I went to a concrete convention and am now fascinated by concrete but I’d rather be fascinated by Twin Peaks: The Return so I am going to exorcise my concrete fascination by telling you everything I’ve learned about it which is pointless to you because you can obviously google it - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

danharmon.bsky.social • 25 days ago

I went to a concrete convention and am now fascinated by concrete but I’d rather be fascinated by Twin Peaks: The Return so I am going to exorcise my concrete fascination by telling you everything I’ve learned about it which is pointless to you because you can obviously google it

Comments

straightbioman.bsky.social•15 days ago

Jokes on you old man, now I have concrete evidence!

jacobyn7.bsky.social•25 days ago

Hey, you're in CLEAR violation of the "smile stop" perfect-photo floor sticker ✋🚫 Concrete convention faux pas!

Pour him, boys.

rutrow.bsky.social•22 days ago

kodyd.bsky.social•3 hours ago

Was a caregiver for a family member with dementia and the last year of their life it was full time live-in. The “end” was around me all the time and I felt trapped. This all feels like how I coped with that, and it’s ok and heathy. Shout out to Nate The Hoof Guy, my favorite demure bovine farrier.

lucaspeters.bsky.social•24 days ago

There are woodworking trade shows that my organization is obligated to attend every summer. Very tempted to engage you as a correspondent based on your insightful coverage here.

pibyte.bsky.social•25 days ago

I learned a lot about concrete when I built my garden observatory. It is a fascinating building material that pretty much our entire civilization is built on. The combination with fiber and iron is genius.

Grady Hillhouse from Practical Engineering has a whole series on it: https://tinyurl.com/4xmp8v4h

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danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

I’d like to understand this garden observatory. Is that the entire thing or is that one part of a colossal project in progress?! Do you have more photos you would be willing to share

pibyte.bsky.social•24 days ago

It is classical "Roll-Off-Roof-Obervatory". It looks like a garden house, but the entire roof is on rails. You roll the roof off and turn the equpiment on and you are ready to go. I designed the Building in Maya and built it myself.

Astroimages you can check out here: https://jfs.photography

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danharmon.bsky.social•23 days ago

Holy cow that’s so bad ass! And I love that you used Maya, I’ve got to get back into that if it still exists. It’s probably now a web app with an AI button that models ten versions of something you describe

vert-69.bsky.social•8 days ago

I really wanted to learn about concrete but now my mind is fractured because you were unable to create a threaded conversation.

Anyway, you should move on to terrazzo next. It's a logical progression.

Also. Please play more d&d. You should try Apocalypse World or Burning Wheel.

mpbmke.com•25 days ago

Well shit, my boss was there, now I wish I'd put in to go along. 😂

axelrothe.com•24 days ago

here is a fun cement fact for you Dan: My dad is a retire professor of civil engineering and he would take part in a regatta with his students in which all boats had to be made of cement - yes you heard that right! Cement is both water tight and light enough to be a boat material.

cledonomist.bsky.social•22 days ago

Another thing about concrete is that due to its properties you need batch plants every 100 miles or so as transporting premixed concrete longer than that will risk it starting to set-up or change its properties significantly when it's poured, so there'll pretty much also be jobs in the concrete biz!

mactakeshi.bsky.social•11 days ago

Bill Bryson's three Cs,
Cement, Concrete and Canals.

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

I hope you enjoyed learning how to make it. if you did, that’s gravy, or as I call it, aggregate, because my objective was to get it out of my head. I do still want to know the history of concrete and I want to try making a concrete work station. Here’s Joan saying we’re done here

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raznad.bsky.social•24 days ago

I'm a nerd and I love concrete. The Brutalist is my kink. My employer is a big exhibiter at world of concrete. CarbonCure is super cool for sustainability, but it's big pesos still. If you want a rabbit hole to go down, learn about flyash and why it's hard to get now and what they're doing about it.

videodrew.bsky.social•20 days ago

Yes but how many chairs are left on stage at the end of this thing?

joerom.bsky.social•25 days ago

The Pantheon in Rome is a good first step for historic concrete understanding! xoxo

riz4robot.bsky.social•14 days ago

do you watch this guy?

https://youtu.be/IclsmE6WV0U?si=A9NOy8GvWkpAWb9U

fluxyfuxys.bsky.social•24 days ago

Hi Joan :) Hi Dan :)

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

To review: find limestone. Based on my gaming experience, it’s kind of a yellowish rock, might have some monsters guarding it, nothing too high level. Cook limestone into lime, add sand while not calling it sand, heat again, add more sand while calling it sand, add water: CONCRETE.

mhplives.bsky.social•23 days ago

Gotta check with my kid in the morning if this checks out in Minecraft

ieyke.bsky.social•24 days ago

Oh okay. So silica IS just sand?
Did they explain why they call it silica at one point and sand at another?

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

You mix your silica with your lime and you heat that up again. Now you have CEMENT. it’s so easy from here. No more heat. You take the cement, you add water and you add your aggregate. What’s aggregate. Welllllll it’s “sand, gravel or rocks.” So keep that sand out of your lime! OR call it silica.

ieyke.bsky.social•24 days ago

Wait.
Is cement not the final product, when it's all hard and everything?

Don't you have to add all the aggregate stuff before that?

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

Anyway I got off track. To make CEMENT, you mix your lime with SILICA, which is not “aggregate” which comes later and you do NOT want aggregate anywhere near your lime, you want SILICA. What’s silica? No fucking clue but I know this: it “comes from” “sand or clay.”

nelannette.bsky.social•25 days ago

I will never touch that industry but FUCK, I love learning new information

ieyke.bsky.social•24 days ago

Silica is silicon dioxide.
It's what quartz is made of. It's what sand is.
It's mostly what glass is made from.

I assume when they're talking about silica, they're just talking about sand?

raznad.bsky.social•24 days ago

Nah, silica, silica sand and sand are 3 different things in concrete production. Silica is straight up SiO2, Silica Sand is high (like > 95%) SiO2 and low iron oxide. Sand everything with <95% Si02 and it's random stuff to provide surface area for adhesion.

hobodemon.bsky.social•24 days ago

And like, not even all sand is the same stuff. For aggregate, you want the kind of sand you get on beaches that's been weathered down consistently by tides, the kind you find in deserts is shaped all wrong and makes shit concrete that'll break apart in a decade or two

raznad.bsky.social•24 days ago

Totally, I take for granted that the sand here is local. Lots of regions don't have that luxury.

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

Even he wouldn’t agree. So they call cement the bonding agent of concrete. What are you bonding? They say “aggregate.” And we do use a LOT of “aggregate” in Semantics Production because to us it means “a gathered gathering of stuff” so it’s great for a process we call “mid sentence stalling” but..

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

And that’s not accurate either. I want to call cement “primordial concrete.” Or “pre-concrete.” Tried that out on Dr. Fiber - here’s Dr. Fiber

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yomigi.bsky.social•24 days ago

Thought his badge said "Mike Cock"

danharmon.bsky.social•23 days ago

Oh no I doxxed Dr. Fiber. And outed him as a fake doctor

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

So anyway, eugh, yeah, I always want to call cement “concrete concentrate” but concrete people DO NOT LIKE that because it implies that concrete is cement plus water and THAT IS NOT THE CASE… I can understand why they go with “bonding agent” but to me that implies that cement is glue, like mortar

spielersun.bsky.social•24 days ago

this game was pretty simple but really fun, thought me a lot about buildin 🙃😅

danharmon.bsky.social•23 days ago

Oh my gosh! I hope that’s on steam

spielersun.bsky.social•23 days ago

it is 😄 its not on house flipper level quality but still I enjoyed a lot.

profoma.bsky.social•20 days ago

When I was a kid I had a hard time naming similar nouns. Gates and fences, zucchini and cucumber, concrete and cement. My dad was a stone mason and once when I asked if you could build things with cement he said you could, but it would be like building a chair out of glue instead of wood.

merman1983.bsky.social•25 days ago

Is this all part of the modern Freemason initiation process?

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

I think it’s working, I think I can finally be bored by concrete now. I’m already losing my train of thought. Like my dog did something cute and I paid attention to her and then I was like okay where was I and when I remembered the answer was “explaining concrete” I felt a pretty healthy “eugh.”

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

Cement is the “bonding agent” of concrete. Those specific words are vital if you don’t want to get corrected by concrete people - I was amazed at how much of what we walk on is composed of semantics. I guess because I work in Semantics Production and care less about words than…cementists? Coined it

hamdangus.bsky.social•25 days ago

4 out of 5 cementists agree

marcmancuso.bsky.social•14 days ago

That lone one is just being cementitious.

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

Okay so can we please get back to our simmering batch of concrete or really what it currently is is a big kiln of powder called lime and also I should probably say at some point that what we’re really making is “cement” before we’re making concrete but don’t freak out about that I’ll explain

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

Here we go here we go, this is the company. Shoutout to that kid that answered my questions because I was clearly a tourist that knew so little about concrete that there was zero “point” in educating me yet he did so I feel bad that he was then likely abducted and sealed in a slab of Nevada sidewalk

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danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

It would feel gratuitously unhelpful for me to info dump how to make concrete and bother to make a grim joke about the poison gas part and then a joke about how the solution to the poison gas part will never happen WITHOUT seeing if I can find the info for that company, hold on, scanning photos

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

I do want to briefly mention a kid I talked to at World of Concrete who worked for a company that can, theoretically, modify your concrete factory, essentially building a factory on top of it that captures the CO2 and uses it to make MORE concrete, i assume that kid is already assassinated BUT

zappaneese.bsky.social•14 days ago

Spent 10yrs working for an enviro construction comp that had somewhat similar aim. We captured byproducts of coal combustion which can be used as filler in concrete. Made for stronger/more durable concrete while reducing water usage in production while reducing CO2. Worth mentioning at Thanksgiving

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

But this is no place for politics. Do keep in mind if you talk about concrete production next Thanksgiving that half of your family may not believe in Carbon Dioxide and we all have a right to our beliefs and the good news is, even if CO2 does exist, it has now left this recipe, it is “in the wind”

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

So you find limestone. Break it into niblets. My term. Put the niblets in a kiln and add a zillion degrees - you’re turning CaCO3 (“calcium carbonate”) into CaO (lime) and you’re doing that by making CO2, everyone’s favorite, and yeah concrete production makes like 8% of ..you know..THAT whole thing

originalteddy.bsky.social•25 days ago

It reminds me of how the plumbus is made

ieyke.bsky.social•24 days ago

Yeah. Concrete is...pretty catastrophic.
8% of the problem.
Not just any problem.
THE problem.

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

So I don’t know if they “processed” the limestone to make Paris, i don’t know when concrete was invented, everything I’ve learned was from two sources: the concrete convention and a guy I met last night that’s pouring a skate park and man does he regret meeting me but now I know how to make concrete

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

I do remember in Paris they said the catacombs were dug mining “limestone” to build the city and they replaced that with all those bones because burying corpses was tainting the water but if you put people’s bones in a tunnel it’s a loophole, they can go to heaven but without poisoning your water

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

Here is how you make concrete: you find limestone, which I don’t know a lot about but I think is sedentary rock formed by calcium from little micro creatures which bums me out because it implies that even frickin concrete is “non renewable” - I guess I assumed it was just “rock” but it’s limestone

heathercampbell.bsky.social•25 days ago

Oh man I’m here for this thread

poormanstoes.bsky.social•25 days ago

My PeePaw got chemical burns on 70% of his legs from concrete! His toes are ok though. We don’t talk anymore.

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

Is he an escaped mobster?!

zombieroomie.com•25 days ago

My dad was a mechanical engineer in the making concrete and cement most of his professional career. There's a lot of night's worth of discussion wrapped in this stuff.

theomadla.bsky.social•25 days ago

checks out. This fact is indeed concrete

fluxyfuxys.bsky.social•24 days ago

So there’s a printmaking style called lithography and the limestone quarry went dry so now there’s no more rocks. Just the ones that are archived in printmaking studios across the globe.

wrighteous86.bsky.social•25 days ago

How long do you have to deal with the Dougie arc before limestone is formed?

emitydna.bsky.social•25 days ago

I used to go to trade conventions with my dad, this is taking me back to some happy times.

daversa.bsky.social•24 days ago

My ex's dad was in the c-suite for Cal Portland. We even used the company's vacation cabin in Concrete, WA a few times. WIth your newfound enthusiasm, you might find the town interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete,_Washington

spacecomplaints.bsky.social•25 days ago

did you go to any of the outside booths? they don’t teach about the origins of concrete but you can drink free beer while trying power tools that destroy the concrete

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

I didn’t see enough, I only got a couple hours on the main floor sadly. It was an unscheduled detour but I could see myself flying out just for it one day. It also makes me wonder about all the different conventions that I’d never know existed if I didn’t look for them

spacecomplaints.bsky.social•24 days ago

WoC is cool and there is already hype (with construction PMs) around the 2026 ConExpo-CON/AGG. I always thought a fabric/textile/sewing convention would be rad

spacecomplaints.bsky.social•25 days ago

and too bad they didn’t invite the people from the “world of making sure all the letters on the sign are functioning properly” convention

ben-bessman.bsky.social•25 days ago

Can’t wait for this concrete information to start pouring in.

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

I was told the concrete convention has a rule against wordplay. I started to ask them how permanent that rule was, like, you know, is it a rule you’d say is unchangeable and they said “we know what you’re trying to make us say and if you don’t leave you will be stabbed with sharpened rebar”

nerdyrealtor.bsky.social•24 days ago

This sounds like a very definite thing. Ah what is the word. A solid thing. Something you can build on. A good basis for a foundation. Ah, if only there was a word for something that was emblematic of being solid and reliable material on which to build!

main-tenant.bsky.social•25 days ago

The owls are not what they seem and neither, it appears, is concrete.

chriscannon.bsky.social•25 days ago

I read the whole thread and now my FB feed is full of concrete ads. Thanks Obama!

duncanjr.bsky.social•25 days ago

Tell me everything you know about The Return you coward!

citizenbree.bsky.social•25 days ago

Dan, come to North Bend, Wa Feb 21-24! https://Therealtwinpeaks.com Ray Wise is coming and they’ve got a Robocop screening

calicoday.bsky.social•25 days ago

📌 world of concrete

pleyland.bsky.social•14 days ago

At this "World of Concrete"... Are the plants and animals made of concrete too?

vert-69.bsky.social•8 days ago

This post has been labeled intolerant. Thought you'd like to know.

pleyland.bsky.social•7 days ago

I'm completely unable to tell the true story of my life, that My father was assassinated by Cyril Ramamphosa and than my uncle was raped by the son of the first Jewish member of the nationalist party, on any other platform, I get banned.

At least on this website I can still post

I'm super tolerant

pleyland.bsky.social•7 days ago

Makes sense seeing as I'm the most tolerant person on earth

Do you hear Gazan voices here? No, You hear me, my family is torn apart but I'm still alive
They murdered my father. They blocked me from all venues
I'm tolerant of literally everything, except when Jews accuse me of rape

Im better than u

fluxyfuxys.bsky.social•24 days ago

I’d rather listen to you talk about concrete than google it, fella.

vengeo37.bsky.social•25 days ago

What was the highlight of the convention for you? What was the best fact you learned there?

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

Well, the not-concrete related favorite thing I saw on the convention floor were these different sized mobile power stations. I have no electrical information about their power but they let me sit on the small one to show that …you can sit on it…here’s the small one

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

But I’m more excited about the big one

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notbettygrable.bsky.social•25 days ago

They should really lean into that burnt out "F" and go full "World o' Concrete."

I too fell into concrete wonder. I had wondered why my friend worked in inspecting the concrete in high rises but we still had Roman Empire era concrete. Turns out they did it special. https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-casts-0106

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

I will check this out!

seanhempill.bsky.social•25 days ago

😳
https://warhistorybuff.com/2019/03/20/nazi-megaweapons-a-concrete-tale/

danharmon.bsky.social•25 days ago

That’s an exciting read! Just got to concrete being deployed by Ancient Egyptians (of COURSE) and wanted to thank you before continuing

seanhempill.bsky.social•24 days ago

😟
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Egypt

peeingian.bsky.social•25 days ago

thank you for observing the smile stop