Posted on 12/04/2007 6:32:34 PM PST by BGHater
ARCHAEOLOGISTS in Germany have found a 2,000-year-old glue Roman warriors used to repair helmets, shields and the other accessories of battle.
"Caesar's superglue" - as it has been dubbed by workers at the Rhine State Museum in Bonn - was found on a helmet at a site near Xanthen on the Rhine River where Romans settled before Christ.
Frank Welker, a restorer at the museum, said: "We found the parade cavalry helmet had been repaired with an adhesive that was still doing its job.
"This is rightly called some kind of superglue because air, water and time have not diminished its bonding properties. We haven't mixed up a batch ourselves yet, but we can thoroughly reccommend it - it lasts, after all, for 2,000 years."
The adhesive was made from a mixture of bitumen, cattle fat and bark pitch.
Still does - LOL
Things haven't changed much for the soldier! from the Jan issue of Vanity Fair - article from embeds with Battle Co of the 173rd Airborne in Afghanistan:
13 firefights in a 24-hour period. A lot of the contact was coming from Table Rock, so Kearney decided to end that problem by putting a position on top of it. Elements of the Second and Third Platoons and several dozen local workers moved up the ridge after dark and hacked furiously at the shelf rock all night long so that they would have some minimal cover when dawn broke.
Sure enough, daylight brought bursts of heavy-machine-gun fire that sent the men diving into the shallow trenches they had just dug. They fought until the shooting stopped and then they got back up and continued to work. There was no loose dirt up there to fill the sandbags, so they broke up the rock with pickaxes and then shoveled pieces into the bags, which they piled up to form crude bunkers. Someone pointed out that they were actually “rock bags,” not sandbags, and so “rock bags” became a platoon joke that helped them get through the next several weeks. They worked in 100-degree heat in full body armor and took their breaks during firefights, when they got to lie down and return fire. Sometimes they were so badly pinned down that they just lay there and threw rocks over their heads into the hescos.
But rock bag by rock bag, hesco by hesco, the outpost got built. By the end of August the men had moved roughly 10 tons of dirt and rock by hand. They named the outpost Restrepo, after the medic who was killed, and succeeded in taking the pressure off Phoenix mainly by redirecting it onto themselves. Second Platoon began taking fire several times a day, sometimes from distances as close as a hundred yards ...........etc.
Pray for our troops
Along with the crack down on science and technology by the church = plunging society into the Dark Ages.
I often marvel at how far along we'd be by now if the knowledge had been allowed to build unabated?
Maybe we'd be building houses a bit better that the current stick houses wrapped in mold-making plastic 'envelopes'?
Maybe we'd have learned how to be a bit more of a peaceful race by now?
Nah
When I was a kid, every Christmas, tree garlands were made with strips of red and green construction paper, glued into rings with flour paste - it's the GLUTEN in the flour -
Beat me to it.
Olive oil ... you can even make a battery with olive oil because of the pH.
Now, that is funny.
There is a good deal of debate about exactly when the Library burned, with claims of anywhere from the Roman wars of Julius Caesar to the Muslim conquest, a range of about 700 years.
More importantly, it appears very little of what we would call "science" was done in Alexandria, especially after its first century or so. After about the 1st century AD, it appears that very little original work was done in "natural philosophy," in Alexandria or anywhere else in the Roman Empire. Work appears to have been limited to commentaries on earlier scholars. Not much to "build on" there.
Plato wanted philosophers to be accepted as equals by the gentry, so he denounced the idea of mucking about with "stuff," (what we call experimentation) as improper.
Philosophers were to think great thoughts. Getting your hands dirty was for slaves and mechanics, both at the bottom of the social scale.
Science as we knew it grew out of medieval colleges, which were completely Christian in origin. Medieval monks weren't afraid to get their hands dirty, as the Church taught the holiness of labor.
The scientific method has been invented exactly once in history. It was invented in a highly Christian context. This is NOT an accident.
This happens to be my field.
We know exactly how to build better buildings.
They would cost more, which means you would have a smaller house for the same money.
Guess what? The customer doesn't want a "better" house, he wants a bigger house.
Free market and all that.
The customer is an idiot, IMHO, but as they say, he is always right.
“In a time where the average age for a citizen was mid 40’s the Legionaries age was into the 60’s barring death or serious injury.”
If they were in such great health - why did they name a disease after them? ;)
You got that right - and here's Gore and his gang forcing CFL light bulbs on us (super toxic waste product = mercury vapor) to 'save energy' - but I hear no one saying to build houses a bit smaller! That would save tons of energy - I'd rather have a small, well built house with a smaller mortgage, less taxes, smaller energy bills, etc -
My house is a 'daylight' basement, considered a 1,000 sq ft house - but I have two south facing rooms in the basement - one 24' long - facing the south with 4' windows.
That gives me 4 bedrooms - or as I'm using them, 3 bedrooms and an office/studio...1 and a half baths - on an acre and a half of forest land.
There aren't many people who need more than that.
As for saving energy - switching light bulbs is one of the least ways to save energy = just assigning each person a 'personal' bath towel that they must use more than once before tossing on the floor for rewash/dry would save more...hanging out wash in good weather, cooking a double amount - cook once/eat twice, etc etc - lots of easy ways energy can be saved WITHOUT the government dictating what we do in our own homes.
(Hey, Gore, did you leave to pool lights on at your 26,000 sq ft mansion when you and 10,000 of your GW buddies flew in private jets to Bali? And how much energy was used for hotels, meals, rooms, rented cars?
Why didn't you come up to Maine. What's that? It's record cold up here - and an unusal deep snow storm?
Oh right, you still remember that GW conference you scheduled in , was it NYC, a coupla years ago = the one that had to be canceled due to a blizzard and record cold???
Liar liar, pants on fire...
One of the more bizarre housing facts is that as families get smaller houses get bigger.
The average house built today is probably a four bedroom. Most of them are bought by people with no kids, or at most with two. What do they need four bedrooms for?
Another peculiarity is the number of bathrooms. The four bedroom house probably has four bathrooms. In all likelihood two of them are used only occasionally, if at all. I have seen some in which one of the bathrooms was used so rarely that the water evaporated from the trap, allowing sewer gases to enter the home.
I really do not understand some of the motivations of the American homebuyer.
False status symbol? Like the biggest, baddest car - they think people will think they're somehow a cut above the herd? =
But they're still a herd animal...dependent on the opinions of others for validation
LOLOL!
Bottle the stuff and it would certainly put Elmers and any other glue company out of business. New meaning to the phrase, "They don't make things like they used to."
Maybe glue their backsides...
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...to their CHARiots?
::laughing::
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