Three-day Weekends

Whoever decided that modern society would generally adopt a two-day weekend knew what they were doing. In fact, it might have even been better when we had only one day of rest, (really, who can argue against that? isn't that proclaimed in the Bible?) although that depends on your objectives in life.

Indeed, our objectives have changed since the days of Adam and Eve, and these days, the 5-day work week is mostly to the advantage of companies who are concerned about employee productivity. And from that perspective, the three-day weekend is awash! That is to say, with three days off, that is nearly half the week, and the results (at least in my case) is that I completely forget about being at the office. Hence, when I return to work on a Tuesday, my motivation is often near zero to jump in and get through the tasks for the day. This is often resolved by lunchtime, but it just goes to show that "nearly half a week" off will inevitably become a full half-week off (which can only be slightly modified with a big cup of coffee in the AM).

So, what I'm getting at is that we had a three-day weekend recently and yesterday, the first day back, was indeed awash. By the afternoon I had cracked a book and started to read through it, although considering the title - Slope Stability and Stabilization Methods - it's no wonder that I was procrastinating. Nonetheless, I was surprised to find quite a bit of the content to be interesting (the power of caffeine), and by page 4 I found an excuse to take notes... but only because I thought it would make for an interesting (I hope) blog entry, which follows:

Since Hurricane Katrina, people have become concerned with the strength of those walls that sometimes protect our communities from flooding - water dams. These days it is inexcusable to ignore hazardous infrastructures that could affect, if not destroy, entire communities (including the bridges of Minnesota counties). When engineers build embankments or dams these days, the structures are often on such a grand scale that they are technologically beyond layman understanding, although they use the same principles of compaction that were discovered in the 1930s. Of course, this idea of "compaction" is nothing beyond the understanding of any kid at the beach with a plastic shovel in hand building a sand castle; not to mention that mankind has been constructing real-life castles, pyramids, embankments and roads for hundreds or thousands of years. So how did they do it way-back when?

For example, it is important to apply these "principles of sand castles" when building embankments for the construction of a new highway and railway to increase their strength (and avoid building a bumpy road that would look like it came straight out of the Flintstones). It doesn't take a rocket scientist - or even a rock scientist - to understand that one must compact the soil along the path where one plans to lay down a highway. This obviousness is reinforced by the fact that mechanical equipment has been used to compact soil since the late 1860s, when the first road compaction roller was built, even though there was probably little understanding of the various factors involved, i.e. moisture content, unit weight, etc. Much in the same way that a kid at the beach must improvise with the tools available to him or her, prior to 1860, humankind has been practicing the sand castle principles with whatever they had available.

In fact, according to one source, one of the oldest recorded earth fill dams is the dam completed in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the year 504 BC, which was 11 miles long, 70 feet high and contained about 17 million cubic yards of embankment. Although the details of construction of that particular dam might not be available in records, we needn't look any further than 1893 in the United States for a hint at how they might have improvised. In lieu of the unavailability of plastic beach shovels at that time, according to the Highway Research Board, the 85-foot high Santa Fe water supply dam of New Mexico was compacted by... 115 goats!


This bit of trivia has been brought to you by the 3-day Weekend Initiative.