practical engineering

A Tom Scott guest video by Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering on the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. A seemingly minor change to the support design led to catastrophic failure, which is why the case is taught as a lesson to check and double-check everything.

Practical Engineering gives a short introduction to concrete, covering the difference between concrete and cement, the ingredients, and reinforcement. It includes a hydraulic press demonstration of compressive strength.

Practical Engineering explains Mechanically Stabilized Earth, where layers of reinforcement make soil strong enough to hold heavy loads, shown with a sand structure supporting a car. It notes that MSE walls are everywhere in infrastructure.

Practical Engineering summarizes the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway failure, explaining the engineering details behind the incident. It also discusses how operators and regulators failed to keep downstream residents safe.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy explains how medieval engineers designed stone cathedrals using rules of thumb, with no science, mathematics or literacy. He uses it to define the engineering method.

Practical Engineering explains what a 100-year flood actually means, combining statistics, hydrology and how society treats risk. Grady walks through local drainage infrastructure and the caveats in estimating flood probability.

Practical Engineering explains why San Francisco's Millennium Tower is sinking and tilting, covering how geology and foundation design (friction piles in the Colma Formation) affect skyscrapers. It also covers the fix being attempted.

Practical Engineering explains how continuous welded rail copes with thermal expansion by restraining it, using the relationship between temperature, stress and strain. The video is part of a series on railways.

Glenn Vanderburg asks whether software development can be real engineering, surveying other engineering disciplines and decades of programming experience. He envisions what a software engineering worthy of the name might look like.

Glenn Vanderburg argues at the O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference that software development is an engineering discipline, even if immature. He contends the discredited body of knowledge called software engineering has led people to wrongly reject the label.

Practical Engineering explains pumped storage hydropower, which makes up most grid-scale electricity storage. It covers how it works and why it fits only certain geographies.

Practical Engineering compares modern concrete with that of the Roman Empire, covering modern techniques like roller compacted concrete and water-reducing admixtures. It explains the tradeoffs of Roman construction versus reinforced concrete.

Practical Engineering explains how canal locks work, including the water-saving basins of the new Panama Canal locks.

Practical Engineering explains how engineers and agencies put a dollar value on a human life to weigh cost against safety. It covers the legal and regulatory basis for these calculations.

Glenn Vanderburg argues at Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010 that university-style software engineering does not work, and asks what real software engineering would look like. He revisits the waterfall model and what engineering means in other fields.

Chris Domas's DEF CON 23 talk on psychological warfare against reverse engineers. He builds code whose disassembly and control flow graphs mislead, intimidate and demoralize anyone analyzing it.

Musician Thoj performs a live looping session on the Teenage Engineering OP-1 synthesizer, building a deep house track layer by layer.

Hillel Wayne reports on interviews with 17 people who have worked as both software and traditional engineers. He argues the fields are fundamentally the same and have much to learn from each other.

Real Engineering explains the engineering behind the James Webb Space Telescope, including its folding mirror, sunshield, orbit and cooling systems, and why deployment was so difficult.

Michael Steil's 27c3 talk on reverse engineering the MOS 6502 from die shots into a transistor-level simulation, as in the Visual6502 project. It covers going from chip package to a digital model.

Bryan Cantrill's Craft 2019 talk on the ethical dilemmas software engineers face as software eats the world. He explores cases where engineering thinking conflicts with the law or personal morals, including Facebook's news feed experiments.

A short clip demonstrating a phone-based social engineering trick in which a crying baby in the background is used to pressure a customer service rep. It shows how attackers exploit human sympathy rather than technical flaws.

Practical Engineering's explanation of the February 2021 Texas winter storm and the resulting power grid outage. It lays out the facts about ERCOT, the grid's isolation, and how generation across fuel types failed in the cold.

Tom Scott visits a rotating house near San Diego and explains how electricity, gas and water keep working on the rotating part. It includes a 3D render of the utility connection system.

Real Engineering examines whether greening the Sahara could draw down carbon and slow climate change. It concludes that the effort would be enormously costly and that changes in albedo and other effects undercut the climate benefit.

Engineering Explained examines BMW's Hydrogen 7, a V12 that burns liquid hydrogen or gasoline. He covers cryogenic storage at -253C and why the approach is impractical.

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut tours SpaceX's Starbase with Elon Musk as guide. They cover the high bay, grid fins, Raptor V2, the HLS lander and stage separation, and Musk explains his engineering management process.

The introductory lecture of Richard Hamming's capstone course, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. It focuses on style of thinking and on educating rather than training, using technical material only as illustration.

SuperfastMatt looks at how the Tesla Model S retracting door handles were redesigned over time, from many parts to a motor plus sensor, with a focus on engineering and reliability.

Corridor Crew VFX artists react to the visual effects of the 2021 Dune and compare them with David Lynch's 1984 version. They discuss which effects were practical and which were CGI.

Lesson 1 of fast.ai's Practical Deep Learning for Coders, taught by Jeremy Howard. It takes coders from running code in a Jupyter notebook straight into training a real image model.

Greg Wilson surveys what empirical research actually shows about software development, why we believe it, and how to share that knowledge more widely. It covers evidence on practices such as TDD and design patterns.

Kurzgesagt's animated explainer on CRISPR gene editing, covering how the technology works and what it could mean for curing disease, designer babies and aging. It frames genetic engineering as an irreversible change coming to humanity.

Hamish Coleman describes reverse engineering the keyboard controller in a Thinkpad and reflashing it with custom firmware. He covers how Lenovo secures its firmware, and his ongoing work on the protocol between the BIOS and the vendor flash tool.

Stuart Armstrong of the Future of Humanity Institute gives an Oxford physics talk on what exploratory engineering suggests about the Fermi paradox. He argues that von Neumann probes and Dyson spheres are plausibly buildable and asks what traces advanced civilizations would leave.

Alex Ionescu's OffensiveCon 2019 keynote on how reverse engineering is done on Windows without conventional reversing. It covers legal ways to obtain names of variables, exported functions and structures.

The Thought Emporium shows how easily bacteria can be genetically modified to produce fluorescent proteins and even bioluminesce, with techniques doable at home. It links to companion videos on incubators, DNA extraction and gels.

A Kurzgesagt animation on using gene drives to modify mosquitoes against malaria, and whether we should. It explains the mechanism and the ethical trade-offs.

A Rubber Duck Engineering episode on the years before Flutter, covering web projects and three JavaScript frameworks that influenced it, and the early DOM-based, network-loaded Flutter.

A tutorial in the GAS Therapy series showing how to recreate the Teenage Engineering OP-1 and OP-1 Field with free software. It argues you do not need to buy expensive gear to make music.