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watson.fawkes
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Fair enough. But this
was not clear to me, not at all.
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The WiZard is In
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Yup. Guilty am I? Of brevis esse l aboro, obscurus fio. (Horace). Yes!
djh
----
But the majority of free Romans relied on the public baths.
Ordinarily these were privately owned. In 33 B.C. there were 170 in Rome; in the fourth
century A.D. there were 856, besides 1352 public swimming pools. More popular than such
establishments were the great baths built by the state, managed by concessionaires and staffed
by hundreds of slaves. These thermae—“hot [waters]”—erected by Agrippa, Nero, Titus,
Trajan, Caracalla, Alexander Severus, Diocletian, and Constantine, were monuments of state-
socialistic splendor. The Baths of Nero had 1600 marble seats and those of Diocletain
accommodated 3000 each. Admission was open to any citizen for a quadrans (1 1/2 cents);
the government met the balance of cost, and apparently oil and service were included in the
fee. The baths were open from daybreak to one P.M. for women, from two to eight P.M. for
men; but mixed bathing was allowed by most of the emperors. Normally the visitor went first
to a dressing room to change clothes; then to the palaestra to box, wrestle, run, jump, hurl the
disk or the spear, or play ball. One ball game was like our “medicine ball”; in another two
opposed groups scrambled for a ball, and carried it forward against each other with all the
enterprise of a modern university. Sometimes professional ballplayers would come to the
baths and give exhibitions. Oldsters who preferred to take their exercise by proxy went to
massage rooms and had a slave rub away their fat.
Passing to the baths proper, the citizen entered the tepidarium—in this case a warm-air
room; thence he went to the calidarium, or hot-air room; if he wished to perspire still more
freely, he moved into he laconicum, and gasped in superheated steam. Then he took a warm
bath and washed himself with a novelty learned from the Gauls—soap, made from tallow and
the ashes of the beech, or the elm. These warm rooms were the most popular and gave the
baths their Greek name; probably they were Rome’s attempt to forestall or migrate
rheumatism and arthritis. The bather progressed to the frigidarium and took a cold bath; he
might also dip into the piscina, or swimming pool. Then he had himself rubbed with some oil
or ointment, usually made from the olive; this was not washed off, but merely scraped off
with a strigil and dried with a towel, so that some oil might be returned to the skin in place of
that which the warm baths had removed.
The bather seldom left the thermae at this point. For these were clubhouses as well as
baths; they provided rooms for games like dice and chess, galleries of painting and statuary,
exedrae where friends might sit and converse, libraries and reading rooms, and halls where a
musician or a poet might give a recital or a philosopher might explain the world. In these
afternoon hours after the bath Roman society found its chief meting point; both sexes
mingled freely in gay but polite association, flirtation, or discussion; there, and at the games
and in the parks, the Romans could indulge their passion for talk, their fondness for gossip,
and learn all the news and scandal of the day.
If they wished they could have dinner in the restaurant at the baths, but most of them dined
at home. Perhaps because of the lassitude caused by exercise and warm bathing, the custom
was to recline at meals. Once the women had sat apart while the men reclined; now the
women reclined beside the men. The triclinium, or dinning room, was so named because it
usually contained three couches, arranged in square-magnet form around a serving table.
Each couch normally accommodated three persons. The dinner rested his head on his left
arm, and his arm on a cushion, while the body extended diagonally away from the serving
table.
The poorer classes continued to live chiefly on grains, dairy products, vegetables, fruits,
and nuts. Pliny lists a wide assortment of vegetables in the Roman dietary, from garlic to
rape. The well to do ate meat, with the usual superabundance of reckless carnivores. Pork
was the favorite fresh food; Pliny praises the pig for furnishing fifty different dainties. Pork
sausages (botuli) were hawked through the streets in portable ovens, as on our highways
today.
When one dined at a banquet he expected rarer foods. The banquet began at four and
lasted till late in the night or till the next day. The tables were strewn with flowers and
parsley, and the air was scented with exotic perfumes, the couches were soft with cushions,
the servants were stiff with livery. Between the appetizer (gustatio) and the dessert (secunda
mensa, “second table”) came the luxury dishes on which the host and his chef prided
themselves. Rare fish, rare birds, rare fruit, appealed to the curiosity as well as the palate.
Mullets were brought at a thousand sesterces a pound; Asinius Celer paid 8000 for one;
Juvenal growled that a fisherman cost less than a fish.. As an added delight for the guests, the
mullet might be brought in alive and boiled before their eyes, that they enjoy the varied colors
it took in the agony of death. Vedius Pollio raised these sesqipedalian fish in a large tank and
fed them with unsatisfactory slaves. Eels and snails were considered dainties, but the law
forbade the eating of dormice. The wings of ostriches, the tongues of flamingoes, the flesh of
songbirds, the livers of geese, were favorite dishes. Apicius, a famous epicure under Tiberius,
invented the pâté de fois gras by fattening the livers of sows with a diet of figs. Custom
allowed the diner to empty his stomach with an emetic after a heavy banquet. Some gluttons
performed this operation during the meal and then returned to appease their hunger; vomunt
ut edant, edunt ut vomant, said Seneca—“they vomit to eat, and eat to vomit.” Such behavior
was exceptional, and no worse than the braggart drunkenness of American conventioneers.
Pleasanter was the custom of presenting gifts to the guests, or letting flowers or perfumes fall
upon them from the ceiling, or entertaining them with music, dancing, poetry, or drama.
Conversation, loosened with wine and stimulated by the presence of the other sex, would
conclude the evening.
We must not think of such banquets as the customary end of a Roman day, or as more
frequent in a Roman’s life than the dinners-cum-oratory so popular today. History, like the
press, misrepresents life because it lives the exceptional and shuns the newsless career of an
honest man or the quiet routine of a normal day. Most Romans were like our neighbors and
ourselves; they rose reluctantly, ate too much, worked too much, played too little, loved
much, seldom hated, quarreled a bit, talked a great deal, dreamed waking dreams, and slept.
The Story of Civilization: Part III
Caesar and Christ: A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325
Will Durant 1944
[Edited on 5-8-2011 by The WiZard is In]
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The WiZard is In
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Lightning hazards and Maxwell's equations
Something to fry your neurons.
Evaluation Of Lightning Hazards To Munition Storage
Handling, And Maintenance Facilities With The Use Of
Advanced Methods For Solutions Of Maxwell's Equations
MINUTES OF THE TWENTY-FOURTH EXPLOSIVES
SAFETY SEMINAR
Volume I
Adam's Mark Hotel
St. Louis, Missouri
28 - 30 August 1990 Sponsored by Department of
Defense Explosives Safety Board
The objective of this paper is to describe how the lightning
hazards to such structures can be evaluated using advanced
formulations of Maxwell's Equations. The method described is
the Three Dimensional Finite Difference Time Domain Solution.
It can be used to solve for the lightning interaction with such
structures in three dimensions and include a considerable
amount of detail.
Sorry I extracted this, however, it is just over Sci Mad's
2 meg limit..... so if you want to read it you will have to DL
the entire seminar.
Accession Number : ADA235005
Title : Minutes of the Explosives Safety Seminar (24th)
Held in St. Louis, Missouri on 28-30 August 1990. Volume 1
Handle / proxy Url : http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA235005
Report Date : 30 AUG 1990
Pagination or Media Count : 1204
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mabuse_
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Thank you for that hint.
I just did the same test with a small rest of double salt I did last year to test it's storage life (which was fine after 10 months).
I used a little Piezo salvaged from a little Chinese mini-blowtorch lighter, placed the sample on aluminium foil and placed the output cable over the
sample, about 2-3mm. The Al foil was connected to the piezo's case.
The spark could not evade the sample.
#HMTD did not ignite
#PbN6 (dextrinated) did not ignite
#Double salt fired at once.
This was of course not a very scientific setup, but the result is obvious.
Otherwise I expect it to be safe to handle when it has been placed in an aluminium tube - the only way currents from outside could reach the primary
is through the fuse or e-match wires.
IMHO connecting one side of an e-match with the tube and shorting the e-match during transport and placement should cure that - what do you think?
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KemiRockarFett
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As theorist I dont do experiments but one college does. He tried to mix Ag2C2.AgNO3 with PETN, very well mixed and tried to set it off with a piezo
circuit from a lighter. He reported that without inmix of PETN the Ag2C2.AgNO3 fired at once but after have been mixed with small amounts of PETN it
refused to ignite by the piezo spark BUT it detonated when exposed to fire from a lighther. I asked him about the ammounts but he told me he just did
it qualitativy and he did not want to recommend any one to trust this experiment. But he told me that the trend was clear.
For me it sounds reasonable that if the DS is diluted by PETN it will be harder to ignite. This may not be good for a primary but indicates that its
possible to reduce risk to static in some way.
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