They should have mentioned Tyrolian (Austrian) loden, a densely woven and felted wool that is reasonably water-resistant. Since that comes from the weaving, it does not require regular reproofing unlike a waxed cotton trench coat. I have a coat that is the best of both worlds, loden with a Gore-Tex membrane.
I also have a lighter weight Ventile raincoat by Private White VC that is absolutely phenomenal. I wish more brands would adopt it and democratize the fabric.
Interesting but I can't deal with the AI generated prose.
Sentences like "This was not a garment for walking between a carriage and a doorway. It was ..." show me no human has proof read or edited the text.
World War II did what it always does to materials technology: it accelerated it by decades.
is a clunker of a sentence. (NB: didn't say 'clanker')
Is it war in general that accelerates material technology, or simply WWII .. which is seemingly something that can be applied many times .. just add a dash of WWII to your tech.
The first is that the governments were willing to allocate vast amounts of money and resources for the development of new materials that would give them advantages over the opponents.
During normal market conditions, it would have been impossible to secure so much money for research whose results were uncertain to generate financial profits.
The second reason is that during wars the global commerce routes were perturbed, so many materials that normally were cheap and easily available became expensive or impossible to procure, which could block the production or the usage of certain kinds of weapons and military equipment.
Therefore it became necessary to find substitute materials, which was the origin of many research projects, e.g. nylon instead of silk, synthetic elastomers instead of natural rubber, synthetic gasoline instead of gasoline extracted from fossil oil and so on.
I don't think it was written by AI but rather edited with help of AI.
There are just a few obvious AI lines in the text.
Not great, not terrible but it immediately caught my eye.
Seriously, people are looking for reasons to get offended. Have you read anything written between 1990 and 2023? Plenty of people talk and write like this. Your post adds nothing to this discussion.
People are moving away from Gore-Tex, especially as the new jackets simply work worse than the previous ones that have poisoned our water. It's just simpler materials and mechanical venting (pit zips). Simple, strong, lightweight. And they don't cost $400.
Waxed jackets and especially Barbour are also having a comeback, I see a lot of them around. Not the best jackets for sports, but for a casual stroll in a light rain they work very well and they look much better than Gore-Tex
No. The newer GoreTex jackets work worse than previous ones. Much of it has to do with the DWR. The previous DWR that has now been banned for its inclusion of PFAS (forever chemicals) which did a much, much better job than the newer, non-PFAS DWR. This switch happened in the States last year I believe.
Gore-Tex these days is not made out of Teflon itself (as the fine article talks about) and its replacement is fine. As the article also points out the patent has been expired for some time and replacements have cropped up. The direct replacements are all fine too.
But without a DWR that works really well, you never have the right conditions to allow water vapor to escape from inside the jacket. Again as the article points out Gore-Tex performs well in the lab, which does not transfer to real world conditions.
So you have a problem where GoreTex kind of just acts like a much cheaper material, at a much greater expense. For those situations (most) you may as well just use a simpler, impermeable material (siliconed-coated nylon, for example) and vent it mechanically (open up a zipper).
The exception is actual alpine conditions, where precipitation is falling as something frozen (snow). There's really no need for the DWR to work perfectly to bead up the water on the surface, as it's not actually liquid.
But even then, much of a layer system for conditions is about control how much moisture you trap within your clothing. You climb a mountain, you sweat. What are you gunna do about it? Wearing a waterproof jacket is sometimes not what you wanna do at all, to keep your layers as dry as possible, and only put the jacket on when conditions require it (it's snowing, or it's so cold you need to trap the warmth in, even though that traps perspiration in too).
And if you don't like PFAS and forever chemicals, you're not going to like microplastics, the majority of which are from rubber car and truck tires. Electric cars -- being heavier -- wear out tires faster and are more of a problem in this respect. We don't talk about this much because we can't live in a world without cars.
Thanks for the detailed clarification. As to the DWR, my experience says that the best GoreTex jacket is one without a nylon outer layer, and therefore no need for DWR. The GoreTex Shakedry jackets finally delivered on the promise GoreTex had made for 50 years. And they did it by just giving you a jacket made out of a sheet of GoreTex and nothing else. No nylon outer layer, no need to mess with DWR. As it turns out, none of that was necessary to make a workable jacket, save one thing: Shakedry jackets are not very durable. IOW, you don’t want to wear a pack with it, the pack straps will rub through the material.
But if you’re not carrying a pack, and just going on a bike ride or a run, this is by far the best jacket I’ve ever owned, and I’ll cry real tears when it dies. Hopefully there will be workable alternatives by then.
You are correct re: Shakedry. What's interesting to me is that it used the now discontinued ePTFE which manufacturing used PFAS in production, but there is still no alternative PFAS-free Shakedry, despite now having an advantage of not requiring a DWR at all.
I would agree that even with the delicateness of Shakedry, or Shakedry-like product, there would still a use case and market.
Funny how in the 1800s they got rid of the hood. I assume hats were the reason? As in: everybody wears hats anyway, so why do we need the hoods? And then the hats mostly went away and thus the hood returned.
Staying dry (from the elements) is a lot less important. Once you start moving, the lack of breathability in any waterproof jacket means that you'll be soaking wet from your own sweat.
People over-emphasize the staying dry part, not understanding that the point of staying dry is usually to stay warm. If it's hot outside, staying dry is not that important.
“Think of it like this. Imagine you have a room full of people on one side of a door, and an empty room on the other side. Open the door and people will naturally drift toward the empty room. That’s how Gore-Tex breathes.”
They should have mentioned Tyrolian (Austrian) loden, a densely woven and felted wool that is reasonably water-resistant. Since that comes from the weaving, it does not require regular reproofing unlike a waxed cotton trench coat. I have a coat that is the best of both worlds, loden with a Gore-Tex membrane.
I also have a lighter weight Ventile raincoat by Private White VC that is absolutely phenomenal. I wish more brands would adopt it and democratize the fabric.
> I have a coat that is the best of both worlds, loden with a Gore-Tex membrane.
Until the goretex delaminates and becomes impossible to repair, of course.
Interesting but I can't deal with the AI generated prose. Sentences like "This was not a garment for walking between a carriage and a doorway. It was ..." show me no human has proof read or edited the text.
LLM or human,
is a clunker of a sentence. (NB: didn't say 'clanker')Is it war in general that accelerates material technology, or simply WWII .. which is seemingly something that can be applied many times .. just add a dash of WWII to your tech.
Wars have accelerated technology for 2 reasons.
The first is that the governments were willing to allocate vast amounts of money and resources for the development of new materials that would give them advantages over the opponents.
During normal market conditions, it would have been impossible to secure so much money for research whose results were uncertain to generate financial profits.
The second reason is that during wars the global commerce routes were perturbed, so many materials that normally were cheap and easily available became expensive or impossible to procure, which could block the production or the usage of certain kinds of weapons and military equipment.
Therefore it became necessary to find substitute materials, which was the origin of many research projects, e.g. nylon instead of silk, synthetic elastomers instead of natural rubber, synthetic gasoline instead of gasoline extracted from fossil oil and so on.
Thanks, Claude.
The premise was never unclear, the complaint is about sentence structure.
You are delusional if you believe that you can distinguish AI-generated texts from human-generated texts, because obviously you can't.
I didn't try to, I just make assumptions about long walls of text that manage to entirely miss the point.
Assuming you actually put time into what you wrote would be the less charitable interpretation.
> Is it war in general that accelerates material technology, or simply WWII
The reply did not miss the point, it was addressing a question directly posed in the original comment.
It didn't, though, the question you quoted is a rhetorical question posed to point out the awkwardness of the original piece's phrasing.
By taking the question seriously, you and the person I replied to both have missed the point.
It was the "honest" stuff that hit my radar, but maybe Claude is just ruining that word for "honest" usage.
If Claude does it, people already did.
I don't think it was written by AI but rather edited with help of AI. There are just a few obvious AI lines in the text. Not great, not terrible but it immediately caught my eye.
by michael knispel, editor in chief of the site for 10 years
https://www.carryology.com/contributor/michael-knispel/
but who knows
.....what?
Seriously, people are looking for reasons to get offended. Have you read anything written between 1990 and 2023? Plenty of people talk and write like this. Your post adds nothing to this discussion.
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[dead]
People are moving away from Gore-Tex, especially as the new jackets simply work worse than the previous ones that have poisoned our water. It's just simpler materials and mechanical venting (pit zips). Simple, strong, lightweight. And they don't cost $400.
Waxed jackets and especially Barbour are also having a comeback, I see a lot of them around. Not the best jackets for sports, but for a casual stroll in a light rain they work very well and they look much better than Gore-Tex
People are moving away from Gore-Tex, especially as the new jackets simply work worse…
Eh? Typo? Why move away from GoreTex if the new jackets are worse?
As a big user of GoreTex, I’m hoping you meant to say the new jackets are better.
No. The newer GoreTex jackets work worse than previous ones. Much of it has to do with the DWR. The previous DWR that has now been banned for its inclusion of PFAS (forever chemicals) which did a much, much better job than the newer, non-PFAS DWR. This switch happened in the States last year I believe.
Gore-Tex these days is not made out of Teflon itself (as the fine article talks about) and its replacement is fine. As the article also points out the patent has been expired for some time and replacements have cropped up. The direct replacements are all fine too.
But without a DWR that works really well, you never have the right conditions to allow water vapor to escape from inside the jacket. Again as the article points out Gore-Tex performs well in the lab, which does not transfer to real world conditions.
So you have a problem where GoreTex kind of just acts like a much cheaper material, at a much greater expense. For those situations (most) you may as well just use a simpler, impermeable material (siliconed-coated nylon, for example) and vent it mechanically (open up a zipper).
The exception is actual alpine conditions, where precipitation is falling as something frozen (snow). There's really no need for the DWR to work perfectly to bead up the water on the surface, as it's not actually liquid.
But even then, much of a layer system for conditions is about control how much moisture you trap within your clothing. You climb a mountain, you sweat. What are you gunna do about it? Wearing a waterproof jacket is sometimes not what you wanna do at all, to keep your layers as dry as possible, and only put the jacket on when conditions require it (it's snowing, or it's so cold you need to trap the warmth in, even though that traps perspiration in too).
And if you don't like PFAS and forever chemicals, you're not going to like microplastics, the majority of which are from rubber car and truck tires. Electric cars -- being heavier -- wear out tires faster and are more of a problem in this respect. We don't talk about this much because we can't live in a world without cars.
Thanks for the detailed clarification. As to the DWR, my experience says that the best GoreTex jacket is one without a nylon outer layer, and therefore no need for DWR. The GoreTex Shakedry jackets finally delivered on the promise GoreTex had made for 50 years. And they did it by just giving you a jacket made out of a sheet of GoreTex and nothing else. No nylon outer layer, no need to mess with DWR. As it turns out, none of that was necessary to make a workable jacket, save one thing: Shakedry jackets are not very durable. IOW, you don’t want to wear a pack with it, the pack straps will rub through the material. But if you’re not carrying a pack, and just going on a bike ride or a run, this is by far the best jacket I’ve ever owned, and I’ll cry real tears when it dies. Hopefully there will be workable alternatives by then.
You are correct re: Shakedry. What's interesting to me is that it used the now discontinued ePTFE which manufacturing used PFAS in production, but there is still no alternative PFAS-free Shakedry, despite now having an advantage of not requiring a DWR at all.
I would agree that even with the delicateness of Shakedry, or Shakedry-like product, there would still a use case and market.
Funny how in the 1800s they got rid of the hood. I assume hats were the reason? As in: everybody wears hats anyway, so why do we need the hoods? And then the hats mostly went away and thus the hood returned.
I wonder about hot environments where it rains, like tropical countries. Any tips or insights on what works best?
Staying dry (from the elements) is a lot less important. Once you start moving, the lack of breathability in any waterproof jacket means that you'll be soaking wet from your own sweat.
People over-emphasize the staying dry part, not understanding that the point of staying dry is usually to stay warm. If it's hot outside, staying dry is not that important.
What can we anthropomorphize next?
“Think of it like this. Imagine you have a room full of people on one side of a door, and an empty room on the other side. Open the door and people will naturally drift toward the empty room. That’s how Gore-Tex breathes.”
Anthropomorphization is just such a sexy, attractive guy. So seductive. I always give in to what he wants…
Bizarre that simple leather garments aren't mentioned. I'm pretty sure leather was the go-to solution to rain and cold for much of human history.
"strange" was apparently edited out of the title.
hn applies a few mechanical cleanup/formatting rules, click-bait words is one of them
see: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20title%20automatic&type=...