Did you know...

...that they couldn't "straighten" the leaning tower of Pisa even if they wanted to?

I gave this assignment to one of my classes that had a component where they had to make up a portfolio for a fictional project management company. One of the groups put in their list of projects a long time concentrated effort to straighten the leaning tower of Pisa. This rattled loose something in my head from an old Nova or something where they were explaining that this was in fact not possible.

See, its not just that the thing is falling over, it is also that it is in fact shaped somewhat like a banana.

And no matter what angle you stand up a banana, its going to be leaning, yes?

Apparently what happened is that the foundation started to shift even before the constuction on the tower was complete. When that happened the building started to pitch to one side. Having absolutely no way to correct the actualy problem with the foundation, the builders decided that they would at least fix the remainder of their tower. So for several of the upper stories, the floor and the ceiling are actually not parallel - purposely pitching the top of the building in the opposite direction and spreading the correction over several courses.

So, should you be successful in getting the bottom of the tower true to the world, the top of the building would now be leaning the other way. A genuine damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The rest ofthe story is pretty interesting as well. Its basically a story of several attempts to stop the tower from falling - because actually it is the very slowly toppling over tower of Pisa, or at least that would be more accurate than "leaning." At some point someone discovered that the rate of pitch was increasing alarmingly and that they ought to do something about it or they would lose their landmark.

Because really who would come to see the pile of rubble of Pisa?

Of course, all intentions aside, everything they tried to do to fix the thing actually threatened to make it worse. My recollection is that they had finally stabilzed things with a ballast and cable system. I don't know what the present day situation is.

So, something new every day, eh? I make no official claim as to the actual voracity of the retelling, but I think I got it right.