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Default Bull**** by the numbers


"Tim Wescott" wrote in message
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On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:11:27 -0800, SteveB wrote:

Some of those Toyota ads during the Daytona 500 were amazing. I owned a
Toyota SR5, and it was a good truck, but just a wannabe truck.

They say the PU will take 30,000 of energy, and drop an obviously empty
box into the bed from a height, suspended from a helicopter.

Now, I know the box didn't weigh 30,000# or the tires would have burst.
I know that an object gains energy as it falls.

Can anyone estimate what the box actually weighed?

I think the ad is misleading to the 99% of the people who don't
understand what they are seeing.

Some of those other ads are very questionable to me, too. Show me real
life situations, and not something that I'll never ever run into in
driving.

Steve


I think I saw that ad, but with the sound turned off. You mean you don't
live in a place where helicopters routinely drop large crates into the
backs of moving pickups? Here in Oregon City we have to keep an eye out
for that all the time. We just listen for a helicopter and start
swerving when we do (unless we drive Toyotas, in which case we know it'll
turn out OK). However, just east of here in Estacada and Molalla it
happens so often that truck owners openly display rifles in the back
windows of their trucks, as a warning to the helicopter pilots that they
may be shot down if they make the attempt.

Of course, these guys rarely try this trick if you have a canopy, a pipe
rack or even a tonneau cover, so the country-boy wannabes who move to
Estacada or Molalla for the cheap housing and proximity to hiking (at all
times of the year but hunting season, where you may encounter men with
Guns), will often have these mounted on their trucks as protection.

Did they really say "30,000 pounds of energy"? If so, they were
emphatically stating that they don't know physics, or that in their
considered opinion you don't, because a pound is not a measure of
energy. To be excruciatingly technical, a pound is a measure of force,
which makes a foot-pound a measure of energy (as well as of torque, it
depends on what you do with it). Even if you take a pound as a measure
of mass (it isn't, although engineers do use a "pound-mass" to mean
approximately 1/32 of a slug) then it's still not a measure of energy
unless you either (a) specify a velocity (squared) to multiply the mass
by, or (b) assume that they meant the energy released by directly
converting over 13000 kilograms of mass to energy, in which case the
truck, the helicopter, and possibly the entire earth would have been
blown up.

--
Tim Wescott
Control systems and communications consulting
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Need to learn how to apply control theory in your embedded system?
"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" by Tim Wescott
Elsevier/Newnes, http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html


Tim,
That's exactly why I moved from Oregon City. I own a Chevy, and with all the
helicopters flying around (especially during the pre-Christmas tree harvest
season), I was at my wit's end. Simply never knowing when or where a 30,000
# mystery box would land in the back of my pickup was more than I could
bear.
Been flying lately, or has the rain got all of you guys grounded?
Paul