“ PBS documentary that explores the seven-year construction project to ‘re-enclose’ the destroyed reactor at Chernobyl. The project was incomprehensibly ambitious, and a million things might have gone wrong, but none of them did. At the climax, I almost cheered. ”
“ Ever wonder how those big construction cranes get so tall? They build themselves. The crane itself is used to deliver the segments to make the crane go higher, as shown in this short video. ”
“ The story of a horrific gasoline pipeline explosion, with the larger context of how siphoning gas from pipelines has become a pursuit of organized crime and gang warfare in Mexico. ”
“ Footage from a communications tower during a forest fire. You can see how fast it spreads, and at the very end of the video, you can actually see the camera lens and housing melt before the feed cuts out. ”
“ A programmer got in a dispute with someone, so he deleted this code from a communal repository. Problem was, lots of other systems depended on that code. ”
“ Road barriers have been refined over decades of testing, trial, and error. There’s a lot more complication involved in their design than you might think. ”
“ In 1930, an eight-story office building was rotated 90-degrees and moved about 50-meters over the course of four weeks, while it remained occupied and in use. ”
“ In the 1920s, people kept smashing a traffic light in an Irish neighborhood because they objected to green being the bottom color. As a result, it is now the only ‘upside-down traffic light’ in America. ”
“ Gold from a lot of different countries is stored in a vault under New York City. Exchanging funds many countries therefore just involves moving gold from one shelf to another. ”
“ Noise and space requirements make it very hard to build new airports, but we still manage to increase passenger capacity through bigger planes, faster turnarounds, and better air traffic control. ”
“ There’s a ‘wet spot’ in the California desert that started slowly moving in 2016, and no one knows why. It’s wiggling under highways, train tracks, and other infrastructure, which causes problems. ”
“ A good explainer on the business aspects of the Panama Canal, in particular its competition of the Suez and using trains to bring Asian goods across the country from west coast ports. ”