[todd8]

The achievements of past cultures are often so impressive. I have seen ancient Egyptian artifacts (King Tut's exhibit) and on the same day got to see some ancient Mayan and very old Japanese Art. All of it interesting and quite amazing (especially the intricacy and exactness of the admittedly much more recent Japanese Art).

To keep these ancient achievements in perspective though I recall working at Texas Instruments in the 70's (doing real-time process control programming). One of my friends there related to me his experience in giving a job interview, years earlier, to a young machinist, classically trained in Germany. The job seeker brought his final project as a sample of his work. A highly polished, precisely square, solid cube of polished steel, or so it appeared to my friend. It had all been made with hand tools, no fancy milling or grinding machines.

My friend marveled at it, but then the young man said "watch this" and proceeded to slide the upper half of the solid cube on a dovetailed channel that connected the upper half of the cube to the lower half. My friend, a mechanical engineer, said he had never seen anything like it; it was so carefully made that the channel was invisible to him when the cube was squared. The main shaping tool used in the construction of this cube was simply a file.