Made By Monkeys

Sometimes you come across such an awesome, stunning, example of good design, you just can't help raving about it -- as engineer Alden Harsch does here in waxing enthusiastic about his Model 1B14 toaster. And here's a bit of trivia - it held the title of the world's most popular toaster for more than a decade in the 1950s. It's not hard to figure out why.

"My parents purchased this Toastmaster toaster around 60 years ago. It was passed on to me when I went to college, and I use it every day. I haven't even had to so much as readjust the "brownness" control - it works so perfectly. My only complaint is that I have to flatten my bagels before toasting them!"

Sigh...if only modern appliances were built like this oil tanker.

Over the past two days everyone has been talking about the Interstate freeway bridge collapse in my hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

While the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will be investigating this disaster and it’s expected that we won't see the investigation concluded for at least a year, it's interesting to speculate already on what factors contributed to the bridge’s collapse.

In a number of reports over the past decade, including a March 2001 study for the Minnesota Department of Transportation conducted by the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota, questions have been raised about the structural integrity of the bridge.

In light of these reports, what we can expect to see in the coming days is any number of claims that the bridge obviously should have been rebuilt. But any experienced civil engineer knows that's not the way things work, as eloquently described in this editorial in the NYT by Samuel Schwartz, who was the NYC Department of Transportation's chief engineer from 1986 to 1990.

In an era of tightened budgets and lack of political will for dealing with the prosaic elements of day to day life in modern technological cultures, infrastructure projects rarely get funded except in the face of a crisis like this. And so engineers have to look for other approaches.

As we come up on the six year anniversary of the World Trade Center attack of September 11, 2001, it reminded me of an article published last year in Design News based on my interview with a University of California professor of Civil Engineering. After conducting extensive simulation studies of the collapse, he concluded that the buildings could have survived, had one bad design decision not led to another:

“The simulation model shows the plane slicing right through the outer walls of the building like it was a flimsy egg crate,”Professor Abolhassen Astareh-Asi explained. “Because of their unique design, the buildings essentially had no robustness to withstand the impact of a medium-sized plane flying into them at 800 miles per hour.”

When it comes to lingerie, my requirements are pretty straightforward: comfort and appearance. No small engineering feat, given that fabric per se is an unwieldy and challenging structural material. The fact that it is weak in compression is particularly problematic in a bra, whose main job is to lift and support a distributed, cantilevered load. Brush up on the physics of bras here.

The NYT reports today that designers were at fault in the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in my hometown of Minneapolis, MN on August 1, 2007:

"The designers had specified a metal plate that was too thin to serve as a junction of several girders, investigators say."

In the UK, objections to wind farms are often made on the grounds of "aestheticism", the twisting blades spoiling otherwise perfect countryside views. Hmmm. IMHO this is just NIMBY-ism in another guise...

However, wind turbines can be far from perfect, as this video darkly and dramatically demonstrates.

Thanks to the website GroovyGreen.com for this one: Exploding Wind Turbine Is Worthy Of Slow Motion Replay

The website writes:

"We're thinking that wind turbine manufacturers are less than thrilled with the above video circulating online. Apparently, this all went down in Denmark when a safety breaking system failed in strong winds. Reports say that two engineers were working on top of the turbine to repair the breaking system, but managed to get down before all hell broke loose. A 19 meter piece of the blade was thrown 20 metres away. Smaller pieces were sent more than 500 meters away."