Biotech Values

[justrpaul]

Thanks biomaven and somewhat OT response –

On vacation in an earthquake-prone third world country, I came across a construction site for a four story building, probably a hotel. The forms were up for the columns, the rebar was in, and they were in the process of putting concrete in the form. Now, you should have a consistent mix of concrete, and pour it continuously down the form, so it dries uniformly and gains strength and appropriate flexibility for carrying various live loads, resisting earthquakes, wind etc. But, they were mixing the concrete with shovels on flattened cardboard boxes. They’d mix a batch there in the street and fill it in gallon or two gallon buckets, send the buckets up by rope, and dump them down the top of the form. Inconsistently mixed concrete batches were simply plopped, bucket by bucket in the form. Perhaps, you can imagine how a column constructed this way would perform in an earthquake.

At any rate, so many of these HCV surveys – the CTAF/ICER, GS, etc. – remind me of standing there, looking at that construction process.