Mud Bricks and Straw

Long before the folks put glass in plastic to make fibreglass, before we reinforced concrete with steel bars... we were baking mud bricks with straw, centuries and centuries into the past, ceaselessly chanting the slogan by Aristotle: The Whole Is More Than The Sum Of Its Parts! Incan masons hew ashlar that stack perfectly on top of each other, while others make cement instead to improve adhesion between the bricks. Elsewhere on earth in Kalevala, the blacksmith Ilmarinen is forging a wife out of gold, but will find her cold and unfeeling. On his way northwards to battle, the war advisor Zhuge Liang bickers with his swordmaker, who asked for water to be fetched from a specific river, many miles away, to have his swords quenched in. In the new world at the age of discovery, the Spainards are pitting steel against Aztec obsidian, and naturally the brittle volcanic glass is no match to stainless steel, thanks to its cavities, strongly unidirectional bonds and extremely large Burgers vectors. For the year and a half preceding, we have been unearthing an ancient science and breathed into it new life. We have flogged a dead horse up and kicking. We have awakened the ancients, who are bursting out in song and storytelling; millenia of folklore are being freed from their strata and are engulfing the libraries in a fine mist.