Saturday, January 26, 2008

Building on Sand

So Mahalia, Stella, and I worked on some homework this morning for like 4 hours together. We made a lot of progress, mostly on our geotech class. Speaking of which, our professor last term made a really amusing comment towards the end.

Now geotechnical engineering is basically the study of soils and how well they hold under pressure. It's important for civil engineering since we haven't been able to design any anti-gravity machines yet so everything that's built rests on soil. There's three general different kinds of soil: clay, sand, and rocks (finer grain to coarser grains). And it turns out that building on sand is probably the best* way to go. Which is really funny since the Bible warns against building your house on sand. I think our professor concluded that the Bible must've had a different definition of sand.

*Okay, rocks are the best but you don't get any until you go really far down (bedrock). In order to support really tall buildings, people drill all the way down to the bedrock and pour in concrete (piling) to support these buildings.

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