I do love a pretty mosaic.
Park Gruell in Barcelona is one of the most magnificent mosaic collections that I've ever seen, and I'm a sucker for pretty much any mosaic construction. This video does make me a little sad, however, as I wasn't aware that the glass industry had largely left Venice, one of its historic homes.
Those are absolutely gorgeous tiles. When my wife and I were redoing our shower, I went with a raku tile for the small accent shelf that we added, but if I'd known about these cement tiles before hand, I might've been tempted by them.
Remember, of course, that these are cement tiles, not concrete tiles...ceramic not composite...though the layering might make them a laminar composite anyway...hmmm...
I assume these folks are using medieval techniques to build their castle because they want to not because they're just stubbornly French, right?
I remember in Thomas Thwaites's Toaster Project video that he mentioned needing to go further and further backwards in time when he wanted to bring the scope of industrial processes down to human-sized scales. If he wanted to smelt iron for a single toaster, he wasn't going to build an industrial blast furnace; he was going to find how they heated iron ore thousands of years ago.
That concept resonates as I see an ancient castle being built in modern times but with ancient techniques. They aren't looking for large-scale, industrial processes. They're looking for ancient craftsman methods.
If you want to see more, I'm putting a few more videos after the jump.
I was at Indian Lake in northern Ohio recently and saw a vehicle/machine driving back and forth in the water about twenty feet out from Oldfield Beach. When I asked what the machine was doing, I was told that it was chopping up and supposedly harvesting invasive pondweed (details of the plan here) that was plaguing the lake because of its shallowness and prevalence of fertilizer run-off from nearby farms leading to blue-green algae blooms and near dead zones.
I don't have any idea what they're doing with the pondweed that they harvest from Indian Lake, but I feel like I might was to put those folks in touch with the subject of today's video as he seems to have found something to do with unwanted aquatic plant growth.
