Pod Insights Something You Should Know Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving About this episode People prefer to pay for things with plastic more than cash today. While it is convenient, it creates a problem that is likely costing you quite a bit of money. This episode begins by explaining the problem and how to solve it. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/people-twice-likely-spend-using-card-than-cash/
So many English words are pronounced nothing like they are spelled. Cough, salmon, laugh, doubt, and calf are just a few examples and I am sure you can come up with more. Why is this? Why can’t the spelling of words match the pronunciation? Well, that’s an interesting question with multiple answers. It’s not that people haven’t tried to fix this problem. Joining me to explain why English spelling is so bizarre is Gabe Henry who is author of the book, Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell (https://amzn.to/3GP36VT)
It’s mind boggling to think about the infrastructure of a city - all the systems that must work for that city to function. There is water, waste, electricity, transportation, communications and more. How does it all work? Here with some insight is Sybil Derrible, a professor of urban engineering and director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is author of the book, The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives (https://amzn.to/3Fb6utx).
There is a stigma about doing things alone. Many of us would feel uncomfortable going to a restaurant or the movies by ourselves. While the thought of it might feel odd, it could actually be quite pleasurable – at least that is what some interesting research says. Listen as I explain https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-unexpected-pleasure-of-doing-things-alone/392486/
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:27 Mike Carruthers? Today on Something You Should Know, the problem with paying for everything with plastic, not cash. Then, weird ways many English words are spelled, nothing like they sound. Why hasn't anyone fixed that?
1:42 Speaker 01 There were early efforts. People were proposing spelling words like laugh, L-A-F, tho, T-H-O. The story of simplified spelling, the story of spelling reform is really a history of failure.
1:55 Mike Carruthers? Also, why doing fun things alone may be more fun than you think. And, infrastructure. All the systems that make a city or town work.
2:07 Speaker 02 It's fascinating to hear about what's happening in Chicago versus New York versus Shanghai versus Paris, because they will have a different system, partly based on the specificity of the cities themselves, and partly based on when the systems were built, because things evolve.
2:22 Mike Carruthers? All this today on Something You Should Know.
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4:22 Mike Carruthers? I'm gonna guess that you are less likely to use cash to pay for things than you used to. I think that's true for most people. And the problem is that that's having an effect on your bank account. Hi, and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know. We're not yet a cashless society, but we are a lot closer than we used to be. Consumers generally report that they prefer to pay for purchases with plastic rather than cash. And consumers generally concede that they know they're more likely to spend more money when they use plastic or their digital wallet than if they use cash.
5:03 Mike Carruthers? There just seems to be something to the idea that by not using real money to pay for things, you're likely to spend more. Now, let's get a little more granular. You are likely to spend more money with a credit card than a debit card, and you're likely to spend more with a debit card than with cash. So just by using cash instead of plastic, you will spend less. But even that gets more interesting. The next time you need cash, skip the ATM and go to the bank and ask for new $50 bills. Why? Because research says you're more willing to spend older bills than newer ones, and you're much more willing to spend smaller denomination bills than larger ones.
5:48 Mike Carruthers? So skip the plastic, stuff your wallet with new 50 or maybe even $100 bills, and it's almost for sure that you will end up keeping more of your own money. And that is something you should know. If you remember back to your early days in school, you probably recall being stumped by the fact that the way many words in English are spelled makes no sense at all. Why, for example, these three words, rough, tough, and cough? None of these words have an "F" in them, but they are pronounced as if they do. And I'm sure it wouldn't take you long to come up with a bunch of words that are spelled differently than the way they're pronounced.
6:33 Mike Carruthers? Why? Why don't we change the spelling to make it easier for everyone? Well, here to explain these strange oddities of English is Gabe Henry. He's the author of a book called Enough is Enough: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell. Hi Gabe, welcome to Something You Should Know.
6:52 Speaker 01 Hi Mike, happy to be here.
6:54 Mike Carruthers? So first, I'm curious if other languages have this same problem. If they have words that are spelled in nonsensical ways, the way we do in English.
7:04 Speaker 01 English is unique in its spelling inconsistencies. French is a little bit inconsistent. It's probably second to English in terms of its inefficient use of letters. But English really is on its own in terms of the unreliable pronunciations, the unreliable spellings, the sheer number of pronunciations of the letters O-U-G-H, though, tough, cough, bow. We're really alone in that. The reason being is, we, England, was really subject to a lot of invasion over thousands of years. Viking conquests, new settlements, dialects, spellings, pronunciations,
7:48 Speaker 01 and we're just really trying to manage that. And we're really an accidental language that came together from many different regions, many different histories, many different peoples, and trying our best to pretend to be one homogenous language.
8:06 Mike Carruthers? Well, what a mess.
8:07 Speaker 01 It sure is.
8:08 Mike Carruthers? So why didn't someone, many, many years ago, say, "You know what, we need to have a meeting. We need to sit down, look at this language we've got here, and standardize some things so it's not so crazy."
8:23 Speaker 01 There were early efforts. As early as the 12th century, there was one man named Orman. He was a monk. And his problem that he saw in English was the inconsistent ways that we denote long and short vowel sounds. So he came up with a solution of denoting short vowel sounds in which he doubled the consonant that follows it. So you take a word like... Sir, S I R, and he would spell it S I R R. And he tried to get this to be picked up. He wrote a whole book of poetry in this new spelling. Ultimately, it was just too much of a sprawling lengthening of the language and what people
9:08 Speaker 01 really craved was something a little shorter. But his effort was the first to try to bring consistency to it. Then there were efforts in the 1500s, the 1600s, and it was in the 1700s that it really became the domain of America and American intellectuals to try to simplify the language they were speaking.
9:28 Mike Carruthers? And it seems like they failed.
9:30 Speaker 01 They generally failed. The story of simplified spelling, the story of spelling reform is really a history of failure. It's a history. It's a history of futility. It's a history of radical-minded eccentric people, highly committed to one singular idea, and kind of blocking out everything around them, tunnel-visioned on this one thing. So, people were proposing spelling words like laugh, L A F, though, T H O. And these weren't just nobodies. These were people like Noah Webster, who was responsible for Webster's Dictionary.
10:12 Speaker 01 He had radical ideas for simplifying every English word to its most pure phonetic essence. And, yes, generally, I'd say about 99% of these efforts failed.
10:24 Mike Carruthers? Well, you would think if anybody had the chops to, anyone had the right influence to change the language, it would be Noah Webster, since he was the dictionary guy. So if he couldn't do it... So where are we now? I mean, as you say, people have tried throughout history, but are people trying now, or have we pretty much thrown in the towel and we've just said, "This is the way we spell these words"?
10:51 Mike Carruthers? Live with it.
10:52 Speaker 01 There is a version of the simplified spelling movement that still exists. It doesn't have momentum, but there are, there is a community of people that are continuing to try to simplify it.
11:03 Mike Carruthers? Well, like so many things that never get off the ground, there's no money in it, right? There's no, there's no profit motive for changing the language, at least not directly that, that anybody could probably see. And so if there's, if there's no payoff, then there's no payoff.
11:21 Speaker 01 There were profit values, there were profit motives for this, specifically among businessmen in the late 1800s. They viewed simplified spelling as something that would increase productivity and efficiency in their workforce. Let's say you were a, you owned a publishing company, or a newspaper, or even a factory. You would look at simplified spelling and see it as a way to save time, save money, because these words are shorter to write. You would save ink, you would save paper, and all in all, you would be able to accelerate the productivity of your workforce. That drove a lot of these people.
12:04 Speaker 01 Noah Webster made some calculations back in 1789, and he concluded that his version of spelling reform, which was actually kind of more moderate, he calculated that it would save printers about one page out of every 18, which doesn't sound like a lot, but for a 180-page book, that's 10 pages, for a 360-page book, that's 20 pages. And when, this is the kind of marginal profit calculation you're trying to make if you're running a business. So there was money in it, but I think the aesthetics of simplified spelling were always working against it.
12:42 Mike Carruthers? I know one of the things that confounds people who don't have English as their first language are the, some of the weird silent letters we have, like the B in doubt, or the B in debt, or the L in salmon. Do other languages have silent letters like that?
13:03 Speaker 01 There are languages with silent letters. French has silent letters. The problem, or the distinction between those languages and English is that you can learn a set of rules for those languages and the rules apply in most cases. So you can teach a child that in this word, you're going to have a silent letter after your S. In every case, you're going to have this following this. And once you learn these rules, you will know and understand spelling. In English, we don't have a set of rules that apply in every case. We have mnemonics like I before E, except after C, but even that has so many exceptions, it's probably not even worth calling a rule.
13:45 Speaker 01 We depend more on photographic memory of how a word is spelled as opposed to appealing to your, your knowledge of the overall rule system.
13:56 Mike Carruthers? You know what I wonder, and maybe you know the answer to this. If you ask someone who has had to learn English as a second language as an adult
14:07 Mike Carruthers? and also learned another language as an adult, they've learned two additional languages beyond their native language. How does English compare to the other languages? Is English a particularly difficult foreign language to learn? Or are all foreign languages difficult just in their own way?
14:26 Speaker 01 That's a great question. I, I tell you that the people I've spoken to that speak English as a second language, they found it relatively easy to learn the grammar and syntax of spoken English, but very difficult to learn our spelling.
14:41 Mike Carruthers? Well, I think even people, many people who are native English speakers have trouble with spelling. I've always felt I was a pretty good speller, but I know plenty of people who, who grew up having trouble spelling fairly common English words.
14:59 Speaker 01 There's a stigma surrounding poor spelling. So children that are growing up, six, seven years old, if they're told once that they're a bad speller, I think they carry that sense of inferiority into their life. I think it's the first intellectual merit assessment of how their brain works. I think it's the first time that
15:24 Speaker 01 An authority points to you in your life and says, "You're not quite good enough for this thing." And I think that you carry that stigma for a while.
15:32 Mike Carruthers? We're talking about why so many words in our language are spelled in a way that has no resemblance to how they're pronounced. My guest is Gabe Henry. He's author of the book Enough is Enough: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell. If you listen to something you should know regularly, you know we talk about sleep quite a bit here. And one of the things I've learned from those conversations is just how important a good night's sleep is. And I've always been someone who loves his sleep. So I was intrigued when I heard about Beam Dream. It's a delicious nighttime drink formulated to help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed.
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18:54 Mike Carruthers? So Gabe, in one sense, we do have some simplified spelling, at least in terms of the way some products are named. Rice Krispies with a K, or Krispy Kreme, or Kool-Aid, they are spelled differently than the correct way of spelling them, which helps make them stand out. But you could also say they're spelled correctly, in the sense that they're spelled the way they're pronounced.
19:20 Speaker 01 Right. This trend came about in the early 20th century, and it came right after... Theodore Roosevelt stuck his hand into the simplified spelling movement. So in 1906, he came out publicly and as a proponent of simplified spelling. And he made some efforts in his political circles to change the way his Oval Office and the federal government would spell in their correspondences and their communications. And his efforts lasted about three months. He was eventually mocked. And what it did, incidentally, was it raised the profile of simplified spelling. It boosted its visibility in the pop culture.
20:03 Speaker 01 And little by little, simplified spelling began seeping into the pop culture. And this was particularly prominent in advertising. So in the 1920s, you get brands such as Kool-Aid with a K, Kleenex with a K, Krispy Kreme. And there was a name for this trend that was coined by one linguist in the 20s. She called it the craze for K. And she blamed this directly on the simplified spelling movement, which had been pushing words like character with a K and chorus with a K since the days of Noah Webster.
20:39 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, that because when you think about it, there are a lot of those kind of words, products that start with K, much more than, say, N or F.
20:53 Speaker 01 Right. There are reasons that people have proposed for this. One is that K doesn't begin many words naturally in the English language. And often, when it does begin a word, it's silent. So there's a novelty to seeing K begin a hard C word. So it catches your eye a little bit. It draws your attention to that aisle in the supermarket, the snack foods, the Krispy Kremes, the Kit Kat bars. And then there's another possibility, which is that anyone who has dabbled in comedy or humor knows that K is inherently funny sound.
21:35 Speaker 01 It's considered to be, to have some quality about it that is just funny to the ear.
21:41 Mike Carruthers? It would seem to me you could make the case that there is kind of a simplified language movement.
21:48 Mike Carruthers? In the sense that texting tends to get simplified. People use the letter U for the word you. People abbreviate in ways to make it quicker and yet you still know exactly what they mean. And yet if you try to put that in a document, in a letter, in a report, you're chastised for that. But in texting, it's completely acceptable.
22:13 Speaker 01 Well, we are living in the digital world and the digital world moves fast. And generally speaking, the internet breeds shorter and quicker content, shorter and quicker communication, just to meet our pace of life. And historically, a lot of these simplified spellers had the same motive: efficiency, speed, a more direct one-to-one correspondence, more direct one-to-one communication. If you can shorten that time it takes to communicate an idea to someone, that's probably the best, most efficient form to communicate with them.
22:54 Speaker 01 So, a lot of the simplifications we see today in texting and in social media, words like "though" spelled T-H-O, "through" spelled T-H-R-U, these were initially proposed hundreds of years ago. And the irony is that these words never caught on when it was some kind of elite class imposing it upon the population. But when it came from the bottom up, when it came from texters and social media users and people typing it out with their thumbs for an informal conversation, these did start to catch on. So, in a way, the simplified spelling movement has these downstream effects in today's world.
23:38 Speaker 01 But the difference is, no one is trying to turn it into the authoritative way of spelling, the way those reformers tried to do.
23:46 Mike Carruthers? Is the resistance to simplified spelling more of a resistance of, "Oh, it's just too much trouble, it's going to cause trouble, and let's just not bother." Or is the resistance coming from real gatekeepers who want to keep English the way it was written, the way it was intended, the way that they're purists, in other words?
24:08 Speaker 01 Every generation has had these gatekeepers, these language purists. And they tend to see simplified spelling or texting shorthand as some loss of tradition or maybe the downfall of English as we know it. They're the purists that try to hold the language in its place. And then there are the people who look at these changes and they see it as a natural evolution, a kind of reflection of how language tends to bend toward that natural simplification that takes place when you have a more interconnected, fast-paced society. I tend to fall into that latter category.
24:51 Mike Carruthers? Even the purists have to acknowledge that English is always changing. I mean, if you compare English today to English 200 years ago, it's a very different language. So you can try to hold the gate closed, but it's never closed. There's always evolution. But the spelling stuff doesn't seem to be subject. I mean, words come and go, but spelling seems to be pretty constant.
25:19 Speaker 01 It does. And the reason it seems that way to us is because we have authoritative dictionaries. We have Webster's, we have Oxford English Dictionary. But these dictionaries are adding new words all the time, new spellings. OMG and LOL are now in these dictionaries. Other digital additions like Binge Watch and Selfie. And you're right, that we see mostly additions of words and not respellings of words. But I think over time, what these dictionaries are trying to do is reflect language as it exists in its current state.
25:56 Speaker 01 And as long as spelling continues to simplify in our informal communication, I think that these language authorities will try to reflect that. And I think you just have to look at the long arc of it, the long timeline. 200 years from now, I would probably be surprised if we're spelling in the same exact way we're spelling now. I would tend to think that it will become simpler and shorter.
26:24 Mike Carruthers? So there are very distinct differences in the way some words are spelled in American English versus English English. Do we know why that is?
26:37 Speaker 01 These are actually the only remnants of successful spelling reform. These come directly from Noah Webster. So Noah Webster had tried to push these radical, extreme reforms in 1789. And these are words, like I mentioned, laugh, L A F, love, L U V. He even had the word tongue spelled T U N G. And they all failed. He realized that they weren't going to work in a practical way. So 20 years later, as he's putting together his Webster's dictionary, instead of pushing for these extreme reforms, he selectively incorporated some of his earlier simplifications,
27:21 Speaker 01 words like color and honor without the U, or plow and draft spelled without the British G H, which it continues to use today. And once his dictionary became widely used, these spellings gained legitimacy and ultimately shaped American English as we know it today.
27:40 Mike Carruthers? Have there ever been any examples of, that you can think of off the top of your head, of words that the simplified spelling was just so good and so practical that it won or not?
27:56 Speaker 01 The word donut really came about in the early 20th century, 1920s, 1930s, push for simplified spelling in advertising, which was really just a way to catch the eye. And Dunkin' Donuts, one of the first large national chains to use that spelling, D O N U T, rather than the way more complicated, D O U G H N U T, it caught on from there. So that's an example of where advertising... Is influenced by the pop culture and then in turn influences the pop culture.
28:36 Mike Carruthers? There are so many little quirks in English that seemingly make no sense like why so many words that that start with P H are pronounced as as if it were an F like why?
28:49 Speaker 01 I I don't know what to tell you, but if you take a word like physique, which I've always hated. You can clearly see a history in Greek. You can clearly see a history in French. But if you look at it, it's two syllables. It should be a simple word to spell. But if you look at each individual letter, you'll notice each letter makes a different sound than it would typically be expected to make. P, H, even Y is used as the sound of I, S instead of the sound for Z. So it is stupid. It is dumb, I think. And it's not that people are bad at spelling. It's that spelling is bad at spelling.
29:34 Mike Carruthers? Well, I think that's brilliant. It's not that people are bad at spelling. It's spelling that's bad at spelling. And I think that lets a lot of people off the hook. The rules are so crazy that it's understandable why people might be bad at spelling. I've been talking to Gabe Henry, and the name of his book is Enough is Enough: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Gabe, thanks. Thanks for thanks for letting people off the hook.
30:05 Speaker 01 I appreciate it so much. Thank you, Mike.
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33:52 Mike Carruthers? Then there's the electricity and the gas lines and wiring for the internet, and there are so many things that have to work to keep a city working. And the same thing is true for smaller cities and towns on a smaller scale. There are systems that have to work. And here to give a peek into how the infrastructure systems work is Sybil Darabal. He is a professor of urban engineering and director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago. He's author of a book called The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives. Sybil, hi, welcome to Something You Should Know.
34:31 Speaker 02 Thanks a lot for having me, Mike.
34:33 Mike Carruthers? So let's start with water, because I've always been amazed, you look at a big, you look at the Empire State Building in New York, somehow the water gets all the way up to the bathrooms near the top of that building. It must be some amazing pump.
34:48 Speaker 02 I mean, it is amazing for tall buildings, but it's more amazing for entire cities, right? And which is what we do with, again, with Chicago, we do 12 pumps for all of Chicago. Now, for a tall building, what happens is that you also have a pump in the bottom, so usually when you have a pump for an entire city, you want to have enough pressure, the pressure in the system is dictated by the fire department.
35:11 Speaker 02 They want to make sure that when they connect their fire hose to the hydrant, they can put out a fire. And so that's why usually that pressure is about enough for that water to go up to a five or six story building. So that's why five or six story buildings usually don't have a pump in the basement, but tall buildings do.
35:30 Mike Carruthers? When there's infrastructure for something new, like one day a city has to decide, okay, we need to wire the internet for everybody and the city's already here. How do you do that?
35:46 Speaker 02 You have two options, right? One is you look elsewhere, you see what they're doing and you produce something similar. And your second option is you see what you have and you try to do the best with what you have. So in the case of telecommunications, one of the things they did is, well, we like fiber optic cables, so we have to lay fiber optic cables there. And so they went to, in New York, for example, I think they went to a lot of the old Western Union pipes that were there for some cables and they just replaced all the cables with fiber optics. But it's usually, it's one of those things, you know, where it's fascinating to hear about what's happening in Chicago versus New York versus Shanghai versus Paris, because
36:27 Speaker 02 they will have a different system, partly based on the specificity of the cities themselves and partly based on when the systems were built, because things evolve.
36:39 Mike Carruthers? But do people from like different cities ever get together and say, well, how did you guys do that? Because we need to do that and we're not really sure how to do that. So can we see how you did that? Or you just, people just do what they do?
36:51 Speaker 02 Well, you'd assume that that would be the obvious thing that you do, right? But in my experience, usually they don't do that too much just because things evolve so fast. So especially, I talk with a lot of people in the transit industry and when you look at how they handle a system in, you know, again, New York, Boston, DC, Chicago, often it's going to be pretty different. So again, you would assume that they get together and that there's a one common system for everywhere, but often it's not the case. Water is another good example because the way that you treat your water really depends on your quality of the raw water that you get. And so there's no way you can have the same system in New York as in Chicago because the quality of the raw water is different.
37:31 Mike Carruthers? What happens to all the waste, the wastewater, the waste from the toilet? Where does it all go?
37:39 Speaker 02 Wastewater is my favorite infrastructure of all. By training, I'm more of a transportation person, but wastewater is what I prefer because it's incredibly complicated. Because you don't have one wastewater, you have two. There's the wastewater that we think of, which is the toilet, the showers, you know, whatever we do at home. But there's also the wastewater coming from the rain. So that's called the storm water. And so in older cities, you tend to have combined sewer systems. So you have one single pipe in the middle of the road that has to handle the sanitary sewers from people and the storm water from the rain. And in newer cities, they tend to be separate. And so depending on the type of system, you'll do, you know, you'll have different strategies. But usually, what you want when you have a separate system
38:22 Speaker 02 is to treat the water that comes from homes and you don't really treat the water that comes from the storm. But in systems, in cities with the combined sewer, then you treat everything. And so that's where you have to go to a wastewater treatment plant. You treat your, all the water that's coming in and then you put it back into the environment in usually a way that's clean enough where it will not harm, you know, anyone or the species or animals downstream, but not clean enough that you can drink readily out of it.
38:51 Mike Carruthers? And when you say, "When the water comes in, you treat it", what does that mean?
38:56 Speaker 02 Oh, that's, so that's a great question. So the first thing you do is you're going to try to separate some of the solids. So again, screens, you know, sometimes you might have again, branches, water bottles, you know, toilet paper roll you have. You try to screen everything that you can physically out of it. Then you put some chemicals to favor something called flocculation. So you have all those particles that are there. Those particles tend to be negatively charged. So essentially, no matter how long you let it sit there, they're like little magnets that just expel one another. So it's never really going to sit to the bottom of a tank. And so you put some chemicals to neutralize that negative charge. And then you just let gravity do its job. And so that means all those little flocks are going to settle at the bottom of the basin.
39:40 Speaker 02 And then all the greases are going to float at the top. So you remove all the, you skim all those greases from the top, you remove everything from the bottom, and then you're left with clear water, but it's still not good water because it's got a lot of diluted stuff, you know, a lot of nasty stuff, but also detergents and soap and everything. And so then what you do after that is you leverage nature. And by that, I mean that all that disgusting stuff that I just talked about is actually amazing food for microbes. So then you use biofilters and as the water just goes down the biofilters, all those microbes feed on all that stuff. And then after that, then you tend to have some pretty clear water and you can put some ozone or you can use some UV light to kill whatever is left there and then you really see to the environment.
40:25 Mike Carruthers? And what does that mean? Release it, put it in the sea?
40:29 Speaker 02 Uh, in the sea, uh, in the river, usually a river, you know. Um, that's why you tend to have water treatment plants upstream of a river and then wastewater treatment plants downstream of a river. One of the things I love to tell people when they fly is when you fly, when you take on a, when you board a plane and you, you know, start to ascend, uh, look at what's out there. And very often you'll see a wastewater treatment plant, you'll see huge circles with water. You don't really know what it is, but it's a wastewater treatment plant. And the reason why you see that is because airports tend to be built wherever there was space. And that used to be normally in like low marshlands or in a place that used, that used to flood a lot. And that's usually downstream of a river. And so that's
41:12 Speaker 02 why, that's why you have the wastewater treatment plant there and the airport just next door.
41:17 Mike Carruthers? But the, the solid stuff that gets pulled out of wastewater, where does that go?
41:22 Speaker 02 Oh, so that, well, then there's different treatments for that. That's the, it's called the sludge. And so usually you try to dry it, uh, and then it ends up in a landfill with your, you know, with the waste, um, that you throw as well, you know, your garbage. Uh, so it just goes through a landfill, yeah.
41:38 Mike Carruthers? So you mentioned before like that they'll put fiber optic cables in the old Western. So is there a lot of old infrastructure underneath cities that I mean, because you don't take it out, right? I mean, you you you just build beside it.
41:53 Speaker 02 I mean, every city is different. The older city, the more infrastructure you'll have there. The funny thing about cities is that at least for the ones that were that really expanded 1950s and 60s, we don't even know what's out there. You know, you can't ask your electric utility or sometimes the sewer systems. They don't really know what's out there because a lot of it was built in 1950s and 60s and they didn't keep detailed record about that. That's the funny bit. So often, you know, that's why you you hear stories of, oh, we've started digging and then we, you know, found this and we didn't expect that. And so something that was supposed to take two weeks actually takes two or three months. Just because, yeah, we don't we don't necessarily know everything that's that's down there.
42:38 Mike Carruthers? So natural gas that runs in pipes everywhere throughout cities, towns, everywhere, that natural gas is odorless naturally. It it doesn't have a smell.
42:51 Speaker 02 Exactly. So natural gas naturally is odorless. So when you collect it, it's odorless. When they transmit it in those large gas lines, it's odorless. And then just when it arrives at the city, they add something called Mercaptin that gives it its wonderful, beautiful, you know, rotten egg smell. They started to add that smell, I think it was in 1920s or 30s, when there was a big tragedy in Texas in a school where, you know, a lot of a lot of children died.
43:20 Mike Carruthers? Let's talk about transportation. And sometimes you you look at a city, particularly an older city, the way the roads go and the highways and and. It doesn't really look like there's much of a plan, but there's always a plan, right?
43:37 Speaker 02 Oh, there's always a plan, right? There's always a plan for transportation. If there's one thing that people need is to be able to go from places to places. I mean, there's very few infrastructure systems as important as transportation for the economy. As people can go as far as possible, as fast as possible, is probably one of the leading, one of the leading factors for the economy. So there's always a plan, always.
44:02 Mike Carruthers? I know one of your areas of expertise or that you're working on right now is depopulation. Can you explain that?
44:10 Speaker 02 Depopulation means that your city is actually losing population, all right? So usually, when you talk about infrastructure, when you build infrastructure, you always have a growth plan. You're like, okay, now we have X number of people. We assume that it's going to grow by 1, 2, 3% in the next, you know, few years.
44:29 Speaker 02 And at some point, the opposite happens. So a city actually starts to lose population, and then you might need new infrastructure, but it's hard to justify it because there's no growth. There's actually, you know, you're shrinking. And so you're left with a lot of infrastructure that's now oversized, often that's aging, and that needs maintenance, but there's no, you know, no resources for it.
44:52 Mike Carruthers? And what cities are shrinking?
44:54 Speaker 02 There's many of them. I actually published an article last year, and you can look at all the cities of the US that are shrinking. Most of them are small, right? Most of them, there's usually a lot of media attention to when large cities are shrinking, like Detroit, but most of them are smaller.
45:10 Mike Carruthers? Where's everybody going?
45:12 Speaker 02 A lot of people are going to the cities.
45:14 Mike Carruthers? The big cities?
45:15 Speaker 02 The big cities, yeah, I know, and places like, like the US, you know, pretty rich countries. Usually, the birth rate is pretty low, and so most of the population growth is coming from immigration. And when you have immigrants, usually they prefer to go to larger cities than smaller cities.
45:35 Mike Carruthers? Going back to water for a moment. For years, people have talked about desalinization, that that was going to help with droughts and things, that if we could take the water from the sea and take the salt out of it, that we would have plenty of water. But always, the cost of doing that was so prohibitive that you couldn't do it on a big enough scale. So where are we with that? Has the price come down?
46:01 Speaker 02 So the price really came down. It's actually in Israel, I think it's 80%, 70 or 80% of water is consumed in the country is coming from the sea. So it's absolutely possible. Before, we really tried many technologies. And the one that works best right now is something called reverse osmosis. And so you really take, so you have a membrane, and it's very packed. And it looks like it's impermeable, like water can't get through. But you have tiny pores, but they're so small that only pure water can get through. So you push that salt water. You push it very, very, very hard against that membrane. And then only the pure water gets through. And you collect all that pure water. And once you have it, you don't distribute it yet. Because that pure water is good, but doesn't have any minerals.
46:45 Speaker 02 And humans need minerals. So first, you put a bunch of rocks into that water, so a lot of limestone to add minerals. And then you distribute that water. And you know, you can consume it, and you can drink it.
46:59 Mike Carruthers? In a city where there's all this infrastructure, there's transportation, and water, and electric, and gas, and all that. Typically, does everybody exist that works on those in silos? Or is there somebody that oversees the whole thing?
47:14 Speaker 02 That's the shift. That's the trillion-dollar question for this coming century. What happened in the 20th century is that they were very, very much siloed. So for example, a good example is water, water treatment. You need a lot of electricity. You don't really care where it comes from. You just ask your electric utility company, "Give me that electricity, and I'll pay you for it." And the problem with that is that whenever something happens to electricity, then it affects the water and then it affects the people. And so it's so interdependent that now we're really trying, talking, figuring out how we can have those people talk with one another a lot more. So that systems that are interdependent by nature are a lot stronger, a lot more resilient.
47:58 Speaker 02 So that's a conversation that's happening now. And I think that's one of the biggest shifts that's going to happen in this century in infrastructure.
48:05 Mike Carruthers? Now, you had said earlier that like in a city, you've, they keep, they try to keep electric and water apart. So one goes down one side of the street and one goes down the other. Is that, that's a thing?
48:17 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. In the US, a lot, a lot of times you have the, you know, back alleys or you might have, um, some of those cables are not underground. It might be overground, but usually in cities that have both underground, yeah, you'll keep water on one side and electricity on the other. Um, but that's the like physical, right? They're separated physically, but you still need a lot of water for electricity. So the way that you generate electricity usually requires a lot of water. Um, and you also need electricity to treat and distribute water. So they're interrelated, but they're physically, the infrastructures are physically apart.
48:49 Mike Carruthers? But wait a minute. So if you have a, a street and you've got water going down one side and electricity going down the other side, the buildings on the other side need the other guy. So the electricity has to cross the water to get across the street to the people over there. And the water has to cross the electricity to get to the people over there.
49:11 Speaker 02 Yes, yes, but these are the smaller lines, right? So your mains are far away from your big electric distribution lines. You know, so your, your large pipes are away from your large wires. And then you have the smaller pipes crossing over. But that's okay, because if you have a leak, it's not going to, you know, impact it too much for the small pipes.
49:30 Mike Carruthers? I see. Well, that makes sense. And where's the gas? Right down the middle?
49:34 Speaker 02 Uh, that's a good question. It depends on the cities, right? Cities are going to have different regulations. Um, the other funny thing, by the way, is even when you dig there. So not only are they're separated, but the types of gravel that surrounds them are different. So for example, with electricity, they have a special type of gravel to make sure that the rocks are not sharp and they don't, you know, kind of dig in the wire. Um, so you might have different regulations. So that's again, you know, different cities have different regulations.
50:02 Mike Carruthers? And what about the aging of all of this? That doesn't, isn't that, to me, I would think that would be what keeps people up at night is that this stuff gets older by the day and, you know, much of it was built a long, long time ago. And isn't it just a time bomb waiting to go off?
50:19 Speaker 02 Oh, absolutely, absolutely. We know this infrastructure is aging. We know it will have to change. Either we do the same thing, right? So we just take away one pipe and you put another one. Or you're rethinking how we do it in the first place. And, and my big thing with this book at least is let's get everyone to understand the engineering principles of how that works. And then we can have a honest discussion about that. And think about the type of infrastructure that we want for the next 50 to 100 years. A lot of water pipes in the streets, you know, a lot of them are 100 years old. Um, so we're not talking about some decisions for five or 10 years, right?
50:59 Speaker 02 We're talking about decisions that are gonna, that are, that will have an impact on our grandchildren and great grandchildren. So let's make sure that we, you know, have a common ground and, and all talk about it.
51:10 Mike Carruthers? What is something that some city somewhere has done uniquely that you think is very forward thinking or different or unique about just a, a solution to an infrastructure problem that nobody thought before?
51:24 Speaker 02 My huge pet peeve is multifunctional infrastructure. So right now, when you build infrastructure, it does only one thing. But what if it could do multiple things? And one of my favorite examples is in Malaysia. So Malaysia, tropical climate, um, uh, and it rains a lot. But also Kuala Lumpur is a big city and all big cities suffer from traffic congestion. So what they've done there is they've got a massive tunnel for cars so that to ease the congestion a little bit. Except that when it rains, the cars are just, they all go away. They close the, the tunnel and they flood it with storm water. And then this way, storm water is stored in that big tunnel
52:07 Speaker 02 as opposed to going in streets or, you know, flooding the, the entire city. So that's one example where you have one infrastructure system that does two things. Multiple, uh, no, multifunctional infrastructure.
52:18 Mike Carruthers? As I said at the start of this, whenever I'm in a big city like New York and I look around, I look up and I think, how does this all work? And it's great to get a little insight into some of the ways that it does work. I've been speaking with Sybil Darable. He is a professor of urban engineering and director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks Laboratory at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He's author of a book called The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Great, Sybil, thanks for being here.
52:58 Mike Carruthers? Have you ever not done something fun just because you didn't have someone to do it with? Like going out to eat or going to an event? Just because you don't have someone to go with is not a good reason not to go. First of all, one of the reasons we don't do things alone is we fear we will be judged by others as one of those people who has no friends. Yet, according to a study published by the Journal of Consumer Research, the judgments that we fear we will get are much harsher than we would ever give if we saw somebody out doing something alone. The same study looked at people's prediction of how they would enjoy an activity if they
53:42 Mike Carruthers? did it alone, going to an art gallery in this case, versus how they actually did enjoy it. And it turned out, people's predictions were off. People enjoy doing things alone much more than they thought they would. So the next time you don't do something just because you have no one to go with, maybe step out of your comfort zone and you might be surprised how much you enjoy it. And that is Something You Should Know. Something You Should Know is produced by Jeff Havison and Jennifer Brennan. The executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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