211–220 of 278 posts
There's been a one-brick-thick wavy wall off a busy road in Cambridge for at least fifty years: https://goo.gl/maps/sxTsPW71F317gwK88 It kept getting hit by cars until they finally installed a guard rail.
I guess the force of impact would be greater relative to scraping a straight wall.
I see this a lot in the rural US with wooden fences but had no idea why it was done, but I guess its for the same reason (stability). Apparently they've done it since the 1600s. https://www.louispage.com/blog/bid/11160/worm-fence-what-is-... Still, this seemed totally unecessary until I realized this mean they dont have to put any posts into the ground. No digging holes, which would be really nice when you're trying…
The US is so bad at naming things! A Serpentine Wall sounds better than a Worm Fence or Snake Fence. Crinkle Crankle Wall is a bit more fun than ZigZag Fence. A Ribbon Wall seems like a nice thing to have on your property vs a Battlefield Fence.
Soda cans also have a counterintuitive efficiency feature: concave bottoms. If a can with a flat bottom held the same amount of soda, it would be shorter and have less surface area, but its metal body would need to be thicker to withstand the same pressure. In the end, it'd require more aluminum. https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/Science-Notebook/2015/0414... ^Probably not the best article for this, but it was easy t…
This feels a bit like diet clickbait... "use fewer bricks than a straight wall"* *A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not just length. My counter would be that from a practical perspective the amount of space wasted by the wavy design seems to negate the usefulness of the design. Probably makes the lawn crew dizzy when mowing it too!
this is an overly cynical take. headlines are brief by necessity. nobody would read that and think that a curved line from A to B is shorter than a straight line between the same points. the first paragraph explains it, > these wavy walls actually use less bricks than a straight wall because they can be made just one brick thin, while a straight wall—without buttresses—would easily topple over
I put the following prompt in GPT4:
create a professional title and a click bait title for the following article
Then provided the article. This was the output:
Professional Title: "Crinkle Crankle Walls: The Aesthetics and Efficiency of Serpentine Wall Construction"
Click Bait Title: "You Won't Believe How These Weird, Wavy Walls Use Less Bricks Than Straight Ones!"
This feels a bit like diet clickbait... "use fewer bricks than a straight wall"* *A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not just length. My counter would be that from a practical perspective the amount of space wasted by the wavy design seems to negate the usefulness of the design. Probably makes the lawn crew dizzy when mowing it too!
Do you also think corrugated cardboard is wasteful?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd much rather have a Battlefield Wall on my property in the US than a Ribbon Wall or Crinkle Crankle Wall. The latter two sound ridiculous. I really like "Serpentine Wall", but it sounds a little too technical for everyday conversation with nontechnical people
I suppose it's subjective but Crinkle Crankle is better because it sounds so ridiculous. Ribbon Wall doesn't sound any more ridiculous than same-shaped Ribbon Candy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_candy ) or Ribbon Cables ( https://www.fxpstore.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/ribbon-w... ), and ribbons don't call to mind atrocities or human suffering. Battlefields are terrible places where horrific things happe…
Would it be stronger for the same amount of bricks if it didn't have the inflection point where there is no curvature, and instead had intersecting arcs like: ︾︾︾︾ ?
My mental reasoning for this is that a (pseudo) sinusoid spends a lot more of its path further away from the centre. Thinking of it as a point moving along the path through time, it will dwell and the peaks, and cruise through he centre. The contribution of each brick to wall stiffness will be related to the cube of the distance from the centre line (neutral axis), so more 'time' spent at the peaks is best. This holds true on the macro scale, but could vary on the scale of a half 'wavelength' as the lack of inversion of curvature could be beneficial there.
Everything moderately reasonable seems to be better than a straight line in this instance. In the limit, two much thinner walls, far apart, is the optimal solution, but that becomes unreasonable as those walls must be coupled together to provide strength.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US is so bad at naming things! A Serpentine Wall sounds better than a Worm Fence or Snake Fence. Crinkle Crankle Wall is a bit more fun than ZigZag Fence. A Ribbon Wall seems like a nice thing to have on your property vs a Battlefield Fence.
I'd've called it a chazzwozzer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
they don't use less wood than a straight fence though :)
they should be able to. same physics applies, right? poles dont have to be as thick or as deep to resist the same torque, and if you could somehow make the pales curvy/corrugated, they could be thinner, too.
Corrugated cardboard just is a wavy wall, sandwiched in between two straight walls. You can also observe corrugated steel and its use in construction, shipping containers, etc. Because these are steel and stronger than paper, the sandwich layers are not needed
You can also peel the label of a tin (can) of baked beans in your cupboard to see the the ripples added for rigidity.
Undulations for rigidity are everywhere!