"Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap" by David Gingery which covers everything from building a foundry to making all your tools from first principles using nothing but river sand and junk metal for smelting.
"On Trails" by Robert Moore that discusses how walking paths from the first peoples persist, grow and change over hundreds of years, along with advances in walking trail design in recent years to become a part time recreational activity vs the pure utility of terrain traversal as they first were. Covers how a trail is a "living thing", as it were, because any who tread on it help reinforce it. Covers non human trails like ants and their reenforcement via pheromones and the like.
To continue this discussion and to tie it into the original link, worth looking at this YouTube Video where "Jon Pike interviews Quentin Skinner about Thomas Hobbes' masterpiece Leviathan"...
I've done a similar thing with Pizza places around me and discovered that my tastes were different when I ordered the same type of pizza pie and had them all at the same time, compared to what I preferred in the restaurant.
That's pretty hard/impossible to do with Phở as the noodles will degrade pretty quickly. I'm hoping that go 3 times to a place spread over time will help average out the swings in my tastes.
Helping people like you are seems like an amazing start. Maybe try to get a pyramid structure going where you teach people to help other people and then they teach people and then it’s a movement? But at all times a low level of effort so there is no pressure other than just holding up a sign or a marker.
I’ve found the hardest thing is breaking the ice and the sign / marker normalises a low stakes interaction where one participant can walk away at any time
I've thought a lot about this since you wrote it. I do wonder if this could become a pyramid activity.
One problem is that it has to be people who are relatively comfortable talking to strangers, which by definition excludes the main people I'm trying to reach.
That said, I wonder if there's a middle ground. Maybe people like myself, who feel unfulfilled, but don't have too much difficulty talking to strangers, could be the ones who hold the signs. And we could help those people get to the point we're at... it could work.
I think teaching people so that they can teach others is a necessity. I've fond that the most effective meetups are the ones where people have a shared sense of ownership, which includes being welcoming to people who are new. One board game group I am a part of ran for 2 years without an official host for this reason.
