Questions tagged [engineering]
Engineering is the discipline, skill, and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes.
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Is this video a serious explanation of missile guidance algorithms?
This video, titled "The Missile Knows Where It Is", has become popular as an internet meme. It describes a technique for missile guidance, but it's so confusing that people have started ...
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Is yellow safer than white for center line road markings?
The Random Fact Generator website told me:
By 1955, forty-nine of the U.S. states agreed that state highways should have a white stripe down the middle between cars going in different directions. The ...
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Were nuclear sub engineers told that when alarms go off they should grab a bar, until they have examined their instrument panel?
The book Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems by David J. Agans, which was first published in 2002, contains the following claim:
On ...
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Would covering 10% of hydro-power reservoirs with solar panels generate as much power as fossil-fuel plants worldwide?
This article in the journal Nature, claims that:
Covering 10% of the world’s hydropower reservoirs with ‘floatovoltaics’ would install as much electrical capacity as is currently available for fossil-...
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Can pressurized air directed on the skin cause an embolism?
At my workplace we are warned against using compressed air to blow dust of working clothes etc, except when a special nozzle is affixed to the to the hose, reducing the pressure of the released air.
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Is the sewage from the Burj Khalifa transported away by trucks?
There are several articles and videos on the net claiming that the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai is not connected to a wastewater treatment plant by a sewer system, but that instead the sewage is ...
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Is the Great Wall of China visible from space?
Is the Great Wall of China visible from space?
This is quoted every now and then in film and television (e.g. The Truman Show), purportedly placing it among a rare class of single object that are ...
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Do bimetal jigsaw blades last twice as long as HSS blades and ten times longer than HCS blades?
Bosch makes this claim in their jigsaw blade documentation:
Bi-Metal (BiM): This highly flexible, tough combination
of HSS [High-Speed Steel] and HCS [High-Carbon Steel] results in a blade
...
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Does this video of collapsing warehouse shelves show a real incident?
This video seems to show a minor bump by a fork lift causing multiple rows of shelving to collapse, burying the fork lift and operator.
Is this a real incident, or a faked video? The video has been ...
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Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
On February 13 2019, NASA announced that Opportunity - a Mars rover launched in 2003 with an intended longevity of three months - was likely to be dead.
In the wake of this event, and the outpouring ...
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Will the Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah be the 'longest bridge' in the world?
In any metric, this doesn't seem to qualify as the longest bridge in the world. I could be miscalculating, but a number of articles are using the title 'longest'. The articles below are highlights ...
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Can the Hyperloop infrastructure implode due to a single crack? [closed]
In the article Hyperloop: the doubts persist, it is claimed that the hyperloop could implode due to a crack in the tunnel wall. The argument is supported by the claim that air would rush in at the ...
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Do electric cars emit half the CO2 as diesel from a life-cycle perspective?
From The Guardian:
"On average, electric vehicles will emit half the CO2 emissions of a diesel car by 2030, including the manufacturing emissions,” said Yoann Le Petit, a spokesman for the T&E ...
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Would it have been possible for the ancients to have built a Tower of Babel? [closed]
As recorded in Genesis 11:1-9, the ancients allegedly built a tower to the skies in a valley in Babylon (near present-day Baghdad), and God scattered them across the Earth as a punishment.
As ...
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Does talking to a rubber duck improve programmer performance when debugging?
In software engineering (especially XP) there is a commonly held belief that talking to a rubber duck will improve performance when debugging problematic code.
This technique is referenced in multiple ...
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Are engineers more religious than average faculty?
Recent Slashdot article:
In a forthcoming book, Engineers of Jihad, published by Princeton University Press, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog provide a new theory explaining why engineers seem ...
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Can Magic Leap deliver its claims about their future augmented reality product?
Magic Leap has been very outward with their public face regarding their upcoming augmented reality product. They've been promising a great deal, and the media has hyped up their image as a result, ...
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Have refrigerators become less reliable over time?
An often recited quip, both in my home and in popular culture, is "They don't make them like they used to." Most recently, the quote was brought up when our refrigerator stopped dispensing filtered ...
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Were Roman engineers required to stand beneath their bridges as they were tested?
"When Roman engineers built a bridge, they had to stand under it while the first legion marched across. If programmers today worked under similar ground rules, they might well find themselves getting ...
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Is this tealight-flowerpot heater more efficient than just tealights?
This article at the Daily Mail describes a small heater based on tealights and flowerpots.
It claims that
[the system] "make[s] the heating more efficient" (I assume in comparison to just tealights)
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Does "liquid-injection damp-proofing" work to water-proof walls?
There are technologies for sale, especially in Germany, to drill holes in the walls of a cellar, and inject into the concrete or masonry a liquid, such as Sodium Silicate
The manufacturers promise ...
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Did big projects used to get finished on time and on budget?
Big projects (software, engineering, architecture etc.) are plagued by cost and time overruns, or so it is widely thought.
Nicholas Taleb argues in Antifragile that this is a modern phenomenon:
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Does a turbo-charged engine require a "cooling down" period?
Some people are saying that after having driven a car with a turbo-charged engine, you need to let the engine run for several seconds (or even minutes) before switching off the engine. But nobody is ...
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Do Möbius strip conveyor belts last longer?
According to Wikipedia:
Giant Möbius strips have been used as conveyor belts that last longer because the entire surface area of the belt gets the same amount of wear...
(No citations given.) In ...
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Can you harvest energy from radio transmissions?
This video gives instructions on building a circuit to harvest energy from radio waves in the air using some pretty straightforward circuitry.
The creator has another video showing such a circuit ...
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Instant, painless amputation via high-pressure steam
Several years ago, a friend of mine who had a long career as a commercial/industrial plumber related an anecdote about a colleague who was working at a power plant. He was in the vicinity of a high-...
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Does wearing a helmet cause/aggravate hair loss?
A person I know (and his colleagues) does not wear his civil engineers helmet because they believe that it causes or contributes to hair loss. An ehow post also makes the same claim regarding ...
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Do you need to break in new engine on a car/bike for first 1,000 km by driving slowly and otherwise following manual's advice?
Normally car manuals say to let the car break in gently, not accelerating or breaking fast for first 1,000 km or driving below 80km/h. Is that really necessary in today's world? Is there any proof ...
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Was NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter lost because engineering teams used different measuring units?
I read in a book that NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was lost on September 23, 1999, at a cost of $125 million, because one engineering team used metric units, while another one used inches for a key ...
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Can you improve a car's engine by driving the car fast?
Many car enthusiasts claim the following:
take 2 identical cars (equal horse power, torque etc).
give one car to an old person who only drives it slowly
give the other car to the car enthusiast making ...
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Is a proposal to build an artificial mountain being seriously considered?
Thijs Zonneveld, a former cyclist, made a joke that a 2,000m high artificial mountain should be created in the Netherlands.
Now, the mass media are reporting that it is being seriously considered:
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Is there anything inexplicable about how the WTC Twin Towers collapsed? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
On 9/11, was Building 7 destroyed in a controlled explosion?
Having just watched the movie Zeitgeist, I'm a bit unsettled because I don't know how to refute the idea that the ...
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Could One Man Have Built The Coral Castle?
Supposedly, just one man built the Coral castle. Jilted by the woman who would be his wife, and miraculously recovering from a terminal case of tuberculosis, Edward Leedskanlin built the structure in ...
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