Structures or Why Things Don't Fall down

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Within school I make a wide contribution to musical life, playing the Cornet in ensembles including the jazz bands, concert band, orchestra and choir. Playing a musical instrument has not only helped me to gain a greater understanding of the importance of teamwork and allowed me to fine-tune my attention to detail, but has provided me with a valuable life skill, from which I will always find relaxation and gratification. Two years ago I was appointed the position of ‘Section Leader’ for the trumpet section of the Concert Band, a role which involves organisation of paperwork, as well as delegation of tasks to younger members of the section. At the beginning of my first year in the sixth form, I was appointed the rather daunting position of ‘Head of Costumes’ for the school production of ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ which involved designing then making and sourcing all costumes, ensuring there was ongoing liaison with the staff members of the production team. Part of this role involved negotiating with companies to secure discounts in return for publicity, whilst budgeting carefully. Did you know that the word beam comes from Old English and means tree? (p.215) I didn’t know that, but it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? As it has turned out, the struggle to understand the real reasons why structures work and why things break has been a great deal more difficult and bas ken noch longer than one might have expected. Chapter 2 Why structures carry loads Strain is a function of the length of an object after applying the force, with its original length. this has effect in sailing, where chinese junk sails are rigged so that as wind pressure increasesthe radius of curvature diminishes and the tension force in the canvas remains roughly constant no matter how hard the winds may blow

The last few chapters are calls to action: Failures in structures are almost always due to lazy designers or lazy manufacturing and these are critical moral failures of Biblical proportions. Parallel to this is failures in aesthetics: an engineer is mostly likely designing something that many people will use. Therefore, it is absolutely critical that what they're designing /is nice/. The Spartan ethic of functionalism is too narrow and close-minded.

teh circumferential stress in the shell of a cylinder is rp/t, meaning it is 2x the longitudinal stress, which explains why sausage skins split longitudinally when they are cooked because the skin can't handle the circumfrential stress Bonds - In Rodrigo Quian Quiroga's "Neuroscience Fiction" there is an often reported case of visualizing Jennifer Anniston (they used celebrities) and mapping neurons to see how the system works... Information in the brain is stored in what looks like a network map with a "key" if you're familiar with database programs. So there is a unique neuron that tries into trees of neurons in the visual cortex for images of the actress, tied to ones with 'Friends' (pun), her other movies if you've seen them, as well as auditory neural patterns that correspond with her name or or voice (way more complex but that's the gist from evidence I've seen so far). Now these can be flavored with different neurotransmitters with likeness or similarity as in Robert Cialdini "Influence" which would make sense since aspects of that person's neural trees could be similar and thus understood and resonate with your own (having common interests like you tubers, politics, hobbies, etc). It could be flavored with oxytocin as in love (Dr. Huberman had a video with love as a mapping function as well with loved ones been wired in close with an expectation of how long it would take to see them and the pain of losing them and not being able to find them). But there are also negative painful flavors that would keep them in the network but not the traditional one as they would be adversarial links or repulsive bonds or fractures in this case. So similar to chemistry one could make much broader and more diverseness links with not only other people but symbolic cues as well pertaining to social structures.

Much of what I write below is copied verbatim from the text, but am too lazy to identify what with appropriate quotes. This is a real personal statement written by a student for their university application. It might help you decide what to include in your own. There are lots more examples in our collection of sample personal statements.Before reading this book, I didn’t know anything about aeroplane engineering. I certainly didn’t think that very similar principles apply to it as to buildings or bridges. For example, aircraft wings act in bending as their static system can be simplified as a cantilever beam. However, what aeroplane engineers often were not aware of in the old days, is that the wings must also resist torsional/twisting forces. Quite some lives and planes were lost due to those kinds of structural failures (p.260-261). Perhaps my favorite chapter was the last of the book (Chapter 15), in which J. E. Gordon discusses the relationship between beauty and functionality in structures, and how beauty has declined in the design process of recent years. This chapter deeply resonated with me, although I can't say exactly why, and prompted some thought-provoking conversations with other members of my household. Yel structures are involved in our lives in so many ways that we Cancel really afford to ignore there af, every plant and animal and nearly all of the works of man have to suit greater. Overall, I highly, highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the rich history and design process of the structures of our daily lives.

Architects and engineers will appreciate the clear and cogent explanations of the concepts of stress, shear, torsion, fracture, and compression. If you're building a house, a sailboat, or a catapult, here is a handy tool for understanding the mechanics of joinery, floors, ceilings, hulls, masts--or flying buttresses.A palintonton or ballista is much more effective than a trebuchet in doing work. trebuchets could only store about 30K joules of potential energy, while ballistas were ~10X that the elasticity of the arteries therefore does the same job as the air-bottle affair which enegineers often attach to mechanical reciprocating pumps Book Genre: Architecture, Business, Computer Science, Design, Education, Engineering, Nonfiction, Physics, Science, Technical, Technology a lapped joint creates stress concentrations at the two ends of the joint, which is why the strength of such joints depends mostly on their width and not the length of overlap between the two parts. This makes simple rivets very effective It is energetically advantageous for a weight to fall to the ground, for strain energy to be released -and so on. Sooner or later the weight will fall to the ground and the strain energy will be released; but it is the business of a structure to delay such events for a season, for a lifetime or for thousands of years. All structures will be broken or destroyed in the end -just as all people will die in the end. It is the purpose of medicine and engineering to postpone these occurrences for a decent interval."

That the study of structures and the way in which they carry loads incompletes-Sle, relevant and very boring indeed. Strength is not the same thing as stiffness (e.g. a biscuit is stiff but weak, steel is stiff ad strong, nylon is flexible (not stiff / low E) and strong, raspbery jelly is flexible (not stiff / low E) and weakOne of my biggest takeaways, personally, was how little we understand of why structures work and how much of our recent experience with airplanes and bridges has been only after structures failed catastrophically. tough materials can have the same strength as a brittle material, but they are able to deflect stress much deeper into their material, increasing dramatically the work required to fracture the material. in other words, with tough materials, molecules living deep within the material absorb some of the sstress