"The Great Courses" is a series of courses combining lessons on DVDs and course notes in a book. They are relatively expensive (generally selling for $200+US per course) so you're more likely to find them at schools and large libraries than in private ownership. I've previously borrowed at least three others - "Buddhism," "Stoicism," and "Cooking Across the Ages" - and found them to be uniformly excellent, but in each case I was defeated by the time commitment. The DVD lectures run from 11 to 18 hours worth of material depending on the package. But this time I was determined to finish the course as it's a subject close to my heart: engineering. (In a former life I received a Bachelors of Mechanical Engineering, and it influences my thinking to this day.)

The course is presented by Stephen Ressler, and the blurb about him goes like this: "Stephen Ressler is a Professor Emeritus from the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he taught for 21 years. He holds an MS and PhD in Civil Engineering from Lehigh University and is a registered professional engineer in Virginia. He served in a variety of military engineering assignments in the United States, Europe, and Central Asia. He has focused his scholarly and professional work on engineering education and has won numerous national awards for engineering education and service." What's genuinely great about "The Great Courses" is that they seem to select their presenters more for their skills in presenting than their credentials in their field (which isn't a knock on Ressler - he certainly seems well qualified) - the previous courses I watched also had excellent presenters, and this has made me willing to attempt pretty much any of their courses.

I should start my review of this specific course by saying that, while he does present a couple of formulas, they're very basic and advanced math and knowledge are NOT required to follow the discussion. He uses multiplication and division, not differential equations. He also uses simple but very effective visual aids to model some of the effects involved. Here's a list of all the episodes (each in the 30-40 minute range):

• Learning from Failure: Three Vignettes
• Flawed Design Concept: The Dee Bridge (Wikipedia)
• Wind Loading: The Tay Bridge (Wikipedia)
• Rainwater Loading: Kemper Arena (Wikipedia)
• Earthquake Loading: The Cypress Structure (Wikipedia)
• Vehicle Collisions: Land and Sea (Wikipedia)
• Blast Loading: The Murrah Federal Building (Wikipedia)
• Structural Response: The Hyatt Regency Walkways (Wikipedia)
• Bridge Aerodynamics: Galloping Gertie (Wikipedia)
• Dynamic Response: London's Wobbly Bridge (Wikipedia)
• Dynamic Response: Boston's Plywood Palace (Wikipedia)
• Stone Masonry: Beauvais Cathedral (Wikipedia)
• Experiment in Iron: The Ashtabula Bridge (Wikipedia)
• Shear in Concrete: The FIU Pedestrian Bridge (Wikipedia)
• House of Cards: Ronan Point (Wikipedia)
• Brittle Fracture: The Great Molasses Flood (Wikipedia)
• Stress Corrosion: The Silver Bridge (Wikipedia)
• Soil and Settlement: The Leaning Tower of Pisa (Wikipedia)
• Water in Soil: Teton Dam and Niigata (Wikipedia)
• Construction Engineering: Two Failed Lifts(Senior Road Tower, L'Ambiance Plaza)
• Maitenanance Malpractice: The Mianus River Bridge (Wikipedia)
• Decision-Making: The Challenger Disaster (Wikipedia)
• Nuclear Meltdown: Chernobyl (Wikipedia)
• Blowout: Deepwater Horizon (Wikipedia)
• Corporate Culture: The Boeing 737 MAX (Wikipedia)
• Learning from Failure: Hurricane Katrina (Wikipedia)

Most people will recognize several of these. One of the most memorable for me (perhaps because I'm an engineer) is "Galloping Gertie," more formally known as "The Tacoma Narrows Bridge." Once you've seen a video of a several hundred meter bridge flapping in the breeze like a piece of laundry, you're unlikely to forget it. (YouTube) Many of these are very old (the Beauvais Cathedral collapse occurred in 1284), the Leaning Tower (construction started in the 12th century, but preventing it falling over is a problem that is still being attended to today), and Galloping Gertie self-destructed in 1940. But the most recent occurrence on the list is the FIU Pedestrian Bridge, which happened in 2018 and killed six people while seriously injuring six more - recent enough to remain vivid in the mind of Floridians, I'm sure.

The last disk (Challenger, Chernobyl, Deepwater Horizon, the 737 MAX, and Hurricane Katrina) really emphasizes a point he'd been making throughout the series: new technology brings new gains, but also new and unexpected failure modes. But it also brought home that new technology is allowing us to threaten ever larger numbers of people through a single failure. Another aspect of the final disk was that most of the failures were systemic and high level corporate rather than a specific individual failure. For example, the failures in New Orleans were mostly driven by commercial interests reducing the effectiveness of the engineered solutions of floodwater control. I was personally simultaneously somewhat less interested in these and more horrified by them: as an engineer myself, I mostly wanted to see design and implementation failures. Not that they were wrong to include these examples, I'm just saying my personal interests were more focussed on the practical details than the administrative ones.

A very odd side-note: this series also demonstrates the remarkable effect Jackie Chan has had on movies. I'm not joking. Jackie Chan may not have been the first person to put out-takes in the closing credits, but he popularized it, and it's spread throughout the industry since. You know you've reached peak saturation when a set of educational DVDs includes out-takes in their closing credits. For example, Ressler saying "The Leaning Tower of Pizza ... <laugh> ... I think I need lunch." And practical examples that went wrong on set. Wonderful.

Very long, but completely worth it. Very well done on every level, and highly recommended if you have any interest in the subjects presented.