The Glade 4.0

Edit: clarity

Why exactly does the Glade pics thread have a separate comments thread? I seriously have no idea. This has been bugging me for literally years, and I've never asked why.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

The separate thread for pictures was to, mostly, keep them out of other threads for people who don't want to load them at work, etc.

As to the separate comments thread, I think it was just to keep the picture thread less busy.... But it's a bit of a pain to read through the two, honestly.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Sorry, that might have been confusingly worded. My confusion is just over why the comments thread was a separate thread.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I figured, but I thought I might as well cover both bases

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Inevitably our picture threads devolved into discussions about said pictures. The story to picture ration was about 10:1. So now we have a thread that is only pictures to keep it less cluttered.

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Hokanu
Duty is a magnificent blessing because it is the sign of trust from the universe.
END OF LINE.

What Hokanu said is what the reasoning is behind it.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Yup, non-separate threads led to many comments, and few pictures. I kind of like it separate personally, then I know which thread is content and which thread is bickering. (lol)

I think the separate one was a wise choice...I'd hate to have to search through 35 pages of comments every time I wanted to look at a sexy Hokanu pic, kwim?

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

I like answering polls.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

A wizard did it.

Why are manhole covers round? Nobody will ever know the answer to these questions.

It is a shape that will not allow the lid to accidentally be lost down the hole that it covers when it is removed.

/sagenod

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

Cause if they were square they wouldn't fit over the manhole?

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Yes I know, it was an attempt at a joke.

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http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/220/why-are-manhole-covers-round

The "they won't fall in" theory may have something to do with it, but I think that's mostly an unintended perk. In the case of sewer manhole covers, at least, there's a far more direct reason. Sewer manhole covers are round because sewer manholes are round. And sewer manholes are round because they frequently serve as junction structures for multiple sewer lines being joined at arbitrary angles. In point of fact, before most state/local regs started requiring the use of manholes every X feet, even on straight segments (for better maintenance access), sewer manholes were generally only placed where you had a horizontal point of inflection.

The point, here, is that a round cross-section has radial symmetry. In looks the same no matter what angle (in the plane of the cross-section) you approach it from. This simplifies the initial design, and also makes it much easier to tap into existing manholes with new lines wherever and however you need to. Using rectangular structures would be a lot less convenient.

Nevertheless, they use rectangular vaults a lot in storm sewer systems (almost exclusively, as far as I know), but the design considerations are a bit different. Storm sewers have a lot of issues with branches and debris clogging junctions and obstructing flow. Unlike sanitary sewers, pipes are frequently joined so that they point towards the structure's discharge instead of just pointing into the center of the structure. Since they don't joint at a perpendicular angle, you need a large, more-or-less flat surface to intersect with. You could accomplish that with a round structure, but it would have to be impractically large, especially since drainage pipe tends to be larger than sanitary sewer pipe in the first place. Or at least, I think that's the rationale. I'm not a civil engineer; I just work with them. They still (generally) use round manhole covers on the rectangular vaults, though.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

That's all mostly irrelevant. Consider that you could still put a square hole on the end of a cylinder.

It's generally easier to get stuff through a round aperture than through a square aperture. That's as true of people as it is of water. The round hole is more structurally secure than a square hole (not that a mansquare cover would collapse under the weight of a car). It takes less metal to make a round hole, because the corners of the square are waste area. Finally, it's a lot easier to make a round hole. You can do that with a drill. If you want to make a square hole, you need to measure right angles and cut right lines.

Once we've established a compelling reason for round holes, in the event that we have a square tube, we'll still want to use round lids for it because they're already available on the market. I mean, we could design a square lid, but there's this perfectly good round one sitting in the back of the truck already.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Manholes are serious business.


This part is true, and is largely the reason why rectangular storm drain vaults still have round access covers.

However...

Actually, not really. By and large, manholes aren't cylinders. The main body of the manhole is cylindrical, but the upper most segment is a (usually) concentric cone. There is no "top" of the manhole into which you can cut any kind of shape. The rim of the manhole is nothing more than the chopped off tip of that cone. Transitioning from the manhole's circular cross-section to a square rim just doesn't make any sense at all. The shape would be really bizarre, and probably not structurally sound. You could probably manage with a fiberglass manhole, but most sanitary sewer manholes are concrete, and the rebar pattern would be like...M. C. Escher. Doing this back in ye olden dayes with brick sewers would be basically impossible.

If the manhole is some other shape, the lid shape will follow suit. For instance, the telecom industry is mostly using cylindrical fiberglass manholes these days, but prior to that, it was fairly common to use square manholes with square rims (no taper). The ones I've seen while surveying usually just have some kind of diamond plate square hatch set on top. I'm not sure how they keep water out.


Only if we can't predict the shape of the thing going through the opening. A square object does not fit more easily through a round hole than a square one. And for a square object, a square opening is the most efficient. The cross section of the human body is irregular, of course, but it's roughly elliptical. If we're going to make an ease-of-access argument, manhole lids should probably be elliptical. In the absence of an ellipse, it's not clear to me (without more data about the shape of the human body) whether a rectangle or a circle would be a better approximation.


Again, in the case of manholes, this is not how it works. You aren't cutting a hole out of a solid surface. You're chopping the end off a tapered tube. Material waste could only be a factor where you're carving the shape out of a solid surface. This might be the case with rectangular drainage structures like I mentioned earlier, although I'm fairly sure the manway opening is cast along with the rest of the vault, not cut out of it later.

But even if it were, the manway opening is significantly smaller than the surface you're cutting into, so "waste area" wouldn't be at issue. The material efficiency would be purely a function of the total area of the opening; shape being irrelevant. Of course, a 26" diameter round opening would waste less than a 26" x 26" square opening. However, this is still largely irrelevant. The cost of the lid and the cost of a few cubic inches of concrete is a trivial component of the cost of a manhole or concrete vault. It's not something you would bother taking into consideration.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Wizards did it... more specifically, ninja wizards.

I think at some point in the distant past, perhaps on the original glade, a few folks had the habit of being assholes in the picture threads, making rude comments just to rile people up.

I think originally, the idea of splitting the comments into a separate thread would discourage this behavior to a degree, and hopefully encourage people to post more...