The Toughness of Imperial Roman Concrete

http://www.academia.edu/1214963/The_toughness_of_Imperial_Roman_concrete

ABSTRACT: The concrete composites used to realize the monumental structures of Imperial Rome are re-markable engineering materials. While the endurance of intact constructions such as the Pantheon evinces theconcretes’ durability, such durability mostly serves to preserve the mechanical properties, which are responsi- ble both for the monuments’ original creation and continued survival. Despite their prominent role in the en-gineering achievements of the Empire, these mechanical properties – particularly in tension and fracture – have not been comprehensively assessed. We first review the mechanical properties obtained through variousexperimental programs conducted on both authentic Ancient composite core samples and their components,summarizing the major findings and outlining the remaining gaps in knowledge. We then qualitatively discussthe fracture of Roman concrete within the context of our own testing program, which will test both re-fabricated and authentic materials, with the aim of characterizing the fracture behavior that has contributed tothe preservation of a significant component of engineering heritage

Grand Guignol

Lenna

Rats: Night of Terror

The Magic Christian

Goya - Colossus

Beckett - Ping

All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn. Light heat white floor one square yard never seen. White walls one yard by two white ceiling one square yard never seen. Bare white body fixed only the eyes only just. Traces blurs light grey almost white on white. Hands hanging palms frontwhite feet heels together right angle. Light heat white planes shining white bare white body fixed ping fixed elsewhere. Traces blurs signs no meaning light grey almost white. Bare white body fixed white on whiteinvisible. Only the eyes only just light blue almost white. Head naught eyes light blue almost white silence within. Brief murmurs only just almost never all known. Traces blur signs no meaning light grey almostwhite. Legs joined like sewn heels together right angle. Traces alone uncover given black light grey almostwhite on white. Light heat white walls shining white one yard by two. Bare white body fixed one yard ping fixed elsewhere. Traces blurs signs no meaning light grey almost white. White feet toes joined like sewn heels together right angle invisible. Eyes alone uncover given blue light blue almost white. Murmur only just almost never one second perhaps not alone. Given rose only just bare white body fixed one yard white onwhite invisible. All white all known murmurs only just almost never always the same white invisible. Barewhite body fixed ping elsewhere. Only the eyes only just light blue almost white fixed front. Ping murmur only just almost never one second perhaps a way out. Head naught eyes light blue almost white fixed front ping murmur ping silence. Eyes holes light blue almost white mouth white seam like sewn invisible. Ping murmur perhaps a nature one second almost never that much memory almost never. White walls each its trace grey blur signs no meaning light grey almost white. Light heat all known all white planes meeting invisible. Ping murmur only just almost never one second perhaps a meaning that much memory almost never. White feet toes joined like sewn heels together right angle ping elsewhere no sound. Hands hanging palms front legs joined like sewn. Head naught eyes holes light blue almost white fixed front silence within. Ping elsewhere always there but that known not. Eyes holes light blue alone uncover given blue light blue almost white only colour fixed front. All white all known white planes shining white ping murmur only just almost never one second light time that much memory almost never. Bare white body fixed one yard ping fixed elsewhere white on white invisible heart breath no sound. Only the eyes given blue light blue almostwhite fixed front only colour alone uncover. Planes meeting invisible one only shining white infinite but that known not. Nose ears while holes mouth white seam like sewn invisible. Ping murmurs only just almost never one second always the same all known. Given rose only just bare white body fixed one yard invisible all known without within. Ping perhaps a nature one image same time a little less blue and white in the wind.White ceiling shining white one square yard never seen ping perhaps away out there one second ping silence. Traces alone uncover given black grey blurs signs no meaning grey light almost white always the same. Ping perhaps not alone one second with image always the silence. Given rose only just nails fallenwhite over. Long hair fallen white invisible over. White scars invisible same white as flesh torn of old given rose only just. Ping image only just almost never one second light time blue and white in the wind. Head naught nose ears white holes mouth white seam like sewn invisible over. Only the eyes given blue fixed front light blue almost white only colour alone uncover. Light heat white planes shining white one only shining white infinite but that known not. Ping a nature only just almost never one second with image same time a little less blue and white in the wind. Traces blues light grey eyes holes light blue almost white fixed front ping a meaning only just almost never ping silence. Bare white one yard fixed ping fixed elsewhere no sound legs joined like sewn heels together right angle hands hanging palms front. Head naught eyes holes light blue almost white fixed front silence within. Ping elsewhere always there but that known not. Ping perhaps not alone one second with image same time a little less dim eye black and white half closed along lashes imploring that much memory almost never. A far flash of time all white all over all of old ping flashwhite walls shining white no trace eyes holes light blue almost white last colour ping white over. Ping fixed last elsewhere legs joined like sewn heels together right angle hands hanging palms front head naught eyes white invisible fixed front over. Given rose only just one yard invisible bare white all known without within over. White ceiling never seen ping of old only just almost never one second light time white floor never seen ping of old perhaps there. Ping of old only just perhaps a meaning nature one second almost never blue and white in that much memory henceforth never. White planes no traces shining white one only shining white infinite but that known not. Light heat all known all white heart breath no sound. Head naught eyes fixed front old ping last murmur one second perhaps not alone eye unlustrous black and white half closed long lashes imploring ping silence ping over.

A Planet Named Shayol

by Cordwainer Smith

Smith acknowledged his debt to Dante in this story, which retells parts of the Inferno in science-fiction form—but with a twist distinctly Smith's own. The action apparently takes place even after that of Norstrilia, for banishment to Shayol is still used as a threat in the novel. At the end of this collection, as at the beginning, a member of the Vomact family appears—and we even meet Suzdal again. But Smith never shed any more light on the origin of the Go-Captain Alvarez...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/336976/A-Planet-Named-Shayol

Ceiling Guy

There’s a man trapped in my ceiling. I don’t know how he got there. I was brushing my teeth and getting ready for work when I heard a faint voice. I stopped, listening for the TV in the lounge room, but it was off. Then I heard the voice again.

“Hello down there.”

I stopped brushing. “Hello,” I said. Silence. I felt silly talking aloud to myself. I spat the toothpaste into the sink and rinsed out my mouth.

“Hey, you, look up here.”

The voice was much louder. I looked up. Staring back down at me through the air vent I could see a face in the darkness. This scared me more than I wanted to let on, so I acted a bit tough, like I dealt with people in ceilings all the time.

“Fuck you pal, hiding in my ceiling. Get the fuck out of there.”

“Hey, don’t blame me, I don’t know how I got here. Do you think I like hanging out in ceilings watching guys brush their teeth?”

He had me there. I wouldn’t like being in a ceiling. It was probably really dusty and dark and full of mouse shit up there.

“What do you mean you don’t know how you got there?”

“I just don’t. Can you help me down?”

“I don’t have a ladder.”

“Oh.”

“Um, yeah,” I said. I felt bad I didn’t have a ladder. But then who has ladders in a small, one bedroom apartment? I felt angry at this ceiling guy for making me feel bad. But then I felt bad for him being stuck in the ceiling.

“I tell you what, I’m really running late for work. I’ll go by the super and tell him about you and if he has a ladder, don’t go anywhere.” I rushed out of the bathroom.

The super opened his door. “What do you want?” he said.

“Uh,” I started. I looked at him, 250 pounds of ‘I don’t want to hear any of your shit’ stared back at me. “There’s a guy. In my ceiling. Need a ladder,” I spluttered.

“You want a ladder, call the fire brigade.” With that, he slammed the door shut.

I looked down the hallway, it looked like the building was empty, everyone here had already gone to work. My apartment didn’t have a phone, and I had left my cellphone at the office the day before, which is kind of why I was late, I hadn’t set my alarm.

I walked out onto the street. An old lady was walking past so I walked up to her.

“Hi there, hi. How’s it going, nice day huh? Um.”

She stared at me, her hand edging into her purse. I forged on. “I was wondering if you could help me, you see there’s this guy in my ceiling.”

She brought her hand out of her purse, I was surprised it was empty, but not as surprised as I was when she slapped me across the face with it and ran down the sidewalk. For a senior citizen, she sure packed a punch.

Still in a daze and holding a hand to my cheek, I don’t see the police car pull up beside me. A young officer gets out and comes up to me.

“You alright?” he asks.

I’m staring at him. Finally, someone to help. “Yes, I’m fine thanks. Look you’re just in time. There’s this guy in my ceiling I need to help.”

The officer is staring off after the old woman. “Did I see that lady hit you?” he said.

“Oh, that? Um, yeah. Maybe. Look, the issue is my apartment. There’s this guy, he’s in the ceiling and my super is being a dick and I tried to get that woman’s phone because mine is at work, and I’m late for work and there’s this guy, you know. In my ceiling. Can you get him out for me?”

The officer is staring at me. “Look, did that punch knock you around some? I can call an ambulance if you like. Do you want to press charges?”

“No, no, I”m fine. I just, I just need a ladder is all.”

“You want a ladder, call the fire brigade.”

The siren on the car went off. The officer still behind the wheel honked the horn.

“Come down to the station this afternoon and I’ll write up a statement for you,” said the young officer. He jumped back into the car and drove off.

The bus going to the city pulls up. I take a quick look back at my building, but I have to catch this bus, or otherwise catch the long slow bus that stops at every stop. Then I’ll be really late for work. I get on and sit on a window seat. It’s a pretty long ride, and lots of people get on and off next to me. I clear my throat a couple of times and start to ask to borrow their phones, but before I can say hardly anything it’s like I’ve just thrown up over their shoes and they jump up and get off at the next stop. I realise I can’t tell anyone about the ceiling guy. It’s just too weird. Maybe he wasn’t there at all. Maybe I just imagined it because I’m stressed and I’m worried about my phone and my job and Riniko who always leaves the TV on. I keep thinking about the guy in my ceiling. I hope he’s alright up there. I’ll bring some food back for you ceiling guy. We’ll be fine.

Gini coefficient

The Gini coefficient is a measure of statistical dispersion developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini and published in his 1912 paper "Variability and Mutability" (Italian: Variabilità e mutabilità)

The Gini coefficient is a measure of the inequality of a distribution, a value of 0 expressing total equality and a value of 1 maximal inequality. It has found application in the study of inequalities in disciplines as diverse as economics, health science, ecology, chemistry and engineering.

It is commonly used as a measure of inequality of income or wealth. Worldwide, Gini coefficients for income range from approximately 0.23 (Sweden) to 0.70 (Namibia) although not every country has been assessed.

The Gini coefficient is usually defined mathematically based on the Lorenz curve, which plots the proportion of the total income of the population (y axis) that is cumulatively earned by the bottom x% of the population (see diagram). The line at 45 degrees thus represents perfect equality of incomes. The Gini coefficient can then be thought of as the ratio of the area that lies between the line of equality and the Lorenz curve (marked 'A' in the diagram) over the total area under the line of equality (marked 'A' and 'B' in the diagram); i.e., G=A/(A+B).

Gooooaaall

Don't die before you're dead

Yasunari Kawabata - The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket

Walking along the tile-roofed wall of the university, I turned aside and approached the upper school. Behind the white board fence of the school playground, from a dusky clump of bushes under the black cherry trees, an insect’s voice could be heard. Walking more slowly and listening to that voice, and furthermore reluctant to part with it, I turned right so as not to leave the playground behind. When I turned to the left, the fence gave way to another embankment planted with orange trees. At the corner, I exclaimed with surprise. My eyes gleaming at what they saw up ahead, I hurried forward with short steps.

At the base of the embankment was a bobbing cluster of beautiful varicolored lanterns, such as one might see at a festival in a remote country village. Without going any farther, I knew that it was a group of children on an insect chase among the bushes of the embankment. There were about twenty lanterns. Not only were there crimson, pink, indigo, green, purple, and yellow lanterns, but one lantern glowed with five colors at once. There were even some little red store-bought lanterns. But most of the lanterns were beautiful square ones the children had made themselves with love and care. The bobbing lanterns, the coming together of children on this lonely slope – surely it was a scene from a fairy tale?

One of the neighborhood children had heard an insect sing on this slope one night. Buying a red lantern, he had come back the next night to find the insect. The night after that, there was another child. This new child could not buy a lantern. Cutting out the back and front of a small carton and papering it, he placed a candle on the bottom and fastened a string to the top. The number of children grew to five, and then to seven. They learned how to color the paper that they stretched over the windows of the cutout cartons, and to draw pictures on it. Then these wise child-artists, cutting out round, three-cornered, and lozenge leaf shapes in the cartons, coloring each little window a different color, with circles and diamonds, red and green, made a single and whole decorative pattern. The child with the red lantern discarded it as a tasteless object that could be bought at a store. The child who had made his own lantern threw it away because the design was too simple. The pattern of light that one had had in hand the night before was unsatisfying the morning after. Each day, with cardboard, paper, brush, scissors, penknife, and flue, the children made new lanterns out of their hearts and minds. Look at my lantern! Be the most unusually beautiful! And each night, they had gone out on their insect hunts. These were the twenty children and their beautiful lanterns that I now saw before me.

Wide-eyed, I loitered near them. Not only did the square lanterns have old-fashioned patterns and flower shapes, but the names of the children who had made them were cut out in square letters of the syllabary. Different from the painted-over red lanterns, others (made of thick cutout cardboard) had their designs drawn upon the paper windows, so that the candle’s light seemed to emanate from the form and color of the design itself. The lanterns brought out the shadows of the bushes like dark light. The children crouched eagerly on the slope wherever they heard an insect’s voice.


“Does anyone want a grasshopper?” A boy, who had been peering into a bush about thirty feet away from the other children, suddenly straightened up and shouted.

“Yes! Give it to me!” Six or seven children came running up. Crowding behind the boy who had found the grasshopper, they peered into the bush. Brushing away their outstretched hands and spreading out his arms, the boy stood as if guarding the bush where the insect was. Waving the lantern in his right hand, he called again to the other children.

“Does anyone want a grasshopper? A grasshopper!”

“I do! I do!” Four or five more children came running up. It seemed you could not catch a more precious insect than a grasshopper. The boy called out a third time.

“Doesn’t anyone want a grasshopper?”

Two or three more children came over.

“Yes. I want it.”

It was a girl, who just now had come up behind the boy who’d discovered the insect. Lightly turning his body, the boy gracefully bent forward. Shifting the lantern to his left hand, he reached his right hand into the bush.

“It’s a grasshopper.”

“Yes. I’d like to have it.”

The boy quickly stood up. As if to say “Here!” he thrust out his fist that held the insect at the girl. She, slipping her left wrist under the string of her lantern, enclosed the boy’s fist with both hands. The boy quietly opened his fist. The insect was transferred to between the girl’s thumb and index finger.

“Oh! It’s not a grasshopper. It’s a bell cricket.” The girl’s eyes shone as she looked at the small brown insect.

“It’s a bell cricket! It’s a bell cricket!” The children echoed in an envious chorus.

“It’s a bell cricket. It’s a bell cricket.”

Glancing with her bright intelligent eyes at the boy who had given her the cricket, the girl opened the little insect cage hanging at her side and released the cricket in it.

“It’s a bell cricket.”

“Oh, it’s a bell cricket,” the boy who’d captured it muttered. Holding up the insect cage close to his eyes, he looked inside it. By the light of his beautiful many-colored lantern, also held up at eye level, he glanced at the girl’s face.

Oh, I thought. I felt slightly jealous of the boy, and sheepish. How silly of me not to have understood his actions until now! Then I caught my breath in surprise. Look! It was something on the girl’s breast which neither the boy who had given her the cricket, nor she who had accepted it, nor the children who were looking at them noticed.

In the faint greenish light that fell on the girl’s breast, wasn’t the name “Fujio” clearly discernible? The boy’s lantern, which he held up alongside the girl’s insect cage, inscribed his name, cut out in the green papered aperture, onto her white cotton kimono. The girl’s lantern, which dangled loosely from her wrist, did not project its pattern so clearly, but still one could make out, in a trembling patch of red on the boy’s waist, the name “Kiyoko.” This chance interplay of red and green – if it was chance or play – neither Fujio nor Kiyoko knew about.

Even if they remembered forever that Fujio had given her the cricket and that Kiyoko had accepted it, not even in dreams would Fujio ever know that his name had been written in green on Kiyoko’s breast or that Kiyoko’s name had been inscribed in red on his waist, nor would Kiyoko ever know that Fujio’s name had been inscribed in green on her breast or that her own name had been written in red on Fujio’s waist.

Fujio! Even when you have become a young man, laugh with pleasure at a girl’s delight when, told that it’s a grasshopper, she is given a bell cricket; laugh with affection at a girl’s chagrin when, told that it’s a bell cricket, she is given a grasshopper.

Even if you have the wit to look by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not many bell crickets in the world. Probably you will find a girl like a grasshopper whom you think is a bell cricket.

And finally, to your clouded, wounded heart, even a true bell cricket will seem like a grasshopper. Should that day come, when it seems to you that the world is only full of grasshoppers, I will think it a pity that you have no way to remember tonight’s play of light, when your name was written in green by your beautiful lantern on a girl’s breast.

Battle of Zama by Giulio Romano

Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture

Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are major psychological differences within China. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, whereas farming wheat makes cultures more independent, and these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world. We tested 1162 Han Chinese participants in six sites and found that rice-growing southern China is more interdependent and holistic-thinking than the wheat-growing north. To control for confounds like climate, we tested people from neighboring counties along the rice-wheat border and found differences that were just as large. We also find that modernization and pathogen prevalence theories do not fit the data.

Lubitsch's 'Angel'

Grand Budapest

Patlabor

Blues and Haikus

Peking Aufgenommen (1900)

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

-William Carlos Williams

25 years

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

-Philip Larkin

Watch Matrix

House