Norway is in the planning stages on a tunnel for ships to bypass having to sail around the Stad peninsula, an infamously dangerous spot with high winds, rough waters, and foul weather. It’s a 2km pathway under the base of the peninsula. Based on rough map calculation, it’ll save ferries and other ships over 30 miles of rough sailing into the open Atlantic.
When you look at the fjord-laden coastline of Norway — a thousand miles of sliced up mountains and deep chasms — it’s sort of surprising that this hasn’t been attempted before.
An interesting visual guide to fictional megastructures, like Larry Niven’s Ringworld, Arcologies, and Dyson Spheres:
Megastructures: The Visual Encyclopedia is part science book, part inspirational artbook. It contains everything from orbiting space habitats to solar system spanning stellar engineering projects. Each of the 40 structures in the encyclopedia includes a scientific explanation, followed by paintings and diagrams that bring the concept to life.
With Shape Up, the process of “shaping” new product takes investment to really understand and communicate an idea. But in the process, this precedes the “pitch”, the step where the team reviews a shaped concept and buys into working on it:
According to the book, shapers prepare pitches, pitches go to the betting table, and then the business decides at the last moment which pitches to “bet on.” Teams who follow this to the letter encounter a problem: how do you justify spending the time to shape something when you don’t know if the business will...
Brian Potter wonders why work as taxing and seemingly-mechanically simple as brick masonry is difficult to automate:
Masonry seemed like the perfect candidate for mechanization, but a hundred years of limited success suggests there’s some aspect to it that prevents a machine from easily doing it. This makes it an interesting case study, as it helps define exactly where mechanization becomes difficult - what makes laying a brick so different than, say, hammering a nail, such that the latter is almost completely mechanized and the former...
A technical piece describing the goals for Facebook’s rewrite of the Messenger app. Interesting to see them avoiding their own React Native for this, and doing things in native iOS/Android.
A humorous post, but has a point. There’s pressure to add new tools that don’t do much but add moving parts and complexity. There’s nothing wrong with Kubernetes, but there’s a place for it (and your small team probably doesn’t need it).
We’ve been doing some thinking on our team about how to systematically address (and repay) technical debt. With the web of interconnected dependencies and micro packages that exists now through tools like npm and yarn, no single person can track all the versions and relationships between modules. This post proposes a “Dependency Drift” metric to quantify how far out of date a codebase is on the latest updates to its dependencies:
Bloomberg has been publishing this video series on future technologies called “Giant Leap.” It’s well-done and a nice use of YouTube as a medium.
This one explores a number of new companies doing R&D in microgravity manufacturing — from biological organ “printing” to creation of high-quality fiber optic materials. There are still some challenges ahead to unlock growth of space as a manufacturing environment, but it feels like we’re on the cusp of a new platform for industrial growth in the near future.
This is a fascinating article from a 2004 issue of Engineering & Science that investigates the “Tunnel of Samos”, constructed on the eponymous Greek island 2500+ years ago.
One of the greatest engineering achievements of ancient times is a water tunnel, 1,036 meters (4,000 feet) long, excavated through a mountain on the Greek island of Samos in the sixth century B.C. It was dug through solid limestone by two separate teams advancing in a straight line from both ends, using only picks, hammers, and chisels. This was a prodigious feat of manual labor. The...
✦