Engineers put Leonardo da Vinci’s bridge design to the test | Hacker News Reader

Engineers put Leonardo da Vinci’s bridge design to the test

news.mit.edu

134 pointsfraqed20 comments

better link from the mit folks working on project: http://news.mit.edu/2019/leonardo-da-vinci-bridge-test-1010

sure, bridge may have worked, but did they actually have the capability to build it? suppose it's not very different than other arches?

Based on the description in the article: probably.

I at least believe it is plausible, though I'm not sure of the economics relating to if it would have been a good expenditure of resources.

I also get the feeling that this might be a "CompSci" style answer: the customer asked for X and Xn was proposed. In reality the customer's needs were actually Y0..Yn which would have been better served by Z. This doesn't change the fact that Xn is a good answer to the problem of X, it just wasn't really what the customer actually required.

Activating the civil construction mode of failures, I'd say that he probably sent the design for construction, but the people on the field didn't think it would work and built it like every other bridge they have built on their lives.

Or it's a fantastic bridge once fully assembled, but every piece is some special snowflake shape and has to be fitted precisely so it would be much harder to build than a traditional bridge.

Yup, there is no word on the tolerances that would have been required (especially when using realistic sized stone blocks, rather than 126 large blocks as done in the experiment).

No like there hadn't been massive engineering projects with ridiculous tolerances before. Ie: Roman Aqueducts, Cusco's walls.

It's certainly possible, but if there is an easier and just as sturdy option available it would be easy to see an engineer going "thanks, but no thanks" when handed this cocktail napkin looking sketch.

It’s a really beautiful design as well, I wonder if the beauty of well designed things is because we see they are well designed or intrinsic.

I think that was proved 18 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vebj%C3%B8rn_Sand_Da_Vinci_Pro...

The article mentions the Norway bridge. But says it was ‘inspired’, whereas this one is a 1:500 scale model of the original design

The Norway bridge was also wood while the MIT students argued it was intended to be stone.

"RELATED VIDEOS: Thinkware Q800 Pro Dash Cam Captures Accident"

Yes, very related, Popular Mechanics. Keep pushing "video views" so the marketing team can show the executive team how great their engagement numbers are.

It would have been neat to see more pictures of... the bridge.

Normally, I'd downvote, but that was egregious. Forces the video to play in browser while reading the article without any intent to watch anything at all, let alone their completely unrelated video.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

"We can’t measure what counts, so we count what we can measure."

Ok, let's use the MIT press release instead. URL changed from https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a....

It's almost worth building the ability to submit additional sources of the same story and being able to vote them up till they become the main link

Who would identify which submissions are the same story?

I think it's just done by voting, anyone could submit an alternative link, but it would need X upvotes to be promoted to the primary link.

I can see how this might not work so well with contentious stories, but when it's just linking to the primary source vs a poorly written article on a secondary source it might improve the experience.

This is also true when something is paywalled but there are alternative versions.

Edit: In my mind it's an additional facet, rather than just being done in comments. Maybe it's not even visible unless you're a high karma individual.

Yes, this is close to the various scribbles in my head on this topic, which hopefully we can turn into working software one day.

Damn, that’s one useless website. Dozens of seconds pass and it still bounces about like a camel on crack.

With all these KPIs people like optimising for, can’t a low rage quit rate be one too?

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