The “magical formula” for stairs.
If this rule isn’t followed when building stairs, then it feels uncomfortable and more accidents will actually happen there.
In easy terms, it says: 2x riser + tread = average step lenght, usually 63cm.
Oh man I hate it when stairs are not built to the proper ratio. It feels so weird.
I’m curious how this compares to eras before this formula was normalized and if this is universal or more so just a matter of keeping things the same so people get used to them.
Visit any old city in the UK (York and Edinburgh for example) and a lot of passages between streets have steps with uneven heights.
When you’re expecting it, its fine, you take extra care. But when its a modern building and they’ve fucked it up you really notice
When I did a tour of Edinburgh Castle, the guide said they’d do that deliberately to trip up invaders.
What if the invaders have the same in their castles at home…? 😉
(No, I don’t believe it at all. They just built something without thinking too much)
Same thing for castles/forts in Portugal.
Okay, sure, and watch out for Nessie. /s
Did they point down at a cupboard and tell you it was a tiny dungeon for torturing people, as well? That’s a classic.
I guess this is why the old-as-balls apartment house I live in, in the middle of the old city, has stair steps go higher further up.
Hundreds of years of burning coal has spread mercury compounds all over the land, so that quite often when they build a new dam for hydroelectric power it’s dissolved into the water and ends up concentrated in fishes that people eat.
having to be careful about how much fish you eat due to mercury is one of the top dystopian things to me. People think about agriculture and grains with civilization but when you look at how important and common fish was to our diet for so long. Its crazy.
And they feed fish products to cows and chickens. The mercury should be there, too.
Man, humans have fundamentally and irreversibly fucked up this planet. We burn coal, so we have that problem you mentioned. I learned recently how chemical companies have done decades of a poor job just dumping chemical waste wherever they want or developing things that does more harm than good at the planet’s expense.
Enjoy it while it’s here I guess.
There’s no way to make a backdoor for encryption that keeps the encryption secure. Politicians and government flunkies can’t seem to wrap their pea brains around that concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol
I’m surprised we don’t have global internet outages more often.
DNS constantly has weird little issues and attacks, same with ARP. Meanwhile, BGP just keeps on chugging along in the background, ignored and unappreciated, day in and day out.
Adding an extra lane to a congested road will always cause that road to be more congested, and will also increase traffic on nearby roads.
When China removed a highway, it reduced car traffic thought the entire city while not reducing the number of people travelling to and around the city.
The only solution to car traffic is viable alternatives to driving.
Tangential but nobody seems to know how to drive in traffic. Pick a lane and stay in it, leave extra following distance, and try to change speed as smoothly as possible. If everyone did these three things, traffic congestion would be significantly less severe.
Don’t forget zipper merging. I lived in an area where hundreds of hours spent commuting allowed me to observe the inability to merge was the primary driver of freeway congestion.
The main problem I’ve observed with zipper merging is nobody can seem to agree on what it is. People get aggressive when you try to use the available space on the road, and in discussions online it seems people think you’re trying to queue jump if you don’t merge as early as possible.
Probably not always. You build a 12 lane road entirely within a random small town, and it will stay empty and stupid. But, in the range of what actually might be built, yes, there’s pretty strong empirical evidence that cars fill any available space.
Which this actually isn’t a straight example of, exactly. Jevon’s paradox says more and better roads will mean more cars operating, not less. That happens, but in this case the increase is so great, that it leads to the same level of congestion on the roads all over again.
The wiki uses the example of coal. Better boilers and engines increased the use of coal, but it’s fair to say industrial Europe had better coal powered equipment afterwards, not the same or worse. (Although, to be fair, congestion is only one metric of traffic performance)
