MNTS #27

[Week 46/ Year 2023] Montaigne, Healing Ourselves to Death, Ancient Concrete, Easy Architecture, Spotify Audio Books, Wildlings

Nov 19, 2023

Mainly, Notes To Self - my weekly attempt to compress everything noteworthy I read, watched, listened to, and discovered during the past week.

Reading

The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Michel Montaigne - I’ve been starting my day reading an essay or two, and it’s a significant upgrade to my morning routine compared to my usual email ritual. Also, the Kindle version is currently $0.99 if that’s your forte.

Essays completed so far:

On Friendship
Of Cannibals
Idleness
Of Solitude
By Different Methods Men Arrive at the Same End
Of Sorrow
Our Affections Carry Themselves Beyond Us
Of Experience

Healing Ourselves to Death by Sherry Ning

Some believe that the leap of faith is made by those who have naively abandoned their introspective search for truth. However, it’s more likely that those taking the leap have rummaged so thoroughly within themselves that they’ve hit rock bottom and felt disappointed. Humility, not ignorance, marks the beginning of wisdom and true learning.

We Finally Know How Ancient Roman Concrete Was So Durable by Michelle Starr - fascinating

The lime clasts give the concrete remarkable self-healing abilities.
When cracks form in the concrete, they preferentially travel to the lime clasts, which have a higher surface area than other particles in the matrix. When water gets into the crack, it reacts with the lime to form a solution rich in calcium that dries and hardens as calcium carbonate, gluing the crack back together and preventing it from spreading further.
This has been observed in concrete from another 2,000-year-old site, the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, where cracks in the concrete have been filled with calcite. It could also explain why Roman concrete from seawalls built 2,000 years ago has survived intact for millennia despite the ocean's constant battering.

Making architecture easy by Samuel Hughes - The author cites Georgian or ‘Palladian’ style as an example of a style that is easy to use and can be mass-produced. The essay also suggests that tonality plays roughly the role for music that easy-ness plays for architecture. The essay argues that architecturally easy, or ‘tonal’, styles do not have to be ‘traditional’ or old ones; some strands of ‘modernist’ architecture were relatively accessible even in the most austere years.