Content tagged with "infrastructure"
“A lovely collection of blog posts about all the hidden stuff in your city. Why lampposts are shaped the way they are. Why manhole covers are round. What the markings on sidewalks mean. It’s a great…”
“A magisterial history of the Hoover Dam, all the way from the problems of the late 1800s that it was meant to solve, through the arguments during its planning, to the construction and beyond (in fact,…”
“I have wanted to read this book for ages. I have a weird fascination with urban planning, and this book is held up as seminal. It’s from the 60s, and was written by the legendary Jane Jacobs. What I…”
“This is a well-researched book, but seems disorganized. It felt like it jumped around a lot, especially between scopes – from macro to micro. The major points I learned: Electricity is unlike any…”
“I’m giving this five stars because it absolutely achieves what it sets out to do. It’s a glossy, illustrated love letter to how skyscrapers are built and managed. If that’s what you want, then this is…”
“This is an extremely short book (like, 100 small pages with lots and lots of pictures). Start to finish, it might take you 30 minutes. It’s more of a handbook of the different physical markers you…”
“This is the definitive history of oil, from the first discovery in the 1850s through the first Gulf War of of the 1990s. It’s a lot – 900-some-odd pages. Not for the faint of heart. I actually brought…”
“Really enjoyed this book. The author decided he wanted to ‘visit the Internet.’ The…physical Internet. Each chapter is a look at some physical manifestation of what makes the Internet go, from…”
“A wonderful history of the telegraph which proves that all of the ‘novel’ problems the Internet brought about actually happened 150 years earlier. Standage pays social attention to the societal…”
“Genuinely one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read, hands down. Speck explains why and how our cities started being designed first for cars, then for people, and why this is bad. Then he gives…”
“If you’ve read ‘Walkable City,’ I don’t know that there’s much new here, but it’s more approachable. There are 101 smaller ‘rules’ about how to fix cities and make them more friendly to pedestrians….”
“A solid book that’s an introduction to engineering. It explains – in the clearest, simplest way – how buildings stay upright. It talks about loads, materials, and different ways of organizing those in…”
