“I’ve been through many teachers, love them all, but I had to leave them all behind to discover WHAT is.”

Butterflies Need No Taxidermist.

“Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.”

According to the same source …

“Most hand tools lend themselves to convivial use unless they are artificially restricted through some institutional arrangements. They can be restricted by becoming the monopoly of one profession, as happens with dentist drills through the requirement of a license and with libraries or laboratories by placing them within schools. Also, tools can be purposely limited when simple pliers and screwdrivers are insufficient to repair modern cars.”

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A self-driving car is obviously not a convivial tool.

Solar Power is “convivial.” Nuclear power is not.

“Sometimes people find themselves falling asleep or becoming tired when reading. This is because the back and forth eye motion reading requires can weaken muscles. To test for this — select any strong indicator muscle and test with the person looking straight ahead. Re-test with the eyes rolled as far as possible to the left, then to the right, without moving the head. If the indicator muscle goes weak, make the following correction. Put one hand on the navel and the other contacting points just below the clavicle and to either side of the sternum. Re-test with the eyes turned right, then left. The muscle should be strong.”

“While it is easy to imagine anyone’s reluctance to test the aroma of urine, it should be kept in mind that long before the era of advanced medical technology, doctors not only routinely noted the scent of urine but tasted it as well as a means of diagnosis. And even today there are some doctors who request their patients to eat asparagus and make a note of the time it took before its characteristic odor appeared in the urine as a rough measure of kidney function.”

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Henry Enfield Roscoe & Carl Schorlemmer (A Treatise on Chemistry, Vol. II: The Metals, 1913) wrote …

“The whole of the animal body, especially the juices, is rich in sodium compounds, the carbonate, chloride, and phosphate chiefly occurring, together with sodium salts of organic acids.

“Plants growing in or near the sea contain sulphate, iodide, and chloride of sodium. Sodium salts, are, however, not characteristic of vegetable life in the same sense that potassium salts are. Thus, whilst the latter alkali is always present in larger quantities in certain organs of the plant than in others, sodium appears in general to be equally diffused throughout the whole organism. It is also a remarkable fact that the sodium salts contained in the ashes of plants are insoluble in water, as they combine with the phosphates of the alkaline earths to form insoluble compounds. For this reason the presence of sodium compounds in the ashes of plants has often been overlooked.

“Duhamel and Cadet have shown that if the plant Salsola Soda, which grows near the sea, and which yields an ash rich in soda salts, be transplanted to an inland situation, the ash gradually loses in soda and gains in potash, until at last the whole of the former disappears. On the other hand, if inland plants are grown near the sea the reverse change takes place (Correnwinder).”