If you go to Google Images and search for “Mammoet Alberta Highway 14” you will see that this is not an uncommon thing at all - and that’s just one moving contractor (Mammoet) and one route (Highway 14). In addition to the cost of moving tooling and equipment to site, quality control, and so on, one big issue is…

One: road wear grows with the cube of axle loading, and so cyclists are a negligible source of road wear. Two: gas and vehicle taxes cover much less than half the total road maintenance and construction costs in the US. If anything, cyclists are paying more than their share, not less.

You need to include your own time dilation. Time dilation is such that your observed speed of light is a constant. Even if some observer sees you moving at an enormous speed and this beam of light just barely overtaking you, your sense of time has been stretched such that the beam of light exits your flashlight at the…

Good thing C4 is so stable, then.

I wish I could delete this post and not just edit it, because I commented before I realized you kept going on about supersonic farts and I was going to criticize your fart nozzle design.

This article was clearly talking about the scientific prizes and not the peace prize, though.

Indeed. $35,000 paid upfront is a hell of a lot more money than $35,000 paid in installments. If someone is willing to finance you something at zero percent, people seem to view that as “I’m paying nothing extra”, as opposed to reality, where it means “they’re discounting my cost at the inflation rate”. Forget about…

Checking their work or finding an initial approximate solution graphically isn’t what I am talking about though; you suggested it as a method of solution. Here, graphical solutions are either approximate or automated. An automated solution does not help the student, and an approximate one does not satisfy the question.

Its valuable to see the behavior of functions and their derivatives as a class demonstration or as an exercise, but in the context of an exam I fail to see any point.

Weird, my experience was also engineering school. Our numerical methods exams never asked us to find a solution, but rather asked us to describe an algorithm that would get one (for example); meanwhile our assignments would typically ask for a working matlab script or some such. Seldom did any exam question involve…

This problem is perhaps 30 seconds to a minute worth of work analytically. I’d probably take more time finding my calculator in my desk drawer than solving it by hand.

wut? Graphing is not required for this problem. In fact, I think it would take longer than the 5-6 lines it takes to just solve analytically.

What I found weird in my experience was that Jr. High School here demanded a single-line scientific calculator, High School demanded a graphing calculator, and then when I got to college they disallowed calculators altogether on exams - which has persisted through my Ph.D.

Mars is perhaps one of the harder planets to land on. On some bodies, like the Moon, you can pretty much neglect the atmosphere altogether: it doesn’t add a huge amount of drag to your spacecraft, it doesn’t cause that much heating, and so on. On bodies like the Earth, the atmosphere is thick and dense. You cannot…

A Citroen 2CV travelling at 60 miles per hour will easily overtake a Ferrari F40 traveling at 55 miles per hour.

And it’s not as if power issues are a matter of automation - such things would have stranded normal trains just the same.

Of course, every researcher truly believes that their research is the most interesting. ‘Interesting’ usually means ‘this is what I’ve spent my career doing’.

How on Earth would you manage to get laminar flow in a Prandtl tunnel of any scale, let alone a 16ft test section, and one testing full scale engines? Anybody who needs a low turbulent intensity is going to be using an Eiffel tunnel (or some other open-circuit) to start with; this is a matter of maintaining something…

In Vanilla, one of the things to do if you were bored (and if you were level capped and BWL wasn’t released, you were bored) was to sneak into the unfinished Hyjal by all manner of hijinks. A GM once removed me from there, but no longstanding issues. :D

Even if 600 passengers in an A380 each had a 50 kg carry-on, that’s only 30,000 kg - just 5% of the total vehicle weight at takeoff.