I had an idea once to make something like this, but on a much more (ridiculously) grand scale. The basic concept was "Society from First Principles", sort of a cross between Boy Scout Handbook, Wikipedia and Robert's Rules of Order.
Just as an example of the scale I'm talking about: I wanted the book itself to be useful / durable, printed on something like Tyvek so it would last through more than the average paperback. The first thing I was thinking of trying to figure out is establishing a measurement system under the assumption that all existing weights & measures disappeared and you would have to recreate them. Even ignoring the fact that $BOOK would have some fixed size/weight that could be used a a reference. Really, really first-principles stuff, like with only wilderness / stone-age type tools available.
I know I wanted to have different volumes, from basic (individual) survival through communities to nations. Volume titles were something like "Survive", "Thrive", "Rebuild", "Expand".
An example excerpt:
That cottage had stood for five hundred years. Thatch is the thick woven straw that makes the roof. The walls are a mixture of clay and straw called cob, or sometimes tabby. The material varies, as well as the name. Cob, or tabby, is a poor man's masonry. To make it, you mix a structural material -- like straw, corn stubble, or oyster shells -- with clay or earth. It makes a solid building material. In one form, we daub mud onto it. Wattles, by the way, are twigs woven together.
Re measurement, this book is an interesting read -- sort of an analysis and attempted reconstruction of the techniques used for furniture building in the preindustrial era (lots of ratios, transfer of measurements without actually putting them into units, et cetera): http://lostartpress.com/products/by-hand-eye-1
When I was in bootcamp (decades ago) we used it for important things like measuring how much of a gap there was supposed to be between the top of your mattress and the top of your top sheet: 1 BJM. Sadly, the rest of physics were not derived from the dimensions of the book.
Just as an example of the scale I'm talking about: I wanted the book itself to be useful / durable, printed on something like Tyvek so it would last through more than the average paperback. The first thing I was thinking of trying to figure out is establishing a measurement system under the assumption that all existing weights & measures disappeared and you would have to recreate them. Even ignoring the fact that $BOOK would have some fixed size/weight that could be used a a reference. Really, really first-principles stuff, like with only wilderness / stone-age type tools available.
I know I wanted to have different volumes, from basic (individual) survival through communities to nations. Volume titles were something like "Survive", "Thrive", "Rebuild", "Expand".