Put on a pure coat of just portland cement, as I’ve seen it made to a paint consistancy of 1:1 portland to water. It is then painted over cement walls of cisterns to make them waterproof.
In this mix, I put in iron oxide to give it color.
Finally, 2 years 2 months later from pouring the foundation, I have finished the door and hung said door on the Shed of Requirement. This glorious shed I’ve built from foundation up, assembled without power tools, carried stone by stone, pound for pound 220 feet from the driveway to the site. The door was supposed to open outwards, but due to geometry restrictions on Gothic doors, it couldn’t open. Not a design consideration I had on my list. Nonetheless, the door now is hung and opens inwards. If it hits anything, it is a sign I have too much shit in the shed. With the lifespan of the shed targeted at 200 years, the door is expected to be the first to require replacement in 20-40 years. Now the shed isn’t done yet, there are many hours left to do.
Some challenges resonate strongly within us. Sometimes for reasons even we do not know. It is simply part of our baggage we carry on this crazy train we call life. Sunday, at Archery class during summer camp, we were given a challenge to stand on a short pole or a tall pole and shoot as many arrows as possible without falling off…but only allowed to stand on one foot. Typically, people could stand 30-120 seconds, and the best record so far was only 3 arrows. When my time came, I was happy to play the game, as I have great balance. Everyone else had chosen the low perch, screw that, I went high out of pride and arrogance. Once I got up on the high perch, I’m really not sure what happened, it is like I blacked out in a way. I kicked in my Zen and hyper focused. Time dilated, and I had no sense of its passage. My eyes locked on a 2″ square of tree bark and my muscle memory took over, while my brain balanced. I remember my leg beginning to hurt and kicking in my old pain management mindset from 30 years ago. I was planted, that was my pole, I wasn’t leaving. I drew and shot, drew and shot, never looking down, never checking my nock, calling out which target I would hit next. I remember the instructor harassing me, but I was so tuned out and it didn’t get to me. I remember him sticking my arrows in the ground to my right to force me to contort down to the ground to get my next arrow, but I was in Zen and simply retrieved them pluck and grace. I wore that perch as the master and commander. My leg burned but I Zen-ed thru the pain and the searing, I was *not* going to falter, I was *not* going to fall. Apparently, I began to softly talk to myself. Someone thought I was quoting Lord of the Rings. I gave it my all. At some point the instructor refused to give me more arrows. I realized, I wasn’t going to fall off but if I didn’t get down I would collapse off. I voluntarily conceded my perch, and stepped down to Terra firma again. I ceremoniously bowed to the instructor, limped 15 feet away and collapsed down cross-legged. I began to shake and to cry from the intense emotional experience. I’m not sure why, but I believe it was me challenging me, and in the end I was weighed, measured, and found passing. My mettle is known. I was told I’d been on the post 9 minutes, shot 11 arrows, struck the target 10 times. To me, I had done something beautiful and bad-ass, and this time, there were witnesses.
I like the HFC competition, for my own reasons. However, most forecasters don’t seem to understand the highly punative scoring system imposed upon them. They will cast a question thinking that because they understand the problem domain more than most, they should answer it. That is flat out wrong, worse, the HFC scoring system inadvertantly encourages casters to participate in more questions because the fewer in a question the more points they can earn. Yet, they don’t seem to process that is a double edge sword.
Lets look at the last few questions that were resoved (correctly, I will point out).
Here are the net points the forecasters got as a group
Paraguayan election -187
Syria strike -303
Cuba election -338
Baffin bay St Lawrence ice extent -305
Let me point out for those who think it is a dash, it is not, it is a negative sign. That is *negative* 187 points. As in, the ‘team Prescience’ would have been better off not forecasting it. At all. But there is an algorithm in the back that will heavily weight the forecasts of the high forecasters and ignore the low ones. So I will avoid discussing the entire team avoiding questions, instead lets look at picking the *right* questions.
If you are wanting to get a high score then lets look at some math. For example the Baffin Bay Ice problem. I got the high score…of 0 points. In fact 13 of us did. The low score got -106. So from a game theory perspective, we risked -106 for achieving 0. That is stupidity.
Another question, the Colorado party Paraguyan question. It started out about 80/20. Top score got only 6 points, the worst got -79. What does that tell you? That you need to be about 13x more confident before you enter a question if it is above 80 or below 20. I could make a heuristic here and say you need to take the percentage ratio 80:20=4 and multiply that by 3 (=12x) to get how much more confident you know more about this question than anybody else. That is, if their is very little variance amongst the casts, so if everyone is in the same range, like 80/20, 82/18, 78/22 then there is low variance.
If high uncertainty reigns. And there are 70/30 and 50/50 and 20/80 and other casts all over the place, then you will be able to win more points as the median estimates will be farther off from your estimate. Like with the Material conflicts in Occupied Palestine question. Almost 1/2 the scores were positive and 1/2 negative, so a favorable question to participate in if you have a small advantage with your judgment.
Conclusions – Triage the new questions carefully. Avoid getting into a question for emotional reasons, or because you know more about it than the average dude at a party.
Avoid questions where there seems to be a consensus in the answer. Unless you really, really, know a shitload more than everyone else *and* you can avoid your own hedgehog bias. You have much to lose and little to gain. On the flip side, if there is chaos amongst the casts, then you can enter the fray with a slight advantage.
Oh my, this Catalan vault is quite the project. I knew it would be labor intensive, but I had no idea the issues I’d have on the corners. Should have stuck with a barrel vault. Guastavino, I am not. Overall, there is about a 40-45% rise, so close to a perfect hemisphere of 50%. Spanning 11 feet with a 4.5 foot rise.
The scaffolding is up and usable, but needs some plywood decks on it.
The corners are so labor intensive, 3-4 tiles must be modified for each corner per row.
I figure 40 more manhours then I have to put on the coping stones around the shed, and then design a glorious Gothic door.
Found a very detailed plan of how catalan vaults were built in Great Britain, including tips and tricks that I really wish I knew before I started. If anyone out there wants to try their hand, follow this advice:
Construction of Catalan Vaults Thesis
Lessons I’ll be applying:
So this weekend, the mason and I finished the outside walls. 3 of them, actually, as the back wall won’t be clad.
So the roof is up to 6 courses, with 5 having a second ply mortared on.
The corners continued to be a bitch until I realized I need to slope them in faster than the roof walls, because they need to get to the center faster as they have farther to travel. Hence the nearby tiles are sloped in as I approach each corner. Now that that’s understood, I think I can make faster headway and get a row done and 2plyed in 2.5 hours. So maybe 3 courses a day 2-plyed completed?
I would have preferred to use broad leaf ligustrum as my weavers but I didn’t have the time or money to harvest so frilling many to have a fence made out of them. Instead I found a guy who had just cleared out a batch of invasive bamboo and had a thousand linear feet or so. I had him trim off the leafy bits and leave me with the straight stalks. Driving in the posts (juniper that don’t rot in 20 years) took me 6 man hours. Weaving in the wattles took 2 man hours. Total length that I built is 32 feet.
Lessons learned:
The shed keeps moving along.
asdf
I’ve also tried making Texas persimmon jam.
So the front orchard is going to need water. I could have just run the irrigation hose to the back tanks, but noooo that would have been easy. Instead I chose to harvest more water off the front of the house where very little water is harvested. I already have two 55 gallon barrels taking in water on the front, those water the fig tree. They only catch a fraction of the rain from 1200 sq ft of roof surface during a rain. So I put in another rain downspout, and ran it under the sidewalk. The tank is a 330 gallon IBC tote, painted and with a shade cloth to mitigate algae growth.
The easy way to tunnel under a side walk is using a water hose with water going full blast and shove it under. It erodes out the dirt and I can reach under and pull out the rocks. Took 20 minutes to dig the trenches on each side of the sidewalk but only took 10 minutes to burrow under. So the premise is the water will fill up the pipe, go down, then go back up the pipe and fill into the tank because the tank level is lower than the starting downspout level.
Then it rained a week later, the tank filled up and then overflowed, because I forgot to drill anti siphon holes on the top of the overflow U, the entire tank drained out. But I discovered that at the end of the rain and fixed it, so the tank filled 1/2 full before the end.
The front orchard has 8 trees in it: 2 Texas Persimmons (at least 40 years old), 2 jujubes, 2 Pomgranates, and a VDB fig.
