Tradition is what you resort to when you don't have the time and money to do it right.

This is one from a few days ago that got messed up somehow:

The above quote by Kurt Herbert Adler, who was a conductor for the San Francisco Opera (not to be confused with Kurt Alder of IGFarben and the Diels-Alder reaction,) applies itself well to the field of engineering. In engineering, time and money are spent researching outcomes to unknown situations, and developing traditions that can be conservatively followed with predictable and safe outcomes.There is no engineering formula that is not the result of countless hours of research, and in some cases, the resulting formu la is simply an efficient but safe guess.

Being efficient but safe is kind of the same thing as being “conservative”, an engineering buzz word. Wrong is okay, if it is conservative. For example, say you’re designing a raod that needs to carry 1000 cars and 1000 trucks a day. You could, conservatively, design it for 2000 trucks, and it would likely never have any problems, but it would be considerably more expensive than it needed to be.

The way you actually solve this problem is to turn the trucks into what’s called “passenger car equivalencies.” I forget what the number used is, but for our purposes, let’s say its 2.5. That is to say, for each 18-wheeler in traffic, it’s the same as if 2.5 cars were in the same space. So in the case of our road, you’d design it 3500 (1000 + 2.5(1000)) cars a day. This versus 5000 c/d-rp (cars per day road price) you would’ve been willing to pay had you not done the research necessary to approximate that one big rig is equal to 2.5 cars.

Approximate (also estimate) is another word kicked around a lot in engineering. Some trucks are heavier than others, some longer. Same for passenger cars, the idea though, is that it’s a best guess based on average car and truck length and weight.

I often say I make up numbers for a living. This is a actually the hardest part of my job. Doing math is easy, I have a calculator and computer programs to the hard stuff for me, it’s when I actually have to pull something out of thin air, that I need to actually put my thinking cap on. Fortunately there is no wrong answer, just varying levels of correctness. Isn’t engineering fun?

For an asshole award I give you Don Shula, the coach of the ’72 Dolphins (the only NFL team to ever go 16-0) suggested that if the Patriots were to go 16-0 this season, they should have an asterisk next to their record in the official annals reminding posterity that they got busted cheating in the season opener, videotaping the opposing teams defensive calls. Let me see if I can get this straight, they wouldn’t be a legitimate 16-0 because in the first game of the season they got caught doing something (that most of the league probably did anyway) that wouldn’t help them until they replayed the team in December. Shula is worried about his mark for being the only coach to ever have undefeated season.