The bridge failure stats from the previous post were updated through 2006, but I originally started looking at the stats when I was in grad school in 2000, and the data itself was no more recent than 1991. (True story, back then 42.3% of all failures were dinosaur related.) When I got my hands on the [...]
Archive for January, 2012
Bridges 202 – More Depth on the Failure Statistics
Posted in Roads, Science on January 31, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Bridges 101 – What Causes a Bridge Failure
Posted in Bridges, Roads, Science on January 31, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Over the weekend the local news stations were carrying a story about a bridge failure in Kentucky. In light of that story, it seems like a good time to share some research I’ve been doing into bridge failure statistics. It’s tough to find any statistics on bridge failures. Surprisingly, there’s no national database on bridge [...]
Impressive Satellite Imagery of a Human Made Disaster
Posted in Uncategorized on January 29, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
This satellite photo was taken four days after the capsizing of the cruise ship Costa Concordia on January 13 off the island of Giglio in Italy. To give you an idea of scale, the ship is 1000 ft long and 116 ft wide. I assume the white line visible between the ship and the coast [...]
Engineering 101 – Engineering and Science
Posted in Science on January 27, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Note: All images below are by Leonardo Da Vinci. One of my old college professors once told us a story about the difference between scientists and engineers. You put them both in a closed room together. The door isn’t locked, and they can take as many steps as they want. The catch, each step can [...]
Water Supply 101 – Demand and the Water Tower
Posted in Science, Water on January 25, 2012 | 5 Comments »
This post builds on the previous one about hydrostatic pressure. If you haven’t read it yet, why not? To me, water towers are an iconic symbol of small towns. I’m not sure why I associate them with small towns, they’re common in larger cities also. It must have something to do with all the small [...]
Movie Review – Underworld: Awakening
Posted in Movies on January 23, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I’ll admit up front, I have a celebrity crush on Kate Beckinsale going all the way back to the vintage costumes Pearl Harbor dressed her in. So this review of her latest movie may be a little biased. Biased, but, as you can see below, only a little. First let’s get the recap out of [...]
Hydrostatic Pressure 101 – What Do Ears, Fountains, And Beer Funnels Have In Common?
Posted in Science, Water on January 21, 2012 | 4 Comments »
When I was a kid I was always challenging myself to swim to the bottom of the pool. (This was when pools were deeper than 5 feet.) The eight foot deep pool at my neighbor’s house was easily conquered, but the twenty footer at the country club was quite a challenge (especially since we weren’t [...]
Making The World Safe For Common Engineering Principles
Posted in Science on January 21, 2012 | 1 Comment »
In the interest of keeping up to date, I have to read trade publications regularly (think New England Journal of Medicine, but for engineers). It doesn’t take very much reading to notice trends. A big one these days is making engineering more interesting to the non-engineer. I’ve decided to make my own contributions to that [...]
Review: UR by Stephen King
Posted in Books on January 13, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I picked up a story called UR during the same short fiction shopping spree where I got Mile 81. UR is also by Stephen King, but I didn’t find it as satisfying. As in Mile 81, the premise was pretty goofy, but this time it had a commercial element to it as well (more about [...]
First Amendment Versus Hickman County High School
Posted in Personal on January 10, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Last week a controversial story broke at Hickman County High Schoool. Hickman County is very rural and it’s located about an hour west of Nashville. Apparently the principal there has a policy where every instance of cursing results in one minute taken off the entire school’s lunch break. The students retaliated by putting together a [...]
