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If his bridge collapsed… reread my post. He obviously did not understand the constraints and technologies of the products he was using. I understand he was pushing into new territory and bridging state of the art, but that in my mind means you should understand your constraints and limitations even better. It is a bridge; people’s lives are at stake. We all know that if he would have just boat tailed the bridge using the AST-II template it would have been fine. [/joking]
I believe you may be mistaken about the Egyptians. Anyone who figured out how to add a curve to “straight” pillars to make them trick the eye into appearing perfectly straight by using the suns rays to project such a gentle curve it couldn’t practically be reproduced by typical means (string curve would have been many miles long) is a pretty darn brilliant engineer in my book. Makes me look pathetic by comparison. Just because they didn’t have calculators and libraries of textbooks doesn’t mean they didn’t understand. They didn’t have to know calculus or be able to solve differential equations, they just needed to understand the products they were using. Stone isn’t that complicated, but they used it to do complicated things. In fact I bet they understood their resources and products better than most present engineers who take the immense wealth of knowledge available at their fingertips for granted.
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