This video is ten years old. It has 13 million views.

That makes me smile. I’ve embedded all sorts of videos in my essays over the years. They mostly disappear down the GrueTube stormdrain after a few years. I’m often going back and looking for different versions of musical stuff, for instance, because so much stuff gets pulled. Websites come and go a lot, too. Mostly go, these days. Have you ever clicked on the links in an older website’s blogroll? Most of the links are dead as disco, but nobody notices.

There’s a lot of good woodworking on display in the video. Making a spoked wood wheel is difficult. It’s easy to see why many ancient cultures, including some who were fairly sophisticated, never invented the wheel. Woodworking and metalworking like you see in the video would be well beyond the technical bounds of many societies. More usually, they did have wheels, but didn’t use them for transportation. It’s a lot easier to make slaves carry stuff than making wheels for carts.

The 13 million views mean something. Those 13 million viewers might only contain a cadre of a few dozen people who need to learn how to build a wheel like that one. The rest are just interested in seeing someone with the physical and mental skills to produce one in action. I know I was.