kragensitaker

While a boiler is indeed pretty fundamental, it's also among the most dangerous technologies to build; steam explosions are amazing things. It's dangerous enough that I would only want to learn to build boilers experimentally as part of a group that was willing to die and large enough to survive the deaths of some members. Or are there modern boiler designs that are less risky?

(Alcohol can be distilled with a still, which doesn't require any particularly high pressure, right?)

Unfortunately most of the people I know who are struggling to feed themselves with ineffective agriculture and whose children are vulnerable to dying of infectious disease don't have a lot of faith in this whole "civilization" thing, much less "science" and "technology" — they feel it's kind of failed them and is failing the world. Perhaps this is a sufficiently unusual self-selected group that their opinions wouldn't be the mainstream in the wake of a civilizational collapse, or perhaps not; do we have good records of public opinion after previous collapses?

I'm really excited to see your book! I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about related issues (how to make a bicycle from raw materials, an unfinished design study for a durable computer time capsule to preserve The Knowledge for post-apocalypse generations, how to build digital computers with stone-age materials, maybe you can make a trackpad from garbage, how to bootstrap an electronics lab from e-waste, how to bootstrap post-apocalyptic telecommunications, microfilm preservation of information using laser printers (see this three-page 600dpi King James bible), using toner transfer to etch stone tablets, and perhaps most popularly, bootstrapping a usable software stack on a bare-metal computer, for which my best effort so far is a self-compiling compiler in two pages of code) but I have very little experience actually doing things like this in practice. (Vinay, /u/hexayurt, has a lot more experience with it.)

So what I want to know is this. How can we carry forward the project you've started by publishing your book? To take a minimal example, the book excerpt in Scientific American explains:

Sodium thiosulfate is the fixing agent still used today and is relatively easy to prepare. Bubble sulfur gas through a solution of soda or caustic soda, then boil with powdered sulfur and dry for crystals of “hypo”.

I think this should read "sulfur dioxide gas" rather than "sulfur gas", since sulfur doesn't boil until 444°, at which point you can't bubble it through an aqueous solution of anything, and also because sodium sulfite is what you get when you bubble sulfur dioxide through lye. By reflex I looked for the "Edit" tab, but Scientific American is not Wikipedia and therefore will probably remain in error; the same limitation applies to a paper book, or even a Kindle book. How can we import the knowledge from your book into some kind of platform that lets us extend it, refine it by correcting errors like this one, adding details like how much powdered sulfur and how long to boil, and contextualize it by linking to experiment reports by people who have actually tried following the recipes and have tips on how to get them to work? Hopefully we don't need to duplicate your book from scratch in order to do that!

Empire-derived video games like Civilization commonly have a feature called a "technology tree", where your civilization "develops" a series of "technologies" as it advances, each depending on some previous ones. Fictional works like Fire Upon the Deep have speculated about designing such a technology tree to help "backward" alien civilizations advance; yours is the first serious attempt I've seen to create a practical technology tree for real life.

(I spent quite a while reading through your web site editing this question.)

Fundamental and meaningful things about mathematics can easily be said in a few pages; unfortunately, it will take the student several days of study to understand each page, because there is still no royal road to geometry.

It's a really interesting question how important these social structures are for a materially prosperous society. I think the answer is "very, very important," but it's really tricky to put into a book.