Content tagged with “infrastructure” under “The Interesting List”

“ There’s a unique architecture to keeping the South Pole research station running. ”

“ When the Redbox DVD rental company filed bankruptcy, it ‘orphaned’ 24,000 machines around the country. No one seems to want to remove them. ”

“ A long explainer and background article about planning and maintaining the maze of undersea data cables that make the Internet possible. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A solid backstory about the undersea cables that you don’t think about, but that move all your data and make your digital life possible. ”

“ It takes a lot to launder the linens products by the largest hotel in the United States. ”

“ A detailed look at the planes, helicopters, and ground vehicles used to transport the president, and how they themselves are transported. ”

“ There’s actually a lot of information embedded an interstate highway’s number. ”

“ To test road surfaces, there’s a massive rotating machine in France that simulates years of tires traveling over the road. ”

“ There are very few suspended railways in the world. ”

“ 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 2017, a California dam almost failed over the course of several harrowing weeks. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 lonely stretch of railroad cuts hundreds of miles through the Sahara desert, taking iron ore from interior mines to the coast. ”

“ The Jewish community in NYC found a way to consider a large portion of the city their ‘home,’ which allows them to perform work on the Sabbath. ”

“ Some pictures of an abandoned train car used as an impromptu covered bridge somewhere in Georgia (the caucus, not the state). ”

“ A time-lapse of a Rammstein stadium show being set up over the course of a week. The logistics of this are just incredible. ”

“ A full-length documentary about the establishment of an airport and commercial air service on the remote island of St. Helena. ”

“ A good explainer of Amtrak’s current status and how their new CEO might get them out of trouble (hint: he has no deep love for trains). ”

“ A heavy lift ship lifts another ship which is almost as big as it is. ”

“ Without electricity, the world is a very different place, as recent history in Venezuela has shown. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There’s a low bridge in North Carolina so famous for catching tall trucks that someone has installed a camera and recorded 145 crashes since 2008. ”