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Back in '09, my foreman showed me a trick for keeping a line straight on a long wall. We were building a 50-foot retaining wall in Phoenix and the string kept sagging. He grabbed a couple of old spark plugs from his truck and tied them on as weights. Worked perfectly.

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3 Comments
abbyd36
abbyd3612d ago
Wow, that's real-world physics solving a problem no textbook covers.
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nina_butler
Real-world physics" is exactly it. Textbooks give you the clean version, but actual problems are messy. You end up using half-remembered basics in weird ways that would make a professor cringe. It's less about knowing the right formula and more about hacking together a solution that works.
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patricia_kelly
Real-world physics solving a problem no textbook covers" is how it always feels at first. But later, you realize the textbook actually gave you the pieces, just not the specific picture on the box. That messy hacking is still applying the basics, just in a new order.
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