It’s not common, but that’s how those values are determined. As if the whole floor is getting used, not just one spot.
Well, properly built concrete with steel reinforcements can carry great loads and probably exceed even the implicit safety margins. It’s only when you use shoddy techniques or super poor craftsmanship (like adding such a balcony with a few wall anchors) that you get the catastrophic failures one frequently reads about.
Now, fire prevention and management, that seems to be a puzzler even in affluent countries.
I recall than when San Francisco had a day when people could walk out on the golden gate bridge they had to limit the number of people out there at a time to avoid exceeding its maximum load. Tightly packed humans approach two tonnes per square metre. Much more than even parked cars.
2 Likes
As a person who has built, maintained, and serviced large bodies of water all I can say is this:
Concrete, in the ground, poly if you want a liner, and don’t fuck around. Water is heavy, and can be evil. Sink your whatever into the dirt. The worst in that case is leakage or whicking.
Otherwise just take a bath.
7 Likes
Someone probably deserves death for this idea, but I’m sure it is not the kid in the “pool”.
Sea water has a density of 1.1? Nah, 1 is close enough. Personally, I tend to use 1kg/l as the density for most things when I’m estimating:
People? They’re basically just water, so 1.
Fuel? Almost water, 1.
Wood? Well, dry wood floats, so must must have a density less than 1, but fresh wood barely floats so pretty much 1.
2 Likes
4 Likes
Imperial for anything other than the size of burger meat makes absolutely no sense.
Does it even make sense there? I mean, we Germans simply decided retroactively that a pound means 500 g, like Pfennigs and Groschen becoming a subset of Marks (0.01 DM and 0.1 DM), even though both are historically incorrect. Since 1 lb = 453 g, it’s not that much of a stretch.
How about a pint of beer to go with that burger?
1 Like
Of course then the question is which kind of pint? Since it’s a liquid we can eliminate the US Dry pint based on the Winchester Bushel. But it could be a US or an Imperial pint. Because the UK pint is based on their new-fangled, steam powered “Imperial Gallon”, while in the US we have have stuck with “Queen Anne’s Wine gallon” Of course it COULD be the old “Ale Gallon” but that is no longer used.
Of course since we have been estimating volume very approximately, we can very safely ignore the difference between the “survey foot” and the “international foot” since the difference is approximately .0003"
2 Likes
Even in the US, a pint of beer in a pub is most often an Imperial pint - about 20 US ounces.
I do indeed know the difference between international feet and survey feet, and usually ignore it. Where I live, though, the difference between State Plane Coordinates, NAD27 and NAD83 is very significant indeed. (NAD83 vs WGS84, not so much).
2 Likes
No it doesn’t really make sense there, either. I was just kidding that imperial is only really important for things that don’t matter that much.
To my ear, “quarter pounder” is just a marker of a restaurant trying to leverage American identity; I would happily welcome a 500g burger. “Half-kilo” does sound more impressive.
I’m English so we still have archaic attachments to these things; I can’t imagine how the UK would respond to no longer serving beer in pints.
Another one that confuses me is the persistence of inches for measuring that one part of a man’s anatomy that he’ll measure cough… surely centimetres give larger numbers, which could sound more impressive to people who’d be impressed by such things.
2 Likes
What I’ve always wondered is why people call 1000 kg “1 ton”, with all the attendant possible ton/tonne/imperial/metric confusion, when the correct metric name for that quantity is “1 megagram”.
“milligram, gram, kilogram, megagram.” Dirt simple. No potential for confusion.
But, no.
(And sometime, ghu help us, they even abbreviate that “metric Ton” as “mT.” Which, in proper metric, of course, means “milliTesla.”)
Humans. /-:
2 Likes
Ah it’s because 1000 letters (γράμμα) apparently wight as much as one tuna fish (θύννος).
1 Like
a quarter “pounder” would be 125 g.
I spent a few years living in both Calhoun Hall and the now-demolished Sawyer Hall, and thankfully never had a flood. Just constant fire alarms. Those were some seriously ugly 70s-era concrete dorms. And here we thought Dabney Hall was the snazzy dorm!
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
