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.
As I mentioned last week, I toured the Indianapolis Art Museum's conservation lab as part of our summer ASM materials camp a decade or so ago. It was a great tour given by Dr Gregory Smith, star of this series of videos through which he explains the process of verifying the age and pedigree of an Uzbek Coat of Many Colors.
The rest of the four-part series is after the jump.
Give 'em a break, alright?
It was the pandemic. People were trapped in their houses. They were doing their best to create content that was interesting and that could be enjoyed remotely.
No, a video of two people talking remotely to each other while narrating a slide show isn't necessarily the most exciting of presentations, but I can vouch for Dr Smith being an entertaining guy. He gave me and our summer ASM campers a tour of the Indianapolis Museum of Art's conservation lab about ten years ago, and it is one of the more unexpectedly great tours that I've been on through those summer workshops.
Take some time and see what Dr Smith has to teach us about art conservation and forgery detection today.
Stephanie Kwolek absolutely belongs in the inventors hall of fame, in the women's hall of fame, on the American Chemical Society's website, and on lots of other lists of honorees.
Stephanie Kwolek, you see, invented Kevlar at DuPont in 1965.
