Notes, 2024-02-01.

Spencer Wright on cobblestone construction, tire dust collection, and File Filosophy.

Bike tire dust — which would otherwise end up in the environment, and our lungs — adheres to an electrostatically charged plate during product testing. Image is via The Tyre Collective, which you can learn more about in the third bullet below.

Today’s newsletter is all scope creep – bullets, by popular demand, but uncategorized and purely for your enjoyment.

SCOPE CREEP.

I wrote on Monday about cobbles, sett, and the fired slag adoquines that are used to pave the streets of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. As I mentioned there, cobbles (that is, true “cobblestones”) are naturally occurring stones, usually roundish; they can be used to pave streets, but rectangular sett, which have been shaped by humans, nest more nicely and generally provide a smoother road surface.

Well it turns out that the glaciated soil in upstate New York is littered with cobbles, and when the Erie Canal was excavated a lot of them ended up being used as cheap building materials. The Cobblestone Museum, in Albion, New York, maintains a remarkably detailed map and database of cobblestone buildings in New York State, and explains how cobblestone walls were constructed and how a cobblestone construction project took shape. They also claim that “Ninety per cent of the cobblestone buildings [in the US] can be found within a 75-mile radius of Rochester, NY.” If you want to see a gallery of cobblestone buildings, here that is.

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