the Dalaverse

I read about this in a book about the construction of the World Trade Center. Here's a (long) quote from an article about it:

"engineers had never measured how much swaying motion humans could stand before they became dizzy, seasick, frightened or disoriented.

To answer that question, Robertson turned to an expert in human perception in Eugene, Ore. -- a spot as far removed from the New York press as he could find. Paul Hoffman, a psychologist, agreed to perform a secret series of experiments to find out just how much swaying motion was too much. Hoffman purchased a small office building in downtown Eugene and in the summer of 1965 put an ad in the local paper offering free eye checkups at a ''vision research center.'' But it was actually an elaborate ruse: the optometrist who conducted the eye exams was one of Hoffman's employees, Paul R. Eskildsen. And as each patient stared at triangles projected on the wall, a hidden technician would trigger a giant set of hydraulics underneath the room that heaved it back and forth like a big saltshaker.

''This is a strange room,'' one patient said, according to Eskildsen's detailed notes. ''I suppose it's because I don't have my glasses on. Is it rigged or something? It really feels funny.''

Patient after patient reacted the same way -- becoming dizzy and confused soon after the eye exam began. Humans, Hoffman discovered, were much more sensitive to motion than anyone had realized. A few inches of sway over 5 or 10 seconds set off psychophysical alarm bells.

Then they insisted on redoing the experiments by swinging a makeshift office on cables inside one of the Lincoln Tunnel's ventilation towers on Manhattan's West Side. ''It was a big packing crate, is what it was, that they had dolled up to look like an office,'' says Eskildsen, who traveled to New York for the new round. ''I had two guys outside who pushed the room. It was hilarious.'' About 40 Port Authority officials rode in the contraption. The results were the same.

Wind-tunnel experiments in Fort Collins, Colo., confirmed that Robertson's initial design would sway far beyond those human tolerances, says Jack Cermak, then a professor of civil engineering and the director of the wind-tunnel laboratory at Colorado State University. Even today, Robertson has no trouble conjuring what two towers full of seasick office workers would have meant: ''A billion dollars right down the tube.'' "

it is enormously, shockingly, almost appallingly good

YES. Welcome to the wonderful world of Dunnett readers. Yay!

You are so lucky to have the rest of the series still in store...

How long did it take you to warm to Lymond? And when did you realise who Christian's amnesiac "English" prisoner was? I spent a considerable portion of the book actually wondering who the hero was - was it Will Scott or the pretty but unpleasant Lymond? LOL.

Great series. I think I stayed up until 3 in the morning to finish Game of Kings and then couldn't get to sleep because of adrenaline overdose: and the series gets EVEN BETTER. Unfortunately this was during the period when they were all out of print (and before I knew how to find things on the net), which nearly killed me: I spent a lot of time scouring library sales.