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Rubbish (n., RUB-ish)

Trash or something completely worthless. Can be a thing or a discussion about a thing, but it always involves Ben Simmons' jumpshot, amirite Sixers fans???

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Link of the Day

The spy who made the Sydney Opera House happen

Joseph Bertony died a couple weeks ago, aged 97. He's not a household name or even one that you'd normally find when looking for details about the Sydney Opera House, but he had a vital hand in making it happen—after becoming a spy and escaping a Nazi prison camp. We'll let you read about that part of his life at BBC, but here's the Sydney Opera House story:

In the early 1960s he was deployed to Sydney to solve a complex problem to do with one of the city's major projects: a new opera house.

The issue, he learned, was that the roof of the building was supposed to be made up of large concrete sails - a visually arresting but logistically very tricky plan. An even more ambitious design, with flatter sails, had already been ruled out.

What it needed was a strong arch that would be able to support exactly the amount of pressure from the concrete. So he set to work.

Bertony spent the next half a year working on the calculations for that arch support, solving 30,000 different complex equations by hand. Those notes, which are now on display in Sydney's Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, were all neatly and methodically laid out.

"He was a brilliant mathematician," Ms Pitt says. "He did those 30,000 hand-rendered mathematical equations in six months, which is a very short period of time - and that's all he did. He would eat, breathe and sleep the Sydney Opera House."

The margin of error on these calculations was tiny - about half an inch - so Hornibrook naturally wanted to check that Bertony hadn't made any mistakes. They needed a computer.

At that time, there was only one computer in the country with the capacity to process something this complicated. It was the IBM 7090, and it was located in a military research centre in Woomera - about 1,700 km from Sydney.

As well as being far away, the computer was available for only one week a month - and even then, only at night. So one of Bertony's younger colleagues, David Evans, diligently spent those weeks running the sums through the computer.

When he finally finished, it was confirmed: Bertony hadn't made a single error.

You can read more about Bertony over at BBC.

TagsObituaryJoseph BertonySydney Opera HouseThe long, hard, stupid wayThrough many dangersDidja go to a land down under?