This does a really good job of explaining the benefits of "stick" construction, even if he does get a little wrapped up in his hamburger analogy. I'm particularly interested in sharing it because of how many people online denigrate wood houses in the US, and I think this will show some of the real advantages of it as a construction choice.

Just find these types of scaled models amazing to see in real life.

And, of course, it's actually being built. https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/civil-engineering-magazine/issues/magazine-issue/article/2023/07/zigzagging-weir-helped-solve-safety-issues-at-2-california-dams

And here are some videos on other physical models like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i70wkxmumAw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtUDGSmPd04

Finally, if you're interested in the mathematics behind how we can do this and make comparable prototypes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3gT-MeJD-U

nah that's totally someone's profile lol

Made this community because I wanted to represent my academic interests and try to grow something. Everyone is welcome regardless of your level of involvement or education, from non-engineers and students, to Professional Engineers and researchers (I'm somewhere in the middle of that spectrum). Hope to see you post!

Surfside sticks in my mind so much because it happened in my first week on the job as an engineer. That was only two years ago, but it really feels like the pandora's box of deferred maintenance is just starting to swing open.

This is one of those instances where I have a lot of cognitive dissonance between my individual feelings, and the desires for ease and expedience when doing projects that are even within sight of a wetland. In my opinion the existing mitigation techniques are laughable and the permitting process is onerous. At the same time, I'd have liked to see even better wetland mitigation or stricter rules from an ecological standpoint and it being the baby thrown out with the bathwater is a massive understatement.

One thing definitely lacking in the article and my brief look on their website is just… wtf even is the binder? Anything to truly replace portland cement will have to be non-proprietary and really well researched if they ever want it to take off.

I guess it does ultimately come to that for the strictest protections, and probably local EPAs are more in tune with the local hydrology so far as making regulations. However, it could raise a big question of "why bother?" if one state has stricter wetlands protections but has major tributaries discharging into the jurisdiction of states that do not have nearly as strong protections and thus have degraded water quality.

Brady does a good job breaking down why RO desalination is energetically and operationally much better than traditional distillation. Only thing I didn't like that much was his discussion of salinity concentrations, as I feel like he built it down by defining what ppt meant relative to percentages, while I think that it being shown to the relative amounts of other dissolved solids like iron and hardness would show that sea water is an order of magnitude more laden with the dissolved solids. To me that is why RO membranes are absolutely miraculous despite the high energy requirements, because they can produce high quality fresh water from differing source water without there being much difference in each treatment process in the end. Running seawater through RO for desalination, versus well water removing hardness and nitrates would mainly differ on the pretreatment to remove suspended solids and then the proportion of reject water to permeate.

Felt like this compliments the Practical Engineering video from yesterday by showing that RO has its own difficulties beyond the cost and energy usage. I've heard about these brine disposal issues, especially for the huge coastal cities. Personally, I am of the mind that municipal water demand, ecology, and fisheries all have higher stakes in coastal water quality than the energy industry (green or not).

Second to that, I don't know much about Hydrogen energy, but I had the understanding that electrolysis of water was net negative energy. I'm not sure if that was already counting RO treatment (figure it is cleaner with DI water), but if it wasn't then that makes it even more of an energy loss. I'm often making the argument that transitional energy, from fossil fuels to renewable, is going to be a mishmash of half-working parts and deviation from the efficiency that we enjoy with a mature fossil fuels industry. I don't think that's an excuse to trip over ourselves and do a lot of the same things that oil companies did (destruction of entire ecosystems, getting in the way of the needs of residents, profiting from the results of public capital investment).

Been using some free time at work to make an inventory of pipeline stream crossings and plan on making it a GIS feature class for regular maintenance. This was inspired by an encased sanitary sewer essentially becoming a low head dam (just eroded, not discharging sewage) in a homeowners back yard and we were unaware until someone called.

It’s mostly just been tracing the features so far, but I’m thinking about where to take it next. Thinking a good direction to go next will be to use the elevation model to try and find manholes in high slope areas and ditches so they can be identified for monitoring for erosion or I&I.

I haven’t read it yet, but the journal article this blurb is about is currently open access. Sharing it because I absolutely love this type of thing. I knew someone in school who was doing similar research with accelerometers on vehicles to try and assess the stiffness of the whole span. I think I sounded weird when I told him this irl, but I literally like to go to sleep thinking about being able to make measurements so indirectly and passively.

oh yeah, I forgot I watched about half of that video last week. He is really thoroughly knowledgeable and I enjoy his videos a lot, but it felt like a bit of a litany of arguments which is why I quit watching. However, the seismic argument is huge to me. Saying 'Masonry houses can kill you here' is a pretty strong argument in my book, especially when dealing with the realities of economics and what's actually affordable/what's cheapest.

Just yesterday I got a dell inspiron for this reason. It’s the “we have a laptop at home” macbook air IMO and I only logged into the OEM windows for the 5 min of checking out what’s new windows 11 before installing my OS of choice.

Birdtray might be what you’re looking for. I’ve only used it on windows, but for me it gets thunderbird out of the way but able to be checked and used immediately.

https://github.com/gyunaev/birdtray

Sure are. I’m amazed how weird the picture ended up looking at that point, but I took another gander since I ended up there on my lunch break again. There are a couple of pieces of lumber run horizontally on the steel beam’s flange and the top chord of the truss is on top of those boards. I think it looks so funky because there are short pieces between each chord right at the very end

Super interesting to watch this unfold and see how they got it back to operation so quickly. At the bottom they have a graphic showing the intent for the next phases to replace the full width span and all the lanes.

We're in a brave new world of information availability in real time, and I think this was great to let the public in and see it all as it happened. There's been a lot of positivity and I think the short time frame and openness of information were key.

An article tooting the horn of the contractors: https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/i-95-construction-crews-get-a-huge-thank-you-party-and-a-reminder-to-return-to-work-at-7-am/ar-AA1d2hhT

The opening was a bit hard to see where they were going, but overall a pretty good video that gives a good history of some difficult road engineering

I haven't heard of that in particular but there have been changes made in my state recently to allow people to get a couple years of their experience for PS and PE at the same time. Additionally, I believe there are some changes coming to allow people who have done surveying work for a significant amount of time to more easily bridge the gap of coursework to get a PS proper. Can't find a source, so I can't confirm the exact details. They had some numbers to back it up that there were significantly more people testing for their PS and it wasn't just the covid backlog.

The PE & PS thing is doubly important here where the County Engineer is required to have both licenses, so I believe its a good thing to allow some of the time to be able to be earned at the same time. Otherwise it is 4 solid years as an engineer and 4 solid years as a surveyor, both separately.

So far as muddying the waters between the duties of a PE and a PS, I don't think that is a good thing for either profession. It sounds like the type of thing you would do if desperate to fill a skill gap without actually training anyone properly. Along with that it will devalue both engineers and surveyors, by making them less specialized and increasing the pool of labor available to whatever tasks are then shared by both licenses.