Colin Davies

I do a bit of gaming myself, and I have to say that this is a constant source of amusement and anguish. When the character is calmly grasping the white-hot end of a bar and whaling on the cold part in the air above the anvil, you get an accurate idea of the general population's understanding of the craft.

My impression of beginners' questions is that they're designed not so much to get at useful information as to strike up a conversation. As a beginner, there's nothing you can say to your elders and betters that they haven't heard; the only way to get involved is to ask foolish questions, because you don't have the knowledge that would let you ask worthwhile questions. It can be irritating, and I'm certainly guilty of it myself, but I don't think it's the end of the world. The idea that one would not seek out others' knowledge generally is complete folly. Learning is iterative - you ask the best questions you can, then you try to apply the answers, and then you find out what you should've asked in the first place. Much later you find out what the answers actually meant. If you're immortal then certainly you have the luxury of doing everything for yourself, never asking the advice of experienced people, fumbling blindly until you hit upon solutions to your problems. But if you're interested in learning and improving as much as you can in a regular human lifetime, you can't afford to be a hermit. The Industrial Revolution did not occur as a result of everyone refusing to speak to one another. And let's forget about rights. I don't have any right to ask anything of any other human being. What I have is necessity, and persistence.

I know it's to be avoided, but I think this is a cool example of the detonation pentagon (like the fire triangle, but with mixing and confinement, too). At least it's a weak detonation, and the shockwave stays confined within the tuyere. It would be interesting to stick a pressure transducer in there sometime and see just how high it gets.