How to build the Pyramids

I was working one day with a new worker, who had worked construction most of his life.  He said to me, almost the first day, "But no-one knows how the Pyramids were built…". To which I said, don't be daft!  People have known for years how they built the Pyramids.  What do you think they were built by Aliens?   His answer was yes, they were build by aliens.  I laughed and told him how they built them.  And a week later he said the same thing that the Pyramids were a mystery.  Luckily he chose to lie to the boss and he was fired, so I did not have to remove him from the gene pool.

It occurs to me that I did not tell you how they were built.  For the record, people built them and they used simple tools and a lot of hands.  The big thing that people forget in the modern world is that every job that we use machines for was once performed by people and no machines.  The road that travels through Algonquin Park in Ontario, was built in the pre-WWII depression by people with very little machinery.  My grandfather and his brothers were there.  They drilled into the Precambrian Shield with simple drills, teams of three, two hitting the drill with sledgehammers and one turning the drill a quarter turn between strokes, switching off every once in a while.  The hole was bored out and explosives were placed in it and the rock was shattered and then dug out.  People using simple tools.  

Modern machines are faster and they quicken most job sites with most jobs.  But remember they still have wheelbarrows at job sites.  A bobcat can fill two wheelbarrows in a few seconds, in the time at twenty people could fill a wheelbarrow with shovels, but a bobcat can only go twice as fast as a person with a wheelbarrow, so it makes good economic sense to used the bobcat to fill wheelbarrows.  An excavator can dig clay and packed dirt faster than a team of diggers can do so by hand.  What I am saying is that machines are faster, but people can still do those jobs—you just need more people to do the tasks.

So there was this guy named Pythagorus and he said a^2+b^2=c^2.  But just because he is credited for the relationship does not mean that people did not know that the relationship existed before then.  The Egyptian used rods that were 3,4, and 5 units long to do surveys.  They would arrange them in the form of a triangle and they knew that the corner of the 3 and 4 unit rods was a right angle and you could make a square field with it.  Great for tax assessment and building straight roads and the bases of square pyramids.  I mean, like REALLY, part of the myth that the ancient Egyptians could not build the pyramids was that they are perfectly square.  So that is one problem fixed.  

But how did they build using those big stones and the stones were so square too.   Square stones, they used the same methodology to bake square fields as square stones.  As for size, they knew a few simple machines, machines that we don't even think of as machines anymore, but ones that are the basis of most of our society.  They knew that if you wanted to take heavy loads and move them you put them on round things and they move easier and faster.  We call them wheels, but for big heavy stones, rollers would work better.  There are many structures all around the world where they moved large stones without machines in this way, Stone Henge and Easter Island to name two.  The stones for Stone Henge are said to come from a quarry a hundred or more kilometers away, so people could move big stones far distances.  

With no gas powered machines the job of a few people now would take thousands of people then.  Ancient Egypt had thousands of people.  It had millions.  Most of them were farmers. It they had a number of advantages that others did not have.  Egypt was and is a dry country made habitable by a huge river that floods its banks regularly once a year.  The flood waters left fine silt and mud on the low lying fields which acted as a fertilizer.  Low lying fields and a river means easy to make irrigation canals.  Square fields means easier state taxation, which means wheat that was taken by the Pharaohs.  Granaries in a dry country means less spoilage and cats, meant less  losses to vermin which meant a large number of people that did not have to grow food and could do other things, like build Pyramids.  In today's modern society as little as 2-4% of the people grow food for e rest of us.  In the very poor nations today, 75% of people are farmers, but even then that means 1 in 4 people don't need to farm, in a nation of a million people that is a quarter of a million people. There is a lot that that many people could do if they were coordinated properly.  

But how did they get the stone up the pyramid with out cranes or alien spacecraft?  Simple, after the wheel the simplest tool is the inclined plane.  Actually, it is even more simple than the wheel.  Working together, you can climb mountains with an inclined plane and a wheel.  Look outside.  Roads are inclined planes.  They are flat and they go up hills slowly, sometimes switching direction to get up a steep hill, or they circle the hill several times.  The Ancient Egyptians used the inclined plane too.  They built roads up the sides of the Pyramids, they started from far away and the slopes were slight and not steep at all and the roads wrapped around the structure.  But that is a lot of dirt moved, they could not do that!  One man can dig and barrow the load and dump it and create a small hill.  A thousand workers could labour for a month and make a large hill.  Ten thousand could labour for a year and make a very large hill.  What is too difficult to imagine when you think like that.  With rollers and kilometers of inclined plane, it would be easy to get rocks up high.  It is like this, the energy required to raise something a certain height is constant, but if you can take longer to pay the cost, it is easier to do it.  A 45° angle is about half the cost and 22.5° is a quarter on the cost.  If you can get the grade down to almost flat, the cost of raising the object is almost negligible.  That is why roads are rarely steep, so your car does not have to work hard to get you up it.  

After the last stone has reached the summit and the work is done there the road is stripped away and the Pyramid is left standing alone by itself.  If the Pyramids were built by aliens, why are they not completely hollow instead of primitive narrow holes? Why are they not made of Magical glass?  Why are they so boring compared to our own skyscrapers?  The original Pyramids were dressed with white Marble and capped in Gold, they were truly spectacular, before looters and conquerors stripped them bare.

If someone suggests that Aliens built the Pyramids again, I will tell them once and if they persist, I will ask them why they did not make them from advanced materials and instead used only simple building materials of stone aged builders.  And possibly slap them silly.

Last week's inconherant rant

The environment affects so much of what we do and what we can do in in this world.  I think of many areas like archeology and other things that happened before the advent of record keeping, History.  

I have heard that there have been ideas about when North America was first settled.  The science says the best evidence was at the end of the last Glacial period, because that is where all the hard evidence comes from.  Archeological sites in places where the ice had just melted or in locations along the coastline where people lived.  But there have alway been people that have suggested that people were here before that time.  The evidence is second or third order significance.  There are no bones, but there are possible tool making sites.  The secondary and tertiary evidence is weak and should not be used as primary evidence, or even as weighty as primary evidence.  But, the locations they are looking are not the best places to look for primary evidence.  

People choose the best places to live as their primary living areas.  On the west Coast of North America, the people's who live there have done so far very long times, because the temperate weather and the plentiful and easy food supply.  But in the times that some people suggest people may have come to North America, there was an Ice Age, and the sea level was much lower than it is now.  The coastal prime real estate of 25k-100k before now is under water and we have no way presently to search for archeological sites.  So until we do, those sites will remain hidden and we won't know for sure.  Oh well.

On another note, we know for a fact that there was an asteroid that wiped out the Dinosaurs.  The dinosaurs were roaming around and having the time of their lives and then wham!, play time was over.  That is what most people believe.  But the truth is a bit more cloudy.  It is interesting to look at the things that were happening at about the same time on this planet.  After millions of years of gymnosperms and ferns dominating the landscape, angiosperms – flowering plant, were making a final push for dominance.  Conifers and ferns vs Deciduous and grasses.  The new plants were more versatile and they produced secondary metabolites in addition to everything else.  Secondary metabolites are chemicals that have secondary affects, like poisons, THC, and other drug like affects.  It has been suggested that when the asteroid hit, dinosaurs were not having a great party, but were suffering from indigestion and minor food poisoning.  

It was also suggested that the world's climate had been changing for millions of years to that point.  More carbon dioxide had been leaving the air and the world was getting cooler.  There was a great deal of volcanism happening in India and this was also contributing to climate changing and cooling down.  When the asteroid hit, many species of dinosaur were already swaying and readying to die.  And then the asteroid hit.

Not a weekend at Bernie's

I just had a fabulous half weekend with my girlfriend, Natural20.  After a tough week of work it was nice to relax with her.  Her husband had taken the kids away for a camping trip, minus one who was sick—which was tricky, because the kids don't know that they are seeing other people, so I had to hide.  The sick one went to the camping trip the next morning.  Natural20 likes camping, but not this trip, because it is with a bunch of right-wing, meat loving, beer drinking people, and she thus has nothing in common with them and most of the wives stay away.  When she goes she cooks and entertains the kids and everything she does at home except that she is then expected to sleep in the cold.  Her husband has a ball, games, meat, beer.  So, she opted out of this adventure and spent the time with me.  

The plan, my plan, was to knock her out with satisfying sex and then to make her breakfast in bed than then sleep and do what ever she wanted.  But that was not what happened.  

First off we both had full days of work and then she also had to prepare for the camping trip that she was not going on.  Then one of the kids was sick.  She told me to come over anyway and I did not arrive until after 8 and we could not eat together that night.  We made love twice so that she was dopey and then we went to sleep.  Funny how tired I was and still could perform.  I was a bit surprised, and so was she.  I really missed her a lot.  We don't get to see a lot of each other and so when we have time together it is precious.  I used to think that sex was for the man and that is what he wanted.  It is more for the woman, no, it is something for both of us.  I don't orgasm, but I make sure she does.  Me, there is something autistic interfering with my orgasm, but I get as much enjoyment out of being with Natural20.

We slept, woke and made love again.  And slept.  When I woke my tiredness was still present, my psyatic nerve was troubling me from last day and the horrors of work and the child in the house so I laid in bed while he was rushed out of the house and to the camping trip.  Afterwards we showered, together, and made breakfast/lunch which ended at 1pm.  Tofu bacon:

One package of firm tofu, frozen and thawed, squeezed of water and dry marinated in:

1/4 cup of water

1/4 cup of soy sauce

3 tbs of maple syrup

1/2 tsp of liquid smoke

Fried or baked

Served with chocolate chip pancakes.

Then incomplete sex in bed followed by a three hour nap, afterwards I woke and was relaxed and fresh… well not quite, but we went shopping by bicycle and then had burritos for dinner.  Followed by installing Monkey Lights on my bike and hers and then going out looking for dessert and discovering that her suburban city shuts down at nine, and getting a doughnut at Tim Hortons and a tea as it started to rain.  Then home we watched Nottinghill, her favourite movie and cuddling until 1am.

In the morning I was refreshed and invigorated and I had a plan, I implemented it.  I knocked her out with two hours of totally satisfying play and told her I was going to make breakfast and she was going to sleep and she collapsed.  Guys, if you figure out what it takes to satisfy your girl enough to knock her out, do it as often as you can.  For Natural20 it is satisfying sex times two.  When she regained consciousness, she was ravenous and I was coming up the stairs with two plates of food

Leftover Eggs 

Oil in the pan

Fresh vegetables or frozen frying until soft

Add leftovers, in this case the black beans from the burritos and the egg whites from the salad dressing,

Add cheese, not too much but enough

Add eggs and stir until they are cooked but not dry

That does not take 30 minutes, but add that I cleaned the Strawberries we bought the day before and added a sprinkle of sugar first, then after the eggs, I through together a chocolate sauce and poured it over the strawberries which were very tart.

Natural20 needs to wear glasses, so she did not see the strawberries until I produced them, and shoved the first chocolate covered one into her mouth.  She and I feed each other.  

I told her I don't like to use words of endearment because they become practiced and old.  I prefer to use actions.  She had a gentle cry as I kissed her. I love this girl a lot.  Ideally, she would then be tired after another satisfying love making session, but the family was coming home soon.  If she were unconscious I would then clean up the mess, but since we were on a time sensitive schedule we cleaned the house together and had a quick shower together where we washed each others backs.   

For me, it is important that my Love gets what she does not get from her regular life.  I show her how much I care for her by making sure she is waited on and her needs are filled before others.  Her relationship with her husband is one which she participated in and she got herself into the position with together.  The roles are a little one sided, I am rebalancing them with our relationship with her.  

I was gone before the kids arrived.  The house was trashed seconds later.  Things were dropped dirty dishes were dropped off.  Her husband announced that the camping trip was no fun without her, be cause he had to do the things she had to do and he could not have as much fun.  She says she will pay him back for her weekend with me.  

I love this woman.  She is my life, she is my goddess.  A Turkey Goddess.

Planting in clay

People who live in the city are funny.  Many of them look at nature as something that needs to conform to their designs.  They build lots of concrete buildings and they have asphalt everywhere.  They have some parks, filled with grass.  They have rainstorms and then it floods, or the trees that they plant die when the ground becomes saturated.  A few years ago a friend had a problem with drainage in his backyard and I told him not to dig it up, but to plant a tree, the right tree.  

I was just in a park that was suffering from standing water and it had been planted with a hundred seedlings of various types, all the wrong types.  If the land dries out, they will do okay, but if it doesn't, they will die.  People want to plant the tree that fits their idea.  They want to plant tall columns of evergreens because it is all contained and the foliage is tight and prevents people from intruding, but they have clay soils and the plant they are choosing do not work for the area.  

When you plant a tree you should plant a tree that will live in the area and thrive, but if you want to plant your tree that you want you need to alter the conditions of the area that you are planting in.  Planting native trees is often the best thing to do, but there are often a variety of non native plants that will change the growing conditions of the area, to allow other types of trees.  

In areas that have poor drainage or excessive dampness, a willow is an ideal type plant.  They normally grow on rivers and so their roots can survive in wet soil.  They will grow fast and soak up the water of the area too.  In a forest or a park I would pick a golden willow that will grow to dominate the area for more than a century, but in a backyard, I would pick a Japanese Painted Willow, whose foliage is pink turning to white and green, or perhaps another dwarf type willow.  Often a backyard will only need one willow to soak up the water and allow other types of plants to flourish.  Willows can come in many sizes, from two meters tall to forty and all sizes in between.  If you are looking for a privacy screen, chose the white cedar, they can grow quite close together and they will grow in permanent standing water, like swamps, so they work in the wettest of backyard conditions.  When I say they can be planted close I mean right on top of each other, but is you are making a hedge, try to keep them at least 15 cm apart.  Unlike many evergreens, white cedar are quite resilient to damage and winter kill.  Many times when people plant a shapely Emerald Cedar, they get a red and dead plant, or some animal will graze on it and it will be dead.  Not so White Cedar, they come back next year.  

In the area I live there is a lot of heavy clay in the soil.  Clay prevents water from permeating the ground and it will enter the hole where your plant sits and not leave, choking the roots and killing the plant.  When you live in a clay belt, it is important to look at the plants that grow well there.  Certain plants do better in clay, like Silver Maples, Red Oaks, and several others.  Plants that can take a lot of water at their roots.  

In clay soils and in areas that flood in rainstorms, it is important to know that there are things that you can do to reduce the surface water accumulating.  Grass helps but only compared to bare soil and asphalt.  It you want to increase the infiltration of water into the ground you need to provide pathways into the ground.  Shrubs and trees are orders of magnitude better at channeling water into the ground than grass.  Water will sink though the holes in the clay and ground that tree roots have made.  Remember the simple rule, the mass of a plant above e ground is proportional to the mass below the ground.  Big trees can shunt more water into the ground than small plants.  

In clay there is only one sure way to get rid of it, other than removing it and replacing it, and that is to add organic matter to the soil.  Organic matter will break up the clay and mix it into the new, making a better soil than you had before.  All plants have roots and the roots grow and die all the time.  The dead roots decompose and mix with the clay, making a better soil.  Small plants change the soil in this way only on the surface and bigger plants deeper still.  This is called soil management and it is something that farmers did unconsciously for centuries.  That is what you want to do in you backyard too. You can add organic matter to you soil yearly and artificially to create better soils; it is a long term project that can feel like it will never end, but gradually you will see differences.  You can add leaf litter to the ground, you can compost and add that too.  You can add manure and other soil products too.  And there is one last thing you can do, if you have to—add Horticulture Gypsum to the clay soil and this will allow the freer flow of water through the ground, but doing this will do nothing to change the soil permanently and will need to be redone every 2-3 years.

Easy as 1, 2, 3

Relationships have always been difficult for me, probably because of my autism.  High school was difficult for that reason, I could do the work, except essays, but interpersonal stuff was lost on me even though I would have given up everything else to have one.  That is Ancient history.  But it took a long time for me to get into a relationship and they all tended to gravitate to unconventional types.  It did not help that I am demisexual and demiromantic.  And those are not the ways that teenagers, twenty and thirty year olds fall in love.  These are all facts and ancient history.  I accept that I can't change anything and I have moved on.  I have always wanted a family; I have always wanted a live-in relationship, but they have never come my way, or they were offered by people that were not right for me at that time.  As I said ancient history.  

I see friends struggle through relationship issues and I want to shake them and get them to understand things correctly.  They have not thought about things, because they have come easily all their life. 

#1.  You can't change people.  That means women can not make a man better than they are, but it also means that the situation they are in when you meet them also will not change just because you are there.  MagicEyes was on a life changing path and I could not halt it by being there.

#2.  To affect change, you need to work at it and both people need to be willing to want to make that change.  MPTR wanted the best of both worlds and because she was not willing to settle, I could not make her choose me, over her dysfunctional relationship, I should have accepted it and let her go, rather than mess up both our lives.

#3. Communication is key.  That means if there is something little that bugs you get it out of the way early before it becomes big and if you decide that you can live with it, dismiss it now.  If you cease to talk everything will get worse, guaranteed.  

I bet every relationship failure can be tied to one of these rules being broken or not followed.  And have lots of sex.  Apparently that helps a lot.  Probably because to have a lot of sex, you need to communicate, accept what you can't change, and work at what you can change.  

I hope that I can continue to tell the story I am telling in Exalted and that Jaguar and Vael can work out their differences.