Thursday Things: Building Things Edition
12 January 2023. Vol 5 No 2. By Dan McGirt. #179
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The Pantheon. Made of Roman concrete. Photo by Lode Lagrainge on Unsplash
Romani concretum est optimum
The Romans were the master builders of the ancient world. Sure, the Egyptians built bigger. The Greeks built prettier. But for practical engineering — roads, bridges, aqueducts, sewers, baths, colosseums — the Romans could not be beat.1
Some Roman roads and bridges are still in use today, thousands of years after being constructed. Pyramids, on the other hand, aren’t good for much beyond pointing at and saying, “Yep, that sure is a big pyramid.”2
One secret of Roman building prowess was there extremely durable concrete. As with Greek fire and Damascus steel, there was a secret ingredient to making Roman concrete that was lost to history — until now!
Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?
Researchers have spent decades trying to figure out the secret of this ultradurable ancient construction material, particularly in structures that endured especially harsh conditions, such as docks, sewers, and seawalls, or those constructed in seismically active locations.
Now, a team of investigators from MIT, Harvard University, and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland, has made progress in this field, discovering ancient concrete-manufacturing strategies that incorporated several key self-healing functionalities.
Cracks in the concrete would heal themselves. But how was this possible? Maybe those little white “lime clasts” seen in many samples of the ancient concrete were a clue:
Studying samples of this ancient concrete, he and his team determined that the white inclusions were, indeed, made out of various forms of calcium carbonate. And spectroscopic examination provided clues that these had been formed at extreme temperatures, as would be expected from the exothermic reaction produced by using quicklime instead of, or in addition to, the slaked lime in the mixture. Hot mixing, the team has now concluded, was actually the key to the super-durable nature.
That’s the secret: hot mixing quicklime into the concrete during production.
“The benefits of hot mixing are twofold,” Masic says. “First, when the overall concrete is heated to high temperatures, it allows chemistries that are not possible if you only used slaked lime, producing high-temperature-associated compounds that would not otherwise form. Second, this increased temperature significantly reduces curing and setting times since all the reactions are accelerated, allowing for much faster construction.”
You can read all the details at Hot mixing: Mechanistic insights into the durability of ancient Roman concrete
Monkey Tools!
There’s serious monkey business going on in Brazil. Or at least there was 50,000 years ago, when the monkeys of Brazil were busy manufacturing stone tools:
Monkeys made stone tools 50,000 years ago that were discovered in Brazil - study
Stone tools that are estimated to be roughly 50,000 years old were found in Pedra Furada in northeastern Brazil, and that these tools were made by monkeys who lived in that time, according to a study that was first published in November.
The tools found at the sites are characterized "by the use of immediately available raw material," the study says.
The researchers also state that they're "confident that the early archeological sites from Brazil may not be human-derived but may belong to capuchin monkeys." The peer-reviewed study was published in the journal The Holocene.
Capucin monkeys are usually found in the tropical forests in Central and South America, according to Heritage Daily. They are considered to be the smartest New World monkey.
Yes, The Holocene is your go-to source for Stone Age news and gossip.
Here’s the abstract of the article “Holocene capuchin-monkey stone tool deposits shed doubts on the human origin of archeological sites from the Pleistocene of Brazil”:
New World capuchin monkeys are well-known by their ability to solve problems using stone tools that have the characteristics and morphology of some human-made stone tools. The aim of the present contribution is to carry out brief comparisons between the Pleistocene archeological sites from Brazil (e.g. Pedra Furada, Sitio do Meio, Vale da Pedra Furada, Toca da Tira Peia) and capuchin-made stone tool deposits.
Pleistocene sites from Brazil are characterized by the exclusive use of immediately available raw material, the predominance of unifacial flaking, and abundance of cortical flakes, together with the absence of blades and bifacial thinning techniques.
In all these aspects, the sites resemble capuchin-made lithic deposits and lack a number of human attributes. In sum, based on positive and negative evidence we are confident that the early archeological sites from Brazil may not be human-derived but may belong to capuchin monkeys.
You had me at unifacial flaking. But could the monkeys make concrete?
And after 50,000 year of R&D, what are those capuchin monkeys building now? Banana dispensers? Lasers? Monkey-powered AI?
My favorite part of logging into ChatGPT is having to prove that *I’m* not a robot. Image: Thursday Things
Speaking of AI…
If you haven’t noticed, we’re in the midst of a Cambrian explosion of AI tools and creative uses people are finding for those tools. And it’s happening so fast!
Here’s a short and woefully incomplete list of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that didn’t exist a year ago:
ChatGPT: A large language model developed by OpenAI.
Whisper: An AI-based tool for anonymous communication.
GPT-3: A state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI.
Codex: An AI-based code generation tool.
GitHub Copilot: An AI-powered code-completion tool.
InstructGPT: An AI-based tool for generating code documentation.
AI slides: An AI-based tool for creating presentations.
DALLE + API: An AI-based tool for creating deep learning models without coding.
Midjourney: An AI-based tool for creating and managing machine learning workflows.
Stable Diffusion: An AI-based tool for creating and managing machine learning models.
Runway videos: A tool for creating AI-generated videos.
Email AI: An AI-based tool for automating email responses.
AI Chrome extensions: Chrome extensions that use AI to enhance browsing experience.
Replit Ghostwriter: An AI-based tool for writing code.
No-code AI app builders: Platforms for building AI-powered apps without writing code.
By the way, I didn’t know what some of those were. I found the bare list here, and then asked ChatGPT to write a one line description of each. Which it did in about 30 seconds. Much faster than me Googling each item one by one.
AI can write text, code, and music. It can produce visual art from cartoonish to photorealistic to approximations of the style of any artist. AI can make slides, videos, animations. AI can produce speech almost (for now) indistinguishable from the live human voice. And so much more.
If you can digitize it, AI can do it.
AI is here and we all will have to, quite literally, get with the program. My brain is overwhelmed by the massive variety of tools available, much less figuring out how to put them to good use! I could spend all day every day doing nothing but reading about AI and still never catch up. Literally everything could change by next Thursday.
To me, this is super exciting. Overwhelming, yes. But the possibilities are endless.
I’ll just link two articles from my recent AI binge. One to show that the tech media now has a catchall buzz word to encompass all these flavors of AI tools. Welcome to the age of “generative AI”.
AI is having a moment—here’s how businesses can lean in
In recent weeks, generative AI seems to have popped up everywhere in the mainstream—via the popularity of ChatGPT, the proliferation of text-to-image tools, and as avatars in our social media feeds. But beyond fun smartphone apps and handy ways for students to shirk essay-writing assignments, global adoption of AI will fundamentally change the way businesses operate, innovate, and scale in the near future….
What is Generative AI and how will most businesses and individuals use it in the near future?
Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence that can generate novel content, rather than simply analyzing or acting on existing data. Generative AI models produce text and images: blog posts, program code, poetry, and artwork. The software uses complex machine learning models to predict the next word based on previous word sequences, or the next image based on words describing previous images. In the shorter term, we see generative AI used to create marketing content, generate code, and in conversational applications such as chatbots.
And here is a small sample of some of the things you can do with ChatGPT3:
20 Entertaining Uses of ChatGPT You Never Knew Were Possible
I’ll give just a few examples from the article. Click through to read the whole list.
Write a Twitter thread
Guest speaker Q&A prompts
Lesson plans for teachers
Find podcast guests
Welcome to the future. Hopefully AI will be a net boon to mankind, instead of helping us go boom. But if the latter happens, maybe the Brazilian monkeys will let us borrow their stone tools when we start over!
No way. You had your chance, humans. Photo by Joy Ernst on Unsplash
Thank you!
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That was usually true on the battlefield too.
The Sphinx is cool though.
It’s so hot right now!