... stupid science ~

The article is interesting. Your diatribe, not so much.

 

to chat posted that article in another thread, i thought it was fascinating.

but shouldn't 'democrats' be posted in the politics section, with appropriate warnings?

 

It was here.

What puzzles me, though, is that the self-healing behavior of lime in mortar is something that's been studied and written about by masons for decades. Articles about restoration of old buildings with straight lime/sand mortar (before Portland cement started getting added to the mix in early 20c) are full of information about it.

So it surprised me it would take so long to suspect the lime in Roman concrete was doing ... the same thing.

Mixing up concrete by adding quicklime directly sounds ... dramatic. One wonders about the Roman version of OSHA.

 

Lol... Pouring concrete is a pretty low bar when it comes to a sophisticated human experience worth bragging about... I mean I was pouring concrete with my older brother when I was 10 years old back in the late 70's and not until this moment right now had I ever thought it made me superior, let alone less of a social-democrat?

But I get it, right wingers are incredibly fearful and insecure about what makes them feel important. But clearly helping friends and family and the greater society in meaningful ways is obviously a weakness rather than a strength when it comes to your own inner demons as relates to your roman empire fetish, right?

As for the concrete mixing, this is kind like when you make hot chocolate but don't mix it very well, which may well stop a crack from getting worse, but self-healing? Gimme a break! Just because paranoid right wingers killed off the makers of the pyramids and lost the knowledge of how to move massive stones in the process, doesn't mean concrete is superior, nor to last as long as the pyramids, nor should it.

 

Lime really does do something a lot like that, though. If "self-healing" sounds too new-agey for you, maybe find a phrase that doesn't bother you as much.

Lime in concrete, or masonry mortar, cures very slowly, by reacting with CO₂ in the air, but only when some moisture is available. That turns it back into limestone, which is pretty cool.

On the interior, there will be some lime that hasn't carbonated yet. Let a crack or flaw form in the surface, and some of that not-yet-carbonated lime will migrate there, and carbonate, and turn into new limestone, which is pretty cool.

Before the early 20th century, plasterers and masons pretty much used lime, mixed with sand or some other aggregate. It had that cool self-renewing property, making it quite durable. The disadvantage was how long it takes before you can use the structure, because you're waiting for this really slow carbonation process, and you can't let it dry out before that happens, so weeks or months go by in the project, all the while carefully keeping it from drying.

Gypsum, in plaster, and Portland cement, in masonry mortar and concrete, started getting added as a matter of course a century or so ago, because both of those harden and set by a different chemistry that's much faster. Even with lime still in the mix, the gypsum or Portland will set up right away so you can get on with the job, and the lime in the mix just continues carbonating and making it stronger for months and years.

But neither gypsum nor Portland do the same self-renewing thing.

And then of course in the mid-20th century everybody started using drywall and forgot how to plaster, and recently the last place I could buy plaster locally got bought out, and I most recently went to Chicago for more.

 

The use of volcanic rocks as aggregates had a role in Roman durability also

 

It does from the aggregate side of the size. The fine particle size fills space between the sand and gravel.

It didn't explain the self repair from when cracking did occur.

The discovery in the news is about how the Roman's mixing technique facilitated that. The paper might go into detail on how it exactly works. Maybe the Roman concrete is better at this self repair than slaked lime concrete because of the hot mixing.

Living with plaster walls, I understand why people abandoned it. Wife loved them, but want to upgrade the electric, add some outlets for modern appliances, and the temptation to rip it out is there.

 

I live with plaster walls and feel quite the opposite way.

I think drywall took off because of how much faster it was for new-house construction. Somebody actually had to plaster my whole house in one go back in 1929, and I'm kind of glad that wasn't me.

But once you're living in the house somebody else plastered, and you're just doing repairs and upkeep ... you just need three buckets. No big unwieldy sheets of drywall to try to bring home in a Prius. No joint tape. No joint compound. No paraphernalia for sanding and dealing with sanding dust.

You have a bucket of sand, a bucket of lime putty (both of which will keep indefinitely), and a bucket of gypsum. After you've made some openings for new electric or what not, you mix some up, trowel it back on just as it was when it was built, boom, done. You don't end up with a Frankenwall of cutout drywall pieces and repair mesh and joint tape. You just have intact plaster again.

Of course these days you can learn to drywall anywhere, and buy all your sheets and tapes and meshes and compounds and sanders and dust masks at the local big box, and how to plaster became kind of lost knowledge, and it's harder to buy the stuff (and the big box employees tend to be clueless, you ask about plaster and they say "oh, like this joint compound here?").

To be honest, the lost-knowledge part is kind of improving. When I wanted to learn, I pretty much had to find hoary old books and try to picture what they were talking about and keep getting it wrong till it made sense. These days there's quite a lot on youtube.

So it seems to me that plaster walls are really quite maintainer-friendly, assuming they've already been built, through the intensive labor of somebody else.

Wood finishes seem to have followed a similar path. The wood in this house is finished in shellac, the goo exuded by lac beetles, dissolved in alcohol for application.

These days, probably no one would do a whole house's worth of wood in shellac; the amount of alcohol evaporating away probably runs afoul of VOC regs. So they'd spray on polyurethane or something instead.

But again, once something's been done in shellac already, it's super maintainer-friendly. It remains alcohol-soluble forever, and will easily blend into itself, so if you have a spot of damaged finish, you just refinish the spot, with near zero environmental impact. As I understand it, the more modern finishes won't really let you do that, so with those you're looking at the environmental impact of complete stripping and refinishing.

Chemically, also, I think those volcanic rocks contained pozzolans.

 

All this ridiculousness would be entirely unnecessary if the right wing paranoids of antiquity hadn't of killed off all the more enlightened humans who could lift and cut 90 ton stones with soundwaves.

"...all the obelisks and their scripts on them. They are so perfect that it is impossible to do it without technology as any “analog” usual tool would had left scars on the stone of significant dimension something that is not the case. ...They used frequencies, sound, resonance and vibration. This is what Nikola Tesla was so obsessed about and based his Wardenclyffe Tower on." https://www.quora.com/Did-the-Egyptians-build-the-pyramids-using-sound-frequencies-to-lift-such-heavy-objects

 

Can't decide if you are being serious.

 

It's more fun not to know.

 

Just keep drinking the Kool-aid with your blue pills and you won't have to upset yourself with 100K years of human history that was disappeared because those most paranoid & delusional and unenlightened of the 5 species of humans wiped the other 4 species out to eliminate all but the past 10K years of history.

As in the red pill is: The Book of Ra where you'll learn about the history of pyramids and much, much more, before the paranoid delusional right wingers set back all life on earth for hundreds of millions of years, as well as eliminating 100K years of written history... But that's what happens when you write your books in gold leaf and right wing wackos would rather melt it down into gold bars than actually advance their knowledge and abilities with the knowledge that they contain.

The burning of the libraries of Alexandria has happened many times under these delusional failures of life who are soley driven by their own ego's paranoia and aggression/violence. It's who we are... The desolation we were born into...

 

"The problem here is that there is no, so far as I know, ancient Egyptians texts that mention this kind of technology or similar things. There exists some Hieroglyphs that shows strange objects no more than that."

So, other info of the ancient Eqyptian civilization made it to other media they had, but not this?

 

I literally posted an Egyptian text explaining soundwaves as a way to move and carve heavy stone (evidence) and you're gonna claim that no evidence exists?

The rest of that reference goes into greater detail to explain it. With attitudes like yours no wonder we live in a reality where all but only past handful of thousands of years still exist as "known" recorded human history.

Sample of text from from previous referenced article: "The ancients were very inclined on how sound works, ancient religions use there ‘ohms’ in certain frequencies which changes brain patterns, sound directly affects waters molecular structure and humans are based on 80% water. It is said they even used light language, this is why the Ancient Hebrew dialect can be shown as a physical symbol when measured with a sound measuring device. You can visually see the sound."

 

Don't be so cynical. I've been through Marine bootcamp and know the power of sound.

Bob Wilson

 

Oh dear. Not again.

 

On a more constructive note....

Does anyone know if the OP is real? Every thread he/she starts seems like a parody of US far-right thought. Is he/she like a Colbert Report era Stephen Colbert or something? Is he/she trying to open our eyes to the lunacy of the far right and drag us out of our complacent torpor? Is it all just being done for crazy LOLs?

Or is this real? And, in America, how normal is this? I see a lot of it online, but I find it hard to believe that people in real life really are like this. In Australia and Britain, this sort of thing is vanishingly rare, but I do worry that in America it might actually be a bit more common.

 

Past trolls were 'real enough.' Yes, I've had blood kin who thought like the OP. Lately, their actions have been called "Owning The Libs." My recommendations:

• Humor - help everyone to laugh at the fool.
• Turn up the Squelch - although more steps involved, your account can put them on your "People you ignore" list.

We have free speech within the limits of private property but there is no "must read" even as the Right-wing nuts adopt Communist/Soviet style practices. My past practice: (1) humor, use their post to setup a joke punchline; (2) use them to introduce empirical facts and data with credible sources, and; (3) turn up the squelch,

Bob Wilson

ps. There are some AM modulated, radio bands used for Citizens Band radio. It has become an excellent example of free speech taken to its logical conclusion ... useless as Twitter.

 

The first I'm definitely up for. The second.... It's very rare that I put someone on ignore. I find it makes threads a bit confusing. They have to be a real full-on [insert British-English word here] for me to do that.

As for empirical facts and data.... I think that used to work in the old days, when these people thought facts were a thing.

I bet there are some absolute gems on there.

----

It's interesting because it's just hard to imagine people like this being real. Generally I think I'm fairly strong on empathy - not in the sweet way but in the way of being able to understand where people are coming from and how they reach the conclusions they do. I know there's Fox and there's there's the absolute nutjob media, and these people get sucked in by it because it appeals to their prejudices. But still, it's hard to understand how things that are so outlandish can gain any sort of traction in people who are, superficially at least, functioning members of society.

At the lowest end of that spectrum, I have a friend who is a Young Earther. He doesn't believe in evolution, and knows the world is 6000 years old. But he is a farmer who uses selective breeding. And he adapts his crops and his farming techniques to deal with the way Australian soil has developed over millions of years. He can hold these two different worldviews in his head at the same time.

But people like the OP... It's a whole different league from that minor cognitive dissonance that my friend has. Science isn't real, but you drive a car and fly in a plane.... Medicine is a conspiracy and Fauci is out to get you, but you still go to hospital when you break your leg. I just can't get into their heads at all. That's actually another reason I don't mute them: they intrigue me because I don't understand how they have become what they are.