Re: The end is nigh

On 2007-06-22, Alan J Rosenthal (aka Bruce)
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 05:27:13 +0000 (UTC), Seth <sethb@xxxxxxxxx>
Alan J Rosenthal <flaps@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Btw, the standard answer for "why are access covers[1] round?" is also wrong.

The standard answer is "because the holes they cover are round". How
is that wrong?

That's the smart-ass peanut gallery type answer, and it's correct, but
not extremely informative.

Dan Holdsworth <dan1701usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
The engineering answer is because it is impossible to drop a round cover
down the hole it was covering,

That's the standard answer which is wrong. It's generally accompanied by
a footnote which says "of course, there's a small lip around the cover",
and therein hides the fuzzy reasoning. Round is a good shape because it
decreases the size of the lip required. You could make a square cover which
can't fall down a square hole, even if placed along the diagonal, if you
made the lip big enough. With no lip at all, the round cover will fall
down the hole just fine. More realistically, you could quite reasonably
make a, say, hexagonal cover which can't fall down a hexagonal hole, but it
would still take a larger lip than would the round one, so it's inferior,
but only for that reason.

Yeah, but a circle is just an n-agonal where n tends towards infinity
(for very big values of 72). As you increase n from 4, the necessary
lip gets smaller and smaller.

For infinite n, the lip can be infinitely small. Yes, it just
happened to be my lip that our most expensive and heaviest instrument
got caught on today as we were manning the crane. Did no damage.
Because the lip was infinitely small (all the clearances seemed to be
off today. This is a "cannot happen" condition, I thought, given the
guide posts).


Anyway, my round tuit doesn't fit in the hole.

--
TimC
Look - a diversion! It's shiny! -- Daniel Stone
.

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