Every time I watch a practical engineering video I like Grady more and more. Great presenter, interesting videos, great value for the time spent watching. Gets right to the point in the first sentence, and the rest of the video is still worth watching.
Add me to the long list of people who heard the bit about desert sand not being suitable for concrete and believed it. I'm happy to be corrected.
I almost feel like his videos are anti-clickbait. On my YouTube recommendations page, often his title and cover image are the least eye-grabbing, but the actual video is always satisfying.
His water infrastructure videos always get me because the thumbnail shows off the very cool model that he built just for it :)
> Add me to the long list of people who heard the bit about desert sand not being suitable for concrete and believed it. I'm happy to be corrected.
Cristobol and Hank's whole business strategy down the drain! (From Barry)
I don't even care about sand but he's so great I couldn't stop watching it
That's the sign of a truly great "content creator". I've found myself watching a lot of different YT channels on topics I would NEVER have thought I had any interest in.
I loved how he tackled this from multiple angles.
Manufactured sand has those rough edges, and is often a waste byproduct of rock crushing anyway. But also, in practice, you want more weathered sand for ease of handling, since too-rough sand is less strong given the same level of workability!
> Gets right to the point in the first sentence,
Huge respect or the "tldr: no" right at the start.
One thing that surprised me when I started running a tugboat business: A country can be both an exporter and importer of sand. Sand of one type goes from the U.S. to The Bahamas to be used in concrete. Sand of another type goes from The Bahamas to the U.S. to be used in aquariums. Specialty sands go to make regulation volleyball courts.
Ironically, we just hit an entirely different "sand catastrophe" - https://mastodon.social/@mimsical/113232531800424706
> the crucibles used to create ingots of silicon which become microchips are made from an ultra-pure quartz sand -- and 70% of the world's supply comes from just one place in North Carolina [Spruce Pine]
> and 70% of the world's supply comes from just one place in North Carolina
A quick search seems to say there are more places available for getting that than North Carolina.
Is it possible that this specific mine just happens to be the cheapest available right now, but in case they for some reason disappear, there are alternatives everyone would switch to? Or is the situation that if that mine disappears, there is no other alternatives at all?
Could not even be the cheapest, Just the refinement process was developed for this particular sand. A different sand might have different impurities and need different processes to handle.
If the particular impurities of this source can be chelated out with safer or cheaper chemicals, maybe in fewer steps, then the cost goes down.
Of course jurisdictions with poor worker conditions can just use the less safe chemicals and externalize the human toll instead of using more complex safety procedures.
Almost all our modern tech has extremely long tails measured in decades.
It's basic economics to exploit one source for as long as possible before feasibility changes, but that's a hard argument to make for anyone, even the most experienced personnel because it's all so site specific.
Availability, production scale, and knowledge base.
I think things will probably pan out okay, maybe a rough month or two as roads (even if rough cut new logging roads), utilities, and prioritized community services get fixed up. Synthetic option is available, apparently, just a bit costly.
Yeah, this is being overblown. It may very well be that there will be a short term constriction as competitors ramp, but to argue that this is some kind of fundamental bottleneck in semiconductor production is ridiculous.
It's quartz: literally the single most common crystal on the surface of the planet. Now, sure, I'm sure this particular mine had great stuff, but it's not like it's hard to find.
No, surely what we have here is a single source provider precisely because the material is so cheap to mine (and therefore unprofitable to try to compete with from scratch).
You're right, but I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes a bottleneck at least for a few months, generating a lot of headaches for some companies.
I wrote this comment on an article that was on HN about 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39818778
Sadly, given the insane amount of devastation in western NC, I'll get a chance to test my hypothesis. That is, despite Spruce Pine going offline, the overall impact to the global semiconductor industry will be relatively unnoticeable.
The majority of the earth's crust is believed to be made of silicon dioxide. I don't know how much I would believe that we would have a scarcity. It may all come from one source simply because of history.
Essential node in global semiconductor supply chain hit by Hurricane Helene | 196 points | 50 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701862
Oh, cool. One of the most common glass batches (raw materials melted to make glass) used by artists is "Spruce Pine Batch".
Wonder if it’s the same stuff or if glass people get a different bin.
I'm not sure that's technically irony but rather an interesting coincidence.
Grady is a hero in engineering reporting and documentaries. I've learned so much about how the world works in other engineering disciplines from Practical Engineering, and often in neglected fields that are losing talent faster than it can be replaced.
It gives me hope that teenagers are watching his videos and becoming inspired to go into infrastructure. More than anything, I appreciate his calm and reasoned perspectives that are so lacking in video content in this modern day and age.
We fools here in Germany sometimes _pay_ to get rid of excess electricity when it's very sunny and windy. How about having some rock crushing machines that instead use that cheap electricity to make more sand?
Thanks for the puns, too.
It's quite likely that the cost of idle capital is much higher than the cost of paying others to accept electricity. Depending on the price swings, a battery may be a much better investment.
I was in Vietnam on holiday a few years ago and dredging sand out of the Mekong was obviously big business. You could see ships full of it going down the river. Apparently it was supposed to be protected, but that didn't seem to be stopping anyone (there seems to be a lot of corruption in Vietnam). We were told it was causing houses to fall into the river, due to erosion.
Really interesting video. This is the first time I have seen the (apparently entirely fabricated) idea that desert sand isn't suitable for construction challenged. I had definitely absorbed that idea into my consciousness without enough due diligence.
If you found this article interesting, definitely give "Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future" a read. One of the most eye-opening books I've read in the past few years.
Agreed, I read it earlier in the year and found it enlightening.
This issue has been discussed here in the past.
One example:
I noticed that the two bars were breaking differently under the hydraulic press. One was crumbling and the other (manufactured) was exploding. There was no mention of this effect in the video. It couldn't be the due to force because in the 2nd half the manufactured bar broke at a lower force. Could this factor has consequences on how manufactured sand concrete behaves with natural phenomenon (hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, etc.)
Exploding means it was keeping its integrity for longer (i.e. not compressing), and then releasing it when it couldn't anywhere.
Crumbling means it was falling apart.
A paper book will explode in a press because it does not have any way to compress and release any of the force on it, until it releases all of it in one shot.
Learned so much about sand in 20 minutes! He mentions nebula.tv at the end. Does anyone have feedback on the content over there?
So… this is really about costs? If costs increase for more environmentally destructive sand production, then other sand production gets relatively cheaper… and as he says, industry starts to use more appropriate materials that suddenly become relatively comparable in terms of costs to concrete?
I’m not an engineer or an economist, does this sound like a fair summary?
Bonus points for articles that start with a tldr and don't try to bury the lead
Note that "bury the lede" isn't really about "make the reader get to the end to find out the answer" but when a reporter/writer emphasizes the wrong part of a story in the intro then you'd say they buried the lede. Like, if the first graf is all about a politician attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Podunk, IL and then in the third graf you have "at the rally, he called for all left-handed people to be put in jail" then you've buried the lede.
If you have in the first graf "so-and-so proposed a radical, and illegal, prosecution of a minority group" it's not burying the lede to make the reader get to the third graf to find out it's against left-handed people. Annoying, perhaps, but not technically burying the lede. :)
Burying the lede is in the same spirit as “the real wtf was…”
FYI it's "bury the lede," a lede being the introductory section of a news story.
The word "lede" was introduced in the 1970s as an alternative spelling for the word "lead" to resolve ambiguity between the leading paragraph of an article and the metal "lead" which was used in typesetting. It didn't even become popular until the 1980s.
In fact, prior to the 1980s, it was indeed spelled "bury the lead". Here for example is an excerpt from a book about newswriting from the 1970s which uses "lead" as the spelling:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=3IxbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22bury+the+...
Meanwhile, the group "Led Zeppelin" also avoided the ambiguous spelling to prevent people from pronouncing their name "leed zeppelin". You can't win with lead.
Huh, didn't know that! Via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Led_Zeppelin#Formation:_1966%E... :
> One account of how the new band's name was chosen held that Moon and Entwistle had suggested that a supergroup with Page and Beck would go down like a "lead balloon", an idiom for being very unsuccessful or unpopular.[21] The group dropped the 'a' in lead at the suggestion of [manager] Peter Grant, so that those unfamiliar with the term would not pronounce it "leed".[22] The word "balloon" was replaced by "zeppelin", a word which, according to music journalist Keith Shadwick, brought "the perfect combination of heavy and light, combustibility and grace" to Page's mind.[21]
It certainly doesn't help that in a rock context, "lead guitar" is very much pronounced with a long e! I'm glad they had the foresight to keep us from being led astray.
I would argue that there's no reason to continue misspelling "lead" as "lede" outside of a context where you are worried about conflating the "lead" paragraph with the "lead" piece of metal which was used as a spacer between words in a Linotype machine
It's not a misspelling, it's jargon. FWIW I prefer it and I think it's valuable to preserve in part because people who dig into it a bit learn about the history of the term and practice of putting publications (especially newspapers) together.
You can prefer one spelling over another, absolutely, but it's a bit too strong to say someone using the actual word "lead" is incorrect.
Oh, I wouldn't correct someone for saying "lead" -- or "intro" or any other variant that makes sense. Leed is right out, though.
If the choice is betwixt overloading a morpheme and having two distinct I shall take the latter.
>I would argue that there's no reason to continue misspelling "lead" as "lede"
Does it still count as misspelling when "lede" is in the dictionary (Merriam Websters & Cambridge & Oxford)?
Pretty sure it's just a word at that point, right?
The Washington Post headline:
>'The Eagle Has Landed' – Two Men Walk on the Moon
That is the entire story, in the headline as it should be. I want to know more! The first sentence should add the most relevant added information.
It shouldn't be "As a child Neil Armstrong always dreamed about..." burying the next most important detail 2/3 through the article. The importance/relevance/interest should start high, end low. Inverted pyramid.
That's the "inverted pyramid" organization that is (or was) taught in journalism. The way it was explained to me is: imagine the reader stops at the headline. Or after reading the first sentence. Or after the first paragraph, etc. In any case, they should have read the most important facts of the story up that point.
Holy cow, don't look for recipes on the web. If you're luck any ingredients and instructions are only 2/3 through. More often 23 pages through.
Your comment and my response exist in so many places on the internet, but I wanted to point out that most of the web-based recipes I use have a convenient "jump to recipe" button. I won't attempt to explain what SEO/copyright/whatever reasons there are for the excess prose at the beginning, though.
What bothers me more about these sites is how heavyweight they can feel even with ads stripped. I wonder if they all use a similar, bloated JS widget that my phone cannot run smoothly.
I’ve been using this app “just the recipe” to avoid this problem. It’s not perfect, but saves me 90% of the time. I think I found it on hn originally.
I have no connection to the app, aside from being a happy user
I have a theory that a lot of journalists really wanted to be novelists. When they get a chance to write a long-form article they can't resist the urge to flex their stylistic muscles; "look at me, I'm a Serious Writer".
Don't we have to move to GaN anyway?
The book mentioned, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization by Vince Beiser:
> The World in a Grain is the compelling true story of the hugely important and diminishing natural resource that grows more essential every day, and of the people who mine it, sell it, build with it--and sometimes, even kill for it. It's also a provocative examination of the serious human and environmental costs incurred by our dependence on sand, which has received little public attention. Not all sand is created equal: Some of the easiest sand to get to is the least useful. Award-winning journalist Vince Beiser delves deep into this world, taking readers on a journey across the globe, from the United States to remote corners of India, China, and Dubai to explain why sand is so crucial to modern life. Along the way, readers encounter world-changing innovators, island-building entrepreneurs, desert fighters, and murderous sand pirates. The result is an entertaining and eye-opening work, one that is both unexpected and involving, rippling with fascinating detail and filled with surprising characters.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36950075-the-world-in-a-...
Another book on this is:
_Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization_ by Ed Conway
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112974899-material-world
>Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future
I wonder if the desert kind of sand that isn’t suitable for construction can be used for those thermal mass sand batteries.
Seems like an obvious solution for storage to me but haven’t heard anything on that front
You didn’t watch the video.
I recently bought his book. It's as great as you'd expect it to be.
I just got back from the beach and my car is full of it if anyone needs some.
Betteridge's law never fails! (At least in this case the author immediately answers the question.)
the world is running out of sand if some crooked politician and his cronies can profit off of it. notice the pattern.
We're running out of most everything, in a very The Limits to Growth/World3 kinda of way.
Isaac Asimov was an early writer on this, noting that if the earth's crust was converted into biomass the limiting element was phosphorous --- look at USDA photos of food crops grown w/ and w/o fertilizer including that element for a very sobering view.
Currently, we expend up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy (depending on food) --- peak oil is still worrisome given how much of the input for fertilizers is from oil.
Sometime in the last century we crossed over from their being more weight in bony fish in the oceans than shipping tonnage to the latter predominating: https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting was outlawed --- I worry my children will live in a time when commercial fishing is no longer feasible.
>I worry my children will live in a time when commercial fishing is no longer feasible.
We are already well into it unfortunately. I've seen enough anecdotal evidence from old fishermen that we have already depleted and disrupted the sea biomass so much that it is already changed forever.
- Old sushi chefs talking about how there are numerous fish they can no longer get at any price that were common when they were young.
- Old fishing photos show smaller and smaller "prize" catches over time.
- Old fisherman talking about how they used to fish by slapping oars at the bay then simply hand/net catching the fish types they wanted near shore.
- Old whalers talking about how they could simply go out and pick what type of large catch they wanted and bring it back. Now they can go days or weeks without a single catch of anything.
The best solution we have so far is outlawing all fishing in certain areas of the ocean. Picked well, the fish are safe there to breed and recover population numbers, and you only harvest schools that leave the exclusion zone due to crowding.
> I worry my children will live in a time when commercial fishing is no longer feasible.
I worry that my parents lived in a time when commercial fishing was no longer feasible, but no one noticed and kept siphoning all the seafood anyway.
The first time I heard about this, I wondered why we didn't just blast desert sand at itself to rough it up to give it better properties. Sure it takes some energy but the sand mafia probably isn't getting cheaper.
It turns we’re all in the pocket of big sand. Which I guess is better than having big sand in our pockets, as that would scratch up our phones. Then, we’d need new phones, or at least new phone screens… either way, big sand wins!
you're forgetting how much damage it'd do in the charging port!
dale gribble was the forerunner
That would probably cause the sand to become smoother.
> I wondered why we didn't just blast desert sand at itself to rough it up to give it better properties.
The grain size of desert (or most maritime) sand is already far too small, and if you blast it to pieces it will get even smaller - too small to be used for concrete.
> If we use the US Department of Agriculture’s soil textural triangle, sand is any granular material that is at least 85% sand…
Cool, I just added a single grain of sand to a tonne of snow, now I have a tonne of sand. How convenient.
If you add a single grain of sand to a tonne of snow, it’s not 85% sand.
Seems somebody slept through Intro to Logic.
I don’t understand how you got that conclusion — 1 grain of sand is not 85% of the [ton of snow + 1 grain sand]
I think OP wanted to construct “sand by induction”, but I also think you need more than one grain. If you have 9 grains of sand and add one snowflake, you now have something that’s 90% sand and is therefore 10 grains of sand. Take your 10 grains of sand and add another snowflake to create 11 grains of sand. Continue with each snowflake one by one, and you’ve inductively created a sand pile.
How does that one grain become 85% of a tonne?