From the USDA (emphasis added):

Thank you for keeping an open mind and reviewing the information for yourself. This paper might help satiate your curiosity: http://www-civ.eng.cam.ac.uk/cjb/papers/p20.pdf

The biggest hurdle for non-engineers is getting them to understand that it’s a pre-stressed structure, so the “logical” rules don’t apply. The biggest hurdle for engineers is one of semantics - a reduction in tension isn’t compression per se, however, the math shows that there is a negligible increase in tension in…

I’m glad you final admit that you don’t understand. If you choose to remain willfully ignorant, that is your choice. I suggest you avoid spreading your ignorance by posting your erroneous opinion instead of replying on the writings of a licensed engineer who did the work, passed peer review, and wrote the book on the…

Their typical reasoning:

Exactly! I used to be an assistant professor. The most difficult thing to teach was recognition of assumption errors. It’s the basic BS test. Does the answer you calculated so precisely make any sense? Do you really expect to get only 42 board-feet of lumber from a 20-acre stand of trees? Do you really think you can…

It’s the same kind of logic exercise used to teach the difference between correlation and causation in introduction to statistics.

Hah!

Most people make two mistakes when trying to understand this problem. The first is to simplify the system down to  a single spoke. The second is to ignore the most important piece of information- the spokes are pre-tensioned. Don’t try to think through this on your own. Read what Jobst Brandt wrote about it. There are…

Read “The Bicycle Wheel” by Jobst Brandt. He did the finite analysis to prove that the hub does not hang by the spokes, it is supported by the bottom spokes. It’s counter-intuitive, but true. On a wheel with welded spokes (like the wheel in the video), the bottom spokes increase in compression when weight is applied.…

Welcome to the club! My oldest frame is a ‘79 Schwinn World Sport which I’ve upgraded with a Fuji crank and Shimano 105 brifters. I dropped the 27" wheels for a spare set of 26" MTB wheels. Braking is handled by long-reach caliper brakes with drop bolts to give them the extra half inch to align with the rim. After…

Do you mean trying to pump hydrogen gas? The overall losses from converting solar to hydrogen via hydrolysis wouldn’t make it worth generating the hydrogen in the first place. That’s why most hydrogen gas is generated by steam fractionation of methane or coal gasification.

It’s not about the cost. There are physical limitations to transmitting power through lines.

It seems like a nice idea, but it falls apart when you consider the limitations on transmitting that power over long distances (it’s nearly 3,000 miles from the U.S./Canada border to the equator). Put simply, the power losses due to the extreme distances and problems keeping the power grids in phase with each other…

I was about to post the same thing!

And for those not in the know, ROW in this context is “Rest of World.”

To follow up on A Drop of Hell’s comment, some deserts form a hard crust similar to pavement. Once you drive on it, the pavement is broken and the soils below start eroding away. If you look at the Sonoran desert, you’ll see that the trails through the desert are below the desert floor. In some of the areas we went,…

Hero!

The same issues affect all large equipment. A friend of mine bought a new bulldozer for his dirt business. The dozer has all of the same electronic gizmos and associated limitations. Late on a payment? Watch them remotely disable the very machine that you need to make money to make the payment.

Some sayings are regional, others are not. Sometimes the wording changes by region. No matter what they said in your area, what I heard growing up isn’t unusual.