Something Interesting Thread

In 1970, my family and I were in Germany for vacation. My uncle was working in Karlsruhe at the time. We went to the Ober Salsburg just outside of the town of Berchtesgaden and went to Hitler's tea house, a/k/a the Eagle's Nest. Great View! Coming down, we walked up to the site of Hitler's house which was blown up by the Bavarian Government in 1952. My father, my uncle and I went to the ruins for a look around. While there, both my uncle and father dug up a couple of bricks to take home.

Both my uncle and father have passed the last couple of years, but we still have the bricks. Each were drilled to sit on a pedestal made of chain. There is no identification on then as to what these are. Rarely did anyone ask them why they had a bricks on a pedestal and were rather shocked when they were told the background.

If you visit Germany in the future, it's worth the trip to visit Berchtesgaden.

 

Will do interesting story, surprise they blew up the place but can understand. I inspected a refinery in Texas which had bricks with swastika symbols on them. They were going to demo the stack.

 

Crinkle Crankle Walls

wikipedia | curiousdoodle.com | mymodernmet.com

Aka serpentine or ribbon or sinusoidal walls, they are sturdier than straight walls and use fewer bricks because their curved form provides enough stability so that one layer of bricks can be used. They are very popular in England as garden fences, especially so in Suffolk which has twice as many as the rest of the UK.

Thomas Jefferson incorporated these walls into his design at the University of Virginia, which he founded in 1819. Flanking both sides of its landmark rotunda and extending down the length of the lawn are ten pavilions, each with its own walled garden separated by crinkle crankle walls. Although some claim that Jefferson invented this design, he was merely adapting a well-established English style of construction. A university document in his own hand shows how he calculated the savings and combined aesthetics with utility.

At this point you are no doubt thinking, OK but show me the math bro! Well, John Cook, PhD, submits in his crinkle crankle calculus that “the amount of material used in the wall is proportional to the product of its length and thickness. Suppose the wall is shaped like a sine wave and consider a section of wall 2(pi) long. If the wall is in the shape of a sin, then we need to find the arc length of this curve. This works out to the following integral.”

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Serpentine wall at the University of Virginia campus

 

I don't understand it but I like it.
Definitely interesting

 

Those old brick walls are pretty too

 

Jatayu

wikipedia | thisiscolossal.com

A massive sculpture of a legendary bird has taken shape at Jatayu Earth’s Center in Kerala, India. Based on the epic story of Ramayana, Jatayu is a noble bird of divine origin who lost his wing and fell while fighting to protect a young woman named Sitha.

The bird as recreated in concrete at the Center is 200 feet long, 150 feet wide, and 70 feet tall, with stylized feathers and enormous curled claws. Its prone body is sprawled on a mountaintop with a 65 acre tourist destination campus.

 

Greenhouses of the Almeria Peninsula

behance.net | amusingplanet.com

This region in southern Spain represents the most extensive greenhouse area in the world. It stretches to about 139 square miles (360 sq km). Around 80% of the grown products are exported to northern Europe — a third to Germany, then France, the United Kingdom, and The Netherlands.

The area is known for its sunny but very dry climate, so crops are grown almost exclusively in greenhouses and irrigated artificially. Its productivity still is 30 times higher than average European farmland.

 

Volgograd, Russia
The Motherland Calls, statue on Mamayev Hill, Volgograd, Russia, commemorating the sacrifices of Soviet soldiers in the Battle of Stalingrad (1942–1943). The German 6th Army was surrounded and destroyed by the Russians. German casualties were 147,200 killed and wounded and over 91,000 captured, the latter including Field Marshal Paulus, 24 generals and 2,500 officers of lesser rank. Worst disaster ever for a German Army. Only 5,000 would return to Germany after the war. (This statue is absolutely massive!!)

 

Hovenring

Opened in 2012 in the province of North Brabant in the Netherlands, this suspended cycle path roundabout — technically, a circular cable-stayed bridge — was built to give the large cycling population a safe way to get around motorized traffic.

The name was chosen through a competition held among the population of Eindhoven and Veldhoven. Literally the name means “ring of the Hovens”, referring to Eindhoven, Veldhoven and Meerhoven (the residential area of Eindhoven where the Hovenring is).

 

^ Walter must have done some ****

 

Talk about an electric personality...

 

That last one put up a good fight.

 

Got this from one of my students in the Boston Area. Came out of a discussion on Network Addressing and the issues that arise with different devices having the same address.

There are at least four "Washington Streets" in Boston. "There are two significant and two minor streets in Boston with the same name. Addresses at these streets need to be distinguished by neighborhood names or ZIP codes."

I've spent a lot of time in Boston and never knew that.

 

The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. For many years it was sealed off since it was in the Russian zone of the city. I had been there many times but could only look from the wall on the West Berlin Side. The day after the wall was officially taken down, I went to the site and walked through it as had many of my German relatives had done.

 

They kinda look like carrots. But, I wouldn't pull one up.

 

Ever tried to follow directions in Atlanta. Every street, it seems, is named Peachtree...

 

Caproni Ca.60 Transaero

wikipedia | italianways.com

On March 4, 1921, the Caproni Ca.60 Transaereo – also known as Capronissimo and Noviplano (nine-wing) Transaereo – tried to take off from Lake Maggiore with its nine, 30-meter-long wings. The aircraft crashed on the water shortly after takeoff and broke up on impact.

Engineer Gianni Caproni’s gigantic hydroplane had eight 400-HP engines, 750 square meters of wings, and weighed over 33,000 lbs (15,000 kilos). It was designed to carry one hundred people over the Atlantic. The project was eventually abandoned after the crash.

From the Italian Ways website:

In the early 1950s, Gianni Caproni, founder of the aviation museum that bears his name, now in Trento, met the President of the United States Harry Truman. As soon as he entered the Oval Office he widened his eyes in disbelief, as he saw a picture of himself on the wall, next to a portrait of Wilbur Wright. “I found them here”, Truman explained. “President Roosevelt kept them up for the entire war, and I didn’t remove them. You are the founding fathers of aviation, and the United States salute you for it.”



The Transaereo on Lake Maggiore








Scale model at the Volandia museum — you can see the open cockpit for pilots above the main cabin


The wreckage is towed to shore after the March 4 crash

 

Dion,

Exactly how many Aggie engineers worked on this project?

 

Give aggy some credit will you?

It took only one aggy engineer to f the project up that badly.

 

Weird Google thing
Type in any 3 or 4-digit number, followed by "new cases"
Eg, 683 new cases

 

This was not an aggy project. This project apparently failed due to engineering flaws. An aggy project would have just run out of airspace after winning the water portion of the event.

 

Let's be clear, after the Allen Stadium debacle their engineers are mostly to blame for everything they build.

 

Vol,

Just a bit of history. Lockwood, Andrews, & Newnam designed most of the major stadiums and/or their expansions (Memorial Stadium in 1970/71, Florida Field, Neyland (named after a kid from Greenville), Owen Field, Bryant-Denny, Jourdan Hare), and LAN is mostly Aggies, when the Aggies decided to pass on LAN and go with a firm from Kansas City made up of K-State grads.

 

Driver 8 that is weird. Tried it. Covid overload.

 

Interesting fact about Texas geography -
- If you are in Beaumont, you are closer to the Atlantic Ocean (Jacksonville, FL) than to El Paso, Texas. You will travel in four other states - Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. From Beaumont to El Paso is all Texas.
- If you are in El Paso, you are closer to the Pacific Ocean (San Diego, CA) than to Beaumont, Texas. You will travel through three other states - New Mexico, Arizona, and California. From El Paso to Beaumont is all Texas.

We live in a large state!