Just Joshin' #106 (Engineering)
1 Family Photo:
|
The other trip within our trip to Truckee was visiting the Nevada State Railroad Museum in Carson City, Nevada.
Longtime newsletter readers will note visiting train museums is sort of our thing—we've visited train museums in San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria, Virginia City, and Tiradentes to name a few. Our house (and everywhere we stay) becomes train museum, eventually.
Thanks to generous tips from newsletter readers, the Sacramento Railroad Museum and the Altoona Curve are on our shortlist of future train museums to visit.
I look forward to keeping you all updated.
--
The Nevada State Railroad Musuem is a big warehouse building full of restored steam engines and railcars. There's a shop in the back where volunteers rebuild and maintain old engines, and a private ralline circling the property where they run the steam trains on weekends in the summer.
There's a map of the transcontinental railroad painted along the floor of the museum. Every foot represents 10 miles. You can walk on top of it for half a football field from end to end, from San Francisco to Omaha. I've known about the transcontinental railroad since I was a little kid, but walking the map makes you marvel at its scale.
America's first railroads were built in the 1820s. Then someone dreamed up connecting the whole country with 2,000 miles of railroad track. Then others planned and designed the project. Then thousands painstakingly labored to bring it into existence.
The transcontinental railroad took six years to build (1863-1869) at a cost of $120,000,000 (2x the US Federal budget in 1863).
Not to mention how absurdly difficult it was to build train tunnels through granite in the Sierra Nevada mountains before the invention of dynamite (which we learned about at the Truckee Railroad Museum).
Once completed, the time it took to cross the United States was cut from months to less than a week. It was safer, and the cost was cut 10-fold.
Megaprojects like the transcontinental railroad, these feats of engineering, are inspiring. They're a reminder that hard things can be done. That hard things are worth doing. That we shouldn't be afraid of doing things just because they're hard.
1 Dad Joke:
Railroad Engineer
Why did the railroad engineer DJ the wedding?
Because he knew how to lay down some good tracks!
*image by Dad[AI]Base
Highlights:
Engineering Feats
The Grid, Part IV: The Hard and Soft Paths of Energy Strategy by Brian Potter
Modern civilization would be impossible to operate without cheap, widely available electric power. The grid makes modern society possible. But today, the grid faces several challenges that threaten its ability to distribute electric power...
The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat by Josh Dzieza
The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems
If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function.
Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks.
The sheer scale of the work can be thrilling, too. People will sometimes note that these are the largest construction projects humanity has ever built or sum up a decades-long resume by saying they’ve laid enough cable to circle the planet six times.
I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory by Virginia Heffernan
Like a dutiful valet who exists only to make his aristocrat look good, TSMC supplies the brains of various products but never claims credit. The fabs operate offstage and under an invisibility cloak, silently interceding between the flashy product designers and the even flashier makers and marketers. TSMC seems to relish the mystery, but anyone in the business understands that, were TSMC chips to vanish from this earth, every new iPad, iPhone, and Mac would be instantly bricked.
Several people at TSMC told me their work at arguably the most powerful company on the planet is “unsexy.” One told me that girls don’t fall for TSMC engineers, but their mothers do. Invisible as suitors. Indispensable as husbands.
How one stays interested, curious, consumed with an unrelaxed and breathless craving to know: This emerges as one of the central mysteries of the nano-engineering mind. Weaker minds shatter at the first touch of boredom. Distraction. Some in Taiwan call these American minds.
Mechanical Watch by Bartosz Ciechanowski
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard W. Hamming
In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.
In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.
Want to Talk?
Grab some time on my calendar to share a funny story from this week:
Book some time even if you don't know what you want to talk about:
https://calendly.com/iamjoshknox
Until next week,
iamJoshKnox
Thoughts? Feedback?
😊Hit Reply and let me know😊
Josh Knox
Hi! I am Josh Knox. Read more of me here: 👇
1 Family Photo: Mother's Day My aunt hosted a Mother's Day luncheon over the weekend. Between aunts, uncles, cousins, my parents and sister it was also probably the closest thing there will ever be to Newsletter reader meet-and-greet. One reader suggested I use this space to explain more Portuguese words. The kids are growing up bilingual. It might be nice if the rest of the family had extra words to say to them (Hi Uncle Jim). My dad's studied Duolingo everyday since before the kids were...
1 Family Photo: Woodwork Home Depot has Kids Workshops on the first Saturday of each month. While supplies last, each kid gets a kit with instructions to make a box, or a picture frame, or a mini-whiteboard, whatever the project of the month happens to be. First-time kids get an orange apron to wear while they build their kit. The kit includes a little pin representing that month's project. They get to tack the pins onto their aprons. This establishes some seniority—you can tell the...
1 Family Photo: Water Cycle The Discovery is a science museum in Reno. We celebrated Lawrence's birthday with a visit. The museum's biggest exhibit is a model of the Truckee River watershed and the water cycle, complete with "clouds" cut from stacks of pringles-shaped platforms towering 3-stories above the atrium. The clouds create an irregular jungle gym for "climbers of all ages". Lawrence loved the clouds—undeterred by their height—dragging me up and down the tiny crawlspaces they created....