Will do in a Pinch

ry commented on the list will-do-in-a-pinch

are these the kinds of things you are talking about? tires as planter boxes, a spoon to cook heroin, binder clips as cable stays, mason jar as barware or hurricane candle-holder; stethoscope for safecracking, CDs as bike reflectors? I hesitated over spoon because it seems to be the de facto "proper tool for the job" (is there a word that means "proper tool for the job")?

January 23, 2013

hernesheir commented on the list will-do-in-a-pinch

Sure, ry, those are all great. One would think the top of the list would be duct tape, the handy-man's secret weapon.

January 23, 2013

ruzuzu commented on the list will-do-in-a-pinch

This is great, hh. Just arrived here after looking up buffalo nickel.

June 14, 2017

ruzuzu commented on the list will-do-in-a-pinch

I just read this in an article about Steve Casner's “Careful: A User’s Guide to Our Injury-Prone Minds,” (at http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/be-careful-your-mind-makes-accidents-inevitable):

"To an extent, we are accident-prone because we are imaginative. We are determined to use familiar tools in novel ways—we might use a knife handle, say, to break up ice in the freezer, or a screwdriver to pry open a stuck drawer. The problem is that we imagine how things will go right but not how they will go wrong. In psychological terms, we perceive “affordances for action” (the blade of the screwdriver prying off the lid), but not “affordances for harm” (the blade breaking off, flying upward, and stabbing us in the eye). Casner worries that our optimism about our own plans might be an insurmountable part of our evolutionary heritage. Recalling the time he fell off a chair while trying to replace the batteries in his smoke detector—he should have used a ladder—Casner reflects that, in our primate past, it was the climbers who ate."

June 14, 2017