Tonight while eating my dinner of jalapeņo poppers and fish sticks (Megan's out of town..), I watched a show I recorded called Bridging the Bering Strait. It talks about the possibility of building a bridge from Alaska to Siberia and the challenges they would face. As has become typical on the Discovery Channel, aka The Trading Spaces Network, the narration for this show about engineering is completely polluted with gratuitous, idiotic comparisons like the following:
"Such a bridge would cost 100 billion dollars which is more than the GDP of five small countries."
Honestly, I know 100 billion dollars is a lot of money without sending me off on a tangent wondering which five countries you might be talking about!
"The bridge will require 50,000(?) tons of steel rebar which is enough to reach from the earth to the moon."
If someone can't understand how much steel that is, they certainly aren't going to be able to relate it to the distance between the earth and the moon! And is that rebar half an inch or a full inch in diameter? Come on!
"The ice flows form compression ridges which rise like mountains above the sea. These ridges can be the size of a block of row houses."
If only I were more familiar with the dimensions of row houses! The least ridiculous of them all and it still would have been more helpful to hear that the ridges can be fifty feet high and half a mile long, for example. We all know that's big.
"In the Confederation bridge, the main girder alone weighed 8,250 tons which is the weight of more than 4000 SUVs."
Good grief! Who cares if the girder weighs the same amount as 4000 SUVs!? I bet it also weights as much as 1.2 million plates of spaghetti, but, again, who cares?
These ridiculous comparisons might sound good to a local news reporter, but they are beyond silly in a show targeted at an engineering and construction audience. If something is big, please just say how big it is and leave it at that.
I'm updating the appearance of my blog to fit in better with the rest of my web site, so you might notice some weird behavior over the next few days. The main blog page and the individual archive pages are updated, but everything else is still using the old style.
It is left as an exercise to the reader to figure out which requests (HTML, images, etc.) are coming from my Windows server and which are coming from my Linux server. These two mortal enemies are working together to bring you this new blog design.
Via Bruce Schneier, I came across this amazing article about a spy operation conducted by the CIA with a military systems engineer in Russia. The fact that this Russian man could be so dedicated to helping a country he had only heard about on Voice of America is incredible. We're certain to hear many more interesting stories like this as the Cold War becomes a distant memory and more reports are declassified.