Content tagged with “infrastructure”

“ 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. ”

“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 reader – every ‘chapter’ is really just a blog post or podcast episode, so you can read 4-5 of them…”

“ 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). ”

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

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

“The Big Dig was the largest highway project in American history. It was conceived in 1987, broke ground in 1991, and wasn’t completed until 2007. Costs rose from $2.3 billion to $14.8 billion. When the loan is paid off in 2038, the total cost will have been $24 billion. Four workers died during the…”

“ 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. ”

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

“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, they don’t even start building the dam until halfway through the book). The Hoover Dam was an…”

“ 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. ”

“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 find interesting about the book is where it starts: with a chapter on sidewalks. I remember…”

“ 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. ”

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

“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 other resource in that it’s not a storable thing. When you use it, it was generated a fraction of a…”

“ 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. ”

“This book absolutely achieves what it sets out to do. It’s a glossy, illustrated love letter about how skyscrapers are built and managed. If that’s what you want, then this is your book. It’s not very deep, but it doesn’t really try to be. The illustrations are well-done and helpful. There are…”

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

“ 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. ”

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

“ 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. ”

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

“A type of road construction. A definition : to construct or finish (a road) by compacting into a solid mass a layer of small broken stone on a convex well-drained roadbed and using a binder (such as cement or asphalt) for the mass In my reading, it appears that this is the type of road where layers…”

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

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

“It’s a lot. But it gets complicated, because energy exists in two dimensions: As a rate at any particular instant in time (‘megawatt’) As a sustained, aggregated amount delivered over a period of time (‘megawatt hour’) So, ‘a megawatt’ is an amount of power being delivered at a singular moment. If…”

“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 can find of the internet in NYC. It has a directory of manhole covers, for instance, and descriptions…”

“I like the subjects of Rose George’s books. She writes about the background stuff that we don’t think about. This book is about the global shipping trade. She wrote another entire book about going to the bathroom . I think these subjects are interesting. But I don’t love how she writes about them….”

“This was apparently a revolutionary book, back when it was published. It pushed back on the idea that industrial accidents were usually the fault of human error. It advaned the idea that in the world of connected systems, humans simply be expected to understand the ultimate ramifications of…”

“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 back in college in the mid-90s, and never finished it. I promised myself I’d get back to it, and…”

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

“ 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. ”

“ 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). ”

“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 Internet exchange points to undersea cables to data centers. Along the way you work with road crews…”

“ 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 wonderful history of the telegraph which proves that all of the ‘novel’ problems the Internet brought about actually happened 150 years earlier. Standage pays special attention to the societal changes that the telegraph wrought, and the effect it had on the lives of the telegraph operators who…”

“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 us 10 ways to change it, from increasing pedestrian safety, to fixing parking, to making the…”

“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. It’s clearly geared to local politicians and city planners, but I am neither and I loved it. If you…”

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

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

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

“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 a never-ending war with gravity. Along the way, the book looks at some historic structures and why…”

“ 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. ”

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

“ 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. ”