It turns out people have been using the "getting real" concepts for a while now. Like, before the web.
For most of the age of sail, the ships were too complex and too costly to be made by rules of thumb. The wright would carve a small half-model of the ship to be constructed, showing the lines of the ship from stem to stern. Owners or clients might argue and dispute over this model, but once it was accepted, it was the basis on which the ship would be built. It took eighteen tons of paper blueprints to specifiy exactly how the World War II battleship the USS Missouri was to be built, but the basis of a sailing ship was a small model easily held it two hands.
(From William Bryant Logan's Oak, the Frame of Civilization, p. 220-221)
Posted by Karl
January 10, 2006 07:23 PM