Masonry oven and the fire won't burn well. Modern masonry ovens sometimes bear little resemblance to their forebears, and can have just a cast deck (similar to a pizza stone) inside a more conventional oven exterior. Such devices are primarily used in commercial settings, though tabletop models are available. Cob is the British name for what is essentially adobe (from Arabic, "al toba," meaning "the mud;" "cob" is the Anglo-Saxon word for "lump," and is also used to describe round loaves of bread, or small, compact horses). As the most common building material on the planet, earth, clay and "cob" construction have
Ceramic street lamps. During the past two decades, additional types of transparent ceramics have been developed for applications such as nose cones for heat-seeking missiles, windows for fighter aircraft, and scintillation counters for computed tomography scanners. In the early 1970s, Thomas Soules pioneered computer modeling of light transmission through translucent ceramic alumina. His model showed that microscopic pores in ceramic, mainly trapped at the junctions of microcrystalline grains, caused light to scatter and prevented true transparency. The volume fraction of these microscopic pores had to be less than 1% for high-quality optical transmission. This is basically a particle size effect. Opacity