Greetings everyone, and happy Thursday! Enjoy the autumn scenery around you while it lasts. As you may already know, designing products and systems to meet the needs of customers and end-users is perhaps the most important job of an engineer. Fast Company released an article a few months ago describing a particular bridge that was [...]
Why is it that you press down the guitar string closer to where you pluck when you play a high note? The physics of sound can explain such phenomena. When you pluck a guitar string, you are essentially inducing what is known as a standing wave on the string. The plucked string is fixed at [...]
Being a (slightly) proud New York City native, I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to share video that I watched this past Independence Day weekend. It’s an episode of the show “Man Made” titled Bridges of NYC (via Hulu). In its history, New York City has held consecutive world records for the longest bridge, and [...]
Have you ever looked at a car’s radiator or a computer’s cooling mechanism and wondered why they consist of several thin protruding surfaces? These protruding surfaces are known as fins, and they are key elements in effective heat transfer for components such as a radiator or a computer that require effective cooling. What makes fins [...]
While we’re on the topic of airplanes and things related to airplanes, here is an interesting article from The New York Times about a safety board meeting regarding US Airways Flight 1549, which landed safely in the Hudson River earlier this year as a result of an unfortunate rendezvous with some Canada geese (a bird [...]