Building Blocks facts
While investigating facts about Building Blocks, I found out little known, but curios details like:
In 1921 a group of workers in a fertilizer factory stuck dynamite in a 4.5k lbs block of hardened ammonium nitrate to loosen it up. The resulting explosion killed 500 people, destroyed 80% of the surrounding homes and ripped the roofs off of buildings 15 miles away.
The Minneapolis Skyway System, a system of footbridges that connects shops, restaurants, and residential buildings over an area of 80 full city blocks. It allows residents to live, work, and shop without ever leaving the Skyway system.
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across. Here are 50 of the best facts about Building Blocks I managed to collect.
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There is a machine that transforms concrete rubble into Lego like building blocks. The blocks allow victims of war or natural disasters to construct their own new, earthquake resistant houses.
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The Pyramids were ordered to be disassembled and their blocks used to build dams on the Nile. The chief architect personally opposed, but knew he'd be replaced if he defied orders. So he prepared a false cost analysis showing that freshly quarried stone would cost less: thus saving the Pyramids.
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In 2014 the Danish government recreated their entire country in Minecraft. It took 4 trillion blocks to build. However, it was discovered that you could use TNT Minecarts on the server. Almost immediatly people started blowing up towns, and planting american flags and tanks over the ruins.
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When an architecture student alerted engineers that an NYC skyscraper might collapse in an upcoming storm (Hurricane Ella), the city kept it secret then reinforced the building overnight (while police developed a ten-block evacuation plan).
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Terrence Howard thinks 1x1=2. He has detailed a system called "Terryology" that he believes is "true universal math". For a time he also devoted up to 17 hours a day to cutting up wires and plastic to form building-block-like contraptions he believes will bring truth to the universe.
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About the Tetris effect, in which people who play Tetris for extended periods of time start seeing falling tetris blocks in their sleep as well as regularly identifying tetromino shapes in their everyday life, such as the layout of boxes on supermarket shelves or patterns on certain buildings.
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Astronomers detected building blocks of life in a planetary system some 455 light-years away
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The trap or 'bend' in pipes is used to block off hazardous gasses from entering buildings.
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There are large buildings all over LA that hide oil rigs from the general public, some disguised as office blocks. The city sits on a massive oil reserve.
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In 1978 an undergrad student notified the chief structural engineer of Citicorp Center in Manhattan that the building would collapse in strong winds. Realizing the student was correct, the chief contacted NYPD and had a 10-block emergency plan drawn up while they quickly fixed the building.
What is true about building blocks?
You can easily fact check it by examining the linked well-known sources.
11 years after 9/11, a piece of one of the plane's landing gear was found wedged in between two buildings three blocks away.
Someone built a working 16-bit computer using nothing but the basic Minecraft building blocks - source
Little Caesars' founder Mike Illitch's family received $340 million in taxpayer dollars from the City of Detroit to redevelop a 50-block neighborhood, but instead broke their promises, built 29 surface parking lots, and demolished or abandoned 27 historic buildings.
Japan addresses don't have street names. Addresses are from largest to smallest units = Prefecture(city) - ward - district - block - building number. - source
The reason many windows are blocked or bricked-up on older buildings in England is because there used to be a tax on windows.
About a building called Al Ba'sa (The Grudge), which is the thinnest building in Lebanon (it's 1m thick at its thinnest part). It was built by a guy wanted to block his brother's view of the sea.
Developers offered an elderly woman named Edith Macefield $750,000 dollars for her small house, which was appraised at around $120,000. They wanted to build a shopping mall on the block where Macefield had lived for the last 50 years.
In 1953 Stanley Miller demonstrated the building blocks of life could be synthesized spontaneously from the interaction of the early Earth atmosphere and an electrical charge.
In 1977, the CitiCorp building in New York was discovered to be at serious risk of toppling over and crushing several city blocks. The repairs were made in secret and the public weren't informed until 1995.
Cyanide mixed with copper when irradiated with UV light, could have produced simple sugars that formed the building blocks of life on early earth.
