u/benjamin-crowell

I'm learning to work with traditional Japanese lacquer, and one of the substances used in that craft as a filler is a certain mixture of clay and mineral powders, which people generally import from Japan. It seemed kind of silly to me to pay to have what is essentially dirt flown across the Pacific, so I thought it would be a fun hack to try to create a work-alike for the material from ingredients that are cheap and easy to obtain here in the US. Part of the composition is typically feldspar powder, and I read online that Bon Ami cleansing powder ("hasn't scratched yet") was pure feldspar if you got the original version. It turns out that you can no longer buy that formulation, so using Bon Ami as a source of feldspar is rapidly fading into impracticality, and I will probably just leave that ingredient out of my work-alike. However, the science geek in me thought it would be fun to try to separate out the feldspar, just as an intellectual/experimental challenge. (I'm a retired physicist, working at home, and my knowledge of chemistry is extremely weak.)

The label says it contains the following ingredients:

• calcium carbonate (limestone)

• feldspar

• sodium carbonate

• sodium bicarbonate

• C10-C16 alkylbenzene sulfonic acid (surfactant)

I looked up the the carbonate compounds on wikipedia, and I found that sodium carbonate was a water-soluble base, while calcium carbonate reacts with acids to give CO2 and water. Sodium bicarbonate is just baking soda.

I used my kitchen scale to weigh out 1.0 g of Bon Ami, and I put it in a coffee filter and put that inside a funnel. I washed the sample with water, and then with vinegar, and left it out overnight to dry. In the morning, I had about 0.08 g of light gray powder, which I would guess is fairly pure feldspar.

This was an absurd amount of effort in order to produce such a tiny amount of feldspar, but just for fun, I thought I would ask here whether anyone can think of a more practical way to process a kilogram quantity of this stuff, which could be carried out using kitchen tools or simple hand-made apparatus. Sluice box? Toaster oven?

I own a set of sieves, the finest of which is 30 μm, so the simplest idea I have for increasing throughput is simply to use that sieve as a replacement for the funnel and filter paper.

(As a side note, if anyone knows of a vendor that would actually sell a substance like feldspar powder, that would be helpful. Amazon sells clay and mineral powders mainly for use in DIY cosmetics.)

Is there anyone here who has experience making sabi with diatomaceous earth rather than tonoko clay powder, or who can say anything about the differences between the two materials? Are they interchangeable?

There is food-safe diatomaceous earth, which is different from the stuff sold for pool filters. My understanding is that 50 years ago, people were getting lung diseases from inhaling diatomaceous earth, but the pool-grade stuff is safer now, and the food-grade stuff is safe enough that farmers mix it into cattle feed for certain purposes.

All other things being equal, it seems sensible to me as an American to use diatomaceous earth rather then paying to fly dirt across the pacific -- and waiting for it to arrive, and paying the Trump tariffs.

I'm lacquering a wooden bowl, and I have a couple of coats of ki on it so far. When I was wet sanding the inside of the bowl after curing the second coat, I made a long scratch in the urushi. I must have not been paying close enough attention to what I was doing, but I'm guessing that the sandpaper had a stiff corner where I'd folded it, and the corner made the scrape. Is there a better way to do this? It seems like there isn't going to be any way to form a flat piece of sandpaper into a three-dimensional curved shape without having some folds and edges.

Any suggestions on how to repair such a scratch?

In the edition of Hesiod I have access to, there is the verb πιμπλῇσι. Why is it accentuated this way rather than πίμπλῃσι? Searching through some texts, the only other subjunctive I can find that is accentuated like this is ἀγνοιῇσι (Odyssey 24.218), but that makes sense because the stem is ἀγνοιε-, so it's a contraction. But there is no ε in the stem of πίμπλῃσι. There are also aorists in Homer like φθῇσιν and θῇσι, where obviously the accent has nowhere else to go because the verb is two syllables.

Does anyone have any information about using sand in urushi? I was thinking that it might be a way to create an interesting visual texture, it would be cheap, and you could make light colors without using heavily pigmented urushis.

My concept of the process, which I was thinking of testing on a scrap of wood, was something like the following. First put the sand through sieves to select particle sizes in a certain range, say 0.2-0.6 mm (#80 to #30 sieve). Wash it and dry it in a toaster oven. Lay down a layer of sabi about 0.5 mm thick. Sprinkle the sand onto it while it's still completely wet. Press the sand into it with a flat tool so that the tops of all the grains are as much as possible at the same height regardless of size. Cure it for an hour or so, then turn it over and dump off any grains that haven't adhered. Cure for a few days. Brush on a coat of ki urushi that is diluted as much as possible while still conforming to the curvature of the surface and not just collecting in a pool at the bottom. Hopefully it is possible to achieve a consistency such that it flows and fills in the spaces between the grains while not covering them on top with a layer that would be thick enough to be opaque. Go through further cycles of sanding the urushi (not sanding the sand) and applying ki urushi until you have a surface that is smooth to the touch but still has visible grains of sand.

It would be great to hear comments such as "That won't work because ..." or "No, the right way to do it is..."

If you're a climber and haven't had athlete's foot, count yourself lucky. Here's some info that may be helpful if you have. This is based on a combination of reading scientific papers and my own experience.

There are a lot of folk remedies for removing the fungus from your climbing shoes. For an initial cleaning, use Lysol and a toothbrush and try to remove as much crap as possible. Studies in veterinary clinics show that if you don't initially physically remove as much crud as possible, other methods of sanitizing are ineffective. One remedy that definitely will not work is putting your shoes in the freezer; experiments have shown that it can survive those temperatures just fine. There is more scientific support for heat, but when people have studied what temperatures the fungus can survive, the answer is complicated because there are multiple species that can cause athlete's foot, and they differ in their ability to tolerate heat. By trial and error, I've found that both my climbing shoes and my Chaco sandals could stand 170 F without any evident damage, but 190 F caused the adhesives in the Chacos to come apart. My guess based on the (tangentially applicable) science is that an hour in a toaster oven at 170 F will probably kill any fungus. There are also gadgets you can buy that are ultraviolet lamps designed to be put inside shoes. They emit UV in the UVC band, which has been shown to kill athlete's foot fungus once it gets your toenails (where it's hard to eradicate with drugs), but there is not yet any direct scientific evidence AFAIK that these shoe gadgets are effective for this purpose. I bought one, and it is certainly a lot more convenient to use than putting the shoes in the toaster oven.

General science stuff: Fungi are evolutionarily close to animals, so it's hard to find drugs that kill fungi but aren't toxic to humans. Athlete's foot originated in SE Asia, spread from there starting in the 19th c when colonialists brought it home with them. Farmers use huge amounts of antifungals on crops. Yields might be 30% lower without them. This produces drug-resistant strains. These spores can get distributed up into the upper atmosphere and broadcast widely. There are strains in India that resist both azoles and terbinafine. They tend to spread around the hips, and they cause itching.

Athlete's foot is most obvious when it infects the spaces between your toes. It tends to go for the outermost two toe-gaps. However, it also tends to infect the skin on your heels, which causes a completely different looking condition, even though it's the same fungus. On the heel, it looks like you just have some dry and cracked skin, with some white color in the grooves and cracks.

Drugs come in several classes. There are creams, which are either azoles or terbinafine. There are also sprays, which are more convenient for treating larger areas like the whole sole of the foot. What I ended up doing was first spraying the whole sole of my foot with a spray, then using q-tips to apply a cream to both the heel and the spaces between the toes. Do not make the mistake of just treating the spaces between the toes without treating the heels. If you do this, the fungus will just lurk on the heels and keep recolonizing the toes.

Keep your feet as dry as possible. Wash your feet every day, including the spaces between the toes. After you wash them, dry them off, including the spaces between the toes, with something like a tee-shirt, and then throw the tee-shirt in the laundry basket. Change your bath towels and bed sheets every day or two.

Wear non-occlusive footwear, which helps to keep your feet from getting damp. There are studies that seem to show that simply wearing toe socks is pretty effective.

Never share toenail clippers. Keep your toenails super short so that moisture isn't trapped under them after you bathe, and every time you use the clippers, sanitize them overnight by soaking them in alcohol or acetone.

References:

Enwemeka et al., The role of UV and blue light in photo-eradication of microorganisms

Seidel, Evaluation of the heat sensitivity of Trichophyton rubrum and Trichophyton interdigitale

Akhoundi, Effect of Household Laundering, Heat Drying, and Freezing on the Survival of Dermatophyte Conidia

Is it possible to get a smooth color gradient with urushi, and if so, what is the technique?

I tried a couple of crude experiments with black and red urushi on some scraps of wood.

On one of them I mixed the urushis on my palette and painted in bands as I slowly varied the color from black to red. This seemed OK-ish, although my technique would need more work. It came out with obvious bands rather than a continuous gradient, but maybe I could have drawn one color into the other. However, it was difficult to do that kind of thing without making the urushi too thick over all, and for that reason I got some puckering.

In the other experiment, I tried painting a uniform layer of black, then put it in the muro for 30 min, then put a uniform layer of red on top. I was hoping that the two urushis would diffuse into each other enough so that later I could sand, and by sanding some parts more than others I could vary the color smoothly. This did not seem to work well. In order to hide the black underneath the red completely, I needed to apply quite a bit of red. However, I then had a layer of almost uncured black with a layer of red on top, and it totally puckered over the entire surface. Of course I could have let the black cure completely first, but then I imagine there would be a sharp boundary between the two layers, which would make it impossible to get a color gradient by sanding.

I've read about togidashi, which seems similar but not really the same thing, since it's a gradient between urushi and metal, not a gradient between urushi and urushi.

I don't have any skills with oil or acrylic paints, but I gather that there is a technique that can be used where you dilute your paint with a partially transparent glazing medium and then paint it on top of a fully dried lower layer, varying its depth. Can this be done at all with urushi, and if so, what would the diluting material be? A petroleum product such as ligroin or kerosene? Ki urushi? Clear urushi? (I've never used clear urushi, and I'm not sure what its purpose is.)

Iliad 3.262 has the phrase βήσετο δίφρον. I'm confused by the form of the verb.

It doesn't seem causative (he mounted the chariot), so semantically you would expect a 2nd aorist here.

The ε is a thematic vowel, which you should only get in a 2nd aorist.

But...

Root aorists generally don't have a middle voice, so this has to be a 1st aorist.

The sigma makes it look like a first aorist, and the stem βησ- is in general the stem for the 1st aorist of this verb.

To add confusion, Hesiod has ἐβήσατο, with an alpha.

Can anyone solve this puzzle for me?

I'm trying to train my brain to recognize περί+gen and ὑπέρ+gen when they describe something like a cause or purpose. Studying the CGL entries, I'm unsure about how much semantic difference there is between the two. It seems like both can be used about conflict for the sake of and grieving/fearing for the sake of. Does ὑπέρ tend to get used more often for protection and support, or acting as a stand-in for someone else? In the cases where the Venn diagrams overlap, is one of these more common than the other?

Logeion lists βάσει and βάσῃ as future middle forms of βαίνω. Presumably these are Doric and the stem is βασ-. My understanding is that Doric changes σ to σε in the future active and middle (Smyth 540b), which is why you get "Doric futures" in Attic. Smyth gives the example λυσῇ, which makes sense to me because the uncontracted form would be λυσέῃ, and contraction would give an accent on the final syllable. But the actual forms seem to be βάσει and βάσῃ. Why?

Smyth actually says that Doric "usually" adds the ε. Is this just one of the verbs for which Doric doesn't add an ε?

[EDIT] I can't edit the title, but it should be "rather than."