Tom Scott
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2018–2026
4:34 · 10M views · Dec 1, 2016
Tom Scott tells how John Reber's plan to dam San Francisco Bay was disproved by the Army Corps of Engineers' giant hydraulic Bay Model in Sausalito. The model showed the plan would have been dangerously wrong.
HN recommends it as a short, fascinating story of a scale model preventing a terrible engineering decision.
6 comments from Hacker News
I don't think we can change the fact that people generally listen to what actors (and other charismatic people) have to say. This is nothing new. For a local example, San Francisco's John Reber, and the plan he pushed to turn the Bay into a freshwater lake ( this video is a good video to watch). For a state (California) example, there's Arnold Schwarzenegger. For a national (US-level) example, there's Ronald Reagan. For what it's worth, Harrison Ford seems to be a stand-up guy. For example, his reaction when he accidentally landed his private plane on an airport taxiway: [LINK] So, rather than saying "Stop listening to <insert charismatic group here>", it's better to engage with and educate them.
Yeaaaah, like that wouldn't have any unintended consequences. Meanwhile, I find this more interesting: [LINK] The Army Corps of Engineers literally built a scale model of the San Francisco Bay Area, and they used it to figure out that damming the SF Bay was a very, very bad idea: this video
Tom Scott has a great video[0] about a similar attempt to dam the San Francisco Bay that got a lot closer to actually happening. So see if it was practical, the US Army Corps of Engineering built a giant scale model of the SF bay and put a dam on it to see what would happen. [0]: this video
> It’s reminiscent of the plan suggested by a school teacher, to dam the San Francisco Bay, which was taken seriously enough to be modeled to scale by the military. For those unaware, I learned of this plan via this short Tom Scott video. Fascinating. this video (4:33)
If you don't know Tom Scott, he has done a great video 4mn vide on the model where you can see it in action: this video