So you want to build a tunnel
practical.engineering
practical.engineering
What helped me more than anything was going out into the garden and digging. I made sure to do it safely, since I know it can be risky, so I dug wide and with wooden supports, but there was something about just digging and digging down that let me work through all the darkness that had built up in my head. It gave those feelings somewhere to go.
This is unrelated, but I wonder if I did actually hit on something primal in myself.
Wide-eyed they said: really? She said yes, dig as much as you want, but the only rule is it all gets filled in before school starts in the fall. 30 years later they say it was the best summer ever. Every day they were working on it and all of their friends would come by and help dig and plan what development would come next.
No collapses happened and everyone is still alive. :-)
For running, I put on some headphones and get lost in a meditative headspace. For weights, I usually end up reading a book on my phone. Still, neither weights or running are as much fun as the gamified exercises (sports), the puzzles (climbing), or the social-oriented exercises (dance, partnered acrobatics, some sports).
> For Cray, the excavation project is more than a simple diversion. "I work when I'm at home," he recently told a visiting scientist. "I work for three hours, and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go and work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the 4-by-4s. Now, as you can see, I'm up in the Wisconsin woods, and there are elves in the woods. So when they see me leave, they come into my office and solve all the problems I'm having. Then I go back up and work some more."
> Rollwagen knows that Cray is only half kidding and that some of the designer's greatest inspirations come when he is digging. Says the chairman: "The real work happens when Seymour is in the tunnel."
https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest...
Joking aside, I too have spent many days digging with a shovel and pickaxe on my desert property. There's something to it, even Jim Keller (of DEC, AMD, Tenstorrent...) has discussed digging trenches in some of his podcast interviews.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lyttle
- The house was later brought back to life in an amazing way https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/sue-webst...
But I feel he was an amateur compared to Joseph Williamson :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestiere_Underground_Gardens
https://www.reddit.com/r/HighStrangeness/comments/v15u0t/sey...
If you haven't already, I would highly recommend this book[1] on Seymour Cray. An amazing read.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Supermen-Seymour-Technical-Wizards-Su...
Edit: lol he’s in the first paragraph.
that said, I've been latently fascinated by this kind of project. I've seen a couple of how-things-work/maker/dare-me-to-do-it type shows from UK and US where folks single handedly do stuff like this, though they're all hairy dudes unlike Kala, whose channel looks pretty cool
This is a very cool frontier for a homeowner, to not just have dominion over your terranean space by growing edible veg and habitat for animals but also use your below ground asset for who knows -- domicile extension or DIY geothermal or ...?
Gemini tells me in the US, land ownership theoretically extends to the Earth's core
https://blog.sintef.com/digital-en/inachus-project-robot-sea...
I don't think any fixed installation is particularly easy to defend?
Also, I'll grant that a drone can see you from miles away, but don't you think any one of a large and growing number of satellites can spot your massive earthworks from tens and hundreds of miles away for the months or years it takes you to construct?
It's attackers that can't defend against anything.
Probably liability insurance makes it impractical, which is a shame. There really is nothing like playing with a big excavator. Very fortunate that it was one of my formative experiences.
Now if the robots were affordable to someone on a minimum wage income that would be a big deal.
However you just made a robot that will happily kill anyone who happens to wonder into the dig zone - we know from experience that people like to watch excavators work and they have no clue where the safe zone is. As such I have to discourage you from trying it - not that you couldn't make it dig the holes you want in a short time, but because you need someone trained watching for people walking in the unsafe zone and so you gained nothing. Waymo/Tesla have put a lot of effort into this type of detection, if you don't have similar backing you have no chance of doing it - if you do have that, there is likely a lot of money to be made.
Any type of automation would be a huge pile of unknown unknowns, safety being one of them, how to even define goals for it to solve being another. Which is what keeps this idea in the realm of a dog chasing a car - if you gave me an excavator I could remote-control from my computer today, I'd not have the first clue what to actually do with it (beyond manually-controlled digging from my chair).
I do get that in the era of "AI" and vibe-coding why I may have set off your engineering sensibilities wtfometer though.
(Automating a lawnmower though...)
eh, kind of. The motivation to take unsafe shortcuts manifests differently, but it is still there. It requires some vigilance to exercise self-responsibility and sometimes make yourself stop and take a step back and figure out a better way to proceed, while accepting that something is going to take longer than you'd planned.
Enjoy for those who would enjoy such things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34CZjsEI1yU
Also, it’s often moot because some part of the government will require you to pull permits to kick a rock in your backyard.
Which is rounded well out beyond significant figures (as we've only got the one in 7 billion people). Rounded, we've spent effectively no time on minecraft.
Sounds about right?
eta: that's 4.51 of every million seconds
To then take that naming at face value and pontificate about code and engineering is very much a two slights of hand not making a right situation. Furthermore, a civil engineer doing so is deep into "man won't understand what his salary depends on him not understanding" territory.
I know that the many HNers from the seismically active portions of the US will have no frame of reference for this but there are portions of the world where for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years basements were built with less than scant engineering. The sort of "just barely below dirt" construction most of these amateurs are engaging in is on that order of complexity. Based on my observations via Youtube, these amateurs should be more scared of their own temporary construction rigging and material handling solutions than the forces their structures must hold back.
The primary practical engineering challenge and hazard these structures face is that there's nothing stopping someone from driving a point load of undefined size over the top and that has serious implications for roof strength.
I am not a civil engineer, but I did spend a bunch of time looking into building an underground range. Way more relaxed life safety reqs, smaller bore, etc. However, when you start reading, it is clear that much of the work is empirical, heavily localized and based on a great deal on the experience of the builder. I found very little in the way of solid theoretical modeling, but lots of measure, adjust, etc.
I think Grady does a reasonable job highlighting the dangers and risks.
Structural steel would be the most predictable. Concrete and timber are in the middle somewhere.
Basically nobody ever died from leaky pipes or substandard weatherproofing. The code is as much about a) homogenizing the industry so big business can statistically reason about it at scale b) turning the subjective into the quantitive so that things can be done, checked, sight off on, etc, etc, without anyone using "judgement" as it is about protecting life and limb. Just about every professional has a laundry list of complaints about their area of code that boil down to it being theoretically useful but at great "not worth it" expense or a similar "not worth it" expense being incurred in lieu of very basic judgement. Arc fault breakers, and engineering requirements for small retaining walls come to mind as oft cited examples. And of course there's the myriad of wrangling that goes on wherein things get looser/stiffer requirements depending on whether their use is deemed worth incentivizing (this stuff usually lives in local addendums to the code).
I'm not saying there isn't value in there, but this habit people have of acting like it's all relevant to safety and screeching about "written in blood" is exactly what creates room for unrelated stuff to exist in the code.
>However, when you start reading, it is clear that much of the work is empirical, heavily localized and based on a great deal on the experience of the builder. I found very little in the way of solid theoretical modeling, but lots of measure, adjust, etc.
Which is a point very much in favor of the amateur.
I know you're probably intending to only remark on leaky water pipes, but:
The New London School explosion was caused by a leaky pipe. It killed 295 students and teachers, and led to the inclusion of smelly thiol in natural gas, as well as the Texas Engineering Practice Act.
A dehumidifier (or an HVAC system, which is where the name of the disease came from) is more likely to give you legionnaires disease than even the most substandard plumbing.
Famously, moist wet areas only grow molds that are safe for humans to live amongst, and absolutely never rotted away wooden structural components of a building.
The part I take issue with isn't the building code in principal or that non lethal things can be regulated. It's that the people being to lie though their teeth and pretend it's all written in blood when a whole bunch of it isn't are essentially stealing credibility from those parts that are. A few bad apples (handouts to industry) spoils the bunch (very clearly important stuff, like floor and roof loading).
meh, I understand the point, but it is about your risk tolerance being different than whoever writes the code. I have a long list of complaints about the NEC, (including AFCI requirements), but IMO, these kinds of requirements do save some amount of lives -- the issues comes down to how much do you value your own life, and/or the lives of others. The tradeoff, as always, is cost -- inspections, permits, impact studies etc push up the cost of new and remodel jobs substantially.
Where I really take issue with different code is when we hammer down on a specific issue of small significance while neglecting a more significant problem. For example, I have never in my life seen an inspector check the torque of a main lugs, polaris connectors, etc. Might just be my inspectors, but I have seen way more failures due to loose or over tightened connections than anything else.
I am all for gradually raising the bar for safety, but it has to rise faster than the increased cost, along with a level raising of the bar across all facets.
Grady's videos are quite impressive to watch.
Grady's video are not instructions, they are entertainment. He is a much better producer of videos than a writer. I'm quite thankful that he makes transcripts of his videos, but they are always better watched instead of read.
> Cray avoided publicity. There are a number of unusual tales about his life away from work, termed "Rollwagenisms", from then-CEO of Cray Research, John A. Rollwagen. Cray enjoyed skiing, windsurfing, tennis, and other sports. Another favorite pastime was digging a tunnel under his home; he attributed the secret of his success to "visits by elves" while he worked in the tunnel: "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem."
https://www.youtube.com/@engineerkala/
Edit: reading is hard -- I only skimmed and did not realize she was mentioned.