13 ms·
Is the world really running out of sand?
- nancyestelle54 2y ago[dead]
- crmrc114 2y agoBonus points for articles that start with a tldr and don't try to bury the lead
- anamexis 2y agoFYI it's "bury the lede," a lede being the introductory section of a news story.
- sharkjacobs 2y agoI 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
- jzb 2y agoIt'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.
- Maxatar 2y agoYou can prefer one spelling over another, absolutely, but it's a bit too strong to say someone using the actual word "lead" is incorrect.
- jzb 2y agoOh, I wouldn't correct someone for saying "lead" -- or "intro" or any other variant that makes sense. Leed is right out, though.
- keybored 2y agoIf the choice is betwixt overloading a morpheme and having two distinct I shall take the latter.
- jameshart 2y agoRight. Saying people outside the industry should feel free to use ‘lead’ instead of ‘lede’ is like saying people outside the tech business should feel free to talk about ‘kilobites’.
- ziddoap 2y ago>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?
- Maxatar 2y agoThe 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+lead%22&pgis=1&redir_esc=y#search_anchor https://books.google.ca/books?id=3IxbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22bury+the+...
- tedden 2y ago[dead]
- havblue 2y agoMeanwhile, the group "Led Zeppelin" also avoided the ambiguous spelling to prevent people from pronouncing their name "leed zeppelin". You can't win with lead.
- btown 2y agoHuh, didn't know that! Via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Led_Zeppelin#Formation:_1966%E2%80%931968 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! And one could be forgiven for thinking that a formation of flying things would necessarily have one member in the lead position. I'm glad they had the foresight to keep us from being led astray!
- samatman 2y ago
- lmm 2y agoThat's a pretentious, anachronistic affectation - the phrase predates the use of "lede".
- colechristensen 2y agoThe 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.
- roca 2y agoI 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".
- colechristensen 2y agoI was talking to a journalist who worked for a major venue and the metric she cared about was number of seconds a user stayed on an article. She didn't say "this is the most important..." she just talked about it for 20 minutes and the different results from different demographics and link sources so it was quite obvious. So that's what journalists are measured by these days apparently, how long a piece can keep the attention of a user. Ironically she worked for what I would consider one of the best players in terms of not writing attention grabbing BS. (I won't mention which here)
- SoftTalker 2y agoThat'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.
- bregma 2y agoHoly 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.
- jzb 2y agoNote 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. :)
- 0xffff2 2y agoReally 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.
- eichin 2y agoIronically, we just hit an entirely different "sand catastrophe" - https://mastodon.social/@mimsical/113232531800424706 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]
- voxadam 2y agoEssential node in global semiconductor supply chain hit by Hurricane Helene | 196 points | 50 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701862
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- diggan 2y ago> 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?
- esmIII 2y agoCould 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.
- cyanydeez 2y agoAlmost 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.
- throw0101b 2y agoThe 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-grain https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36950075-the-world-in-a-...
- WillAdams 2y agoAnother 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 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
- lazide 2y agoLithium seems like a weird one to add to that list. It definitely hasn’t been important for thousands of years. Potassium or Nitrates are a more likely addition.
- WillAdams 2y agoExcellent point. I suspect it's more a nod to its recent importance --- bought the book for my ebook reader when it was on sale, but it hasn't gotten to the top of the to be read stack yet --- should probably accelerate that.
- criddell 2y agoThis issue has been discussed here in the past. One example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21869624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21869624
- Havoc 2y agoI 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
- db48x 2y agoYou didn’t watch the video.
- breakingrules3 2y agothe world is running out of sand if some crooked politician and his cronies can profit off of it. notice the pattern.
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoThe 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.
- bee_rider 2y agoIt 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!
- backtoyoujim 2y agodale gribble was the forerunner
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoyou're forgetting how much damage it'd do in the charging port!
- telotortium 2y agoThat would probably cause the sand to become smoother.
- mschuster91 2y ago> 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.
- rootusrootus 2y agoEvery 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.
- xnx 2y ago> Gets right to the point in the first sentence, Huge respect or the "tldr: no" right at the start.
- stouset 2y agoI 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!
- airstrike 2y agoI don't even care about sand but he's so great I couldn't stop watching it
- jayrot 2y agoThat'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.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 2y agoI 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.
- jabroni_salad 2y ago
- sideway 2y agoIf 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.
- iamacyborg 2y agoAgreed, I read it earlier in the year and found it enlightening.
- justinator 2y agoWe're running out of most everything, in a very The Limits to Growth/World3 kinda of way.
- WillAdams 2y agoIsaac 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/ 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.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago> 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.
- philipkglass 2y agoIndeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_northwest_cod_fishery#Mismanagement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
- citizenpaul 2y ago>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.
- caust1c 2y agoGrady 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.
- FredPret 2y ago100% - he calmly explains various approaches and their tradeoffs. He’s not exactly a traditional journalist, but this is what I want the future of journalism to be like. People with subject matter expertise explaining their thing simply and clearly.
- cochne 2y ago>It gives me hope that teenagers are watching his videos and becoming inspired to go into infrastructure. Sadly, that was me ~10 years ago, but the lure of FAANG money was too strong and I went into EE/CS after 1 year as a civil engineering major. I wonder if one day we will really start feeling the affects of this talent reallocation, and civil engineering will become a higher paying profession.
- rpigab 2y ago> 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.
- ses1984 2y agoIf you add a single grain of sand to a tonne of snow, it’s not 85% sand.
- hinkley 2y agoSeems somebody slept through Intro to Logic.
- fwip 2y agoHow does that one grain become 85% of a tonne?
- pinkmuffinere 2y agoI don’t understand how you got that conclusion — 1 grain of sand is not 85% of the [ton of snow + 1 grain sand]
- sakras 2y agoI 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.
- timando 2y agoYou don't need to construct sand by induction. Just notice that snow has the right particle size to be considered sand.
- itsdrewmiller 2y agoBetteridge's law never fails! (At least in this case the author immediately answers the question.)
- manav 2y agoDon't we have to move to GaN anyway?
- pikminguy 2y agoIf you think sand usage is primarily silicon power electronics you're missing a lot.
- tminima 2y agoI 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.)
- ars 2y agoExploding 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.
- kamray23 2y agoPutting stress on the concrete requires force, and causes the concrete to deflect. Force over displacement is work, and energy can't be lost to nothingness by just breaking the concrete. Thus, the concrete releases the stored up energy as kinetic energy of its fragments. Stronger concrete requires more stress to cause it to fail, and as such it takes more force to break it. There is logically more energy because of the higher force, so more energy gets released.
- luxuryballs 2y agoI just got back from the beach and my car is full of it if anyone needs some.
- jiveturkey 2y agoI recently bought his book. It's as great as you'd expect it to be.
- neeleshs 2y agoLearned so much about sand in 20 minutes! He mentions nebula.tv at the end. Does anyone have feedback on the content over there?
- phyzome 2y agoYeah, I subscribe to Nebula -- and he's actually the reason I did. They have a decent size catalog although my interests are narrow enough that I only actually follow a couple of channels there. But that's certainly been worth the price.
- neeleshs 2y agoThank you.
- NoahKAndrews 2y agoNebula is fantastic
- mcculley 2y agoOne 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.
- lb1lf 2y agoIndeed! Then there is all kinds of specialty sands - say, when replacing the sand in our local athletics union long jump pits, I learned that one should use sand from river beds (as opposed to sand crushed at a plant) as the river sand is much less likely to cause abrasions, seeing as all the sharp edges have been worn away as the sand has been shifted back and forth by the river current... Sand is not just sand.
- larsrc 2y agoWe 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.
- epistasis 2y agoIt'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.
- outlog 2y agobetter make it a sand battery: https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/03/10/sand-batteries-could-be-key-breakthrough-in-storing-solar-and-wind-energy-year-round https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/03/10/sand-batteries-cou...
- Someone 2y agoFree power doesn’t mean free production. There’s also labor, wear on the machines and the lost opportunity of using your money to do something else. Building such crushing machines and only use them x% of the time (for, for now, fairly small values of x) may not be a good investment.
- westurner 2y agoSo, energy storage should be lucrative and incentivized for us to solve the Duck Curve, and Alligator Curve, and overcharging the grid forces the price to zero or unlucratively below problems. For firms with depreciating datacenter assets that are underutilized, a Research Coin like Grid Coin or an @home distributed computation project can offset costs Datacenters scrap old compute - that there's hardly electronics recycling for - rather than keep it online due to relative cost in FLOPS/kWhr and the cost of conditioned space. Doesn't electronics recycling recover the silica? Can we make CPUs out of graphene made out of recycled plastic? Can we make superconductive carbon computers that waste less electricity as heat? Hopefully, Proof of Work miners that aren't operating on grants have an incentive to maximize energy efficiency with graphene ASICs and FPGAs and now TPUs
- hermitcrab 2y agoI 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.
- chris_wot 2y agoSo… 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?
- JoeAltmaier 2y agoThe whole idea of making your own sand is not sound. It will cost more, perhaps many times more. Seems clear when you think about it: hard to beat the cost of 'natural' sand because you just drive over and load it up. Add any more to that process, it's gonna go up in price. Including crushing rock etc - energy-intensive, then sieving. All add cost over and above, well, just hauling. And vague comments about 'couldn't find the science behind river sand being less useful' (because it's rounded not jagged). That's no kind of science. This guy is lauded but I"m not so sure he's someone to listen to. "I hit some rocks in my garage and made my own sand!" isn't any kind of interesting. At what cost? At what scale? It's all about money, baby. Anything that doesn't add up cost is just storytelling.
- emilecantin 2y agoHaven't read the article, but I watched the video. He goes on to say that it's not the full story, and he also does some tests where instead of optimizing for a particular water ratio in the mix, he optimizes for a specific texture when mixed, which is termed "workability". If you keep "workability" constant, you can put much less water in the mix, resulting in a stronger concrete when cured.
- ChuckMcM 2y agoDid you watch the entire video? I ask because Grady discusses EXACTLY this point. He explains that the whole 'more expensive' thing is really just noting the actual cost of sand versus ignoring the externalized costs of mining it. When you dig up a river bed there is a cost there that isn't necessarily reflected in the cost of the sand you mined from there, sometimes because that cost is passed on to someone else who has to remediate the site after you mined it (like taxpayers). He empirically points out that different sands need a different water/cement ratio and also points out that the papers on sand use in concrete understand that. The 'bug' seems to be that people just add 'x' water to the mix and if the sand changes they might get different results.
- JoeAltmaier 2y agoSand is often a byproduct of other operations. So the cost is complex, to be sure. I was annoyed that he dropped the idea that smooth sand is not necessarily worse, because he couldn't find the paper on that. Not much of an argument. Then he proceeded to make sand, and came out with what, 50%? stronger cement. Because, of course, it was new sand. All sand is made by cracking larger stones. The moment it is made, it is as rough as it will ever be. All subsequent natural processes are smoothing, rounding, knocking the rough off the sand. His garage experiment supported exactly that point: 'old' weather-and-water smoothed sand is an inferior product as far as the resulting cement strength is concerned. When compared to virgin sand. And yes, cracking your own sand is always going to be more expensive than just driving to where good sand is already lying and loading it up. The mining argument is subject to economies of scale, larger diggers and dredges make the cost of mining per pound negligible. Where the energy cost of cracking your own totally doesn't scale. Every pound you make requires exactly the same exhorbitant energy cost, no matter a pound or a million pounds. Definitely the cost structure of sand is changing, in future it will only be more expensive. The days of 'big cement' are changing forever. We may never see these days again.
- lofaszvanitt 2y agoJust like the US debt is about to collapse on pepl and kill the economy, but ... ... it never happens.
- FredPret 2y agoPublic debt is more like a brake that gets worse and worse really slowly over time. And then it suddenly explodes - more and more of the budget goes to interest payments instead of procurement. At one point the government has to borrow to make payments on the debt, and then you’ve got a very bad spiral.
- pfdietz 2y agoBecause the debt is in US dollars, the government will inflate away the debt. So the end game is dollar devaluation, followed by enforced budget discipline because lenders will no longer accept treasury bills.
- topspin 2y agoThe US has had a long way to fall. In a wealthy economy can suffer a great deal of public finance abuse: there are many wells that need to be dried up. The progression of the US toward that goal includes, most recently: progressively shifting to ever shorter term notes to finance deficits and large scale monetizing of deficits, such as during the Great Recession and COVID. We'll get there. You'll know it's over when you get "bailed in" and the treasury starting minting trillion dollar coins.
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoSo I'm confused. How are we to differentiate sand for semiconductor from sand for fiber optics? Or say sand for windows?
- throwup238 2y agoThe sand is first screened to separate out larger objects, then washed to eliminate clay/silt/fine particles. Then it goes through a couple more steps to separate out quartz, magnetic minerals, etc before finally batches are tested for silicon dioxide content and impurities using xray fluoroscopy and other spectroscopy methods. The purer a batch is, the higher end the customer. Most localities can’t produce sand good enough for semiconductors or optics because they contain impurities that are too hard to remove so most of it is used for concrete or glass.
- undebuggable 2y agoDidn't know artisanal sand is a thing.
- m463 2y agoReminds me of the Onion: https://theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running-out-of-rocks-1819571484/ https://theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running-out...
- sundarurfriend 2y ago> I tried to track down the original source of this idea ... Beiser cites an article from the UN, which itself cites a 2006 paper about using two types of desert sand from China in concrete. But that paper doesn’t mention the roundness of the particles at all. This seems to be a fairly common pattern where a citable source (Beiser's book and the UN article) makes a mistake, that then propagates everywhere as common knowledge even though it's incorrect. There are many well-researched blog articles like this out there, where the author has dug deep, done the hard research, and found mistakes at many levels, but because it's not in what academia or Wikipedia considers a "citable" source, the mistaken assertion continues to be propagated. Until someone manages to present it in an academically acceptable format, if that happens at all. Solving the "what should be a citable source" problem is complicated, but in the interim, I hope we can at least find a way to transfer these well-researched findings and corrections from non-academic sources to citable forms regularly and easily.
- tourmalinetaco 2y agoThe problem is that what defines a “citable source” for Wikipedia is loose at best and malicious at worst. There are many examples where “improper” sources are accepted, especially in social matters, because they benefit a certain viewpoint. STEM is, for the most part, decent, but anything covering the life of people needs to be considered carefully due to the lack of several types of important sources and the biases present on many people’s pages.
- NeoTar 2y agoThe BBC Maths and Statistics programme 'More or Less' has coined a term for statistics like this - 'Zombie Statistics'. An initial, often misquoted fact, which is useful as a soundbite and gets repeated over and over and over again, despite multiple debunkings.
- emeril 2y agogreat new yorker piece on this https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/the-world-is-running-out-of-sand https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/the-world-is-r...
- alex-moon 2y ago"Concrete blows most other materials out of the water." In fact, according to Wikipedia, concrete is the "second-most-used substance in the world after water" - I was on the Concrete Wikipedia article while I read this as I realised it was a thing I have never thought about despite its ubiquity. Amazing how that can happen.
- snypher 2y agoWhat about eg air, wood? Used by mass or volume or?
- smt88 2y agoIt seems likely to me that both concrete and plastic are used in greater mass and greater volume than wood.
- jballanc 2y agoAnd concrete dates back to (at least) Roman times
- orthoxerox 2y agoRoman concrete was a drop in the water compared to the modern era concrete.
- alex-moon 2y agoYes sorry I didn't cite my source - it is per weight: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1350630714000387?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13506... Per tonne, twice as much concrete is used per year than all other building materials (including wood, plastic, metal) combined.
- uberduper 2y agoFrackers bought the Kermit Sand Dunes in Texas 7 or 8 years ago cause the sand there was ideal for fracking.
- gorfian_robot 2y agothere are lots of types of sand for specific purposes just like say different kinds of wood. unfortunately while we can essentially 'farm' certain kinds of wood that really isn't possible for sand.
- krisoft 2y ago> unfortunately while we can essentially 'farm' certain kinds of wood that really isn't possible for sand. The linked article demonstrates this to be false.
- mugivarra69 2y agono
- dyauspitr 2y agoI didn’t exactly understand the take away from this video. In the first test he does, the river sand concrete is three times stronger than the desert sand concrete, but in the second test, the desert sand concrete is 10% stronger than the river sand concrete. What exactly is going on?
- NeoTar 2y agoIt's normalising for different things. If you normalise for the the same ratio of cement / water / gravel / sand then sharp-sand (crushed rocks) is stronger. If you normalise for workability (i.e. the concrete flows and can be worked easily) you need to add additional water to sharp-sand, which means that the smooth-sand (e.g. river-rocks) end up stronger.
- dyauspitr 2y agoThat’s what I mean, he doesn’t really test for absolute strength. Which one is stronger if the right amount of water for the corresponding concrete is added?
- kilna 2y agoHe explained it in the video. The amount of water was adjusted so the viscosity (well, workability) was identical between the samples in the second test. Less water in concrete has a huge positive influence on strength, and rough sand needs more water to be workable. Thus, for comparably workable samples, rounded sand concrete with less water was actually stronger.
- dyauspitr 2y agoBut given the right amount of water, which one has the higher absolute strength?
- mrguyorama 2y agoDefine "right" amount of water. There is no singular correct amount of water in a concrete mix. It is dependent on the properties you want, the materials you have available, how things are going that day, etc.
- wiz21c 2y agoFTA > And we have engineered machines that can transform big rocks into small ones. OK, so you solve a problem of decreasing resources by using additional energy, so more CO2 emissions...
- ianburrell 2y agoFunny thing is that crushing rocks could be solution to CO2. Olivine rock chemically fabsorbs CO2 when dumped in seawater. Crushing the rock increases the surface area. Mining, crushing, and dumping rock are all something that we can do, and should be doable when electricity is cheap and green. It should be more efficient than pulling CO2 out of the air.
- rldjbpin 2y agotl;dw/dr - no, but not all sand are made equal, nor costs the same to procure.
- creativenolo 2y agoThe transcript is a pleasure to read. A familiar style to hear but not read. I can’t think of reading something written in the style of a YouTuber before but it is a animated read.