lubujackson
veqq
This is an urban legend. The college archivist covered it: http://web.archive.org/web/20020816065622/http://www.new.ox....
> In 1859, the JCR told the SCR that the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true.
> In 1862, the senior fellow was visiting College estates on `progress', i.e., an annual review of College property, which goes on to this day (performed by the Warden). Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.
> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling. It is standard woodland management to grow stands of mixed broadleaf trees e.g., oaks, interplanted with hazel and ash. The hazel and ash are coppiced approximately every 20-25 years to yield poles. The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.
coldtea
> the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true. > Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.
So seems like the "legend" is true after all, the trees were 150+ old and let to grow, and the "takedown" is just not wanting to acknowledge that they did it purposefully, which is beside the point pedantic hair splitting...
stavros
But this urban legend must be over 150 years old! When was it created?
saltcured
Right after they consumed the previous rural legend.
swah
I would only "complain" about this urban legend if there was no way someone would be so future-thinker as to plant trees that are going to be used one or two centuries later.
But since I'm sure we have done things like that in the past, for me, the urban legend is "valid" and I don't feel like that specific case being true or false is that important, just the pattern...
gowld
> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling.
> The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.
Splitting hairs a bit. In fact what they did was to maintain a more general solution, maintaining a supply of wood over the long term of 400 years.
rfrey
Ah yes, "exacting young man debunks charming tale with touching moral, to the benefit of nobody". A tale as old as time.
dxdm
It is good to be able to recognize charming tales and other biases and influences in a narrative. Having them pointed out counteracts the readiness of people to take things at face value. Knowing that something is a tale does not have to take away from it.
I don't know what irked you about the other comment, but I think there's a positive side to it.
pxc
I think it still works fine as a parable, and it doesn't hurt to know a little bit more about how the trees are Oxford are really kept.
PaulDavisThe1st
There's a better version of this sort of story that I first heard also set at Oxford.
The stone steps in front of one of the college buildings have been worn down by centuries of people walking up them. The college decides to replace it, but it turns out that the stone used comes from a specific quarry in Wales that in the hundreds of year that have elapsed has been finished when it comes to this sort of rock.
Nobody is sure what to do. They want matching stone but the only other source is in South Africa and it would cost a fortune to ship the stone from there.
A young architect suddenly has a brilliant idea. "We could just extract the stone, turn it over and get a brand new edge". Everyone is very excited, and contractors and tools arrive to carry out the simultaneously tricky yet simple procedure.
It was at that point they discovered this had already been done.
Avicebron
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit" - Paraphrased from Elton Trueblood
travisgriggs
Which defines why American society seems to be F'ed of late. Decades of short term rewards combined with a baby boomer population looking at their last hoorah and declining relevance. Most of the old people I interact seem to be in a state of denial about soon not being here.
neumann
Or just compare the billionaires actions now - they are building tunnels in hawaii to prepare for survival just as they are knowingly destroying the future instead of spending their obscene wealth to protect it.
eru
Why? It's very easy to get people to plant trees for you. Just give a gardener, even a very old one, some money and they'll do it for you.
rhubarbtree
Greatness seems to come from long term vision, and with success that vision collapses to short term gains. It’s cultural. Why does that happen and how do you prevent it?
okr
What a heinous posting. Judging about others shows true evil.
resource_waste
What is the bad part? Still number 1 GDP.
When was the glory days? Pre 1900s with slavery? The war and interwar years?
The cold war?
Pessimistic.
tristor
Unfortunately, while they bridle at the truth, Boomers are the most selfish generation in American history. Every single political and economic action of their generation has been done explicitly at the expense of future generations to enrich themselves. They are the first and only generation in American history to leave their children worse off than themselves. Unfortunately, they are also one of the longest living generations in American history also, and still control the reins of power long after most other generations had passed along. I think we're far from reaching the pinnacle of the damage they will do to our society and to the world. Depending on how long the US lasts as an entity, they might well go down in history as the worst generational cohort ever.
xwolfi
Zoom out: 200 years ago they were killing each other over slavery, 400 years ago, there was no american society.
The trend is up, but they're in a local minimum :D
reginald78
There's a youtube channel shadiversity that I haven't watched in awhile. It is mostly about fantasy media and swords but also spends a lot of time on medieval building techniques and clothing. One of the more interesting videos I watched talked about how before and even after saw mills could process and produce different sized boards people would 'grow' them instead by trimming trees to produce long straight narrow branches. There was even a still living example in some English village that some trimmed 100 years ago before the process was completely stopped.
This also reminds me of those Japanese temples where in order to preserve the institutional knowledge of how to rebuild the temple in case of disaster the monks tear it down and rebuild it from scratch every 30-40 years assuring the next generation has experience.
K-Wall
Can't wait to see this story used on some growth hacker / seeking new opportunities LinkedIn post talking about planning for success.
neumann
The funny thing is that 99% of the linkedin shills will miss the second crux of the allegory: To maintain the institutional knowledge for this to happen, you need to have a culture that nurtures employees, keeps them on long term and listens to them. And gives them time to write good documentation for future-proofing.
hackitup7
It's wild that they managed to retain this knowledge without a Confluence by Atlassian subscription (tm).
yegle
This reminds me of the US Navy's Oak forest for ship building: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Live_Oaks_Reservation
mathattack
Although this story was debunked, many Universities own Timberland in their portfolios. They’re a good inflation hedge for schools with long time horizon. (Real estate and paper investments were historically very correlated to university costs)
https://blog.realestate.cornell.edu/2018/04/20/harvards-natu...
mathattack
I have no idea if this story is true, but it should be.
kwhitefoot
We should all strive to make it so.
wazoox
As said in Italian "si non è vero, è ben trovato".
dfabulich
Here's another good example of a series of slow experiments: the cosmic distance ladder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdOXS_9_P4U https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder
You can compute the distance to the moon if you know the radius of the earth by looking at how long lunar eclipses take, data gathered over years of observations.
Eratosthenes computed the radius of the earth by clever trigonometry in ancient times, and Aristarchus computed that a 3.5-hour lunar eclipse indicates that the moon is ~61 earth radii away.
Once you have the distance to the moon, you can compute the size of the moon by measuring how long it takes the moon to rise. It takes about two minutes, and so the radius of the moon is about 0.0002 of the distance to the moon.
By cosmic coincidence, the sun and the moon appear to be approximately the same size in the sky, so the ratio of radius/distance is approximately the same for the sun and the moon. If you measure phases of the moon, you'll find that half moon is not exactly half the time between the full moon and new moon. Half moon occurs not when the moon and the sun make a right angle with the earth, but when the earth and the sun make a right angle with the moon.
You can use trigonometry to measure the difference between the half-time point between new/full moon, and the actual half moon, giving you an angle θ. The distance to the sun is equal to the distance to the moon divided by sin(θ).
To get θ exactly right, you need a very precise clock, which the Greeks didn't have. It turns out to be about half an hour. Aristarchus guessed 6 hours, which was off by an order of magnitude, but showed an important point: that the sun was much larger than the earth, which was the first indication that the earth revolved around the sun. (Aristarchus' peers mostly didn't believe him, not simply out of prejudice, but because the constellations don't seem to distort over the course of a year; they were, as we now know, greatly underestimating the distance to nearby stars.)
Next, you can compute the shape of the orbits of the planets, by observing which constellations the planets fall inside on which dates over the course of centuries. Kepler used this data first to show that the planetary orbits were elliptical, and to show the relative size of each orbit, but with only approximate measures of the distance to the sun (like the θ measurement above) there's not enough precision to compute exact distances between planets.
So, scientists observed the duration of the transit of Venus across the sun from near the north pole and the south pole, relied on their knowledge of the diameter of the earth, and used parallax to compute the distance to Venus, and thereby got an extremely precise measurement of the earth's distance to the sun, the "astronomical unit." It took decades to find the right dates to perform this measurement.
The cosmic distance ladder goes on, measuring the speed of light (without radar) based on our distance to the sun and the orbit of Jupiter's moon Io, using radar to measure astronomical distances based on the speed of light, measuring brightness and color of nearby stars to get their distance, measuring the expected brightness of variable stars in nearby galaxies to get their distance, which provided the data to discover redshift (Hubble's law), measuring the distance to far away galaxies (and thereby showing that the universe is expanding).
AceJohnny2
Beat me to it. Indeed, from that video I learned that astronomy work requires large and/or longitudinal datasets.
I loved the tidbit that Galileo had a spat with Tycho Brahe because Brahe wouldn't share his data, so Galileo stole it (?)
2b3a51
Johannes Kepler was in there somewhere I recall. It was Brahe's data on the motions of Mars that lead Kepler to the idea of elliptical orbits.
AceJohnny2
Oops, I may have confused Kepler for Galileo
skyyr
Looking forward to Tao’s book on the subject. This is worthy of its own post, thanks for sharing.
wwarner
solid! thank you!
lamuswawir
Thank you.
tombert
In my free time, I have taken to trying to prove the Collatz conjecture.
People much smarter and more educated than me have failed at this quest, so I will nearly certainly fail at it, but that's not really the point in my mind. Even if I'm not the one to actually prove it, I can at least try and contribute to the body of work towards proving it. Mathematics is, more than nearly anything else, the result of generations building upon previous generations work. It's never "done", always growing and refining and figuring out new things to look at.
I have a few ideas on how to prove Collatz that I have not seen done anywhere [1], and usually (at least for me) that means it's a bad idea, but it's worth a try.
One of the greatest things about humans is our willingness to have multi-generational projects. I think maybe the coolest thing humans have ever done was eliminate smallpox, and that took hundreds of years.
[1] Which I'm going to keep to myself for now because they're not very fleshed out.
wwweston
And it’s not only never done, it’s always on the verge of dying off. Like Bill Thurston said, mathematical understanding basically lives in communities of mathematicians, every one of them a cell in the superorganism that is the field. You’re part of the distributed filesystem providing persistence as well as the possibility of new understanding.
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...
7373737373
Interesting new contender for simplest to state unsolved problem: The Antihydra
Does this program halt?
a = 8
b = 0
while b != -1:
if a % 2 == 0:
b += 2
else:
b -= 1
a += a//2
tombert
Interesting, I hadn't heard this one.
I should see if I can model this in Isabelle or something and see what happens.
7373737373
for reference, the statement has been formalized in Lean in Deepmind's open problem database: https://github.com/google-deepmind/formal-conjectures/blob/e...
gowld
Is that also the simplest unsolved state problem?
fragmede
Fwiw, ChatGPT is able to say that it doesn't. I wonder what other classes of programs it's able to state if it halts?
yifanl
Tom from the pub says that it does.
schoen
The math community surely expects a proof of that, and ChatGPT surely doesn't (yet) have one. (Maybe some day it will, as Kevin Buzzard and others are experimenting with asking language models to produce formal proofs.)
You could get LLMs to opine on many unresolved math conjectures, but I doubt much credence should be given to their responses, when not accompanied by a proof.
7373737373
Most LLMs I've tried come up with invalid reasoning, many confuse empirical evidence (of simulating it for a few steps and it 'most probably not halting') with definite proof that it never does, some create invalid probabilistic mathematical arguments to the same effect
Others I've tried are caught in a loop of trying to prove the same, insufficient approach over and over again, lacking explorative and "creative" behavior
Generally it seems that LLMs lack the 'motivation' to actually try to solve unsolved problems especially if they know that they are unsolved or difficult
IshKebab
ChatGPT is able to say anything it wants. Surely you know this by now ...
SirChud
What ChatGPT says has no relevance to whether it halts.
snarf21
Reminds me of Stewart Brand and the Clock of the Long Now (and other longer time horizon projects they are working on).
Reminds me of a statement he made during a Tim Ferris interview that I think is quite profound for our mental health. ".... being proud is the most reliable source of happiness that I know."
saulpw
Proud of your work, not proud of yourself. The latter is quite a reliable source of unhappiness, I've found.
snarf21
In the full quote, he is talking about fitness and being able to lift things and being proud of your abilities to do so. I'm not saying it works for everyone but it is nice to have a "thing" that you can hang your hat on. The whole interview is quite interesting and worth a read.
cubefox
A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later, but from a different author.
The cool thing is that you can easily become the current world leading expert on such a niche topic, because there aren't that many papers. So it's easy to know every single one of them, and the few experts are spread out in time rather than space.
It's like a web forum thread on a very obscure question, where only every few years someone contributes a new comment, likely never to be read by most of the previous authors, but read by all that come later.
pavel_lishin
> A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later, but from a different author.
Reminds me of certain parts of "Anathem".
Davidzheng
I do want to say often math papers have gaps, purely explained parts and sometimes mistakes which can make it quite hard to understand a topic of literally no one else still remembers it though. However the overall advancement of math sometimes helps in this regard
aaronbrethorst
The 2nd Ave Subway in Manhattan, with
preparatory construction beginning in
1942. First phase opened in 2017.
While every project is unique, it is not
immediately clear why digging a subway
on the Upper East Side is twenty times
more expensive than in Seoul or ten
times more expensive than in Paris.
here's a even more damning look: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/why-it-costs-4-billion...
edit: I've been on a tirade about this subject this week. https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/07/state-capacity-and...
jauntywundrkind
Super enjoyed this read today. And a much shorter punchline. https://www.volts.wtf/p/us-transit-costs-and-how-to-tame https://bsky.app/profile/volts.wtf/post/3lvbpy6p2zk2c
It's just so sad having a nation where disbelief & being against things is so the spirit.
persolb
Alon Levy being brought up on this topic always tweaks my “but somebody is wrong in the internet.” I’ve been on several of the projects he talks about. He’s right about the macro numbers and the general vibe, but often wrong when he starts talking about he details.
The main issues are, in general: 1) increased regulation, which includes internal self-regulation. Lots of rules that are preventing potential minor problems, but have a lot of overhead to follow. 2) large projects are treated like a Christmas Tree. Everybody expects their vaguely adjacent hobby horse to be addressed by the project… so scope keeps growing. There is ALWAYS something you can point to that has a good cost/benefit; and always addressing these ensures that the project never actually finishes. 3) lack of decision making. There is a general analysis paralysis and fear of making the wrong call. It’s often cheaper to just move ahead and risk rework. By not moving ahead, change orders are being incurred anyway.
As much as a hate saying it, the best thing for any large project in these orgs is being run by a semi-dictator who has enough political capital internal to the org, and who strongly objects to anything outside of scope.
bichiliad
I was really sad that we lost Andy Byford. As far as benevolent transit dictators go, I can’t imagine doing much better.
aaronbrethorst
I was really disappointed when David Roberts stopped writing due to persistent hand pain, but the podcast series he's turned Volts into as a result has been eye opening for me. I haven't listened to this episode yet. thanks for highlighting it!
AceJohnny2
> It's just so sad having a nation where disbelief & being against things is so the spirit.
Yeah, being French sucks.
... what?
wwweston
The “it is not immediately clear” part should be taken to heart a lot more than it is. Right now I’d bet you could elect Ezra Klein president and he would be as unable to improve things as most, and he probably has a somewhat clearer picture of the factors than your average internet commentator.
Railing against optimizing for caution in a vague sense really isn’t articulating specific dynamics however well it leans into the shallow strawmanification of “regulation” that doesn’t merely dominate lay discourse but has essentially ascended into conceptual godhood without having paid real dues in sacrifice or insight.
There is no respectable theory of why that has even begun to grasp the problem.
km144
Theories are hard because the world is complex. I guess that sounds trivial but it really should be said more often. There is no silver bullet with these things, because the systems are so complicated that it is hard to reason about how one thing is the true root cause without implicating another cause. That's also why economics is so difficult I suppose.
aaronbrethorst
I recommend checking out the Vital City NYC link i shared. It articulates some of the “specific dynamics” you’re thoughtfully, if turgidly requesting.
wwweston
no more turgid than the much of the boner for building boosterism, just more notes, which may not be a bad thing if some of the scope of consideration could stand to be inflated.
before I check vital city, should I anticipate that they go beyond articulating “here’s a series of public institutions that took a long time to do things“ and perhaps even into “here’s our theory of the incentives and other motivations that underlie the sociology of this behavior”? or mostly the former?
twojacobtwo
Thank you for using "turgidly" as such. You've given me a new appreciation for the term.
alnwlsn
A friend of mine once wrote a dictionary[1]. It has all the (normal) one syllable words in English, defined using only other one syllable words. He decided to work on it by focusing on one letter per year, so A was in 1991, B was 1992, and the book was finished in 2017, 26 years later.
It's not even a very long book - only a few hundred pages - but I'm sure if I tried to do the same thing all at once, I'd probably have lost interest around B or C, so I suppose it was a worthwhile strategy.
[1] It's not online anywhere as far as I know, sorry.
hidroto
that seems to be in the same vain as this presentation by guy steele https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 .
autoexec
I question how well many of the words that come to mind could be defined using only other one syllable words, but it sounds like a fun project.
alnwlsn
Most of them aren't defined as rigorously as a dictionary would do, it's more like trying to come up with a plausible description for each word.
"day" might be "time in which the sun goes round the earth" even though that's not technically correct.
"sit" could be "to take a chair" and "sat" might be "to have took a chair"
"moth" is "a bug that flies and likes to eat cloth", and so on.
mateo411
I bet your friend is good at Scrabble.
thom
Hopefully their interest expands beyond single syllable words, otherwise the highest scores according to a cursory search are 'zizzed' (34) and 'jazzed' (32) which are probably slightly below the average for an elite player.
yunwal
Zizzed and jazzed if spelled in scrabble would be worth less than 32, since only one of the zs would be worth 10 points, the rest being blank tiles which are worth zero.
Of course most good players will create more than 1 word per turn, and will lay down over multiplier tiles.
You can probably do fairly well with just single syllable words, although at a certain level not being able to get a lay down bonus will prevent you from winning.
saltcured
yeah, "quizzed" (35) is the highest I found
rangestransform
The SAS is a joke, putting its name on the same list as actually impressive feats like the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem insults everything else on the list. It's the most expensive subway line worldwide per mile, ever, despite the existence of technology that made tunnelling easier. Inflation adjusted, it costs more per mile than hand-digging one of the PATH tubes with 1900s technology [1]. Its cost and duration are almost entirely due to politics and not technical and logistical challenges, including the MTA political fiefdom fighting the Park Board political fiefdom, make-work-program labour spending, staff paid to have their thumbs up their asses in the tunnels [2], deep-bore tunneling instead of cut-and-cover to avoid political fighting, and MTA departments wanting their miniature fiefdom dug into the ground at each station [3]. The SAS is a project that should bring great shame to everyone in charge and everyone who stood around in the tunnels getting paid to do nothing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptown_Hudson_Tubes (tunnel happens to be about a mile and it cost 21 million 1905 dollars)
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
[3] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/12/09/the-mta-sticks...
bee_rider
I dunno. I think we should separate out the stuff that fundamentally has to take a long time, like the pitch experiment, from stuff like Notre Dame, which just took a long time because they lacked the resources to do it all at once. Like OK, it takes a long time to build a big church because you need to find all the right rocks or whatever. But the pitch, that’s the universe taking a long time to tell us something.
(I’m being flip for comedy/emphasis sake, of course Notre Dame is pretty impressive too).
tgv
When they started building cathedrals they knew they weren't going to see it finished. They did it anyway. That's the point.
pavel_lishin
As I recall, Gaudi wasn't even finished with the design when the construction started. He kept working at it until his death.
heikkilevanto
When people complained about the time scale, Gaudi famously replied that his client was in no hurry.
WJW
I think it is part of the point for a cathedral to take several generations. If you can point to a building and say "that took 5 years to build and I was there for all of it!", then that's great, but the building is in some way "smaller" than you. If you can point to a partially constructed building and say "my grandfather worked on it, my father worked on it, I'm working on it and my children will work on it too", that's a building that is "larger" than any one person.
Taking a century or more to construct anything makes that thing larger than life. There's a certain sublime quality in such efforts, whether they're explicitly dedicated to a god/pantheon but also if they are "just" earthly like the White House (technically took 178 years to construct from start to finish).
8n4vidtmkvmk
There's certainly something interesting about taking multiple generations, but it also feels kinda wrong to attribute greater meaning to something because you dragged it out or intentionally scoped the project too big.
Maybe if the project served a greater purpose and couldn't possibly be built in a shorter time, then it would mean more. But a cathedral? What's wrong with a modest church or two?
WJW
Sure, the same amount of stone could be used to construct several smaller churches. The US congress could also just rent a conference room at a nearby hotel if they chose. The Eiffel tower could supply iron for several kilometres of rail track, or maybe a small boat.
But building something extravagantly big has a signaling value all of its own: "see the glory of <whatever it is we constructed this for> and how much resources they command". You don't build a cathedral because it's more practical than a normal church for holding services and stuff, you build a cathedral to express the power of your religion and impress it on others.
peterkos
I'm imagining a spectrum between "has to be slow" and "needlessly slow", with a middle slider for that one razor where things take as much time as you give them.
Intentionality is a big theme in math research (so i've heard), where solving "useful" problems isn't the ideal goal. The goal is to solve interesting problems, which might seem useless, but along the way achieve results with much wider implications that would have been impossible to discover directly. Or, how inventions like toothpaste came from space travel research.
(rhetorically) Does an indirect result "justify" a longer, slower project? Is speed an inherent property of the problem, or is it only knowable once it's complete? Or both, in the cases of misused funds?
aaron695
[dead]
Bukhmanizer
This reminded me of an old comic or meme about people’s expectations about science that went like:
Protester: What do we want??
Crowd: High quality, double blinded, N of 100000, 20 year longitudinal, preregistered studies!!
Protester: When do we want it??
Crowd: Now!!!
dang
Related by content (OP says "This page is a riff on Patrick Collison's list of /fast projects"):
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36605912 - July 2023 (298 comments)
Fast (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279 - March 2022 (97 comments)
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 - Dec 2019 (291 comments)
Fast · Patrick Collison - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355237 - Oct 2019 (5 comments)
--
Also related, if only by title, this from yesterday:
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 - July 2025 (418 comments)
m463
I think of The Art of Computer Programming...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programmin...
blahedo
Definitely belongs on the list; notable not just because it's a slow/long project spanning 60 years and counting, but because part of it included the side trip to write TeX and METAFONT in order to be able to write and typeset the rest of TAOCP properly.
saagarjha
Kind of amusing to have this at the top of the front page considering “Fast” was there yesterday
frutiger
I imagine the two events are correlated.
drivers99
Just to add to that, it does link to
https://patrickcollison.com/fast (which has 300 comments from 2019 on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 )
which is different than yesterday's link to https://www.catherinejue.com/fast (426 comments as of now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 )
temp0826
Pretty bad title that should've been editorialized imo...kind of clickbait
fuzztester
Next?
Medium.
Posted on Medium, ofc.
WJW
You know why they call it Medium, of course? Because it's definitely not Rare and usually also not Well Done.
rglover
Kudos to the OP for writing this.
That PC post always irked me. Not because it showed positive examples of going fast but because it felt slightly demeaning to teams/projects that move slowly on purpose, with intent.
MontyCarloHall
I disagree. The PC post never demeans projects that purposefully move slowly with intent, but rather criticizes boondoggles that move slowly due to utter incompetence. The only pejorative text in the PC post is this:
>San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022, yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost $346 million, i.e. $110,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.
cma
At least 30 deaths in the construction of the Alaska highway and obviously much lower eminent domain costs for remote tundra vs downtown SF after the second tech boom.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/alaska-...
I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like:
The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the staff begin to look at major renovations to the building's architecture.
Until the Oxford groundskeeper heard about the problem. "We have a replacement beam," he said.
The groundskeeper took the curious admins to the edge of the grounds. There stood two old growth trees, over 150 feet tall.
"But these must be over 200 years old! When were they planted?" the admins asked.
"The day they replaced the previous beam."