Pocket reading list : Week 1.2 of Mar

The Strangest, Most Spectacular Bridge Collapse (And How We Got It Wrong) : Most of us in college have heard of this story at some point or another, that winds were moving a bridge up and down at the resonant frequency of the structure and it oscillated so drastically that it broke apart. The bridge was nicknamed 'The Galloping Gertie' because it had moved about in strong winds before. Anyway, most of us were told that the reason the bridge fell apart was because of resonance, which, as this article points out, isnt the right answer.

Stumbling to Inflation : The theory of inflation was proposed to solve some of the drawbacks of the Hot Big Bang model of the universe. You know, The Big Bang theory. Alan Guth proposed a theory of Inflation and this is the story of how the idea came about to him.

The Big Fish - The story of suck.com : suck.com is a very real magazine/website, made by two people at HotWired.com to tell the management how the internet works and how they shouldn't think in terms of traditional print based magazines. They said no to sign-up/in only content because data had shown them that a lot of traffic drops off at the sign-up page. They also pioneered the single column tabloid view that is now common on the internet. Learning about the history of the internet is fascinating.

The real reason the media is rising up against Donald Trump : I remember reading a Pew Research Center study on how polarized the American audience is and what the polarizing news channels are. This is an interesting take on how Donald Trump is screwing with the way things were run by the news channels.

The Artist Who Obsessed the FBI : Artists can have just as much of an effect as writers do. Photographers have brought the truth into the light during war times. This is a similar story of an artist who pursued the truth to make into an art piece, eventually to kill himself, apparently.

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