
Historian uses lasers to unlock mysteries of Gothic cathedrals - bcaulfield
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/150622-andrew-tallon-notre-dame-cathedral-laser-scan-art-history-medieval-gothic/
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Shivetya
I find it fascinating the feats that they managed back in when there were no
computers, no powered heavy equipment, and mostly just ambition and sweat. We
too often forget that they had an incredible understanding of construction
techniques and math we hide in our design programs was worked out on paper,
not discounting a bit of gut feel when actually putting the structure up. This
of course was not limited to the Middle Ages but stretches back through Roman
times, Egypt, and the far East of China and more.

note : the site wants flash for some activities so it may limit what you can
view

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kevin_thibedeau
There is a survivorship bias in ancient structures. Those that wern't up to
snuff, collapsed. Most did.

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Luc
I don't think it's right to apply survivorship bias in this case.

I mean, it's trivially true that anything unmaintained will collapse over a
long enough time-frame, but I don't think >50% of buildings built to last
collapsed before their time. If anything the damn things were overbuilt and
hard to get rid of, even while being plundered for building materials.

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alejohausner
Actually medieval designers did not use conservative design. Many cathedrals
were _not_ overbuilt. There was a push to make the walls and pillars thin, the
ceilings tall, to create a sense of ethereal beauty. As a result, many
buildings collapsed during construction, because they were pushing things too
far.

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Luc
But not most, I don't think.

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kevin_thibedeau
Cathedrals were 100+ year endeavors and sufficient care was taken in design so
that relatively few failed completely. Most buildings were not cathedrals and
didn't benefit from such care.

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acqq
The article was written while the researcher still was alive and the
researcher speaks in present tense.

But now with the new interest, they republished it mostly unchanged (starting
in present tense and all) but then inserted in the middle (completely shocking
for me):

"Tallon, who died Nov. 18, 2018, at 49..."

and then the text continues:

""Every building moves," he says."

Sad. There is a Wikipedia article about the researcher:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tallon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tallon)

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13of40
I really want to read that article, but there's an advertisement covering the
"continue reading" button.

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dsfyu404ed
There's a great documentary on the construction of cathedrals which heavily
relies on this same research. It's floating around YouTube (not gonna link it
because if I do it will probably get flagged and taken down as I suspect it
violates copyright by being there). It goes into mid level detail on how they
were constructed. It's well worth watching if you're interested in this kind
of thing.

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ptah
did the fire start with a laser? ;)

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Iv
Too soon.

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netsharc
So this is an article originally published in 2015, but now "Published April
16, 2019". Why do I feel, like how the death of artists pushes them to no. 1
on iTunes (so death is a good career move!), are news websites taking
advantage of world events to get pageviews? Next level SEO-ptimizing!

I suppose it's a natural evolution, Twitter spambots do it, YouTube spammers
do it. Now respectable news sites too.

