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.
Questions tagged [engineering]
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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 of emotion it triggered, I've seen the following…
Prometheus
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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 transported away using trucks.…
oliver
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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 much more interested in Ada !" — Robert Dewar,…
Larry OBrien
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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 spacecraft operation.
Was it really a conversion…
splattne
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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 posted on many news sites, but I can't find…
Paul Johnson
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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 places from well-respected blogs such as Coding…
combinatorics
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23
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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 fact, a Google search reveals that such a conveyor…
Douglas S. Stones
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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)
Is this true?
(Based on this question, it seems…
user5582
21
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4 answers
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 powering a wall clock. Is it possible to harvest…
Catherine Hoy
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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 nuclear-powered subs, there's a brass bar in front…
Ryan1729
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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 Florida City, Florida sometime around 1923.
He…
Monkey Tuesday
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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:
But the puzzle was that such underestimation did not…
matt_black
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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 this claim
If you put both cars on a test…
BaGi
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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 motorcycle helmets.
Is there any research done to back…
Nav
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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:
Example: Agence_France-Presse (AFP)
A…
Oddthinking
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