what makes engineers happy
I was doing a cost estimate and getting the quantity of materials, including some sidewalk areas. It was a rough estimate, so I was just drawing quick polygons around stuff, not getting exact about the corners of the new sidewalk.
I slapped a quick trapezoid around a standard curb ramp. To two decimals the area was exactly 125.00 square feet. Weird.
Next I drew a quick jagged line around a section sidewalk that connected one of the ramps to a nearby sidewalk. Area: 499.66 square feet. 0.34 off exactly 500 square feet. Weirder.
Even odder still, the curb ramps were for a regular, four corner intersection, meaning their total was 500 square feet!? So a couple casual on-screen scribbles calculate out to 999.66 square feet of concrete sidewalk, basically 1,000 sf.
I couldn't design an area of sidewalk that tight if I tried.
It is this kind of statistically very improbable shit that gives engineers massive hard-ons and makes me just a little less atheistic about my freakish world.
I slapped a quick trapezoid around a standard curb ramp. To two decimals the area was exactly 125.00 square feet. Weird.
Next I drew a quick jagged line around a section sidewalk that connected one of the ramps to a nearby sidewalk. Area: 499.66 square feet. 0.34 off exactly 500 square feet. Weirder.
Even odder still, the curb ramps were for a regular, four corner intersection, meaning their total was 500 square feet!? So a couple casual on-screen scribbles calculate out to 999.66 square feet of concrete sidewalk, basically 1,000 sf.
I couldn't design an area of sidewalk that tight if I tried.
It is this kind of statistically very improbable shit that gives engineers massive hard-ons and makes me just a little less atheistic about my freakish world.