Honey, I Finished The Internet

9 Replies to “Honey, I Finished The Internet”

1. The important question is does it identify as being structurally sound? That is all that matters.

2. “Are you good at math?”

   “Do you get every question right 100% of the time?”

3. Just because the building is going to fall down is no reason to find fault with the designers, engineers, or other folks associated with the building. After all, who could have foreseen something like incompetent design or failure to not consider local conditions?

4. Engineer here (although not a structural engineer, I still know enough).

   If I lived in that thing, I would move out and never return. If I owned a part of it, I would sell for whatever I could get. If I lived next to it, I would move and never return. I would not even walk near it.

   It seems at major risk to fall without any seismic event. If a sesmic event were to occur, collapse seems highly probable.

5. Upright buildings are cis-heteronormative, and a sign of the toxic masculine aspects of patriarchy. They display a colonialist settler bias and white privilege. I think, my usual internet blog source for these things has been off line for about a year.

   It’s all in my book, The 15 second city. A big hit in Turkey and Syria.

6. This is the sort of stuff I absolutely enjoy. I cannot be everywhere or know everything, but someone somewhere brought this to Kate’s attention. Fascinating. I see the problem, mechanically, as the crumbling of the concrete around the upper circumferance of the plate, rather than the plate itself.

   The meta-problem is that it is already built and paid for, and now they have to live with it. The engineers have come up with a solution that, fingers crossed, will last beyond their own lifetimes. A lifetime guarantee, as it were.

   The chief engineer, AKA the man with his signature on all the documents, he who would go to jail, appeared to be in his ’60s. So a lifetime of 30 years would be OK with him.

7. In an earthquake zone no less. What will be the peak load be during an earthquake? I would calculate that max load and then make everything twice as strong. It’s not like you have to carry those threaded rods around and replacing them would be a total pain.

   It would be possible to place a tube under the plate between the ends of the thread rods. Connect to two vertical tubes ending above the concrete. Dropping a borescope down one vertical tube and a light down the other would allow engineers to monitor the plate for bending or shearing.

   The SF City engineering ‘review’ reminds me of the Boeing 737 Max fiasco. The FAA does not have enough engineers so they delegated design approval to Boeing and then signed off on it. Then Boeing decided to go cheap and put two AOA sensors instead of three with a comparator (if A and B agree but C doesn’t C is kicked out of the system and flagged as unserviceable). Then to keep costs low Boeing decided that no simulator time was needed for the pilots to practice responding to a runaway trim condition.

   1. “What will be the peak load be during an earthquake?
      Alternatively, what is the peak load during a severe wind storm ?
      There’s a lot of building exposed to wind, and I believe that his earlier
      video on this building mentioned that glass had not been installed on
      upper stories to mitigate wind forces, until a fix was instituted.

8. Started to watch. What’s with the continued repetition of the two ‘experts’ at the beginning? Trying to heighten the drama or something??

   So I just turned it off. I hate these video links – give me text that I can read quickly, and stop subjecting me to these people who love the sound of their own voices and take forever to get to a point.