Land
Illegal Lines
In a rather puzzling overreach by the California Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists, they are fining a California man $1000 for... drawing lines on maps.
They're claiming that the resulting images are "unofficial surveys", despite the site he sold them through literally having "THIS IS NOT A LEGAL SURVEY, NOR IS IT INTENDED TO BE OR REPLACE ONE" written at the top. Plus, if drawing lines on maps is illegal, I may suddenly be one of California's Most Wanted. Maybe that's why I moved to Colorado.
There's echoes of the time when the Oregon engineering board sued an electrical engineer saying he couldn't call himself an engineer - a case that, fortunately, the engineer won. Because, you know, he had a degree in electrical engineering and had been doing engineering for decades.
Maybe We Should Build Buildings To Match Their Climates
As the world warms up and climate change occurs, we have to both seek to prevent any further change as well as adapting how we live to the world around us. And, it turns out, living in giant steel and glass boxes and then having an air conditioner humming away to undo the massive greenhouse effect is somewhat less useful than just building the house right in the first place.
This article looks at the particular design of India's lattice buildings - where the lattice does a particularly interesting job of letting natural light in while cutting out a lot of direct sunlight. The older building designs also use the technique seen in many hot countries' traditional buildings of employing the stack effect (or wind suction) to draw cold air in through a building and up and out of the top.
I love seeing buildings like this that work with their climate, rather than one specific design style that works well in temperate regions but not elsewhere.
Mesoamerican Land Reclamation Still Works
The Aztecs were well-known for their engineering, but maybe one of the less famous achievements - but one that still works today - are the chinampas, "island" farms in the lakes around Tenochtitlan (modern-day Mexico City).
Built out of soil piled on reeds, and with retaining walls built from ahuejote (a willow species), they're really not that different from what we do today - albeit without the same need to support large buildings. What's even better is that they're still actively farmed - the lake being right there has a very positive impact on the nutrients and groundwater in the farms.
As the article mentions, they also saw a resurgence during the COVID pandemic - few things are better for avoiding a respiratory virus than giant, open-air farmers' markets on a lake, I imagine. Definitely adding this to the list of things to see when I finally get to Mexico.
Sea
Ah Yes, Train-Boat Collisions, They Happen All The Time
Something you would not think is a common occurrence would be a train colliding with a boat, and you'd be right - they have two very different requirements for the surface they travel on. And yet, on the banks of the Mississippi, we have one - a river barge and a freight train had that most unusual of encounters.
The river barge, to be fair, parked in a location that was too close to the train tracks, such that it jutted out into the load envelope of the train (after all, it's not like the train can easily be in the wrong place), but what is specifically interesting here is the bad UI that led to this - the barge's GPS did have a warning about the location they parked in, but it was tiny and unnoticeable, in a sea of other less important warnings.
Sounds to me like a classic case of "alert fatigue" as well, but either way, the NTSB have another one for their very small file of boat-train collisions. May it be a long time until the next.
Sky
How Possible Are Electric Aircraft Anyway?
Electric aircraft are all over the news as of late, but there's a lot of criticism of the way they're presented - modern aircraft are one of the most efficient users of fossil fuels there is, and surely it's going to be hard to match them with batteries with a much lower energy density?
Well, it turns out, it is. This article examines a few proposed electric aircraft and what their actual range would be in practice, giving the batteries a lot of benefit of the doubt, and unless you're hopping from one city to another one right next door, it doesn't look good. You're definitely not going transoceanic.
That said, it is almost purely a function of energy density, so provided we find more energy-dense batteries - or maybe switch to hydrogen fuel cells (as you can directly turn power into hydrogen on-site at an airport) - it'll become more and more possible.
Silicon
OS/2 Is Somehow Still Going
The New York subway system is the largest and most complex in North America and even does reasonably well on the increasingly-busy world stage. They've always lagged behind a little with technology though - as any visitor in the last two decades would have seen. You turned up to this thriving world city and were presented with the MetroCard, a magnetic swipe card, to go through the turnstiles.
These days, New York is finally heading into the future with the introduction of OMNY, a contactless system based on London's Oyster Card, but no sendoff of the MetroCard system can be complete without an appreciation of the now-ancient computer systems that run it.
OS/2 was, in all regards, a big failure - microkernels never really took off - and yet its one big success was that it was incredibly robust and resilient. As such, it's still going, and presumably will keep going until the last MetroCard swipes through the last turnstile, and finally those old computers get a rest.
Industry
Important Marshmallow VAT News
The UK's VAT laws never cease to amuse - the most notable case is still the decision that Jaffa Cakes are cakes, not biscuits, meaning they were zero-rated for VAT - but this one surely has to come along and be a challenger for that crown.
A recent ruling by the Tribunal has established that while "standard" marshmallows are still confectionery and thus attract a 20% VAT rate, marshmallows "of unusual size" are an ingredient (for s'mores, specifically) and thus are zero-rated for VAT.
Where the line between standard and unusual sizing is will presumably be decided in a future case. As Dan Neidle writes on Twitter, "any sufficiently detailed VAT rule is indistinguishable from satire."
Very, Very Offshore Solar
For a long time, there has been the thought experiment - how much of the Sahara would you need to build solar panels on to power the entire world? Well, the start of that experiment is now, strangely, underway, as a giant undersea power cable from a massive amount of solar panels (and some wind) in Morocco to the UK begins construction.
Or rather, its construction begins construction - they have to build the factory first, and then that factory can build the cable, so it's a while until the thing starts working. It should be enough to power seven million UK homes, though, or in real numbers, 10.5GW of generating capacity plus some battery storage on top.
For reference, the largest power station in the entire UK (Drax) "only" produces up to 4GW of power, so that is a lot of power.
Medicine
Advances In Hard Hats
Sometimes it's the small advances in technology and materials science that are worth celebrating, and that's true here with some advances in the design of hard hats (drawing from similar, recent innovations in sports helmets) that significantly reduces the chance of a concussion.
Of course, it's a brand new tech with a single company making them, so it'll likely be a while until the price comes down and they become more common, but it's still good to see slow but steady advances in PPE. That said, the PPE you're wearing is always better than something magical in the future you're not yet wearing, so... do make sure you use it out there, eh?
Heists
The Theft Of Destiny
British royal ceremony is a very silly thing, and none moreso than the naming and use of the Stone Of Destiny (a.k.a the Stone Of Scone) in royal coronations, as it has been a symbol of Scottish royalty for many centuries.
Like a lot of English erasure of Scotland, though, this Scottish relic was for many years kept permanently in Westminster Abbey, until a rather daring heist by some young students managed to remove the Stone in two pieces and smuggled it up to Scotland, where it was kept hidden for several months as publicity around the Stone heightened, until eventually they released it back.
It returned to London and was present for the coronation of the late Queen Elizabeth II, before finally being moved back to Scotland in 1996 where it now sits permanently - well, apart from a short trip to the upcoming coronation next year.
And Finally
It's A Farm Shop On Wheels
From the wonderful people of Karlsruhe, Germany comes one of the best uses of a tram yet - a mobile farm shop, loaded up with food in the countryside and then stopping around the city as a portable farmer's market.
Is it practical everywhere? No. Do their pictures of the tram have weird, apparently-overlaid font work? Yes. But do I love weird uses of railways? You bet I do.