studiot

I really am confused now. Your sketch seems to me to indicate a (water lubricated?) ramp, where a sled is pulled up by suitable lines. I said earlier that there was no need for a slave army of men to pull the lines. I now understand your earlier reference to a funicular and a counterweight. There are many simpler ropage mechanisms they could have used, as in my earler references. One of these systems, including yours, could also have led to a vertical lift without a ramp, but it would have been necessary to bring (drag?) the blocks beneath the lifter somehow. Thank you.

And how did the sled-boat in your sketch displace enough water to float? Edit I am trying to take your ideas seriously so I wish you would stop disparaging egyptologists and ramps in your replies to me. I really don't know or care whether ramps or egyptologists were used. I have to discard more than half your posts as chaff to find some kernal to think about.

I'm sorry but I require considerably more convincing than your selective proclamations. That does not mean I support any other theory I treat them all the same. Nor does the use of ramps require men to drag anything. What do you know about the mechanics of 'dragging'? You say both that it is impossible to use canals and that canals have been found. I have never been to the pyramids so I do not know the site. You keep referring to cliffs, but I see no cliffs in any photos. You have (I think) told me that most of the stone is limestone quarried from within a few hundred yards of the pyramids. I was thinking the stone had travelled further. You state that derricks were not used, so how did they load and unload their ships? In particular how did they put large blocks of stone on board? If you try to drag a large weight aboard, all you will achieve is capsizing the boat or pushing it away. I am still waiting for the details of the boats capable of transporting 20 ton blocks.

It would seem that we cross posted as you added to your post whilst I was responding to your first line. Pressing the post button is easy to do, I have done it too early myself. So I am sorry if my last post came over as a tad strident. However you have still not responded to my main points. Hard information such as the distance from the pyramids to the quarry would really enhance discussion. Can you also list the height of the lift (ie to the top of the pyramid) and the rock material the blocks are composed of? Is there any evidence as to whether the blocks were cut/split and dressed on site or at the quarry? It would make sense to transport the stone by canal to site, but the canal would be at a fixed elevation, it would not run uphill as the work progressed. As I understand the history of engineering, the Ancient Egyptians were quite capable of using a loading/lifting derrick of the type in my logging link These could also have been deployed on the developing structure. A further possibility is that a very large ramp (as in Masada), larger than a pyramid, could have been constructed and the blocks lowered down to place. If you really want to explore the posiibilities, now is your chance.

The fact that the pyramids themselves exist suggest that some sort of temporary devices were used to build them. How about addressing my main questions? and please add this one What would be the draft of the boat (you keep using that term in preference to raft why is that?) that can reliably handle up to 40 tons displacement?

If you are serious about holding an adult discussion it would be nice if you would take time out from your florid exchanges with certain others to pursue this. I have never said ramps were or were not used, and have made several highly pertinent comments, to which I am still waiting for an answer. Further I am not an Egyptologist (whatever that means) and have no knowledge of the language or languages they used, so I feel rather insulted being lumped in with them. I do, however, have probably considerably more heavy engineering and construction knowledge than you do and could quite easily offer many other scenarios to be tested scientifically.

Thank you, I am quite capable of understanding hydraulic lifting techniques. The 'little boat' would not be so little. Rock has a density of around 2.4 - 2.6 so a two and a half ton (tonne) block would be approcimately 1 metre cubed. This would require something like 3 cubic metres displacement to allow handling stabilty, may be up to 5 cubic metres if you include the weight of the raft etc. But all this misses my point. Which is that since time immemorial builders have constructed temporary works they have removed when the permanent works are complete. I listed several possible lifting technologies, available to the Ancient Egyptians, including noting that the Harappans used this on the Indus and Ganges. But hydraulic lifting alone will not cut it for the final placement of the blocks. On a different note the siege of Rochester Castle provides an interesting demolition technology - pig fat. If I was really to play detective and try to determine how the pyramids were built, I would not start at the pyramids. The blocks must have come from something bigger so they must have had the capacity to handle bigger things. So I would try to start at the quarry and see if there were any relics of their cutting, handling and transport methods to be found. Transporting the blocks by raft from the quarry to the construction site would be a good solution.

ellabarker I note you have returned to this thread several times so I guess you have a continued interest, and you have obviously put some good effort into the experiment. But no one here knows what you are expecting us to do. (you haven't said) That is why there is a shortage of replies. However lots of good chemists will be happy to discuss with you so fire away and ask. I said in post 7 that I expect you should draw a graph like the one below (which is what I made very quickly of your figures). Yes grams would be just fine, don't worry about moles. Over to you

Lots of posters discuss books here. No problem. I do have a comment about textbooks though. You have stated that you want to achieve an engineering degree. There is generally quite a mismatch between the content of textbooks and the content of courses. Many colleges even produce their own texts or notes as they say there is no text that properly covers their course. This is not to say that either the books or the course syllabus is wrong it is just that courses are very very selective because any engineering subject is way too large for one degree course. So you need texts that will properly cover the course syllabus you are following to do the work and the exams. Years a go a lecturer once said "This course is 10 one-hour lectures. The exam is 1 hour long. So we can only ask you 10% of the course in the exam. The trick is knowing which 10%"

You cannot have hybrid orbitals in an isolated free atom. The standard s, p etc orbitals are the lowest energy solution. But as soon as the atoms bond the combined orbitals (molecular orbitals) exist in (slightly) lower energy states by hybridisation, resonance or other mechanisms. So the rearrangement for bonding from an s, p d ............ structure to a hybrid structure is a bit like clearing the decks for action in a warship. It only happens in certain circumstance ie when there is a suitable dancing (bonding) partner or partners available. The alternative approach to bonding is to go straight for solving quantum mechanics for the molecule rather than the atoms. This would be tough postgraduate and research work. The normal approach is called the Linear Combination of Atomic Orbitals (LCAO) method.

I don't know if it was clear but my post#10 was meant to be an answer to your question about spare p orbitals in post#9

Well that was why there is no common carbon to carbon quadruple bond and how the carbon to carbon triple bond works. But there are also carbon to carbon double and single bonds which employ a different form of hybridisation. These are discussed in my links.

Done, that will be one beer

Either it is a fact that the falsework is missing or it is not. It cannot also be a matter of belief. I offered you an alternative explanation, not base exclusively on ramps, that I'm willing to bet you had never considered before. I'm willing to bet that the Giza Construction plc woud have had all manner of prehistoric scaffolding, craneage, haulage lines and posts scattered around during construction and would have cleared it all up at the end. Here is another link to simple heavy materials handling in another industry (logging). Whilst skylines were probably beyond GizaCon some is basic and would have been available to them. http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs/rmrs_gtr292/1974_studier.pdf You should study it along with the book about Smeaton (he used water) Incidentally why is all the falsework also missing from Stonehenge, Karnak, The Parthenon, The Blue Mosque, The Coliseum etc?

The Geometry of three dimensions. Two of the sets of p orbitals are sideways on and can form pi bonds (say py and pz) But that would leave the px orbitals facing end on as the bond is along the x axis.

I see no evidence of the constructuion method any more than I do in my quoted examples of later constructions.

I have given fuzzwood +1 for getting you to this stage. However you have not quite drawn the two sp hybrid orbitals quite correctly. For the situation we are talking about there are two number sp hybrid orbital per atom. The original p orbitals are symmetric about the origin, both lobes are equal. The sp hybrids are not. They have one large fat lobe sticking out to one side of the origin and one small tail lobe on the other side. The fat lobes form the bonds. Of the two in each atom One fat lobe sticks out to the left and one to the right (along the x axis) So the two overlapping fat lobes form a single bond along the x axis and the other bonding lobe for each atom sticks out on the other side of each atom (and therefore can easily bond to a hydrogen). The other two p orbitals per atom overlap sideways on and form 2 weaker pi bonds http://www.chemtube3d.com/orbitalsacetylene.htm also http://science.uvu.edu/ochem/index.php/alphabetical/g-h/hybridization/

For the reasons mentioned!!! The "ramps" point at the bottom of the pyramid. Also because they removed "ramps" (natural ground) even before construction began. I can't post a picture of it right now but the entire north and west sides of the second pyramid at Giza was extensively excavated far below bedrock even before the first stone went in. This was necessary because water had to be able to flow all around the pyramid before they could lift the first stone. That water flowed around it is established throughout the physical record but let's save this. I'm sorry I don't follow this response either. I didn't say they did or didn't use ramps. (I do know the Romans used them in their construction as in the siege of Masada http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Masada) But what do you mean by a ramp and what do you mean by pointing down or that they were removed before construction began? It is normal construction technique to this day to create a level 'formation' (the modern word) So what? As a matter of interest in the building of interlocking masonry structures in difficult circumstances by primitive methods, Smeaton's Tower is worth a read https://wordery.com/smeatons-tower-christopher-severn-9780954275099?currency=GBP&gtrck=VmREc2dBTE1tU1BtdG9BWSsxREF6UFpKV0YrQi9YQzdtbWYvSXdacjFYUnpDYXM0YzVhZnNPdVltU1hhbThrdUFVb2hWc24ycWFEYk1yMVU0ZXU3R2c9PQ&gclid=CJX83qjugcECFafnwgodsi0Aig

How would one stand on the top of something before it was built, in order to drag stones up it, to build it? Alternatively if it was already built why drag stones up it?

Indeed yes. In fact modern practice is to construct what is known as 'falsework' in order to build the permanent work. This is a bit like building a giant jig as a metalworker or carpenter might do to fabricate a door or some other work. The falsework is deliberately removed at the end of the construction, because no one want to see temporary support holding up the nice new bridge. How do we know that the ancient Pharoh's didn't also cause this to happen because all they wanted to see was pyramid? We know that the Egyptians, the Harappans and the Babylonians all used temporary works in their respective river management, but often left them in place afterwards, perhaps for the opposite reason ie these were utilitarian works not showpieces.

Cladking, Do you have any idea how the Clifton Suspension Bridge, The Maillart Elastic Line Bridges, The Forth Bridge, The Tay Bridge, the Kocher Valley Viaduct (amongst others) were built? And is there any on site evidence today of this? Oh and I have never called myself a scientist.

Do work on what?

This is really annoying. I lost the entire post when I went to preview. Anyway I will try again. It really depends upon your point of view, either could be correct. Both Timo and John are correct, but they are making different points. Timo is saying that it depends upon your point of view. John is making the point that when considering (dividing it into regions of interest) the entire universal population set, you must be careful to avoid counting the boundary twice. Since John has presented the standard Chebychef inequality that includes equalities, the region of interest in the question should be denoted by strict inequalities when Chebychef is reversed. This is what I think your book has done. However many statisticians start with the reversed inequality, including the equality, so the strict inequalities will appear in the other region and the region of interest to your question will then be denoted by inequalities including equality and the outer region by strict inequalities. This is because the inner region is normally the one of interest. Here is an excerpt from my old textbook (Clark and Schkade 1969), who adopt this latter approach. The important thing is to be consistent when dividing up the universal population set into regions.

And yet your source does describe the use of shall and will as auxiliary verbs, but not go. The OED is quite clear that shall & will are in the present tense (should & would in the past) when used as auxiliarly verbs. (p2802 and p 3687 in my copy)

I have to observe that your reference source prostrates itself before the OED, since it manages 5 lines about the same word and does not seem to describe the use of go as an auxiliary verb at all.