Welcome back to Freaky Friday, IT Oddities, a new series that will feature one tech terror, each week. This week’s IT oddity is pretty much the perfect storm of Freak Friday-ness: It’s got both certain brilliance, while still bordering on the slightly insane.

Two gentlemen from Stanford University and Northeastern University have designed the world’s first “Earthquake-Resilient Building”!

That’s right; you read that correctly…

They’ve noticed that in a standard earthquake scenario, the building was designed to absorb the “brunt of seismic shaking.” Although this seems like a necessary design element; this left many buildings to be demolished and saw cost-heavy rebuilding.

Their radical innovation, utilizes “steel fuses” allowing the building to rock back and forth during an earthquake, “and cables”, to pull “the building back into plumb once the shaking” has “stopped.” This literally earthquake-proof design, “absorbed the shock of an earthquake greater than magnitude 7”, upon testing, and “the deformed fuses could be replaced in about four days—while the building remained occupied.”

While this is undoubtedly a firm step for engineering in the right direction; I’d hate to be in one of these massive see-saws when the Richter scale is reading anything above 2.0!

See IT Oddity# 2: Koala Computing

See IT Oddity# 1: Scented USB’s