Crooked to the Millimetre
ethz.ch
ethz.ch
The canonical example in California are acoustic "freeway walls" which are block walls that line the freeways as a mechanism for minimizing noise in the surrounding neighborhoods. The "simple" way these are build tends to just reflect the noise somewhere else, and has some really interesting effects with low clouds.
If on the other hand you could mathematically design an audio 'notch' filter out of the walls using a precise set of openings that would absorb sound and dissipate its energy into the wall, you could create much more effective sound walls. And if you could do this so that anyone working on the wall has a good chance of successfully laying out the wall correctly, then you could apply it to the miles and miles of walls that Caltrans builds every year. That would be pretty neat.
My favorite application similar but different from what you’re describing from antiquity is the acoustical effect of certain Mayan and Aztec pyramids. Here’s a video[2]
I’ve worked for a masonry company for about four years and recently started my apprenticeship to become a brick block and stone mason a year ago. Working in this sector has made me truly appreciate the amount of work (Work = force*distance) that goes into any masonry. You see brick block and stone EVERYWHERE but what you might not realize is each brick, each block, each stone, has to travel from their source to their final destination. Usually that’s done by someone like me; if we’re lucky, we’re using M2 mobile hydro units coupled with a boom lift to reach whatever heights we need to hit. If we’re not so lucky, we’re building scaffolding by hand, stocking everything by hand, mixing mortar (in a mixer) by hand and using buckets to get the mortar where it need to be. It’s truly mind boggling and back breaking work. I realize this is an emerging technology but some of the masons I work with could reproduce work very close to this, maybe not mm accuracy but close enough where you’d never see the difference. And 3 months to lay ~15,000 bricks is an INSANELY long time. To put that number into perspective, a crew of 5 guys with average skill (3 masons, a laborer, and an operator making mud), given no extra equipment besides a mixer could pound out about 1000 brick in a day. That’s including everything from setup to cleanup.
Some of the guys I work with have been a mason for 40 years and they posses some incredible skill and can create amazing things and damn they’re fast too. The sad fact of the matter is most blueprints don’t want fancy masonry work anymore. It’s too cost prohibitive. We charge about $25/square foot of stone that’s without added arches or keystones or corbels etc; that also doesn’t include material costs (mortar, stone, tar paper, mesh, staples, etc). One experienced mason can throw up 100 square feet in a day, sometimes more given the differences in material. I wish we got contracts to create the beautiful buildings like in downtown Chicago or Milwaukee but it’s too much of a numbers game with real estate developers now. No one wants to pay us to create art, just slap it up and go man go!
With all that being said, man I’d like to have some time to play around with this tech! Or at least get to be the guy that holds the camera all day ;) looks like a breezy job compared to what I do everyday.
When I used to build staircases, it always gave me pause to think that people not yet born would be walking up and down those stairs long after I'm dead. And that's the nature of your work. Your work product will outlive you by decades, or possibly centuries.
It's amazing to think that person, probably relatively young when they built this house just after the war, is now either dead or pushing 90. A whole life lived with their name in the loft.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Overzich...
But it's still interesting - on a personal level - to think about the lives of the people who built it.
Fun fact : when your house is so old, you have to take care of it the old way too... It's more expensive and nobody wants to do the job 'cos it's always trickier than new houses :-)
Be careful with your back!
As for your comment on the economics: the main reason that old buildings looked so ornate and beautiful to our present day eyes is that at the time the labor costs and costs of materials were a small fraction of what they are today, and cost overruns were very common. On a relative scale the cost of building has gone up substantially which leads to every building being put up with the least amount of labor and the cheapest materials that can be found. If brick is used at all (instead of the ugly stone strips, which is a material which I think ought to be prohibited) it is in a decorative rather than a structural manner, the building itself will be made out of concrete.
The only place where you'll find some room to really use your skills is in restoration work as well as the houses for the rich. Almost everything else, including commercial buildings is done to a very tight budget.
I have worked some pretty tough summer jobs. Working in a garden centre it was normal to spend a whole day moving bricks and slabs from delivery pallets onto nicer retail pallets. While objectively it's much harder physically, it also much easier to guage progress and perhaps mentally more rewarding than having spent a whole day trying to wrestle a few bytes of information into the desired form. Even when you think you have succeeded you have a reasonable chance that something unexpected will come back to bite you in the ass.
Manual work is usually the result of thousands of years of practice. And masters in their job are truly masters. That is, they do things you can only understand when you have reached some of their proficiency. I'm sad many people do not appreciate the quality of the job they do because "it doesn't look that difficult; you don't need a phd to do it".
I'm very respectful of these people (except that when you need a professional, somehow, they're always hard to find and just never start on schedule :-) just joking)
Common freeway walls are cast concrete preforms, so it's easy to make them have a particular geometry.
In terms of protecting the surrounding community from the noise, the wall tops actually have a lot more impact than the wall geometry itself due to edge diffraction.
Robots are way too expensive. It will be a long time before it is cost effective to have stair climbing robots. With car driving and navigation this has already happened. Turn right here, keep on the left.
A lot of the "AI" is just simple code, algorithms and statistics - and humans helping over some spots.
At some points, large companies were developing robots that could work alongside humans on assembly lines etc since they had sophisticated safety features. I don't know if they ever were commercially successful.
Also heard about similar robot drawing the lines to the pavement (can not find the link just now). I think similar technologies will play a large role in building, and maybe even more importantly, building inspection.
I had to read this 3 times to realize it has nothing to do with Etherium and blockchains
Assuming this involves making CAD drawings of every brick placement, that work should be done by an algorithm, with a human doing fine-tuning if needed.
And of course, as others pointed out, if we know the exact position of every brick, the bricklaying would be perfect work for a robot. No need for a master mason if brick positions are decided by an engineer (or computer).
Current-era economics will incentivize this transition (assuming the cost of labor does not fall radically and long-term): Using a robot may not reduce the construction time appreciably, but it would move the cost from a salary expense to a capital expense. Capital will continue to be very available in the low-interest economy.
What happened to the efficiencies of mass production?
Pretty neat stuff.
Founded in 1855 it is older than the blockchain token!