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Did you know? (Random things in life)

James

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Did you know...
Chris Craft, the boat manufacturer known for its beautiful wooden boats, produced the landing crafts used on D-Day?
The hot link I provided has some fascinating information.
View attachment 104047
The Higgins Boats were originally made in New Orleans. Designed by Andrew Jackson Higgins. Who actually produced more might be up for question and there’s a bunch of different types. I think they produced 12,500 in New Orleans. Even the standard model kept changing with improvements. Higgins employed 25,000 people at the height of the war effort.


5d132e920c1aa.image.jpg

6951558D-72D1-41BE-A4B3-9E0274856779.jpeg


Higgins also produced PT boats. Elco in Bayonne, NJ was the main producer.

 

dbostedo

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:geek: Pretty cool.

But the surface area is huge.... keeping on topic, and related:

1) Did you know that the Pacific Ocean covers nearly half the earth?

1591752961013.png


2) Did you know that despite how we think of it, the earth is very smooth? If shrunk to the size of a pool ball, the largest features would be about 1/1000 of an inch tall... barely there. About the same thickness as fine grains of sand. (It wouldn't be as smooth as a pool ball, contrary to the many times I've seen that written.)
 

James

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James

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Did you know the Golden Gate Bridge is now producing ethereal Bryan Eno type sounds?

Wild

Under certain conditions, a new wind upgrade is now causing noise heard from quite far away.



 
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TS
Tricia

Tricia

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Speaking of bridges... Did you know the Mackinaw Bridge can sway up to 35 feet in severe winds?

I walked the bridge a few times on the Labor Day Weekend annual bridge walk.

The expansion joints are crazy cool.
 

James

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I had no idea there were two definitions for the unit of measurement, the foot. Very, very small difference.

——————
The first foot is the old U.S. survey foot from 1893. The second is the newer, shorter and slightly more exact international foot from 1959, used by nearly everybody except surveyors in some states. The two feet differ by about one hundredth of a foot per mile — that’s two feet for every million feet — an amount so small that it only adds up for people who measure over long distances...

While such differences might seem merely philosophical, they can have vital and costly consequences in the real world. In one case, in a certain city that Dr. Dennis declined to name, the construction of a downtown high-rise that sat in the approach path to an international airport was delayed while the building was redesigned to be one floor shorter.
—————————-
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/...logy-dennis.html?referringSource=articleShare
 

Bad Bob

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@James. Messed up survey can get real messy quickly. Survey Technology Prof in school told the tale from the lang ago about Los Angeles CA. In the 1840's? A surveyor came out from back East to survey the city. While there a link in his chain broke so he took it to the blacksmith to be repaired. (a chain was used in the day to measure straight line distances precisely) The smithy didn't account for the cooling shrinkage of the metal and the link ended up 1/8" off. The land boundaries people are still try to straighten out some of those problems. So LA is still 1/2 a bubble off in some ways.
 

dbostedo

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By some estimates, all the gold that's ever been mined in world would form a cube that's only about 22m (72 ft) on a side.


(Some estimates are up to about 10 times this... but it's still not all that much, in my view.)
 

Doug Briggs

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@James. Messed up survey can get real messy quickly. Survey Technology Prof in school told the tale from the lang ago about Los Angeles CA. In the 1840's? A surveyor came out from back East to survey the city. While there a link in his chain broke so he took it to the blacksmith to be repaired. (a chain was used in the day to measure straight line distances precisely) The smithy didn't account for the cooling shrinkage of the metal and the link ended up 1/8" off. The land boundaries people are still try to straighten out some of those problems. So LA is still 1/2 a bubble off in some ways.
Zoiks!
 

KingGrump

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By some estimates, all the gold that's ever been mined in world would form a cube that's only about 22m (72 ft) on a side.


(Some estimates are up to about 10 times this... but it's still not all that much, in my view.)

More bad news regarding all that gold.

 

Bad Bob

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Had to take Alaskan History in Junior High. We were taught that all of the gold EVER taken out of the ground in AK would fit in a 10'X10'X10' box. That was in the mid 60's so adjust.
 

T-Square

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Mistakes in surveying can be messy for a long time. My Dad was a surveyor and had a job in town to find and mark the property lines for a house. This house was part of a small "subdivision" of six houses in a row along a street. The original survey had been done in the late 1800s using a surveyor’s chain. (66’ long and made up of 100 links) Dad easily found the front and rear boundary lines which were parallel. Then he found the outside right and left lines of the entire subdivision. The problem was the property lines marking the interior boundaries. Somehow during the original survey they "dropped a link," .66 feet, about 8 inches. If you added up the distances of the individual frontages the result was one link short of the actual distance. You could not determine where the interior boundaries should be without all the property owners agreeing. I don’t know if it ever was resolved.
 

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There are two types of measuring chains, the engineer’s chain of 100’ with 100 links and the Gunther’s surveyor’s chain of 66’ with 100 links. Surveyors still call measuring use a metal tape chaining.

Here’s why the Gunther’s Chain is 66 feet:

The 66-foot (20.1 m) chain is divided into 100 links, usually marked off into groups of 10 by brass rings or tags which simplify intermediate measurement. Each link is thus 7.92 inches (201 mm) long. A quarter chain, or 25 links, measures 16 feet 6 inches (5.03 m) and thus measures a rod (or pole). Ten chains measure a furlong and 80 chains measure a statute mile.[1]

Gunter's chain reconciled two seemingly incompatible systems: the traditional English land measurements, based on the number four, and decimals based on the number 10. Since an acre measured 10 square chains in Gunter's system, the entire process of land area measurement could be computed using measurements in chains, and then converted to acres by dividing the results by 10.[2] Hence 10 chains by 10 chains equals 10 acres, 5 chains by 5 chains equals 2.5 acres.

 

Bad Bob

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The infamous LA survey issue would have been don on a 4 rod chain 66'. It is interesting that 'rods' are a measurement still being used. Have worked on a number of pipeline and surface projects that still present offers in rods. ;suspect it is more a matter of using a little slight of hand to present the offer to the landowners, since all of the engineering stationing is in feet.
 

James

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It’s amazing civilization advanced with that measuring mess.
Surprised we never did the weight in ‘stones’ thing. We have kept ‘hands’ for horse height.
 

RobSN

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The ratio between a mile and a light year is within 0.2% of the ratio between an inch and an "astronomical unit", or the average distance between the earth and the sun. Big deal, huh? Buuuut ... if you want an easy way to visualize how empty space is in terms of distances we call understand, it means that if we imagine the solar system to be shrunk so that the earth is an inch from the sun, each light year is a mile. That means that the closest star system (Proxima Centauri) is 4.2 miles away, and the brightest star, Sirius (off Orion's right foot) is 8.7 miles away.
 

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