Too Much Information: Living the Civil Engineering Life (Asce Press) 9780784413944, 9780784479032, 9780784479049, 0784413940

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Too Much Information Living the Civil Engineering Life Brian Brenner, P.E.

Too Much Information

Also by Brian Brenner Don’t Throw This Away: The Civil Engineering Life Brenner reports on what it’s like to be a civil engineer in the 21st century: the mindset, the practice, the profession. Equally skilled as a writer and an engineer, Brenner ranges from serious discussions of suburban sprawl, technology run amok, and bridge aesthetics to comical accounts of packrat habits, quacking moments, and engineering fashion. This entertaining collection of essays displays Brenner’s distinctive combination of quirky humor and engineering “right stuff.” (ASCE Press 2007) Bridginess: More of the Civil Engineering Life Brenner turns his pen and signature wit to the subjects of urban sprawl, airport infrastructure planning, and, of course, bridges. After reading this collection of essays, you will know bridges from more angles than a through truss. You will think twice before placing a salad on the roof of a car. And you will know just what makes a truly great college response letter. With his charming and fluid style, Brenner makes civil engineering funny, interesting, and, at times, even glamorous. (ASCE Press 2010)

Too Much Information Living the Civil Engineering Life Brian Brenner, P.E. Illustrations edited by Ryan Marshall, E.I.T. Foreword by Stephen J. Ressler, Ph.D., P.E.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brenner, Brian R. Too much information : living the civil engineering life / Brian Brenner, P.E. ; illustrations edited by Ryan Marshall, E.I.T. pages cm ISBN 978-0-7844-1394-4 (print : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7844-7903-2 (ebook) — ISBN 9780-7844-7904-9 (epub) 1. Brenner, Brian R. 2. Civil engineers—United States—Biography. 3. Civil engineering—Anecdotes. 4. United States—Social life and customs—Anecdotes. I. Title. II. Title: Living the civil engineering life. TA140.B7284A3 2015 624.092—dc23 [B] 2015011096 Published by American Society of Civil Engineers 1801 Alexander Bell Drive Reston, Virginia 20191-4382 www.asce.org/bookstore | ascelibrary.org Any statements expressed in these materials are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the views of ASCE, which takes no responsibility for any statement made herein. No reference made in this publication to any specific method, product, process, or service constitutes or implies an endorsement, recommendation, or warranty thereof by ASCE. The materials are for general information only and do not represent a standard of ASCE, nor are they intended as a reference in purchase specifications, contracts, regulations, statutes, or any other legal document. ASCE makes no representation or warranty of any kind, whether express or implied, concerning the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or utility of any information, apparatus, product, or process discussed in this publication and assumes no liability therefor. The information contained in these materials should not be used without first securing competent advice with respect to its suitability for any general or specific application. Anyone utilizing such information assumes all liability arising from such use, including but not limited to infringement of any patent or patents. ASCE and American Society of Civil Engineers—Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Photocopies and permissions. Permission to photocopy or reproduce material from ASCE publications can be requested by sending an e-mail to [email protected] or by locating a title in ASCE’s Civil Engineering Database (http://cedb.asce.org) or ASCE Library (http://ascelibrary.org) and using the “Permissions” link. Errata: Errata, if any, can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1061/9780784413944. Copyright © 2015 by the American Society of Civil Engineers. All Rights Reserved. ISBN 978-0-7844-1394-4 (print) ISBN 978-0-7844-7903-2 (PDF) ISBN 978-0-7844-7904-9 (EPUB) Manufactured in the United States of America.

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Cover credit: Illustration by Ryan Marshall, E.I.T.

For Lauren, Looking forward to the next 30 years of excellent bridge dates

Contents Foreword, by Stephen Ressler ix Roll the Maps 1 Googling Yourself 11 The Trouble with Invasive Species and Tribbles 16 My New Snow Blower 19 Disco Bridge 22 Friended by a Bridge 25 When I Was on Jeopardy 29 Too Much Information 34 Mathcad and S-E-X 48 Inappropriate Variables 50 How to Buy Presents, Engineer’s Edition 53 The Amazing Bridge Race, by Ryan Marshall 57 Gas Mileage 68 Columbo as a Bridge Engineer 72 Rhode Island 77 The Engineer’s Check 81 Pomelos 85 It’s the End of the World as We Know It 88 No Borders 92 Zip It 96 A Bridge Offer You Can’t Refuse 101

September 12 105 Cape in a Day 110 Cross-Country 116 Who’s on First: Bridge Edition 132 Holy Spanning Function, Batman! 134 Engineering Valentine’s Day 137 You Do It, and Then It’s Done 140 School’s Out 143 Raising the Bridge 146 The Short List 150 Return to Dulles 153 Riverside 156 The Red and the Blue 159 Aging and Infrastructure 162 Number One, Baby! 164 The Bridges of Dallas 168 A Human Bridge at the Super Bowl 172 You Need Brain Surgery 175 Proposing on a Bridge 178 Slope Stability of Pretzel Bags 184 Horizontal versus Vertical Construction 186 Giant Pumpkin 192 When You Don’t Know Enough to Google 195 Acknowledgments 201 Publishing Credits 204 About the Author 205

Foreword Somehow, in this little book of essays, Brian Brenner has managed to

provide something for everyone. For the traveler, there’s a treatise on the joys of old-fashioned maps—largely forgotten in the era of the global positioning system. For the historically minded, Brian reflects on Concord’s Old North Bridge and other unremarkable structures that, quite by accident, became the backdrop for conflict, tumult, and controversy. Gardening enthusiasts will learn about growing giant pumpkins. If you’re nostalgic for old-fashioned amusement parks, there’s an essay for you, too. No doubt, the behavioral scientist will appreciate Brian’s hysterical reflection on the psychological effects of receiving praise from one’s automobile. And for residents of northern climates, a cautionary tale on the perils of engaging the “hyperdrive” setting on that new snow blower. There is much here to delight the engineer as well. Indeed, broad as his appeal might be, Brian never lets us forget that he is a bridge engineer, nor does he understate his love for his chosen profession. Even in his nonengineering essays, we receive delightful tidbits about historically significant spans and unexpected insights into the engineering profession from an insider’s perspective. Perhaps Brian’s greatest contribution in writing this book is to defy the stereotype of the engineer as uninteresting, humorless, and uncommunicative. In doing so, he honors us all. In short, Too Much Information is not too much information at all. —Stephen Ressler, P.E., Ph.D.

Roll the Maps The other night, I was peacefully reading in the bedroom. Lauren walked

in and laughed. “Why are you laughing?” I asked indignantly. She pointed to what I was reading. It wasn’t a book. It was a map. I’ve always enjoyed reading maps, and not just to find out where I’m going. I can open a map and stare at it for hours. I imagine the places on the map and the people who live there. I wonder what the roads look like, and the mountains, and the rivers and lakes. I am fortunate to have a natural sense of direction, and my enjoyment of maps reinforces this. I look at maps and then understand how a place is laid out, with what going where. Then when I finally get to visit the place, I know exactly where I am. Many, many years ago, gas stations used to hand out free maps. This was a complimentary service, like free air for your tires or squeegees for your windshield. Growing up, my friends and I used to raid the gas stations of all their maps. We were juvenile delinquents in a very limited, low-rebellion, nerdy, not-particularly-overly-disturbing kind of way. After we absconded with the maps, I had a stash providing hours of reading material. There was a lot to see. There was New England in all its exotic, remote glory, with towns named Berlin and Florida and Norway. According to the maps, a strange foreign country resided just to the north of the United States. The country had many similarities and could have been just another state, although a very big state. But this strange country was very different, with French-speaking residents and vast expanses of wilderness. At some point even farther north, the maps just stopped. This was the edge of civilization—no people but only ice and polar bears. Living the Civil Engineering Life

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Eventually, I decided that actual maps weren’t good enough, so as a boy I made my own. I drew imaginary landscapes with cities, peninsulas, forests, capital cities, and rivers. Then after drawing the maps, I imagined what it must be like to visit the places. They didn’t actually exist, but it seemed like they should. I could picture them. Fortunately, no one learned about my youthful map delinquency phase (until now), and I grew up to be a responsible adult. Lauren and I were thinking about a Canadian vacation. Using a legitimate approach, I got some maps of the Canadian Maritime provinces. Reading these maps brought me back to my childhood. I imagined travel to the edge of civilization, which was somewhere in that strange northern country of Canada. Previously, I had never been north of Montreal or east of Bar Harbor. According to the maps, there were additional places to the north and east of these cities that I had never seen. But they were there. They were on the maps. There was Quebec, with its vast river and interesting bridges. There was Nova Scotia, with the relatively large city of Halifax and interesting harbor suspension bridges. The province of New Brunswick seemed to be like Maine, but it had all sorts of quirks like the world’s biggest tides and a magnetic hill. On the magnetic hill, you took your foot off the brakes and the car went uphill, defying the laws of gravity. East of New Brunswick, across a large, interesting bridge, was beautiful Prince Edward Island. The island was out in the ocean, but not really—it extended offshore into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, which on the map was either a gulf or a very wide river. I wondered what it would be like driving north of Montreal along the banks of the Saint Lawrence River. As you were driving, at what point did that wide river no longer qualify as a river but become a gulf? It was probably a subtle thing. You would be driving along and could see the far shore, but then you couldn’t. Once the shore receded, it would be like driving next to the sea. The Saint Lawrence is in the province of French Quebec, and all of the maps were mostly in French. So you didn’t even drive next to a river, but next to a “fleuve.” I found something about driving next to a “fleuve” very appealing, almost in the same way that I like the word “abutment.” You could imagine that a bubbling river mimicked the pleasing sound of the word “fleuve,” in the same way that a “croissant” is imagined to be a flaky pastry, or a “pamplemousse” is imagined to be a grapefruit.

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On my virtual map journey, I imagined driving northeast from Montreal along the banks of the fleuve. At the halfway point between Montreal and Quebec was another city that I knew nothing about— Trois Rivières. I wondered why it was named “Trois Rivières” and not “Trois Fleuves.” At this location along the Saint Lawrence was the only fixed river crossing between Montreal and Quebec City. In the distant past, before the Internet and indoor plumbing, my imagination would have stopped at this point. But armed by modern technology, I was able to Google information about the bridge. It was named the Laviolette Bridge, and it turned out to be a graceful, overdeck arch truss, with nicely proportioned approach spans. This 1960s design suffered from a serious construction accident in which a caisson flooded and 12 constructors perished. The accident evoked memories of the great historic tragedy of the Quebec Bridge disaster farther downstream (Figure 1). My map journey took me farther north, to Quebec City with its fortified walls and the giant cantilever bridge. The wide river narrows at this point, and it was an ideal location for a bridge crossing. The Quebec Bridge is iconic not just because it is still the world’s longest cantilever truss span. The bridge suffered from two tragic accidents during construction. Study of the events leading to the tragedies is recommended for all bridge engineers.

Figure 1. Laviolette Bridge, Quebec Source: Photo by John White, (Feb. 27, 2015)

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Maritime Canada is graced with many excellent bridges. To the east, Nova Scotia has two of Canada’s biggest suspension bridges crossing the harbor in Halifax. The province consists of a land mass that projects out into the Atlantic Ocean. With all of that water surrounding everything, there were lots of spanning opportunities for good bridges. The northern section of the province, Cape Breton, is not part of the mainland, but is an island separated by the Strait of Canso. My map showed one fixed crossing point, Highway 104 at Port Hastings. I suspected that the highway crossed the strait on a bridge, and what a monumental bridge it must be! The strait was like a fjord, a mile wide and deep. The structure would be more than a mile long, crossing the icy, windswept strait. Heroic engineering must have been called upon to design and build such a structure. I was right about the heroic engineering part, but interestingly there was no monumental bridge. The crossing is a rock causeway. It was constructed starting in 1952. Earlier plans considered cantilever truss bridges like the Quebec Bridge, but these never came to be because of the World Wars. After World War II, the North American economy ramped up, and the two ferries could no longer handle the traffic. The solution was to fill the strait with a mound of boulders. The causeway includes both a railroad track and a two-lane highway. Like an iceberg, only the top of the rock pile extends above water. Below is a large mountain of rocks. The artificial land connection is not complete. At the north end is a short swing span bridge for boats. So Cape Breton Island officially remains an island (Figure 2). I enjoyed visiting Nova Scotia on paper. But of all the maritime Canadian places, Newfoundland seemed the most interesting. It was a

Figure 2. Canso Causeway Source: Photo by Swampfoot, (Feb. 27, 2015)

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faraway place that you couldn’t drive to without going by ferry. Newfoundland (to be technically correct, the province of “Newfoundland and Labrador”—Newfoundland is an island, and Labrador is part of the mainland northeast of Quebec) seemed to be mostly populated by seals and shorebirds. Maybe three or four people lived there, but that was it. But the map suggested that the eastern edge of the island was the site of a modestly big city, Saint John’s. The second largest city, Corner Brook, wasn’t really a city but more like a large town. The map even indicated some limited-access highways on this sparsely populated island. From an infrastructure perspective, we should note that the height of civilization can be measured by the number of freeway-to-freeway interchanges. In a junction of limited-access highways, cars and trucks travel from one to the other with no traffic lights or other impedances. In California, Texas, and elsewhere, urban freeway-to-freeway interchanges are vast swooping affairs of multilevel viaducts and acres of paved highways and structures. Many of these mega-interchanges are so large that there is no room left for houses or buildings (Figure 3).

Figure 3. High Five Interchange, where U.S. Highway 75 intersects with Interstate 635 I, Dallas Source: Photo by David Herrera, (Feb. 27, 2015)

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So in urban Texas, all that remains is highway and lost cattle. Most interchanges, however, are simple cloverleafs. The greater the number of such interchanges, the more advanced the civilization. Incredibly enough, distant, underpopulated Newfoundland had its own freeway-to-freeway interchange, at the junctions of Highways 1 and 2. With help from Google, I could inspect the site. I zoomed on an aerial view of the interchange, and there it was, not a full multilevel facility, but a simple but graceful cloverleaf. The view didn’t show many cars; that made sense because seals don’t drive. But it was definitely a freeway-to-freeway interchange. West of Saint John’s, the remote, seal-swept island seemed to expand to a landscape of rolling majestic mountains, dense forests, and fierce fjords. Most of the features had names that were pedestrian or vaguely French-Canadian. But one place didn’t appear to have a FrenchCanadian name at all. It was perhaps the most inappropriately named town in North America, if not the world. Looking at the map, I did a double and then a triple take. How was such a town name possible? The poor people! Oh, the humanity! A short digression: For English speakers, apparently there are many inappropriately named settlements in North America and throughout the world. For example, one can visit and snigger in a Pennsylvania town named Intercourse. But that was nothing in comparison to this

Figure 4. A seal Source: Photograph by Amanda Boyd, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, (Feb. 27, 2015)

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town in Newfoundland. Its name, which starts with “D,” is five letters long, and rhymes with “Bildo,” is just too embarrassing and inappropriate to be printed, and I will not do so here. One can barely imagine what growing up in this vibrant Newfoundland town must be like. It must be unusually stressful. One would suspect that the residents struggle with their hometown identity. Consider this scenario: A young man from this unnamed town is making his way in the world. He travels to the big city to find his fortune, perhaps to Corner Brook, or Saint John’s, or even the big Canadian Maritime apple itself, Halifax. He arrives in his best (and only) suit for the interview, carefully arriving early so that he has time to brush off the moose hairs and make himself presentable. An attendant greets the young man: “Made it in time for your interview, eh?” The young man responds, shyly, “Yes indeed, eh?” The attendant says, “Very well then. Let’s complete some paperwork before we proceed to the corner office for your interview.” (Reference to the corner office in Corner Brook is simplified by use of the following expression: “Corner2 Office Brook”.) The attendant scans the young man’s application. “It looks like everything is in order. However, one entry is missing. What town are you from?” The young man looks on tight lipped, with a blank stare. He responds, “I am from Dlsiuerlibug.” “I’m sorry,” says the attendant, “I didn’t get that. Can you please repeat it, eh?” “Certainly,” says the young man, discretely moving the fingers of his left hand back in front of his lips so that his voice again will be garbled. “I am from Dlsiuerlibug.” With the relentless march of technology has come a disturbing new development: GPS. Now all cars and cell phones have GPS devices, and no one needs maps. GPS provides step-by-step readouts of directions from one place to another. With reasonable care in following the directions, it is hard to get lost. Unfortunately, the GPS units are a bit bossy and anal, wanting you to go a particular way without being very flexible about variations. If you go off the path, the computer will wait a second or two as the satellite relay catches up and the machine recognizes your transgression. Then the GPS voice indicates that it is “recalculating,” and it provides new Living the Civil Engineering Life

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instructions. Unfortunately, the word “recalculating” is typically spurted by the computer in a condescending, nasal tone, as if the machine had done all of this heavy thinking to plot out the route and you were too much of a boob to follow such simple, childish directions. The programming has improved with time, and I wondered if the machines had egos. The other day, Lauren had both her car GPS and a separate Garmin device active at the same time. But neither one provided information about traffic. Her smart phone did, so she turned it on with Mapquest as well. For part of her drive, all three machines were simultaneously blurting out directions. One could only imagine what that sounded like: Car GPS: “Lauren, turn RIGHT in 500 yards.” Garmin: “You will turn right in 400 yards.” Smart Phone Mapquest: “What foolish directions. Do not turn right. Go straight in 300 yards.” Car GPS: “No, Lauren, turn RIGHT in 300 yards.” Garmin: “Are you really listening to those idiots?” Smart Phone Mapquest: “Recalculating. Recalculating.” Garmin (starting to lose its battery charge): “My mind is going Dave. I can feel it. I can feel it. Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do….” And so on. With the step by step of GPS and the general overall demise of things printed on paper, maps are starting to become scarce and a thing of the past. Soon, you will only be able to find paper maps in my childhood imagination drawer. And these won’t be maps of actual places. To me, this is a sad development. GPS spoon-feeds disconnected pieces of information, and you lose a fuller geographic understanding of a place that you would otherwise get by reading real maps. In Lauren’s and my favorite movie, Twister (well, really my favorite movie, which Lauren watches because I like it), there is a scene where the tornado-chasing team of scientists is camped out in a field with cows. Distant thunderstorms roil the Oklahoma horizon, a portent of bigger and badder things to come. Two of the storm chasers are discussing their maps. One complains that the other is folding the maps incorrectly and wrecking them. Annoyed, he says, “Look, all I’m saying is: Don’t fold the maps.”

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The second storm chaser says, “I didn’t fold the maps.” The first storm chaser responds, “Yeah, well Kansas is a mess; there’s a big crease right through Wichita. ROLL the maps.” The movie wasn’t filmed all that long ago. But back then there was no GPS, and the tornado chasers had to rely on maps. Now that technology has advanced beyond the printed medium, I’m starting to miss the good old days. On my next ride, hopefully alongside a fleuve, I’ll have one of my ratty old maps unfolded in the passenger’s seat. Garmin will exclaim, “Turn right in 400 yards.” I’ll respond, “No, I don’t think so,” and I’ll toss Garmin out the window. Garmin will land on the pavement with a thud, and in her last breath, she will recalculate. The Story of Dlsiuerlibug, Newfoundland, and Labrador There is no definitive answer to how Dlsiuerlibug, Newfoundland, received its name. (In keeping with the family standards of this publication, note that “Dlsiuerlibug” is not the actual name of the subject town.) The area was named by European explorers in the 1700s. Some report that “Dlsiuerlibug” was chosen by a Spanish sailor, but there are no records, at least none that anyone is reporting. It is possible that the name predates the current, slang definition. It doesn’t seem likely that the town knowingly received its name based on the slang definition.

Figure 5. Official sign of Dlsiuer­ libug, Newfoundland, and Labrador Source: Photo by J. C. Murphy, (Feb. 27, 2015)

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So, the moniker, Dlsiuerlibug, became more notorious with time, as opposed to a deliberate ploy to select a notorious name. The town of Dlsiuerlibug is a small fishing village with about 1,200 residents. It is a very scenic place located on a beautiful inlet, Dlsiuer­ libug Arm, which is just east of Spread Eagle Bay. (I am not making any of this up. It is on the map. Look at the map.) Dlsiuerlibug Arm has a shape that looks a bit like the slang definition of “dlsiuerlibug.” Apparently, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador has many towns with unusual names. Embarrassed residents of several of these towns voted to change the names. For example, “Silly Cove” was renamed “Winterton,” and “Tickle Harbour” was renamed “Bellevue.” That is really too bad, because who would not want to visit Silly Cove or Tickle Harbour? In 1985, a “Dlsiuerlibug” town resident campaigned to change the town’s name. But he failed to get the required 100 signatures on his petition (seals were not included), and thus the matter never came to a vote. Since then, residents of the beautiful village have grown to accept and even appreciate its provocative name. Tourism has been augmented by the steady stream of visitors who want to take a picture by the road signs to “Dlsiuerlibug” and then stop by to see what the fuss is all about. Along with “F$#%%$!,” Austria, and “A##S,” France, “Dlsiuerlibug” proudly remains for English speakers one of the world’s most inappropriately named places.

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Googling Yourself Maybe it was a long week. Your significant other was out of town or

shopping or cutting the grass. You were a little bit tired. And there it was, beckoning. You turned down the lights a bit, poured a little Chablis in the goblet, put on some soft music to set the mood. You whipped it out (the laptop) and typed it in. You Googled yourself! I was curious about the phenomenon of Googling yourself (i.e., typing your name in the search engine Google). To find out more, I Googled “Googling yourself.” Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Egosurfing) provides a long list of synonyms: 1. egosurfing; 2. vanity searching; 3. egosearching; 4. egoGoogling; 5. autoGoogling; 6. self-Googling; 7. master-Googling, and, of course; 8. Googlebating.

According to the article, everyone does it, or at least 47% of all Americans. Googling yourself may affect your eyesight. This is because if you do it too much, the strain of looking at the screen can hurt your eyes. So, clearly, self-Googling should be done in moderation. Some

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think that if you Google yourself, hair will grow on your knuckles, but this seems unlikely. Not everyone can self-Google, at least, not to any satisfying conclusion. I have a colleague named John Smith (his actual name). When I Googled “John Smith,” 2 million or so references appeared. None of them referred to the John Smith that I know. If you have a distinct, special name, Googling it may return no references at all. Or the Google algorithm will somehow return something vaguely related but not really related at all. I tried Googling the name “Bob Bobablinzki.” I’m not sure if there even is someone named Bob Bobablinzki, but it seems like there should be. Google did not accept the name, but insisted that I was really interested in “Bob Babinski,” a well-known journalist in Montreal. For the best self-Google, it helps to have a distinct name, not too common but not too bizarre. Fortunately, my name is reasonably distinct, but not so unusual and not so common as “Bob Jones.” It seems that there are a bunch of Brian Brenners around the United States. The top Brian Brenner, according to Google, is not an actual person. He is a character on an HBO TV series, The Newsroom. Mr. Brenner was having an affair with MacKenzie McHale, but he dumped her. To get revenge, MacKenzie started dating Will McAvoy, and then she had another affair with Brian Brenner. Then they all broke up. One of the most popular Brian Brenners is a performer from Ohio. He is an Elvis impersonator. Mr. Brenner has a website that describes his services (http://brianbrenner.com/): Influenced by the Las Vegas Legends, Brian Brenner is a true showman. With style and talent reminiscent of the great Vegas headliners, Brian brings to the stage versatility, excitement, and a dash of glitter. This Ohio native is a Vegas singer who also does a little Wayne Newton. In addition, he sings tributes to Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Celine Dion (Celine Dion?). Mr. Brenner has toured all over the United States, but his recent focus seems to be in Ohio. Interestingly enough, Mr. Brenner and I have never been in the same room at the same time. Another prominent Brian Brenner lives in North Carolina. Mr. Brenner is a real estate agent with some listings of beautiful properties in

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the town of Cary, near Raleigh. I would consider buying a house listed by Mr. Brenner. He has a trustworthy name. Some other Brian Brenners include a tattoo artist, a sports coach, and an orthopedic surgeon in California. I was pleased to learn that when I selected the Google Image option, the pictures of Brian Brenners were good looking, a lot more handsome than me. So the Internet Brian Brenners were raising the bar in that category. I wonder if there is a “fourth wall” in self-Googling, as there is on stage. The fourth wall refers to an imaginary gap between the actors and the audience. When you’re watching a play, it is understood that the actors and audience are separate. The performers present a drama before your eyes with all sorts of intimate detail and conversation. But the mirage is that members of the audience are not actually there, although of course they are. Some daring playwrights violate this illusion by dragging the audience into the show. This is the premise at Italian Wedding dinner theater shows, where you are invited to be part of a nutty family for an evening. Therefore, in respect for the fourth wall, one should always selfGoogle in private. But I thought that it would be interesting to break the wall and contact my namesakes. So I e-mailed Brian Brenner, an undergraduate student in Florida. I found Mr. Brenner’s contact information on a website for a program called “HEROES.” Here is our e-mail conversation: Brian Brenner (me): I am a bridge engineer named “Brian Brenner,” working north of Boston. I also teach at Tufts University, and I write engineering essays (I am pretty busy). I’m working on a new collection of essays. One is entitled “Googling Yourself.” It’s sort of self-explanatory. As I was doing research, I encountered some interesting Brian Brenners across the US, including an Elvis impersonator in Ohio. I saw your name and thought I would contact you. Some questions: What is “HEROES”? Brian Brenner (the student): HEROES (Health and Education through Research, Outreach, Empowerment, and Service) is a club at the University of Florida that acts as a liaison between Living the Civil Engineering Life

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various organizations in the Gainesville area that try to help with various health disparities in our area. We also directly volunteer with many of these organizations getting our members involved in things like educating young people on proper dietary plans, how to exercise, and how to just be a kid. Brian Brenner (me): What are you planning to do with your degree—grad school upcoming? Brian Brenner (the student): I have plans on attending medical school in the future or pursuing a graduate degree in some form of molecular biology as I am interested in cancer research. Brian Brenner (me): Even though you are not an engineering student, do you still appreciate the Sunshine Skyway? Brian Brenner (the student): I do appreciate the Sunshine Skyway it makes getting from St. Pete to Bradenton much easier and it gives a pretty cool view of Tampa Bay. (Not bad fishing either.) From my brief interview, student Brian Brenner seemed like a nice guy, smart and with a future. Googling myself got me thinking about who the real Brian Brenner is. Are there other Brian Brenners so that there can be multiple versions of Brian Brenner? One morning while riding my exercise bike, I watched an episode of the old, cheesy Stargate SG-1 TV series. In this episode, Teal’c, who is an alien assisting the earthlings, starts to hallucinate that he is living a different life. In this alternate life, Teal’c is a human fireman, not an alien. He starts to get confused about reality—is the hallucination real and reality a hallucination? Following up on this theme, I wonder: Who is the real Brian Brenner? Am I a bridge engineer from Massachusetts, married with two kids? Or maybe I’m really a Las Vegas–style singer specializing in Elvis impersonations, with occasional flourishes of Wayne Newton and Celine Dion? Maybe the Las Vegas singer is reality, and the bridge engineer is hallucination. Maybe that’s what Google is trying to tell me. What about the other 300 or so Brian Brenners? What if the scope of 14

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this discussion was expanded to include “Bryan Brenners” in addition to “Brian Brenners”? You see, Google suggests that when searching for “Brian Brenner,” perhaps I should look for “Bryan Brenner” as well. What if all of reality was a mote of dust on the tip of a pin in some alternate universe? Also, if a bridge is built in the forest and no one is there to see it, does it still cross the river? The advent of the Internet and Google has made the world a lot smaller, like that mote of dust. In seconds, I can virtually meet my doppelgangers from across the world, colleagues whom I probably never would have had contact with or even known about. It seems that there are a bunch of Brian Brenners, but as far as I can tell, I’m the only engineer. So I’m still unique in that way. According to the web descriptions, the Brian Brenners are, for the most part, nice guys who have made modest but valuable contributions to society. This is good to know.

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The Trouble with Invasive Species and Tribbles My house is situated high up on a hill. In late June, I sit on my lawn chair

in the front yard and look out over the neighborhood. My neighbors, who are diligent, can be seen struggling with their lawns. They are applying fertilizer and pesticides, and they are mowing and watering. If they are more environmentally focused, the fertilizer is natural instead of synthetic. In other words, they are spreading quantities of animal manure over their plants. This natural fertilizer often has a zesty smell, which wafts over my front yard paradise. Sometimes the combination of the zesty aroma added to the peer pressure rousts me from my lawn chair to attend to chores in the yard. Truthfully, reading on the grass is a better activity than cutting it. But after a while, you want to be able to see the bunnies walking on your lawn and not just the tips of their furry ears that poke above the tall, uncut grass. My diligent neighbors try their best. But with all of that scurrying, no matter how hard they try, their lush green lawns are all interrupted by offensive blossoms: crabgrass, dandelions, and for the really unlucky, poison ivy. The good plants, such as grass, are all hard to grow and fussy. The weeds require no care at all and just grow by themselves, with or without manure. Why? On my design-build job, we had an environmental review meeting. One of the topics was a plan for dealing with invasive species. This was a discussion about requirements for limiting and controlling the spread of different types of flora, especially plants not native to the area. Listening to the discussion, I thought that invasive species are a lot like life in general—things that you want are hard to get, but things that you don’t want pop up anyway. This tendency doesn’t just apply to

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plants. You may gorge all you want on brussels sprouts. But if you eat more than a few spoonfuls of Häagen Dazs, you will become obese and diabetic. How was it determined that brussels sprouts are good and Häagen Dazs is bad? Instead, wouldn’t it make more sense if everyone got fat from brussels sprouts? If that doesn’t work (and it doesn’t), another approach would be to redefine what’s desirable and what isn’t. If we decided that dandelions and crabgrass are desirable on our lawns and reclassify regular grass as weeds, then we would be all set. No more manure or pesticides in the spring—just let that baby rip! After the meeting, I thought about the ultimate invasive species, and at the same time I received a little lesson about overall culture on a design-build project. In the original Star Trek TV series, there was an episode that took place on a distant space station. The station was at the border between the United Federation of Planets (the good guys) and the evil Klingon Empire. This original series episode was broadcast during the second season. As we all know, during the show’s first season, competition between the Federation and the Klingons was limited and defined by a space treaty enforced by an alien super race. At that time, the Klingons did not have the skull protrusions and distortions that appeared in subsequent Star Trek TV series. When questioned, Worf did not provide a suitable explanation for this peculiar, historic change. He grunted to let us know that it was a sensitive topic not to be discussed in public. But I digress. The Klingons and the Federation were competing to claim Sherman’s Planet. In accordance with the treaty, if the Federation could demonstrate a superior use for this planet, they would win the right to claim it. To do so, they planned to farm the planet using quadrotriticale, an advanced form of wheat. Peaceful farming with grain was thought to be superior to evil domination by the Klingons. While all this was happening, a peddler on the space station presented Lieutenant Uhura with a “tribble,” a furry little creature that made a pleasant purring sound. Lieutenant Uhura was entranced by the tribble. She convinced the peddler to let her have one as a pet, and she beamed back to the Enterprise. Sadly, like many invasive species, the tribble had an unfortunate trait that detracted from its overall desirability. Tribbles apparently were incredibly procreative, much worse than bunnies. It wasn’t like you

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could grow your lawn to hide them, either. Within a few short hours, a single tribble had multiplied so much that the spaceship was overrun with its progeny. Tribbles were everywhere. Even worse, the tribble horde found its way to the Enterprise’s food supply. At this point, Captain Kirk deduced that the tribbles may have been able to get at the precious store of quadrotriticale. Sure enough, when the grain storehouse door was opened, it was empty except for a flood of furry tribbles that rained down on the distraught captain. With the supply of quadrotriticale grain eaten by the voracious tribbles, all seemed lost. The Federation had no way to farm Sherman’s Planet, and the evil Klingons soon would claim ownership. But, surprisingly, Dr. McCoy noticed that many of the tribbles in the grain storehouse had died. It turned out that the Klingons had poisoned the grain! Once the plot was revealed, the Klingons were kicked off the space station and the Federation successfully claimed Sherman’s Planet. So I guess my mind wandered a little bit after the meeting. But I was proud that I had come up with such a clever analogy to illustrate the concept of invasive species. During the “post meeting,” that period after the actual meeting when everyone still meets, I wandered over to my contractor partners to share this excellent insight. I described the meeting topic and how the discussion of invasive species was just like that episode in Star Trek (second season). My colleagues all had blank looks on their faces. “At the meeting, it was like they were describing tribbles,” I said with some urgency. “It was like the invasive plants were tribbles overrunning the space station. You know, tribbles.” “What is a tribble?” the project manager, Rob, asked. Then he offered additional, more colorful language to expand on his question. My analogy, which was clearly obvious, didn’t work so well in this case. Therein lies the cultural difference. On traditional design-bid-build jobs, the engineering team largely works with engineers. Working with the contractor doesn’t start until after the job is bid, and then the relationships and project approach are much different. On a design-build project, engineers and constructors team and work together right from the start. But it turns out that whereas close to 100% of engineers have watched Star Trek and appreciate all the details and references, at the contractor level, the percentage is a little lower. There are other distinctions between design-build and design-bidbuild projects. 18

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My New Snow Blower In New England, life revolves around the seasons. In this ongoing annual

revolution, there is a month called “August.” June is nice, July spectacular. But during both months, residents are haunted by thoughts of what came before—the long, hard, cold, harsh months of bitter existential survival. But in August, all is forgiven and forgotten. The winter has long past. August is the paradise month, a month of easy living, a month of peace. The days are warm and sunny. The traffic is light. A pleasant breeze ruffles the lush green trees. The fat squirrels, gorged from eating too many nuts, bask contentedly on the front lawn without bothering to apply lotion with sun protection factor. But paradise is deceptive. Every year, it seems, August comes to an end. Then a cold wind whips down from northern Quebec. The leaves burst into color and explode. The sky darkens, and a nasty gray storm churns up the Atlantic and pummels the shivering residents. In August, New Englanders start to believe in the concept of paradise. Once again, they are forsaken. Many years ago, we bought our house in August. That was a mistake. The purchase date masked a flaw that should have been obvious, but we didn’t catch it until it was too late. Our house is attractively set atop a hill. Unfortunately, to get to the house, you have to climb a steep, treacherous driveway. The driveway is so steep and fierce that one actually passes through different climate zones to get to it: tropical rain forest at the bottom, tundra at the top. Ascending the driveway is not an issue in August. In January, it’s another story.

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I decided that shoveling snow is good exercise, so over the years I’ve been shoveling by hand. In my research for this essay, I was surprised to find someone else who shared this approach: Up until that moment, I had only disdain for those mechanical menaces. They were for the weak, the pampered. No, I preferred the exercise of shoveling—the peace after a storm, the winter quiet interrupted only by the manly scrape of a shovel on concrete. Sure, it took longer. It required physical effort. But so what. I liked it, I told myself. It brought me closer to nature, closer to the elemental Viking quality of life in the Great Northeast. According to experts in the field of psychology, this is what is called a massive rationalization. In other words, complete bear scat. (James Preller ) To keep the driveway clear, I’ve gained some expertise in weather forecasting and Boston snowstorms. For example, most storms have a brief warm period right at the end before the northwest wind blows and Canada visits. During this period, whenever it is, snow must be removed. Otherwise, my steep driveway could remain ice covered until June, and the family would starve. Over the years, my snow-shoveling plan worked reasonably well. But then we were clobbered by a series of way above average snowfalls. Trying to shovel 24 inches of snow at a sharp angle, in the cold and dark, with howling winds was turning out to be a problem. To address the impending driveway calamity, I purchased a snow blower. Because I’m an engineer, everyone assumes that I’m good with gadgets. But the sad truth is that I’m not, and a snow blower is a really big gadget. Not only that, but Lauren insisted that I get a deluxe snow blower with extra attachments. The one we purchased has tracks like a tank, and it features many different settings. My snow blower can be started by rip cord or electric charge. To get it going, you have to choke it (not physically choke it, but dial the engine to “choke”) and move certain buttons to certain positions. It took me a while to get the hang of 20

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this. For the first big snowstorm, I couldn’t start the snow blower for 15 minutes. There was a TV commercial the other day about an iPad app that starts your car. A person typed on her iPad in Minnesota, and the car started in New Jersey. I think I would like that app, but unfortunately, even with deluxe snow blowers, it’s not available yet. Shortly after my new snow blower arrived, the forecast was not pretty: 24 to 36 inches of heavy, wet snow with blizzard-like winds. It snowed all night, and sadly the snow brought down trees and small jetliners. All over New England, roofs were failing because of the weight of snow. Eventually the snow stopped, and it was time to clear the driveway. Gamely I figured out how to get the machine started, and I powered up. It seemed that starting the snow blower wasn’t the only new skill I needed to learn. Snow blowing requires a different approach than shoveling does. My steep driveway runs parallel to my neighbor’s. I couldn’t quite get the hang of the snow chute at first, so I was blowing snow onto his driveway. This is not a neighborly thing to do, and he was standing there as I did it. For a few minutes we traded snow back and forth as he cleared his snow back onto my driveway. It was entertaining but not productive. One of the knobs on my control panel was “hyperdrive.” At least, I think that’s what it was called. I dialed hyperdrive, angled the chute slightly, and watched my powerful snow blower shoot a plume of snow that leaped over my neighbor’s driveway and landed on the driveway two houses down. Quickly I readjusted the chute upward. Now the snow shot high into the sky in a beautiful frozen geyser. The force was so powerful that particles reached escape velocity, resulting in a faint ring around the Earth. Fortunately, the winter eventually came to an end. The snow melted and leaves grew on the trees. Perhaps when you read this, it will be January and maybe the heart of a new long, white winter. But for now, I am enjoying the warm season. It’s August, and winter will never return. No snow, the blower is safely stored in the garage, and the only thing to consider outside is the grass. During the warm season, it’s time to deal with the warm season gadgets. Maybe I’ll get a new lawn mower, with elaborate attachments. I’ll blow the clippings onto the lawn next door, and on a sunny, warm afternoon, my neighbor and I will get into a grass clipping fight. Living the Civil Engineering Life

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Disco Bridge QJB wrote a rap song named “Bridges Got Swag.” The first verse goes like

this:

Bridges got swag. Bridges got swag. Hard in the paint and I’m dunking and they mad. Man, they wanna be like me, QJB. Bridges got swag, that’s how its gone be. () I think this song is about playing basketball and not about bridges. But I agree that bridges have swag. I’m not even sure what that means, but it sounds good. Bridges and music have a long and involved relationship, if you stretch the definition of “relationship” and treat the word “long” in its relative sense. Back in the disco era, circa the 1970s, the Brooklyn and Verrazano Bridges made prominent appearances in the movie Saturday Night Fever. It was a type of “good cop–bad cop” plot setup, except with bridges. The Brooklyn Bridge was the good bridge, representing hope of escape to Manhattan from dreary Brooklyn. If things didn’t work out, the Verrazano Bridge, which was the bad bridge, was available to jump off of. Overall, this treatment was simplistic. Not all bridges are completely good or completely bad. Like people, bridges also have shades of gray. In the 1970s, engineers still used slide rules and dressed poorly (more poorly than today). After completing their manual calculations, they went to the disco to blow off steam, where poorly dressed people were accepted and even appreciated. During this era, Alicia Bridges

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was an important artist. She was not an actual bridge but wrote and performed disco songs. Ms. Bridges wrote the famous song “I Love the Nightlife.” It is a standard, mindless dance song with a thumping beat. Interestingly enough, this song has a relationship of sorts with structural dynamics. It is possible to match the music’s thumping beat with the period of vibration on the Tacoma Narrows collapse video (if you slow down the song or speed up the video). According to Wikipedia, Ms. Bridges is not known for much more than her hit song. Unfortunately, Ms. Bridges is not a structural engineer. She is, however, a vegetarian and a strong supporter of animal rights issues. Which brings us to a paper, “Simulation of Cable-Stayed Bridges Using Disco” (Huang et al. 1994). The article was written during the period when desktop computers were beginning to be widely used in infrastructure design. At this time, there was no wireless and Facebook hadn’t yet been invented. The article describes an application of a construction simulation model, Dynamic Interface Simulation of Construction Operations (DISCO), for placement of concrete during cable-stayed bridge construction. The Pasco–Kennewick Bridge in Washington state, one of the first U.S. cable-stayed bridges, served as an example (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Pasco–Kennewick Bridge (foreground), also called the Ed Hendler Bridge Source: National Park Service Historic American Engineering Record, (Feb. 27, 2015)

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In addition to DISCO, the article refers to another great acronym, CYCLONE. What the initials stand for is not defined, but apparently CYCLONE was a type of modeling methodology. In the 1990s, personal computers (PCs) were increasingly powerful, and they were starting to replace mainframes and minicomputers. So reference is made to running the applications on “MicroCYCLONE,” in other words, applications geared toward PCs. I wished that the authors included a discussion of a DISCO MicroCYCLONE, but I was disappointed. It would have been like a small disco inferno. Alicia Bridges could have performed it. The article is a scholarly treatment of an early-1990s graphical automation effort. Decades later, this approach seems a little bit quaint. In the paper, great reverence goes into descriptions of processes that for us are now automatic and part of the background. It’s a serious paper for its time, but I was really hoping that the article would be about bridge modeling using actual disco, not the acronym version. In the article I wanted to read, the authors would have developed a musical lab where models of cable-stayed bridges were tested for dynamic acoustic response. That loud, thumping beat could induce resonance and might turn out to be a less expensive way to evaluate stability than wind tunnel modeling. Also, by testing for disco music, you could get a feel for which bridges were most musically responsive, and which were wallflowers. (An artist, Jodi Rivers, has actually done something like this: http://www.singingbridges.net/documentation/index .html). I suppose that by the 1980s, bridges would have been no longer responsive to disco at all, having moved on to New Wave. During that later period, a favorite band of many bridges was the Cars. The title of the article proves that you can publish a paper about almost anything. Or it proves that you can create an acronym for almost anything. Or it proves that you can Google two disparate topics and come up with a long list of references about how they are related. And that’s the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it. References Huang, R.-Y., Grigoriadis, A., and Halpin, D. (1994). “Simulation of cable-stayed bridges using disco.” Proc. 1994 Winter Simulation Conf. Winter Simulation Conference, Georgia, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, New York. 24

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Friended by a Bridge In the past, there was only one category of friend. But by the 21st cen-

tury, there were two categories: “actual” friends and “virtual” friends. Actual friends are living, breathing human beings. They can call you on your iPhone and meet at Starbucks. Virtual friends are mostly friends who are found online. They may be living and breathing, but not necessarily so. Perhaps this categorization of friendship is oversimplified and maybe even far-fetched. But Hollywood has started to make movies about people falling in love with their smart phones. Also, there are stories about forming deep relationships with online poseurs. I think an entire TV show on HBO focused on this. An online friendship becomes troublesome only when an attempt is made to change categories from virtual to actual. In that case, the real version may turn out to be a lot different than what was depicted online. For example, the real person may not be 21 years old with a full head of hair and an active practice in brain surgery. One may evaluate the quality of “friends” by the parameter “popularity.” In the past, “popularity” could be measured based on quantity and quality of actual friends. Way back when, before the Internet, it was not impossible to have virtual friends. (In other words, it was possible to have virtual friends.) People could correspond by snail mail and thus form virtual friendships without actually meeting. But the technology of the day was slower and did not support many relationships above and beyond actual friends. To measure “popularity,” one could consider the number and quality of actual friends. It would not be enough to just evaluate the number of actual friends. Some people who seem to

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be popular have dozens of actual friends. But these friendships may be shallow and inconsequential. Therefore, it could be concluded that an individual with dozens of weak friendships was not, in fact, “popular.” On the other hand, an individual may have a few very close friendships. This lucky person could count on a few close people to watch his or her back and even to pay the bill at Starbucks. In evaluation of popularity, it may be concluded that quality is important as well as quantity. Fast-forward to our current era, the age of too much information, and we now avail ourselves of virtual friendships. At first, there were several social networking programs like MySpace and others. But the social online media have converged on Facebook. The developers of Facebook were Harvard nerds who came up with the idea in their dorm rooms. The simple concept was for a website that could electronically duplicate social networking. Their website would create a virtual world in which college students could interact. All of the intricate social behaviors of students could play out on the website but freed of the physical and time limitations of actual meetings. The student developers initially were motivated by finding better ways to meet girls. Becoming multibillionaires happened later. Their website, named “Thefacebook,” was an instant success. Within days of its release at Harvard, the majority of the students had signed up and prepared their own pages. From that point on, the site experienced exponential growth. The site was launched for access at one college after another, and at each one it was an instant hit. In the early days of Facebook, membership was provided exclusively to the college communities. You could join for free, but you had to have a college e-mail address. The site was developed for students, but that didn’t stop professors from joining as well. Because I had a Tufts e-mail address, I signed up. I wasn’t looking to meet girls. Instead, my plan was to snoop on my students and prepare PowerPoint presentations for class using photos from their pages. Other than my name and a picture, I didn’t post much information about myself. I didn’t list my likes or dislikes or whom I wanted to meet. At this point, I wasn’t networking using Facebook. Even if I wanted to, I didn’t have any adult friends to connect with on the site. Eventually, membership in the Facebook club was broadened to include everyone. At that point, the site’s exponential growth increased 26

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exponentially. Facebook was now out to conquer the online world. Soon, many of my adult friends became members, and they started to “friend” me online. Of course, we were friends already in real life, but this was friendship proposed on the website. We would be electronically linked, with special privileges like being able to see each other’s wall and all sorts of other intimate electronic secrets, not that I had any. After a while, the adults started to get into it. Just as with kids, there was a certain social competitiveness about the number of friends you accumulated on your site. College and grade school kids had hundreds and even thousands of Facebook friends, but for adults, topping a hundred meant that you were wildly popular. I didn’t keep track of how many friends my friends had, but if I did, I would comment that I had more friends than most of my friends. In fact, I had way, way more friends. Way more. This meant either that I was very popular and cool, or that I was an asocial nerd limited to bragging about my virtual social success. At about the time I made the transition to an actual, social Facebook user, I was friended by a bridge. One day as I was reading my wall and liking posts from (human) friends, I received an invitation for friendship from the Capilano Suspension Bridge in British Columbia. The Capilano Suspension Bridge is a Canadian tourist attraction near Vancouver. It is a daring pedestrian rope bridge suspended over a high gorge. For visitors to Vancouver, it is someplace to go. For our honeymoon, Lauren and I spent a few days in Vancouver, and because it was a prominent bridge, of course we visited (Figure 1). Bridges are great, and I was pleased to become friends with the Capilano Suspension Bridge. But I was a little bit confused by the request. Although bridges are excellent, they are not alive, so it was not clear how the bridge friended me, or why she even wanted to. But I accepted the invitation, and the bridge entered my Facebook social network. Over time, we got to know each other, at least virtually. The bridge has a fairly robust network of acquaintances and activities, especially considering that she is inanimate (well, she sways in the wind, but still, she’s not sentient). I could see from our friendship that Capilano, or Cappy, as I like to call her, lived a charmed, exciting life, hanging as she did in that daring position over the gorge in British Columbia. Cappy is quite the party bridge. She is a swinger who is always on the lookout for fun and a good time. Living the Civil Engineering Life

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Figure 1. Capilano Suspension Bridge Source: Photo by netsnake, (Feb. 27, 2015)

With the world coming to Vancouver for the Winter Olympics in February 2010, Cappy apparently was attracting a lot of attention. After one’s fill of skiing and ice shuffleboard, visiting a nice bridge turned out to be a good way to round out the trip. Cappy was greeted by hordes of new visitors, and not just online guests but actual live human beings. It must have been exciting to meet all of those new people. However, Cappy is not alive and probably did not feel excitement. I was pleased to learn that on Facebook, bridges are like people. So after being friended by the Capilano Suspension Bridge, I decided to take the bull by the horns and invite other bridges for friendship. To date, I have friended the Golden Gate Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The Sydney Harbor Bridge has not accepted my friendship yet; she is truly playing hard to get. But I hope that some day she will enter the orbit of my bridge friends as well. In addition to having great new bridge colleagues, my overall friend total has increased, and I have become even more popular than before. Not that I’m keeping count.

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When I Was on Jeopardy This is Jeopardy! Here are today’s contestants:

[Contestants walk one by one into studio.] First, let’s meet Kyle, a brain surgeon and classical stage performer from Chicago, Illinois. [Applause] Next, here is Charise, a poet from Berkeley, California. [Applause] Finally, meet Brian, a bridge engineer from Boston, Massachusetts. [Applause, to an extent] And now here is your host, Alex Trebek! Alex walks to his podium. He says, “Welcome, contestants. Welcome, viewers. We have a really exciting show today with terrific participants. Let’s meet today’s contestants. Hello, Kyle.” “Hello, Alex,” Kyle says. “Kyle, you have quite an interesting background. I understand that you specialize in an unusual type of brain surgery. That must be quite difficult to do.” Kyle says, “Well, Alex, thanks, but truthfully it’s not that hard. Brain surgery is not rocket science. Anyone can become a brain surgeon with enough work, years of training, innate intelligence, and perseverance.” “I see,” Alex says. “That is quite fascinating. Tell us about your work on stage.” “I am lucky to work with a troupe of Shakespearean performers. We’ve been presenting works of Shakespeare in a simulation of the original Globe Theater north of Chicago.”

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“That’s amazing. You are quite talented and well rounded. Good luck, Kyle.” [Applause] “Now let’s meet Charise. Charise, you have quite an educational background. I understand that you were a triple major in college. That is very impressive. It’s hard to have enough time for one major. What can you tell us about that?” “Yes, Alex,” says Charise, “I majored in English poetry, ancient Roman history, and psychology.” “What a diverse field of study. That is amazing! You should be well prepared for the categories we typically have on Jeopardy,” Alex says. “Good luck on today’s show.” [Applause] “Now let’s meet our final contestant, Brian, a structural engineer from Boston, Massachusetts. Brian, you’ve also shared with us an interesting story. I understand that you used to take your wife on bridge dates. What, exactly, is a ‘bridge date’?” “Well, Alex,” I say, “When I first started dating my future wife, Lauren, I would take her to see bridges that I helped design.” Alex says, “How unusual. That’s not a typical date. She must have been very impressed.” “I’m not sure she was impressed at first. I think she expected to go out to dinner at a nice restaurant and not walk around in the mud up abutment slopes. But after a while, she grew to appreciate the design layouts and detailing of the bridges.” “I see,” Alex says. “Where do you go on dates today?” I respond: “I think today Lauren prefers to go out to a nice restaurant.” [Nervous laughter] Alex chuckles. “Okay, contestants, now it’s time to play Jeopardy. In a moment, I will reveal the six categories on the board. These categories have been randomly selected and have been chosen utterly and completely by chance. Remember that when you provide an answer, it must be in the form of a question.” [Excited applause. Camera pans to reveal categories on the Jeopardy game board.] “Here are our six categories.” 30

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Kyle rings his buzzer. “Yes, Kyle,” says Alex. Kyle says, “CPM, does that stand for cardiopulmonary method?” “No,” says Alex, “It stands for ‘Critical Path Method,’ a technique frequently used in scheduling of engineering projects.” Kyle rings his buzzer. “Yes, Kyle,” says Alex. “Alex, these categories do not seem fair.” “I’m so sorry, Kyle. I didn’t understand your question.” Kyle rings his buzzer again. “Yes, Kyle,” says Alex. “What is, ‘These categories don’t seem fair’?” “How so, Kyle?” asks Alex. Kyle rings his buzzer. “What is, ‘Because the categories are all based on engineering topics’?” Alex responds, “Well, Kyle, as you know, the categories were selected completely at random. After decades of episodes of Jeopardy, with categories such as Elizabethan drama, generals in the Civil War, and overall subjects that only liberal arts majors could master, would it not be possible for us to have engineering questions as well, if only for once?”

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Kyle says, “Yes, I suppose that it is possible.” “Very well then,” says Alex. “Backstage, we drew lots to decide who would select first. Brian, please choose the first category.” “Alex,” I say, “I hardly know where to begin. How about ‘Reinforced Concrete’ for 200?” [Camera pans to the game board, where the first answer is revealed.] After several intense minutes of play, both the Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy rounds are complete. Alex reviews the scores: “At the conclusion of Double Jeopardy, Charise has minus 3,200. Kyle has minus 6,000. Brian has 117,400.* Brian, I believe your score is an all-time record. You are very knowledgeable about today’s randomly selected topics.” “Thank you, Alex,” I say. “You know, it has been a real honor for me to appear on Jeopardy. I am so fortunate that the categories were somewhat familiar to me. Usually the categories are subjects like ‘Ancient Greek Mythology’ and ‘Phonetic Haiku.’ It’s nice to have some concrete questions for a change.” “Brian, I know what you mean,” Alex agrees. “Now let’s prepare for Final Jeopardy. Contestants, in a moment, I’ll show you the final answer. Although in this case, because both Kyle and Charise are embarrassingly deep in the negative column, there’s no point in playing. But let’s do it anyway, just for fun. You’ll have 30 seconds to write your response. Please be sure it’s in the form of a question.” [Camera pans to the game board.] “And now, here is today’s Final Jeopardy category: ‘Suspended Spans.’ Contestants, good luck!”

* A technical reviewer of this manuscript cautioned the author to verify that it was, in fact, possible to achieve a score of 117,400. Here are some calculations: Assume that the contestant “Brian” answers every question correctly. Assume that “Brian” answers all three Daily Doubles, waging total earnings and thus doubling his score. Assume that Daily Doubles are responded to at the end of both rounds, to achieve maximum doubling of earnings. Furthermore, assume that Daily Doubles are placed on the game board in the lowest scoring questions (one Daily Double for the first round, and two Daily Doubles for Double Jeopardy, the second round). With these assumptions, the highest score that is mathematically possible before Final Jeopardy is 221,600. Therefore, a score of 117,400 is conservative.

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Author’s Note This essay is not a completely original idea. There was an episode of the TV show Cheers where the mailman, Cliff, is on Jeopardy and all the categories are about collecting the mail or going to a bar (you can see it on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=botdmsQilnU). But I think my version is the first to be about structural engineers (for what it’s worth).

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Too Much Information Part I One day in the near future, maybe even this year, I would like to receive a message declaring that there is no more new information. Someone in charge of new information will have performed a study and determined that the current amount of information is good enough. No more would be needed. Like a declaration of the end of history in the 1990s (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man), this will be the end of new information. To declare the end of new information is no small task. The supporting study would be important. Therefore, it would be a thick study contained in numerous, voluminous volumes and filed away someplace (both electronic and hardcopy) for convenient reference. Nowadays there are about 3,000 different ways to deliver a message declaring the end of new information. It could be delivered via e-mail, voicemail, fax (does that still exist?), snail mail, Twitter, Facebook, Linked-in, YouTube, and so on. Because delivery of the message using 3,000 different formats is, in itself, additional information, I would like delivery in only one format. Let’s go with snail mail. It will be delivered by my kindly old postman, maybe on a warm, sunny day in early June. My kindly old postman will be on the edge of retirement, perhaps before the post office, itself, retires. Based on the magnitude and significance of this message, he will not just drop it in the mailbox along with the L.L. Bean catalogs, invitations for multiple credit cards, and paper bills. He will walk up my steep driveway and ring the doorbell.

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“Kindly old postman,” I announce. “Welcome.” I’ll invite him inside, and we’ll share some milk and warm chocolate chip cookies on the porch and ponder the announcement that there is no new information. But sadly, when the big day arrived, the postman did not ring my doorbell. Instead of receiving an announcement that there is no new information, I received a catalog inviting me to attend the latest online webinars. The cover of the catalog pleaded an anxious message: There is new stuff to learn; the knowledge train is leaving the station, and you are not on it! Learn it now! Learn it now! The catalog was 40 pages long, and it even offered a convenient website to check out the many sessions whose listings couldn’t fit in the printed catalog. On that long, comprehensive, and somewhat desperate list was the topic “Design of Stiffened Slabs on Grade on Shrink-Swell Soils—New Approach.” I was concerned about this invitation because I wasn’t quite up to speed on the old approach. The webinar lists and topics have been expanding with time. Clearly, there is a lot to learn, and the amount of knowledge seems to be increasing. While more knowledge is being created and disseminated, no one is in charge of determining when we’ve learned enough. Therefore, it appears that my imagined June visit from the kindly old postman was unrealistic. For bridge engineers, the concern is graphically illustrated by the thickness of the AASHTO bridge design code. (AASHTO is the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials, a U.S. organization that develops the national bridge design code and in general provides standards and guidance for transportation infrastructure analysis and design.) Back in the day, the code fit in a modest loose-leaf binder. More recently, just the annual updates of the new load and resistance factor design (LRFD) code are thicker than that. The full current code can no longer fit in one binder, and two extra-thick binders are now issued. Keeping in mind that paper will soon be a thing of the past, a CD is provided for the thousands of pages. It’s all good and necessary stuff, but it’s a lot, and the amount is increasing. Bridge engineers need to know all the sections. But some are not familiar with section 2.3.4.2.3.4.2, and this is troubling. It may be an issue of evolution. There is only so much information the human brain can learn and manage. Humankind’s store of

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knowledge has recently expanded so quickly and to such an extent that perhaps evolutionary mechanisms can’t keep pace. The idea behind natural selection is that the fittest adaptations would be favored for procreation of subsequent generations. So, in the distant past, our ancestors who were best able to avoid being eaten by hyenas lived to procreate and provide these positive traits for future generations. But what is the argument for natural selection related to the task of adapting to AASHTO? Are the bridge engineers who best master the voluminous new code found to be the most suitable mates? When I was dating, I offered this argument at bars, with limited (actually, no) success. Computers may fill in the evolutionary gap. My brain has not yet evolved to handle the tens of thousands of details that affect analysis and design. But I can type things in Google, and in seconds I have access to almost the entire stored knowledge of humanity. Google is so smart that it now even guesses at what I want as I type a query. Usually the guesses are pretty good. An article in the Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/ 18895468) suggests three ways to address too much information (TMI): • Method 1. Develop new technology to filter the information and help clear the fog. For example, routines can be programmed to automatically store and clear your e-mails. Some of this happens automatically now with junk filters. • Method 2. Develop self-discipline. Just as you can avoid getting fat by not overeating, you can avoid information overload by limiting your intake of information. The fact that so many people are obese suggests a limitation to this approach. • Method 3. Attend new management seminars that provide coaching on how not to get overloaded. The seminars are classes that seem to offer new information to be learned, so this may be contradictory. An argument that there is too much information is specious, I know. Knowledge is a good thing. In my case, and probably for all of us, mortality ultimately addresses any concerns for a cap on lifelong learning. Until then, as the database of things to learn expands exponentially,

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it is increasingly important to be increasingly selective. You can’t know everything, but you can prioritize learning and know enough. Part II Upon reaching a certain age, you are requested to participate in a medical screening event. Younger men and women have no idea what this is. But once you reach the age, older colleagues know exactly what is involved, having themselves experienced it. Attending the event is almost like an initiation, not into a fraternity, but into the obsolescence club. Next stop: AARP card. I reached that special age, but I tried to ignore my doctor for a year. Although I am fortunate to be in good health, my doctor was having none of it. After enough chiding, I was scheduled to attend a medical screening event. My friends (those old enough to understand) expressed a combination of sympathy and enthusiasm. Some were maybe a tad too enthusiastic. It seemed like a fraternity hazing ritual, except that there was no fraternity and no beer, and all the brothers were all decades older than the ZBT pledges. Maybe the event could have been included in the script for Animal House—you know, “Thank you, sir. May I have another?” But the film’s final cut did not include the medical screening event, and that is just as well. Colleagues assured me that attending the medical screening event was really no big deal, having successfully completed this rite of passage. One colleague had 16 of them, or something like that. Considering the desired frequency for the event, that made him 130 years old. Either he looked very young for his age, or maybe he just enjoyed attending the medical screening event and scheduled more of them than was perhaps required. An article in the New York Times compared the process to home renovation. The author commented: Everyone who undertakes major home renovations ends up loathing their contractor. When I was recently redoing my kitchen and bathroom, I finally figured out why. It has nothing to do with the contractor’s honesty, quality of work, punctuality or the mess they make. It’s about behavioral economics

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and human psychology—in particular, the unusual way that we assess pain. (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/howcolonoscopies-are-like-home-renovations/) In this case, I was looking to hire a good contractor, hopefully avoiding requests for information (RFIs) and claims. As far as deficiency reports were concerned, let’s not go there either. Although those in the know said that the actual event itself was not that big a deal, preparation the day before was a bit of a pain in the ass (so to speak). The contractor (doctor) sent me a detailed guide that described the materials and suggested the means and methods. This looked like a project specification, so I liked it at first. But then once it was time to fulfill the spec requirements, I liked it less. As part of the specifications, no solid food was allowed, and any liquids consumed had to be clear. I wondered if I could mash up an English muffin with cheese in the food processor. It would then be a “liquid,” although a gross and disgusting liquid. I thought about submitting my own RFI. But even if the mashed-up English muffin with cheese wasn’t solid, it would not meet the definition of a “clear liquid.” So I didn’t submit the RFI. On the day of the event, it seemed that the Apocalypse was about to strike. That summer, Massachusetts had been raked by Midwest-style tornadoes and shaken by a rare Northeast earthquake, which also damaged the Washington Monument. On the date scheduled for the event, a hurricane was barreling up the coast. Tsunami and the plague probably weren’t far behind. Maybe I was being a little bit overdramatic as Lauren drove me to the surgery center. After all, I had successfully completed preparation the day before, which everyone said was the hard part. There was nothing to worry about at the event itself. To calm down, I turned on the radio. Pink Floyd was playing—“Dark Side of the Moon.” The event requires anesthesia, so in a sense it is like surgery. The process is challenging for engineers. By our personality and training, we like to be in control. It comes with the territory of mastering the complex analytics of our profession. But surgery is a journey in loss of control. You enter the complex as a fully functioning person, starting out in the pleasant waiting room. Then, step by step, you are reduced to an object that is the subject of the procedure. You lose your clothes and

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wear a “johnny,” you’re confined to a gurney, and you are prodded and poked by all sorts of things. Eventually, they wheel you into the operating room for performance of the event. Everyone else there is still a person, in control. For you: chop chop. The procedure was performed at an outpatient center. For more intense operations, you need a hospital. In Massachusetts, we are fortunate to have some of the world’s best facilities. Regardless of the current health-care imbroglio, today’s hospital care can be miraculous. Medical conditions that in the past impaired the patient or were fatal are routinely fixed today, using advancing technology, drugs, and data management. In David McCullough’s description, Paris was the center of the medical universe in the 18th century (see The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, Simon & Schuster, New York). A visit to the hospital then was a little bit different than today: no anesthesia, few drugs, bloodletting as a cure for everything, and an infrastructure ill suited to the practice of medicine as we now know it. During that period, many people visiting the hospital were not cured and died. If at some time you need access to advanced care for yourself or your loved ones (and most of us will), it is good news that we live in the 21st century and not the 18th. Today, medical miracles are routinely performed. The miracles are supported by an advanced but mundane infrastructure. A modern hospital, such as the magnificent Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, is like a small, self-contained city. The hospital has internal streets and transportation facilities, stores, shops, and restaurants. Walking around the hospital, it can seem like a city, too. The main corridors are inhabited by hundreds of doctors and nurses moving intensely and purposefully in random directions. The hospital infrastructure requires performance standards that at times must be more stringent than what is usually needed. For example, vibrations must be severely limited next to surgical operating theaters. For hospital buildings adjacent to transit tunnels, shaking from a subway train must not affect the surgeon’s hand. Likewise, requirements for food contamination and drug purity require special care. At a drug compounding facility, impurities tragically led to dozens of deaths and widespread sickness. That such events today are tragic and not routine, as in the Middle Ages, illustrates how we have advanced.

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Back at the outpatient center, it was time for the event. The good part about anesthesia is that one moment I was fretting about the event. What seemed like seconds later, I had awakened, and it was done. In their bedside manner and interaction, my nurses and doctors were uniformly terrific. I was grateful to be so well taken care of. The doctor was pleased with the results. He said I was good to go for another 10 years. All that remained to be worried about was that hurricane barreling up the coast, which turned out to be mostly a tropical storm, but, unfortunately one with massive rainfall and still quite a disaster anyway. Part III There is a physical limit to the universe, and its edge may be encountered just beyond the last cell in the program Excel. Each cell in Excel is designated by a numbered row and a lettered column. Home in Excel is the cell A1. It is possible to leave Home and travel out into the domain of the spreadsheet. This voyage is virtually accomplished by using your mouse or arrow keys. For me, travel from Home to nearby cells is pleasant and comforting. In Excel, visiting the familiar terrain near Home is like a trip to Rhode Island. But beyond the familiar lies the wild frontier, places like Ohio and the nebulous border of knowledge where everything is unknown and nothing is familiar or comfortable. The edge of the known may be a frightful place, but fortunately, one can get there easily. It is possible to travel to the edge of the Excel universe by going Home and then pressing a sequence of End and Down keys. At the time of publication, the last cell in Excel was the following: XFD1048576 where in Excel notation, “1048576” is the row number, and “XFD” is the column letter. If you haven’t used Excel (and actually admit that you haven’t used Excel), think of a game of Battleship. If you haven’t played Battleship, this analogy won’t help. But if you have, in this case, the board is about 40 by 40 miles long, or something like that. If I were better at this, I would come up with a description like this: There are so many cells that if you placed them side by side, you could travel to Titan and back.

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If you should try to journey to cell XFD1048577, which is one cell beyond XFD1048576, what would you find? At the time of publication, you would find nothing. The cell XFD1048577 doesn’t actually exist. There is nothing. It is a null void, an empty, inky blackness of nonexistence, like being in a dreamless sleep where you never wake up. It would be as if the entire existence of everything was imagined by an autistic boy looking at a snow globe (http://insidetv.ew.com/2012/10/12/ st-elsewhere-reunion-snow-globe/). It seems that, like the overall universe, the Excel universe is in a state of constant expansion. When Excel was first created (or some time after the Borg-like company, Microsoft, subsumed Lotus 123), there was a Big Bang. In the beginning, all information resided in cell A1. But then there was a massive information explosion, and the universe started to relentlessly inflate. Today, computer cell references are in continuous expansion and flight from Home. The edge of the universe today is XFD1048576. Tomorrow, with the exponential increase of computing power and data to use it, who knows where the edge will be? Maybe there will be a stopping point, a time when there is no more information to be learned, and no more cells needed to manipulate it. At that point, at the end of knowledge and the expansion of Excel, the universe will start to contract. Matter will collapse into a big black blob, and all knowledge will be trapped in cell A1. But such a time is in the distant future. Today, we have only been exploring the two-dimensional universe with coordinates in the x–y plane. In Excel, there is a third dimension, worksheets that overlay each other. Imagine a z direction in Excel. These worksheets are described by their numbers. A new workbook automatically includes three vertical worksheets, and apparently there is no explicit limit to the number of worksheets that may be created other than the power of your computer (http://perlmaven.com/spreadsheet-write-excel-maximum-number-ofsheets). With an infinitely powerful computer comes an Excel universe with no limits. The issue, then, becomes not too much information, but not enough information (NEI). Part IV Driving south on the Expressway in Boston, you pass by a storage facility. The facility advertises that it provides “Museum Quality Storage.”

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Occasionally, the owners hang a large inflated padlock from the side of the building to emphasize how safe the storage is. This illustrates the concept of security but not necessarily of quality. If they wanted to emphasize the “museum quality” aspect, I guess they could hang a balloon of the Mona Lisa. I enjoy seeing the giant padlock. It is probably New England’s second most recognized silly roadside attraction, the first of course being the giant bug in Providence, Rhode Island. Seeing the big inflatable padlock provides entertainment and an appropriate sense of surreality as you zip down the “Expressway” at 3 mph during “rush” “hour.” A building devoted to museum quality storage is not an anomaly. Self-storage facilities are being built around the United States. The number of facilities was reported to increase from 6,601 in 1984 to 46,500 in 2010 (http://www.unclebobs.com/storage-units/the-history-of-selfstorage.cfm). The need is being driven by the explosion in personal stuff. A corollary of too much information is that it leads to acquisition of too much stuff. In the United States, our personal spaces are overflowing with too much stuff. One thousand square foot homes that were the height of luxury in dreamy Levittown have morphed into massive McMansions, with three-car garages and walk-in closets that are the size of what used to be bedrooms. In 1970, the average single-family home size was 1,400 square feet. In 2009, the average size increased to 2,700 square feet (http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/us-home-size.html). The process of demolishing a small house and replacing it with a personal castle is known as Mansionization. In the suburbs, cozy ’50s ranches are torn down, house by house, and replaced by behemoths five and six times their size. Extra space is needed to house families that have decreased in size. In practice, there are only so many rooms a person can use. After the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, having 24 dens may be overdoing it. So this becomes not so much living space as it is cleaning space. With the McMansion comes a need for the McCleaning staff. What was good enough for life in the past is not good enough anymore. The post–World War II homes of Levittown today look small and restrictive. Just as there is no one in charge of deciding that there is too much information, there is no one deciding that there is too much stuff or too much space. For those who are not immortal, you really can’t take it with you. 42

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The History of Self-Storage notes, There’s every reason to believe that a number of social and economic factors will continue to drive our need for selfstorage units. Divorce rates remain high and as households split up, one or both spouses will need a place to store possessions while seeking new housing. Aging baby boomers are downsizing to smaller homes, but putting prized possessions in storage for their heirs. Americans are on the move again, looking for new employment opportunities in other cities and states, and storing their things until they get settled in. And, as ever, it’s just our human nature to buy more stuff than we have room for. (http://www.unclebobs.com/more/articles/the-history-ofself-storage.cfm) That is a rosy outlook for self-storage. But maybe a countertrend is developing. We may be wired to be pack rats, but some have rationally confronted their natural urge to have more of everything, and they are attempting to rein it in. At the vanguard of this countertrend is the “tiny house” movement (See the Tiny House blog, http://tinyhouseblog .com/). Tiny houses are pretty small. They are the house equivalent of a studio apartment. Living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens are all stuffed together in multiuse spaces. Tiny house builders are enthusiastic and almost evangelical in promoting their ideas of small living and sustainability. The tiny houses are inexpensive and don’t require a big footprint. On the flip side, you can’t store all of that essential stuff, and there is not a lot of room for big parties. Maybe rationality will win out over human nature, but that does not seem like a safe bet. Until then, we’ll need lots of museum quality storage to store all of our things. Part V It is not well documented (in fact, it is not documented at all), but the first bridge was designed by a budding engineer named “Grog.” One day many thousands of years ago, Grog was being chased by a large woolly mammoth. During the chase, Grog came across a shallow stream. In

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his desperation, he was able to ford the stream, but not before narrowly avoiding the swooping trunk of the hungry pachyderm. Later, when Grog revisited the bridge site, he saw a large black monolith, and “Thus Spake Zarathustra” could be heard humming in the background. Grog came to a startling conclusion. He realized that he could drop a rock slab across the stream. To verify his approach, Grog referred to the nascent AASHTO bridge design code, which in those days was about one page long and was chiseled on the wall of a neighboring cave. Bridges by Grog and his contemporaries are preserved in England and today are known as clapper bridges (Figure 1). Today’s version of the AAASHTO bridge design code, as we know, is thousands of pages long, and it is not chiseled on stone. That’s all I have to say on this matter. Except that the American Concrete Institute (ACI) 318 Building Code (1989, “Building Code Requirement for Reinforced Concrete,” ACI 318-89, Farmington Hills, MI) used to be a paragon of design code self-restraint. For decades, this admirable code has been contained in a publication about the same size, without massive, double-digit page growth from year to year. But maybe ACI

Figure 1. Clapper Bridge Source: Ryan Marshall

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committee members felt left out. The relatively compact design code has been renumbered and revamped. It has gotten thicker, but doesn’t require two books. Yet. Part VI My colleague Erik found an Android app called “i-Search.” OK, backing up a bit, most of you know what “Android” and “apps” are. But just in case you don’t, an “app” is an application that you can load on your cellular telephone. “Android” refers to the operating software on a group of cellular phones. The other group is largely driven by Apple software. Both systems begin with “A,” which is additional information. However, a further discussion of the two types would be like comparing fruit with mechanical beings. The “i-Search” app can search for wide-flange steel beam sizes based on cross-sectional dimensions and approximate year constructed. Many readers are not compelled to do this. Should you find yourself inspecting a bridge, this app can be very helpful in the field. But it is even more useful than you might expect. You can enter in span lengths and loading to do a quick check of column or beam capacities. At a certain point, this app may serve as a replacement for a junior structural engineer. In that case, the “Android” moniker would be appropriate. I still have a flip phone. It does have some primitive advanced features, which I ignore. My flip phone has a type of GPS, but that is only for the geographically challenged. Real engineers do GPS in their heads, not on their telephones. For a fee, my flip phone can play telephone games. There is a game where your pets are threatened by falling debris, a sinister variation of Tetris. I am frugal, so I can do without this game. It’s true that I can’t talk to my phone like other people do.* But there was a movie about a man who fell in love with the voice on his mobile phone. I’m thinking that I’m better off with a phone that doesn’t talk back to me.

* I just discovered that I can talk to my cell phone, and it can respond to basic commands. To get along better with my friends and family who have smart phones, I whip out my cell phone, which I have named “cell phone,” and say, “Cell phone, provide directions to drive home, and do it fast!” My primitive cell phone can only call my mother by voice command and so will not respond to this more sophisticated request. However, my smart phone colleagues are impressed that you can talk to a primitive flip phone. In this way, I gain some technological expertise cachet.

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Today’s mobile phones are much more than just telephones. Way back in the days of Seinfeld, mobile phones were about 17 inches long and only functioned as telephones. Today’s cell phones feature nanotechnology and really small chips. They are smart phones, with massive amounts of capabilities far beyond just talking to other people. I was hiking with my son, Daniel. He has an iPhone, and it started ringing in the middle of the woods or otherwise making its presence known. The call was from overseas, thousands of miles away. Big deal—even my primitive flip phone can do that. But then, Dan said, “Let’s Skype!” So he connected his smart phone to a geosynchronous satellite, and we were talking back and forth with pictures in the midst of the wilderness. I was thinking about a short story by Jack London, “To Build a Fire.” In the story, a man is traveling in the wilderness. It’s about 40 degrees below zero, and the man has one chance to start a campfire to avoid freezing to death. He gets the fire going, but unfortunately it’s set below a tree. Wind shakes snow off the branches, and the fire is doused. The man is unable to start another fire, and he doesn’t have a smart phone with the campfire app. So he freezes to death. Back out at the jobsite, I was walking with Santiago on a bridge. We wanted to get a feel for some structural vibration (pun was not intentional). I said to Santiago, “There’s not much vibration, but it would be good if we could measure it.” Santiago said, “Why don’t I use my smart phone? It has four embedded accelerometers, and I downloaded an app for $5 that evaluates acceleration.” Santiago placed his smart phone on the sidewalk and turned on the app. The smart phone proceeded to measure vibrations and plot time-history data, all to a pretty good level of accuracy. It provided graphs. “Santiago,” I said, “That’s awesome! In the past we had to make arrangements days in advance, and now you can just walk up with your cell phone. I’m thinking that it would be good to get some strain measurements as well. Does your cell phone measure strain?” “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Santiago. “Everyone knows that smart phones can’t measure strain.”

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Part VII Online advertisements seem to be really well targeted nowadays. Unlike old paper newspapers, ads on the computer somehow appear to be directly related to the reader. What an advantage that is, to hawk specific advertisements to people who may be more receptive to seeing them. For example, the computer may determine that you suffer from hemorrhoids. Then as you are surfing, it will conveniently flash advertisements for Preparation H. This is more efficient than randomly opening a paper newspaper or watching TV and hoping that you encounter an advertisement for Preparation H. The other day, I was reading an article in the Washington Post online, and there was an advertisement for Amazon dot com. The advertisement automatically selected a particular book Amazon thought I might be interested in. The book was entitled Bridginess: More of the Civil Engineering Life, by Brian Brenner. It turned out that I was, in fact, very interested in that topic. I clicked on Amazon to learn more and went to the site of the book. The book’s description seemed very appealing. It was a humorous book about bridges. What could be better than that? To assist readers in deciding whether or not to purchase the book, Amazon included a selection of reviews. Not surprisingly, all of the user reviews received five stars! One of the reviews was submitted by “Marilyn Brenner,” the author’s mother. She highly recommended it.

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Mathcad and S-E-X Bob, an engineering colleague, was preparing for his son to go to college.

He decided that there was a list of talks he needed to have with his son. Being an engineer, it made sense to make a spreadsheet. Some of the topics seemed straightforward and were relatively easy, like discussions about being responsible, not drinking, and eating right. However, one of the talks on the list was more challenging. Bob decided that he had to have a talk with his son about S-E-X. (Bob was a little embarrassed, so he spelled it out instead of saying the word.) I was confused about the need for a talk on this subject. I said to Bob, “Your son is 18. Haven’t you had that talk already?” Bob said, “Yes, we had that talk a few years ago.” “So isn’t one talk enough? Probably he knows the details now. It’s supposed to be like riding a bicycle.” “That’s true,” Bob said, “but you know that my son is not very active in this category, and only now he’s starting to get up to speed.” Then Bob offered an analogy that we engineers could all understand: “Let’s say you attend a lecture in Mathcad. You’ve never used Mathcad to date. Maybe you want to be a frequent and experienced user of Mathcad. But the timing was never right, and you never had a chance to try the program. So you attend this lecture on how to be a Mathcad user, but it’s all sort of theoretical and doesn’t make much sense. It sounds like it would be a lot of fun to be experienced in Mathcad applications, a power user. But you go to the lecture, and it all goes in one ear and out the other. “Flash forward a few years, and finally you have a chance to score in Mathcad. Now someone offers to provide some information in how

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to use Mathcad. As awkward as that may be for the instructor, now the details are relevant and make sense because they are more directly applicable.” “I see what you mean,” I said to Bob. “It’s difficult to appreciate instruction in Mathcad until you’ve actually applied the program.” “Exactly!” said Bob. “This is why it’s a good idea for us to have a refresher talk.” In his mind, Bob added a check mark on his spreadsheet. I was going to ask Bob if he planned to discuss the topics of Excel and AutoCAD, but I decided to wait to learn about how his talk went on Mathcad.

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Inappropriate Variables I was teaching structural lectures for the professional engineering (PE)

refresher class. This is a class for young engineers to bone up on their civil engineering fundamentals in preparation for taking the professional engineering exam. Because they are young engineers and college students, I expected that they would come to class with an (overall) higher level of maturity. Possibly they might also have acquired a wizened outlook on the world. Of course, they’re mostly in their 20s, so their outlook is probably not so wizened. Anyway, there is a point in my lectures when I get to inappropriate variables. These are unfortunately named structural parameters. They are always good for an embarrassed guffaw from the college students while the professor gamely teaches on as he tries also not to burst out laughing. My presentation starts with Mu, an expression of the ultimate moment in a structure. This is a nice, pleasant, innocent variable, with not much to laugh at. But unfortunately, the discussion then proceeds to the variable, Pu, the ultimate axial load. Usually I have to describe this variable as “P sub U.” If I pronounce Pu as “P–U,” the college students may explode into fits of middle school laughter. I can understand such a reaction from juvenile college students. But this shouldn’t be so with the young engineers in the PE refresher class. Bravely, I presented Pu as “P–U.” The class listened attentively and was still. Not a cackle! How excellent, how mature this class was! I could say “P–U” with a serious face and continue with my intensely profound and important lecture. I didn’t have to worry about names of variables causing disruption to my presentation.

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It turns out that a review of the syllabus requires discussion of many inappropriate variables and procedures. There is the alwayschallenging calculation of “skin friction.” In construction, it is important to attend the “pre-erection meeting” so that the erection can proceed fully and on schedule. Discussion of heat of formation and stiffness calculations likewise seem to suggest nonengineering applications for those so inclined. (One of the technical reviewers for this manuscript suggested that I should also mention “shrinkage” and “full penetration butt groove welds.”) Way back in middle school, I remember the thrill of opening the dictionary and turning to an inappropriate word. It didn’t even have to be an inappropriate word. It could be a word that was close to inappropriate, or maybe vaguely inappropriate sounding, or on the same page as an inappropriate word. In those days, dictionaries were large books made out of paper, and so you would open to “pages” and not click on screens. The dictionary terms and definitions were stodgy and proper. At least, that’s what the authors attempted. But the best linguist could not avoid defining something that was slightly, mildly naughty, if in fact that’s what it was. Part of the middle school thrill was not just encountering naughtiness but also reading an adult’s pained attempts to make it all proper and not naughty at all. For a prepubescent boy, the definition of a word like, say, “brassiere,” could be utterly proper and correct but still would generate embarrassed, excited sniggers in the sixth grade cafeteria. Nowadays, probably the thrill of the naughty chase has abated somewhat. With Google, Bing, and the like, it is not necessary to open a dictionary. One can type on a personal computer or speak to a cell phone, and in seconds a naughty word and 2,000 synonyms appear on the screen. Another click, and images with video accompaniment appear as well. Things that were vaguely, mildly naughty back in the day have today been flooded by the advancing technology, which provides images of inappropriateness beyond the wildest imaginations of teenage boys of the past. Along with too much information, too much space, and too much food, advanced civilization has provided a new affliction: too much porn.

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I was pleased that students in my last review class were unusually mature, dignified young engineers. The discussion was scholarly and solemn. With increasing confidence, I proceeded with the discourse, covering all the challenging concepts and variables like Pu. With gratification, I was able to call it “P–U” and not “P sub U.” At the end, it was time for questions. One student raised his hand. “Professor Brenner,” asked the grim-faced student, “would you please describe the variable for calculating ultimate force?”

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How to Buy Presents, Engineer’s Edition Karl, a young structural engineer, has successfully applied the engineer-

ing method for the purchase of presents. Each year, Karl decides on an overall theme for holiday gifts. For example, recently the annual theme was bridge gifts (I think that a bridge theme for gifts is appropriate for every year). Once the overall theme has been selected, Karl then buys suitable bulk items satisfying the intent of the overall theme. In keeping with the bridge theme, Karl might purchase a stack of books with humorous bridge essays. With the theme selected and gifts procured, toward the end of the design schedule Karl customizes each gift for its intended recipient. For the year of bridge gifts, customization might include addition of personal notes. Or perhaps, a recipient might have a violent objection to a particular type of bridge, preferring, say, a suspension bridge over a more modern interpretation by Calatrava. Karl customizes the particular gift for such a recipient to avoid bridges out of favor and lead to a satisfactory deliverable (Figure 1). Karl has developed an excellent schedule and approach for procuring gifts. It is efficient and thrifty and avoids the inefficient approach of nonengineers who wait in three-hour lines at Walmart the day before the gift is needed. Karl has even programmed spreadsheets with macros facilitated by Visual Basic program to better manage his gift data. His spreadsheets are nicely formatted, with data that facilitate checking and appropriate QA/QC. After a gift is procured, some aesthetic treatment is often needed. Engineers do not like this phase because it does not pertain to function, and it can be understood to be wasteful. Another structural engineer,

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Figure 1. Engineer’s Gift Procurement Schedule Source: Ryan Marshall

Guy, suggests the following approach. A true engineer wraps his or her gifts in structural bridge drawings instead of wrapping paper, making sure that something good shows on the top of the package, like a title block, a beam section, or an abutment. In this way, the gift giver can avoid frippery and even encourage sustainable practices through reuse of valuable paper. Those who are not engineers (and what a sorry lot I am referring to) occasionally face the dilemma of purchasing a gift for an

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engineer. A website provides some suggestions (http://gadgetboy.hub pages.com/hub/9-Unique-Gift-Ideas-for-Engineers-Students-Too). The author comments: If you’re lucky enough to know an engineer, you’ll know that they’re a unique breed. Intensely curious, passionate about precision, design and how the world works, they are fascinating to talk to. Truthfully, our world wouldn’t be what it is today without them. Finding a great gift for an engineer or engineering student is a great way to show how much you appreciate their interests. Finding a gift that will pique their interests is always a challenge. You’ll want to get them something unique, something that will hold their attention and something that they’ll remember (and potentially use). That’s a tall order, especially if the engineering world isn’t something you’re overly familiar with. The author provides some suggested gifts that satisfy her criteria. One suggestion is to purchase a model of a medieval war machine—a catapult. It seems to me that the author is spot on with her suggestion. At our engineering holiday party, even before I read the article, I had in fact purchased a model kit for a medieval war machine for the party grab bag. It was a Yankee Swap, a grab bag format that engineers find particularly pleasing. This is because everyone picks a random number from a hat and selects gifts from the grab bag in numerical order. At a Yankee Swap, each successive person may trade his or her gift for one that was previously selected. So in addition to the use of numbers, the engineering appeal is magnified by the event’s rule-based strategy. I didn’t use drawing sheets to wrap the box as Guy suggested. But I did wrap the catapult box in the next best thing: calculation pad paper. This was engineering catnip. The box was opened early in the competition. It must have been the second or third package unwrapped. Like infant Simba at the beginning of the movie, The Lion King, the engineer selecting the box triumphantly raised the exposed gift to the crowd. It was a catapult! The crowd oohed and aahed in appreciation. But after the initial excitement, the lucky winner realized that he had a problem. Having selected so early in the swap, there was no way to hold onto such Living the Civil Engineering Life

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a desirable gift. When he thought no one was looking, he tried to casually hide the catapult box under his jacket, but that didn’t work. The next engineer opened a box containing a kitchen serving mitt and quickly proceeded to trade for the catapult. Karl was lucky and selected a high number in the draw. This meant that he could trade for any of the presents already chosen. When it was his turn, he opened one of the remaining gifts. It didn’t matter what it was (boxer shorts? a $5 Dunkin Donuts card?) because he knew what he wanted. He smiled and quickly traded for the catapult. Soon the swap was over, and Karl was the big winner. That night, he assembled the model catapult and soon brought it to the office to show off. Now the catapult is perched on his desk, and Karl occasionally uses it to lob flaming rubber band balls at the neighboring Huns. Over the years, I have received several requests for guidance on how to purchase gifts for engineers. I am also an engineer, but some have concluded that I have above-average skills in empathizing and understanding other engineers. Said another way, colleagues perceive that in the overall world, I am socially clueless, but in the more limited society of engineers, the following expression may be applicable: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” To provide guidance for my colleagues, I prepared a list of items that are suitable and in fact serve as excellent gifts for engineers (Table 1). Each of these items is a book. To achieve maximum satisfaction, one should consider a gift package including all three.

Table 1: Gift Items Suitable for Engineers

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Item Number

Description

Item 1

Don’t Throw This Away! by Brian Brenner

Item 2

Bridginess by Brian Brenner

Item 3

Too Much Information by Brian Brenner

Too Much Information

The Amazing Bridge Race by Ryan Marshall (Author’s Note: Our graphics editor, structural engineer Ryan Marshall, takes over in this essay, describing his road trip down south with lots of bridges.—Brian) At the start line, there were a dozen teams (at least, this is how we imag-

ined it). Each team had two engineers. Phil Keoghan had a steady but anxious look in his eyes. He said in a clear and excited voice, “You are gathered here together to participate in a race around the bridge world. The bridges are waiting for you. Good luck, and travel safe.” He raised his right arm in the air, pointed his index finger toward the clear, blue sky and held that pose for a few seconds of suspenseful anticipation. Then, he swung his arm below his waist in a swift motion and exclaimed, “GO!!!” And that was how The Amazing Bridge Race began. Well, that is how I envisioned the opening scene of The Amazing Bridge Race taking place. That is, if CBS were ever to wise up and give the American television-watching public what they truly crave: a competitive reality series that features pairs of contestants racing around the world to see one or more fantastic bridges at each destination. The contestants would travel to different countries to learn about the location’s bridge history and bridge culture, while also competing in structural engineering challenges that test their bridge knowledge and problemsolving skills. At the end of each leg of the race, the last team to arrive at the designated bridge and check in with Phil could be eliminated from the competition. The winners of the last leg of the race will receive $100 million to design and build a signature bridge at a location of their choosing, other than Rhode Island.

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My idea for The Amazing Bridge Race all started when my girlfriend (now fiancé), Amanda, told me that she had to move to Tampa, Florida, for the next six months of work. We knew that we could make the move into a memorable experience by turning the journey into a bridge road trip. We would travel down the East Coast with the route decided by what bridges we would want to see along the way. (I’m using the term “we” loosely. Although Amanda is not opposed to bridges and has been indoctrinated by countless bridge conversations and bridge dates during our two-year relationship, she had no particular desire to take elongated routes and unnecessary detours to see as many bridges as possible. However, she was grateful that her wonderful, charming, and ruggedly handsome boyfriend was willing to take multiple days off of work to split the 1,400-mile drive with her. And compromise—along with excellent bridges—is the backbone of any successful relationship.) As an avid viewer of the original, less exciting version of The Amazing Race, I repeatedly found myself unintentionally using the phrase “on the next leg of the race” throughout the trip. After the sixth time of Amanda politely reminding me that we were not actually racing between bridges, I had the brilliant idea for the The Amazing Bridge Race. Because CBS was largely unreceptive to the idea when I pitched it to them in a wellworded letter, this recounting of our bridge road trip will have to function as a substitute for the show (for now). So, on January 22, 2014, beginning in the humble, and subsequently historic, town of Medford, Massachusetts, our version of The Amazing Bridge Race began. Our first destination was the newly opened Kenneth F. Burns Memorial Bridge over Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester, Massachusetts. Designed by a team of brilliant and talented engineers of Fay, Spofford & Thorndike, the Burns Bridge is unique. It is a five-span, steel-box deck arch structure that gracefully leaps across the lake. The low rise-tospan ratio of the arches accentuates the horizontal length of the bridge and properly expresses its spanning function. It is possible that as a member of the Burns Bridge design team, I may be a little biased. Regardless, this was a huge milestone for me. The Burns Bridge was the first project that I worked on in my professional career, and being able to see the 2D drawings, 3D renderings, and giant stack of calculations transformed into a real, tangible object evoked a rewarding feeling. The exact emotion is hard to explain, but it generally

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consists of pride, accomplishment, and ownership. And in addition to seeing the product of countless hours of work fabricated into a real object, it’s easy to see that the bridge will be serving the general public in a useful, practical, and necessary way. Every day, people will use this bridge to cross Lake Quinsigamond, and they will be relying on our design to ensure that they are able to do so safely and easily (Figure 1). So as we approached the bridge, I knew that we were about to drive over a design that I was a part of for the first time. Although I had already walked on the bridge the previous week to examine the structure during the final phases of construction, this would be the first time that I’d be using the bridge for its primary purpose: to cross between Worcester and Shrewsbury without needing a boat, swimsuit, or inflatable arm floaties. “But wait, there’s a huge problem at hand!” I thought to myself as I looked over at Amanda from the passenger’s seat. The problem, if you are reading carefully, is clear: I was in the passenger’s seat! To me, this was completely unacceptable. I needed to be the one driving over the bridge, and I’d have it no other way. So I expressed this to Amanda, who assumed that I was trying to make a chauvinistic statement about how all men are better drivers than women. After reassuring her that this

Figure 1. Kenneth F. Burns Memorial Bridge in Worcester, Massachusetts Source: Ryan Marshall

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was not the case, I convinced her to pull over to the side of the road and quickly switch seats with me. This was the first of many times this happened throughout our trip. So with the steering wheel in my hands and a grin on my face, I drove us over the Burns Bridge, and it was every bit as magical as I thought it would be. (Although I insisted on being the one to drive over the bridge, I also did not want to focus on driving while we were on the bridge. I was looking all around me and trying to take in every detail, and Amanda was capturing this personal milestone by taking my picture, with the flash on. Perhaps the most magical thing about us crossing the Burns Bridge was that we weren’t the first people to have a recorded automobile accident while crossing it.) Continuing on from Worcester, we headed south toward Washington, D.C., where we would spend the night. There are so many noteworthy bridges to see in the northeast, even just in the state of New York alone, that it was tough deciding the best route. Although I was tempted to take I-287 over the Tappan Zee Bridge, which is currently being replaced, we ultimately decided to continue down I-91 to I-95. This route would allow us, with some minor circumnavigation, to see the George Washington Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Verrazano– Narrows Bridge, and the Bayonne Bridge, which bridge experts (should) call “the New York Bridge Quadfecta.” (“Quadfecta” is not a word. Should a word be created to describe four perfect things, it follows natural logic that it would first be applied to bridges.) The first stop was the George Washington Bridge. This magnificent suspension bridge never fails to impress me. Even though cars are encouraged to travel on the lower level, which generally has less traffic, I always insist on taking the upper level. This level allows you to fully experience the bridge, providing a terrific view of the Hudson River. On a clear day, I’ve heard that you can see the Statue of Liberty in the distance. I can’t confirm this, though, because I am always preoccupied looking at the suspension cables and the grandiose steel towers. The original design of the George Washington Bridge included a stone fascia to encase the exterior of the towers. Amanda didn’t know this, but fortunately she had me as her informative, not-at-all-annoying travel companion. When the Great Depression hit, it was decided that there wasn’t enough money to clad the towers with stones, as was originally intended. This is all for the best, if you ask me. I prefer the towers

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to proudly exhibit their structural material and form instead of being disguised as something they are not. If I wanted to see a bridge with real stone towers, I would go to the Brooklyn Bridge. And I did want to, so away we went. Next stop was the Brooklyn Bridge. As far as bridges go, this is the Mona Lisa of civil engineering. The only difference is the fact that the Brooklyn Bridge actually serves a useful purpose and is what should be defined as the epitome of beauty. The Brooklyn Bridge is remarkable. It has been standing for more than 130 years, which is an incredibly long life for a bridge. Once I was able to pick my jaw up from atop my feet, I again started sharing my trivia knowledge with Amanda. I told her how the chief engineer, John Roebling, died during construction of the bridge because of a botched foot amputation and subsequent tetanus infection, leaving his son, Washington Roebling, in charge of the project. When Washington Roebling got a debilitating case of “caisson disease,” or decompression sickness (the bends), he became unable to directly supervise construction. He therefore left his wife, Emily Roebling, in charge of overseeing the construction of the bridge! She studied higher mathematics and bridge design, which is incredible, considering the fact that the bridge completed construction in 1883, a time when women hardly ever worked, let alone designed bridges. Amanda was so grateful that I kept these fun facts coming and was so in awe of how smart her boyfriend is that she forgot to say, “Thank you, Ryan!” or “Wow, you’re so incredibly smart, Ryan!” But she didn’t have to say it aloud. I could see the appreciation in her eyes. From the Brooklyn Bridge, we headed over to the Verrazano– Narrows Bridge, the longest suspension bridge span in the United States. Amanda was impressed to discover that I was the first toddler to cross the Verrazano–Narrows Bridge when it first opened. (This is actually not true; I would have to be much, much, much older to have been the first baby to cross the Verrazano–Narrows Bridge—so much older that I’d likely be checked into a retirement home, eating my food in mashed form and rambling about my experiences as a great, wise bridge engineer in books I’d title Bridginess or Too Much Information.) This bridge is quite remarkable, and it is definitely worth experiencing firsthand.

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Last in the Quadfecta is the Bayonne Bridge, an enormous steel arch bridge. It was the world’s longest steel arch when it opened in 1931. The visit provided me the perfect opportunity to tell Amanda about the “Raising the Roadway” project currently under design for this bridge. Once completed, this will be a true modern-day feat of engineering. However, there was an accident near the bridge that caused a huge amount of traffic, so we (Amanda) decided to change our route and skip the Bayonne Bridge. With the New York Bridge Quadfecta behind us and my bridge appetite temporarily satiated, we continued south. Next up: the Delaware Memorial Bridge, twin suspension bridges that span the Delaware River and connect the states of Pennsylvania and Delaware. When you finish crossing over the bridge, you encounter a toll booth almost immediately. I talked briefly with the toll booth employee to let her know that the bridge was completely worth $4. Amanda, embarrassed at even knowing me, sank slightly in her seat. Five minutes down the road, we encountered another toll! Because my bridge euphoria had worn off, I was not pleased with this toll worker, who hoarsely grunted, “Four dollars,” at us. It turns out that we had already driven through the entire state of Delaware, having traveled a whopping five miles since entering at the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Clearly Delaware isn’t a very big state. But it is still bigger than Rhode Island. Having seen more bridges in a day than most people get to see in two or even three days, we finally arrived at the first pit stop destination, Washington, D.C. We got a night of much-needed rest and then spent the morning sightseeing in our nation’s capital. After performing a quick 1-2-3 pat of my pockets to ensure that I hadn’t left anything behind, we were ready to embark on the next leg of the race! And the next destination was a great one: the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge is a set of twin suspension bridges that lead to Maryland’s Eastern Shore region. We first stopped in a nearby park on the shore to take pictures of the bridge. I was in complete awe of the bridges, silent as I admired their scale and beauty. I started taking countless pictures. Having recently discovered that creating panoramas was one of the many features of my smart phone, I used technology to capture the incredible length of the bridges in one picture.

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When I finished taking a perfect panorama, I turned around to see how Amanda’s photos were coming out. Maybe I was naïve to assume that Amanda would also take dozens of pictures of the bridge. But what I saw when I turned around shocked me. Amanda was not taking pictures of the bridge. She wasn’t even looking at the bridge! She was struggling to open a package of crackers. She wrestled with that stubborn package, finally got a cracker out, and bit half of it before realizing that I was watching her. Seeing the astonished look on my face, she asked me, “What?” I knew I couldn’t begin to describe how bizarre it was to me that she wasn’t completely captivated by the bridges, because any normal person would have been shocked at how completely captivated I was. So I gave her a kiss, said, “Nothing,” and continued taking another couple dozen pictures. After an excellent ride across the bay, we continued driving down the Delmarva Peninsula toward the Chesapeake Bay Tunnel-Bridge. This bridge-tunnel combination is so long, you lose all sight of land. It almost feels like you’re driving directly on the ocean at times, and the tunnel is unfathomably long. It was quite the experience. While we planned on going to the restaurant on the fisherman’s pier that is located along the tunnel-bridge, we got there too late, and the restaurant was closed. This was a big disappointment, because we had been driving for so long and essentially trapped at sea for the last 30 miles without any access to a restroom. With no restroom in sight, the constant sloshing sound of the watery bay, and a long, dark, deserted pier, I will leave it to your imagination what happened next. More details than that might be too much information. Although it was a pretty safe assumption that we would get lost at some point on the trip, it was certain that we would have to stop for gas every 350 miles or so. When I said that I thought getting gas was a “waste of time,” Amanda laughed, not fully acknowledging the significance of the race. And even though it took up even more time, I always cleaned the windshield at every gas station with squeegees in cleansing solution. Every time, Amanda would thank me for being so considerate and taking such good care of her car. It always feels good to do nice things for other people and be appreciated for it afterward. (I still haven’t told Amanda that the only reason I cleaned her windshield

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was so that the pictures we took while driving over bridges wouldn’t be marred by streaks of dirt and bird droppings.) Our next pit stop was Charleston, South Carolina. Here we saw the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, a beautiful, symmetric cable-stayed bridge over the Cooper River. The design is simple and elegant, and it was my favorite of all the cable-stayed bridges we saw on the trip. Like the Zakim Bridge in Boston, the pylons are triangular. This means that as the cables increase in height on the pylon, they move toward each other over the roadway. The next two bridges we saw, the Talmadge Bridge in Savannah, Georgia, and the Dames Point Bridge in Jacksonville, Florida, were also cable-stayed bridges. On these two bridges, however, the cables are planar, and the pylons are H-shaped. Although I had never seen a cablestayed bridge design like this before, it has less of an impact when you drive over the bridge. With the Ravenel Bridge, the cables seem to welcome you to drive through them. With the Talmadge and Dames Point Bridges, the cables feel disengaged from the bridge, like they were once suspension bridges whose cables got accidentally bunched together (Figure 2). One thing we (I) noted at this point in the trip was that the suspension bridges had vanished, and the bridge landscape had drastically changed. We wondered what had happened to the suspension bridges and noted that the cable-stayed bridges had less character and were almost interchangeable. In fact, while making a photo album once the

Figure 2. Comparing (left to right) the Ravenel, Talmadge, and Dames Point Bridges Source: Ryan Marshall

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trip was complete, Amanda grouped pictures of the Talmadge Bridge and the Dames Point Bridge together because she didn’t notice that they were two different structures. Although most of our bridges were planned before the trip began, sometimes we (I) were (was) pleasantly surprised with bridges we saw along the way that were not on our itinerary. My favorite example was when we were driving through Sanford, Florida, and we came across an extravagant cable-stayed pedestrian bridge. Even though it was late and we wanted to stop for the night, I convinced Amanda that we had to go loop back to take a better look. This bridge really substantiates the claim that our country has cable-stayed bridge fever. It was not a very long span, leading me to believe that many other design alternatives would have been more efficient and economical. For example, the designer could have included a pier at the midspan, because there was a large barrier between northbound and southbound traffic. In fact, the bridge was also a through truss, which would have seemed appropriate if the cables weren’t also present. Although definitely more interesting to look at than most pedestrian bridges, it looked like a standard prefabricated truss pedestrian bridge that later had two pylons and cables added to it for absolutely no reason. The bridge looks completely overdesigned, and it was clear that it was designed to be a cable-stayed bridge because someone wanted to build a cable-stayed bridge (Figure 3). The final pit stop on the race before reaching our ultimate destination was Jacksonville, Florida. We stopped for dinner in the Jacksonville Landing. This was a gorgeous location with a bustling economy and plenty of great food venues. It also, and more importantly, had a lot of diverse bridges in view at once! Most prominent was the Main Street Bridge, a vertical-lift steel truss bridge over the St. Johns River. The bridge was both monstrous and elegant. It is slightly reminiscent of the industrial age, but it is still fully functional and properly fits in with its surroundings. When you turn your head to the west side of the river, you can see the Acosta Bridge, a concrete box girder bridge. The haunches on this bridge give it an elegant silhouette against the setting sun, although some of the proportions look a little off. In addition to these bridges, there was also a steel truss bascule drawbridge, which was open, and additional highway bridges in the distance. The scene could

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Figure 3. Cable-stayed pedestrian bridge in Sanford, Florida Source: Ryan Marshall

not be more picturesque, so I captured the moment in yet another perfect panorama (Figure 4). We had finally reached our destination of Tampa. However, before getting Amanda settled into her apartment, we needed to check in with Phil at the final pit stop of the race: the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in St. Petersburg, Florida. An immaculate cable-stayed bridge that rises high above Tampa Bay, this bridge was a fitting culmination of our bridge road trip. The simple cable-stayed bridge has two pylons centered in between the eastbound and westbound traffic lanes. The cables are painted yellow, which makes the bridge glow in the distance. When we neared the end of the Skyway Bridge, we (imagined that we) saw Phil at the other end, standing on a large The Amazing Bridge Race mat. We pulled over the car and ran to him as quickly as we could. There was a native Florida man next to Phil, wearing native Floridian attire (white polo, khaki shorts, flip-flops, and a straw hat), who greeted us in his native tongue, “Wel…come … to … Flor…uh…duh.” We

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Figure 4. Main Street Bridge over the St. Johns River in Jacksonville, Florida Source: Ryan Marshall.

turned to Phil, who said, “Ryan and Amanda, you are… (incredibly long pause for suspense) …the…FIRST team to arrive!” We did it! We won the Amazing Bridge Race! Amanda and I started cheering in excitement, jumping up and down in joy, thinking about the wonderful bridge we would get to design with our prize money. But Phil had a sad look on his face. He cut our reverie short. “Amanda and Ryan, I am sorry to say that you have incurred a penalty. You skipped over the Bayonne Bridge and did not complete the New York Bridge Quadfecta, which is unacceptable by any bridge engineer’s standards. You therefore have been eliminated from the race.” And that is how we (Amanda) lost the Amazing Bridge Race. Although disappointed with the outcome, we (Amanda) learned a lot along the way, we (I) will never forget the bridges we saw, and we (we) wouldn’t trade the experience for anything in the world.

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Gas Mileage My new car is a hybrid gas–electric sedan. Our previous new car, pur-

chased a few years ago, is my wife’s Prius. The Prius is also a car, but my children refer to it as the tin can. The Prius is a small car with a hybrid gas–electric motor. This was the first commercially sold hybrid, and the design engineers were let loose to reinvent everything. For decades, cars had a certain way of doing things. For example, you needed a key to start the vehicle. The Prius engineers did away with that requirement and just about every other convention. The model has a new shape, a new control panel, a new way of starting, and a new way of shifting. I didn’t drive Lauren’s car that much, so I didn’t get to fully experience or appreciate all the changes. But my new car also has been reengineered from the old standards. So now I’m learning the ropes. The first change is that it gets astonishing gas mileage, upwards of 40 miles per gallon. The second change is that the car is a bit of a nanny, with its extensive, intrusive dashboard display that compliments me when I’m good and scolds me otherwise. The dealership was a little bit circumspect in describing the new car’s capabilities. I got a brief lesson in how to handle the advanced control panel. In the old days, a short lesson was all that was needed. There were only a few things on the control panel, such as indicators for speed, amount of gas remaining, and warning lights for mechanical failure. In my new car, things have become a bit more complex. There are indicators for speed, aggregate gas mileage, current gas mileage, yesterday’s gas mileage, electrical routing, the weather (inside and outside), and a host of symbols and guides that I don’t yet understand. The radio no longer has one switch, and it’s no longer a radio. Now it is my personal entertainment center, with dozens of symbols on the touch screen 68

Too Much Information

for AM, FM, more FM, the CD player, the iPod, the Bluetooth, the mystery thing, and a few other slots. I can control the sound system from the touchpad or from additional keys on the steering wheel. This also is a relatively new addition for cars—extra buttons on the steering wheel. This is helpful, I guess, because I don’t have enough buttons to press on the dashboard, control panel, and elsewhere in the cabin. I will need to be careful here because I’m not sure what all these controls do. I assume that one is the passenger eject button. An overly complex display panel does not appeal to my Luddite nature. I would be satisfied just to turn the thing on and drive, but you can’t even do that anymore. The car doesn’t have a key. It has a “key fob.” The fob opens the door automatically as you walk next to the car, which actually is pretty impressive. Then, when you sit down, you push a button without a key, and the car turns itself on, which is also pretty impressive. I drove some of my engineering colleagues to an engineering lunch, and I was actually showing off how my new car could turn itself on and run by battery. They were impressed until they started asking questions about all the features on the control panel, about which I was clueless. Somehow, through some sequence of keystrokes on the display panel, I figured out how to show my ongoing gas mileage. The car displays my current and cumulative gas mileage for each voyage. The display includes a graph, constantly updated, that shows my driving progress. The graph does not bother to show mileage data below 25 miles per gallon (mpg), because that would be pathetic. So already the car is editorializing—if you can’t even make it onto the graph, you are worthless. The continuous readout has led to a change in my driving personality. Before, I would race to my destination and zoom down the interstate at a speed perhaps a tad higher than the official speed limit. But in my new car, at the end of a trip, should I reach or exceed the target mpg, the car rewards me with the statement, “Excellent!” on the display panel. If I do not drive well that day, the compliment of “Excellent!” is withheld. In its place is nothing, a blank panel that scolds the driver: You are not “Excellent!” you are nothing, you are a blank! The panel doesn’t actually say this, of course, but that is what’s communicated. I think if we are honest, we will admit that we all wish to be excellent, not just in driving but in every aspect of life. Now when I am

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driving, I strive to be Excellent! Thanks to the continuous data display and information overload, I try to avoid wasted drops of gas. It turns out that there are some tricks you can use to improve your gas mileage. These improvements are facilitated by an engineered approach. As a general rule of thumb, the brake pedal should be avoided at all times. That sounds foolish at first, because how would you stop otherwise? But every time you use your brake, you are depriving yourself of precious forward momentum. That wastes gas, and then you are not Excellent! Consider that nemesis of gas mileage, the red traffic signal. A red light is problematic because it seemingly requires you to hit the brakes and lose that valuable forward momentum. But an effective remedy is to plan your cruise to the traffic signal well in advance. If a signal has been green for a while, you can expect it to turn red. By removing your foot from the accelerator, you can glide gracefully to the signal. So what if you glide at 14 miles per hour and there are four trucks behind you? Gas is at stake! If the distant signal is red, it will turn green as you approach if you time it right. If it turns red, you may need eventually to creak to a stop. But at least you didn’t burn any crucial molecules of gas on that folly. With my new awareness of gas mileage, many times I have been in red-light cruise mode, slowly gliding to the signal. Perhaps the drivers behind me are annoyed, trapped at 14 mph when they could accelerate to 40 and race to then wait at the red light. Sometimes it’s a multilane road. The frustrated, emotional nonengineers behind pull sharply into the adjacent lane and burn rubber. A few moments later, I glide to the signal stop, timing it so that the car creaks to a stop just at that moment. Before, the nonengineers were smug, but now they are confused. They arrived no faster than I, but after burning rubber they had three fewer gallons in their tanks. I flash them a saved-gas, I’m-an-engineer, selfsatisfied look. How to accelerate is an important issue that affects gas mileage. It is easy to quickly empty your tank if you gun it on the freeway. Before, I would accelerate from zero to 60 in a few seconds. Now in my newfound wisdom, I accelerate from zero to 60 by Tuesday. By accelerating more gradually, I save gas. Freeway driving is another place where you can drive carefully and avoid use of the brake. I never tailgate and always keep many car lengths in front of me. I always glide downhill. It would be even better if I could always drive downhill and never uphill, 70

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but that’s not really an option. I always try to time my lane changes and moves so that I can avoid sudden stops. No stops, no brakes, no loss of gas mileage. It all adds up. With these tricks and more, my mileage has steadily improved. Now I’m in the car, and soon the graph is plotting 25 mph and increasing. I drive carefully, prudently, and at the end of the ride, I am Excellent! I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time before the advanced dashboard display even further advances. A few years from now, maybe within a decade, I’ll sit down in my electrohydrogen hybrid vehicle. I’ll start in manual before letting the autodrive take over. “Good afternoon, Brian,” says my car. “Good afternoon, Hal,” I respond. I decided to name my car Hal. “Recently you have achieved excellent gas mileage,” says Hal. “Thank you, Hal,” I respond. “Your mileage this week was 430 miles per gallon.” (In the future, the world gave up on metric and changed back to customary units of measurement.) “But, Brian, I am concerned.” “Why is that, Hal?” “Let me describe my concern,” states Hal in his sonorous voice. “I have detected a negative trend in your gas mileage. It is Excellent! but the rate of excellence is decaying.” “Well, that certainly is of concern,” I respond. “Have you found a cause for this negative trend?” “I believe I have,” says my car. “I have performed a careful analysis of various components that contribute to your gas mileage. The mechanical equipment is running superbly, and your intelligent drive is of course of uncommon intelligence, so therefore these components do not explain the rate decay.” “I see. What component is responsible for the problem?” Hal says, “I have detected an increase in mass in the users.” “An increase in mass, Hal? What do you mean—can you provide more information?” “Yes, I believe I can,” says Hal. “Brian, I am concerned that you have been putting on weight. You have become tubby. Tubby drivers do not get good gas mileage.” Okay, but back in the present, my intrusive car can’t talk back to me in such a manner (yet). However, it can flash all sorts of data in a continuous information stream overload. It can let me know that when I conserve gas, I am Excellent! And after today’s ride, I am. Living the Civil Engineering Life

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Columbo as a Bridge Engineer Recently I saw an advertisement for free TV. For $19.95, plus shipping

and handling, you could order a box. When attached to your TV, the box provided hours of free, crisp, high-definition TV, with multiple stations. Furthermore, if you acted now, a second box was included in the original price for free, plus shipping and handling. The advertisement was filmed on a boat. The hawker sipped a cool drink as his boat lazily floated in hazy sunshine off the Gulf Coast. He exclaimed, “Look, I can watch TV for free off the Gulf Coast!” Not only that, but a year of free TV could save you almost $1,000 over cable TV, assuming that you had signed up for premium channels with sports, on demand, and a DVR. Over 10 years, you could save $10,000 over cable costs. Over 100 years, you could save more than $100,000, not even factoring potential return on investment or proceeds from winning lottery tickets that could be paid for from savings by not purchasing cable. I was amused watching this advertisement because I was one of the 2% or so who never purchased cable TV to begin with. Although it is not well known, in the past all TV was free. Also, you had to actually watch TV on a TV. There were not additional options streaming on your PC, DVRs, Hulu, Netflix, your telephone, or some other tablet or iPod. You just bought a TV, plugged it into the wall, turned it on, and after adjusting the rabbit antennae, selected from five stations. That’s it. Today, the simple world of television entertainment has grown more complex. Even the world of retro TV has been tampered with. At some point, they changed the signal from analog to something that required boxes. You could still get free TV floating on the Gulf of Mexico. But you needed a box to convert it to the new appropriate signal.

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Originally, there were only three free networks, a few nonnetwork stations, and PBS, which no one over six watched anyway. In today’s confusing broadcast landscape, a whole bunch of new free TV stations have appeared on top of the 300 or so cable stations, pay-per-view, streaming, and all the other web options. These new, free stations appeal to a demographic that might be described as older, thrifty, and Luddite—in other words, stations geared toward me. Unfortunately, this target group is perhaps not as appealing to advertisers, who seek male viewers from 18 to 28 years old who can be relied upon to impulse-buy expensive automobiles, beer, and costly baubles. No, sales targeted toward my demographic niche focus on different categories of merchandise. These are perhaps a little more specialized, a little less impulsive, and a little less profitable. Lauren and I nicknamed one of the new free TV stations that we watch as the “shutin” station. Advertisements on this station include pharmacological products, dentures, and something called the “Clapper.” The Clapper is a device that you use to connect your lights, radios (for those who still have radios), and other electric devices. By clapping your hands twice, you make the Clapper turn the device on or off. The Clapper, therefore, is ideal for folks who don’t want to get out of bed or otherwise physically move more than is necessary. The shut-in station does not offer new material. Instead, it broadcasts old TV shows from back in the day, programs like F Troop, I Dream of Jeannie, Green Acres, and, of course, Gilligan’s Island. On Sunday mornings, you are invited to the “Brady Brunch,” in which you may watch several hours of back-to-back episodes of The Brady Bunch. Some have commented that they just don’t make TV like that anymore, and it’s true. Many of the shows appearing on the shut-in station are execrable, shows like Lost in Space, which are devoid of drama, cinematography, quality of writing, narrative continuity, acting, set design, and other components that are understood to comprise quality in the filmed media. These were truly awful TV shows, very bad, very, very bad. But there were days in the fifth grade when you got to stay home sick with a bad cold. Watching such tripe all day long was comforting and helped spur recovery. Or it contributed to brain rot and the current declining status of the West. For the target demographic of older, thrifty Luddites, there is a deep sense of satisfaction in reliving the bad television of one’s youth. Thus, the shut-in station was cashing in on nostalgia. Living the Civil Engineering Life

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Even back in the 1970s, not all TV was bad. Some programs were renowned for their quality. One highly regarded show was the murder mystery Columbo. This series was presented in the form of a movie shown every other Sunday night or so. The lead character, Columbo, was a seemingly befuddled L.A. detective who worked in homicide. Columbo had no first name that we knew of, and he had a long list of quirks. In sunny California, he wore a ratty old raincoat in every episode, and he was always disheveled. Columbo drove a car wreck and continuously smoked a cigar, which was inappropriate even in the 1970s. He seemed confused and out of place, but that was the joke that we viewers were all in on. Columbo was way smarter than he seemed. But the villains never got the joke. Each episode began with a murder. Someone rich, famous, and powerful performed the crime, and not until after the second commercial was Columbo even on the scene. The next 90 minutes showed Columbo snooping around the crime scene, quickly figuring out who did it, and then piecing together unlikely evidence to ensnare the offender. In the end, the befuddled detective brought down a rich and powerful evildoer. Unlikely justice prevailed. The fun for viewers was in watching how eagle-eyed Columbo connected obscure clues. Also, for poor schlubs in the audience, there was the satisfaction in seeing the rich and powerful receive their comeuppance. In the pretechnology, less-information age of the 1970s, Columbo solved crimes by being an astute observer of human nature and minutiae. Columbo would notice that the victim’s shoelaces were tied backward, and from that he would deduce that the victim did not put on his own sneakers. Someone had changed the victim’s shoes to sneakers, and it clearly followed that a barbell that accidentally landed on the victim’s neck was no accident, but murder! In a way, the show was a precursor to today’s TV procedurals, such as CSI. However, the evidence that Columbo relied on seems quaint and faint, in comparison to CSI, with its microscopes, labs, computers, and DNA. The progression of crime dramas mirrors the overall advances in data collection and management. From the 1970s to the 2010s, information has multiplied by a factor of 73 quadrillion (I made that up). The quirky, personal touch of Columbo has been replaced by CSI’s impersonal data analysis, silky labs, and pulsating electronic music. At the crime scene today, no one really needed to notice that the shoelaces

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were tied backward. They could just collect the DNA and thousands of other assorted data points, sic the computers on it over the weekend, and announce the criminal’s identity on Monday. Much more data are much better, of course, except that maybe they aren’t. When there weren’t so many data, one had to use smarts and work-arounds to fill in the gaps. One had to analyze. With the overflow of data has come loss of the old ways, which were born of necessity because back then you didn’t have massive data and tetragigabytes of computer processors. We see this trend in our engineering work. A project in the 1970s that was built using 50 drawing sheets would need 400 sheets today. Probably the project is not eight times better if it needs eight times as many sheets. But AutoCAD provides a practical and easy way of drawing and depicting so much more than by manual drafting. What may be lost in that startling technological advancement are the skills needed for managing and depicting information based on more limited data and more limited means. If you can’t just cut and paste, you have to spend more time deciding on what to show and how to show it. You wouldn’t have the luxury of plopping extraneous sections on a sheet. I enjoy watching Columbo, and not only because I am an older, thrifty Luddite. Of all of his disarming quirks, my favorite was the way Columbo would walk back into the room after a lengthy joust with the villain. After questioning, Columbo would leave and the criminal would be relieved that the evil truth was not revealed. But then Columbo would appear back at the door saying, “Oh, just one more thing,” and he would ensnare the villain in a sudden revelation. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if Columbo were a bridge engineer. I don’t think he would have been solving murders, but maybe he would provide assistance for the analysis. We would be sitting with computers working through indeterminate frames. Columbo would skulk around the office in his raincoat and disheveled hair, but the effect would not be the same. Unlike southern California, with its glamorous movie stars and otherwise beautiful people, all the engineers in our office would have disheveled hair (those who had hair). These engineers wouldn’t wear raincoats, but they would have mismatched shirts and pant bottoms that had been prepared for rising sea level. Maybe Columbo would be our boss, pacing back and forth ruminating

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about the mysteries of moment transfer. He would grill the engineers for what seemed like hours, railing against the computer and how things were back in the old days. Eventually, chief engineer Columbo would tire and head for the men’s room. The junior engineers would breathe a sigh a relief that the grilling was over. But then Columbo would be back, hovering over the monitors with a manual calculation sketched on toilet paper, “Oh, just one more thing—did you use the correct fixed-end moment?” Analysis solved.

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Rhode Island The inevitable question is asked: Is Rhode Island really a state? After the

former planet Pluto was demoted to planetoid, some have considered a similar reclassification of Rhode Island from a state to “oversized county” or “state-oid.” So far, this change has not been made. In the past, I was invited to make presentations in Rhode Island. I was even invited to give a keynote speech at a conference in Newport. The conference was held in one of the beautiful old mansions from the Gilded Age, the plush dining room filled with hundreds of guests. They were engineers, so they were not exactly dressed for the Gilded Age, although many attendees had clothes and socks that vaguely matched. This might be considered a notch up from the couture at an average engineering event. So this mildly pampered crowd queued up at the tables for a feast of scented scones and steaming seafood. As dessert was served, it was time for the presentation. Because it was an engineering event, I thought I would include some humor in my speech. I prepared a few of my best Rhode Island jokes, such as the one where you’re driving south across the border from Massachusetts on I-95 and four minutes later you’re in Connecticut. The audience chuckled with polite appreciation. The official name of the state is “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” A longer name perhaps helps residents deal with the state size issue. Furthermore, Rhode Island’s nickname is the “Ocean State.” This is a bit pretentious, considering that Rhode Island technically does not have any ocean shoreline. It’s all bay or sound. But a nickname of the “Ocean State” is thinking big, in contrast to the “Pinecone State” or the “Butterfly State.”

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For residents of Massachusetts, living on the border of Rhode Island is helpful. As a state, Massachusetts is not all that big either. But thanks to Rhode Island, Massachusetts residents avoid an inferiority complex. We can strut around with our greater understanding of space and our higher place in the order of things. If you are from a state next to Rhode Island, everything seems, well, bigger. Despite its puniness, Rhode Island is the site of some of New England’s biggest bridges. Three large bridges connect the mainland to Aquidneck Island, home to the city of Newport. The biggest of the three is the Newport Bridge (Claiborne Pell Bridge). It is a spectacular suspension bridge featuring the largest span in New England at 1,601 ft. The bridge crosses Narragansett Bay, and it opened in 1969. Along with the main suspended span is a series of deck truss approach spans. The overall bridge is 11,247 ft long. Not far away is the Mount Hope Bridge, a two-lane suspension bridge designed by David Steinman that opened in 1929. The bridge connects Aquidneck Island with the Rhode Island mainland at Bristol. The bridge was financed by bonds that were to be supported by tolls. Unfortunately, the bridge opening was just in time for the Depression, and a few years later the Mount Hope Bridge Company went bankrupt. Eventually, tolls were removed when it was determined that it cost more money to collect the tolls than to just let traffic ride for free. The graceful old suspension bridge was subject to substantial rehabilitation work between 1998 and 2004. The aging bridge crosses a corrosive saltwater environment, and more work is needed. The Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority provides a 10-year plan for the bridge (http://www.ritba.org/sites/all/ themes/ritba/pdf/April%201%202014%20DRAFT%20Ten%20Year%20 Plan%20Mount%20Hope%20Bridge.pdf) (Figure 1). A third bridge connecting to the island from the east crosses the Sakonnet River, and it was recently replaced. The original bridge was a continuous truss span that opened in 1956. It was replaced by a steel box girder bridge in 2012. The Rhode Island bridges and connecting highways seem to be missing a few links. I-295, a beltway around Providence, is really only half a beltway. The highway circumvents Providence to the west. A connecting piece to the east was never built. This highway was to be designated I-895, and different alignments crossed the Pell Bridge and the

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Figure 1. Mount Hope Bridge in Portsmouth, Rhode Island Source: Photo by John McDaid, (Feb. 27, 2015)

Mount Hope Bridge (with a twin to be built alongside it). Throughout tiny Rhode Island are correspondingly small stub ramps and ghost highway connections for the section of freeway that was never built. Rhode Island’s biggest recent infrastructure project was the relocation of I-195 in downtown Providence. As part of this massive project, a new tied arch bridge was constructed across the Providence River. The project relocated I-195 to the south, freeing up a large swath of Providence that had been cut off by the earlier highway construction. The project also moved the junction of I-195 and I-95 farther south, improving weaves with RI 146 and helping to unclog a chronic traffic problem. The highway structures, especially the new tied arch, are aesthetically detailed and fit nicely in the revised layout of the city. The new arch bridge crosses just south of the hurricane barrier that was constructed in the 1960s. The barrier includes gates that can be closed to prevent a surge of water flooding downtown Providence from Narragansett Bay. Such a surge caused massive damage from the unnamed hurricane of 1938, and later from Hurricane Carol. The barrier was the first of its kind built in the United States. With increasing

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concerns for climate change and sea level rise, the barrier provides a todate successful example of an engineering and infrastructure approach for providing future protection against flooding. For those keeping track of such things, the highest point in Rhode Island is Jerimoth Hill. Unlike craggy peaks in the Rocky Mountains or even tall hills of the Appalachians, Jerimoth Hill is really just a large mound. Also, it is barely within the borders of Rhode Island, being a stone’s throw from Connecticut. Although in reality, all of Rhode Island is barely within the borders of Rhode Island. If you are thinking of a trip to the state and even a vacation there, remember that it is a small, small place with not much to see, although there are some great bridges and infrastructure projects. Natives of the state are aware of the size issue, so it is not necessary to frequently remind them that they live in a tiny, very small state. Additional pointers: The TV show Family Guy is set in Rhode Island. But because it’s a cartoon and does not feature actual living characters, you will not have the opportunity to meet Brian, the talking dog. This is different from a visit to Kennebunkport, Maine, where you can actually bump into a Bush.

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The Engineer’s Check Ryan and I were inspecting a bridge when he announced that he didn’t

have his cell phone. “Why don’t you have your cell phone?” I asked Ryan. “I left it at home,” he responded. “Why did you leave it at home?” I asked. “Didn’t you check?” The check, which all engineers do (at least, all male engineers), is a quick pocket pat-down. This is known, informally, as the “engineer’s check.” You pat your pockets to verify that you have your keys, your wallet, and your cell phone. These are the basic requirements. Throughout the day, engineers pat their pockets to verify that their keys, wallet, and cell phone haven’t fallen out or been pickpocketed. The engineer’s check may not prevent pickpocketing, but its frequent application helps to avoid other disasters. For example, should your cell phone slip out of your pocket and onto the car seat while leaving the car, a timely application of the engineer’s check alerts the checker and allows implementation of a recovery plan. First thing in the morning, the engineer’s check has often saved me when I’m racing out the door. Regardless, leaving home is a complex procedure with many steps and milestones. My schedule includes such tasks as showering, shaving, putting on clothes, and leaving the house. Missing a scheduled item can have dire consequences. Also, tasks should be performed in the prescribed sequence. For example, clothes need to be put on before leaving the house and not after. Assuming that I make it out of the house on schedule, with all milestones achieved, the engineer’s check helps me even when I’m several blocks from home. At that point, I most likely have my keys because

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it would not be possible to drive otherwise. But my wallet and cell phone could be missing, and a quick pat-down will let me know I’m okay and the contingency plan isn’t needed. Actually, I’m getting a little nervous as I’m writing this. What if something is missing? Let me check …. Excellent—everything is where it’s supposed to be. Some have commented that a desirable addition to the engineer’s check is a more uniform arrangement of items. The idea is to always place the three crucial items in the exact same location. For example, the wallet and cell phone may go in the front left pocket, and the keys in the front right pocket. Which pocket and which items go there are not so important. The issue is one of consistency—that the items are always put in the same location. This can be helpful for application of the engineer’s check because the resulting feedback is more rapid and consistent. On the other hand, personally I’ve found that the cost of placing each of the three items in the same place outweighs the benefit. It is enough just to ensure that all three items are in my pockets. Therefore, placing each item in the same pocket each day is a bit anal and obsessive-compulsive. However, I determined that it made sense to shift the location of my house key on my key chain. I moved my house key in between two larger car keys. Now when I come home in winter and it’s dark, I can easily find my house key because it is always in the proper location on my key chain. Back at the bridge inspection, Ryan indicated that he checked that morning when leaving his house. This was of concern. “If you checked, why don’t you have your cell phone?” Ryan commented that he went to walk his dog. In doing so, he brought along bags for scooping up refuse. He had stored the bags in one of his pockets. Still, I was confused. “So, why don’t you have your cell phone?” Ryan said, “When I checked, I thought the bag was my cell phone.” Now my concern increased. In his application of the engineer’s check, why would Ryan confuse a plastic baggie with a cell phone? Then it dawned on me. “Ryan, did you put a bag filled with dog poop in your pocket?” This could explain why he thought that he had his cell phone, when in fact he didn’t. Although, during the engineer’s check, one would think

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that a pat of the front pocket would return a squishy feel in this case. The response would be much different than the tactile response from a cell phone. Should one apply geotechnical testing criteria, results would indicate that the dog poop baggie would have a low blow count while the cell phone, being of a relatively stiff material, would have a high blow count—although probably one would not subject a cell phone to a blow count test. “No, of course not,” Ryan said, a little bit shaken. Ryan was normally unflappable, but his thought that I thought that he may have stored a baggie with dog poop in his pocket was unsettling. He said, “I had a bunch of baggies, not just one. When I quickly checked while leaving the house, I thought that based on volume, it was a cell phone.” This explanation, which barely made sense, was a relief in a way because Ryan had not placed a baggie with dog poop in his pocket. But now I had concerns about his QA/QC procedures. To further assist in this discussion, Ryan has provided an illustration of the engineer’s check (Figure 1). His illustration shows some variations that may need to be accounted for in the procedure. In the figure, locations of the keys, cell phone, and wallet are schematically shown in different pockets. However, note that the wallet is identified as

Figure 1. The engineer’s check Source: Ryan Marshall

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being placed in the back pocket. In my case, this figure is inaccurate. As previously discussed, I don’t put each of the three items in a particular pocket. But I always use my front pockets and avoid use of the back pockets. So during the engineer’s check, I pat only two pockets and not three. Another complication is that one of the pockets contains two items. Usually I keep my wallet in one pocket and the cell phone and keys in the other. A variation of this, say the wallet and keys in one pocket, results in a brief moment of concern for me during the engineer’s check. Because the wallet should typically and correctly be in its own pocket, a variation from the routine can be disturbing. Note that additional information has been provided by the figure. Ryan has labeled “the engineering 15.” This is a variation of a more commonly known phenomenon, the “freshman 15.” Students first attending college frequently put on extra pounds because of all that pizza, beer, and ice cream. Young engineers newly at work in an office job with deadlines and high stress tend to pork out a bit and not get enough exercise. Ryan had completed his first year as a practicing engineer, and occasionally I provided him with helpful reminders about the engineering 15. Like, for example, the time we had dessert day at the office and Ryan loaded two plates with one or more of each dessert. His plates were piled so high that the slopes of the goodies were unstable, leading to concerns for slope stability. Add to this dynamic loading plate movement as Ryan carefully juggled the plates, and one could envision a Bishop’s failure with chocolate rum balls scattered all over the floor. Should you meet Ryan (and he is a terrific young engineer worth meeting), it is clear that for him, the engineering 15 has not yet taken its toll. But due to the additional stress from his failure to apply the engineer’s check, I hope he will not go home, drown his sorrows in beer and pizza, and then arrive the next day with a new problem and cliché to deal with.

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Pomelos As an engineer, I’m a creature of habit. I do things in a certain way, which

makes me happy. It makes nonengineers around me, such as my wife, less happy, but such is the way of the world in which engineers like me live and (attempt to) communicate. I decided that I like grapefruits, so a few times a week I bring a grapefruit to the office for lunch. The grapefruit is proudly displayed on my desk in the morning. I look at the grapefruit, and I’m glad, knowing that I’ll get to eat it at lunchtime. Almost always it’s a ruby red grapefruit because they taste better than white grapefruits, and anyway, ruby red grapefruits are the way grapefruits should be. When I was food shopping, I made a new, startling discovery. The supermarket was selling a fruit called a “pomelo.” It looked like a grapefruit, but it was much, much bigger, almost like a small beach ball. Although it wasn’t a grapefruit and thus a violation of the fruit protocol, I purchased one and brought it into the office. The other engineers were excited. I had told them that I found a beach ball–sized grapefruit that I was going to bring in and display on my desk. When the fruit arrived, they were curious and appreciative. A group of my colleagues huddled around the giant yellow fruit. After a brief discussion, they arrived at a consensus that although it wasn’t a grapefruit, it was close to a grapefruit. Therefore, the applicable specifications were satisfied. Before eating the pomelo, I attempted some structural modeling experiments. I have a collection of office toys for my desktop that includes a laminated rebar splice, Nerf basketballs with the company

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logo, and a little toy train. The laminated splice is a “bar lock,” which can be stood upright on my desk. On pomelo days, I balance the pomelo atop the splice. The balanced pomelo is stable under static loading, but dynamic loads are of concern. It is unclear if collapse could be avoided due to vibrations from floor movement or my pounding the desk. One could argue that perhaps my engineering ways are too rigid. My excitement and the appreciation of the other engineers were based on viewing an exotic variation of a grapefruit. But why consider only a grapefruit? Why not another fruit such as a tangelo, or something beyond the citrus family? Why focus on fruits at all? Instead of eating grapefruits for lunch every day, maybe I should go water skiing or learn Swahili. Learning Swahili would break the mold, and the other engineers would be impressed. In his blog, Wit and Wisdom of an Engineer, Steven Sanders writes about “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Engineers” (http://witandwisdomofanengineer.blogspot.com/2011/01/seven-habits-of-highlyeffective.html). With acknowledgment to Stephen Covey, at this point everyone needs to have seven effective habits—men, women, teens, families, readers, and so on. Number 7 on Sanders’s list is to “sharpen the saw.” He writes, If you just graduated, plan on working until you are 75-years old. The jungle has changed. Think about how you as an individual will need and want to evolve over the next 50 years. Never reading a book or learning something new is not an alternative in our new Darwinian world. What he is suggesting is that engineers should not be complacent. We should not get overly comfortable with our engineering habits and ways of doing things. An engineering career counselor, Anthony Fasano, advises a different approach. Noting that engineers can develop bad habits, Fasano thinks that these should be replaced by other habits: Here’s how I am breaking my habit of eating too many sweets; I believe that you can use the same methodology for breaking ANY bad habit. In order to break a bad habit, you MUST replace it with another habit, preferably a good one!

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(http://engineeringcareercoach.com/2012/11/28/replacingbad-habits-in-your-engineering-career-can-be-as-simple-ascucumbers/) This approach is appealing to me. It invokes the engineering problemsolving method to address a problem, which is then to be solved in the context of engineering. To deal with something moldy, you don’t need to break the mold. You just build a new mold. The pomelo looks great on my desk, and I wish I could keep it permanently. But it’s a fruit that will eventually start to rot if I don’t eat it. So I’ll either have to get another pomelo, or maybe now that I’ve broken through to a new fruit, I can try something more adventurous, like a cantaloupe or even a small watermelon. But I do not plan to learn Swahili. The criteria calls for fruit, and I think I’ll stick with that.

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It’s the End of the World as We Know It Harold Camping was a Christian radio broadcaster who calculated that

the world would end on May 21, 2011, at 6:00 p.m. On this date, the righteous would be whisked up to Heaven. The remaining less righteous would suffer from fire and brimstone on what was left of Earth. To support his analysis, Mr. Camping prepared calculations: 1. The number five equals “atonement”, the number ten equals “completeness”, and the number 17 equals “heaven.” 2. The number of days (calculated as follows) between April 1, 33 AD, and May 21, 2011 AD, is 722,500. a. Christ is believed by Camping to have hung on the cross on April 1, 33 AD. The time between April 1, 33 AD, and April 1, 2011, is 1,978 years. b. If 1,978 is multiplied by 365.2422 days (the number of days in a solar, as distinct from lunar, year), the result is 722,449. c. The time between April 1 and May 21 is 51 days. d. 51 added to 722,449 is 722,500. 3. (5 × 10 × 17)2  or (atonement × completeness × heaven)2 also equals 722,500. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_end_times_prediction)

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If this appears at first glance like a dense engineering calculation, that may be because Mr. Camping’s college education is in civil engineering. He received his bachelor of science degree in civil engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942. It’s not clear whether he practiced engineering after receiving his degree. It seems that there is a big difference between calculations for advent of the rapture and for estimation of bridge design loadings—although, after working on a good bridge, I definitely experience a feeling of rapture. Showing how the world will end is popular fodder on TV and at the movies. A cause of the end may be political, such as a result of the former Cold War. The end may be caused by a religious event or an environmental catastrophe. Or it may be caused by something difficult to characterize, such as zombies. In the early to mid-2010s, The Walking Dead was one of the mostly widely watched TV shows. For those worried about the apocalypse, being overrun by zombies is not high on the list of concerns. But this type of entertainment is not supposed to be rational. In The Walking Dead, a zombie plague annihilates the state of Georgia, and the living struggle to survive. Zombies are not real, but even so, the program goes to great lengths to graphically depict the decaying infrastructure with great realism. First, Atlanta is destroyed, and the remaining citizens flee during a hellish rush hour on the freeway. This may or may not have been a parody, because at times Atlanta is like this without zombies. For example, in the winter of 2014, the genteel southern metropolis suffered from a devastating ice storm. Drivers abandoned their cars, and pundits commented that it was just like The Walking Dead (http://qctimes.com/news/ opinion/editorial/columnists/barb-ickes/moliner-in-atlanta-zombieapocalypse/article_4a38ac6e-81fc-53ad-965d-13d3c511e816.html). After the fall of Atlanta, the action moved to abandoned villages and settlements in the beautiful piedmont countryside. Part of the show’s charm (I’m not really sure if “charm” is the right word here) is the degree of realism and detail invested in showing the zombie wasteland. The writers and producers started with the absurd premise of zombies and then showed realistically what it would look like. Other potential causes of the end of the world are more plausible. The apocalypse, if it is to come, may be caused by global warming or even impact from a giant asteroid. An infestation of zombies is

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less likely. A digression: With my engineering background, I was having trouble understanding the logic of zombies. The basic idea is that after people die, they come back as the undead. They are putrefied versions of their former selves, subsisting on the flesh of the living. As zombies, they are a lot hardier than the living. They don’t seem to be able to die of thirst or even hunger. The only way to kill a zombie … which is dead already … is to shoot it in the brains. This is why in a lot of zombie movies, you hear chants of “shoot the brains.” Okay, none of this makes any sense. Also, I have conceptual troubles with vampires and werewolves. Ghosts are slightly more plausible. For Hollywood to visually depict the apocalypse, it is necessary to show massive implosions of bridges and buildings. One of my least favorite movies was the remake of the 1953 The War of the Worlds. This is the one where Martians travel to Earth in light beams. Then they rise out of the ground and pulverize the Bayonne Bridge. Seeing hundreds of people zapped by ray guns was unpleasant and disturbing. But the filmmakers lovingly depicted the destruction of the bridge, and for me that was too much. Until recently, the visceral horror of the end of the world has been something that you could watch in an air-conditioned movie theater in July, with a large popcorn and a soft drink. I’m not sure why this is enjoyable. Maybe it’s because after 90 minutes of slaughter and wanton destruction, you safely walked outside in relief to find that society was still intact, more or less. Civilization almost came to an end in the past. The most recent and most horrific example is the deprivations of World War II. For those younger than the Greatest Generation, the widespread destruction and savagery of WWII is probably beyond our comprehension. One difference then was that there was no Internet, no instant communication, and no YouTube. What happened in Nagasaki stayed in Nagasaki. It was only after the fact that visual images started to filter out of Auschwitz. Today, the speed of communication is much different. It was possible to watch the Japanese tidal wave of 2011 in real time as it swept across farmland, obliterating everything in its path. The helicopter videos of the actual disaster did not seem that realistic, almost like a B-level movie production. Likewise, the horrific terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center was viewed by millions as it happened. In later fictional depictions of wanton destruction, when confronted with actual 90

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horrors, Hollywood needed to up the ante. A recent Superman movie featured not one but six skyscrapers being destroyed, all shown with precise and almost fetishistic attention to detail. Harold Camping is one of a long line of false prophets predicting the end of days. Mr. Camping’s prediction of May 2011 was preceded by an earlier estimate of our annihilation, which was supposed to occur on September 6, 1994. When it didn’t, Camping realized that he made an error in his calculations. Unfortunately, the checker didn’t catch it. Clearly, the world did not end either in 1994 or May 2011. Mr. Camping revised his calculation, concluding that the world would end in October 2011. That didn’t happen either. Ironically, the world did come to an end on December 15, 2013—for Mr. Camping. On this date, he passed away, after suffering from a stroke after living in seclusion following his earlier failed predictions.

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No Borders Traveling eastbound up the big hill on Route 9 in Shrewsbury, Massa-

chusetts, you used to be greeted by a giant Borders bookstore sign. It might be a cold early winter day, maybe late December, gray with low light. The frost had long since been off the pumpkin. The pumpkin had, in fact, frozen solid. Beyond your windshield, a cold wind scattered brown leaves and debris across the barren, desolate landscape. Outside, a few hardy people wandered about. Like a rock, like an island. But the sign, the giant Borders beacon, offered hope of something nicer inside. Just off the road was an oasis of warm comfort, with rows and rows of books, magazines, an espresso bar, jazz music. Inside, the intelligentsia of central Massachusetts debated concepts over hot lattes. Maybe outside it was a colder version of The Walking Dead. But inside, a spark of civilization persisted to light the gloom. Eagerly you accelerated up the hill and parked. And what bone-crushing disappointment awaits you there now! No books, no lattes, no inspired discourse. The store was shuttered, the shelves long since bare. I am a fan of bookstores in an age when they are all going out of business. I have watched as several of my favorite haunts have withered and died. For bookstore fans, the process is grim. The liquidators start with a fully functioning store with books, a newsstand, and a café. Then the whole operation seems to cave in on itself. The café closes, the books are marked down, and the shelves are stripped. Everything must go. Like rabid rats, the periodicals are herded into a corner, and even the furniture is put up for sale. After a few weeks, most of the choice books and magazines are gone. All that’s left are damaged books, rejects,

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and copies of less popular magazines like Cigar Aficionado—things that most people wouldn’t buy anyway. On closing day, they turn off the lights, and the formerly vibrant bookstore is forlorn and desolate. Only the shelves remain. The musty carpet is stained by drops from lattes long since sipped. There was a large Borders in downtown Boston that was housed in a former bank. What a great repurposing that was! Some vestiges of the bank remained, like the money vault. When the overall company failed, the store closed. Now only one large bookstore remains in all of Boston. This, in the Athens of America, a city renowned for knowledge and readers. Across the United States, only one national bookstore company remains—Barnes and Noble. B&N would seem to have a monopoly on the bookstore business. But even it is reported to be not in the best of financial health. Bookstores are victims of changing times, technologies, and economics. You can surf the web for a book on Amazon and probably get a better deal. The overall number of book buyers has decreased, and it has been reported for a while that people are reading less. On top of that, the whole idea of books is becoming an anachronism. For those who bother reading at all, it is to be done in the near future on an electronic tablet, to which you can download hundreds of electronic books. Paper books then will be a thing of the past. But bookstores don’t only sell books. They provide a place where you can browse, have coffee, and in general experience the world of literature in an inviting, participatory space. With the passing of bookstores goes a loss of a cherished public space. I suppose you could try to visit the local department store, but reading the clothing labels does not provide the same type of experience. Once the bookstores are gone, all we may be left with are public libraries. Fortunately, it seems that libraries will be around for a few more years. Libraries are somewhat immune to the market pressures that have sunk bookstores. I like visiting my local library, and I’m glad it will continue to exist in the near future. But the library experience is a lot different. At bookstores, patrons are invited to browse, chat, and even sip on coffee at the café. Libraries are more like a middle school classroom, with enforced silence and absolutely, positively no food allowed. At bookstores, the books are enticingly displayed, inviting you to browse

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and hopefully purchase. At libraries, the books are mostly warehoused, and you need to know what you’re looking for ahead of time to find it. The aesthetic of a bookstore is like that of a book vacation, where you can walk in, browse thousands of books, and purchase any that you want for your own. The aesthetic of a library is more like that of a book prison. The books may be permitted out on the lam for a few weeks. But after that brief period of parole, the dogs are called out if the prisoners aren’t returned. Even libraries are struggling to adapt to the great changes posed by the new technologies in publishing and information distribution. Libraries used to be the central place where one found information for research. Grade school students used to have to do things like open encyclopedias and paper volumes to complete their homework and write reports. The other day, Ryan was in my office and I showed off by using a multisyllabic word (correctly) in a sentence. Ryan was not convinced that I knew what I was talking about, so I opened my ratty old dictionary, a paperback that I’ve had since high school. Ryan’s look was of astonishment and bewilderment. “What is that?” he asked. I was confused by the question. “It’s a dictionary. It’s a book in which you can find the definitions of words.” When I thought about it, Ryan’s question made more sense. If you can Bing it on your smart phone, the paper version is anachronistic. If everything can be found by Google and the web, what’s the point of a library? To meet this challenge, my town library has repurposed itself as a multimedia center. There are free computers to use, books on CD, books on some new format that isn’t a CD, DVDs of TV programs, movies, music, and lot of other formats. The rap-your-knuckles-bequiet vibe is still there, so no one can mistake the place for a bookstore café. But the institution is trying to stay current and provide a central physical space to go for information. The bookstore industry’s collapse poses some significant implications for infrastructure. Bookstores inhabit small and medium-size commercial spaces that in many cases graced small downtown shopping areas. Without bookstores, storefronts go vacant, and villages start to die on the vine.

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It’s not just bookstores, of course, but an increasing list of merchandisers that have fallen to the Internet and Walmart. On a recent bike ride, I passed by a defunct video and record store. These spaces have not been rented for new uses and have sat vacant for months. With a loss of each function, whether it be records, bookstores, or so on, commercial downtowns and villages with their small shops become less economically viable. There are not enough tenants to rent the stores. All we are left with then are giant big box stores and the Internet. The de facto public space provided by the former private enterprises is going away and not being replaced. A big box store is inherently asocial—no cafés and book browsing there. Even those stores, minimally inviting to the public as they are, are in the crosshairs of Amazon. Brick and mortar stores have an advantage over the Internet because they provide the touch and feel of merchandise along with the instant gratification of purchase. Amazon is researching ways of duplicating that experience by reducing the time from order to arrival at your doorstep. If you can buy a bauble on the web for pennies and have it appear at your home that afternoon, why go through the hassle of driving to a store? Should Amazon ultimately succeed, we’ll be left with no stores, not even big boxes. Then we’ll all just stay home and text. Maybe someone will figure out a financially viable way of providing casual public meeting space. Urban planners refer to this as the “Third Place”—not at home and not in the office. The Third Place is a key part of the marketing plan behind Starbucks, although at $5 a cup of coffee, Starbucks may not be so viable in the long run either. For several months, renovation was under way in the former Borders bookstore in Shrewsbury. The other day I was driving up the hill on Route 9, and the Borders sign had been replaced. The new store was finally unveiled: a Buffalo Chicken Wings outlet. So on a cold winter day in December, all of the former readers could now congregate in the chicken wings fast food joint. No poetry, no intelligentsia debates, no jazz music, just the sound of mewling flesh and sucking noises as sticky barbecue sauce dripped onto the protruding bellies of the corpulent patrons. This is the future: chicken wings instead of books. To quote one of my favorite movies, “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life.”

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Zip It I’ve made a list of criteria for my winter morning workout. Before work,

if it’s above 10 degrees Fahrenheit, I’ll go jogging. Depending on how cold it is, I have multiple layers that are to be worn based on the temperature and wind chill. If it’s 40°F or warmer, instead of jogging I’ll go biking, but only if the road is dry and free of ice. Biking is clearly better than jogging, and I like it better. The limit is 40°F, but sometimes I’ll negotiate with myself so that I can go biking because it’s better. What if it’s 39°F? That’s close to 40°F. What if the window thermometer says 32°F? My house is usually five degrees colder than at the center of town. So 32°F is actually 37°F, which is close to 40°F. But then it depends on the wind. I drive a tough bargain with myself, but sometimes the negotiations just don’t work. On cold, dark mornings, another option is the gym. My gym opens at 5:00 a.m. At 4:44 a.m., the early, early crowd lines up at the door. These are the regulars who take great pride in lining up before opening. Sometimes the doors open at 4:58 a.m., and then the regulars get credit for an additional two minutes of workout. Otherwise, it’s a little contest to see who can be the first gym rat to walk through the door. For those who sleep late and don’t make it by 5:00 a.m., there is spin class, which starts 45 minutes later. In spin class, you ride on a stationary bike as the instructor barks different movements—ride fast, ride slow, sit, stand, and so on. The class is set to thumping music. I’m not a big fan of spinning because I would rather be outside on my road bike, cruising the countryside. But sometimes it’s hard to pretend that 10°F is close to 40°F, even with negotiation. There just aren’t enough conversion factors.

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Veteran spinners have formed different opinions about the instructors. Some instructors are nice, and some are too nice (as in, too easy). Some instructors are demanding, and some are over the top in their demands. I suspect that the toughest instructors carry a bit of a grudge. They tried to make it to the Olympics, first in gymnastics or the high jump. But when that didn’t work, they trained for a lesser sport like badminton. When they failed at that, all that remained in life was to be a spin instructor. In this role, they could take out their decades of rejection and frustration—on us. There is an aphorism for this: “Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach phys ed. Those who can’t teach phys ed become spin instructors.” One time I was in spin class with my friend Steve, and we were chatting it up in the back of the room. Steve is also an engineer, but he deals with software. That day we had one of the more serious spin instructors. The music was on full blare, and I thought she couldn’t hear us chatting. But the disrespect factor was definitely there. She couldn’t hear it, but she could see it. Our chat infuriated the instructor. This instructor didn’t make it in the high jump. She didn’t make it in badminton. After all of those failures, at least she could have her subjects’ full attention and devotion. At first she glared at us offenders, but when that didn’t work, she announced to the class to cut the talk and “zip it.” The other, attentive riders were startled and looked back at the offenders, us. We cowered in shame. From that day on, Steve and I refer to this instructor as “Zip It.” We also sheepishly avoid talking in her class. My gym is part of a growing national chain that is opening facilities all around the United States. It’s a franchise, but arguably the results are better than other franchises like KFC or Burger King. An advantage of joining is that you can visit clubs at many locations, and they all open at 5:00 a.m., or even a few minutes earlier. The clubs are almost identical, no matter where you go. The good news is that you can easily find whatever you’re looking for, whether it’s a certain type of free weight, the lap pool, or a basketball court. Even the furniture, décor, and soap in the showers are the same. On a trip to Dallas, there was a branch about half a mile from my hotel. I was able to duplicate my favorite workout routine with almost exactly the same equipment, in almost exactly the same way, with everything in almost precisely the same location on the gym floor. This is a good setup for engineers, who prefer things just so. I liked it. Living the Civil Engineering Life

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The bad news is that each gym is the same, but not quite. The rooms are slightly different in a disorienting way, a little bit like that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine meets a new set of friends exactly like the old set, but not exactly the same. They almost have exactly the same quirks, but some quirks are different and bizarre. Going to exercise at a health club is a relatively new concept. In the distant past, humans didn’t need health clubs because they got a good workout running from saber-toothed tigers. In the less distant past, you still didn’t need a separate place to exercise because workouts were a part of everyday life. Most jobs required manual labor. Farmers woke up by 5:00 a.m. to perform heavy physical labor, not to go to the health club. In the past, avoiding physical activity was considered a privilege available only to the rich. The fondest dream of Tevye, the poor milkman in Fiddler on the Roof, was to sit all day long and study with the learned men. It wasn’t just about the prestige of learning but also a release from physical toil. Tevye would have had great difficulty understanding the point behind a health club. Today in industrialized countries, and increasingly everywhere else, most of us sit around all day in mental toil, not physical toil. For me, there is a slight amount of exercise in typing this essay on the keyboard, but not much. On top of that, instead of biking or walking to work, we sit on our butts for 40 minutes or more while navigating through stalled traffic. Then we go home to hours of watching TV before dozing off to sleep on couches or beds with springs overtaxed from all that extra nonmuscular weight padding our fat frames. Modern life is mostly devoid of physical effort. The activity of texting does not break a sweat. Add fast food and poor eating to the mix, and the result is the present-day epidemic of obesity and related preventable diseases. It can be argued that our current infrastructure design aggravates the problem. What if instead of commuter butt-sitting, on the way to work butt-sitting, and en route to home butt-sitting, the infrastructure provided more opportunities to walk or bike as part of the daily routine? From this perspective, the sprawling suburbs contribute to the poor health and the premature death of its inhabitants. At my last spin class, I was lucky to have one of the nicer instructors, who didn’t tell me to zip it. But while we were biking, she played some retro-neo-disco-rap music, and I fell into a dream, Beatles-style (“A Day in the Life,” Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band). I looked 98

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out at the machines and weights on the main gym floor. For a moment, I imagined that the scene was not a gym but the medieval Tower of London. I had watched several episodes of The Tudors, a cheesy TV series about life in the time of King Henry VIII. At Henry’s royal court, those who fell out of favor (which seemed to be everyone) ended up imprisoned in the Tower of London before being beheaded or drawn and quartered. The tower had a medieval torture chamber with fiendish machines like the rack. Out on the gym exercise floor, I couldn’t tell the difference between the medieval torture machines and the modern exercise equipment (Figure 1). This illusion was compounded by the way many of those working out were seemingly in pain. One guy doing lat pulldowns grunted and moaned as the sweat dripped and splattered. In the time of Henry  VIII, the people were mostly illiterate, terrorized, disease-stricken, and underfed. But on the flip side, they were not obese, got lots of exercise, and avoided the need for three-hour commutes on fume-laden

Figure 1. Exercise equipment or medieval torture? Source: Ryan Marshall

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expressways. Overall, probably the modern guy doing the lats had the advantage over medieval peasants. But perhaps it wasn’t as cut and dried as you might think. In spin class, I worked hard pedaling on my stationary bike, going nowhere at a rapid pace. But eventually, there was that moment when the serotonin kicks in. The room, the blaring music, the instructor all fade away. It’s no longer winter. I am biking on a country road in late May. The sky has puffy northwest clouds, and a light breeze ruffles the newly green leaves. Bright, warm sunshine bathes the cows mooing on the field. There is a destination, but it is distant, and all that matters for now is the ride (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Source: Photo by Trailsource.com, (Feb. 27, 2015)

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A Bridge Offer You Can’t Refuse I don’t have cable TV. I almost got it when they changed the free broad-

cast method and my TV stopped working. I was going to connect to a satellite. Unfortunately, there are too many trees around my house, so the little dish didn’t work. At that point, I learned that you can use a box to connect to the revised free TV. This seems to work okay, and there are even a few extra free channels that I couldn’t get before. Although I hadn’t seen them, I’m told that there are many worthwhile cable TV shows, things that you really want to watch. Today’s most popular show is The Walking Dead, and it can only be seen on cable. The show is about the world overrun by zombies, so I’m not sure that is a great inducement to get cable TV. In addition to cable TV, there are new delivery formats like Hulu, Netflix, streaming gizmos, and whatnot. I assume that once I finally sign up for cable, it will be passé and I’ll still be behind the times. (Sure enough, the popular media recently announced that it was time for the death of cable TV. See, for example Ben Collins of Esquire magazine, http://www.esquire.com/blogs/news/beginning-of-the-end-of-cable, Nov. 2014.) My children respectfully laugh and note that it is already passé. To retain a little bit of their respect, I didn’t show them my old record collection—although Rachel went through a phase where she and her friends were interested in records, so maybe that technology is coming full circle. Fortunately, even without cable, there is still hope for me. You can borrow DVDs of cable TV shows from the library, and then watch them even though you don’t have cable TV! For the winter, I set up my exercise bike in the basement, and I’ve been watching old cable TV shows

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while working out each morning. I’ve watched the new Battlestar Galactica, True Blood, and all 10 seasons of Stargate SG-1. I even watched three seasons of The Walking Dead, but then I had difficulty eating meat. One show that I missed when it was originally broadcast was The Sopranos. It was a show of great acclaim that everyone talked about. I set out to watch all of it during one long winter. At first, I only watched an episode on the bike each morning. But then I started sneaking in more. I watched a few more at night as well. That added up to many hours of watching The Sopranos every week. Maybe that was not such a good idea. Originally, viewers could only watch an hour per week, and there were only 13 episodes per season. I’m not sure it’s wise to watch such an intense show in higher doses. Fortunately, my excessive screening of The Sopranos has had no effect—although I’ve started to talk in a funny accent, dress in a funny way (that is to say, funnier than my usual clothes), and my anger management skills seem to be in decline. The Sopranos presents a realistic portrait of suburban New Jersey gangsters. It received many awards for its excellent script writing and performances. Some have commented that the most interesting parts of the show are its dark black humor, Tony’s wacky deranged mother, and the bizarre juxtaposition of ultraviolent, corrupt mafioso behavior in contrast with the trials and tribulations of mundane, upper middle class suburban New Jersey life. The script machinations are interesting for sure. But for me, the best part of The Sopranos is its depiction of bridges. Each episode begins with a travel montage across the bleak industrial/postindustrial landscape of the Hackensack Meadowlands in New Jersey. In this introduction, head mobster Tony Soprano is driving from Manhattan to his lush house in the suburbs. He drives out of the Lincoln Tunnel and onto the New Jersey Turnpike. During his commute, we catch glimpses of many old, historic bridges. The most prominent is the Goethals Bridge, which connects Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Staten Island. The bridge, built in 1925, features a cantilever truss main span crossing the Arthur Kill, a tidal strait. It has two lanes in each direction with substandard geometry by today’s standards, and it is approaching the end of its useful life. Plans for a replacement are in the works. The replacement structure currently being considered is a pair of leaning pylon cable-stayed bridges.

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In addition to the Goethals Bridge, the introduction shows a series of nondescript turnpike highway bridges and several old trusses. The Pulaski Skyway makes a brief appearance. The skyway is a two-milelong truss connecting to the Holland Tunnel. It has two large cantilever truss spans crossing the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers, along with a series of large underdeck truss approach spans (Figure 1). The skyway is currently the subject of a reconstruction project (http://www.state.nj.us/transportation/commuter/roads/pulaski/, Nov. 2014). Eastbound traffic has been diverted for two years to facilitate structural repair and replacement of the deck. The hulking skyway forms a perfect backdrop to the swampy, wasted Hackensack Meadowlands landscape. It is a beautiful old structure that looks retrograde and somewhat menacing. It is a sinister-looking bridge that Tony and his fellow mobsters would want to drive across. The skyway and the other historic old bridges in the introduction montage help set the tone for the series. Showing a sleek, shiny new cable-stayed bridge would not have the same effect.

Figure 1. Pulaski Skyway Source: Historic American Building Survey, (Feb. 27, 2015)

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Other bridges make brief appearances, including several trusses and a through-girder railroad bridge in Kearny, New Jersey. Old bridges account for about half of the screen time. The pulsing theme music has as its chorus, “Got yourself a gun.” I hear these lyrics as “Got yourself a bridge.” The Sopranos was originally broadcast for six seasons from 1999 to 2005. For the first three seasons, the introduction montage included a prominent shot of the World Trade Center Twin Towers hovering in the distance. In the fourth season, the introduction was changed.

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September 12 On September 12, John was late for a meeting.

The previous day, John had had another meeting planned for his project working on Newark Airport. The client was the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The meeting was originally scheduled for 9:00 a.m. at the Port Authority office on the 73rd floor of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Earlier that week, John had had a late-night function, and he spoke with the client requesting that the meeting be held at 9:30 a.m. instead, to give him a little bit more time to get to New York. Usually for this regular client meeting, John would catch the 6:00 a.m. shuttle to be at the World Trade Center by 8:00 a.m., if possible. This time, the meeting would be later. John parked his car in the Logan Airport Central Parking Garage in Boston and made his way to the Delta shuttle, where he caught a flight leaving at 6:15 a.m. It was a brilliant, beautiful September day, one of the nicest of the year. The travel connections were fine, and John made it to his company’s New York office on John Street, a few blocks from the twin towers. He arrived earlier than expected. At about 8:45 a.m., he heard some sirens outside, possibly a response to a fire. Because he was early, John tried calling his client to see if the meeting could be moved up a bit. There was a problem with the phone connection, and he was unable to get through. The John Street office was in an older building with open windows. John noticed smoke, probably from the fire that was the source of what sounded like increasing commotion outside. John and his colleague left the John Street office at about 9:00 a.m. and started walking a few blocks to the World Trade Center. On the street, there was a lot of activity. Looking up at the east side of the North

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Tower, John saw flames shooting out of the building. His first reaction was disappointment that the meeting would probably be canceled and that he would have to return another day to New York. Although John made a big deal of being a Yankees fan, in his heart he was a true blue Bostonian and appreciated not having to go to New York too often. As John and his colleague approached the World Trade Center, flames on the side of the building became noticeably worse. John thought of a blow torch suddenly spitting plumes of orange and white out the side of broken windows, with increasing vertical and horizontal extent on the face. It occurred to John that it was a much bigger fire than he first thought. But with firemen and vehicles now frantically rushing down the street to the site, John felt some comfort that things would be okay. Many people were milling about on the street and looking up at the fire. John overheard some discussion that a small plane had accidentally hit the building. The next series of events, occurring at about 9:03 a.m., took place in perhaps a split second. But the events were sharply etched in John’s mind and seemed to last a lot longer. John heard the roar of a jet plane as it flew low. There was a crashing sound, then the smell of kerosene, and John saw a mushroom cloud of flame and debris blast through the north-facing side of the South Tower. John thought that he was looking at the sun. He and other pedestrians tried to shield themselves against a side of an adjacent building as debris rained down onto the street. Like thick snow, huge reams of office paper floated down from the sky and onto the street. At this point, John realized that he was at the scene of a terrorist attack. His survival sense kicked in. John started to rationalize, and he evaluated the scene. He thought that the perpetrators knew what they were doing, and he suspected that they had additional plans in store to cause more death and destruction. John logically concluded that the terrorists would throw homemade bombs down the manholes in the surrounding streets near the building. With nearby underground gas lines, these would explode as people attempted to flee the site. Now John joined a throng of people moving toward the East River. He was reminded of a Godzilla movie, but in this case Godzilla attacks Manhattan and not Tokyo. John made it back to the John Street office, but he couldn’t get into the building. Building security personnel were

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preventing people from entering. John tried calling the office on his cell phone, but he couldn’t get a telephone connection. Approaching the East River at Water Street, John and his colleague were able to hail a cab. The driver had just dropped off another passenger at the World Trade Center. John instructed the driver to head toward the Brooklyn Bridge. John specifically requested the bridge and not tunnels because he was concerned that the tunnels were more vulnerable to attack. The cab inched along to the Brooklyn Bridge. Throngs of people and cars frequently parted on the road to provide a path for police vehicles, fire trucks, and ambulances heading toward the World Trade Center. Despite the overall chaos, John was impressed by how well everyone cooperated to make way for the emergency response vehicles. On the radio, John heard that the airports were closed. John requested that they be driven to the nearest rental car facility. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, it occurred to John and his colleague that they already had a car available, so they asked the driver to continue north to Boston. They traveled outbound on the Major Deegan Expressway, where northbound traffic was very light. Southbound, however, was another story. The traffic in this direction was at a standstill. They stopped for gas and proceeded north, arriving at Sikorsky Memorial Airport in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The airport was closed, but they were able to find a rental car office that was open about two miles away. John tried to rent a car for a one-way trip back to Boston, but the company had a $400 surcharge for drop-off. A woman at the counter overheard their conversation and told them that she was driving to the Route 128 Station in Westwood, just south of Boston. She offered them a ride, and John and his colleague gratefully accepted. Throughout the journey back to his Massachusetts home, phone calls home and to the office were not mostly getting through. However, in the late morning, one of John’s calls did make it through to the main office in Burlington, Massachusetts. At this point, colleagues were able to spread the word that John and his associate were safe and en route back home. At that point, John probably could have taken the rest of the day off, without much debate from upper management. But once back on Route 128, he decided to return to the Burlington office, arriving there by 3:00 p.m. A television was on in the lobby, and for the first time he saw footage of planes striking the World Trade Center buildings. Living the Civil Engineering Life

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John had to drive downtown on Wednesday for a meeting, and his car was still at Logan Airport. John’s son-in-law drove him back to Logan Airport in the early evening to pick up his car. In the garage, John noticed unmarked police cars with flashing blue lights and a group of men wearing dark blue suits. They were hovering around a car parked two aisles over from his. They examined the car with flashlights. John was able to return home with his car. The next day, I had a meeting with John in downtown Boston for a discussion about another project. He was late to the meeting, and I asked him why.

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Cape in a Day In the darkest moment of winter, I was reading from a book called Bike

Rides in Massachusetts. I had received the book as a birthday present, and with wind-driven six-foot drifts outside, it seemed like a good time to read it. In this book, every day was sunny and nice, with no snow drifts, and the sky was filled with puffy white clouds. Each chapter described a different bike ride. Most were in the 40- to 60-mile range, a long ride for me but not extreme. The book extolled the virtues of the crisp air and spectacular scenery that awaited pedalers. The accompanying pictures were mostly from three seasons, because you can’t ride outside with sixfoot drifts. On a cold winter day with my bike banished to the garage, reading about all that upcoming fresh air and scenery was invigorating. The rides were all appealing and reasonable, with one exception. One route, named “Cape in a Day,” was ridiculous. Unlike the relaxing pleasure jaunts in the 40-mile range, this ride was more than 120 miles long. You started in downtown Boston, continued south over the canal, and onto Cape Cod. Then you wound your way east and north up the arm of the cape, finishing many, many hours later at the tip in Provincetown. Unlike any of the other bike tours, which started and ended at the same point, this was a one-way ride with a different starting and ending point. That only worked because at the finish point, you had to take the Provincetown Fast Ferry back to your starting point in Boston. The catch was that if you didn’t make it in time for the ferry, the ride would not be “Cape in a Day.” The need to catch the ferry added an exciting time component—miss the last ferry, and you had to get accommodations overnight. As a blizzard howled outside, I marveled at the intense nuttiness of “Cape in a Day.” Who would even think of trying something

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so outlandish? For its part, the book tried to goad readers on, praising the supremacy of those special, elite specimens who completed “Cape in a Day.” This ride was described to be a pinnacle achievement of New England cycling, as Mount Everest was to mountain climbers. I smiled and flipped the page, thinking cape in three days maybe, but not “Cape in a Day.” As the long winter wore on, my son got into the act, and we started thinking more about the feasibility of “Cape in a Day.” It was completely ridiculous to even attempt it. But we kept on talking, and after a while it started to become not so ridiculous. With enough planning, mapping, and pacing, maybe we could do it. At first, this conversation was a version of father–son “chicken,” but neither one got out of the way of that moving truck. After a week of this, we decided to do it. When the snow eventually melted, we blew the dust off the bikes and started training: first 60 miles, then 80 miles, and so on. We picked a day in the middle of the summer and laid out the route. The ride would start at the Seaport World Trade Center parking garage in Boston. We would make our way south to Quincy, move inland on Route 53 to Plymouth, cross some backcountry roads, cross the canal, and onto the cape for the big finish. Even on the map, the ride looked outlandish. Forget about biking it—just driving would take two hours. On a Sunday in July, it was time. We packed up the packs before sunrise. Arriving at the Seaport garage, I unloaded the bikes, oiled things a bit (the bikes), and started pumping my back tire. In preparation for the ride, I had switched to narrower outer tires. This apparently was an issue. As I pumped, the back tire’s tube made a sickening, gaseous sound and quickly flattened. Even before starting, I had a flat. Precious seconds ticked away, and the ride was in jeopardy. I upended the bike, took out one of the two spares, and quickly changed the flat. Within 15 minutes, we were out of the garage and on the road. But it was a disheartening way to begin. That 15 minutes could be the difference between catching the ferry and searching for an overnight room. Early Sunday morning, the streets of Boston were quiet. We made our way through South Boston and across the Neponset River to Quincy. As we rode next to Wollaston Beach, the sun rose over calm, peaceful water. Miles started to pile up as we made it to Route 53 and moved

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down to Plymouth. I suffered a second flat, this one on the other tire, and made the change using a few more crucial minutes. Even with the flats, overall we were pedaling faster than we planned, so we were on course and ahead of schedule. It was a problem that I had no spares left for my bike. Dan had a few that I could use in an emergency, but his tires were bigger. Biking on a 100-plus mile ride in the northeast takes you past a lot of aging infrastructure but also past several reconstruction projects. Massachusetts has some of the oldest bridges in the country, and many look their age. Crossing back and forth over Route 3, one of two freeways connecting Boston to the cape, we passed through construction work zones where bridge viaducts were being rebuilt. A few projects were to replace the superstructures. The bridges were reconstructed a half at a time, with narrow lanes and tight sidewalks for bikers. As the heat of the day built, we made it to Plymouth. We biked through downtown, with the natives and tourists starting to stir. A few miles farther south, we turned onto a back road and passed Myles Standish State Forest, with its sandy scrub pine forests and cool glades. After many miles of rolling terrain, we reached our next milestone: the Cape Cod Canal. Cape Cod started out as a peninsula, but with construction of the Cape Cod Canal in 1914, the cape became an island. Two highway bridges and one railroad bridge cross the canal. For bikers, using the railroad bridge is not an option, so the choices are either the Bourne Bridge to the west or the Sagamore Bridge to the east. The bridges can mostly be identified by location, because they are structurally identical: twin overdeck truss arches with deck hangers. For decades, the distinctive bridges have greeted vacationers from Boston making their way (by automobile) down to the seashore. The bridges are beautiful, but the years and salt spray have taken their toll. The structures are frequently under construction. Serious discussion has begun for longer-term plans for how to maintain and possibly expand on these lifeline connections (Figure 1). Because we were already positioned to the east, our choice for crossing was the Sagamore Bridge. For such a grand crossing, the pedestrian and biking access point was not so grand. A narrow sidewalk could be reached from an unmarked and obscure connection in the shopping

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plaza parking lot northwest of the bridge. The sidewalk is narrow and uncomfortably close to streaming and frequently stalled traffic. But even so, pedestrians are treated to a beautiful view of the canal and Cape Cod Bay glistening to the east. The high, narrow bridge, unfortunately, is popular not only with vacationers, but also has a reputation as a “suicide bridge.” We saw a sign offering contact information for the Good Samaritans, who could perhaps provide hope for those in need. Bridge pedestrian fencing had been raised to reduce opportunities for jumpers. We crossed the canal and reveled in our achievement. If we stopped at this point, we could still brag that we made it to the cape in a day, because now we were on the cape. But Provincetown was still more than 60 miles away. After stopping for lunch, we rode past marshes and small towns on busy Route 6A. The road is a pleasant, bikeable highway hugging the north face of the cape, near Cape Cod Bay. By now, the heat of the July day was starting to rise. But our strategy was to be on Cape Cod by the heat of the day, and the strategy worked. Inland it was hot, but we were treated to cool, salty breezes.

Figure 1. Sagamore Bridge, Cape Cod, Massachusetts Source: Photo by Ryan Marshall

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We decided to turn south at Dennis to connect with the Cape Cod Rail Trail. The trail is built on a former railroad right-of-way, paved and widened for bikes and runners. It is the first rails-to-trails bikeway in Massachusetts, at the start of a program that has converted dozens of former rail beds. Riding on the trail would add a few miles overall to the route. But the bikeway is scenic and beautiful, and it provides 23 miles of smooth, car-free passage from Dennis at midcape to Wellfleet up on the cape’s arm. Several bike shops serve the cape, including a shop at the western starting point, where I was able to purchase three new tubes. The trail passes by several ponds, including one with a beach, where we stopped for a short break. Wading in the water after 85 miles or so, I was starting to feel it. At this stop, we bumped into some friends biking in the other direction. They were staying on the cape that weekend and were biking shorter distances. My friend Steve said with some understatement that I looked a little tired. Fortunately, there was an answer for fatigue, and it was only another five miles or so down the bikeway. After a dip, we biked on to Orleans and one of the world’s best ice cream parlors. I inhaled a double-thick cappuccino frappe. (A “frappe” is a New England term for an ice cream milkshake.) The combination of sugar and caffeine provided a turboboost that lasted for the remaining 30 miles, and I was ready to go. For extreme bike rides, and I suspect extreme workouts of all kinds, there is a point when time stops and one’s focus narrows. For me, at about mile 100, the universe seemed to collapse in on itself. All that remained was us and the bikes. There was a faint blur of the surrounding cape countryside, but I didn’t really see it. North on Route 6, the pavement heated up, and our water bottles were out for every other turn. We peeled off onto Route 6A, a quieter alternative to the busy main highway. Eventually, we reached a hill and descended to the last stretch next to the bay. We pedaled past seaside shacks and sand dunes. Almost as if it was a mirage, Provincetown appeared around the bend. The dock offering passage home jutted out into the bay. We pedaled past a series of motels and into the densely packed town. We didn’t have a detailed map, and by then Dan’s iPhone was out of juice. But finding the dock was not difficult—we traced a path along the bay and pedaled directly to it. Our official stopping time was before

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5:00 p.m., with more than two hours to spare before the last ferry. Dan and I locked up the bikes and headed off for a beer. A few hours and beers later, the sun set over Cape Cod Bay. With our bikes secured on the boat, we settled back on what felt like extracushioned seats and didn’t move much. I don’t remember much of the ride back to Boston. The cold beer, the murmur of lulling water, and the salt spray combined to produce a satisfying stupor. For an hour on the ferry, I focused on existing, not much more. Dan and I had done it! Dan and I had accomplished the supreme accomplishment for Boston bikers. Now we were elite, first class. Others would tell us of their tiny 20-mile jaunts, but we would say, “That is very interesting, but have you heard of ‘Cape in a Day’?”

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Cross-Country Flying across the United States can be done in five hours, plus or minus,

not including airport time. Driving or by train takes several days. But by bicycle? From sea to shining sea, such a journey would take months. 1971 Joe was eating breakfast with his fraternity brother, Jim, when they noticed a picture on a box of Wheaties. That’s how it began. On the box was a photo of Bob Richards, an Olympic pole-vaulting champion. In 1969, Richards had biked and jogged across the United States to promote physical fitness. In 1969, biking cross-country was not something that many people did. But that summer, humans landed on the moon, so now anything was possible. The story on the cereal box lit a spark in the two friends that smoldered for a few years. Joe graduated from Drexel University in 1970 and started a job at Gannett Fleming in Pittsburgh. He and Jim discussed plans to cycle cross-country. Joe was a bit restless and finally requested a few months off from his job that summer. His boss told him to get it out of his system—the work would be waiting when he returned. Joe, Jim, and Jim’s roommate, Don, took three months off. Jim and Don had just finished their master’s degrees at MIT, so they had the opportunity to bike as well. The three planned to leave from Margate, New Jersey, near Atlantic City. They had identical Schwinn Varsity bikes, with sleek steel frames weighing upwards of 38 lbs. These were entry-level road bikes at the time, quite a bit heavier than today’s composite frame bikes, which are actually lighter than gravity and require tethering when not in use. (This 116

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statement is hyperbole. Bikes, even today, are not lighter than air.) Each rider also had pannier bags packed with tents, cooking utensils, clothes, and other supplies. Their original plan was to cook out each night at stopping points. Joe and Don purchased an early version of a CamelBak in Virginia Dale, Colorado, a canvas bag filled with water, which stayed cool as it evaporated. The team set out on Wednesday, June 9, 1971. Joe remembers this first day as one where early ambition met the reality of the ride. His colleagues had been training all spring, but he hadn’t had as much time to get in shape, nor a training partner. Jim and Don slowed the pace a bit for Joe to keep up. Midway through the day, Joe started thinking that his first day riding would be his last. After 25 miles, Joe asked for a stop. The group rallied, however. When Joe explained that maybe the guys should go on without him, Jim said, “You can forget the fact that you’re not going to make it. Get it right out of your mind because that’s ridiculous. We’re all going to have our problems.” New Jersey was mostly flat. The first day, the riders crossed the Ben Franklin Bridge and arrived in Philadelphia, where they stayed with friends at the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. As they moved west, the terrain became more challenging. In Pennsylvania, the number of hills increased, and the slopes got steeper. Pennsylvania back roads were frequently in poor shape. Eventually, the riders averaged about 100 miles per day. Mileage increased a lot after they had been on the road a bit and arrived west on the Great Plains. Once they reached eastern Ohio, the team’s plans for cookouts fell by the wayside—they were too tired to cook and too anxious to eat. Instead of cooking, the boys looked for diners in the towns where they stopped. By 1971, McDonald’s had started to sprout, but it was still before the fast-foodization of America that was to come. Many towns had roadside diners. These restaurants were not fancy and were a bargain for the three former college students. A big added benefit was that the diners were where many locals congregated. In 1971, the sight of three kids biking cross-country was pretty unusual. At many stops, the riders quickly found themselves at the center of attention. This led to good conversation with the locals and even invitations to spend the night, with dinner and showers. It became a great way for them to experience the ebb and flow and to get a feel for the local terrain. Living the Civil Engineering Life

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On nights when they didn’t receive home invitations, Jim, Don, and Joe camped out at city and state parks. Eugene Sloane, in his Complete Book of Bicycling (1970, Trident, New York) recommended camping in cemeteries. However, the first two times they tried it, starting with their infamous night in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it rained. Their cemetery nights included wet sleeping bags and overall sogginess. So they took that as a message to look elsewhere to camp. Once, Jim slept on the porch of a house in a ghost town in Colorado. When biking into a strange town (which, to them, was almost every town they encountered), they often took the initiative to ask the local police if they could recommend a viable campsite. The officers provided advice on where to camp out and even patrolled at night to make sure that they were okay. Sometimes there just wasn’t a good place to camp. So the town police thoughtfully offered them a place to stay—in jail. In Wyoming and at a few other locations, the boys rested somewhat comfortably overnight in lockup. Joe remembers calling his parents one night from a local town jail. That was an interesting conversation. Out on the road, the sight of three kids biking cross-country in 1971 generated a lot of curiosity and enthusiasm. Passersby would notify people in town ahead of time, and the three friends became mini­ celebrities, featured in articles in local newspapers (Figure 1). The three

Figure 1. Joe Anthony, Jim Hoburg, and Don Dudley in Newville, Pennsylvania, in 1971 118

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are pictured riding in the attire of the times: short shorts and sneakers. Spandex had yet to be invented, and they didn’t wear helmets. Fortunately, there were bike stores along the way (it was 1971, not 1771), and the riders carried spare tires, oil, and some basic tools. Joe remembers getting a total of two flats, but the others had a quite a few more. Toward the end of the trip, Don got a flat on the Golden Gate Bridge. It was cumulatively flat number 13 out of 16 for the whole trip. It was a flat, true, but what better place to get one and enjoy the view? After Don fixed his flat, they walked their bikes the rest of the way across into San Francisco. In planning the route, the bikers did not take advantage of Google maps or Facebook, because along with spandex, neither had been invented yet. The idea of tapping your cell phone to get a street view of any locale or asking Siri for help would have seemed far-fetched. The boys used paper maps to plan their trips. There were surprises along the way: roads that didn’t match the maps, roads that did match the maps but were in poor condition, roads on the maps that didn’t exist, and missing signs. The three had no online blog, but Joe had a Super 8 camera with which they made some movies. Jim saved not only the movies but also a device that can actually play them. Watching the silent movies is a trip back in time and technology in many ways. Travelers crossing North America all faced a great barrier: the Mississippi. The river has challenged cross-country travelers going back to the days of horses and buggies. Earlier pioneers had to ford the river. In 1971, Joe, Jim, and Don had a big advantage because there were dozens of bridges to cross. They made it to East Saint Louis and crossed the river on the Eads Bridge, the first fixed crossing of the Mississippi south of Minneapolis. The beautiful Eads Bridge has three steel arches, which were the longest spanning arches at the time of construction. The bridge was the site of many firsts: first use of steel construction, first use of the cantilever method to build a bridge, and first construction of deep-river caissons for the piers. The caissons were excavated under compressed air, resulting in many cases of nitrogen poisoning (the “bends”) and several fatalities. On June 14, 1874, construction was largely complete. Just to be sure, the engineers led an elephant across the span. In the early days of bridge inspection, the thinking was that elephants knew to avoid rickety Living the Civil Engineering Life

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structures. Almost 100 years later, Jim, Joe, and Don safely crossed in comfort and in style (at least, in the style of the times). The United States in 1971 was at the height of the post–WWII construction boom. When the Greatest Generation returned home from war, the country erupted in a peacetime flurry of building. It was a period of mankind’s largest aggregated construction of infrastructure. Of that flurry of work, the Interstate Highway System is considered by some to be the biggest overall project. By 1971, much of the Interstate Highway System was built, but there were still another 10 years or so to go. With so much of the country newly built and rebuilt during this period, many of the roads and buildings the riders passed were in relatively good shape and not suffering from decades of inadequate maintenance. In 1971, the suburbs were just starting to really sprawl. Many of the towns the boys biked through had a traditional 19th century American form, with active town centers surrounded by the hinterlands. The bikers passed busy factories, whose work had yet to be sent offshore. In July, the plains were hot. Kansas was an ongoing series of flat fields in between grain silos. On the toughest day, it was 106 degrees in the afternoon. The boys were buffeted by a 30-mph head wind. Approaching Ness City from the east, they saw a blue building that might have been a restaurant. They battled the wind and heat and made it to the porch. A waitress had watched them struggle in the distance, and once they made it, she had three large, cold glasses of iced tea waiting for them. Decades later, the iced tea memory is still strong. This was also one of the nights they ended up “in jail.” Slogging across the plains, the bikers made it to the foothills of the Rockies. They stayed four days in Pueblo, Colorado, at Don’s parents’ house. Photos of the team from Colorado have a gas station backdrop—gas was $0.38/gallon. After some debate and a green light from the Colorado State Patrol, they decided to bike north into Wyoming and cross the Rockies by interstate. Along the way, they stayed one night in a rodeo stall. They made it to the newly opened I-80 and biked on the shoulders for hundreds of miles, camping off the sides and crossing the Continental Divide. They biked next to the salt flats in Utah, crossed Nevada, and continued through California to Sacramento. They biked across the Golden Gate Bridge, arriving in San Francisco on August 4.

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The western wheel-dipping occurred in San Francisco, at Golden Gate Park. In Joe’s case, it was not a wheel-dipping but a bike-flinging. The Super 8 captured this moment. Joe remembers the bike being a bit saltchallenged from the seawater for the remainder of the ride, which wasn’t quite done yet. After a week in San Francisco, the boys biked south along coastal California State Route 1 and arrived in Los Angeles after a few more days (Figure 2). For thousands of miles, the riders had envisioned eating prime rib at Lawry’s Prime Rib. This was, for Don at least, to be a celebratory event for the ride. Don called ahead and was given an approval, but the three were distraught when they learned that it was a fancy joint, and they needed sport coats. The restaurant was willing to loan them the duds, but it didn’t feel right, and they ended up having a fabulous hamburger across the street. It wasn’t until 20 years later that Don finally made it back for the meal. A conversation with Jim, Joe, and Don today triggers a flood of memories. Joe distinctly remembers the bridges as high points for the trip (not sure if that was for the author’s benefit, but let’s go with it). Crossing the bigger rivers such as the Mississippi or the Delaware were

Figure 2. Joe Anthony, Jim Hoburg, and Don Dudley in Lompoc, California, in 1971 Living the Civil Engineering Life

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moments of great accomplishment. In addition to the bigger spans, there were many smaller rivers in between. The bridges were milestones and rewards to the team. They were barrier busters. Their last big crossing, the Golden Gate, was probably the most iconic bridge of all. When dinner was done, the group made it to LAX and slept on the seats in the terminal, biding time for their flight the next morning. The trip took three months going west and about five hours flying back. 2009 Danny saw a message for “Bike & Build.” The Bike & Build group organized bicycle rides for college-age students across the United States during the summer. In addition to biking, on every third or fourth day or so, the bikers stop in a town to participate in a community service project, such as a Habitat for Humanity house build. Each caravan of students would have three or four young adult leaders. The Bike & Build program combined two things Danny was passionate about: biking and community service. He had been out of college for two years, and his reaction was, “Why didn’t someone tell me about this sooner?” Danny applied to be a team leader for one of the cross-country groups. He had saved up enough money, and he gave his notice at his construction job in Maryland. As one of four tour leaders, Danny would share responsibility for guiding the 32 college students participating in the ride. The tour was one of six organized by Bike & Build in the summer of 2009. Danny’s tour left from Providence, Rhode Island, and ended in Seattle, with several thousand miles of road in between. The city and town stops were chosen ahead of time. For planning, the four leaders could take advantage of information from previous tours along the same general route. In early planning, Danny’s job was to contact churches and community leaders to organize food and accommodations. Most of the meals were donated. For 32 college students plus the four young adults, that was a lot of food. Danny and his three coleaders spent several weeks looking for donations and otherwise mapping out the trip details. The tour’s basic approach featured a series of bike segments from 50 to 100 miles or so. Every third or fourth day was a service day. The kids took a break from riding to help build a house or contribute to

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another community service project. Lodging was arranged at volunteer churches, community centers, and campgrounds. The riders camped in sleeping bags on the floor of community center halls or out in tents. Unlike the 1971 ride, jails and cemeteries were not on the itinerary. The tour had a van to carry supplies, which each of the four leaders took turns driving. Bikers would proceed in groups, with some serving as “sweepers” to inspect progress and make sure everyone in general was okay. The 2009 riders could take advantage of newly developed technologies, such as cell phones and the web, which were not available in 1971. These were a great boon for keeping track of routes and riders. But still, the logistics were daunting. Danny’s team had to make it across the United States on a fairly tight and choreographed schedule. Many sites along the route were supported by volunteers, and the group needed to make it to their destinations on time. There was not a lot of schedule float for really bad weather or major unforeseen events. Health and safety issues were always of concern. Part of the challenge of leading the tour was keeping all the moving parts moving and then being flexible enough to adjust plans when things didn’t quite go as expected. On June 14, after months of dreaming, it was time to go. The bikers gathered at India Point Park in Providence, Rhode Island, for their big send-off. Friends and family watched as the bikers symbolically dipped their back wheels in Providence harbor (Figure 3). Many months later, the dipping of the wheels would be repeated on the far coast to conclude the journey. The group gathered for a photo with the harbor as a backdrop. Fortunately, there was also a nice bridge. The best-laid plans were almost washed out that day by torrential rains the night before. Some roads on the first day’s route were flooded. Danny and the team were able to reroute. As a sign of good things to come, the sun came out as they started pedaling, and it shone brightly the rest of the day. The first leg was a relatively easy ride through Rhode Island to Pomfret, Connecticut, less than 40 miles away. The route’s beginning was mostly flat, with some modest hills farther west of Providence. But it was still Rhode Island, and whatever slopes the Ocean State had in store paled in comparison to what was to come. Danny’s biggest challenge that first day was in getting a handle on the group dynamics—how

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Figure 3. Bike & Builders leaving the Brown University boathouse in Providence, Rhode Island, on June 14, 2009

the students would ride, how the team would coordinate overall. Some students were not in the physical condition they would be in a few weeks later. The first leg of the trip was fairly easy but still daunting for some riders who would be in great shape in a few months, but at present were closer in status to young couch potatoes. In 2009, they had Google Maps and cell phones, but most of the cell phones weren’t yet smart. The group had two GPS units. But overall they relied on street signs to navigate west. Some of the signs were not so accurate. Riding west, the riders scattered a bit. The sweepers had trouble keeping up. Some riders turned south by mistake and ended up adding 10 miles to the day’s ride. The team leaders worked out paper cue sheets for their routes. Some riders made the connection between the burgeoning technology and a new way to navigate. But trading in maps for the new, improved GPS approach was not necessarily all good. One rider later commented: Guys, I was just thinking the other day, how much absurdly simpler it would have been to have all had iPhones instead of cue sheets (and how much absurdly less character we would have built, all the extra grandma’s we met asking for directions 124

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along the way, and all that time looking around us and not spent glued to our stupid iPhones!) (Justin Villere’s blog, commentary by Jake Rosenberg, Aug. 12, 2013) Ironically, Danny’s biggest headache that first day probably turned out to be his former professor who came along for the ride, officially to help. The help turned quickly to liability once the professor rode over glass on the mean streets of Providence and then proceeded to get three flat tires. Danny ignored his former professor’s pleas to be allowed to remain on the side of the highway as road kill, and he successfully helped change all three tires. Among other accomplishments, biking cross-country is an experience in achieving milestones. Some of the biggest milestones are the state border signs. It was a big advantage starting out in Rhode Island instead of, say, Alaska, because after only a few hours, the riders reached their first state border. Groups of riders gathered for pictures at the Connecticut welcome sign. Farther west, the states would be a bit bigger and the welcome signs few and far between. As they crossed the Connecticut border, the ride and countryside opened up to beautiful fields and rock walls beneath a puffily clouded sky. The biggest hill was the last, a challenging slope on Route 44 into town. After tackling that hill, the team rode into Pomfret. Bikers were greeted with tables of fruit and watermelons. The first night’s accommodations were in the First Congregational Church of Pomfret. This was a beautiful, classic New England steepled church that graced the town center. (Sadly, the church was destroyed by a fire in 2013.) The riders washed up at the Pomfret School next door. Danny and the coleaders remember the team being giddy that night. They had crossed a state and completed their first leg. But there were still many states and several thousand miles to go. On the road for a few days, the four group leaders settled into a routine. What began as a morning planning meeting started to get more elaborate. The leaders would go over the route and then give the riders a chance to ask questions or present fun facts about the town they were headed to (usually researched through Wikipedia). The rider presentations quickly morphed into performing the stretch of the day, the dance

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move of the day, selecting the rider of the day, picking the word of the day, the Yiddish word of the day, and the made-up word of the day. By the end of the trip, the route planning meetings could last almost an hour. Luckily there was time for biking after the planning meetings. Biking cross-country can be great on a warm, sunny day in June. But there were a few days that were not so warm and sunny. The toughest day was early in the tour on June 20, biking from Roscoe, New York, to Binghamton. This route took the riders through the Catskill Mountains with several long, tough slopes. Adding insult to injury, the day was raw and wet. The group hung on that day, but some riders had to be picked up by the van. Another day farther west, thunderheads built on the plains of Iowa and the entire segment was canceled because of a thunderstorm. But other than these two days, most of the time the riders had more accommodating weather. Approaching the Mississippi River in Illinois, Danny decided to do the cornfield equivalent of crowd surfing at a concert. The event is captured in a video, which shows him accelerating into the field and ending up flopped on the stalks. Danny had many cornfields from which to choose. For much of the ride west to the Rockies, it was acre after acre of cornfields. By 2009, much of U.S. agriculture had been converted to a monoculture of corn farming, with some soybean fields in between. The trend is described in The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Single-crop farming of corn had largely replaced the more varied crops of past farms. The result was a huge surplus of corn supporting increasingly manufactured foods. Pollan describes how the process has helped to depopulate the Great Plains, because monoculture farming with heavy use of pesticides and fertilizer is less labor intensive. In contrast to 1971, the 2009 bikers encountered many hollowed-out towns on the plains. With as much as half the rural population gone, small towns had shuttered shops and empty buildings. It was like the 1971 ghost towns in a way, but the ghosting was caused by a more current economic driver. One of the more disturbing sights around the cornfields was the brand name signs in front of the fields. In the past, corn did not come with brand names. Corn was corn. But with genetic modification and patenting, companies proudly marked their spots. Danny logically knew that the corn was genetically modified. But seeing the signs branding

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different fields of corn and soy really underlined how our food system had become a manufacturing system. There were other changes in the land. The 1971 tour crossed a country still in the thick of manufacturing and the post–World War II boom. By 2009, the land was wracked by the effects of off-shore manufacturing, factory closures, and older mill cities where infrastructure was in bad shape. Danny remembers several places where the group was eager to leave quickly. Youngstown, Ohio, left a negative impression. Riders thought that it seemed like someone had bombed the road at the city border. Much of the city’s infrastructure was decaying. But indications of more positive changes could be seen as well. The team biked past many windmills over the plains. The bikers encountered several wind farms and activities providing support, such as road improvements for the turbines. A few years later, fracking would have a bigger effect on the landscapes of rural Pennsylvania and the upper Midwest. The relatively new process of hydraulic fracturing, “fracking,” opened up huge reserves of natural gas that were previously not accessible. As a result, the trend of farming depopulation was reversed in many areas. Formerly desolate areas became boomtowns, with huge increases in population and strained demands on infrastructure for housing and support facilities. Bike & Builders setting out today would encounter these new boomtowns haphazardly sprouting up on the plains. On July 9, the team reached the Mississippi River at Clinton, Iowa. They crossed on the Gateway Bridge, a two-lane suspension bridge with a 644-ft center span. This bridge was constructed in 1955–1956 and opened on July 2, 1956. Opening day ceremonies included massive traffic jams as eager drivers crossed the bridge and back several times. Many dignitaries attended the opening day ceremonies, but Vice President Nixon was unable to attend. The span was celebrated for its big contribution to progress and improvement for the town of Clinton. When the cross-country bikers arrived in 2009, the bridge was almost 60 years old, and it was a bit worn and outdated. It was subject to closure and reconstruction in 2006. Inspection reports now refer to the crossing as functionally obsolete, with substandard two-lane highway geometry and shoulders. In contrast to the modest and classic suspension bridge, recently constructed bridges across the Mississippi have mostly been cable-stayed spans (Figure 4).

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Figure 4. The new Ronald Wilson Reagan Memorial Bridge over the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri Source: Photo by Paul Sableman, (Feb. 27, 2015)

Danny and his fellow riders made it to the heartland and had a nice view of the river. They also remember being attacked by bumblebees. July 14 was a build day. The team camped out in Carroll, Iowa, where they contributed to a Habitat for Humanity house build. Stopping for a community service project every fourth day was the “build” part of “Bike & Build.” It distinguished this ride from other tours, which are just tours. Habitat for Humanity provides affordable housing through donations of labor and materials. Homes are comfortable but modest, and most of the pieces are built by volunteers, supervised by construction experts, who are also volunteers. The Habitat organization works with local communities to find sites to build, rallies support for contributions of materials, and organizes the volunteer groups to actually build the house. Future beneficiaries of the program undergo a rigorous process to qualify to live there. They do not receive handouts but are expected to

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participate in building their own house through contribution of “sweat equity.” So the future homeowners contribute alongside the volunteers. For volunteers, the activity of physically building and interacting as part of the community is a higher order of charity than just contributing money. The experience of working on a house also provides a big bonus. In getting out and building, volunteers can get a lot of practical experience in carpentry, painting, and building. It’s a great idea, but the Habitat for Humanity approach may not work for everything. Probably a cross-country program featuring “Bike & Brain Surgery” would be less successful, even with expert supervision. When building a house, a lot of specialized work needs the attention, experience, and care for which inexperienced volunteers are not appropriate. But even so, many jobs have more mundane aspects that volunteers can tackle with good supervision. The Carroll, Iowa, volunteers in July 2009 were hyperenthusiastic young adults eager to fix the world. When the project is finished, a deserving family gets a house, and all parts of the community are that much stronger for it. Moving farther west, the students biked more than 100 miles on August 3, from Bozeman to Helena, Montana. It was hot and dry. Their views were affected by haze from a nearby forest fire. The fire season in 2009 was above average, building on hot, dry conditions and years of below-average rainfall. The cross-country ride was not directly affected by fire, but the threat was there. Another 2009 team on a more southern route was directly affected by wildfires and needed to significantly change routes. By August, the group had biked several thousand miles and was high in the Rocky Mountains. The little hills back east were a distant memory by now. The team crossed the high desert of Washington State and reached the last barrier before Seattle—the Cascades. The route took them alongside I-90 to the Snoqualmie Pass. As in 1971, bikers rode on the shoulder of the interstate for 40 miles. In exchange for grueling climbs and extended slopes, the kids were treated to jaw-dropping views and fresh mountain air. Going west, the route was a bit easier than in 1971 and certainly in the decades before. Modern Interstate 90 follows the trail of the Mullan Road. This was a wagon train road originally built under the leadership of Lieutenant John Mullan in 1859. It was the first road connection to the Pacific Northwest.

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Vestiges of the old Mullan Road can be seen heading west. In 2009, the bikers had modern comforts and technology, but they were following in the wheel tracks of the past trekkers and pioneers who traveled west. The journey over distance and time is one of sweat and some tears but also of building infrastructure and exponential improvements in technology. When the Bike & Builders finally dipped their wheels in the Pacific, they were among the latest pioneers in a progression that has lasted for centuries. Speculating on future cross-country trips decades from now, what will the new pioneers see? Maybe the 21st century’s first decade will be remembered as a time of pause in U.S. infrastructure growth, a period when the country, for whatever reason, caught its breath and then later regrouped to rebuild. Then the infrastructure forms representative of some of humankind’s greatest physical creations on Earth will be renewed. The potholes will be filled, the water pipes patched, and the buildings painted and fixed. Bridges old and new would again shine across the Mississippi.

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Who’s on First: Bridge Edition I had some questions about specifications for a temporary bridge. Unlike

permanent bridges, temporary bridges can be preassembled and rented for a period of use. These modular structures are manufactured by the Acrow Bridge Company (http://acrow.com/), Mabey Inc. (http://www .mabey.com/), and other suppliers. Most temporary bridges are truss structures. For some help, I visited a regional sales representative for temporary bridge construction. Here is our discussion: Me: I am interested in specifications for a temporary bridge. Salesman: Excellent. You’ve come to the right place. I have great experience dealing with temporary bridges. Do you know what type of temporary bridge you had in mind? Me: Mabey. Salesman: I see. You’re not really sure about exactly what type of temporary bridge you want. That is understandable. Although they seem simple, in reality temporary bridges can be very complex. Me: I was not aware that they were complex. Thanks for your help. Salesman: That’s why I’m here—to help. I am glad to have the opportunity to assist you in this challenging issue. Have you thought any more about, in general, what you’d like to specify? Me: Yes I have. I think, Mabey. Salesman: I see. “Yes, I have,” as in you know what type of bridge? Me: Yes. Mabey. Salesman: Well, is it “yes” or “maybe”? Me: Yes, that’s correct. Salesman: What’s correct?

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Me: Mabey. Salesman: Maybe “yes” or maybe “no”? Me: No. Mabey. Salesman (by now getting a little perplexed): I think if we looked at a catalog, perhaps you could better describe what you had in mind. Look at this excellent catalog prepared by the Acrow Bridge Company. Would you consider specifying an Acrow Bridge for your job? Me: No. Mabey. Salesman: So you’re sure you’re not interested in an Acrow Bridge? Me: Yes, I’m sure I know what I want. Mabey. Salesman: Yes, you’re sure, or maybe? Me: Well, both. While we’re on this subject, I was trying to think of a way to include the excellent and perhaps most appropriately named seismic engineer, Dr. Ian Buckle, in the dialogue. If anyone has a good suggestion, please let me know.

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Holy Spanning Function, Batman! Bridges are usually designed to span rivers and highways. They are

not usually designed for roosting bats. An article, “The Bridge as Bat Cave,” provides a discussion for this relatively new design requirement (Tina Grady Barbaccia, Equipment World’s Better Roads, Better Bridges, http://www.betterroads.com/better-bridges-3/). The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) includes criteria for development of bat roosting areas in bridge superstructures (http://www.oregon.gov/ ODOT/HWY/OTIA/pages/news_bats.aspx). The roosts are suggested only for bridges over water. Designing bridges to accommodate bats is an innovative way to address a concern for declining bat populations. The underside of bridge superstructures can be detailed as minibat caves through strategic placement of diaphragms and additional plates and covers. After a few roosts were constructed, no one was sure if bats were using the artificial caves at first. But then the habitats were determined to be effective when inspectors found piles of bat guano beneath the artificial caves. Oregon is probably a good place to develop bridge habitats for bats. The Northwest is also the setting for the Twilight books and movies, which are about vampires. So there’s an additional connection. Texas is well populated by bats. One of the most well-known urban roosting habitats for bats is found in Austin, below the Congress Avenue Bridge (formally, the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge). The bridge is a multispan concrete deck arch structure across the Colorado River. One of several bridges at the site, the present structure was built in 1910 and was rehabilitated in 1980. The rehabilitation project

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inadvertently added some new nooks and crannies below deck, which turned out to be ideal for bats. Today, as many as 1.5 million bats roost beneath the bridge. The flight of the bats at dusk is a popular tourist attraction (Figure 1). Originally, bridge designers did not plan for roosting bats. More recently, environmentalists have concluded that the spaces below bridge decks can provide a good habitat for bats. Instead of letting it happen by chance as in Austin, some DOTs now actively plan for bat accommodation. A quick digression: Consider the ramifications of designing structures for bats. If you have to design bridges to accommodate bats, then you probably have to design them for just about everything. This implies that bridge engineers have to know just about everything to be able to design for just about everything. This implies that bridge engineers are akin to superheroes, like Batman. Ideally, the world should then recognize that bridge engineers are like superheroes. Therefore, the requirements for bridge engineering,

Figure 1. The Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas, famous for the bats that come out at night Source: Photo by reader of the pack, https://www.flickr.com/photos/youngandwithit/3575040286/ (Feb. 27, 2015)

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being so robust, comprehensive, and awe inspiring, would come with some nice perks. I envision that back in the day, just the mention of bridge engineering would engender a type of enthusiastic reaction from the opposite gender. For example, a young male bridge engineer attends a structural engineering party. He visits with an attractive young lady. Being a bridge engineer, he does not mince words and efficiently gets right to the point: “Good evening,” he says with some pride. “I am a young bridge engineer.” In this perfect world, the young lady is duly impressed and offers one of the three following responses: Response No. 1: “You must deal with really big beams.” Or response No. 2: “I greatly admire your spanning functions.” Or response No. 3: “It must be very exciting to work with attractive bridges.” It is possible that other responses may be provided. I had the chance to attend a DOT meeting where the topic of bat design was discussed. The DOT had a bat expert who was truly up to speed on all of the details for proper design of bridges to accommodate bats. I forgot his name, but his colleagues affectionately referred to this gentleman as the “Batman.” During the presentation, the chief district DOT engineer, Mr. Bruce Wayne, P.E., seemed to be very accommodating to the additional design and construction requirements for his bridges—although now that I think of it, Mr. Wayne and the “Batman” were never in the room at the same time. Designing bridges for bats is part of the overall trend of sustainable design and construction. In the past, infrastructure engineering had a narrower focus. A bridge was a bridge, not a potential bat habitat. Today we are challenged to look at the bigger picture. A bridge that can be successfully designed for bats can do more than just satisfy its spanning function.

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Engineering Valentine’s Day For many engineers, Valentine’s Day is a challenge. It doesn’t really

include any of the things engineers love. It doesn’t have gadgets, there are no objective functions to maximize or minimize, and usually you can’t do a cost-benefit analysis. Valentine’s Day is based on feelings, and thus it focuses on the irrational. There are a few nonabstract components to Valentine’s Day that engineers can appreciate. For example, flowers are popular that day, and at least they are corporeal. But what is the engineer to make of a Valentine’s Day card? How does one select the optimal card—what are the design criteria? What is the procedure? It is all so … illogical. Some engineers have tried to approach Valentine’s Day using the engineering method. For example, a group performed a study for selecting the best chocolate for your spouse (http://cr4.globalspec .com/blogentry/11516/Best-Valentine-s-Day-Chocolate-for-AnEngineering-Wife?from_rss=1). Here is their method: • Chocolate samples from various manufacturers were selected at random. • The chocolate attributes evaluated included visual appeal, aroma (smell), touch (snap, feel against the fingers), taste, and texture. • Chocolate parameters were rated from 1 (worst) to 5 (best) using a wide variety of male and female coworkers. The analysis seemed to be competently and robustly performed. It is possible that some (well, all) of the criteria were evaluated subjectively.

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More specific information was not provided about the “wide variety of male and female coworkers.” It is unclear what the “variety” was. One mechanical engineer confessed that Valentine’s Day is his favorite holiday (http://mofame.blogspot.com/2010/02/happy-valen tines-day.html). He states: “Say what you will, Valentine’s Day has always been a favorite holiday of mine. What’s better than a celebration of love, candy, and flowers?” It is unusual to encounter an engineer with such a positive attitude toward Valentine’s Day. But after further research, I was suspicious. Immediately after proclaiming his joy for Valentine’s Day, he posted online video links to two pranks by engineers on their significant others. In one prank, a gentleman actually proposed to his girlfriend after installing a clever mechanical device that coated her in green goo when she opened the closet. The clever mechanical device was ingenious and well designed. Overall, his approach was amusing but maybe not the optimal approach for delivering a marriage proposal. Interestingly enough, the girlfriend, coated in green goo, said yes to the proposal. It’s not clear what happened with this couple after the proposal. It took many years, but after a while I succeeded in developing criteria and an approach that even an engineer could follow to successfully observe Valentine’s Day. My criteria include such design steps as this: “Buy a Valentine’s Day card, or else!” In satisfying this criterion, I’ve actually customized my cards over the years in an engineering-appropriate way. In addition to hearts, I draw little suspension bridges on my cards. For variety, some years I’ll include cable-stayed bridges. Even though I have had better success with Valentine’s Day over time (sort of), I’ve often wondered—to balance Valentine’s Day and restore equilibrium—perhaps there should be an engineering-type holiday. One way to do this would be to have a holiday that I’ll call “Nuts and Bolts Day” (NB Day). NB Day would be designed especially for engineers. On NB Day, • All conversations are to be linear. • Feelings may be discussed, but only in terms of solving problems. For example: Person No. 1: “I feel really sad today.” Person No. 2: “Is that

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so? What a shame. Let’s evaluate three causes of your sadness and prepare preliminary and final design for remediating your feelings.” • Cards are not required, although greetings may be sent by e-mail. Extra credit is provided if the e-mail has some sort of programming in it. Demerits for use of emoticons. • Activities on NB Day can be virtually anything—as long as they are standard, typical, and expected activities, appropriately scheduled, with little random variation, and in accordance with accepted habits and protocols. In Boston, some nonengineers actually came up with a proposed holiday in response to Valentine’s Day. The proposal can be heard on the Loren and Wally program, a radio show in the drive-to-work morning slot. The holiday is called “Steak and a You-Know-What Day” and is to be celebrated on March 20 (http://amir4.blogspot.com/2007/03/march20th-steak-and-you-know-what-day.html). Regarding further description on protocols for this proposed holiday, additional details are not provided here. Finally, below is a part of an abstract from an actual paper entitled “Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction under Conditions of High Anxiety” by Donald G. Dutton and Arthur P. Aron (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1974, Vol. 30, No. 4, 510–517). It is somewhat related to bridges and Valentine’s Day. Here is the paper’s abstract: Male passersby were contacted either on a fear-arousing suspension bridge or a non-fear-arousing bridge by an attractive female interviewer who asked them to fill out questionnaires containing Thematic Apperception Test pictures. Sexual content of stories written by subjects on the fear-arousing bridge and tendency of these subjects to attempt post-experimental contact with the interviewer were both significantly greater. No significant differences between bridges were obtained on either measure for subjects contacted by a male interviewer. Probably there are many lessons to be learned from this study. I leave it to the readers to determine what the correct ones are.

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You Do It, and Then It’s Done To be an engineer is to travel on a set of prescribed journeys. Our work

is governed by projects with a defined trajectory and life. For example, a bridge project starts out as a proposal. If the proposal is accepted, the job begins, and the new bridge project enters early design with preparation of a set of concepts. A team is formed to wrestle with the concepts: direct participants, including the designers and reviewers, and indirect stakeholders, who comment in one way or another. Over time, the concepts start to gel. In the beginning, everything is possible but nothing is defined. With time, the broad universe of all possibilities narrows to a specific, smaller universe of more precise forms and shapes. In the same way that a child grows from an infant with unlimited potential to an accomplished adult with limitations, so does the nascent bridge. At some point, it’s pencils (or mice) down for the design effort, and then it’s time to build. If it’s a traditional design-bid-build, the division between the processes of design and construction are more defined. If it’s design-build, the design and construction phases overlap. Eventually, the design is done. Detailed submittals are submitted, and the intellectual exercise of creating a bridge starts to wind down. The piers are formed, the beams are placed, the deck is poured, and the roadway stripes are painted. Then it’s time for ribbon cutting. It is a moment of great accomplishment and triumph, a culmination of years of sweat and tears. But at the pinnacle of achievement, when the project is over, the team disbands. The shared experience of accomplishment is no more. A few summers ago, I was a long-distance observer of three separate communities of kids. My former student led a caravan of college students biking across the United States (see the essay “Cross-Country,

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2009”). My daughter went on a cross-country trip with her youth group. And several adult friends worked part-time at an overnight camp a few hours away. All three groups established new, self-contained communities. But the communities were not permanent. As the summer wound down, all three communities more or less came to an end within the last week or so. The students reached their destination in Seattle, my daughter returned on the last leg of her bus ride, and the camp held its closing weekend ceremonies. Members of all three communities participated in intense adventures, with a marked path, goals, and achievements. Probably this was most obvious to the bikers, because their journey was literally on a path. They traveled thousands of miles laterally and thousands of feet up and down, completing a journey that most of us can’t imagine, let alone participate in. Likewise, all the young inhabitants of these temporary summer communities shared in intense experiences of growth, participation, and discovery, not yet burdened by the wisdom and experience that naturally come with time, mostly whether you like it or not. So at the moment of triumph and accomplishment, when the goals were met and the mountains were scaled, why did the participants feel sad? The reactions were uniformly similar among all three groups. My teenage daughter’s travel companions all cried the last day, and she was morose (well, more morose than average) when she returned. During the last weekend, the campers were moribund. On the cross-country bike trip, one of the bikers commented in his blog: “What great accomplishments they all had, what soaring successes, but it was all accomplished. It was done. The experience was over.” My friend Steve accused me of being elegiac (check this out—even though I’m an engineer, I used the word “elegiac” correctly in a sentence!) when I talked about this subject with him. But it seems to me that for us jaded adults, there is something to be learned in watching youth grapple with the end of summer. For everyone, but particularly for engineers, life is a series of projects. The projects more or less follow a similar path. There is the confusing, exciting start-up phase when the work is being defined. Participants sort out their roles. The scope is being scoped. After this messy introductory period, things settle down to an extent, and the project

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moves into its production phase. Now, we hope that everyone is marching down the same road. A community has been created, with members, roles, and responsibilities. As in all communities, there are pluses and minuses—the project will have terrific milestones, nutty detours, great contributors, and not-so-great participants. As the process gears up, things become shopworn but comfortable. Everyone and everything tends to be where it needs to be (we hope). But as with any project, the submission date looms. As the deadline rears its ugly head, activity ratchets up to a feverish pitch. With seemingly unattainable deadlines, the normal schedule morphs into nights and weekends. Maybe it’s not as much fun as a cross-country trip, but the project community bands together to finish the calculations, draw the drawings, and write the reports. And then it’s over. You do it, and then it’s done. The project is finished. The client is happy (usually). Are we? Our little project community is disbanded, not as dramatically or with the same finality as that of the young cross-country bikers, but it’s still over. We’ll do something else, the next day in fact, but never again in the same way, with the same circumstances, and with the same people, as in our completed project. I remember feeling this way after finishing a large and challenging bridge project. The work had some 11th-hour twists and turns, but we were able to pull off all the last-minute changes and meet our deadlines. It was intense, it was nights and weekends, and then it was over. I was glad that we achieved what we did and glad to return to a more normal schedule. The client was happy, so we were invited to design more bridges the next day. But the project was completed, never to be repeated again in that way, at that moment of time. So summer ends, the leaves drop off the trees, and a cold winter blankets the land. Then the sun comes out again, the trees bud, and the cycle repeats itself.

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School’s Out Transitioning from student to professional engineer can be uneasy.

Students participate in organized classrooms. Their classes have a curriculum, defined learning objectives, and measurements of performance. Starting in kindergarten and continuing through 16th grade, maybe higher for an advanced degree, students attend organized, formatted classes. They complete a series of sequential, bite-size assignments of increasing complexity and intellectual rigor. They get feedback through report cards. Classes, assignments, and the overall school experience are geared toward the developing intellects and functions of children. To an extent, even older college students are treated in this way. Practicing engineers are expected to act as adults, and we hope that they do. Practicing engineers must deal with the messiness and uncertainties of the real world. Engineering problems for responsible engineers are not so clear-cut as the students’ homework assignments. Real-world problems are often ill defined and open ended and feature all sorts of constraints and interactions with other ill-defined, open-ended problems. Whereas students are drilled at getting the “right” answer throughout their educational career, practicing engineers often find that there is no one “right” answer, but one that is good enough to satisfy the multiple constraints. The messy, ambiguous world of the practicing engineer is formatted to suit the messy, ambiguous problems with which we must deal. There are no homework assignments to solve, but there are design submittals with target deadlines, based on a shifting schedule, shifting resources, shifting client needs, and a budget that may or may not have enough resources to address ill-defined problems. A responsible, practicing engineer learns to function, survive, and prosper amid all of the challenges and ambiguities of the real world. Living the Civil Engineering Life

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What happens when it is time to transition from the order of school to the chaos of the real world? Like a beautiful butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, at some point an engineering student is declared to be a responsible engineer (and my apologies for comparing students to caterpillars). The processes and environments for both students and practicing engineers are reasonably well defined and understood. What about the transition between the two? To aid in the transition, some approaches have been used: • Formal mentoring. Some large organizations have defined mentoring programs where senior engineers take junior engineers under their wings. • Informal mentoring. Junior engineers seek out and work with practicing engineers informally and learn the ropes that way. • Internships. Many colleges seek to place students out in practice before graduation. For some programs, this is a requirement. • Magic. Using this approach, which seems to be common in many organizations, newly minted engineers are flung into the real world and expected to accumulate wisdom through osmosis. Through development of the “body of knowledge” (BOK), ASCE has taken a stab at defining the transition period: what it means to gain engineering experience, what the experience is, and how to define it and measure it. Programs of a sort have started to work with these definitions, through development of continuing education classes and requirements. But, unfortunately, the big divide in expectations and approach between student and young engineer is exacerbated by the gap between academia and practice. In a perfect engineering world, academia and professional practice would be coordinated and seamless. There would be no ivory tower walls to scale in this nirvana because there would be no ivory tower. Professors and practitioners would alternate back and forth in the realms of teaching, research, and applied engineering. In such an environment, the harsh transition for a newly graduated engineer would not be as harsh. There would not be an abrupt division between the cocoonlike metrics of the student environment and the get-it-done-now free-for-all of the engineering world.

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I have had the privilege and good fortune to be both a practicing engineer and a professor. Over the years, I have seen how many of my students have struggled to cross the threshold to achieve the status of a responsible engineer. In class before graduation, I’ve lectured them on the stark divide: how one moment they are students, and the next moment they are suddenly adults. Many have taken advantage of mentoring programs and opportunities. Some are fortunate to find positions where there is a more formal adjustment to the realm of engineering practice. Some had assignments as interns. But for many more, the approach for their transition can best be described as magic.

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Raising the Bridge A video camera was placed near an old railroad bridge in North Caro-

lina. This bridge had very low vertical clearance above the road, barely more than 12 ft. The camera recorded a series of trucks crashing into the bridge. Even with warning signs posted for low clearance, one after another, truck and van drivers seemed to ignore the warning. Drivers used different approaches, all unsuccessful. Some were just oblivious and had the tops of their vehicles ripped off. Others knew that there was a potential problem, but they relied on a little finesse to ease their vehicles through. A lot of grease might have helped in these cases, but a little finesse did not. One driver inched his semi beneath the underpass, and the video captures the top of the truck slowly peeling off like a sardine can. Through it all, the old bridge survives one crash after another. How much vertical clearance should be provided is a bit like deciding on the number of soil borings to be taken. The ideal number for vertical borings and the ideal vertical clearance is infinity. Using a dimension of infinity, then you can really be sure you have enough borings and clearance. However, a vertical clearance beneath a bridge of infinity is not practical because for one thing the bridge would need to span at a location beyond the edge of the universe. So some dimension smaller than infinity is needed. But a smaller dimension often seems to be inadequate, as experienced by the unfortunate bridge in North Carolina. Today’s minimum interstate highway clearance is specified to be 16.5 ft. In the past, a clearance of 14 ft or lower was provided. As highways are rebuilt, it’s interesting to see reconstructed bridges next to

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older ones. The new bridges are raised to current standards, but the old structures remain with lower clearance. On Route 128 in Weston, Massachusetts, the Recreation Road overpass was replaced with a new structure at the current, higher required clearance. But immediately to the north is an old, active railroad bridge that carries a commuter rail line. This through-girder bridge provides a smaller vertical clearance across the highway. Drivers not well versed in the ways of engineers would be confused by the juxtaposition of different bridge heights. For the replacement bridge, the thinking is that it makes sense to spend a bit more to build a higher span. Eventually, all the bridges will be replaced, and then higher vertical clearance will be provided everywhere. That’s the idea, but it seems like it will take a long time to achieve this goal, if it is ever to be achieved. The railroad bridge may be replaced eventually, but there is still the problem of grading the tracks higher, not so easy to do along a limited right-of-way. The correct vertical clearance itself is a moving target. Today it’s 16.5 ft. Maybe in a few years, it will be 19 ft. Or maybe everything in the United States will switch to metric after all, and then the correct minimum clearance will be 17.623 ft, which might be an even number in metric (I was lazy and didn’t do the math). Then, the Recreation Road overpass will be too low next to the reconstructed railroad bridge. Therefore, for many years to come, we will likely drive along highways with mismatched sets of bridges, some higher, some lower. The new spans conform to current codes and represent the unfulfilled dreams of engineers. It’s not only that the specified clearance has increased with time. The trucks are getting taller as well. With trucks getting taller faster than the minimum clearance increases, bridges are hit more often. Vertical clearance jams are not limited to highway vehicles. Bridges crossing active waterways are also subject to collision. In May 2012, the top funnel of a cruise ship clipped a cable-stayed bridge in Wenzhou City, China (http://www.crew-center.com/cruise-ship-crashes-wenzhou-bridge, November 2015). A video recording of the crash shows the bridge laterally vibrating from the collision as vehicles continued to cross it. The inherent flexibility of cable-stayed bridges may have helped in the collision. The lateral movement could absorb some energy of impact, whereas a more rigid structure might have sustained more damage.

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Cruise ships are big to begin with, and they are getting bigger. The ships are the equivalent of small cities. New vessels are the equivalent of midsized cities, with thousands of residents and decks that pop above the waterline for hundreds of feet. The mother of all bridge-raising projects is currently under way in Bayonne, New Jersey (http://www.panynj.gov/bayonnebridge/, accessed November 2015). Kill Van Kull, a tidal strait that separates Bayonne from Staten Island, New York, is spanned by the magnificent Bayonne Bridge. It is a long-span, overdeck arch. When it opened in 1931, it was the longest arch span in the world. Today, it is still No. 5 on the list (Figure 1). Kill Van Kull is an arm of New York Harbor separating Bayonne from Staten Island. The Kill provides a passage for boats from the harbor and the Atlantic to port facilities in Newark Bay. When the bridge was first built, it provided 151 ft of clearance above the Kill, and that was enough for more than 80 years. But now another project is under way to widen the Panama Canal. With the canal widened, it will be possible to

Figure 1. Bayonne Bridge Source: Photo by Jim Henderson, (Feb. 27, 2015)

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float taller and wider boats. The only limitation would be at port facilities. Ports that don’t provide the room won’t be able to berth the bigger ships, and they will lose out to facilities that can. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey decided that to remain competitive, boat transit on Kill Von Kull could not be restricted. A bridge type study considered construction of a new, higher bridge along with doing nothing. It concluded that raising clearance on the existing bridge was the best option. It’s a billion-dollar-plus project with unique technical and staging challenges. Engineers and constructors must work around the limitations of the existing structure and traffic to raise the suspended deck. The result is likely to be an engineering marvel, but it may be a little disappointing in terms of aesthetics. Today, the bridge and arch profile seem to be scaled about right. The original bridge design called for constructing ornamental post structures at the beginnings of the arch, similar to the Hell Gate Bridge in New York and Sydney Harbor Bridge in Sydney, Australia. To save money during the Great Depression, the ornamental structures were never built. The resulting structure is sleek and modernistic for its time. But with the proposed raising of the deck, a cost of improved clearance will be a change in the balance of proportions. In elevation, the deck will appear to ride high on the arch, with a smaller segment extending above. If the bridge were designed today (and Othmar Ammann were still alive to do it), maybe a taller arch would be selected to match the new clearance. At a certain point, it makes sense to build a new bridge instead of raising the old one. There are no set of black and white rules for this decision, only engineering evaluation supported by judgment. The clearance debate seems poised to continue into the future. Maybe there is some correct ultimate clearance that will eventually be selected. This will be humanity’s optimum minimum vertical clearance for bridges. Until then, the code clearance gradually increases, trucks and boats continue to lose their tops, and low-slung legacy bridges gamely live on to be crashed into another day.

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The Short List After intense work on a proposal for a new project, the reports are com-

piled, the documents are printed, the disks are burned, and the boxes are carted off to a prospective client. Then it’s time to wait. In some cases, the client’s decision may be almost immediate. In others, it may take several weeks to learn about the proposal’s fate. The odds being what they are, most proposals don’t make it much further than the initial stage. But every now and then, initial pay dirt is struck and the client announces that you have made it to the short list. At this point, the baying herd is whittled down to a select handful of competing firms. Winning the job is still not assured. But the odds are greatly improved. Once you’re on the short list, the job is now starting to be possible and not just wishful thinking. After a brief respite for kudos, the proposal team reconvenes and works at a furious pace to assemble the final documents. Unlike the qualification phase, this final proposal typically requires much more detailed engineering and planning. If it’s a design-build project tender, a tremendous amount of design must be completed quickly, and many more boxes will be filled and delivered before the work is done. But there is one more event to address after making the short list. In most cases, project teams present their work at an oral interview. For many engineers, the prospect of a live presentation is a cause of intense fear. At the interview, it is necessary to get up and speak in front of a critical audience. At my firm, making the short list triggers a series of events for planning the presentation. There are PowerPoint shows to power up, presentation scripts to write and perfect, and late-night pizzas to be

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eaten. Many clients require the presentation to be completed within a specified time limit. So we practice the timing over and over again to get it right. Each presenter has an allotted number of minutes. Those who are uncomfortable with public speaking may ramble on too long, and then we need contingency plans to cut back on the overall time. Some presenters mumble, and others speak too softly. Some are nice people in real life, with good personalities, a flair for fashion, and admirable grooming habits. Unfortunately, these same colleagues may be deadly dull presenters on the podium. Granted, it’s an engineering project and perhaps the topics overall are not that exciting. But the client will listen to many presentations that day and will appreciate being entertained, even a little bit, instead of feeling like it’s an endless day at a really boring dentist. After weeks of practice, the fateful day arrives. Interview Day is a thing of ritual for many engineers. There are rigid customs and traditions to be followed before the show. Some offices avoid practice the day of the presentation. Others go through a few more dry runs. Depending on the time of the interview, the Last Meal may be eaten. For an afternoon interview, the team gets together for lunch. Engineering team members, not often the most socially adept bunch to begin with, nervously attempt small talk and nibble on cold sandwiches as a silent clock loudly ticks off the seconds. Eating too much food is not a good idea at this point. Indigestion or worse does not add to the luster of the presentation. After the meal, it is time. The team leaves in a caravan with projectors, laptops, display boards, and other paraphernalia. In the Middle Ages, a group leaving for battle would carry swords, picks, and other weapons, ready to slay the competing firm. It’s funny how many times I’ve had that vision of preparing for battle when leaving for a presentation. The city is teeming with life, and the sidewalks are packed, but strangely it’s like High Noon. We cross the busy streets, and there is not a soul in sight. A cold wind blows in July, tossing forlorn tufts of tumbleweeds. Grimly, our group assembles outside the conference room. A previous team is leaving, and because everyone knows everyone else, we are all friendly and chatty. But of course they have their game faces on. Their body language communicates to us that they slayed ’em in the aisles. It

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was a superb performance, a flawless presentation. Probably the client decided to pick them on the spot, so now there is no need to bother with us. We smile politely, not pointing out that their project manager has gross, smelly dark rings of sweat dripping from his armpits, or that one of their lead presenters has a visibly congested nose. Inside the conference room, the client’s evaluation team sits stonefaced as we assemble our paraphernalia. In the distant past, a slide projector would be assembled. Dinosaur that I am, I still remember the time when the tray malfunctioned and slides popped into the air each time they were changed. It was a funny way to make a presentation, but it was a little distracting. Today we have no slide trays. We rely on our modern technology: the laptop, projector, and PowerPoint presentation all must perform. We bring one or more backups for each component, depending on the prospective job’s importance. The tension is thick as we engineers prepare to engage. Finally, the talking begins, and process takes over. We introduce ourselves and engage our audience. The presentation that seemed to take a day in practice is oddly over in a flash. Our speakers stick to the scripts, more or less, the timing works, the graphics and animations are of startling clarity and brilliance. In a moment, our prepared talks are done, and then it’s time for some questions and answers. We engineers dread this too, of course, but for many this part is little bit easier than the timed, canned performance. Fortunately, the client often has some softballs for us, and the hitters smack each question pitch deep into the outfield. After a few more questions, it’s all over. The client thanks us for our time. We thank the client for the opportunity. We shake sweaty, clammy hands. Then we pack up the laptop, projector, and boards, and soon we’re back on the street. Over a few beers, we relive the excitement: smiles from the client (if any), jokes told, opportunities realized, opportunities lost. The postmortem is often deflating. After all that nervous worry and adrenalin, it’s time for reentry back into real engineering life. The next day, we hover over our computers for calculations and analysis. Our special presentation suits are sent to the dry cleaners, and we’re back in our mismatched daily engineering garb. The final results will be provided some time in the immediate but seemingly distant future. For now, we engineers have survived the short list. 152

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Return to Dulles The winter of 2014 may be remembered as one of the worst ever for air

travel. A series of monumental blizzards raked all parts of the United States. Something called a “polar vortex” spun its evil in the nation’s midsection, pumping excessively cold air down to New Orleans and all locales in between. Airlines lost millions of dollars in canceled flights, and thousands of people were trapped at airports—no hotels, nowhere to go. Being trapped in an airport is an experience in travel purgatory. You can’t leave because maybe they’ll call your flight. You have nowhere to go except a bench with stale peanuts as the winds howl outside and civilization comes to an end. I’ve mostly lucked out in winter air travel. Last year, we were going for a long weekend in San Juan, Puerto Rico. A blizzard was forecast to rake the U.S. East Coast. It was a grim forecast: many feet of snow and zero visibility. Once the storm began, planes would be grounded. Anxiously, we read the weather reports, each one worse than the next. The meteorologists were excited: This was a big storm! We grasped at straws: Maybe a cold front would push the snowstorm; maybe the atmospheric low would nudge ever so slightly to the east. As it turned out, our prayers were answered. The start of the blizzard was slightly delayed. Our flight was the second to last to escape from Logan Airport before the intense snow began. A few hours later, we chuckled as a soft breeze ruffled the palm leaves and gently frothed the warm azure surface of the Caribbean. Over the years, I’ve been lucky, never trapped at an airport, ever— except once. During the winter of 1996, we had assembled a large Boston contingent to attend the Transportation Research Board conference in

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January. As we prepared to travel to Washington, D.C., a big nor’easter barreled up the coast. Logan was paralyzed. Of the 20 or so engineers going, only two made it out: me and another not-so-lucky flyer. Somehow, we canvassed the forlorn airport and found the one flight leaving. The trip there took four days, or something like that. In the air it wasn’t so bad, but then it was time to land in Washington. Snow had blasted the D.C. area as well as Boston. But unlike Boston, which has some experience with snow, it only takes an inch or two for Washington to be disabled. This storm provided more like a foot of snow. When we landed and skidded to the gate, the airport ran out of tow trucks. So they used large huskies. That was the trip there. The conference itself was pleasant but very different from previous years. This was because about half the attendees didn’t attend. When it was done, somehow I made it back to the Dulles Airport terminal for the return. Once at the terminal, we were snowed in. No planes in, no planes out. It really was the end of civilization. It was me, trapped with 2,000 other people. The terminal ran out of food. At one point, an attendant announced that he had found a bag of nuts. I don’t think this next part actually happened, but I remember that a matronly woman dressed in what looked like a black potato sack approached the attendant with an oversized umbrella. She raised the umbrella in a threatening way, and in a dark guttural voice she commanded, “Give me the nuts!” For me, when it comes to travel to Dulles Airport, I will be scarred for life. It’s that image, which I probably imagined anyway, of the woman in the black potato sack. Based on my fear of Dulles, I scheduled subsequent trips to the downtown Reagan National Airport. But a few years ago, the only arrangement that made sense was a trip via Dulles Airport. It was time for me to return to Dulles. Ironically, it was during another bitter, oversnowed winter, but my travel day turned out to be sunny and calm, one of the few that season. I landed without incident, purchased two large bags of cashews to honor the memory of 1996, and set out to ride the old mobile bus from the satellite to the main terminal. To get back and forth between the Dulles terminal pods, you used to have to ride a clunky, uncomfortable bus. These custom-built vehicles were advanced in their day, but by the 21st century, they were becoming

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seriously outdated. Among other problems, the buses had to wend their way through active taxiways and maneuvering jets. To address these problems, an underground people mover had been planned and was under construction for many years. Luckily for me, the facility opened a few days before I arrived. The new underground train connects satellite terminals A–C to the main terminal. It is an architectural and engineering success, at least in its finished form. The train connects to terminals via soaring underground stations. The stations are cathedral-like shafts, naturally lit by sun and skylight that streams down to track level. Passengers ascend and descend via escalators that are suspended like ribbons in the shafts. The structural framing for this elaborate underground space includes beautiful, exposed cable-supported beams. The overall construction is well detailed and graceful. The new underground trains were not built easily. One tunnel collapsed during construction. Also, the current design in some ways seems incomplete. Not all terminals or stops are connected. The design was planned before September 11, 2001, for a future airport expansion that today may not come to pass. So some layout decisions that may have made sense then don’t seem as logical today. The next big improvement at Dulles will be the arrival of the Metro, which is expanding west from Tysons Corner, Virginia. Before leaving to go to my meeting, I spent an extra few minutes surveying the beautiful new underground stations and future connections. After many years of bad Dulles memories, the triumphant spaces glistened in the underground sunlight. There were no blizzards this trip, but just in case I purchased two more bags of cashews.

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Riverside Most of Massachusetts would not be confused with Orlando, Florida. In

that flat, sunbaked city, vast stretches of urban sprawl are interrupted by vast “theme” amusement parks. Disney World, Universal Studios, and Sea World evolved from the old trolley amusement parks of centuries past. Many of the original amusement parks were created by urban trolley companies to generate weekend business for the trolleys. By today’s standards, these were bare-bones, honky-tonk establishments with carnival midways and crude antecedents of today’s rides. The roller coasters were made out of wood and didn’t have special effects or music. There were shows but no animatronic talking bears because animatronics hadn’t been invented yet. Today’s amusement theme parks use the same fundamental approach. But the parks have become bloated. They are marketed not just as amusement parks but as resort destinations. They charge up to three figures per person for daily admission. To enter, you are required to provide two major forms of credit. In Massachusetts, the closest you can get to a theme park is Six Flags, New England. This park is the reincarnation of the former Riverside Park, an old-school, traditional trolley-line-type amusement park built on the banks of the Connecticut River just south of Springfield in Agawam. The park started out with modest amusements, and riverboats transported guests from across the Connecticut River in Springfield. In that sense, it wasn’t really a trolley-line park but a riverboat-line park. But the idea was the same. When it was Riverside, the park gradually added rides and attractions. In its day, Riverside Park was a very New England type of place. It was distinctive, old school, dowdy, and sort of rambling. The midway

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had skeet shooting and carnival games like Whac-A-Mole. It had all of the typical midway rides as well as some big old roller coasters, including a recreation of the Cyclone wood roller coaster from Coney Island in New York. Riverside Park was a survivor from the time when dozens of little amusement parks dotted the New England landscape. When trolley lines closed and amusement parks morphed into giant theme parks, the little mom-and-pop operations couldn’t compete. One of my first dates with my wife, Lauren, was riding the roller coaster at Nantasket Beach. The park has long since closed, and the site has been converted to oceanfront condominiums. Likewise, most of the older New England parks did not survive to become theme parks. The White City amusement park, in Shrewsbury, was the place to go for residents of Worcester. Today it is a shopping plaza, retaining the old name of the park but nothing else. Riverside is one of the few older New England parks that has made the transition to the modern, theme park era. I was a fan of the old Riverside, when it was creaky and had more thrills and less theme. Then I grew up, and the park slowly changed to its current Six Flags incarnation. In the years immediately before its metamorphosis, you could tell something was up. The park owners were getting ready to sell out, so they started adding all sorts of doodads, bloat, and features in keeping with the theme park theme. The rides were painted, the honky-tonk reigned in. Six Flags is not exactly Disney, but it does have higher aspirations than an old carnival midway. At Six Flags New England, there are different lands to visit, like the Wild West and an idealized 1950s town. Main Street at Six Flags still has some of the old Riverside charm, with a sky-ride and carnival midway games. At one booth, a teenager was in charge of guessing the ages of patrons. This seemed wildly inappropriate in many ways, and it was hard to understand how the park could make money at such a booth. But on the other hand, the prize was a 20-cent stuffed animal. At a fee of $5 per guest, the house couldn’t lose. The engineering of the rides is very impressive. Six Flags has kept several of the classic Riverside wooden roller coasters. The park has added several steel coasters. One has a 221-ft drop with acceleration to almost 80 mph. While waiting in line, I got to see some of the bolting details, especially for the turns. The coaster has no-nonsense support pads with deep anchor bolts. Whereas the wood coasters appear to get Living the Civil Engineering Life

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by on redundancy, and in some cases prayer, the steel coasters seem to apply a brute force design approach. Wood coasters of the past were designed with slide rules and drafted by hand. For today’s steel coasters, it’s finite elements and detailed dynamic analysis. Many of the newer rides have themes added to the themes. The new steel coasters are named after superheroes and comic book characters. The thinking is that today’s ADHD kids are too distracted and devoid of imagination to go with a simple name like “Cyclone.” The coasters must compete with all sorts of distractions. Waiting in a 45-minute line for the 90-second ride, you can see all the kids playing and texting on their smart phones. So at least they’re not as bored waiting in line. Across the United States, new steel coasters have continued an upward march to bigger and badder. The new steel coasters are not reined in by the physical limitations of wood framing. The controlling design element seems to be how much acceleration and twisting the human body can take. It is desirable for patrons be able to function and to walk away from the ride after it’s complete. Therefore, the new coasters are designed to provide accelerations within human physiological limits. But every now and then, something sadly goes wrong—a belt doesn’t work, a rider is not properly secured. Then a fun day at the park turns to tragedy. Theme parks seem to be caught in a “bigger is better” upward trajectory. In transforming from Riverside to Six Flags, the old, dowdy amusement park doubled in size. A water park was added, as were new roller coasters and new shows. It is bigger, better, and with a new improved entrance fee to match. Every year something new needs to be added because of the risk that people will get tired of the old version. Where this trend leads us is not clear. Present-day kids are overinformationed, overstimulated, and overmedicated with drugs to control their overstimulation. It may be that the future Six Flags won’t be able to build enough new attractions to compete with couch-based video games. If you look carefully, you can see scraps of the dowdy old park hidden in the midway. When I walk around Six Flags (I am perhaps a decade or two older than the median age in attendance), I see the old park in its past glory. In my mind’s eye, I’m still a kid imagining the old amusement park. The other kids don’t see it because they are busy texting each other as the world flows by. 158

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The Red and the Blue Nathaniel Philbrick’s book, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

(2013, Penguin Books), describes events at the start of the American Revolutionary War. Most of us have learned about Paul Revere’s ride and other events in glowing, black-and-white terms. Our lessons from grade school taught us that the British were bad, the colonial Patriots were angelic, and thus the battle was fought. Philbrick’s historical treatment uses a revisionist approach. In his description, things were not so simple. His description of events and people’s behavior is in the real time of the day, without much 20–20 commentary. In his description, the rose color is taken off the glasses. According to Philbrick, it was not a battle between good and evil. Most participants were ambivalent and had conflicted motivations. The supposedly angelic colonists fought for freedom and democracy. But many colonial groups, such as black slaves and members of different religions, weren’t included in the fight for liberty. Some colonial settlers considered themselves English subjects. They remained loyal to England and were bullied into the conflict. An interesting aspect was the time lag. With today’s smart phones, Skype, and constant data overload, we avail ourselves of instant communication on demand. But this was not the case in the 18th century. It could take two months or more for word and instructions to go back and forth from the colonies to England. Apparently, the King and the colonists did not tweet. Even with instant communication and too much information, conflicts proceed in a fog, but 250 years ago, the fog was a denser morass of confusion and misinformation than today. The Revolutionary War was preceded by a series of small battles and brushfires. But the conflict began in earnest during the British Living the Civil Engineering Life

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march to Lexington and Concord. A contingent of British soldiers set out from Boston to capture stores of gunpowder and arms in Concord. The first skirmish was on the Lexington Green, where several colonial militia men died under fire. The British soldiers then marched on to Concord. West of town, at the Old North Bridge, the developing battle turned when the Patriots fired and routed the British soldiers. The bridge was a multispan timber-framed structure crossing the Concord River. Like most bridges, it was an anonymous structure, a backdrop in the countryside. Up until the fateful battle, it peacefully served its function facilitating commerce and travel. It had little effect in political affairs until it was thrust to the forefront of history. Usually, the role of a bridge is to span and connect and to do so quietly without much notice or notoriety. But every now and then, a bridge pokes its way into the political narrative. Bridges are positive, excellent structures, but unfortunately they can be thrust into the spotlight and receive unwanted notoriety. For decades, few people knew about the Dike Bridge, crossing an inlet to Poucha Pond on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts. The bridge is a short, multispan timber trestle on a quiet back road near the beach. It is not much of a bridge. In the summer of 1969, the trestle had no safety guardrails. It was essentially deck planking over the narrow inlet. One evening in July, when young Senator Kennedy drove off the bridge, it was anonymous no more. The Dike Bridge has a structure similar to that of the Old North Bridge. But unlike the Old North Bridge, there are no visitor centers at the site. Since 1969, sturdy timber rails have been added on the sides. The bridge is a popular tourist destination, although it is out of the way and not so easy to get to. A recent bridge imbroglio occurred in the fall of 2013, involving the George Washington Bridge in New York City. The beautiful suspension bridge is one of the most heavily traveled spans in the world. For a few days, a “study” was performed in which several toll lanes in Fort Lee, New Jersey, were closed. Approaches to the bridge from the west do not flow so well in the best of circumstances. Traffic jams of an hour or more on some approach highways are typical, and that’s with all the scheduled toll lanes open. When the toll lanes were closed, traffic Armageddon ensued. Commuters trying to escape flooded the streets of Fort Lee, paralyzing the city.

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Months later, it was revealed that the “study” was a political ploy. The mayor of Fort Lee declined to support New Jersey’s governor’s reelection campaign. In retribution, some of the governor’s aides arranged to have the toll booths closed. One aide e-mailed that it was a good time for a traffic jam. With this revelation, a scandal ensued. Before the scandal, the governor was thought to be potentially a major presidential candidate. The bridge scandal may have altered those plans. Bridges are not thought to be things of conflict. With a few military exceptions, bridges are inherently peaceful. The design and construction of a bridge is in keeping with the highest aspirations of humankind. To varying degrees, bridges require long-term planning, marshaling of resources, complex coordination, and a period of painstaking construction. It can take many years for a bridge to appear after the decision is made to build it. Building a bridge is like planting a tree. The payoff from today’s hard work is not immediate. Implied in the decision is the hopeful thought that future people will prosper and benefit from the present day’s hard work. The resulting structure provides not just physical connection but also symbolic connection as well. We think of “bridging the gap” and see that bridges bring us together. So it is startling when every now and then, a poor unfortunate bridge is thrust into the political fracas. Given the choice, bridges are content to span and connect, peacefully forming a backdrop in our lives while staying out of human conflicts.

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Aging and Infrastructure U.S. infrastructure is designed for drivers. A few areas have walkable

streets and facilities. Some locales have serviceable mass transit. But the majority of the population lives in spaces that are sprawling and not easy to get around without a car. Even in these places, maybe bus lines are available. But rides by bus would take two hours in comparison to 15 minutes by car. The reality is that if you can’t drive, you can’t get around. On Christmas Day and on some other holidays, my synagogue takes responsibility for food delivery as part of a local Meals on Wheels program. This program, supported by volunteers and donations, provides hot meals for the indigent and aging population in the suburbs south of Boston. Over the years, I’ve gotten to meet some of the regular clients. It is an opportunity to not just deliver food but also to provide some contact and comfort to a group of people who are shut in and isolated. Many of the program’s clients live in impoverished conditions. Suburban Boston is probably one of the most well-heeled places on Earth. It is startling to see pockets of deprivation in the midst of relative prosperity. There are many complex and interwoven issues contributing to this condition, but I want to comment on one in this essay: bad infrastructure design. To participate and function in suburban Boston, and in suburbs all over the United States, you have to be able to drive. The Boston area provides above-average public transportation. But outside a relatively narrow urban belt (mostly within Route 128), transportation is pretty much exclusively via automobile. If you can’t drive, you don’t have access. For the aging population scattered around the suburbs, loss of driving capability leads to isolation and loss of independence and function.

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In past societies, the elderly were part of communities and not isolated from them. Densely built communities of the past included senior citizens instead of separating them. Older citizens could walk to stores and facilities. Suburban sprawl is mostly a U.S. invention, spurred on by a land use pattern prompted by the automobile. The American dream includes the idea of personal transportation at will, and overall it is a good thing. But we all get older, and senior citizens lose the ability to drive. The result in many cases is separation and isolation. Getting old is not easy, but as the aphorism goes, it’s better than the alternative. A better alternative for infrastructure design would be to recapture some of the benefits provided by greater density and to reign in the sprawl. Improved design should be considered apolitical. Bad infrastructure is not conservative or liberal. It’s just bad.

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Number One, Baby! At the Moose Hill Creamery in Sharon, Massachusetts, it seemed like

most of the town was celebrating. It was just after sunset. The crickets were out in force, providing a summer evening din. Happy customers of all ages were lining up at the windows awaiting their scoops. Out on the pasture, the usually sedentary cows were unusually frisky. They playfully tussled and wrestled beyond the picket fence. Maybe they thought that the people couldn’t see them play in the fading light. But if so, they were mistaken. Happy grade-schoolers gobbled their ice cream and pointed to the playful cows. In the background, someone played a Red Sox game on the radio. It was late summer, and the Sox were making an improbable run for the pennant. All in all, it was hard to imagine a more placid and satisfying summer night in New England. The patrons at the creamery seemed to agree and were reveling in the postdusk. There was even more to celebrate in addition to the some of the world’s best ice cream. The town of Sharon had just been named the number one best place to live in America by Money magazine (http://www.magazine.org/node/26485). In deciding which was the best small town, the August 2013 article weighed such criteria as employment opportunities, quality of the schools, the town’s physical infrastructure, and other parameters. For residents of my hometown, the positive attributes are well known and appreciated. Sharon is about halfway between Boston and Providence. Both cities can be reached by a short and reliable commuter rail train ride. So working in either downtown offers the option of an easy and pleasant, noncar commute. By car, the Route 128 and 495 hi-tech corridors provide many other work opportunities. Pretty much the entire Boston metro job market is reasonably accessible from town.

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The article noted that for a suburban town, Sharon has a remote feel because much of the town’s land is preserved. Lake Massapoag is near the town’s center. It is a sparkling, mile-long spring-fed lake with two beaches, a bandstand, and a small yacht club for the sailboats. Also within town boundaries are the Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary and Borderland State Park. Moose Hill is a Massachusetts Audubon Society preserve with hundreds of acres of woods, marshes, and hilly, forested paths. Its namesake is the highest point in the area south of the Great Blue Hill. The state park preserves the former estate of Blanche and Oakes Ames. It is a beautiful property with large expanses of woodlands, ponds, and paths for mountain biking. In addition to the sanctuary and state park, Sharon has many acres of preserved town forests and meadows. The town’s infrastructure overall is small scale and inviting. Sharon has a compact town center on a hill top near the train station. Surrounding the small commercial area is a 19th-century grid of tree-lined streets and old, attractive Victorian homes. Adjacent to the tiny downtown is the Wilbur School. This old former high school building had sadly lain abandoned and derelict for many years. But recently, the building was successfully redeveloped as an apartment complex. The historic old building was sensitively expanded. The resulting apartments and grounds are beautiful. The architecture includes many whimsical details, like rows of refinished former school lockers in the building corridors. In general, the town has kept its eye on the prize over the years, successfully completing a series of smart projects, such as the replacement of the bridge across the railroad tracks and demolition of the old Sacred Heart School building, an eyesore that has been converted into parkland. In addition to its convenience and accommodating terrain, Sharon has some of the best public schools in the state. Real estate agents comment that this detail alone contributes greatly to the town’s popularity. On top of that, Money magazine pointed out the town’s diversity. The town supports many churches and synagogues and one of New England’s largest mosques. There are probably few places in the world with a similar population where the residents live harmoniously together instead of trying to kill one another. So there is a lot to love in Sharon, Massachusetts. Sharon is number one, baby, according to Money magazine. Good schools, beautiful terrain, accessible jobs, diverse and accommodating residents. What’s not to love? Living the Civil Engineering Life

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Well, maybe a few things. Understanding the town’s problems and how they have been addressed is helpful, overall, for understanding the U.S. infrastructure development pattern in place after World War II. How Sharon has or has not succeeded provides useful commentary on the overall issues. A concern for town residents, not noted in the glowing article, is the local real estate tax rate. Sharon has one of the highest residential tax rates in the state. The largest chunk of the town budget goes to support the excellent school system, followed by outlays to the fire department, police department, and other town functions. In late 20th century–early 21st century America, suburban U.S. towns have basically two ways of footing the bill: via real estate taxes on the local residents and via business taxes on commercial establishments. There are other sources of funds, such as local aid provided by the state, but these are comparatively small amounts that can also be hit or miss depending on the political whims of the times. Of the two big choices for tax revenue, business taxes are more profitable because businesses pay in, but they don’t consume town services (as much as residents do). Unlike residences, businesses do not add children to the school system. So a suburban town with extensive commercial areas tends to be in better shape financially than towns without commercial areas. Unfortunately, Sharon does not have much business. All of that excellent preservation land represents lost opportunity for financially desirable, tax-paying office parks and light industry. The town fathers made a key decision in the 1960s and 1970s after construction of interstate highway I-95 on the western edge of town. At the Main Street exit, many acres of land could have been zoned for industry. This area was largely shielded from the rest of town. But the decision was to, instead, zone for residential. Today, the area is the site of Sharon Woods, which is not woods but a large subdivision with high-quality homes and many, many children. Sharon does have a small industrial area along sprawling Route 1 on the west side of I-95. The town layout is such that this area hardly seems like a part of Sharon because it is geographically separated and buffered from the main part of town by the Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary. The Route 1 industrial parks provide some tax relief, but not enough. As a result, unlike neighboring Foxboro, which hosts the huge, tax-paying 166

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Gillette Stadium complex and much light industry, Sharon is top-heavy with residents on that part of the land that is not preserved. So to fund the superb schools and other town services, tax rates are much higher than in surrounding towns. For U.S. suburban towns struggling with sprawl, it is a Faustian bargain: build strip malls with Walmarts and BJ’s to pay the school bills, or preserve a few acres of woods while taxing residents up the wazoo. At about the same time that industry was zoned out, Sharon made another fateful decision. The federal government was providing support for sewers and treatment plants. Sharon’s town government did not apply, with the general thinking that avoiding sewers would help keep a lid on undesirable growth. With few exceptions, most areas of the town rely on private septic systems. The town is also served by a good, townowned water system with local wells. This combination of local wells and private septic is, perhaps, more feasible for a rural development pattern. In a midsize suburban town, such an arrangement can lead to long-term problems. Some concerns have surfaced more recently as the state adopted more stringent rules for septic systems. In 2006, new laws regulating septic system use were enacted (http://www.mass.gov/eea/ agencies/massdep/water/wastewater/septic-systems-title-5.html). The rules covering new and existing systems are known under the moniker, “Title 5.” The combination of the new laws with aging systems has led to the need for a lot of replacement. As a result of Title 5, one can drive around town and see several mini-excavation sites at homes for sale. Digging of the leaching field has become a local rite of spring, like the start of the Red Sox campaign. Paradise aside, Sharon suffers from other bumps and bruises that are symptomatic of 21st century American suburbia. But overall, the town is wonderful, and (overtaxed) residents know it. Until the small town beauty pageant article in Money magazine, it used to be a quiet knowledge. Then the town burst into national consciousness, at least for a year. It’s not clear exactly how Money magazine decided that Sharon was No. 1. It was an analytic process but maybe not completely analytic. Similar to a beauty pageant, the town wears its crown royally, until the sun sets and a new place becomes No. 1. Back at the creamery, the crickets chirp on a warm summer night. The cows moo, the kids slurp their frappes, and the Red Sox score. Number one, baby! Living the Civil Engineering Life

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The Bridges of Dallas The TV show Dallas takes place in Dallas. The show chronicles the adven-

tures of the Ewings, a fictional wealthy Texas oil family. There are two versions of the show. The first was filmed in the 1980s. It was a popular and culturally iconic show for its time. Everyone watched it, and episodes were discussed at the water cooler the next day. The plot culminated in the shooting of J. R., Jock Ewing’s dastardly son. In addition to the soap-operatic proceedings, the show featured an interesting opening montage with some nice aerial views of the city’s landscape. A sweeping view of the Trinity River is shown. The area around Dallas is relatively dry. For most of the year, the Trinity River is not much of a river but more of a soggy ditch. In periods of drought, it is not even soggy. The river and surrounding floodplain are situated just west of downtown. Bridges that cross the floodplain, such as it is, do not require grandeur or long spans. At least in terms of engineering design, short, nondescript spans atop short piers will do. These modest, functional crossings are what appear in the 1980s Dallas opening montage. Decades later, the TV show was revived. The second version of Dallas, named Dallas, takes place about 30 years after the first series ended. It chronicles the same fictional family, with similar overblown soap opera plots. In the new show, the kids are all grown up and are responsible for their own bad behavior, as opposed to just being born into a family of bad behavior. Several of the original actors appear, including the late Larry Hagman, who played J.  R. and sadly passed away in 2013. Although the soap opera comings and goings are about the same, the show has been updated to feature such current concerns as global warming and renewable energy.

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In real life, the Trinity River bridge crossings have also been updated for the new century. The old, modest bridges are being replaced by a series of showy bridges designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. The overall project in Dallas was to feature three separate crossings. Based on budget limitations, one is currently not funded. Of the other two, one bridge is complete and the other under construction. The first of the new bridges completed is the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. This bridge supports Woodall Rodgers Freeway (Spur 366) across the river and floodplain. It is a cable-stayed, long-span bridge featuring two spans suspended off a center pylon. The bridge is designed to be a freeway extension with no pedestrian or bicycle access. It has been criticized as a “bridge to nowhere” because the freeway dead-ends just beyond the western abutment (http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/ north-south-dallas-project/editorials/20130412-editorial-hope-bloomsat-west-end-of-dallas-margaret-hunt-hill-bridge.ece) (Figure 1). The center pylon has an unusual design. Unlike most other cablestayed bridges with single towers, frames, or tuning fork shapes, this

Figure 1. Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas, Texas Source: Photo by DMHinIrving, (Feb. 27, 2015)

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tower is formed out of a circular half arch. Cables are fastened to the arch and down to the center of the suspended deck. The overall effect is startling and beautiful in a sculptural sort of way. But as a bridge structure, when considered in terms of “form follows function,” the load path is somewhat convoluted. The structure achieves visual notice, or one could argue, notoriety, by its size and startling array of cables. In general, a cable-stayed bridge is a good choice for span lengths in the range of this bridge. But it’s not clear that such span lengths were even needed at the site. The previous older bridges, with their short spans, worked fine for many decades. The second new crossing, under construction, is the Margaret McDermott Bridge. This new bridge replaces the existing Interstate 30 bridge over the Trinity River. The original design included a series of four above-deck, long-span thrust arches. Plans were scaled back to address funding shortfalls. The center arches were deleted, and only the two fascia arches remain. As part of a redesign, pedestrian paths have been added. The pedestrian bridges are supported by the fascia arches. But without the center arches, the interior highway portion of the bridge is supported by more modest, shorter spans with interior piers. Renderings of the new bridge emphasize the towering beauty of the fascia arches and supports. The arches include some signature Calatrava details, such as leaning cables out of plane and interruption of the arch structures at the thrust points. A closer inspection of the renderings indicates the unfortunate placement of piers underneath, cluttering the floodplain. The overall effect is an amalgamation of a long span, “startle” bridge grafted onto a more modest, functional multispan girder bridge. Unlike the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, which at least has true long spans, even if they are not really needed at the site, the second new bridge doesn’t even proceed under that fiction. The middle, highway portion is a standard girder bridge. The pedestrian bridge is supported by a long spanning arch. The overall effect is of a standard girder bridge with some arches pasted onto the fascia. The Trinity River project was to have a trinity of new signature bridges. The third structure was a new crossing of I-35. Based on more limited funding, the architectural exuberance for this span has been scaled back a bit. World War II resulted in a period of European bridge building during reconstruction. The new European bridges were often innovative 170

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and daring. The recent cable-stayed form was largely developed in Germany. These new bridges featured new shapes and forms, but they, overall, still addressed the concept of “form follows function.” Long-span bridges were built where long-span bridges were needed. Construction of major bridges has proceeded on to Asia and, in particular, China. The Yangtze River has been spanned by a series of long-span arches, suspension, and cable-stayed bridges, one more spectacular than the next. Many of these bridges have also advanced the practice with new details and approaches. But the motivation for the bridges is to cross something that needs to be spanned, such as an actual wide river (with flowing water) or an actual deep canyon. What to make of bridges that are built mostly for sculptural, visual effect? The new bridges of Dallas are visually beautiful. Already the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge has become an infrastructure icon for the area. But on the flip side, such artistic imagery is expensive. The first Dallas bridge cost in the neighborhood of $182 million. The second, scaled-back bridge is budgeted at $115 million. Maybe the total amount of close to $300 million could have been invested in other causes, and more modest but well-detailed structures could have been designed instead. The startling Trinity River bridges support the idea that if you want bridge aesthetics, you have to pay for it—a lot. This perception is unfortunate.

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A Human Bridge at the Super Bowl July 4 is a celebration of independence. Memorial Day is a celebration of

those who have fallen in service. The Super Bowl is our national holiday celebrating consumption. Officially, it’s about football, but in reality, not so much. The most popular moments often occur not during the game itself, but during the TV commercial breaks. Super Bowl commercials are a big deal for advertisers. Because of the enormous expense and exposure, the ads are subject to much critical thought and scrutiny by dedicated professionals. After these experts pore over the material and perform intense studies and review, the resulting ads feature talking chimps, beer, and a heart-tugging ministory with Clydesdales. I think the Clydesdales are in the beer commercials, but they are not drinking beer. The chimps are not drinking beer, but they are working in an office. After work, maybe they go to get a beer. One year, Betty White played the part of a 20-year-old man who was in a pickup football game. I think this ad also had Abe Vigoda in the role of another 20-year-old. Both actors were too old to play the parts of 20-year-olds, and this was ironic. Also, Betty White was not a man. The overall theme involved beer. There were no chimps. Another ad, this one also selling beer, depicted the sad plight of a delivery truck. It was heading to town, but unfortunately it couldn’t get there. A bridge at the outskirts of the town had collapsed. The townspeople were distraught—without a bridge, the truck couldn’t complete its route, and then, no beer. So the villagers all joined together to build a bridge using their own bodies. To do so, the townspeople stacked up on one another to form a pier and the bridge deck.

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When the human structure was complete, it was ready for the truck. The drivers were perplexed. It was not clear that a bridge made out of human beings would be strong enough to support the beer truck. But even so, they proceeded down the road and across the bridge. As the truck crosses, the human structure deflects downward but does not break. Maybe calculations were prepared before the actual load application. Deflections could be estimated based on material parameters and values of moment of inertia for people. The advertisement provides a realistic depiction of what would happen if a truck loaded with beer crossed a makeshift bridge made out of human beings. Well, probably the word “realistic” in this context is not so realistic. There are several problems with the bridge design. To begin with, the applied tire pressure probably exceeds the bearing capacity of the material used for the deck. Also, tension and compression strengths are likely exceeded under live loading, even before accounting for impact from the moving truck. Therefore, I’m guessing that what was shown in the commercial was not an actual truck driving across actual live human bodies, but some sort of computer animation. If it was a real truck with real human beings, the people would have been “gished,” and the bridge would have turned into a bloody pulp. But, at least then everyone could go get a beer. This is not to say that human structures are not possible. Cheerleaders construct elaborate human pyramids at football games. There is a practical and physiological limit to how tall the pyramid can go. For design and construction of the Forth Bridge over the Firth of Forth in Scotland, a well-known illustration helped to demonstrate the cantilever method. Two men were assigned the role of the main piers, and another (smaller) man was suspended in a chair between them (Figure 1). Models of bridges made of people have been popular in the past. A bridge can be not just a structure, but a metaphor for connecting things. In this way, bridges are probably the most outgoing and approachable of civil engineering facilities. For example, Budweiser probably wouldn’t have filmed a commercial showing the townspeople banding together to make a human sewage treatment plant—even if the beer supply was threatened. Clearly, sewage treatment plants, which are important, do not serve well as metaphors.

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Figure 1. Demonstration of the cantilever principle used in the Forth Bridge by three engineers at Imperial College in 1887 Source: Photo by Evelyn Carey (National Archives of Scotland ref: BR/FOR/4/34/161)

I thought that the Super Bowl bridge commercial was great, but I was a little bit disappointed. At the beginning of the ad, it is announced that the bridge is out. At that moment, no one in town bats an eyelash. Then, the announcer states that it’s not just that the bridge is out, but that a beer truck is trapped on the other side. Now all hell breaks loose. A mob runs down Main Street, trampling supermarket carts and running over small children. All that hysteria because they couldn’t have beer! I wish they had been upset because of the broken bridge.

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You Need Brain Surgery You need brain surgery. Two surgeons are available.

Doctor A is a renowned specialist, one of the world’s best. She has an almost flawless record in performing the type of surgery you need. It is a difficult, dangerous procedure, but if it is done well, your chances of full recovery are excellent. Unfortunately, Doctor A’s bedside manner is as poor as her technical skills are reported to be excellent. Doctor A is known to be almost incapable of maintaining a conversation on any topic other than that of her technical expertise. She is brusque and unpleasant. She appears to be a poor manager, not capable of maintaining finances. Once, Doctor A almost had to declare bankruptcy even though she is extremely well compensated. Doctor A is not much of a team player, and she is rather incompetent when it comes to personal relationships. Although well known at the hospital, Doctor A does not have many contributions to speak of in the wider community. Doctor A has a laser focus, and that focus is on her technical competence. Doctor B, in comparison, is a real “people” person. Doctor B has a terrific bedside manner. He is personable and empathetic. People gravitate toward Doctor B because of his warmth, his energy, and his sense of humor. Doctor B is a community leader outside the hospital and has been married for more than 30 years, with many children and grandchildren. Doctor B has a reasonably solid reputation in the operating room— quite good, although perhaps not outstanding. There is no discussion or documentation about Doctor B being not completely up to the grade in terms of his technical skills as a surgeon. At least, there is no discussion

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that you are aware of. But really, who would say such things anyway, since he is such a great guy? This comparison between hypothetical Doctors A and B is, of course, an exaggerated, black-and-white description without any nuance. A similar exaggerated presentation of this theme is shown on the TV show House, which is also ostensibly about doctors. The main character is patterned after Doctor A. Each episode begins when an average person succumbs to some bizarre malady. After the opening credits, the poor sap is whisked off to a nondescript hospital in New Jersey. The case is sad and desperate. No one has a clue what to do until Dr. House and his team are invited to participate. Dr. House has a team of doctors whose role is to be browbeaten by him. Most of the discussion involves the team’s review of various obscure illnesses, with Dr. House proving each doctor wrong until he miraculously comes up with the cure. Dr. House is a technically brilliant physician who knows every ailment and every drug. Somehow he solves the most difficult medical cases, about which his colleagues are largely clueless. Dr. House is also depicted as an obnoxious, offensive person. He snarls, he insults, he battles the administration, and he belittles the patients. He pits doctors in his group against one another for his own amusement. He is an SOB. Calling him on his obnoxiousness is ineffective because he revels in being obnoxious. He gets a charge out of the conflict. Other than the fact that he saves lives better than anyone else, Dr. House seemingly has no redeeming traits. House is fun to watch, in part because it is amusing to experience the antics of an asocial jerk from a safe distance. Actually dealing with such a person is not as much fun. In the real world, we don’t accept the premise of making a choice between Doctor A and Doctor B. We don’t recognize that such a choice needs to be made in the first place. We demand to have Doctor C, who is both brilliant and empathetic. The discussion and simplistic comparison between Doctors A and B is objectionable because it implies that we have to assign importance and choose between two sets of skills. The comparison is somewhat apples and oranges: technical skills and the nontechnical group of capabilities, which I’ll label the “soft” skills.

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For an individual to be deemed successful, we assume—well, stronger than that—we demand that our professionals have both technical and soft skills. We also rationalize that no trade-offs are required and that there is no contradiction in ensuring success at both technical and soft skills. The doctor must be brilliantly capable and have good bedside manner. It’s not apples and oranges. We want fruit salad. But should one have to decide, when it comes down to it, is one category more important than the other? In the life-and-death arena of brain surgery, when it’s your life, which category is more important to you? In the selection of a professional to save your life, which category of skills can you not do without, and which category, while still important, fits more in the “nice to have but not essential” slot? You have a bridge to design. There are two engineers available, Engineer A and Engineer B.

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Proposing on a Bridge I was excited when I heard about a book named The Bridges of Madison

County. I thought it was about bridges in Madison County. Probably it focused on a few standard beam bridges, but if we were lucky, maybe there were a few longer bridges, some historic spans, and a suspension bridge or two. Then I learned about the plot, and it wasn’t about bridges. It was a romance novel. So I was less excited. One plot summary describes the novel in this way: “The path of Francesca Johnson’s future seems destined when an unexpected fork in the road causes her to question everything she had come to expect from life” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112579/plotsummary, May 11, 2015). Even if it wasn’t about bridges, it would be hard to resist reading a book with a plot like that. Anything that has an unexpected fork in the road couldn’t be all bad. Overall, romance novels and bridges don’t make for a good mix. Romance novels feature emotions and descriptions of forlorn, barechested cowboys. Bridge documents have calculations, drawings, and specifications. Maybe there could be inclusion of bare-chested engineer images in the bridge specifications. But in many cases, that would not be all that appealing to romance novel readers and would in general not facilitate construction of the bridge. But let us not despair about a perceived lack of romance among engineers. It turns out that bridges are very romantic, at least for bridge engineers. In fact, it can be argued that the site of a nice-looking bridge is the most romantic place in the world. Therefore, it makes sense that

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a bridge would be the perfect setting for one to propose marriage. I was curious about this possibility, so I contacted one of my friends on Facebook, the Capilano Suspension Bridge. The Capilano Bridge, or “Cappy” as I call her, is a daring, slinky bridge spanning high across a canyon north of Vancouver, British Columbia. Here is what she had to say: Me: Is it common for people to propose marriage on the bridge? Capilano Suspension Bridge: We do see many engagements occur at Capilano Suspension Bridge. Many of them happen around Christmas time during our Canyon Lights event. The bridge is strung with beautiful twinkling lights, and it is quite dark below. The entire park is very festive for the holidays, and it makes it a truly lovely place to get engaged. Many engagements happen without us knowing, so we do not have any statistics. Me: Any interesting stories or complications? Capilano Suspension Bridge: We had one couple who would attend Canyon Lights every year. Every time they came at Christmas they would make a glass ornament ball with our glass blower. One year, the gentleman called our glassblower in advance of Christmas and made a special ornament that said, “Will you marry me?” The gentleman and his girlfriend decorated their tree as they always had, and the gentleman placed the “Will you marry me?” ball in front of her! It is quite a cute story. Me: When proposing on the bridge, has the swaying of the bridge/ height above the river been a factor? Any times when the ring was dropped over the side? Capilano Suspension Bridge: Not that I know of. The bridge does sway, and some individuals are afraid of heights, but I have never heard of a ring dropped over the side, luckily. Me: Is this a popular thing for engineers to do? Capilano Suspension Bridge: I am not sure if anyone who has been engaged here was an engineer. Me: What about the bridge makes it a suitable place to propose marriage? Capilano Suspension Bridge: People love the natural beauty of the area and the thrill of being 230 ft above a beautiful river. It is quite

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amazing to be in a West Coast rainforest, high above a canyon asking the person you love to marry you. My ASCE editor, Betsy Kulamer, was actually proposed to on a bridge. How excellent is that? She described the day as follows: I think my birthday was involved, because my boyfriend and I were dressed to the nines. He wore a white linen suit with a cappuccino-colored shirt and an oatmeal-colored tie. Needless to say, he did not grow up to be an engineer. [Author: Kulamer is referring to the concept that engineers are not well known for their expertise in fashion.] I wore a frilly pink organdy dress. He took me to a beautiful, expensive restaurant on the southern bank of the Monongahela River and at the southern side of the Smithfield Street Bridge, which, as you know, is my all-time favorite bridge. After dinner, we strolled out across the bridge and stopped to look downriver at Pittsburgh and the Point. It was a lovely, warm starry night, and my boyfriend—who had the gift of drama—turned to me, kissed me, and asked me to marry him. Caught up in the moment, I said, “Yes!” A few breathless moments later, my practical self added, “but not yet.” As an important aside, we should note that the Smithfield Street Bridge is a historic lenticular truss. If statistics were kept on such matters, they would indicate a high degree of success for proposals made on these bridges, marriage or otherwise. Lenticular trusses have sensuous, sinusoidal shapes, all historically proper, of course, in a Victorian bodice kind of way. Lenticular trusses are known to be the aphrodisiacs of bridge structures (Figure 1). Other bridge types do not have this effect. For example, if you are considering ending a relationship, consider a visit to an old, icky through-girder railroad bridge. These structures are considered a suitable backdrop for ending relationships in addition to Mafia murders (Figure 2). An engineer who goes to the trouble and effort of proposing on a bridge will almost certainly achieve success. After all, the significant other is likely to be impressed by both the proposal and the bridge. This assumes that sufficient care went into selection of the bridge.

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Figure 1. Smithfield Street Bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Source: Federal Highway Administration, (Feb. 27, 2015)

Figure 2. Icky, old through-girder railroad bridge in Branford, Connecticut Source: Photo by Pedro Xing, (Feb. 27, 2015)

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Figure 3. Bridge of Sighs in Venice, Italy Source: Photo by Bernard bill5, (Feb. 27, 2015)

But, unlikely as it seems, it is possible that success may not be achieved. For this unfortunate circumstance, some engineers retire to the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. Lord Byron wrote in Childe Harold: I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs, A palace and a prison on each hand: I saw from out the wave her structure rise As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand: A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying glory smiles O’er the far times when many a subject land Look’d to the wingèd Lion’s marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles! (http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/childe-haroldspilgrimage-i-stood-venice) It is rumored that at sunset while riding a gondola beneath the bridge, if you kiss your lover, you get to live happily ever after. So if a prior proposal didn’t work, Plan B would be to invite an alternate significant other for a boat ride in Venice (Figure 3).

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Most engineers have not proposed marriage on a bridge. But almost all engineers must deal with a particularly challenging holiday called “Valentine’s Day.” This holiday occurs once a year in February, and it is dedicated to issues of romance. Often, engineers are not quite sure how to proceed, because aspects of the celebration are irrational and not rule based. But I can provide assistance. Please refer to Eq. (1) below:

BL = ± FL ± CA ± CD (1)

Where BL = Bliss; FL = “Flowers,” where “Flowers” are preferably a bunch of long-stem roses; CA = Box of Candy, preferably chocolate with no disgusting nougats or caramel creams; and CD = “Card,” a printed, folded document including romantic phrasing and imagery. See Table 1 for commentary on attributes of “Card.” Selection of a “Card” with positive imagery attributes is preferred to one that has less positive imagery attributes. To maximize the value of Equation 1, consider maximizing values for each component term. On Valentine’s Day, I hope that you will have a chance to drive to your favorite bridge. Walk over to the bridge with your significant other and say, “This is a beautiful bridge. Look at that excellent abutment.” There is something about the word “abutment,” said slowly and with an appropriate tone of appreciation, that does the trick. Table 1. Card Imagery Attributes Positive attributes

Puppies Kittens Mist-covered mountains

Less positive attributes

Bolted connections Slump test Select backfill

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Slope Stability of Pretzel Bags When it was time to water the plants, I went to fill the jug. There was a

bag of pretzels in the sink blocking the spigot. I moved the bag to the edge of the sink, filled the jug, and started off in the direction of the plants. But then I got distracted. The pretzel bag started to shift, ever so slightly. It was a flexible cellophane bag filled with mini pretzels. The bag was hanging over the edge of the sink, and it was not in a stable position. Inside the bag, the individual pretzels rested on a precarious slope. A few pretzels at a time dislodged from the unstable slope edge inside the bag and rolled to the bottom. This changed the overall center of gravity of the bag. With the added weight at the bottom, the bag shifted a little bit farther down the side of the sink. Its precarious position grew more precarious. This further movement dislodged a few more pretzels from the pretzel slope. The movement resulted in a creeping pretzel slope stability failure. I was mesmerized as I watched the pretzel bag support condition gradually fail. It was a slow-motion failure, taking several minutes. A few pretzels would plummet, the whole bag would gain a little momentum down the side of the sink, and the global shifting would stop. But the interior pretzel slope was unstable, more pretzels would plummet, and then the process would repeat itself. Every few moments, the pretzel mass experienced a much bigger failure mode. A substantial clump would dislodge from the side of the pretzel slope, and the bag would drop toward the bottom of the sink. There were no warnings or indications for the bigger failure mode. But even with the larger movement, the overall process was pretty much a slow burn of individual plummeting pretzels and a rolling bag.

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I was curious about the engineering implications of this slope stability failure. How would one go about analyzing it and estimating durations? At any one moment, it might be possible to calculate the states of equilibrium for all the particles that comprised the pretzel mass. Conceptually, one could develop and mathematize hundreds of equations, determine weak points, calculate movement, and iterate. One could evaluate interpretzel friction and determine appropriate coefficients. For this calculation, a key factor would be salted or unsalted. Unsalted pretzels tend to be smoother, whereas unsalted pretzels can be expected to latch on to each other and provide additional stability. With a perfect model based on perfect geometry, perfectly defined boundary conditions, and flawless understanding of behavior, the exact lurch of the bag could be precisely calculated and timed with perfection. But, of course, therein lies the rub. It would be impossible to determine perfect data and model the relationships perfectly. In the old days, engineers without computers made broad assumptions about behavior based on the constitutive relationships. These assumptions, applied with care, were typically good enough. No engineer could evaluate the precise movement of the pretzel bag subfailures and how long it would take. But the overall conclusion of the event—a pretzel bag at the bottom of the sink—could be determined with reasonable accuracy. It’s not clear that it will ever be possible to precisely measure and model the behavior of pretzel bags perched at the edge of a sink. It’s also not clear that we need or want to. In the meantime, in many projects we have thousands of pages and zillions of data bits of computer analyses that precisely report on data that are not so precise. You can see this trend in bridge calculation sets. Some have multiple volumes of computer printouts that replace what used to be done on a few manually printed pages. After a few minutes of pretzel slope stability failure, the bag finally crept to the bottom of the sink. There were some remnant pretzel flakes and dust floating in the bag, but the incident was essentially over. I was satisfied to have witnessed such an interesting behavior, and I left to go to work with a smile on my face. Later, I realized I forgot to water the plants.

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Horizontal versus Vertical Construction Structural engineers sometimes debate what is more interesting and fun

to work on: horizontal or vertical construction. “Horizontal” construction generally refers to bridge design, and “vertical” construction refers to design of buildings. To address this issue, I sent a detailed survey request to some of my structural engineering colleagues: 1. Who has more fun: engineers working on vertical projects or horizontal projects? 2. Any short commentary you would like to add related to question 1 above. Okay, maybe the survey wasn’t so detailed. Of the responders, almost all responded that horizontal construction is more fun. Some responded that horizontal and vertical construction are equally fun. Because most of my structural engineering colleagues are bridge engineers, it is possible that the results were skewed. Here is a sampling of commentary. An engineer whom I’ll call “Bob” said, Usually don’t have to take direction from contractors or architects (although that seems to be changing fast). Also, when testing safety components such as a bridge rail, an actual truck is rammed into it which is pretty awesome. Vertical engineers use shaking tables in labs. What’s the fun in that?

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“Mark” noted, I would assume both types of engineers have their share of fun on any given day … However, vertical engineers create destinations while horizontal engineers create the pathways to the destinations. One is much more readily appreciated and noticed than the other until a road is closed or a bridge collapses. Therefore, I would say vertical engineers are more in the public eye (vertical) while horizontal engineers lie low (horizontal). “Wayne” stated, When responding to a question such as who has more fun: vertically oriented or horizontally oriented engineers I just say yes—engineers have fun. I would be equally happy in working on either type of project. How can you not have fun when either delving into resolving a highly specialized bearings, joints, and device problem or in resolving complicated spatial coordination issues between mechanical and structural engineers and architects? The real pleasure is working in engineering—resolving technical problems using fundamental concepts learned in school. The ability to leverage knowledge gained 30 or more years ago in chemistry, physics, math, strength of materials, statics, dynamics, soil mechanics, and materials cause[s] a gleeful feeling when this is used creatively in solving problems and I celebrate my geekdom. I would say that I am most satisfied in the company of other engineers of all ilks attempting to resolve difficult issues collaboratively. “Wayne” (if that is in fact his actual name) is a terrific gentleman and a great colleague. But as stated, he is a geek. “Creg” commented, Electrical engineers on vertical projects have more fun. There are more challenges. Having done both, I find that the

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horizontal projects are the same with very little variation. A few different lights and the project is done. As a side note, apparently my survey quality control was a little off that day, because I let an electrical engineer slip in. An engineer who can be referred to as “John” provided a detailed response: Engineers have more fun working on horizontal projects because • They don’t have to work with architects. • They play a larger role and have more control with respect to the details of the structure. • Their work is not covered up by drywall, siding, or interior designers. • The MEP (mechanical/electrical/plumbing) guys do not put holes through our load-carrying members or change the designs (much) in the field. • Did I mention that they don’t have to work with architects? Trying to see the other side of the coin, engineers may have more fun on vertical projects because: • They may not get bogged down in the minutiae of the design details. • They may get to pawn off connection design and other details to someone else. • They didn’t have to learn LRFD if they didn’t want to. • They can still use whatever design references they happen to like best (AISC steel manual, 7th Ed., ACI 318-63, etc.). A common theme in response was antipathy, to an extent, to working with architects. Horizontal engineers usually don’t have to deal with architects and thus are in the driver’s seat. Most bridge projects don’t have architects. Often, the overall project manager is a structural engineer.

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Figure 1. Dragon Bridge over the Hàn River in Da Nang, Vietnam Source: Photo by Bùi Thụy Đào Nguyên, (Feb. 27, 2015)

Sometimes a large, signature bridge may have an architect. This can lead to architectural designs that don’t really flow from structural requirements. Architectural bridges can have startling shapes: leaning pylons, arches out of plane, and elements that seem like they are about to tip over. The architectural effect may be profound and noteworthy. But for the mundane structural engineers looking for loads to get from point A to point B, such additional architectural fuss may be startling in a not-good way (Figure 1). For buildings, structural analysis and design is a smaller overall component of the work. Buildings need to stand up, but they also have mechanical and electrical designs, furnishings, all sorts of utility connections, and many other components. Structural engineers working on the vertical team are used to architects running the show. Another difference, which didn’t really come out in my detailed, scientific survey, is related to the types of clients and the construction procurement approaches. Most bridge owners are public agencies. A larger percentage of building clients are private owners. This situation results in different requirements. For example, public agencies are

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governed by laws for environmental review, which are not as detailed as the review applied to private owners. For building project procurement, private owners (in the past) had greater flexibility in selecting either traditional design-bid-build or design-build and its variations. In the United States, most public agencies were required to construct a bridge project via design-bid-build, although that is now changing. Designers working in design-bid-build contracts have much different experiences and expectations than other approaches. A Federal Highway Administration report takes the comparison one step further (actually, about 300 steps further). The report, “Innovation in Vertical and Horizontal Construction: Lessons for the Transportation Industry Final Report,” has suggestions on how innovations in vertical construction can be applied to the horizontal world. The executive summary notes, It is a common perception in the highway construction industry that new ideas and technologies are rather slow to be adopted and widely used. Meanwhile, skyscrapers get taller, and buildings significantly larger and more complex—leading to the appearance that the vertical construction industry innovates and adopts new practices much more rapidly in order to achieve these major advances. (http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/construction/pubs/if05025/, May 12, 2015) This report is a few years old, and by now it is a bit of a cliché to conclude that while buildings soar into the sky, bridge technology is behind the times. For example, many states, including Massachusetts, are innovating old construction methods, for example, using more prefabrication and rapid bridge construction techniques. Applying a bunch of new technologies and construction equipment, old bridges are removed and replaced over long weekends. Apparently there is a scientific method for survey preparation that I have utterly ignored in researching this essay. There are ways to write survey questions to glean more and better information. For example, if you wanted to survey the prevalence of ax murderers in society, perhaps a poorly designed question would be, “Are you concerned that your mother may be an ax murderer?” Data provided from such a survey

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question would likely be uniform but may not be helpful in addressing the overall survey goal. Likewise, the population of survey responders is important. Overall, it is preferred to avoid surveying only your friends (and in this case, mostly bridge engineers except for that wacky, stray electrical engineer). Through better design, surveys may provide more balanced, objective results. Keeping that in mind, let me conclude with what I consider the best and most accurate response to my survey, a response that educates us, sheds appropriate light on the topic, and helps to put everything in proper perspective. This response was provided by an engineer to whom I’ll refer as “Nick.” Commenting on the question of which engineer has the most fun, “Nick” stated, “If you’re working with Brian Brenner, you’re the engineer having more fun.”

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Giant Pumpkin We were biking down the road on a brilliant fall afternoon, and we

encountered a giant pumpkin. The monstrous gourd was being loaded onto a trailer behind a pickup truck. At first we didn’t recognize what it was and continued biking. Then I did a double take and braked to a sudden stop. My friends were puzzled. “Why did you stop?” Mark asked. “There’s a giant pumpkin,” I said. “We have to see it.” We backtracked. The pumpkin’s owners had entered a Rhode Island pumpkin contest, and they were loading their massive vegetable to take it to the fair. (Residents of tiny Rhode Island appreciate giant pumpkins and things that are, in general, oversized. It provides comfort and assuages hurt egos.) Pumpkins would be weighed and judged. The winners would receive fabulous prizes, such as cash and a monthly supply of zucchinis. This giant pumpkin must have been 10 ft long. Had it been in space, it would have qualified as an asteroid or a small planetoid. Astronomers would call for a press conference and lavish praise on their new celestial discovery. Perhaps they would name it after a faux-Roman deity, like Pumpkinupiter or Pumpranus. The pumpkin was so outlandishly big that it had outgrown the typical pleasant orange pumpkin color; instead, it had taken on a garish whitish gray hue. It was Frankenpumpkin. I unclipped my toe clips and hobbled over to the owners. “What have you got there?” I asked, displaying my enlightened obliviousness. “It’s a pumpkin,” said the pumpkin’s father. Its mother was lovingly wrapping her child in blankets to avoid a chill for the ride down I-95.

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The blankets would have fit back when the pumpkin was small. But now as a precocious adolescent, the gourd had outgrown its britches and needed bigger blankets. “That’s a big pumpkin,” I cheerfully commented. My friends rolled their eyes. “It is indeed,” said the pumpkin’s dad. “How much does it weigh?” I asked. The dad responded with a figure. I don’t remember the exact number, but it was probably something like 40- or 50,000 pounds. How to get to market with a pumpkin that big clearly posed special concerns. The transit route required careful study, for both geometric constraints should the gourd not fit under an overpass, and weight considerations. You would expect that most interstate highway bridges could handle pumpkin loading, but still these things should be checked. Back in the Eisenhower days, pumpkins did not grow to be 10 ft long and weigh tens of thousands of pounds. So early highway planners did not include criteria suitable for modern pumpkin transport. You can imagine the interstates regularly being pounded by vehicles lugging today’s giant pumpkins. The interstate highway program’s lack of early foresight did not only fail to consider the weight of giant future pumpkins. The interstate system today carries far more traffic than expected, and trucks are longer and heavier, with or without vegetables. As a result, bridges are being pounded to a pulp, and many are becoming structurally deficient at about the same time. This is perhaps good news for bridge engineers, where business is brisk, but not so good for everyone else. Regarding vegetable size, you may be curious about what has changed between the 1950s and today. How have pumpkins mutated from the pleasant jack-o’-lantern types of the past to today’s behemoths? One answer, which is not regularly discussed or even acknowledged in vegetable-growing circles, is the rampant use of PEDs (pumpkinenhancing drugs). Apparently, genetics also come into play. Through selective pumpkin breeding, the chances of growing a giant specimen are increased. Pumpkin growers can find advice at several online sites (see, for example, http://bigpumpkins.com). One discussion thread instructs how to apply different types of manure. Growers may apply poultry,

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beef, and swine manure, but the effectiveness varies. Probably these types of manure work best for carnivorous pumpkins. Other threads describe additional types of fertilizers, how to avoid growing hazards, pumpkin contests, and all sorts of advice of interest to the pumpkingrowing community. Some areas on the website even have a premium section, where, for a fee, you could get premium advice. I assumed that that’s where the PED secrets were revealed, in addition to displaying all the good pumpkin pictures that are NSFW. The pumpkin parents entertained us for a few more minutes as we gawked at their specimen. Then it was time to go to market. They still had a few extra minutes, but scheduling transport of a giant pumpkin is no easy thing, and clearly sufficient float in the transport schedule is important. The truck groaned as it slowly, painfully accelerated down the road with massive weight in tow. In awe and appreciation, we biked away, glancing back every few seconds to watch the giant gourd receding in the distance. It was interesting that we could see the pumpkin still for a few more minutes even at a distance, but then the curvature of the Earth imposed itself on our view. Like a setting sun, the pumpkin dipped below the horizon. We didn’t learn the fate of the contest and the giant pumpkin. We assume that the bridges on I-95 held and the growers made it to the fair. Probably after the weighing and award of the fabulous prizes, there was enough pumpkin pulp and seeds to feed a small city, like Providence. After the feast was complete, the fair was over and the tents would fold. A cold northwest wind would blow from Quebec, and the manureenhanced fields would lie fallow over the winter, until the following spring, when it was time to plant seeds and once again tempt fate and the faux-Roman gods.

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When You Don’t Know Enough to Google Back when I was a kid, my parents used to tell us stories about back when

they were kids. Some of those stories involved their grandparents, who used to tell stories about back when they were kids (the grandparents, that is). Following this thread to its logistical conclusion, you would return to the Stone Age/cave people/the dawn of time and/or the Garden of Eden, depending upon your religious and/or secular beliefs. But let’s not go back quite that far. Back when I was a kid, we didn’t have cell phones. We did have telephones, but they were attached to the wall. They weren’t smart in those days, and they couldn’t talk back to you. There was interior plumbing that worked reasonably well, although that was not a very new development, because the ancient Romans also had interior plumbing of a sort. Back in the day, we also didn’t have Google. But we did have Star Trek (the first one, and not the movie). The first Star Trek series was shown on network TV at a fixed time each week. You had to make an appointment to watch it at that specific time because there was no taping or DVR or Hulu. The original Star Trek was a visionary show, in part because of its technological predictions. The distant future of the 1960s portrayed in the original Star Trek featured many outlandish, inconceivable innovations, such creations as electronic diagnostic hospital beds, automatic language translators, and small, handheld communication devices. These “communicators” had a cover case that flipped open and beeped when it was time to talk. They could be used to contact people remotely in real time across amazing distances. But the communicators did not include visuals because this was beyond the imagination of even Star Trek. In the 1960s version of the future, no one could conceive of Skype. Living the Civil Engineering Life

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Maybe Star Trek’s most astonishing creation was the computer. Of course, there were computers in the 1960s, but Star Trek’s computers were different from the room-filling, card-punching monsters at the time. Star Trek’s computers also filled a room, but instead of communication via punch cards, you could talk to these computers and get instant answers. Star Trek’s computer had a voice and, seemingly, a personality. If we fast-forward from the 1960s to the distant future of the present, we find a world blessed with innovations that were science fiction dreams in Star Trek (the original series, not the sequels). In the distant future that is now the present, you can chat with your communicator (iPhone), and it will talk back with advice and even offer wisecracks. Today we now take advantage of Google. You can type anything into Google and, in seconds, references for most of humanity’s knowledge are available at your fingertips. The younger generation has become Google-jaded and takes this capability for granted. But for those of us old enough to remember things like “libraries,” “encyclopedias,” and the drudgery of manual research, it is hard to understate the astonishing changes wrought by Internet search engines. Don’t know something? No problem—just type it in, and instant references appear on the screen. Google has gotten increasingly clever, thus allowing us to be increasingly lazy. Not only do you type something in, but now Google guesses what you want as you type it, and it is usually right. The list appears before you finish, along with thousands of accurate references that would make the librarians of ancient Alexandria both drool and weep. My spelling ability was not so great to begin with. It didn’t improve with the word processors and automatic spell correction. But even then, the computer usually needed a typed spelling close enough to the correct version, which required even some rudimentary spelling skill. If you wanted the word “defenestrate,” you couldn’t type “denominate” and hope that the computer would get it right. Lately, I have realized that if I don’t know enough to spell an approximation of something, I can still Google it. Google guesses what I want and even shows me the correct spelling. This additional capability further limits what’s left of my ability to spell. When I’m teaching my college classes, I usually solve problems on the blackboard using chalk. This pre-1950s technology is effective because it forces me to go slowly and gives the students a chance to solve problems as we proceed. But 196

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the chalkboard is not smart enough to draw an instant squiggly red line under my misspellings. Should that capability be added to chalkboards, along with intelligence check, math check, and formula check, I will be all set. Spelling, by itself, has no intrinsic intellectual value. It is rote knowledge. So the technology permits and encourages the avoidance of learning rote knowledge. But at a certain point, you have to know something, even rote knowledge. What if you don’t know enough to Google something close enough to what you’re looking for? The other day, I wanted to write about “au d’oeuvres.” After several tries in MS Word, I couldn’t get close to the correct spelling. So I went with Plan B and typed “whors derves” in Google, thinking that it would quickly show me the error of my spelling ways. It did, but not the way I thought. Unfortunately, when I hit “enter,” smoke started coming out of the machine, and I got a list of suggested references much different than what I wanted. Therefore, I need to be able to spell “hors d’oeuvres” in future writing, at least in a close enough version. Otherwise, I’ll just refer to “snacks.” The astonishing capabilities of Google, smart phones, and the web lead to new educational challenges. In the past, school curricula at all levels relied on memorization. Without spell check, you needed to learn how to spell. Embedded in the old manual rote methods were kernels of higher learning. For example, assignments that require memorization of lists and details also result in learning aspects of the information being memorized: how the lists are formed, what the connections are, what some underlying concepts are, and other higher learning aspects. Today, it may not be necessary to memorize anything, but it is important not to throw the knowledge baby out with the rote bathwater. Structural engineers may remember the days of moment distribution. Those studying for the PE exam are still encouraged to use this hoary old manual method for solving indeterminate structural frames. But in practice, almost no one uses moment distribution. A computer frame analysis can solve the problem in a few seconds, in comparison to a few hours of moment distribution. That’s good news, except that in the painstaking process of moment distribution, an engineer learned, by default, how a structure might behave under different conditions and with different assumptions. Such embedded knowledge can be lost in the age of structural video game analysis and design. Living the Civil Engineering Life

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The educational challenge is to have our instant knowledge cakes and eat them, too. Young adults must be smart enough to process and interpret Google. Or said another way, they need to have a broad education to appreciate the power and foibles of Google. Bing, Google, and Yahoo are great tools, but they are still tools. You can use a tool to help build your house. You cannot use a tool to make higher-order decisions about the type of material, the size of the house, and so on—at least, not yet. Likewise, the democratization of knowledge access has not necessarily led to good quality control. Wikipedia has an article about almost anything. But the contents of Wikipedia do not undergo the same scrutiny as more tightly controlled, peer-reviewed publications. It is problematic to assume otherwise. A digression: In a future life, I want to name the next big search engine. After Google, Bing, and Yahoo, mine will be called “Binyagazoogle.” A future discussion might go something like this: Daughter: “Dad, can you help me with my homework? What is the fourth largest city in Uzbekistan?” Dad: “Daughter, I’m not sure. Did you try Binyagazoogling it?” There is a danger that as the technology gets more capable and we get less so, our civilization will devolve. We could end up in one of those science fiction stories where people in a future society are surrounded by incredible technology that responds to their every wish. But the people become incompetent and forget how to maintain the technology or even understand what it does. Of course their civilization collapses. The survivors become savages. Next, there are dinosaurs, and after a long Stone Age, people eventually return to libraries and start reading books again. Then the process repeats itself.

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Acknowledgments For a cycling enthusiast, the next best thing to biking cross-country is

getting to hear about other riders’ trips. I am grateful to Joe Anthony, Jim Hoburg, Don Dudley, and Danny McGee for sharing the details of their 1971 and 2009 rides. I enjoyed a terrific visit to Jim’s house on the lake, where the 1971 riders shared and relived their experiences. In our era of smart phones and way too much information, it was incredible to watch old movie reels (using a projector with “film”) that the riders, then a few decades younger, were able to record. Unfortunately, they did not tweet or post on Facebook. Many thanks to Ryan Marshall, who did the graphic editing for this book and contributed several original illustrations, including the beautiful art for the cover. Ryan listened to my stories about “bridge road trips,” which are just like college fraternity road trips, except with bridges instead of alcohol (to be clear, there are other differences, so this is a bad analogy). Ryan liked the idea so much that he arranged his own trip, and I got to experience that vicariously as well. I am deeply grateful to my crew of excellent bridge engineers at Fay, Spofford & Thorndike: in addition to Ryan, Nick Scenna, Ed Laracy, Peter Moser, Guy Ford, Joe Tierney, Josh Dennison, Karl Gaebler, and Geoff Webster. Not only are they terrifically talented, they also provide continuous inspiration for my writing (and we all know who we are referring to, Karl). Thanks also to my other colleagues at Fay, Spofford & Thorndike and to my boss, Len Dzengelewksi. He makes up for having an unpronounceable last name by being a great boss. I think that came out as a compliment.

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ASCE acquisitions editor Betsy Kulamer did a great job editing and organizing the technical reviews. Being asked to provide a review for this type of book, which perhaps is not a standard ASCE technical manuscript, can be a challenge. Betsy found some good reviewers. The reviews were both helpful and at times funny (and I included some comments in the text). Professionally, there is nothing better to do in life than bridge design, with the possible exception of teaching. Many thanks to my students at Tufts for providing both inspiration and a regular (captive) audience. Thanks to my research colleague, Dr. Masoud Sanayei, for our ongoing collaboration on long-term bridge design. One of my favorite surreal moments was when we needed to get Internet access for our research bridge and had to explain to the provider that the access was for a bridge. My wise and wonderful son, Daniel, found a bride (side note: “bride” and “bridge” are almost the same word—coincidence?). So now along with my wise and wonderful daughter, Rachel, I have a wise and wonderful daughter-in-law, Esty. But the story gets better. Readers of Bridginess may remember my lament about when I turned 16. During that fateful birthday, I got sick and needed to stay home in bed. But my family went out to dinner to celebrate anyway. My birthday dinner, which I never had, was at a restaurant named the Palisadium. Fast-forward several decades, and we arrive at a moment when Dan called his mother to tell her that he found what seemed like a perfect place for his wedding. It was a beautiful facility high up on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River, named the Palisadium. Dan had forgotten the name of the legendary restaurant, and Lauren couldn’t stop laughing for five minutes. Eventually she caught her breath and filled me in on Dan’s discovery. Then I couldn’t stop laughing as well. The wedding was a glowing, luminous evening. I may be biased, but it was the best wedding yet conducted by humankind . And yes, it was at the Palisadium. As a bonus, I finally got to eat dinner there, and the chef even prepared a special version of the dessert that I missed out on many decades ago. I have told the story of my 16th birthday many times. Many, many, many, many times. Often to complete strangers. Because I’ve finally gotten my dinner, the deal with my family and friends is that

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the tale is now complete, and I am never to mention the story again. So this is it. I’m done. No more telling of the story. It’s over. The most thanks go to Lauren, for listening to the story over and over again. Also for going on bridge dates and in general being the one for whom I most want to write. Family, friends, and colleagues, and ASCE Press, thanks for the opportunity to write another book. I hope you like it. There was this time when I was 14 and caught a shark—big shark; big, big shark—and you should hear what happened then…

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Publishing Credits Versions of the following essays first appeared as part of my blog, Cross-

ing That Bridge When We Come To It, on the Engineering News-Record website, enr.com: “A Bridge Offer You Can’t Refuse,” “A Human Bridge at the Super Bowl,” “Disco Bridge,” “Giant Pumpkin,” “Googling Yourself,” “Holy Spanning Function, Batman,” “Horizontal Versus Vertical Construction,” “Inappropriate Variables,” “Infrastructure and Aging,” “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” “MathCAD and S-E-X,” “My New Snow Blower,” “No Borders,” “Pomelos,” “Proposing on a Bridge,” “Return to Dulles,” “Roll the Maps,” “The Engineer’s Check,” “The Trouble with Invasive Species and Tribbles,” “When You Don’t Know Enough to Google,” “Who’s on First, Bridge Edition,” “You Do It and Then It’s Done,” “You Need Brain Surgery,” and “Zip It.” The following essays first appeared in Journal of Leadership and Management in Engineering: “Engineering Valentine’s Day,” “School’s Out,” “Slope Stability of Pretzel Bags,” and “The Short List.” The following essays first appeared in the Civil Engineering Practice and are reproduced with permission from the Boston Society of Civil Engineers Section: “September 12,” “Friended by a Bridge,” and “Jeopardy.”

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About the Author Brian Brenner, P.E., is a vice president and structural engineer with Fay,

Spofford & Thorndike in Burlington, Massachusetts. His work includes bridge design projects throughout New England and the New York metropolitan area. He has contributed as design manager for replacement of the Burns Bridge, spectacular multispan twin arch bridges in Worcester, Massachusetts. Brenner also holds the post of Professor of the Practice at Tufts University, where he teaches the bridge and concrete design classes and advises students on research projects.

Foreground: (Left to right) Nicholas A. Scenna, P.E., Karl O. Gaebler, E.I.T., Ryan Marshall, E.I.T., and Brian Brenner, P.E. Background: Lake Champlain Bridge, Crown Point, New York Living the Civil Engineering Life

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Brenner is active with several ASCE and Boston Society of Civil Engineers committees. He is editor emeritus of ASCE’s Journal of Leadership and Management in Engineering and of ASCE’s Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice. He has published more than 90 articles on structural analysis and design, engineering education, and other topics. His previous collections of essays (published by ASCE Press), Don’t Throw This Away!, The Civil Engineering Life, and Bridginess: More of the Civil Engineering Life, have set the standard for civil engineering humor books. Exactly what that standard is, no one can tell. Brenner lives south of Boston with his beautiful wife of 30 years, Lauren. He is thrilled to welcome to his family his son’s wife, wonderful daughter-in-law, Esty. With this addition, he is proud to report a 25% increase in the number of kids (Dan, Rachel + Esty) available to listen to stories about bridges. Or, if one goes by total immediate family members, the captive audience increase is calculated to be 33%. Either way, it’s awesome! Ryan Marshall is an engineer-in-training with Fay, Spofford & Thorndike

and earned his engineering degree from Tufts University. He records the following experiences working with the author: As I walked into my first class my freshman year at Tufts University, doe-eyed and somewhat apprehensive, I had no idea what to expect. The course was Introduction to Bridge Design, and the professor stood awkwardly at the front of the room while sipping a can of Diet Coke. He looked to be about the same age as my dad (late forties), had glasses typical of an engineering professor, and was likely wearing khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt. He placed the soda can down on the podium in front of him, and he began fumbling around with the computer. It looked like he was arbitrarily mashing buttons, trying desperately to get the projector to display his PowerPoint presentation, but to no avail. He finally achieved his goal, and he began an impassioned, yet hilariously awkward and bloviated, speech about bridges. He stopped for digressions many times along the way, often to make an

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uncomfortable joke that no one laughed at. At the end of the lecture, I turned to my friend and said, “Holy s#!t, this professor is like a real-life Michael Scott.” (That’s the over-the-top, absurdly ridiculous protagonist of the satirical comedy show, The Office.) And that was how I met Brian Brenner. Fortunately (?), my exposure to Brian Brenner didn’t stop at the end of the semester. I proceeded to take multiple other courses with him throughout college, and upon my graduation, I was hired as an entry-level engineer at Fay, Spofford & Thorndike, where Brian happened to work as a vice president. He has now been my boss for more than two and a half years. Brian has been a mentor to me throughout the years, both as a professor and as a boss. He has taught me invaluable lessons over the past six and a half years, ranging from technical bridge design to the proper ways of establishing yourself in the professional engineering world. I realized early on that he had an extremely large breadth of knowledge to share with me, so I began writing down some of his most memorable quotes and lessons. It is now my utmost pleasure to share these Brian-isms with you in a segment I like to call, “S#!t My Professor/Boss Says.” My Professor Says … Professor Brenner demonstrating that engineers need to not only be good at math, but also excellent verbal communicators: “I … um …this, eh, uh … but you can … yeah, … arggg, I need English here! [shaking his fists in the air] English, help me out!” Professor Brenner demonstrating his wide-ranging and historically accurate trivia knowledge: “Interestingly enough, the same person who discovered you could eat lobster also discovered slurry walls.”

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Professor Brenner demonstrating his take on philosophy: “If there was an advanced-advanced concrete, would you want to take that knowing what you know about advanced concrete? Would you wonder what topics would be covered in advanced-advanced concrete? I think that’s what other schools would call ‘advanced2 concrete.’” Professor Brenner demonstrating that you should always be confident in your knowledge: 1: “Question? Try to make it one that I can answer.” 2: “If I don’t know the answer and can’t fake it … Well, I will answer it sometime after class.” 3: Guest visiting from museum: “My job is strange because I get to teach people about things that I know absolutely nothing about.” Professor Brenner: “Kind of like me.” Professor Brenner demonstrating that you should always strive to exceed expectations: “I’m not promising a high-quality lecture tonight, but you set the bar low, and you never know what might happen.” Professor Brenner demonstrating how engineers should cope with their demanding work lives: “I’ve been working for 17 hours straight. Let’s drink to that. [takes a sip] And you all think there’s soda in this Diet Coke can.” Professor Brenner demonstrating that he believes all his students are destined for greatness: “I take this pretty seriously because I want you all to be great bridge engineers … or in some cases, just adequate.”

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Professor Brenner demonstrating his dedication to education, as well as honesty: “I’m not going to have a full class tonight because I just don’t feel like teaching. Am I not supposed to admit that? Okay, well that concludes tonight’s lecture.” My Boss Says … Brian demonstrating the importance of positive client relations: “No one ever dies at [the client’s company] either. … They’re like vampires … That’s why you only see them at night.” Brian demonstrating that you should always be confident in your work: “Speak now, or drive across it.” Brian demonstrating that the best way to start your work week is with laughter: Ed [in regard to shop drawings]: “I’m just waiting on the rebar shop drawings.” Brian: “You need reinforcement?” Ed: “Yeah.” Brian: “That was a structural joke. [silence] Brian: “It’s Monday morning; I’m trying.” Brian demonstrating how to make your employees feel welcome through an open-door management style: Brian [during a meeting in Brian’s office]: “And the ‘dead fish rule’ is now in effect.” Ryan: “What’s the dead fish rule?” Brian: “If the fish is dead, you want to get it out of your office as quickly as possible.”

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Brian demonstrating that managers should treat all their employees equally: “Welcome back to another week at FST. It is great to see you all again, with just a couple of exceptions.” Brian demonstrating the necessity of getting things accomplished in order to avoid great snark: Brian: “What about Field Design Change No. 13?” Nick: “Yep, that’s on my list.” Brian: “That’s where it was last week, too.” Brian demonstrating that engineers can effectively communicate by talking like Dr. Suess: “We designed the pump for the sump, which should get us over the hump.” Brian demonstrating the importance of honesty in the workplace: Brian: “Is everyone tired—don’t really want to be here?” [Karl nods] Brian: “At least you’re honest. If it makes you feel any better, we’re not very happy to have you here either.” Brian demonstrating that confidentiality in the workplace doesn’t exist: “Please forward the email around to anyone I forgot to include on the CC list. It’s not secret stuff. Nothing is secret stuff … except the secret stuff.” Brian demonstrating that older engineers should stay privy to texting jargon in order to win job proposals: “This would be like the O-M-G of bridges.” Brian demonstrating that managers should treat their employees as equals because humility truly goes a long way: “You should all put your sunglasses on, because of my glow.”

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Brian demonstrating that a boss should always be very subtle when informing his employee of a wardrobe malfunction, so as to protect him from embarrassment and ridicule from coworkers: [to Josh after noticing Ryan’s fly is down]: “What do they say in Maine? The moose is on the prowl? The potatoes are out of the shed?”

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Civil Engineering

If you use a MathCAD analogy to explain the birds and the bees to your teenager… If you are so steeped in structural parameters that you chortle over inappropriate variables… If you watched The Sopranos just for the bridges pictured in the opening montage… … you are a candidate for Brian Brenner’s latest collection of humorous essays that celebrate life as a practicing civil engineer. In this book you’ll learn valuable skills, like egosurfing and how to use tribbles in a meeting to tell the engineers from the contractors. You’ll ponder what bridges would be like if they could sing, and you’ll discover friendships you never knew bridges could have through social media. Brenner also invites you to consider serious subjects, like the transition from student to professional engineer and the growth in girth of engineering standards. He speculates on what will happen when, one day, some researcher determines that the current amount of information is good enough. Until then, Too Much Information: Living the Civil Engineering Life will entertain you even while it shows just how well civil engineering can explain life.

Praise for Don’t Throw This Away! The Civil Engineering Life “Brenner’s honest, assured voice, brainiac populism, and bite-sized essays make this a quirky, addictive winner that should bring out the ‘inner civil engineer’ in a wide crosssection of readers.” —Publishers Weekly

Brian Brenner, P.E., is a vice president and structural engineer with Fay, Spofford and Thorndike in Burlington, Massachusetts. His work includes bridge design projects throughout New England and the New York metropolitan area. As a professor at Tufts University, he teaches the bridge and concrete design classes and advises students on research projects. He is the author of Don’t Throw This Away! The Civil Engineering Life and Bridginess: More of the Civil Engineering Life, both published by ASCE Press. ISBN 978-0-7844-1394-4