Yup, it sort of made sense in a ‘what’s the difference’ kind of way. But if you look at the ad-hoc change, well…
There was supposed to be a single threaded rod that tied all of the platforms together, but it was too expensive to ship these long rods as they were longer than the trailor transport, so some non-engineer decided to cut cost and use several shorter rods offset from each other between the platforms, this added a moment force between the two rods and caused the fasteners to fail.
And yes, we studied this in my Statics class in college.
Yes, there’s a definite pattern there.
Yes, even when you face the fact that there is Too Much History and you are going to have to be selective about what you teach you very quickly run into the questions of how you present what you do teach and why you’re teaching it. The last being the most important and the driver of what gets selected and what doesn’t.
That’s where I first heard about it too. What a great title for his book: To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design.
It wasn’t the moment that caused the failure, but the doubling of the load on the upper nut and box beam. The Wikipedia article cited above has a good description of the issue.
When I taught physics, we went through an analysis of the loads. I thought it was a good application of statics.
I then used the analogy that the original design was analogous to two children each holding on and supporting their weight on a vertical rope, one above the other. Each child only has to support their own weight. The design was revised such that it would be like if the lower child was instead holding onto the legs of the child above them instead of holding onto the rope independently. The failure point then is the grip of the upper child on the rope because they are now supporting twice the load as before.
As I remember from his book, one practical problem with the design is that the upper walkway would have to be suspended temporarily with the long threaded rods running through it vertically, and then the nuts would have to be threaded up, dozens of feet, before they reach the bottom of the walkway.
Exactly. The original design had serious constructibility issues, which is why it was changed in the field. Unfortunately nobody checked to see how the changes affected the loads. Or everyone assumed somebody else had checked.
Same, we did a lot of units on the Miwok, and even visited a recreation Miwok village.
They never taught us what happened to the Miwok, though. I learned that from a Ken Burns documentary.
To be fair, there is only so many hours in which to teach History, you can’t get everything in.
In 2008, I was quite shocked at how few people knew that Sarah Palin was not the first woman to be chosen as a vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket. That was Geraldine Ferraro, in 1984.
It’s not that it was forgotten. Many people there knew the victims. So it wouldn’t be appreciated to bring it up in casual conversation. You’d have no way of knowing who was close to a victim.
Then you weren’t around or paying attention during the swine flu outbreak in 1976. It was brought up constantly. It’s the reason everyone panicked.
Don’t feel bad. When Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene are 2 of the people pushing a conspiracy theory, you know it’s not worth wasting brain cells over it.
And that is completely understandable. It’s just that people who were not from there may not know about it, unless they have taken the aforementioned classes.
Granted, I was 12 years old in 1976, but I knew about swine flu and was interested in what was going on around it. Anyway, the previous summer, Legionnaire’s disease had been discovered, and while we know now that it is not a new disease, nor is it transmissible person-to-person, that still wasn’t proven, and I really think people were frightened enough by LD to take swine flu seriously.
The Battle of Manila in World War II.
It was a pretty unnecessary battle, only a few months before V-E Day. The Philippines had been all but bypassed. The Japanese general had wanted to abandon surrounded Manila, but garrison inside the city disobeyed and decided to make a fight of it. The Japanese fought until the last man, and Manila was totally devastated during the battle; called the 2nd-most destroyed city after Warsaw.
100,000 Manila civilians were massacred by the Japanese during the battle; more than the Bataan Death March, Babi Yar, Katyn, and even Hiroshima’s blast.
Yet, I’d wager this enormous destruction and massacre is but a footnote in the Pacific War, stuck between Iwo Jima and Okinawa.