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How are Rome's monuments still standing?

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Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#131

Post by pengaru »

wombatpm wrote: post #116
pengaru wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see how you can call the climate "harsh" with a straight face since it never rarely get moist enough for long enough for water and bacteria to do much to wood and masonry. Most modern products/methods/coatings deteriorate very quickly in the extreme temperature swings of the desert. If they're exposed to the sunlight, most things can't handle the UV in combination with the extreme temperatures. I own a dese…

Minnesota routinely sees 90 days in summer and -20 days winter. Water plus 110 degree temperature swings destroys a lot of things quickly. Plus vegetation, mold, animals

I never said nowhere else is harsh, I just strongly object to arguing the desert is not a harsh environment.

My parents are in the midwest which is where I lived into my 20s, and my dad did a lot of DIY maintenance on their house which I helped with. There was no comparison in terms of how quickly things deteriorated there vs. here in the Mojave where I have property. The "15-year" Behr brand exterior paint I put on a refinished shed ~2 years ago is already cracking and peeling off, simply because the substrate undergoes such extreme thermal expansion and contraction daily between the day-night cycle, with the UV quickly embrittling the skin.

The main problem we had back in IL was ice-heaving of roads and patios/sidewalks. But asphalt-shingled roofs easily lasted over a decade, barring some exceptional tornado-style event ripping them apart. Asphalt shingles quickly become embrittled in the desert, and the frequent gale-force winds break them off. It's why you find Terracotta/slate/metal roofs so common in the desert; the environment is too harsh for the cheaper asphalt shingle stuff you find across the country.

And it's not like deserts don't get freezing temps or snowfall. My last camping trip in Joshua Tree National Park concluded with my tent collapsing on me under a snow load.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#132

Post by hattmall »

thoughtsimple wrote: post #75
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jonathan Blow makes a bunch of great points about our simplified view of ancient people, versus the reality of their complex achievements which could only be brought about by lots of ingenuity and iterations. https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk

He started off well with the history of civilization collapse but then he got the heart of his presentation with the misguided idea that modern software is more broken recently. He showed some incomprehensible bugs in Visual Studio. All I have to say is that on Windows the Blue Screen of Death was a prominent problem for many years. On the original MacOS that was non-preemptive multitasking and no memory hardware pro…

The BSOD is kind of actually the opposite in reality. The software is worse, the hardware is better, so we are running more software to containerize those bugs. Software is more buggy and bloated than in the past it's just that the failures are silent and we don't have to reboot the entire system we just reboot pieces.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#133

Post by emodendroket »

pengaru wrote: post #102
emodendroket wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every climate brings its own challenges, of course, but it still seems true that that's better than dealing with constant precipitation, freezing, and so on.

If we're talking about the PNW, it doesn't take a genius to look around and see nature alone manages to build towering long-lasting structures in that environment. Some of those redwood trees are older than the oldest buildings in the entire nation. The desert's evolved long-lasting structures are shrub-sized and endure by retreating underground. Otherwise there's rocks.

Plants need water to live. Man-made structures, however, are not plants.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#134

Post by emodendroket »

hattmall wrote: post #129
pengaru wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're talking about the PNW, it doesn't take a genius to look around and see nature alone manages to build towering long-lasting structures in that environment. Some of those redwood trees are older than the oldest buildings in the entire nation. The desert's evolved long-lasting structures are shrub-sized and endure by retreating underground. Otherwise there's rocks.

Big difference in the tree living vs being dead.. The desert is very harsh for life, but much more gentle on structures. Even when it does rain the arid environment evaporates it away quickly. It's not even a close comparison, you find structures from the 1960s in the southeast that are far more deteriorated than ones from the 1860s in the southwest.

In fact the presence of life is negatively correlated with the survival of structures. One more thing to mess them up.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#135

Post by rurp »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #106
rurp wrote: post #57

Tangentially related to this, one of my hobbies is to explore old long abandoned ghost towns and mining camps in the Southwest US. It is really impressive how well many of these structures have held up in harsh climates. One of my favorite parts is seeing how repairs were improvised in the wilderness using whatever supplies happened to be available. The standard approach to trash back then was to throw it in a pile n…

Are there really sites undisturbed enough for you to see how they did repairs or disposed of their trash? That sounds amazing. SW-America is definitely on my bucket list and I love ghost towns. In Western Europe it's hard to find any abandoned place older than a couple of years that's preserved well. I guess it's because the next city is never very far and there's always uncultured idiots whose idea of fun it is to v…

It's incredible what's been left behind and still in decent shape. As you've found, any place with a lot of human traffic tends to get destroyed by vandals but fortunately the SW deserts are massive and hold a shocking amount of old mining roads that lead to well preserved locations. A spot that requires a modest amount of effort to reach tends to filter out the idiots.

Another favorite site I didn't mention are the old mining structures. Image search for something like "old mining headframe" to see the sort of thing I'm talking about. There are a lot of those structures still standing from many decades ago.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#136

Post by retrac »

noyeastguy wrote: post #53

I wonder if there will come a time when society decides it's better to fix ruins such as the Colosseum and the pyramids instead of letting them just rot away.

With the Colosseum at least, it didn't just sit there untouched for two thousand years. The locals have repaired it after disasters. And also partially torn it down. And then rebuilt it.

About 150 years after it was built, it was partially destroyed by fire. And rebuilt. Another 200 years later there are inscriptions from late emperors who did more repair work. In the medieval era it was stripped of marble and suffered serious damage from an earthquake. In the 18th century it seems the Popes started to appreciate that it was historically significant, and various repairs and preservation activities have gone on ever since. One of the largest cleanings and repairs ever has just started in the last decade.

How much to repair though? At a certain point you have to start taking out original work to replace the ruined interior, and I can understand the extreme reluctance to do that.

As to the Pyramids, they've been rotting for 4300 years and they're still there mostly intact. The most severe damage was intentional acts in relatively recent history. As long as we don't decide to start tearing them down again for free stone, they'll probably outlast humanity.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#137

Post by [deleted] »

nescioquid wrote: post #119
basementcat wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rome wasn’t written in a day.

In fact it was, but on the second day, it would no longer compile. After a long debugging session, Romulus realized Remus had unpublished the hWall (or aMoenia) function in the night. Romulus then murdered his brother.

[deleted]

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#138

Post by emodendroket »

dragontamer wrote: post #96
lillecarl wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sweden we sort them by colored or translucent, they'll be smashed and reheated to be made into brand new bottles. Haven't seen used bottles in quite awhile, not sure if it's good or bad.

That's how its normally done in the USA as well. Brown, Green, and Transparent glass gets sorted, smashed, and melted back down into new bottles.

I was collecting some bottles and after trying 5 grocery stores who all told me they don't accept bottle returns (happy to collect the "deposit fee" though!) I gave up and threw them away in the regular recycling bin.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#139

Post by pavlov »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #89

It's struck me, reading roman authors, that they were considerably more obsessed with building a legacy than we are. Not just getting powerful or famous in life, but entering the history books, to become big name like Scipio Africanus. May be that it comes with living in an "eternal" city that's been the same as long as anyone can remember, with generations coming and going and most human activity washed away like sa…

Rome wasn’t very old by the standards of 1 AD. Elsewhere in Greece, Egypt and Middle East, cities had been inhabited for several millennia.

But Rome’s founding just 750 years earlier was mythological because the place was too remote to even have written history until much later. Virgil had to invent a Trojan connection to elevate the national epic.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#140

Post by virtue3 »

poo-yie wrote: post #59
rurp wrote: post #57

Tangentially related to this, one of my hobbies is to explore old long abandoned ghost towns and mining camps in the Southwest US. It is really impressive how well many of these structures have held up in harsh climates. One of my favorite parts is seeing how repairs were improvised in the wilderness using whatever supplies happened to be available. The standard approach to trash back then was to throw it in a pile n…

Similarly, I have a hobby of restoring vintage and antique tools. Same observation regarding how disposable many modern items are.

As someone that does swing dancing and with quite a lot of people into vintage stuff there has been this talk of "survivor" bias whenever we talk about how stuff was made better back then.

Naturally the cheap stuff didn't tend to even remotely make it this far.

Curious what your opinion is as I haven't heard much about tools etc.

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