Tag: TechStories

Exploring the “Solnyshko”: A Glimpse into Unorthodox Soviet Physiotherapy Practices | October 20 2024, 20:20

I just came across a device called “Solnyshko” that is still in use and available for sale in Russia. It commonly appears in memes about the first children’s hookah. A while back, I read about Soviet physiotherapy, which essentially differed from Western practices in that it involved testing all sorts of wild ideas on people without the usual processes required for legitimate medical devices.

So, what exactly is this “Solnyshko”? You can Google it by “OUFnu (UHN-1)”. Inside, there’s a DRT 240 lamp – a high-pressure mercury arc tube lamp used in sterilizers. The 240 in the name stands for 240 nm, which refers to the harsh UV radiation (100-280 nm). The device directs UV-C radiation towards the mucous membrane inside the mouth. The mucous membrane (excluding the eyes), as known, is not protected from UV rays (unlike skin and eyes), and here it is exposed to intense UV-C radiation, which, under normal circumstances without ozone holes, doesn’t even reach the Earth’s surface. Essentially, “treatment” is achieved by burning off the mucous membrane along with bacteria and viruses. Sterilizer radiation simply kills cells and, like any UV-C exposure, is proven to promote the development of cancer.

How did we ever survive all this in childhood 🙂 I just googled and it turns out that the arsenal of children’s health resorts also included UHF-therapy (ultra-high frequency electromagnetic fields), VLOK (intravascular laser blood irradiation), and electrophoresis (this is a type of drug delivery in a non-invasive way — without needles! — directly to the exact spot where it hurts, though it doesn’t work at all, but at least it doesn’t cause harm).

It’s madness overall, and if you search for the Solnyshko irradiator, for instance, you’ll find it in hundreds of places.

Technological Revolutions: From Textiles to AI and Their Unintended Consequences | October 19 2024, 02:49

Regarding the issue of “AI taking people’s jobs. I read about an interesting example in a book where the invention of a machine that was supposed to greatly simplify people’s work ultimately led to worsening working and living conditions for laborers (and, incidentally, the British occupation of Egypt). It’s about Whitney’s machine, which simplified cotton processing.

Before the invention of the loom, fabric was worth its weight in gold. Literally, a gram of silk cost almost as much as a gram of gold. Stories about crime in the 18th and 19th centuries are almost always about how criminals were put in jail or sent to Australia for stealing a handkerchief, a bundle of lace, or some other seemingly trivial item, but in reality, these were often items of enormous value. A pair of silk stockings could cost 5 pounds, and a bundle of lace could be sold for 20 pounds — enough to live on for a couple of years, and a very serious loss for any shop owner. A silk cloak cost 50 pounds sterling, which was unaffordable for anyone but the highest nobility.

John Kay, a young man from Lancashire, invented the mechanical (flying) shuttle — one of the first revolutionary inventions necessary for the development of the textile industry. Kay’s mobile shuttle doubled the speed of weaving work. Spinners, who were already struggling to keep up with weavers, fell even further behind, and problems began to arise across the entire supply chain, creating huge economic difficulties for all participants in the process.

In 1764, an illiterate weaver from Lancashire named James Hargreaves invented an amazingly simple device known as the “spinning jenny, which used multiple spindles to do the work of ten spinners.

Before this invention, home craftsmen spun 500,000 pounds of cotton by hand each year in England. By 1785, thanks to Hargreaves’ machine and its improved versions, this number had jumped to 16 million pounds.

In England. In the USA, there was a different problem. In the American South, the only type that grew well was short-staple cotton. But it was not profitable to harvest because each boll contained sticky seeds – three pounds of seeds for every pound of fiber, and they had to be picked out by hand. This was so labor-intensive that even using slave labor didn’t pay off. By hand, one worker could only clean about 1 pound (0.45 kg) of cotton per day. Eli Whitney solved the problem by inventing a simple rotating drum, which used nails to grasp the fiber, leaving the seeds behind. He called his machine a “gin” (from engine). Whitney’s machine allowed one person to clean up to 50 pounds (about 22.7 kg) of cotton per day. That is, 50 times more. In effect, it replaced 50 people with one.

At that point, slavery existed in six states in the US; by the time of the Civil War, it had spread to 15.

Why? It turned out that instead of reducing the need for labor, Whitney’s machine increased it: because cleaning was no longer the bottleneck of production, more workers were needed for planting, harvesting, and processing the increasing crop. The US became the main global supplier of cotton, which made the textile industry in Europe (especially Britain) dependent on American raw materials. This led to the growth of the slaveholding system in the southern states, and in England, increased the share of child labor in production (because they didn’t need to be paid, just fed, and children managed better).

Subsequently, when the Civil War in the US ended, cotton prices fell, leading Egypt (where high-quality long-staple cotton was grown and sold to England) into an economic crisis and a rise in foreign debts. Eventually, this was one of the reasons for the British occupation of Egypt in 1882.

Returning to the topic of AI. The job market adapts, but sometimes slowly and with losses. In the long run, new jobs will appear, but the transition period might be accompanied by mass unemployment and social upheavals.

Indeed, there is still no such thing as true artificial intelligence. AI will become real AI when it understands and utilizes knowledge about the structure of the world, not just projections of this knowledge. Take image generation—it uses “projections—a database of annotated photo and video materials. It does not use knowledge about anatomy and the structure of the world. The same is true in GenAI—projections are everywhere, not pure knowledge. It seems that the current breakthroughs in GenAI are unsuitable for storing, accumulating, and using “pure knowledge.

Also, we need not just a system that can correctly answer our trivial questions. We need a system capable of posing the right non-trivial questions. Large language models (LLM) by their nature are not capable of this.

Nevertheless, the stories of the inventions by Kay, Hargreaves, and Whitney do draw parallels.

Historical Curiosities: From Fashionable Mouches to Milk Sickness | October 17 2024, 00:53

Curiosities — four items on various topics: about face patches, wigs, an architect, and milk sickness.

First: I’m reading that in England, during the 16th to 18th centuries, it was fashionable to wear artificial beauty marks, known as mouches (French for ‘fly’). Eventually, these beauty marks took on shapes like stars or crescents, worn on the face, neck, and shoulders. It is written that one lady had a carriage and six horses galloping across her cheeks. At the height of this fashion, people wore a multitude of mouches, probably looking as if they were swarmed by flies.

Interestingly, both men and women wore mouches, and they were reckoned to reflect a person’s political leanings depending on which cheek they were worn – on the right (by the Whigs) or on the left (by the Tories). Similarly, a heart on the right cheek meant that a person was married, and on the left, that they were engaged. They became so complex and varied that they spawned an entire vocabulary: on the chin called silencieuse, on the nose – l’impudente or l’effrontée, in the middle of the forehead – majestueuse, and so on throughout the head. In the 1780s, artificial eyebrows made of mouse skin briefly became fashionable.

Thus, stylized stickers and acne patches in the shape of stars and hearts are a modern counterpart to this trend. We await the modern equivalent of mouse-skin eyebrows.

Illustration: “The Morning: The Woman at Her Toilet by Gilles-Edme Petit, c. 1745-1760. The text below – “these artificial spots add ‘vivacity’ to the eyes and face. However, placed poorly, they could mar beauty.”

Second: It turns out that there was a condition called Milk sickness in the USA. At the beginning of the 19th century, it claimed thousands of lives among settlers in the Midwest, especially around the Ohio River and its tributaries. The essence of it was that a seemingly healthy cow would start giving milk that could quickly “knock one off their feet” in the worst case, or just cause severe suffering from vomiting and pain if you were luckier. The culprit was a plant the cow ate, known as white snakeroot, but, of course, no one told it what was safe and what was not. Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby is credited with figuring out the cause. She was told about it by a Shawnee woman she had befriended, after which Bixby conducted experiments to observe and document evidence.

Bonus curiosity about Benjamin Latrobe, the architect of the Capitol in our Washington. Finished college, tried building something in Europe, didn’t work out, his wife died, went bankrupt, the guy decided to drop everything and move to the States. Met Washington’s nephew and the rest is history. Seven years after moving, he was already building the Capitol, and before that, he designed several other important buildings today (Philadelphia Bank, original jail in Richmond, etc.). Basically, networking — it’s important, and it’s crucial in moments when things just aren’t going right to just take everything and change it.

About wigs, it’s even more interesting. From the mid-17th to the early 19th centuries, men wore wigs so massively that the fashion lasted a whole 150 years. Wigs were made of anything: human and horse hair, silk, goat wool, cotton thread, and even wire. They were very expensive — up to 50 sterling pounds each — and were considered such valuable property that they were bequeathed by inheritance. The bigger and heavier the wig, the higher the status of its owner — hence the expression ‘bigwig.’ Since wigs were often stolen, they were the first things robbers grabbed.

Wig maintenance was also a hassle. Once a week they were sent back for “rebaking” to re-curl the locks — this process was called fluxing. From the 1700s it became fashionable to sprinkle the wig with white flour daily (incidentally, “to sprinkle one’s head with ashes isn’t about this. It’s from the Bible, used as a symbol of repentance, mourning, and admission of guilt). When a wheat shortage hit France in the 1770s, it triggered massive riots — people were outraged that scarce flour was being used on aristocrats’ heads instead of bread. By the end of the 18th century, colored powders, especially blue and pink, became popular. The powdering process was a whole ceremony: they put on the wig, covered the shoulders with cloth, put the face in a paper funnel (so as not to suffocate), and a servant would spray powder on the head using bellows.

Some aristocrats took style to the next level: one prince hired four servants to simultaneously spray different colored powders, through which he dramatically walked. Lord Effingham kept a whole five French masters just to care for his hairstyle.

By the way, women’s hairstyles were not that simple either. They were built on a wire frame, and for volume, they added wool and horsehair. The height of some women’s hairstyles reached 75 centimeters, so that the ladies barely fit in carriages and sometimes had to ride sticking their heads out the window. There were even instances when hairstyles caught fire from chandeliers, sometimes ending tragically. Of course, the hairstyle wasn’t dismantled for months, maintaining its shape with paste, and to avoid disrupting the structure during sleep, they slept on special wooden supports. Notably, there were significant hygiene issues: the hair was teeming with insects, and one lady even lost a child after discovering a mouse nest in her hairstyle in the morning, having been deeply shocked.

But the fashion for wigs among men sharply ended at the beginning of the 19th century. So much so that desperate wigmakers petitioned King George III to make wearing wigs obligatory. But the king refused. Old wigs were then used as household rags. Today, wigs are still worn in British courts — they still wear horsehair wigs, costing about 600 pounds, which are customarily soaked in tea to give them an old-fashioned look — after all, a too-new wig might give away an inexperienced lawyer.

All this — for the sake of fashion!

The Boy and the Heron | October 14 2024, 18:15

We watched “The Boy and the Heron” by Hayao Miyazaki yesterday (original Japanese title: “How Do You Live?”). After viewing it, of course, I scoured the internet searching for answers to my questions.

Here I am, considering myself educated and well-rounded, yet some films and sometimes cartoons trigger an “I must be the dumbest person alive” complex.

It all started with Mulholland Drive. According to the reviews, everyone who watched it seemed to grasp the depth of the director’s vision, except maybe for some details, but I remember watching it and barely understanding anything. Then, of course, after reading various reviews and discussions on the subject, I watched it a second, and then a third and a fourth time. Now, indeed, a lot of it makes sense, but it feels like cheating. I couldn’t figure it out on my own. Well, that’s Lynch for you; his works are always like that.

Sometimes it seems that a director just shoots whatever, and then someone in the reviews starts connecting the plot dots, which picks up, deepens, and becomes rationalized, and suddenly there’s meaning even where there was none by design. This is partly why directors dislike discussing the “what did the author want to say” topic. What I wanted to say, I’ve said; the rest is up to you.

Or take something like “Barbie.” I watched it and saw nothing noteworthy, but then you start reading, and it turns out it’s a work of art where everything is interconnected. Or “Asteroid City” by Wes Anderson. If I’m honest, I didn’t even finish watching it.

And now there’s “The Boy and the Heron.” It’s brilliantly made from every perspective. But the depth and complexity of the meanings really raise the bar high for viewers who want to fully understand the film.

I categorize such works as “stop thinking and just watch how awesomely it’s made; maybe you’ll get it later.” With Mulholland Drive, it worked, and it did with Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” as well. This approach even worked for me with the recent “Deadpool and Wolverine,” where I clearly lacked the context to grasp the director’s vision, but in the moment, everything was beautiful and captivating, boom boom bam. But, damn, a bunch of people around me see much more than I did. And it’s comics! A product for the masses. Am I dumbing down?

It’s great, of course, that films are made in such a way that each audience finds something commensurate with their education, exposure, understanding of the context, etc. When a film’s structure is nonlinear, full of visual metaphors, where symbolism is more important than the plot and can be interpreted in different ways, when a film rather provokes the viewer to feel and interpret what’s seen than to follow a clear narrative — this all requires from the viewer a rather high level, I don’t know, of IQ or thoughtfulness. How such films collect big box office and ratings when most people going to cinemas are somewhat obtuse, and I often classify myself in this category when I leave another “complex” movie.

You know what it’s like? It’s like someone who grew up on rock, bards, and chanson goes to a Wagner opera, something from “The Ring of the Nibelung” or “The Master-Singers of Nuremberg,” and then finds everyone around is amazed, while despite trying hard, he understood little.

So, if I am not the only one, give a thumbs up 🙂

Amtrak’s Car-on-Train Travel to Miami: Cost and Process | October 13 2024, 12:28

Some time ago, Amtrak came up with an interesting business model — travel by train with your car — and now it’s being advertised to me on Facebook. Clearly, it’s for those who, for some reason, find it important to drive around Miami in their own car, but don’t want to make the fifteen-hour drive themselves.

So, there’s a special station where you arrive, hand over your keys, and head to boarding. Your car is loaded into a special wagon, and in Florida, both you and your car are unloaded, and you drive to your hotel on your own wheels.

For a standard-sized car, they charge over $500, plus the train ticket itself, which can cost anywhere from $100 to $280 depending on when and how far in advance you buy the ticket. A motorcycle costs $310.

The Surprising Origins of the Word “Crap” | October 12 2024, 13:41

Here is the translated text with the style and HTML markup preserved:

Interestingly, the first properly functioning toilet flush device was invented by a dude named Crapper. Moreover, the meaning of the word crap is actually due to the fact that every tank was branded T. Crapper & Co. Sanitary Engineers. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, Rudolf Diesel, Étienne de Silhouette, Louis Pasteur, Pierre de Coubertin, and others are quietly envious.

Evolution of Personal Tech: A Nostalgic Journey Through Mobile Phones and PDAs | October 12 2024, 01:49

Do you remember your first mobile phones and PDAs? I wasn’t exactly making a lot of money, but somehow I managed to buy them.

My first was a Philips Aeon. 1999. Beeline, DAMPS. This little brick was eating up twenty-five cents per minute of talk. I was spending around 600 rubles a month, earning 1200 at the time. It had a green glowing screen. For lacking a mobile communication license, I ended up in a cell with prostitutes one night, arrested by the cops. This happened on my way to the store for some food from the office where I was overnighting, as it was farther to go home. I wasn’t released until I paid 100 rubles.

After that came the Motorola CD930. Heavy and indestructible.

Next was the metallic Benefon Q. Stylish, beautiful, golden. It even had a browser 🙂 WAP.

Then there was the LG 600 flip phone. With two screens, one on the lid and another inside. It had a great Korean joke — 70 characters in the address book for a number, and 10, I think, for a name.

Then came the chic Siemens S65. This one had a color screen.

After that was the wonderful Sony Ericsson K790i. It was the most comfortable phone as a phone. If only the buttons weren’t so close together.

Then came the era of touchscreens. I got a Glofiish X500+ (E-Ten). This was already a PDA with a stylus and GPS on Windows CE. And it had GPS!

Among PDAs, I had two Toshibas – e310 and e740. The latter could connect to the Internet via WiFi.

And before all that was a Casio Cassiopeia A-20. It was a precursor to laptops. It had Excel installed.

Among Android devices, I had the Samsung Galaxy Note II. There was also a Samsung Note 4.. With a fingerprint scanner, and the resolution back then was impressive. In 2015

Among tablets, there was the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, then iPads.

Then began the era of iPhones. I missed the first iPhone, the second – 3GS I drowned in tea. Then I bought an iPhone4.

Well, then came more iPhones. It’s boring to list them all. Probably updated every generation, now iPhone 15 Pro Max.

And before mobile communications, I spent a couple of years with a Midland Alan 42 radio station. It could be used as a phone. You had to call a special lady on 27MHz who would “connect” you to a telephone subscriber. I mean, she dialed the number and held the radio station to the phone. And vice versa. If they called her, she would shout to reach me. I paid monthly for this service.

And around that time, I also had a Motorola pager.

Cameras… Among digital ones there was a Canon PowerShot Pro 70, Sony Cyber-shot DSC F505, for a compact camera Canon PowerShot SD630, then Canon 40d, and I’m still using a Canon 6d

The Evolution of Sanitary Terms: From Toiletries to Restrooms | October 12 2024, 00:15

Finishing Bill Bryson’s At Home, I discovered that originally, around the year 1540, it was a word for fabric, a diminutive of “toile,” which is still used to describe a type of linen. Then, it came to denote fabric used for a dressing table. After that, the items on a dressing table (hence “toiletries”). Subsequently, the word came to mean the dressing table itself, then the process of dressing, then receiving guests while dressing, then the room for dressing, then any personal room next to the bedroom, then a room used for sanitary purposes, and, finally, the toilet itself. This explains why “eau de toilette” in English and French can mean both something women enjoy applying to their face and simultaneously “toilet water.”

Interesting note on the word “wardrobe,” exactly as garderobe. It was a combination of “guard” (“to keep”) and “robe” (“clothing”) and initially meant a storeroom, then any personal room, briefly (and briefly only) a bedroom, and finally, a toilet.

The “water closet” (WC) appeared in 1755 and originally designated a place where royal enemas were performed. From 1770, the French called the home toilet “un lieu à l’anglaise” (“an English place”), which might explain the origin of the English word “loo.” Online sources say that loo comes from “gardez l’eau,” meaning “watch out for the water,” as it was shouted before emptying chamber pots out the window.

Here in the USA, toilets are called restrooms—a true Americanism. I just googled that in the first half of the 20th century, many American workplaces and public buildings had rooms with chairs or sofas that employees or clients could use to take a break, sit down, and rest. In some jurisdictions, laws were passed requiring these restrooms to also have toilet facilities. In everyday life, people who didn’t have the time to sit on a sofa and relax still entered the restroom to use the toilet. Over time, the expression “I’m going to the restroom” became synonymous with using the toilet or sinks, rather than chairs and sofas. Even as rooms with sofas became less common, the phrase with its new meaning persisted. Thus, a room with toilet facilities came to be called a “restroom.”

Of course, we can also say bathroom, without, of course, expecting any actual baths there.

The photo — a restroom from the 1930s.

Sewing Struggles: A DIY Armrest Cover Saga | October 11 2024, 17:47

ME AND THE SEWING MACHINE. Yuki owns an Ikea sofa. I occasionally read on it too, but essentially, the sofa is truly his. He’s very meticulous with it (as with everything, really); we wash the covers, but over time, they began to look less presentable, and I decided instead of buying a new set for $99, I’d at least sew some armrest covers. So, it’s going to be two-tone.

Yesterday, I hopped on my scooter and zipped over to Hobby Lobby. Picked up 2 yards of fabric for 20 bucks.

Look, this isn’t my first rodeo, but I hate it every single time. How do seamstresses manage to love this kind of work? It took me 4 hours just to make one armrest cover. I’m definitely not continuing and am now switching back to the original and ordering a set.

This whole endeavor is an engineering feat, no simpler than programming, I swear. First, you have to reverse-engineer the reference item. That’s a major challenge, especially if you don’t want to cut up the item. In this case, it’s just a cover, which is simpler than, say, shorts. So, it became clear that I needed three pieces of fabric, 45×88 cm, 178×23 cm, and 30×88 cm, plus each piece must have at least 2 cm allowance on each side.

The first challenge is just drafting all of this on the fabric in order to cut it later. Especially if the fabric has a pattern. Overall, millimeter precision isn’t necessary, but what’s needed is a) straightness of the lines b) the same angle with the fabric fibers throughout the straight lines, ideally at a strict 0 or 90 degrees. This is all quite complicated to achieve, especially if you need to cut a piece 188 cm long. You spread it out on the floor, and if any section of the fabric shifts by a couple of millimeters, then there you have it, the line will be crooked. So ideally, you need to secure/stretch the fabric and then draw along it.

Then there’s the separate issue with the fabric itself. First, if you follow the fibers with your eyes, you realize the fabric, or the pattern, does indeed break up periodically, or zigzags, and you can’t see past ten centimeters. Second, the fabric might stretch. Besides that, when you try to smooth something out, it slightly increases or decreases in different places, so that straight lines aren’t straight anymore. After washing, everything will probably return, but it’s bothersome nonetheless.

Separately, what you draw with. Whatever draws on the fabric needs to be erasable afterward and thin enough so that the blade doesn’t wander. A marker might not work. Okay, if you’re drawing on the inner part, it might be okay, but it won’t work with transparent and semi-transparent fabrics.

Next, what to cut with. Scissors obviously don’t work, unless you use them as a knife, not as scissors. There is a special knife. Pretty convenient, I must say.

So, we cut it. That’s half the job, but it takes a lot of time. The rest is technically simple – sewing these pieces together. But that’s if it’s just simple sewing. Any cheapest Chinese product is five times more complex than this “simple sewing.” At least, you need an overlocker (I have one). Plus, you need perfectly straight seams, and for that, you need more skill, as at slow speeds they don’t come out right (my skill is so-so, but if not rushed, generally what’s needed is achieved).

In general, the hassle with this is such that it’s easier to give up. Ultimately, I’ll be ordering a new set. If I ever think of sitting down at the sewing machine again, please remind me that there are far more interesting things in the world, and I definitely underestimated something.

But on the plus side – I can now say that, overall, superficially, I understand how it all works. Now I’d be interested in seeing how this is automated. How they manage to produce shirts for a dollar — it’s definitely not just because the Vietnamese in the factory are working for food. Surely there’s a lot of automation involved, where problems mentioned above were solved ages ago.

Exploring the Vast World of Clothing Terms | October 10 2024, 14:24

In “Monday Begins on Saturday,” I came across the word “culotte” and realized that I have a very vague idea of various clothing names in Russian, except for the most basic ones.

This is pretty much a whole new language for me. I don’t know, maybe those who go shopping for clothes have a better grasp of it.

Great source with pictures: https://lookso.ru/vidy-odezhdy/.

Following this link, you’ll encounter Balmacaan, Bushlat, Duster, Duffle coat, Sheepskin coat, Inverness, Cape, Covercoat, Cocoon, Coper, Crombie, Manto, Ulster, Pardessus, Polo, Poncho, Puffer, Raglan, Riding coat, Swinger, Trench coat, Chesterfield, Greatcoat, Hubertus, Raincoat, Mackintosh, Coat-robe, Trench, Anorak, Blouson, Bomber, Leather jacket, Cape jacket, Norfolk, Parka, Spencer, Blazer, Jumper, Cardigan, Kittel, Top, Afghan, Baggy, Bamster, Bananas, Bermudas, Boyfriends, Breeches, Galife, Gaucho, Jeans, Joggers, Pipers, Capri, Cargo, Carrot, Flared, Culottes, Leggings, Palazzo, Skinny, Slacks, Tubes, Chinos, Churidar, Shalwar, Shorts, Bodysuit, Boxers, Briefs, Bustier, Combidress, Negligee, Peignoir, Pajamas, Slip, Thong, Trunks.

No need to read the text below carefully because it’s pretty much impossible to understand.

Here’s an example of what I didn’t know:

I wouldn’t have been able to explain what a tunic, pashmina, cape, cardigan, parka, trench, bomber, or anorak is even though a Google search shows that all these terms are used.

Tunic – a long or short women’s blouse or dress, I don’t know how else to define it.

Pashmina – a wide scarf often used as a shoulder wrap.

Cardigan – a knitted sweater with buttons or without any fastenings.

Parka – a long jacket with a hood, often insulated.

Trench – a classic long coat with a belt and double-breasted buttoning, with a lapel collar.

Bomber – a short jacket with elastic at the waist and sleeves.

Anorak – a lightweight hooded jacket that fastens only halfway up.

Here are just a few coats from the list above:

Balmacaan — a single-breasted long coat model with raglan sleeves and a placket completely hiding the buttons.

Bushlat — a shortened double-breasted coat adorned with two rows of buttons and a turned-down English collar with lapels

Duster — a women’s lightweight, long, loose-fitting coat model with a belt instead of fastenings, worn like a robe

Duffle Coat — informal single-breasted coat of straight cut above the knee. Recognizable attributes of the model: patch pockets, hood, and toggle closures instead of traditional buttons.

Inverness — a vintage-style elongated coat with loose fit and sleeves covered with a cape.

Cape – a sleeveless cloak that fastens at the throat.

Covercoat — a single-breasted coat made from a namesake dense fabric. Recognizable for its pointed lapels and traditional decoration of four or five parallel rows of stitching at the bottom of the garment and on the sleeve edges.

Cocoon — a model of men’s or women’s oversized coat that narrows towards the bottom and broadens at the waist with dropped shoulders and a rounded silhouette.

But I started with culottes. It’s somewhat historical, but a Google search shows that not always, and there’s plenty of such items in marketplaces. So, there are certainly loads of unknown words to me. Starting with short-pants

Culotte – short or wide knee-length trousers. Nowadays, these are wide-legged women’s trousers, usually longer than the knee.

Coper — a long leather coat with a belt, visually resembling a raincoat. Most popular in men’s wardrobe, but women’s models are also available.

Manto — a spacious trapezoidal coat-wrap with no through fastenings, made of fur or with corresponding trim.

Capri are essentially the same as trousers, the difference being only that their length reaches the mid-calfement.hasMore …