Recent content by curiousnoncat

Thanks Jack, but I am aware of the derivation for bending stress and the distribution of shear stress in vertical and longitudinal planes, so what I want to know is how you would calculate vertical compression or tension in a beam at an arbitrary point. For example, surely as mfb said, right...

By the y direction, I meant the vertical direction on element c, which has no stress indicated. And what I'm really interested in hearing is a response to that part of the question, about the state of stress in the horizontal beam.

I'm a student taking a non-calculus strength of materials course, and I believe I have what is probably a very simple misconception. I'm wondering why in the "eccentrically loaded column" b), which has two point loads placed at distances of equal magnitude from a centroidal axis, the moments...

I was reading this interesting article on different varieties of roller coaster loops, and I know nothing about calculus or ODEs, but I was wondering what the constant-g loop in section 3.2 would actually look like for some typical initial velocity. Is it conceivably possible for a rider to...

Physics is what will make clean and efficient energy technologies viable and cheap enough to be used more widely. They're working on different photoelectric technologies to make solar panels cheaper to manufacture. But it's not just limited to solar power, either. In the (possibly near)...

Interesting. I was just brainstorming before I saw your post, and what I have thought of is a much simpler electronic way to get random digits. I think if a person weighs themselves with a high accuracy scale with many digits after the decimal, and then drinks some water or eats some food...

That seems to have good potential, if there is a timepiece in the room, or the individual can count a consistent 'unit' of mental time, not necessarily seconds. I guess once you found the average rate then you would just measure the small variations from the average.

There are, as fargoth said, random elements to human behavior, I just want to know some clever ways to observe them. Here's a bad example: If you could lift your arm and let it fall back down onto a surface, and use its position to create a random number. However, that probably wouldn't...

I believe I have heard about that. However, that requires a computer program designed specifically for detecting such things. I'm mostly interested in things that can be done by monitoring yourself or performing some action analogous to a dice roll, using only the mind and body. I'm sort of...

I'm posting this here because it's neither fully statistics or biology, and I have no technical knowledge of statistics. It's well known that humans have trouble behaving truly randomly. If a group of people is asked to choose a random number between 1 and 10, each person is very likely to...