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How are Rome's monuments still standing?

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Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#181

Post by lillecarl »

flipbrad wrote: post #174
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.

Germany has a bottle return scheme. It's common for your (glass) bottle of beer or sparkling water to have significant wear marks where it's been rubbing against neighbours in a crate.

We used to have it as well, I remember from when I was a kid. It says on Wikipedia that we replaced the glass bottles with PET mostly. So I guess we have the same scheme, but not on the same scale anymore (one bottle supposedly gets reused 40 times on average).

Though the rare ones I get I just throw in the glass recycling that'll be crushed, made into new bottles and insulation material.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#182

Post by ogogmad »

mro_name wrote: post #164

The Romans had no arabic numerals and no arithmetic - that's why the statics of the buildings were not calculated. So some were over- and others under-dimensioned. You only see the over-dimensioned ones. They are still standing today.

Are you sure? You can do calculations geometrically with tools like compasses and straight-edges. No need for numerals.

Here's a practical way using a compass and straight edge: https://janmr.com/blog/2010/04/arithmetic-by-geometry/

Here's a contrived way, but using only a straight edge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Georg_Christian_von_Staud...

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#183

Post by bluGill »

ido wrote: post #177
samstave wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a thought: There are a couple factors that would result in a longer lasting tool of Yore... There were no plastics and other ephemeral materials, and so tool handles were wood, leather or metal. There was no 'mass production at global scale' - effectively every tool was hand made, or made by machines that were made by hand to make the tools -- and all of which were done without aid of computational mathematical…

In terms of building I remember hearing how in the distant past (anything before the last 200 years or so) the buildings that survived to this day have just used way too much materials in a way that would seen as wasteful today (e.g. double as much stone as was needed because they couldn't calculate it as precisely as we can today). Would you be willing to pay double for your new home to make it last 300 years instea…

When answering that question, note how much effort is needed to retrofit to modern needs. Electric, running water, closets, all things modern humans demand that you would need to retrofit.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#184

Post by ciphol »

pmontra wrote: post #78
cblconfederate wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tons of pagan roman and greek statues were destroyed. what's left today is only a tiny amount

And basically all of them lost their paint. What we admire is only the shape of what the artists created, not the full creation. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/gods-in-color-ancient-...

Those garish colors probably aren't the real colors either. The researchers found one speck of paint and assumed the whole surface was the same color, when in reality the paint probably had complex gradations of color, like any normal painting. There is no need to assume the painting was less sophisticated than the sculpture underneath it.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#185

Post by iSnow »

silisili wrote: post #155
jacquesm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That probably won't work for railroad ties because they are usually in/on the ground and without that tar the bugs would eat them in a few years.

Well, the idea is to just heat them past any temperature they'd experience naturally such that they don't bleed anymore. The wood itself would still be saturated in awful chemicals. For railroad ties specifically, I imagine it would be deemed way too much cost. But for say, house framing lumber... guaranteed termite free forever, I think people would pay for it.

Usually, tar-like substances still sweat out a range of volatile aromatic compounds which aren't good for your health. Yes, heat-treating them would get rid of 99% or more, but that's not good enough for housing.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#186

Post by bluGill »

smegger001 wrote: post #11
FredPret wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use reinforced concrete, concrete with steel bars inside. This allows us to built really thin and strong concrete bridges, balconies, roofs, etc. But the steel rusts after a couple of decades. Rusted steel is marginally larger than new steel. So when the steel bars expand by rusting, it pushes against the concrete from the inside, causing cracks. Then lots of water can get in it rusts faster. Eventually chunks of…

I wonder how long carbon fiber rebar, or plastic coated steel rebar would last.

Steel and concrete have similar coefficients of expansion. Most other choices don't and so as temperature changes something has to bend or give which reduces life.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#187

Post by llampx »

emodendroket wrote: post #138
dragontamer wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Germany you must accept returns and give back the deposit if you sell bottles or cans that have the deposit attached.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#188

Post by ido »

hattmall wrote: post #132
thoughtsimple wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

win 9x was absolutely worse and a lot less stable than the NT lineage (that we're currently in). classic macos was absolutely worse and less stable than the NeXTSTEP lineage we're currently in. I used linux for the first time in 1998 with Red Hat 5.2 and it was an absolute pain to get working/install and a lot of hardware was unsupported. At least it didn't crash as much as windows 9x!

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#189

Post by imtringued »

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…

Capitalism has no legacy. After all, time preference can't be negative. Implying that destroying the earth is a perfectly viable idea because the discounted future value of earth is $0 to many people after their death.

A time preference of 0 is equivalent to never consuming (e.g. never consuming the earth in its entirety).

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#190

Post by imtringued »

roca wrote: post #26

Did the Romans really know that using certain volcanic rocks would make their concrete structures last longer? Or did they mostly just use whatever aggregate was convenient and the structures that have survived are the ones that used the right rocks? The latter sounds more plausible to me. Of course we can still learn valuable lessons from these surviving structures.

They probably noticed that their aqueducts were crumbling. You don't see their failed experiments.
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