Perhaps not everything should be seen from the viewpoint of evolution:
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Speaking of conspiracy theories and monkey pox, @Randy ,
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There was one worse than that that one of our churchâs elders found when he was about 18: He grew up in West Virginia, and at one point he was driving with several friends in the car, and saw that the road along the side of the mountain seemed to disappear ahead. He hit the breaks, stopped a bit before the end, and found that the road just ended at a few hundred foot-drop. No signs, no warnings, just a 300+ foot cliff to drive off. He said that he and friends walked up to the edge to check if there were any remains of cars at the bottom; there werenât any, and they turned the car around.
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Yikes! Apparently only locals drove that road and they all knew?
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Preciselyâwhy put up a sign if everyone who ever drives there knows about it?
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It we assume that the baskets are about 1.4 m tall (thus that the wheels are about 24 m diameter), that the first one is spinning at about 0.7 m/s (within a reasonable range), and that the centrifugal acceleration for the middle one is about 7 m/s (plausible from the drawingâthe tilt angles on the middle one canât all be rightâif the ones at the middle are right, the top should be upside-down). For the third one, the rim is going at about 120 m/s; thus the acceleration is about 116 gs at the passengersâ heads and 106 gs at their feet. That would feel like getting run over by a tank, and would break the Ferris wheel in almost every possible way at once.
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Of course not â it all got sold at the salvage yard.
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I never heard how accessible the bottom was from a different direction.
Thinking of signs and what local people know . . . .
Thereâs a sign on a road coming up from a bay near me where, going uphill, two roads converge to become one. On the southern road thereâs a stop sign with a sign that says, âNo stop required for right turnâ.
The problem is that proceeding at that point is really going straight ahead. Locals know what it means, so they breeze up the hill and right past the sign, but tourists donât see a right turn so they stop. This has the result that near-collisions by someone who knows the road almost rear-ending someone who doesnât happen fairly often, and occasionally the collision happens.
People have recommended making a sign that says âUphill Traffic Not Required to Stopâ, but the county road people say they canât afford to have a custom sign made, while the state says the sign is on a county road, not on the state highway (which is the northern road merging there), so they canât do anything about it.
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One big wrongful death lawsuit might change their mind. I mean, how much can a single custom sign cost.
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Pretty sure that asphyxiation would still be the first cause of death until about 450 MYA.
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They would desperately be trying to dial in the Carboniferous before fading to black.
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This is great! Love it!
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And after they visted the carboniferous the came back to everyone having antennae! And Jesus was a sentient kangaroo!
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A custom highway sign that meets the standards set by the state and by the federal government make those signs astoundingly expensive. When I was a university student and visited a friend in a fraternity a guy just down the hall from him had had quite the wall decorations â a bunch of highway signs retrieved from brush or just lying along the road. I use the past tense because someone reported his collection and some folks from the highway department came to take them away. He asked if he could buy them, since it hadnât been hurting the highway department for him to have them. The head of the crew shook his head and asked him if he happened to have $37,000 handy, because that was the replacement cost for the signs he had. How many signs? Just seven, all standard and very common, not custom.
That was the cost a few decades ago; prices have just gotten worse, so I wouldnât be surprised if a custom sign for that spot came out above $10,000. For a small county thatâs a serious bit of change!
If it succeeded â Iâve seen two instances where a number of people had been seriously injured and entire neighborhoods were demanding better signage, and nothing happened until a kid got killed and a teen got killed, respectively. No lawsuit would have gone anywhere because it says right in every driverâs manual that a driver must pay attention to the road and exercise due caution â and unless youâre driving a truck with a load of gravel or something equally massive/heavy on the road I talked about, there is room to stop well before hitting a car with a driver who got it wrong.
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Yikes. Not sure which state, or if all states are the same. If it is that expensive then maybe someone should look at why and maybe figure out how to lower the costs. Part of the reason these prices surprise me is that my father used to work for the city of Seattle in their sign shop. About 30 years ago, because he knew I liked cows, he surprised me with a pair of cattle crossing signs for my birthday. These were the real deal, one with the cow silhouette and the other saying âCattle Crossing.â He made them himself in the sign shop where he worked, with permission, of course, and I know he did not have the kind of money to spend that much on my birthday. I think part of the reason they allowed him to do it was because he used two slightly damaged sign blanks to make them, but still, I find it hard to believe it would have cost more than a few hundred each at most to make them. I still have them hanging in my office.
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