Recent comments in /f/explainlikeimfive

Muroid t1_je50suh wrote

Also, the white stone looks gorgeous. The way things were painted in bright colors in antiquity was gaudy as hell.

A lot of the classic Greek and Roman architecture and statuary would look kind of stupid to modern eyes that are used to seeing it with the color stripped away.

7

kepler1 OP t1_je4wt0t wrote

This is the best answer, thanks.

I was thinking of not so long ago when we didn't have constantly connected bluetooth/wifi networks in hotels and there had to be some mechanism for codes to be issued without the lock having constant connectivity.

1

futuraprime t1_je4wdwp wrote

These two examples have pretty specific causes. u/bastardlyann mentioned the Parthenon’s being blown up in the Morean War.

The Colosseum’s a bit different. It had little purpose after the fall of the Empire—it could have comforably held medieval Rome’s entire population twice over. As a building robbed of its purpose, it not only was too much to maintain, but it was a great source of materials. Many of the iron clamps that had held its stones together were pried out and melted down. The marble façade and travertine core—especially where had already fallen down in earthquakes—was effectively re-quarried, as it was much easier to obtain and closer to hand than anything from a quarry. Some of it was used in the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in the 16th century. Some of it was just burned to make quicklime (useful in making steel and cement).

Contrast this to the Pantheon, Rome’s oldest standing building, which was repurposed into a church in the 600s. Or the Castel St Angelo, originally the tomb of Hadrian but rebuilt into the main fortress defending the Vatican. Neither building survives exactly as a late Imperial citizen would have seen them, but nor are they ramshackle ruins. These buildings (and there are many other examples, like the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, or the Cathedral of Syracuse in Sicily) have managed to remain useful to their city’s inhabitants for many, many centuries, in different forms and with different uses. (You’ll note that religious buildings tend to do well with this; the Parthenon was also used as a church for many centuries.)

Buildings that aren’t adaptable—like the medieval walls of many European cities, or indeed many of the shopping malls of 1960s America—tend to just be viewed as in the way (or a source of materials for new building) and often get cleared away.

52

mrpenchant t1_je4vys2 wrote

They misstated it a little bit.

The way the format is set up is the first time it gives a length is for the whole thing, but it is defined to have 2 subchunks. The first subchunk will always have the same size for a wave file, but does provide a length of that subchunk and then the last data length is just for the data in the 2nd subchunk.

This is all to say, it's not a reminder but a slightly different length, which would be the length of the entire thing minus 36.

5

koolaidisthestuff t1_je4v7u9 wrote

Say you take out a mortgage or home loan for $500,000

After ten years you have paid off $100,000 of that mortgage loan.

You now have $100,000 in equity. It’s essentially monies paid back versus your loan.

I think..

1

Cycleguy57 t1_je4ul4y wrote

To me, the real astonishing thing is that these old monuments weren’t torn down a thousand years ago to re use the building materials. I’m glad they weren’t but I remain surprised.

8

phryan t1_je4uk2v wrote

A key role of the stomach is to store food and slowly release it into the small intestine, kind of like a funnel. The stomach also releases some chemicals that breakdown food while it's sitting in the stomach. The intestines are where most of the nutrients are pulled out the food and into your body.

3

aiusepsi t1_je4u9v5 wrote

A computer doesn't, but software is (at least for now) written by human beings. You could have the size of the actual payload be implicit, and calculated from the information you've already seen, but there's more opportunity for the person writing the code which is reading the file to get the calculation wrong in some subtle way.

If the size is written explicitly just before the data, you can make the code which reads it much simpler and therefore more reliable. Simple and reliable is really good for this kind of code; mistakes can lead to software containing security vulnerabilities. Nobody wants to get a virus because they played a .wav file!

2

Cloverleafs85 t1_je4u2uz wrote

Other have already made some good points, the difficulty or resource poverty to repair damaged buildings, and cultural changes that meant some buildings suddenly become undesirable.

​

At which point they have often been converted into a five fingered discount quarry.

​

They have been very, very vulnerable to resource looting. Sometimes for ordinary buildings, sometimes for other monuments and other religious buildings.

Often new churches were built on the same site as the former temples, renovating or reusing older parts of the structures.

​

Some were also used as churches without much adaptation, like the Pantheon, which is still to this day an active church. Though a pope did mug it during the 17th century and absconded with a lot of bronze and marble to build the Barberini Palace.

​

In the eastern part of the roman empire (byzantine empire) many temples and shrines were demolished by decree and reused to build new churches.

A church in Hagios Kosmas used stones and columns from a shrine to Aphrodite. As far as researchers can tell just about every bit of that shrine is gone and more or less recycled into various structures, some which are also long gone by now.

​

Quite a bit of the Colosseum that had been damaged by earthquakes and then some was carted off to build medieval and renaissance Rome, until a pope in 1744 put his slipper down and banned the practice as well as declaring it a protected site that could not be demolished. Parts of it is in Barberini Palace, Piazza Venezia and St. Peter's.

​

You can find stones from a building dedicated to Ramses II (Died 1213 BC) used miles and miles away from it's original place to build the gateway for Shoshenq III (Died 798 BC).

For when you still wants that glorious builder prestige but haven't quite got the same budget. In that case Ramses was from a very different family and time, but Shoseng III wasn't averse to taking from his direct ancestors either.

​

Recycled sarcophaguses too. Some previous occupants might have been dumped who knows where, and some found themselves reinterred in less fancy environments with new roommates.

And some dispensed with relocating entirely and just cleared out the previous incumbent, relabeled stuff and moved in after death.

​

If people ever wonder why we don't know where more pharaohs, their relatives and other dignitaries mummies are and who's whom, this is also one of the reasons. You can't even trust these people to stay in their own graves.

3

rupert1920 t1_je4trmb wrote

4

HappyLeading8756 t1_je4t8rw wrote

Would add that it is important to remember that most sites are located in the cities that have been and still are inhabited. Fact that those sites are still present and have not been used to build other buildings or demolished throughout centuries if not millenniums, already says a lot.

Additionally, you cannot keep it all. You have to make choices. Not only because of limited resources but also because otherwise you wouldn't have a city that would be liveable. When you have layers upon layers of history, you have to make choices about what to keep and what not.

21

Only_Razzmatazz_4498 t1_je4rxm8 wrote

The Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul that started life as a Byzantine (eastern Roman Empire) church is an example of one used and maintained over the millennia. Also there is a church in Rome (Pantheon) that started life as a Roman gods church (pantheon lol) and has one of the oldest and largest concrete self supporting domes with an opening up top (oculus) for light. I think the doors are the original also.

There might be other counterexamples but as someone said it all depends on whether the structure found other uses and possibly at least in the western world the church was the only large organization with the resources to maintain empire type structures.

18

Ormyr t1_je4phi0 wrote

Because in order to be "worthy" of restoration it needs to fulfill a function (be useful) and have some sort of return on investment (be profitable).

Otherwise it's up to philanthropy/charity to keep up the place.

1

psycotica0 t1_je4ovsd wrote

Did you click on it? It's the document that describes what makes a wav file a wav file so that programs that can read wav files can read it. It's essentially a description and some instructions for the programmers making the reading program and the writing program so they know they're making the same file that contains the same information.

2