups. There are no actual schisms in the sense of christianity, mind you - the fractures start taking place at the jurisprudence level. Oh yeah, and that whole colonialism / subjugation of the middle east thing. (Read Said's Culture and Imperialism. Read Orientalism. Hell, read anything, you sound like you need it.)
In closing, racism bad, and everything you know is wrong. Have a nice day
It is easy to sharpen a blade so it is sharp enough to cut through silk.
What is hard is to make it hard enough to keep that edge without making it as brittle as glass.
The Japanese katana accomplishes this. It can be polished so sharp it will cut through meat under its own (low) weight. On the battlefield, admittdly there is little need to cut through a silk scarf or to carve steaks, but one useful tricks you could do with a katana and presumably with a fine Damascus blades was to actually cut through lesser blades. Which is very useful indeed.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Can you say Prior Art?
But can anyone prove that the Damascus steel of legend was made the same way as the Damascus steel of the 21st century? Who has the burden of proof?
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Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
There is something seriously seriously seriously swrong with the moderation system used here.
......
I am no expert on metals or blades, however this looks like an extremely intelligent and useful post, with a lot of information. However as of now it's rated +3, Informative, and on either side (with my filter set to a minimum of 3) there are +5, Funny one liners that aren't really all that funny.
So someone intelligent gets +2, and someone spitting out a silly 1-liner gets +4.
Something's not right with this picture.
If God gave us curiosity
> Steel doesn't want to be free... people want steel to be free.
No... no... I think it's "People want to steal things that aren't free"
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Muslims have seen many rewards from their love and pursiut of science, the"unflinching adherance to ancient religious law" you talk about is a misguidend CNN/hardcopy view of the orient that is highly prevalent and highly distorted.
While it may be true that many parts of the muslim world today are in shambles, Afghanistan's taliban, etc. This is not indicative of a falure in the religion, or of adherance to religion. Anyone with a rudementry understanding of Islamic law, or the Quran can point out the contradictions between Islam, and what is being implemented in Afghanistan.
Last, the "ancient religious law" you speak of is nothing of the sort. Islam has one of the most coherent and highly developed systems of law. Islamic law, and jurrice prudence has heavily influened the west. Concepts such as social justice, public utility, womens equity, equity, and tolerance were all popularized by muslims.
I certainly encountered more than my fair share of professors in undergrad and in grad school who had tenure and all kinds of honors, but didn't understand how a real computer works. Case in point: Algorithm analysis. We analyze the performance of algorithms based on a model where every memory access can take the same amount of time. But anyone who understands modern virtual memory knows that's not the case. And it turns out that although that won't take an algorithm in polynomial time and move it into exponential time, an algorithm that on the surface is O(N^3) can actually be O(N^5) (according to one of the examples Larry Carter at the University of California-San Diego gave in a lecture).
In academia, people write papers on doing nifty things, while in the real world, people actually do them. It's kind of like the article below where a CS professor writes about DOOM and it becomes clear (at least to me) that he doesn't really know the first thing about what John C. actually does.
I'm not pissing on degrees; I certainly recognize the value of my degrees now that I have a job. But it took me a while to un-learn the habit I'd acquired in grad school of thinking ideas into the ground without actually doing anything with them. For a while I had to force myself to just DO things and worry about whether I was doing them "right" later. Only then did the education start to prove its worth.
I think it's common to think that people with Ph.D.'s are brilliant. They may be smarter than average, but getting a Ph.D. is more a matter of working VERY hard towards a goal than it is about being a genius.
Just because something is irreducibly complex, doesn't mean it couldn't have evolved. I wish I could find the beautiful critique I read of Behe but I can't. The best way I can think to explain it is if you looked at two cards balanced against each other, you would say "that's irreducibly complex"(i.e. neither card could stand on it's own). But what if originally there was third object, that the two cards could balance against. Then, once the two cards were in place, you could remove the object and you've got irreducible complexity.
The metaphor here is that the cards represent some irreducibly complex system(something that, before all the pieces are in place, is useless), and the third object is something that was already there serving a different purpose.
And I wish I could elaborate further, but I'm about to be hit by lightning.