Resourcefulness Archives - understand-culture

Science the S— Out of This

In Andy Weir’s novel The Martian, first self-published as a serial on his blog and released as a book in 2011, astronaut Mark Watney is left behind on Mars. He grows potatoes in the habitat, makes water from rocket fuel, revives the old Pathfinder lander to contact NASA and modifies a rover for a 3,235-kilometer drive.

In Ridley Scott’s 2015 film, Matt Damon’s Watney sums up his position: “In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option: I’m gonna have to science the s— out of this.”

In the closing scene he says: “You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”

The Army You Have

On December 8, 2004, at Camp Buehring in Kuwait, Specialist Thomas Wilson asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld why soldiers “have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?” Soldiers of a Tennessee unit called the improvised plating “hillbilly armor.”

Rumsfeld answered: “You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want, or wish to have, at a later time.”

Here the soldiers were improvising, and the question was why they had to.

Mock Apple Pie

Mock apple pie looks and tastes like apple pie, but it contains no apples. The filling is made from crackers. The best-known recipe uses Ritz crackers, which Nabisco introduced in 1934.

The usual story is that the recipe was invented during the Great Depression. It is older. Newspapers printed apple-free apple pie recipes in 1857, and soda crackers were called for by 1869. The pie was “popular among pioneer families crossing the Great Plains.” One food writer calls the Depression story “untrue,” spread “probably by the Nabisco marketing folks.”

2,000 Uses

WD-40 was created in 1953 in San Diego by the Rocket Chemical Company to prevent rust in aerospace work. The first company to use it commercially was Convair, to protect the Atlas missile. The name records the 40th attempt.

Employees took cans home, and the product reached stores in 1958. In 2008 the company and members of its fan club published “The official list of 2,000 uses.”

Two Turntables

On August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc played at a back-to-school party in a community room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. His sister Cindy Campbell had organized it. The party is remembered as the beginning of hip-hop.

Expensive DJ equipment “was still a limiting factor” for young DJs. Herc “figured out how to use his two turntables to loop a single break with two copies of the same record.”

Jury-Rigged

American English has three related words for improvised work.

jury-rigged — “constructed or arranged in a makeshift fashion.” The term comes from sailing and is recorded from 1782.

jerry-rigged — “organized or constructed in a crude or improvised manner.” It is recorded from 1890. Its likeness to the other two probably helped it form.

jerry-built — “built cheaply and unsubstantially.”

Merriam-Webster notes that jury-rigged stresses doing what one can with the materials at hand. Jerry-built suggests poor quality.

The Cajun Navy

After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, boat owners from south Louisiana came with their own bass boats, johnboats and airboats and rescued people. A former state senator, Nick Gautreaux, had appealed for boaters.

The volunteers became known as the Cajun Navy. In 2016 one of them adapted the walkie-talkie app Zello and the location app Glympse to send boats where they were needed. The groups had “no admiral, no uniforms.” After Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Cajun Navy groups made more than 5,000 rescues in Texas.

The Hedgerow Cutter

In Normandy in 1944, Sergeant Curtis Culin of the New Jersey National Guard’s 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron is credited with a plow for tanks that cut through the hedgerows. It was made from “iron anti-tank jacks the Nazis had scattered across Normandy’s beaches.” The idea was “thought up by Culin overnight.”

General Omar Bradley saw it work and ordered production. The cutters went on “virtually every tank in the First Army.” In the breakout at St. Lô on July 25, 1944, the tanks “caught the Germans completely by surprise.”

Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make It Do

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” An early printed form appeared in 1933, tied to the spirit of New England: “Eat it up. Wear it out. Make it do.” In 1941 a Massachusetts newspaper called it the “old Yankee code of thrift.”

In 1942 and 1943 it became a motto of the home front. The Oregon State Archives uses it as a title in its exhibit on World War II. A wartime notice there reads: “Trucks and tires must last till victory.”

Two Peach Baskets

At the YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts, James Naismith invented a new indoor game. He asked a janitor to find two boxes to use as goals. The janitor brought him two peach baskets instead. They were hung about 10 feet above the floor. The ball was a soccer ball. The first game was played in December 1891.

After each score, someone had to get the ball out of the basket. The game kept the name of the object at hand: basketball.