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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
To add a simple date to a tombstone in the late 90s, Ron Richard, an engraver based in Southern Massachusetts, would trace the numbers onto a sheet of rubber and cut them out with an X-acto knife. By the time he'd placed the stencil onto the stone and run over it with his sandblaster (sand bounces off of the rubber portions of the stencil and carves rock exposed in the voids in between), about 20 minutes had passed.
Today, the same process takes Richard about five minutes. "It's far, far different," Richard says of his job nearly 20 years after he started his business, Northeast Stonewriters.
Richard now uses his laptop computer, which he brings with him to the cemetery, to lay out the text he wants to engrave. He uses a specialized printer, designed for the sign industry, to cut the rubber stencil according to the appropriate sizes and fonts.
Engravers and etchers like Richard, according to a survey by the US Department of Labor, now have the most automated occupation in the United States.
In the context of the current narrative of robots and software taking over jobs, this sounds like a sad story. But when I called a handful of etchers and engravers who have been in the business for decades, that's not the story they told me.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday May 17 2017, @08:08AM (1 child)
One could probably learn a lot taking apart a body riddled by disease.
See what alcohol did to this liver? Look at those lungs... can you imagine those were in a living body? Guess these belonged to the Marlboro Man.
I have learned a lot from taking apart failed things. Probably more than taking apart perfectly operating things. I received insight on what made them fail. So, hopefully, I do not make the same mistake.
Or I'll more readily recognize the situation should I see it again.
Thanks, Julian... I am also in your camp.
I won't be here anymore and I won't need it, but maybe someone else needs a spare part. I know others can learn by disassembly, just as I have learned the same way.
When they get through taking me apart, and trying to figure out what made me tick, then they can do the burning bit. Save the ashes though... it makes good fertilizer. Maybe part of me will be reborn as a tree.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday May 17 2017, @07:00PM
My sister was always pretty amazed at seeing the MD students who light a cigarette, right after dissecting the black lungs of a smoker's corpse.