Fascinating!

I had heard this story in short, but the people at Veritasium tell it brilliantly with interviews, archival film and graphics. The best 33 minutes you will waste on the web today. Check it out:

Want more information? Look out for Michael Greenburg, The Great Miscalculation: The Race to Save New York City’s Citicorp Tower (June 2025) [link]. Also, the original New Yorker article is available online: Joseph Morgenstern, The Fifty-Nine Story Crisis (May 21, 1995). [link] Wikipedia has an article, too: “Citicorp Center Engineering Crisis” [link].

The Pinto problem

I’m sure that some will criticize this as an oversimplifying article about America’s most famous automotive engineering case, but Gladwell does have a nice way of organizing information and opening up corridors for thinking across disciplines.  Worth reading.

Malcolm Gladwell, “The Engineer’s Lament: Two Ways of Thinking about Automotive Safety,” The New Yorker (May 4, 2015) (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-engineers-lament).