Animation of how bridges were built in Central Europe in the Middle Ages [video]

Most of the time in human history people were struggling to even stay alive. You had to work until you got enough food to feed your family, or you'd die. Live was not great, it was very stressful and inefficient (but people were used to it). This is still the case in most of the world, although overall not as bad as it once was, it is improving constantly.

We're the lucky ones who can sustain ourselve with 8 hours of work, food is cheap and abundant, we can afford luxury items like iphones even if a 300$ android smartphone would do the same job.

No, at average, people are not working harder now, because we don't have to. We managed to improve efficiency so much already and quality of life continues to rise.

With exception of very rich people in few periods (idle aristocracy, middle class 1950 household), majority of people needed to work a lot. That includes both women and men.

Construction, for example, is incredibly hard work even with modern tools, and they had none of those.

That we can live comfortably with all the modern amenities on 40 hours a week, which for many is just sitting in a chair, typing text, is really good. I'm not bashing office workers here, btw.

Could definitely work less, maybe the push for shorter work days will gain traction.

Even if we doubled yearly increases in ppm we'd be a century away from a measurable impact on human cognition for outdoor air.

A couple of other studies showed no effects of elevated CO2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23161403

One specific marvel is the self-aligned gate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-aligned_gate)

Only because we expect a far lesser fraction of societal productivity to be spent on them.

I don't know if anyone's run the numbers for the pyramids but European castles and cathedrals took a massive fraction of their area's productivity to create compared to modern civil engineering products.

Recreating the pyramids would only be "big" because modern society doesn't spend big on vanity projects like that anymore. With modern tech we could build the same pyramids much cheaper or many more pyramids for the same money.

Also, often builders would start with scale models, and then exaggerate proportions - that doesn’t require sophisticated math. Just do the modeling “analog”!

Depends on the site, probably.

Driving the first piles had to have been a tough job. Still, Caesar's legions did it to cross the Rhine in 55 BC. So pile-driving in water was being done a long time ago.

https://www.infoplease.com/us/health-statistics/life-expecta...

like to have other people work on something that improves society.

What's clear is that knowledge transfer (from region to region and from generation to generation) was facilitated by traveling apprentices, a tradition that still lives on and (I believe) is documented to go back to that time. Their profession wouldn't be bridge builder but merely some contributing role (with the occasional exception of whatever the period-correct term for architect or project manager would be), but of all the masons involved, you'd have some whose learning circuit involved a bridge, of the woodworkers you'd have some who dabbled in cranes before and so on. But was that usually sufficient or was there also a pattern of on-demand traveling leadership?

edit: post was lingering in the input form for some hours, some good answers already there!

"Charles BridgeAmong the best-known architectural features of Prague is Charles Bridge (Karl¿v most). Known as PragueBridge until 1870, it spans the Vltava River and the Kampa Island between the Lesser Town and the OldTown. It is one of the oldest stone bridges in Europe and the second oldest in the republic (the oldest inPísek, Bohemia, was built in the thirteenth century).The first bridge crossing the Vltava in Prague was wooden anddated from the tenth century. The Judith stone bridge, built 1158–1160, spanned the river until a disastrous floodwashed it away in 1342. Charles IV commissioned Petr Parlérˇ to erect a new bridge; being somewhat superstitious,the king broke ground for the bridge in 1357 on 9 July at 5:31 A.M., thus creating a date and time that, if given com-pletely in numbers, is a perfect palindrome: 1–3–5–7–9–7–5–3–1.

The sandstone bridge, stretching 516 meters with sixteen arches, was completed in 1402.Thirty statues adorn thebridge (the originals for most are in the Lapidarium of the National Museum). In 1683 Charles Bridge received itsfirst baroque sculpture, that of St. John Nepomuk, the work of Matthias Rauchmüller and Jan Brokoff. The bronzerelief at the base of the statue depicts the false legend that Jan Nepomuk would not tell Václav IV the secrets of thequeen’s confession, so Václav IV had him cast into the Vltava from the bridge (a bronze cross in the bridge parapetmarks the alleged spot). Other baroque masters who sculpted works for the bridge included Ferdinand MaximiliánBrokoff, Michal Josef Brokoff, and Matyá≥Bernard Braun. In the classical era, Josef Max, Emanuel Max, and otherssculpted several statues. Karel Dvorˇák completed the most recent statue, that of the missionaries Cyril and Method-ius, in 1938.

On the Lesser Town side of the bridge are two towers.The first is a remnant of the Judith Bridge that was rebuiltin 1591. The taller Gothic tower was completed in 1464, and a Gothic gateway links the two towers. On the OldTown side of the bridge stands a single Gothic tower decorated with saints, the builders, and skillfully executed rep-resentations of Charles IV and his son,Václav IV. Also embellishing the tower are the coats of arms of the Bohemiankingdom.The roof is the design of Josef Mocker from the late nineteenth century. A portion of the Old Town Towerfacade and the bridge was damaged during a Swedish bombardment in 1648."

Ok - so now, I can see where the wiki claim is from. But, where is this source in the history book from?

My problem is that this is presented as true, but I want to know where the sources are. The book "EASTERN EUROPE" by RICHARD FRUCHT, was written in 2005. Obviously we are not dealing with a primary or secondary source. But what is the source Frucht is using? Is it just a story Frucht or someone else made up? We don't know.

https://www.academia.edu/3093773/Založení_Karlova_mostu_a_ko...

(alert: scanned and turned 90 degrees, my neck hurts)

On page 202 it describes founding of the bridge. The author puts it in context of gathering the remnants of St. Vitus (that Charles was obsessed about and his statue is present on one of towers at the end of the bridge) and highlights that the conjunction (opposition) of Saturn and the Sun happened on 1357, 9th day of 7th month.

He further investigates whether the way Charles or people of his age would write the date is the same as ours and concludes that it is likely - arab numerals, year, day, month then time, 60-minute hours are all documented in his court. Founding of the bridge would have to include a mass so it could not take place in the afternoon, which 5:31 AM isn't. Indeed different ways of expressing time used at the time are all consistent with that - except the "old bohemian" way to express time because that would be before sunrise.

If they did express it the same way as we do then at 5:31 AM the constellation of Lion (symbol of Czech kings) was in ascendent (just above horizon, important astrological place).

Additionally, a sign (which was dated to 1640 but could have been a replacement of an older one) on one of the towers at the end of the bridge contains a palindrome poem (in Latin).

Another reason why it could be true comes for the author from the fact that Charles and his people would have known and read Dante Alighieri's Vita nuova where similar numerological symmetry plays a major role. And the Prague Astronomical Clock contains a completely extra gear that serves no purpose but the counts of its tooth is also a palindromatic sequence.

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Notes:

† Roughly. Using GNU units: 45 years / 3 minutes = 7889231.5

Most of us are used to faster paced information delivery, and we still go back to what we missed or want to check more in detail.

That’s what we deal with day in day out, and I don’t think we end up with an understanding that is shallower than when stopping at each frame for 5 seconds.

I find it sad it becomes some “kids these days” rant material when it’s just a matter of preferred watching pace.

Of course time-lapses and stuff like that are intentionally sped up, but for something like an instructional video, it's going to be challenging to take real meaning from it.

In general it seems that people want to see some "neat" thing, click Like, and move onto the next interesting thing. For me, I don't relate. I like to dive into my interests and invest some real time into them. Otherwise my perception of the world and the things around me is super shallow. In fact, when I want information, I usually want text and images, not video/audio.

Further, I don't find it very rewarding to watch those sort of "clickbait" clips. I understand it can be satisfying in the short term, but I find almost zero need for this type of entertainment. I sense the primal nature of it and find it unappealing. I also feel that those primal "entertainment" desires are being exploited for clicks/likes/advertising, and I prefer to be compensated by greater value than relatively-shallow time-wasting if I am being exploited :)