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Layman's terms please! Tower collapse issue

Pictures are always nice. Sorry for the shoddy quality, but you should be able to get the idea anyway (for those of you who didn't have it in your heads already).

1495347e321aa35011.jpg


Hmmmm. Now why do those dimensions seem so familiar?
 
You know to be fair to Heiwa I think you should have set up the problem in SI units: meters, and Newtons and Pascals and all that stuff....
 
Apollo20 said:
You know to be fair to Heiwa I think you should have set up the problem in SI units: meters, and Newtons and Pascals and all that stuff....
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The math is a lot easier in SI, I don't know why the rest of the world hasn't converted. I'm tired of having to spec efficiencies in stupid hybrid units like kW/Ton.
 
Newtons Bit said:
I have a problem that Heiwa can solve that will
a) show us that he knows a little bit about engineering
b) show him that the spandrels don't brace the columns in the wall in the out-of-plane direction


Question: What is the compressive capacity of a 14" (355.6 mm) thick x 208ft ( 63648 mm) x 1000ft (304800 mm)tall wall? Assume that the wall is loaded by a distributed force (i.e. no local failures at the point of loading) and that the top and bottom of the wall are considered pinned (k = 1) for simplicity. The wall is made of a material that has a yield strength of 36ksi (2.482E8 Pa) and a modulus of elasticity of 29,000ksi (1.999E11 Pa).

How about it Heiwa. Will you have a go at it? Show your work, show us that you really can do this stuff and I will defend you whenever accuses you of not being a real engineer.
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converted to mm-N-sec
 
Well, as long as we're discusing units, I insist all velocities and accelerations be measured in forlongs per fortnight and furlongs per fortnight2, respectively.


1 m/s = 6 012.88475 furlongs per fortnight
1 m/s/s = 7.2731854 × 109 furlongs per fortnight per fortnight

You see why arguing units is pointless? Or maybe it's just because, being in Canada, I have to be comfortable with imperial and metric, that I view it as meaningless.
 
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Heiwa said:
I like the quillets. And you know, reputation is an idle and most false imposition, often got without merit and lost without deserving. When Nist speak fustian, hot and moist means anything.
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Speaking fustian we like it hot and moist. Can you bring it on?
 
Hokulele said:
The world should be Simplex. Or Stylus BT if you are feeling pretty.
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If only I'd won the Font Wars of 2005, then the world would be different. Our "office manager" put out a new timesheet a month ago that had at least five different fonts (not counting different sized versions of the same font - the damned thing didn't work right either).

At least my coalition came out on top in the Browser Insurgency of 2007.





Those who have not journeyed thru the cubical jungle might think this is tongue-in-cheek, but I beg of you to beware - such calamitous struggles are commonplace in the wild territories. I have seen grown men cry over the size of their monitors, and women faint at the sight of an email that contains the contents of forty previous replies. Such a place is not to be taken lightly, if it is to be taken at all.
 
tsig said:
Speaking fustian we like it hot and moist. Can you bring it on?
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You really give me for my pains a world of sighs! I take this opportunity to thank for all intelligent JREF comments about my article. They were not many but useful. Really improved it.
 
Why, did you rip it up and throw it in the bin?


Now, can you answer any of the technical points put to you and in particular NB's calculation?
 
[X] said:
Well, as long as we're discusing units, I insist all velocities and accelerations be measured in forlongs per fortnight and furlongs per fortnight2, respectively.
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Really? I find furlongs per fortnight per leap year far more convenient. For one thing, it converts directly into furlongs per leap year per fortnight.

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
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In my first year of college, I had a test problem to convert the speed of light from cenimeters per second to furlongs per fortnight. No calculaters allowed, but we did have a table of conversion factors. There were still some people who got the answer wrong.
 
Heiwa said:
You really give me for my pains a world of sighs! I take this opportunity to thank for all intelligent JREF comments about my article. They were not many but useful. Really improved it.
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You have demonstrated that you are incompetent--spectacularly incompetent--to write such an article.
 
pomeroo said:
You have demonstrated that you are incompetent--spectacularly incompetent--to write such an article.
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One reason I write for children is:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/03/23/sv_michiokaku.xml

Prof Kaku has a gift for communicating complex scientific ideas in a way that lay people can understand. He argues, moreover, that good physics should be simple, so simple that it can be understood as an image. I'll let him explain. 'A good physicist is driven by a childlike fascination and imagination. If we find ourselves getting jaded or bored we have to try to recapture that childishness. Einstein used to do that. He could be quite childish. He wanted to get access to that feeling of wonderment.
'He also believed that if a theory couldn't be broadly explained to a child it wasn't working. He believed that there should be a picture behind the theory. So his special relativity, for example, can be understood as a 16-year-old boy out-racing a light beam.

Sorry, if my article were too advanced for you. Time to grew up?
 
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