headspace-hotel:katsdom:30-minute-memes:I see his robot as an absolute winOK - a very tangential tak
headspace-hotel:katsdom:30-minute-memes:I see his robot as an absolute winOK - a very tangential takeoff: Engineering prof assigns students this question: Explain how to determine the height of a very tall building using a barometer.Obviously meant to use change in barometric pressure with altitude. But one student submitted the following:There are several ways of doing this1. On a sunny day, stand the barometer up in the sun, measure the length of its shadow relative to its height, then measure the length of the building’s shadow and calculate its height from that.2. Go into the stairwell and climb the stairs to the top, marking off the length of the barometer on the wall, giving you the height of the building in “barometer units”.3. Go onto the roof of the building and drop the barometer off the top and time how long it takes to hit the ground, then calculate the height using the well known formula of 32 ft./sec./sec.4. Go into the office of the building superintendent and say “If you tell me how tall this building is, I will give you this nice barometer”.Science! I love the barometer thing because my dad and one of his brothers were complete smart-asses who gave these sorts of answers to my grandfather when he asked them that. Although later when he became a professor he actually encouraged the answer because he wanted to reiterate to his students that their skills as engineers were valuable resources to be bought and sold (one of my dad’s other suggestions were “sell the barometer and hire a consultant.”)I later used that in an engineering class I took where we were asked how we would design the tallest free-standing structure with an 8.5x11 sheet of paper and an inch of tape, and whatever non-building resources we had at our disposal, and I suggested pooling my team’s money and hiring one of the civil engineers down the hall to do it for us, because as mechanical engineers this was outside our professional area of expertise and it would be unethical and possibly dangerous in a professional setting. The TA had never heard that approach before and went into a 5 minute lecture about how technically I was correct, but that approach wasn’t covered in the rubric. -- source link