Status Updates From Humble Pi: When Math Goes W...

“I have a poster in my office claiming that ‘education works best when all the parts are working.’ It shows three cogs labelled ‘teachers’, ‘students’, and ‘parents’, all linked together. This poster is ‘mechanically impossible yet accurate’ because three cogs meshed together cannot move. If you wanted some movement, one of the three needs to be removed. (In my experience: parents.)

"The curved glass front of the hotel focused sunlight and burned the skin of hotel guests lounging by the pool.
Can we reasonably expect the architect of 20 Fenchurch Street to have known about a hotel out in Las Vegas? Well, the Vdara Hotel was also designed by Rafael Viñoly, so we could probably expect some information flow between the two projects." (280)

"There was an easy enough fix, though: a sunshade was attached to the building to block the sun's rays before they could focus on anyone else's lemon. And it's not as if this freak alignment of reflective surfaces could have been predicted in advance. It had never happened to a building before. At least, not since the same thing happened at the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas in 2010." (280)