Tube Challenge
I always dreamed of doing this when I was a lonely and boring teenager. All the tube stations in one day. Thanks to Mary for sending me this link from Jon’s blog. I will add this to the reasons to move back to London list, a list that I hope will soften the blow of leaving Paris in the autumn.

Project update
This is just the briefest of project updates. Things have been super busy recently in the office. Most of last week was spent researching how different types of floor structure vibrate when people walk across them. Unfortunately, the classical mechanical methods that we have been taught are not very useful for the design of office buildings as the calculations quickly become unwieldy and unreliable. Instead, the literature in this area gives empirically derived formulas for checking for excessive vibrations. The problem with these quite specific methods is that it is difficult to see how applicable they are across the board to other types of flooring. In the next few days I will be talking to the manufacturers of various different flooring systems to find out which is best suited to the building that I am working on. They will provide their own methods for checking for vibrations, but it would be nice if I didn’t have to rely on them to provide the method with which I will be testing their theory!

I have also been a little more involved with preparing material for meetings with the architects for whom, being American, it is useful to prepare stuff in English. All of a sudden, from languishing on the sidelines, I have been thrust into the middle of it all. That’s fine with me!