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We're downthread of someone moaning about the complexity of a world which requires him to understand sidewalks, strangers and rooms he isn't allowed to enter. Doesn't feel like paper is any more intuitive or 'natural' at any level than those, and tbh if I don't have to understand it well enough to understand how it's made, glass-walled skyscrapers really aren't complicated either...

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> glass-walled skyscrapers really aren't complicated either

Until they become a focusing mirror that turns into a gigantic magnifying glass, see: the Walkie Talkie building. Evidently, glass buildings are hard enough that even with hundreds of engineers, there still ends up being second order effects that are unaccounted for in many designs.

Building a skyscraper with glass windows means understanding the physics of light, geography, the spin of the earth and it's rotation around the sun, materials science etc.

Well yeah, designing them is hard, even making the glass is hard. Similarly, ancient civilization was full of buildings whose constructors did very complex things but didn't understand the second order effects and artisans that spent a lifetime honing their skills to work on it. But anyone that can dismiss them as uncomplicated because they're just stone shouldn't need to worry too much about the engineers and digital models and processes behind the glass ones either.

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