Please Please Please, I’m Begging People, Start Talking About Indonesia Occupied Papua. Over The Last

House in Ecuador is well… in good hiding.

Hidden Stone House Ecuador by A1 Arquitectura. Photo by Bicubik @bicubik.photo.

Get Inspired, visit www.myhouseidea.com

How lovers call each other around the world

What makes lovers bloom in the most beautiful colors of their deepest inner feelings is a grave insult for 99% of all people around them.

Disclaimer: This is not a comprehensive list. I chose the weirdest/funniest terms.

Afrikaans: klein bokkie (little buck)

Arabic: بصري [basari] (my eyesight)

Catalan: colomí/colometa (pidgeon)

Dutch: dropje (little licorice), mopje (little joke)

English: “pumpkin”, “sweet pea”

Finnish: kulta (gold), muru (breadcrumb)

French: ma puce (my flea), mon chou (my cabbage)

German: Hase (bunny), Maus (mouse)

Indonesian: jantung hatiku (my heart and liver)

Irish: a leanbh (my child), mo chuisle (my pulse)

Italian: biscottino (little biscuit), microbino mio (my little microbe)

Japanese: 卵方の顔 [tamago hō no kao] (egg with eyes)

Korean: 우리강아지 [u-ri gang-a-ji] (my puppy)

Mandarin: 沉鱼落雁 (chényú luòyàn) ([beautiful enough to] make fish sink and birds alight), 心肝 [xīngān] (heart-liver)

Persian: باشد که یک موش شما را بخورد [bashed keh ak mewsh shema ra bekhewred] (May a mouse eat you)

Polish: misiu (little bear), okruszku (breadcrumb), rybko (little fish)

(Brazilian) Portuguese: chuchuzinho (little pumpkin)

Russian: лапочка [lapochka] (paw), рыбка [rybka] (little fish), голубчик/голубушка [golubchik/golubushka] (little pidgeon)

Spanish: cielo (sky), gordo/a (fat boy/girl)

Swedish: söt kanin (cute bunny)

Thai: ช้างน้อย [cĥāngn̂x/chang noi] (elephant)

Tibetan: སྙིང་སྡུག་ལགས། [nyingdu-la] (most honored poison of my heart)

Turkish: patlıcanım (my eggplant)

Smooth magic!

141020

An axial piston contraption to complement the radial one. Rigging this was a gigantic pain…

#Covid #ChinaCovid #flying

How Safe Are You From Covid When You Fly?

To understand how risky it may be to board a flight now, start with how air circulates in a plane.

More people are flying every day, as Covid restrictions ease and vaccinations accelerate. But dangerous variants have led to deadly new outbreaks, raising questions about just how safe it is to travel now.

In most single-aisle models, you are constantly breathing a mixture of fresh and recirculated air.

The high exchange rate on planes forces new and existing cabin air to mix evenly, with the goal of minimizing pockets of air that could become stale or linger for too long.

As more people fly — nearly 1.5 million people passed through U.S. airports on Friday — congestion and crowding in parts of the airport can make physical distancing a greater challenge.

Airports vary in size and passenger volume, configurations and on-location businesses, Harvard researchers found. That could increase the chances of exposure depending on where people linger and for how long.

Going to in-terminal restaurants, for example, can be risky because masks are routinely removed and kept off to eat.

The Harvard researchers found that many airports were not designed to mitigate the airborne spread of respiratory pathogens. Although some airports have installed new or additional filtration systems, distancing, vigilance and other safety practices are still crucial.

“The challenge isn’t just on a plane,” said Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist specializing in infection prevention. “Consider the airport and the whole journey.”

Methodology

The particle air flow simulation was conducted using a later version Boeing 737NG as the model for the cabin interior, which only has side air inlets. The model accounted for passengers occupying all of the seats. A computational-fluid dynamics code system known as FEFLO was then used to simulate the flow of more than 2.5 million particles. A large number of very small particles were introduced at the cabin inflow ducts, in part to ascertain the movement of pathogens that may have passed through the HEPA filters without being caught. The simulation showed that the air close to passengers’ heads had been in the cabin for less than 50 seconds. The first 10 frames of the particle flow animation were slowed down for clarity.

Different positions of sneezes were simulated as part of the modeling, and only smaller particles were used to estimate what may become airborne. This assumed face coverings could block larger particles expelled during a sneeze that can otherwise land on surfaces and body parts. Particles in this visualization were scaled up for presentation purposes. Sources: Airbus; Boeing; Rainald Löhner, George Mason University, Center for Computational Fluid Dynamics. By Mika Gröndahl, Tariro Mzezewa, Or Fleisher and Jeremy White (The New York Times).

I want a house by each of these lakes…

Here it is folks:

My definitive ranking of my least favorite bodies of water! These are ranked from least to most scary (1/10 is okay, 10/10 gives me nightmares). I’m sorry this post is long, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this.

The Great Blue Hole, Belize

I’ve been here! I have snorkeled over this thing! It is terrifying! The water around the hole is so shallow you can’t even swim over the coral without bumping it, and then there’s a little slope down, and then it just fucking drops off into the abyss! When you’re over the hole the water temperature drops like 10 degrees and it’s midnight blue even when you’re right by the surface. Anyway. The Great Blue Hole is a massive underwater cave, and its roughly 410 feet deep. Overall, it’s a relatively safe area to swim. It’s a popular tourist attraction and recreational divers can even go down and explore some of the caves. People do die at the Blue Hole, but it is generally from a lack of diving experience rather than anything sinister going on down in the depths. My rating for this one is 1/10 because I’ve been here and although it’s kinda freaky it’s really not that bad.

Lake Baikal, Russia

When I want to give myself a scare I look at the depth diagram of this lake. It’s so deep because it’s not a regular lake, it’s a Rift Valley, A massive crack in the earth’s crust where the continental plates are pulling apart. It’s over 5,000 feet deep and contains one-fifth of all freshwater on Earth. Luckily, its not any more deadly than a normal lake. It just happens to be very, very, freakishly deep. My rating for this lake is a 2/10 because I really hate looking at the depth charts but just looking at the lake itself isn’t that scary.

Jacob’s Well, Texas

This “well” is actually the opening to an underwater cave system. It’s roughly 120 feet deep, surrounded by very shallow water. This area is safe to swim in, but diving into the well can be deadly. The cave system below has false exits and narrow passages, resulting in multiple divers getting trapped and dying. My rating is a 3/10, because although I hate seeing that drop into the abyss it’s a pretty safe place to swim as long as you don’t go down into the cave (which I sure as shit won’t).

The Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota

This is an area in the Brule River where half the river just disappears. It literally falls into a hole and is never seen again. Scientists have dropped in dye, ping pong balls, and other things to try and figure out where it goes, and the things they drop in never resurface. Rating is 4/10 because Sometimes I worry I’m going to fall into it.

Flathead Lake, Montana

Everyone has probably seen this picture accompanied by a description about how this lake is actually hundreds of feet deep but just looks shallow because the water is so clear. If that were the case, this would definitely rank higher, but that claim is mostly bull. Look at the shadow of the raft. If it were hundreds of feet deep, the shadow would look like a tiny speck. Flathead lake does get very deep, but the spot the picture was taken in is fairly shallow. You can’t see the bottom in the deep parts. However, having freakishly clear water means you can see exactly where the sandy bottom drops off into blackness, so this still ranks a 5/10.

The Lower Congo River, multiple countries

Most of the Congo is a pretty normal, if large, River. In the lower section of it, however, lurks a disturbing surprise: massive underwater canyons that plunge down to 720 feet. The fish that live down there resemble cave fish, having no color, no eyes, and special sensory organs to find their way in the dark. These canyons are so sheer that they create massive rapids, wild currents and vortexes that can very easily kill you if you fall in. A solid 6/10, would not go there.

Little Crater Lake, Oregon

On first glance this lake doesn’t look too scary. It ranks this high because I really don’t like the sheer drop off and how clear it is (because it shows you exactly how deep it goes). This lake is about 100 feet across and 45 feet deep, and I strongly feel that this is too deep for such a small lake. Also, the water is freezing, and if you fall into the lake your muscles will seize up and you’ll sink and drown. I don’t like that either. 7/10.

Grand Turk 7,000 ft drop off

No. 8/10. I hate it.

Gulf of Corryvreckan, Scotland

Due to a quirk in the sea floor, there is a permanent whirlpool here. This isn’t one of those things that looks scary but actually won’t hurt you, either. It absolutely will suck you down if you get too close. Scientists threw a mannequin with a depth gauge into it and when it was recovered the gauge showed it went down to over 600 feet. If you fall into this whirlpool you will die. 9/10 because this seems like something that should only be in movies.

The Bolton Strid, England

This looks like an adorable little creek in the English countryside but it’s not. Its really not. Statistically speaking, this is the most deadly body of water in the world. It has a 100% mortality rate. There is no recorded case of anyone falling into this river and coming out alive. This is because, a little ways upstream, this isn’t a cute little creek. It’s the River Wharfe, a river approximately 30 feet wide. This river is forced through a tiny crack in the earth, essentially turning it on its side. Now, instead of being 30 feet wide and 6 feet deep, it’s 6 feet wide and 30 feet deep (estimated, because no one actually knows how deep the Strid is). The currents are deadly fast. The banks are extremely undercut and the river has created caves, tunnels and holes for things (like bodies) to get trapped in. The innocent appearance of the Strid makes this place a death trap, because people assume it’s only knee-deep and step in to never be seen again. I hate this river. I have nightmares about it. I will never go to England just because I don’t want to be in the same country as this people-swallowing stream. 10/10, I live in constant fear of this place.

Honorable mention: The Quarry, Pennsylvania

I don’t know if that’s it’s actual name. This lake gets an honorable mention not because it’s particularly deep or dangerous, but it’s where I almost drowned during a scuba diving accident.

Fushimi-inari, Kyoto [OC]

About the Pantheon in Rome, Italy…

The Pantheon in Rome

The Pantheon in Rome, now a church, was built as a temple to all the gods. It has been a shrine for architects since the Renaissance. It is also a worthy tribute to the skills of the ancient Roman masons and engineers who built it and the incredible alchemy of their concrete mix.

If there Was a competition to find the most durable and beautiful concrete structure ever built, the Pantheon in Rome would most surely win the prize. It also stands as a monument to the genius of Roman concrete.

Commissioned by Hadrian (who was emperor 117-138 CE) as a temple to all the gods, the Pantheon replaced Agrippa’s earlier temple following a fire. It is still the most visited site in Italy, having weathered centuries of tourists, floods, wars and earthquakes.

Its huge concrete dome – 43.4m in diameter and 21.75m high – was unrivalled in size until the building of Florence Cathedral in the 1400s, and is still the largest ever made with unsupported concrete.

“The mastery of building something so daring and having the structure resist essentially without any structural support for more than 19 centuries is simply extraordinary,” says Renato Perucchio, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Archaeology, Technology, and Historical Structures Programme at the University of Rochester in the US.

So how did the Romans do it, what were the secrets of their concrete recipe and what lessons can architects and civil engineers learn from its construction today?

As every builder knows, foundations are everything. One of the most overlooked aspects of the Patheon’s remarkable construction lies below its famous dome. Although Rome is not on one of Italy’s major seismic zones, it has known earthquakes. Many historians believe seismic activity caused damage to the Colosseum. Moreover, until some of the River Tiber’s tributaries were buried in the late 19th century, it was also subject to major flooding.

The foundations of the Pantheon were made of concrete, originally 4.7m deep and 7.3m thick. During construction, however, they cracked due to the marshy, clay land below. “For this reason, a second reinforcement ring was built, projecting three metres beyond the original perimeter,” according to the Archeoroma website. Thick buttress walls were also built to the south of the building anchored to the Basilica of Neptune next door. “This had the effect of stabilising the structure by counter­balancing the forces and weights at either end of it,” Archeoroma writes.

Romans did not invent concrete. It had already been around for hundreds of years before the Pantheon was built.

Curiously that accolade probably goes to the Nabatean Bedouin tribes of the land that is today southern Syria and northern Jordan, who were using it to create hidden underground water cisterns around 700BC.

The basic concrete recipe the Romans followed can be found in the Roman architect Vitruvius’s book ‘De Architectura’, published 100 years before the building of the Pantheon. He described how to make concrete out of lime and pozzolana sand, a type of volcanic ash found near Naples, all mixed with stone mass.

Different aggregates were used to give the concrete diverse densities. Travertine limestone gave the Pantheon’s foundations a density of 2,200kg per cubic metre, while lighter rock was chosen for the dome.

Pozzolans, made of siliceous and aluminous materials, possess little or no cementitious value, but when mixed with water, react chemically with calcium hydroxide at ordinary temperature to form cementitious compounds.

It was the chemistry of this material that formed the basis of the durability of the dome, enabling it to survive two millennia without the steel tension rods used today.

Indeed, the Romans understood that the bigger the structure, the stronger it was, because the simplest way to keep concrete in compression is to put heavy stuff on top of it, like more concrete.

It is a trick still used today. Many large concrete dams are either gravity or arch structures that rely on their own weight and geometry to withstand water.

However, the circular structure of the dome meant that before the ancient engineers could start making its concrete ceiling, they needed to figure out how to direct the weight away from the centre. If they didn’t, and removed the wooden structure holding it in place, the 3,000 tonnes of concrete used to make the dome would have pushed outwards and the whole edifice would have collapsed under its own weight.

Even the kind of scaffolding framework used to support such a framework is still under discussion. “Think of the design of the scaffolding that holds a structure of that weight,” says Perucchio. “They [the ancient Romans] had a high mastery in using timber framing in a way that no other earlier cultures had developed.”

Today when we build in concrete, we introduce a steel tension rod which picks up half of the stresses in the concrete. The Romans used their ancient concrete recipe, and an abundance of highly skilled artisan labour, who tamped the stiff mixture into moulds and walls, rather than pouring it as is done today.

To build the dome, the Roman builders constructed a solid base, a wall six metres thick in the shape of a rotunda, to act as the foundation for the ceiling. They then used the vertical walls on either side to buttress the dome itself.

As the ceiling rose towards its apex, the master craftsmen mixed increasingly lighter aggregate materials into the concrete.

This principle of using different weights of aggregate goes from the heavy travertine used in the base right up to the top of the dome.

“It doesn’t look like it from the inside but on the outside it’s a very thick dome, but relatively light,” says Norbert Delatte, head of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Oklahoma State University.

In some parts, the ancient builders mixed in small clay vases, called amphorae, to control the weight.

The aggregate of the concrete used to make the upper dome region consists of alternating layers of light tuff, found in abundance north of Rome, and pumice stone, the material we use today to file off rough skin. The concrete substance at the top of the dome had a density of just 1,350kg per cubic metre.

To make the ceiling even lighter, masons moulded recessed concrete waffle-like panel bricks called coffers; five layers of these bricks formed the interior ceiling. They pounded the concrete into the moulds using some kind of tamper, most likely made of wood or iron.

This meant that aesthetically, they had allowed an area of the dome to be decorated while simultaneously reducing the amount of concrete necessary for the dome itself.

At the top, the Pantheon’s crowning glory is an open oculus, 7.8m in diameter, which allowed light to shine in, adding to the sense of wonderment the building still incites today. But most importantly, it meant the apex of the dome was made of the lightest material of all, air.

Today, engineers all over the world are looking at the chemical properties of Roman concrete to see if it can be reproduced today to make buildings that last longer. Although the basic ingredients were set out by Vetruvius, modern measuring technologies are making it easier to ascertain the exact chemical properties from just small samples of material.

Yet the clever use of engineering and the unique Roman concrete material is not the only reason this enduring temple to all the gods is still there to inspire awe today. History also played a role in its staying power. The event that probably most ensured its long destiny happened in 609 AD, nearly 400 years after it was built.

The Emperor Phocas, the Byzantine emperor in the east, gave the Pantheon to the Catholic Church in Rome. The Vatican has used it as a place of worship ever since, while its formidable structure also still serves a shrine for architects and engineers the world over.

By Hilary Clarke.

Madrid in winter

Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid

To be understood maybe first to be transparent.

“There’s nothing more intimate in life than simply being understood.”

— Brad Meltzer