Everything I know about life I learned from model aeroplanes
The Tao of Airfix
After struggling with a variety of languages it’s a slight relief to find a new Dornier Do217 reference in English – Osprey Combat Aircraft 139, Do217 Units of World War 2 currently at a decent price from Books etc.
The author is Chris Goss so it’s going to be a good one. As one would expect, the usual Osprey format focusing on units and operational history, but with some good photos and colour schemes.
Continue reading “If you go chasing rabbits… a new Dornier Do217 reference, auf Englisch”
After determined searching and a bit of retail, some more Dornier Do217 books arrived. One in German, two in Polish, but with lots of pictures and diagrams (fortunately for some of us).
What started out as “a couple of books off eBay for some pictures” turned into a Holy Grail-like obsessive quest for the definitive Do217 reference. Spoiler alert: there isn’t one – yet.
Continue reading “Further down the rabbit hole – even more Dornier Do217 books”
Once again, apparently simple questions turn out not to have simple answers. Like just about everything else these days, Dornier Do217 references have a few gaps and a fair amount of ambiguous information. In various languages, including German and Japanese.
Looking for a few pictures of the real aircraft modelled by Airfix and a few odd bits of information about the Do217E turned into a real rabbit hole. I now have a small but growing collection of Do217 books, each with its own distinct pieces of the (incomplete) puzzle.
Continue reading “Down the rabbit hole – Dornier Do217 references”
Instructions are supposed to literally tell us what to do. In the UK (possibly just England, it’s hard to keep up) we were recently told that instructions are even stronger than guidance. At the very least, you expect them to be sort of helpful in some way. However, we often find that instructions tell us more about the people who wrote them than about the task at hand.
You hope that instructions will help you with some sort of difficult or confusing task. Someone has gone to the trouble of writing them out, or drawing a diagram. They have been written by experts, who you believe are trying to help you – hopefully the experts believe that too. But the only time you seem to get unambiguous instructions is when the task is so obvious you don’t need them. So instructions often turn out to be either unhelpful or unnecessary – you start out with high expectations and they let you down.
I found out about unhelpful instructions from model aeroplane kits, and then they kept turning up in adult life: car maintenance manuals, Swedish self assembly furniture, anything remotely related to software etc. And let’s not forget instructions from the government, which can be about important stuff like how to stay alive.
Continue reading “What do instructions really tell us?”