Why is it that I can walk all day long, either barefoot, or wearing sandals/Tevas and not have any problems, but if I’m wearing shoes and a hole forms in my sock, I’ll have a blister within three blocks?
Read the chapter on shoes and sandals in Edward Tanner’s Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity for an eye-opening look at the history of shoe technology and what it does to our feet.
Um. Care to summarize? Not that reading the reviews isn’t thrilling and all but…
I think that our dear friend Exapno Mapcase means for tou to read the mentioned chapter, not the reviews.
mangeorge
Perhaps because the edge of the hole in the sock is now starting to rub against the skin. If it’s cotton that won’t help matters (it soaks up sweat, sticks to the skin and chafes). I’m a bit of a fanatic on socks and haven’t bought anything but decent wool/wool blend socks in many years. Vast improvement over cotton.
I’m sure this is true, but sadly Amazon is not currently in the business of providing me with books for free over the internets. Shocking, I know. Rest assured that I have sent them a strongly worded letter and expect a response any day now. I will of course supply updates as they arrive.
Ask EM for his credit card info. I’m sure that, in the interest of Fighting Ignorance, he will be happy to oblige.
I got the book from the library. I highly recommend that course of action. No credit card required.
As you can see from the reviews it is a somewhat dense academic book. I found some chapters more enthralling than others, myself. That makes it difficult for me to summarize data from thousands of years and several civilizations in a snappy paragraph. Sometimes it is better just to point people to a source and say, it’s all in there.
The closest I can come to a summary is that our feet were designed to be barefoot over yielding soil. Shoes are a compromise and have many defects. Oddly, at least from a modern western viewpoint, sandal technology, even very primitive sandal technology, allows for a much more natural gate and properly constructed provides fewer friction points. Shoes, even shoes designed for running, which constitute a further chapter, are extremely difficult to get right. Maintaining an even pressure all around an extremely uneven surface - the foot - is difficult enough without adding a slippery inner lining - the sock - to the equation. Shoes are terrible for feet and always have been.
However, this terribly oversimplifies a vast amount of insightful detail he provides. I really prefer that you go to a library and read the original for free to get the most out of a fascinating presentation that is among the best in the book.
Sounds interesting. I’ve got two of those 30% off coupons for Borders good this weekend. I was going to use one of them on Making Money (which is oddly not discounted automatically…) and maybe I’ll use the other one on that book.
Have you read and of Henry Petrowski’s books on engineering?
All of them, I think. He’s very good.
Care to summarize?
Heh, I’ll field this one:
Engineering is a human endeavor and is thus subject to human failings including tunnel vision, hubris, and even simple error. The design of large structures is driven by several considerations, but Petrowski primarily focuses on the interplay between conservatism and innovation. It is inevitable that buildings will experience failure, because designers are not going to stop innovating, and every change comes with consequences, some of which will be unforseen because of the human failings above. Even if the designer is using a time honored design, they may be lulled into complacency and things may still go all pear-shaped because changes in location or materials have revealed a new, or intensified an old, failure mechanism.
The books are essentially case studies in this principle. Of course, not all bridges fall down and he also highlights examples of particularly good or farseeing design. An example is the Tacoma Narrows bridge, the famous Galloping Gertie. (Newsreel footage and slightly less histrionic color footage. Notice the car in the color footage is on the other side of the bridge. I wonder which is original.) The bridge across the Tacoma Narrows was innovative in many ways, it was across a very deep and fairly wide chasm, at least for the time, which channeled the wind to blow across the bridge. What doomed the bridge was its slim profile. The designers decided not to build a heavy substructure of stiffening trusses. This decision opened the bridge up to more aerodynamic effects. What you see in the film is the bridge twisting back and forth. Because it was so light (relatively speaking of course) and flexible, lift from the wind caused it to twist. You can see that the bridge is twisting in different directions on the two halves of it’s span, with a node in the middle. Eventually the materials failed and the bridge collapsed. It was later rebuilt with a strengthening truss under the roadway.
The books are more in depth analyses of this type on famous (and not so famous) civil engineering projects. Not all of the failures are catastrophic. For example there’s the Britannia railway bridge across the Menai Straight. (Wikipedia page, with pictures!) It was in continuous use for more than 100 years before being rebuilt after a fire. In what way was it a failure? It was a big metal tube that trains passed through. Trains burning coal. Apparently it was completely wretched inside the thing. 
Tenebras
Just to nitpick. His name is spelled Henry Petroski. Here’s his Wiki page with a list of his books. I haven’t read the new one yet, and I may have missed one or two others.
He coined (or least popularized) the phrase “form follows failure.” Products fail constantly from the time they are introduced. He doesn’t mean spectacular failures like the collapsing of a bridge, although he writes on those too, but that engineers and entrepreneurs and just plain people with ideas are perpetually looking at products, machines, structures, and things of all kinds and thinking, why doesn’t it do that or I wish it did that better, or I hate the way I have to do that all the time. Whatever the that is, means that a piece of that object is a failure, of design or construction or materials or conception. If the that can be done better or more economically or more usefully or in a more specialized fashion everybody benefits. It’s how cars have gone from horseless carriages to computer controlled rolling living rooms. And the idea works with every other mechanized or engineered object in our modern lives, which is essentially all of them.
It’s an eye-opening way of looking at the world.
Been reading too many Russian novels lately. Figured there just had to be a “v” sounds in there somewhere. 
I recall hearing someone, likely an engineer, on tv say that the loss of the Tacoma Narrows bridge was worth it just for the lessons learned.
I think that’s a cool attitude.
And this involves blisters somehow?
Oh!
