knapping: a big job

obsidian flow

Have you ever cut yourself on glass? Glass is extremely sharp; broken edges can be only a molecule wide, this is "sharper" than a surgical scalpel. Volcanic glass, obsidian, occurs naturally. However, obsidian flows feature large fragments which are not particularly useful, especially for precision tasks. Turning a large hunk of obsidian into a useful tool using only rocks and sticks is a daunting task. This art is knapping.Its preservation is an excellent example of how we can find a connection to ancient peoples.

I nearly died in completing this assignment.

(I'm very sorry about the late post, everyone. I guess what happened was that for some reason with all the videos and pictures I had in here, the schedule feature didn't work the way it was supposed to. I've put the text up now, so you can at least see something, but I can't get anything to upload at the moment, and I'll have to try to put the pictures and videos back in when I can go find a better internet connection. Sorry for the inconvenience; I guess this is what I get for taking a class that forces me to learn a whole new medium.) 

I’m pretty good at a lot of things. Maybe that’s not particularly humble of me to say, but it’s true. However, I am not good at everything. This week is proof.

I enlisted my 15-year-old brother, Bennett, to teach me something about an area of folk knowledge I had never previously attempted: break dancing. 

some glow stick fun

The ancient (well actually very modern) art of rave glow sticking is wrought with intricacies. At my friend’s request, it was my task to teach her those intricacies in one afternoon.  And after some smacking of oneself with the glow sticks, mostly on her part, she managed to learn two tricks! It was a very fun experience!

Manicures for Boys 101.

So I was at dinner a few days ago with friends brainstorming a list of things that I could teach someone. I listed off a few ideas such as teaching the alphabet in sign language, teaching someone how to sing in Korean, or teaching someone how to bat correctly when playing softball. But as I was listing these ideas off, my friend suddenly asked "Can you teach me how to paint my nails?!" He's a boy...

So we scheduled a time for me to give him a manicure. After scrubbing and cleaning his nails, I showed him how to paint and apply with a second coat:

He choose the color blue for the big game tomorrow.

Then I let him give it a shot and he tried painting his middle three fingers:

Here's the end result:

Tyler

 He's glad he learned how to do it, but he got a lot of odd faces, so he decided to clean it off. I taught him how to remove dried on nail polish without peeling his nails:

Facials: cucumbers not (necessarily) included

Regrettably, I must report that I did not learn a useful skill. I enjoy being adventurous, so finding something new was a bit difficult. I had my heart set on learning to ride the unicycle but that fell through. So I was left with something uncomfortable that I had never done before: Facial/Manicure night. My whole life I had always found a way to avoid it a pressing homework project, early class the next day, a late work schedule, but now the time had come not just to experience it, but to  learn it. So I braced my self for an evening of green glorp, cucumbers, and nail files. Only to be surprised.

The Calendar

What do birthdays, holidays and the last day of school all have in common? They're things everyone looks forward to! But how are they determined? Thanks to many cultures before us, we use what is called a calendar to measure quantities of time, which help us to figure out when events take will take place.

The calendar measures quantities of time such as years, months, and days. One well known lunar calendar was created by the Mayans, a people who "revolved around the concept of time." (History of Mayan Culture) It was created in order to plan and determine agricultural and religious events. They used a vigesimal numbering system (base 20), which was most likely developed by counting the number of fingers and toes on a person. The Mayans were the first known successful civilization to determine the measure of a year and of a day.

Traditional Mayan calendar.

The Julian calendar, a revision of the Roman Calendar, was created during the time of Julius Caesar. I was based around the sun and divided the calendar into twelve months. However, it failed to account for a leap year which set the dates off track.

The Gregorian calendar, which is most commonly used today in Western cultures, was developed by Pope Gregory XIII takes into account both lunar and solar forms of tracking time. It uses the lunar system in order to track religious and significant historical dates, while also using the solar method in order to accurately determine the change of time. It accounts for a leap year, unlike the others.

Gregorian calendar.

Today, many people use calendars such as these to celebrate specific events, such as holidays, birthdays or anniversaries, as mentioned above. I just thought I'd post about time since my birthday is coming up and I thought it was interesting how people were able to document and pass on their knowledge about sequences of events!

A Whistle to Carry You Home

WARNING: THIS POST MAY GIVE YOU NIGHTMARES!

     So as I have been researching about ancient cultures I have become fascinated with the Aztec Empire of Mexico.  Last week I talked a little bit about the medical practices of the Aztecs and other pre-colombian cultures.  Sadly, not even modern medicine has advanced enough to let us live forever and death is inevitable for us all.  I stumbled across a video on the internet that freaked me out and intrigued me enough that I decided to investigate some more about Aztec beliefs about the passing from this world to the next.  Before showing it though I need to explain a little first.

     

Quetzalcoatl and Mictlantecuhtli (god of the underworld)

Belay on!

I spent several hours today teaching an old roommate of mine to rock climb at The Quarry, the indoor climbing gym here in Provo. At first, I figured that this would count as folk knowledge because it is something you learn from other people rather than from textbooks or internet articles—you learn by doing and watching and feeling it out. You get instructions from people who are better than you are, but the instructions tend to be things like, “Stand more on your legs and  less on your hands,” or “Make it a little less, well, like that”—instructions that make little sense without a shared physical context. After spending the day teaching Lisa to climb, I still think it counts as folk knowledge, and I recognized some aspects of it that I hadn’t previously thought of as folk knowledge at all. 

Fencing: A Real Social Experience

Last night, I got stabbed at least 30 times, and stabbed my attacker back at least 40 times.   I was participating in Rebel Swords, a fencing club here at BYU.  Throughout the hour and a half of instruction, I learned how to hold my body and the foil (a fencing sword), how to lunge and recover, and how to parry and thrust.  I learned what it means to suit up in communal fencing gear, and let's just say it is smelly!  I was taught by someone who had been fencing for about a year, and then as I practiced my partner and I taught each other through the experience.  At the end of the night, we were able to view a mock duel from some of the more skilled fencers in the room, and it was an amazing experience.  The most interesting part of the Duel for me was watching the referees.  I myself am a soccer referee, so I have a little empathy for all sport judges, but this was completely different.  I felt awed at the vast knowledge this fellow student had about his sport, and how complicated it all looked and how quickly he was able to see what happened.  The calls he made sounded mostly like a foreign language, but they were probably normal fencing words and I could only interpret the little that I had learned that night. 

We didn't do any moves as cool as these... at least not yet....

Any sport, I feel like, is a very social and folk knowledge type of thing.  It helps to actually see the skill in action when you are trying to learn it, instead of just having someone explain it to you, or reading about it.  I would not be able to do the little that I can if I had tried to learn it from Youtube.  Despite our amazing social networking techniques, there is still something amazing and very important about the personal, physical presence and interaction between two people or a whole group.  I definitely would not have been as excited about learning fencing if it was going to be an experience in front of my computer or TV or a book.  This experience helped me define folk knowledge more personally, and understand the concept better.  Folk knowledge is what we learn when we are with "folk", things that are only experienced in some kind of social context and are best learned that way. 

gettin my face did

getting rid of those sleepy eye shadows

I must say I don’t know if I could have picked an activity father out of my comfort zone than learning how to do male TV makeup. If that doesn’t catch your attention I don’t know what will! It all started when I begrudgingly agreed to be a makeup model so my friend could learn how to put make up on a male for her makeup 101 class. I debated back and forth in my mind when I learned of this assignment. Do I really want to put this kind of thing on the Internet? I mean as Dr. Burton says: the stuff you put on the Internet doesn’t ever go away! Well in the end I decided I would be open minded and learn something new. I kept telling myself I am an adventurous guy always looking for new experiences.

Ballet Dancing.

I decided to go out of my comfort zone for this project. I can't have no dancing skills whatsoever you could hardly consider me graceful. So I asked around Hinckley Hall to see if anyone knew how to dance. As it turns out, Stephanie from my hall used to take ballet. She agreed to teach me some of the basics:

Before we began, I thought that ballet had more to do with the position of your feet, but she explained to me that it's not just that, it's the centralization of the body and the straight back. Although I will probably never (NEVER) become a professional dancer, it was nice to have stepped out of my comfort zone and learned a type of passed on knowledge.

the confectionary evolution of a pig

I rather enjoy those getting to know you activities where you list your hobbies because I can feel proud of the eclecticism that is me. I enjoy all my hobbies and  find great satisfaction in my accomplishments; but occasionally, I think I should develop a useful talent in addition fun ones. It remains to be seen if I will succeed in that in the second half of this assignment, but for this first part the difficulty was finding something that I can do that someone else would want to do.
Here follows a list of what I considered, and rejected, as possible topics.
balloon animals, zombie makeovers, hybridizing kitchen appliances, chicken plucking, fossil preparation, calligraphy, and swing lifts.
When I discovered someone in my complex had a birthday, the choice was clear FONDANT CAKE.

Scrubbing Tomatillos

Peeling and Scrubbing the Tomatoes

This Monday I approached a girl who is in my Spanish and my Religion class here at BYU and asked her if she had any skills that she could teach me.  She replied - How about I teach you how to play ukulele? (completely random) And I answered her - Actually I already know how to play it. (even more random)  So she said well how about i teach you to cook salsa verde then.  I LOVE salsa verde so I was pretty excited that she knew how and was willing to teach me because i'm not super great in the kitchen.

Turns out that the salsa making process doesn't start out in the kitchen.  It starts in the grocery store.  So we went to the grocery store to pick out our produce.  It has always been a mystery to me how some people can just look and feel a fruit and know if it's going to taste good or not.  I was taught to pick out tamatillos (green tomatoes) and chili peppers and cilantro and onions and garlic.  Soon we were home and in the kitchen with our ingredients.

This way, please.

At first glance, it’s a pile of rocks. Hardly noticeable. Could have been put there by mistake.

 

At second glance, it might be more.

 

And if you’ve just spent four hours wandering in the direction that you hope is south-south-east, it’s a tremendous comfort.

 

Those piles of rocks are called cairns, and though they are still used today (I can attest to this from my own backpacking experience), they have been used for centuries all over Europe, North Africa, Asia, and the Americas. I specifically want to talk about the use of cairns in Europe. 

The Idiocy of Measurement Systems

If I asked you to show me how long a inch is, what would you do? How about a yard? I first learned the measurement of a yard from my mom, measuring out rope for a game of tug-of-war. It is the approximate distance from your finger tips to the center of your body and that was how I have measured out approximate lengths since. This is how the majority of measurements came about in our English system today, by standardizing the approximate measurements previously used to enable fair trading (usually by accepting the length of the reigning monarch's foot).

But I want to talk about the Ancient Hebrew system of measuring length instead. In this time, the measurements started out as approximations of the length of certain body parts, and again were standardized to be used by the entire nation. Distances longer than an "reed" (approx. 9 feet) were measured by the number of paces or the days that it took to journey there. Distances did not become standard until the Greek and Roman influence of later centuries. The measurements that were used were rarely taught, just accepted as commonplace and that everyone understood what was meant by them. I mean, really, how could you tell a fishing story without indicating the length of your fish and exclaiming that it is 4 feet long! Idiocy

A cubit is the basic unit of measurement in the Hebrew system, and is the approximate length from fingertips to elbow. In the culture there became two standardized measurements, the common cubit and the long cubit which measured 17.5 inches and 21.5 inches respectively. A handsbreadth was another, measuring the length of the palm across the base of the fingers (approx. 4 inches). In Ezekiel's time (600 BC) the measurements of the future temple were given mainly in "reeds" which was a length of wood cut to the length of six long cubits, or approximately 9 feet.

For me personally, I enjoy the logically metric system. I guess I really am a science nerd. :-)

Deleted Posts

Hey guys -- there has been some comments about deleted posts on the blog (i.e. Alicia and Will).  If this ever happens to you just let me know because it seems that I can see your old post that you may or may not be able to see.  It's saved as a draft in the editing section that I have access to.  So don't stress.  Just give me a call.  Or better yet, write it in word and copy paste it into blogger.

Mike

Becoming a Man

Sorry...! had some frustrating moments when Blogspot deleted my post...

What were you doing at the age of 18 or 19? Surely not preparing to secretly kill as many state owned slaves as you possibly could, right? I was preparing, like many LDS church members, to serve a full time mission to teach the gospel and serve others for the Lord. Instead of preparing to spread the Good News, at that same age ancient Spartan males were preparing to preform the krypteia. Seen through a modern Westerner’s eye this Spartan male right of passage can be seen as a very cruel concept.  This right of passage involves being thrust out into the wild with nothing more than a knife and made to kill as many state owned slaves called helots as he could and return to his training masters without being detected.