If you want to see all the maths, check out the Stan Wagon write-up: community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/2917199 Thanks to Jane Street for sponsoring my video and the Hat Competition. I want to see loads of SUM viewer entries! momath.org/hatcontest/

@ParasocialCatgirl

9 ай бұрын

​@@DontReadMyProfilePicture.57shut up spambot

@aguyontheinternet8436

9 ай бұрын

ALSO there's a math youtuber that had an entire series about shapes moving flatly when given a specific plane, pretty sure he got started through SoME, his name is Morphocular

@KenFullman

9 ай бұрын

Wouldn't it have been better to have a little gearbox on the winch. Then you could have a ratio that would only take a couple of minutes to move the bridge. If you're struggling you could then change gear to make it easier but take longer.

@FHBStudio

9 ай бұрын

I had an architecture student today I told about math in design and sent him this video. Very fortuitous. Great video too.

@WillMoff0

9 ай бұрын

what are you talking about not being an applied mathematician, you apply math to the real world for all kinds of stuff, like those disco balls

When artists and architects team up, engineers invent new swear words

@mrdan2898

9 ай бұрын

lol, yeah.

@JP-jf1oc

9 ай бұрын

lol

@diatonicdelirium1743

9 ай бұрын

Usually because the clever marketeer already sold it!

@BEdwardStover

9 ай бұрын

Yet it is the new solutions that engineer invent that forward the industry. New inventions are new ways to build.

@diatonicdelirium1743

9 ай бұрын

@@BEdwardStover No doubt, and there is nothing like a practical implementation to show the flaws and/or benefits of a design. Paper is very patient, but moving parts may scream at you!

"you can't just turn up and start cranking it" applies to most places tbh

@c4ashley

9 ай бұрын

There were 69 likes on this comment before I got here. 😥 I'm so sorry.

@slaney141

9 ай бұрын

Scrolled for this. 8th comment down.

@Acidlib

9 ай бұрын

“You’ve gotta contact people in advance” advice that can apply to so many areas of life

@dielaughing73

9 ай бұрын

Sadly true

@Delaterius

9 ай бұрын

challenge accepted

Tale as old as time. Architect: Hey this looks cool, should be easy! Civil Engineer: Oh brother here we go again. Tribute to RCE.

@robguyatt9602

9 ай бұрын

Then the mechanical engineer turns up and.... WFT? 20 minutes? What were you thinking? Put a bloody motor on it! And all the pedestrians and boaties cheered wildly. :)

@iluomopeloso

9 ай бұрын

​@@robguyatt9602Or just a series of gears to provide some mechanical advantage? Seriously, this is not difficult. Twenty minutes of cranking is a *lot*.

@erichurst7897

9 ай бұрын

@@iluomopeloso It does have gears to give advantage, that's why 1 person can crank a wheel to make it turn. That comes at the expense of making it a lot slower, however.

@Sekir80

9 ай бұрын

Yea, I was thinking of RCE when they started discussing the challenges.

@leandervr

9 ай бұрын

@@iluomopeloso If you want to make it go faster with gears, it'd require MORE force.

"This bridge turns so efficiently that all physical labour is now done by one Australian man."

@only20frickinletters

9 ай бұрын

underrated

@wobblysauce

9 ай бұрын

I would like to take the roll.

@vcprado

9 ай бұрын

Neat 📸

@ichbinein123

9 ай бұрын

Nice reference, mate

Pulled a fast one on Tom Scott didn't ya?

@cam5556

9 ай бұрын

We call it Dereking around these parts

@Werdna12345

9 ай бұрын

Hand cranking for 20 mins! I’m not sure I would call that a fast one 😉

@MrWshaw

9 ай бұрын

@@cam5556 until Matt gets reverse-dereked by tom

@blauw67

9 ай бұрын

​​@@MrWshaw a Parker Derek?

@antilukeskywalker

9 ай бұрын

Well, Tom is retiring the format, so someone needs to pick up the torch.

"Not normally an applied mathematician" made me lol. Great design

@fenix849

9 ай бұрын

Yep solid joke.

@alexrains1893

9 ай бұрын

As an extremely amateurish maths student, I sure enjoyed this gaffe, mostly because I understood it.

@DavidBurstrom

9 ай бұрын

But he's at least standing up!

@hps362

9 ай бұрын

A real zinger line

@ezekielbrockmann114

9 ай бұрын

Although nobody forced him to do it, let hope he didn't derive any work related injury to his rotator cuff.

I feel a missed opportunity to have a tiny scale model of the bridge for people to play with near the crank. And of course a way to tie them together so the model moves when the big one does.

@pvanukoff

9 ай бұрын

Anytime you put something out to the public to "play with" it's going to be broken in short order. Then good luck getting the funding to fix or replace it.

@worldbfr3e263

9 ай бұрын

@@pvanukoffYou are so right. One time I made a diorama for a science project that was on display to the public and some "prankster" hit it with a AGM-65 Maverick missile carrying a WDU-20/B shaped-charge warhead fired from a F/A-18 Hornet.

@nomadMik

9 ай бұрын

​@@pvanukoffNot always, especially if it's designed with a bit of thought-there's a standard I call _shroomer-proof_ at Burning Man-but you're unfortunately right most of the time.

@ubermidget2

9 ай бұрын

@@nomadMik Don't worry, the universe just made a better shroomer

@BILLY-px3hw

9 ай бұрын

Turns out the maths don't work on the smaller models

"There's poetry in it and it "only" takes twenty minutes of winding..." thus speaks a true artist.

@fghjconner

9 ай бұрын

Spoken like someone who won't be doing the cranking.

@JohanAulin

9 ай бұрын

@@fghjconner Or by one who doesn't need to wait 40 minutes to get to the other side. 😱

@AnasHart

9 ай бұрын

Yeah, I love the engineering behind it, but 20 mins to turn by hand... idk about that one

@LanfordU

9 ай бұрын

Also “zero effort!” Lol what a joke.

@skilletborne

8 ай бұрын

Nah, artists are okay with doing mundane activity for an incredibly long time if it's part of the process of making something new

This feels straight out of the poly bridge leaderboards

@NoNameAtAll2

9 ай бұрын

made by aliensrock

@Magpie_Media

9 ай бұрын

@@NoNameAtAll2 Sponsored by Niff-Tea.

@ImmortalAbsol

9 ай бұрын

@@Magpie_Media I understood that reference!

@mauri7959

9 ай бұрын

@@NoNameAtAll2 The hate for hidraulics makes me think it was made by a certain Civil Engineer actually

@BobBigWheels

9 ай бұрын

​@@mauri7959and not an imaginary one, but a Real one

idk, personally I've always thought we needed more complicated bridges. Why should buildings get all the fun?

@kempo_95

9 ай бұрын

Trust me, a normal draw bridge is pretty complex.

@jmunt

9 ай бұрын

@@kempo_95 yeahhh... but with engineering inflation these days (with rotating buildings and huge overhanging glass infinity pools and crazy twisting designs and whatnot), complexity just doesn't buy as much as it used to, and I think bridges are due for a raise 🤪

@totally_not_a_bot

9 ай бұрын

Compared to normal drawbridges, this one is remarkably simple. It's kinda fancy is all.

@snex000

9 ай бұрын

How much of other people's money do you think you should be entitled to spend on such things? Buildings are privately owned, so they can waste as much as they want.

@namethathasntbeentakenyetm3682

9 ай бұрын

Based

Haha, Matt's joke while he was cranking the wheel that he usually isn't an "applied" mathematician was funny

It's genuinely a pleasure to see an artist come up against engineering issues when it comes to scaling something up. Art and science are the two best things humans do and they don't interact often enough for my tastes.

@scania9786

9 ай бұрын

And when he did, he punted it to the engineer...

@thewhitefalcon8539

9 ай бұрын

@@scania9786 and the engineer got to experience some art! I'm sure they get bored of pumping out square concrete structures all day...

@MegaLokopo

9 ай бұрын

@@thewhitefalcon8539 No, we don't, art is a stupid waste of time and is nothing like science, technology, engineering, or math.

@grahamwilson8843

9 ай бұрын

​@@MegaLokopowow! What a depressing statement! I'm not here to throw shade on anyone's preferences, but do you truly believe that art is just a waste of time? No music, free expression, or even movies? Just math problems and scientific research? Again, not trying to put down your preferences, that statement just seems a bit heavy-handed. 🤷‍♂️

@Gakulon

9 ай бұрын

​@@MegaLokopo This MF eats grey nutrient paste only

Awesome video, i love how matt almost seems annoyed that "this is reality and there is friction" 4:57

@falsemcnuggethope

6 ай бұрын

Needs more lube 💦

I love the synergy of the artist-engineer partnership. I'm a chemist that works with chemical engineers and I love the reality/hate the resistance that they inject into a solution and they roll their eyes a lot.

This bridge looks like a mathematician's dream and an engineer's nightmare, and it sounds like that's exactly what it was.

@grahamwilson8843

9 ай бұрын

Maybe a boring engineer! It seems like this guy was quite up to the challenge, and is better for it in the end.

@jAujAl1

9 ай бұрын

@@grahamwilson8843 It's not boring, I'll give you that. But the amount of shortcomings, drawbacks and potential failure points this design has would never make it in any public contract. No engineer would ever proudly list the need for a hand crank in order to detect suspicious noises from failure as a feature, not even the not boring ones.

@the11382

9 ай бұрын

@@jAujAl1 Its not like the bridge will collapse like a drawbridge does. If the Center of Mass is well in the middle, I doubt it would roll much if the cables snap(additional safety mechanisms aside).

@bramvanduijn8086

9 ай бұрын

@@jAujAl1 That's not what the hand crank is for, the hand crank is for opening and closing the bridge. That it also functions as a failure detector is the result of having a simple system: You get direct observation of issues thrown in for free. Adding a seperate interface with sensors would add more failure states, increasing the chance of unexpected interactions and requiring higher training level of operators. Complexity (i.e. more parts and tighter coupling of said parts) may sometimes be necessary, but it is never in and of itself a good thing. At best complexity is a necessary evil.

@jAujAl1

9 ай бұрын

@@the11382 Cables snapping is not the failure point I'm worried about. If anything, the constant height for the center of mass ensures the square is always at an equilibrium and won't move if the cable snaps. What I'm worried about is the integrity of the square structure. The uneven mass distribution adds a lot of stress to the beams, and a square is not that strong of a shape in the first place, especially a square with literal cut corners. Add the fact that the whole cube lacks two edges, and that the resting place for the bridge will have the concrete weighted edge stay upward in equilibrium, and I could perfectly see the bridge snap sideways after some wear.

I worked like 50 seconds from this bridge. Used to sit there on lunch breaks and stuff. Super cool bridge, they were trying to get it done for ages and had a gofundme or something for it and needed £200k or so which I don't think they reached. Odd little area in the middle of the industrial estate with few people passing through. The number of people passing through should shoot up a lot by around 2030 when nearby housing devellopment(+ a possible huge data center) are done so the river path/Lea Way is finally completed all the way to Canning Town and the thames so it'll actually be a useful route for lots of people to use. At the moment the path this is on is pretty much pointless since it doesn't go anywhere. They're wanting to build up the rest of the site with a few more things eventually.

@Gorgonzeye

7 ай бұрын

So nobody wanted it and even still they are cursed with it.

@awesomeferret

4 ай бұрын

Yep, that confirms my opinion about this being overengineered. I and some guys in their 20s with welding skills could make an elevator style of bridge for under 50k. 200k for that, good gosh!

@bigbeans202

3 ай бұрын

​@@awesomeferretI mean, it's meant to be art, not the most effective solution

Nice idea ! But I wonder.... would a peddling mechanism ( like a home trainer ) with a big gear ratio not be more practical to move that bridge? It would make moving that bridge easier and pleasant than turning a hand crank for 20 minutes.

@chrisj683

9 ай бұрын

My RSI is flaring up just thinking about it.

@clementm5417

9 ай бұрын

A bike with it's original gearbox so each person can choose his own pace.

@88porpoise

9 ай бұрын

My money is that, if there is ever more than a couple boats a week needing it moved, there will soon be an electric motor on it.

@nomadMik

9 ай бұрын

​@@88porpoiseI was thinking that, too, but I think the pedalling idea would be a nice compromise that would at least put the electric motor off.

@charlesgalant8271

9 ай бұрын

My 'simple' solution would be to just have an attachment for a hand drill that can spin the pin in place of the crank. You always have the manual backup, but don't have to crank for 40 minutes in the elements (both ways, remember) just to get a boat through.

I think what's going to happen is the novelty of hand-cranking the mechanism will wear off and it will eventually be fitted with (also a low-tech, non-sensored) version that uses a motor to do the cranking. It will have to have a momentary switch that a person will hold until the bridge has made it's transition.

@Vinemaple

9 ай бұрын

Maybe in London, among artists and hipsters.. but canal folks across the rest of England don't seem to mind operating Victorian-era locks by hand. However, Matt's dismissal of motorized operation, and how safe it can be, is indeed rather thoughtless.

@ferretyluv

9 ай бұрын

Or they could just add more gears and pulleys to make it more efficient. As Archimedes said, get a large enough lever and fulcrum and you can move the world.

@mikem3707

9 ай бұрын

You know somebody is going to turn up with a battery Drill!

@fghjconner

9 ай бұрын

@@ferretyluv Sure, but making it easier makes it slower and visa-versa.

@asj3419

8 ай бұрын

The dismissal reasons felt a bit weird to me to be honest. It's not that hard to design around the problems that he stated just by using a cordless drill with a torque limiter.

a bicycle kind of setup would probably make more sense 😄 Super interesting, this just motivates me more to finally continue my maths degree soon🙌❤️

@chriswest1996

9 ай бұрын

Most unpowered things on the English canals are cranked: e.g. lock gate paddles, lock guillotine gates, canal bridges. So, it's consistent.

@korenn9381

9 ай бұрын

@@chriswest1996 still, pedalling would make it a lot easier.

@chriswest1996

9 ай бұрын

@@korenn9381 Pedaling is very effective compared to hand cranking, for sure.

@monhi64

9 ай бұрын

Took me a good moment to understand that because I assumed you wanted to incorporate the bike into the bridges design trying to comprehend what that could even look like

@Moraziel

9 ай бұрын

@@monhi64 the mother of all peeny-farthings

It appears the designers did not anticipate that people would need to be kept from attempting to cross the bridge when it is absent.

@ferncat1397

9 ай бұрын

Yes that crossed my mind too. It means the bridge will be out of action for over 40 minutes every time it has to be moved.

@ancellery6430

9 ай бұрын

@@ferncat1397 the only other solution would be a full draw bridge, which would probably be 10x more expensive. This is just a piece of metal with a rope and crank

@ZeroPlayerGame

9 ай бұрын

If I were blind or hard of seeing, I would never go anywhere near this, word.

@short600

9 ай бұрын

I think from what he said about needing to contact people to use the bridge that the crank won’t always be attached or accessible

@ZeroPlayerGame

9 ай бұрын

@@short600 the problem of not noticing the bridge is drawn is not related to the problem of someone drawing the bridge when you weren't supposed to.

I forgot this was a Stand-up Maths video and not a Tom Scott video whilst the architect was talking

It should automatically lift a barrier across the crossing as its rolls, and then lower it as it rolls back.

@CraigClarkson

9 ай бұрын

One could just integrate some light weight skirting on the pedestrian ends at the "top", hopefully without totally throwing off the center of gravity that is at the heart of the whole endeavor. When the bridge flips, the barricades are also then in position.

@brokenwave6125

9 ай бұрын

It’s not even open yet

This is the best Tom Scott video this year. I really love the designer's idea for having tradition and interactivity in the bridge.

I love the fact that an elliptic integral showed up. Here we are centuries after Euler and others first studied them. Of course, as mathematicians showed long ago, elliptic integrals do not have elementary anti-derivatives hence the need for numerical methods. I seriously hope they make a plaque on the bridge with the integral.

That's really cool. I always loved the square-wheeled bike. It would be nice if there was a scale model of the bridge next to it that people could wind whenever they liked.

Seems like a much simpler (but less cool) design variation would be a straight track along the canal walls (at a lower elevation), and a circular bridge, with a flat bridge deck part way up from the bottom of the circle. Same approach with adding weight along the upper portion of the circle to move the center of gravity to the center of the circle. It would take a longer track however as the circumference of a larger circle would exceed the perimeter of the current design.

An unexpected bonus of this would be also that the bridge cleans itself! Now, the canal on the other hand...

@ZedaZ80

9 ай бұрын

Good idea! Time to make a rotating canal!

@ilyapopov823

9 ай бұрын

@@ZedaZ80 Already exists: see Falkirk Wheel

@thesavageone8685

2 ай бұрын

How do I see you everywhere

There's some irony building a complicated bridge like this and yet caring about removing the complexity of electronics.

@karls8103

8 ай бұрын

cant wait for that wire there using to give n whip around slicing the person cranking it n half n causing the bridge to move to quick breaking n sicking a boat underneath

@TantalumPolytope

3 ай бұрын

@@karls8103 Probably won't happen. Also, you should brush up on your grammar.

This feels like something Tom scott would make

@terrynicol2098

9 ай бұрын

The crossover we all need.

@dingo4530

9 ай бұрын

​@@terrynicol2098technically, it's a bridge

This video has such a "tom Scott" vibe. Nice work.

Whoever arranged funding is also a genius, or will hopefully be remembered as one. Funding functional art is a risky endeavor. This one turned out so well (both in artistry and functionality) that it could be a nice funding model. There should be prizes, you know.

That animation at 6:45 helps tremendously to explain the challenge that they had to calculate.

I feel like this is the sort of problem engineers live for. I feel like a lot of the job is probably running through the motions, walking well-troden ground and just applying it to something in particular. Meanwhile, this is a hyper-specific challenge that hadn't been solved yet, and require some, well, enginuity!

Just one thing to add, it's very easy to detect if a motor is suddenly pulling too hard, by measuring the wattage of it, it will take more power of the bridge is stuck for the motor to move, so if you just put a fuse type electrical component on it, that would do it

@ZacDonald

9 ай бұрын

$20 cordless drills even have a similar feature to avoid stripping screws. I do understand the ritual and human aspect part, just that 20 minutes is a bit too long, especially when it's twice a week.

@peterfireflylund

9 ай бұрын

@@ZacDonaldyeah… it will have a motor (or better gearing) soon.

@thewhitefalcon8539

9 ай бұрын

i think there are torque limiting gears. Lego mindstorms kits had one

@CMDRunematti

9 ай бұрын

@@thewhitefalcon8539 you mean clutches? Tapping drills have them to not break the tap. Cars too, to be able to start. But CNC machines just measure the power of the main spindle to notice if it's too easy to spin. That means the tool broke, and they stop.

@dodsg

9 ай бұрын

The trouble with all of those mechanisms is making them account for variable loads. On a windy day the base load could be higher than a "triggering load" on a calm day. I'm sure it's a solvable problem if you allow for other inputs, but I don't think it's as straightforward as a basic torque limited motor.

"When you have a person rolling it and something goes wrong they stop." (Paraphrasing) This man has too much faith in people.

@kaitlyn__L

9 ай бұрын

"It got a bit difficult to crank all of a sudden... so I just pushed really hard until it felt normal again!" Says the person who broke the gearbox.

@beeble2003

9 ай бұрын

It's not even about people being "good". If you're opening the bridge for the first time, you have no idea if it's supposed to be completely smooth the whole way, or if it's normal for it to get difficult. Indeed, you _expect_ it to be difficult to move an enormous steel cube, so you're definitely going to force it if it gets stiff.

@DanielsPolitics1

9 ай бұрын

I think my real issue with the idea that motor operates bridges will just break is that he has no idea that bridge operators exist, or what they do.

@Vinemaple

9 ай бұрын

The only caveat to this statement that I can think of is that it's in London, not Los Angeles or Moscow. In the UK, it's usually the canal boat operators who operate the bridges and locks themselves, and they mostly have experience with this kind of thing. I'm not sure that's a valid caveat.

@beeble2003

9 ай бұрын

​@@Vinemaple Certainly most locks and bridges on the UK canal network are operated by the boater. There are some exceptions for high-traffic locks where the Canal and River Trust operates the locks to coordinate between multiple boats and make things go faster. However, from the video, I get the impression that this bridge is on a small branch off the main canal that's only used to get to one boatyard or something like that. If that is the case, since only customers of that yard would pass through the bridge, it _may_ be that the yard's staff operate the bridge, rather than the boater.

Upvoted for the kitty near the end. That's a cool cat that appreciates the mathematical purr-cision that went into making this bridge work!

Oh hey anyone else seen those videos about roads for square wheels? Made for a SoME I believe, maybe SoME2? Great videos

@estebanmarco8755

9 ай бұрын

Yeah, it was SoME I, it generalised the problem as well.

@k0pstl939

9 ай бұрын

Morphocular, i believe

8:48 the animation reminds me of the mechanical act of monkeys swinging from trees. I've heard tree swinging is actually a very efficient way to travel based on the conservation of forces or something that I don't fully comprehend, but this animation kind of alludes to it in some way I can tell

@thewingedporpoise

9 ай бұрын

that act of travel is known as brachiation if you need a fun new word to throw around

@hedgehog3180

3 ай бұрын

It's efficient for the same reason that you don't need to use a lot of energy to swing on a swing.

The bridge is cool, and the hand crank is quaint, but I feel like the 20 minutes of manual labor to lift it is going to get old really fast.

@blondewoman1

8 ай бұрын

Thankfully a robot or migrant will do it for us

@skilletborne

8 ай бұрын

*and another 20 minutes to put it back

@P.G.Wodelouse

8 ай бұрын

its never going to be used don't worry, it is a bridge that opens up to nowhere and no one is going to want to park their boat there.

@Nemesis-pe7mw

7 ай бұрын

It's idiotic if you ask me. Only over shadowed by the reasoning behind it. You cam have a hand crank and a motor, it's not one or the other... But no he think that'd somehow impact the bridge. Thus creating an annoyance for many.

@Nemesis-pe7mw

7 ай бұрын

@@P.G.Wodelouse That is kind of beside the point though.

I like how the hand operated theme is continued from the hand operated locks in the canals.

They missed the opportunity to power it with a humansize hamsterwheel😂

‘I’m not normally an Applied mathematician’ great stuff. What a fabulous piece of engineering and maths.

Really glad you were able to show the information for how the teeth were designed. I was mesmerized by their varying shapes and how they fit into the design of the track.

Should have put a bike as a cranking mechanism. Better power, plus it's so fashionnable and poetic

@londonalicante

9 ай бұрын

Yep. A motor would be even better, but a bike would have been hipster-acceptable. A design that allowed more than one person to power the bridge at the same time would be a massive improvement.

I had a smile on my face all the way through that video. What a perfect marriage of new and old! Somewhat reminiscent of how Gaudi used the cutting edge Math of his time in the Sagrada de Familia cathedral.

There is just so much beauty in its chunky, functional design, I'm so happy that a bridge exists like this!

Nice! I grinned through the whole video. Thank you!

Very fun! Trust a mathematician to enjoy solving this issue with 'hard' maths. I would have modelled the 'rolling cube' with it's round corners and set the edge to draw the curve for me. The tooth profile could be achieved in much the same way. Somehow I'm reminded of comments made by a certain engineer about architects while playing Polybridge. PS: Oh, and I'd want a motor.

10:58 "You can't just show up and start cranking it" I'm an adult.

Make more of these types of video! This was so fun to watch!

Such a brilliant design! Bloomin' love it.

I love everything about this I wish more people made things overly complicated in the name of art and mathematics

@iluomopeloso

9 ай бұрын

You're paying, right? I'm certainly not willing to pay. Because all the extra time it takes to engineer overly-complicated things isn't free. Not to mention the massive increase in maintenance costs.

@maskettaman1488

9 ай бұрын

No you don't lmao

@hedgehog3180

3 ай бұрын

@@iluomopeloso Okay go live in your world of boring grey concrete blocks with endless highways, the rest of us prefer to live in a world that's a little bit interesting.

i guess i hate fun, because my first thought when I saw that it took 20 minutes of hand cranking to open was just "oh, so it's a worse bridge than the off-the-shelf solution"

@beeble2003

9 ай бұрын

I guess I don't understand what fun is. Cranking a bridge for 20 minutes to open it, and another 20 minutes to close it doesn't sound like fun to me. Especially when all the pedestrians who want to use it are standing around watching me and growling.

@johnladuke6475

9 ай бұрын

No, no, you misunderstand. The fun part is when you happen to wander through that area after a few too many drinks in the middle of the night and there's nobody around to stop you. Then in the morning the neighbourhood finds the bridge upside down. Every Friday and Saturday night until a concrete box with a steel door is built around the crank.

@KuK137

9 ай бұрын

@@johnladuke6475 A) it's loud, genius, so no one can do it without notice, B) I bet the crank is removable (and that's why you need to phone them) but sure, keep finding straw problems to bash...

@exasperated

9 ай бұрын

You just have no soul. Can't you see the artistic purity, the poetic perfection, of the ritual of hand cranking a bridge for nearly an hour?

@rakninja

9 ай бұрын

@@beeble2003 it's "fun" to these rich artsy people, for whom an hour of (light) manual labor is a novelty.

It's amazing how smart people are, to develop something like that. Way beyond what I could do!

This ismy favorite video this week.

This is so fudgin cool. Great job explaining the motivation behind this and capturing the important bits from the engineer, Alfred.

10:30 A mathematician in its natural environment: doing no work.

I love seeing an inspiring and cultured inventor/creator

Always nice to see a new bit of math that seems silly and impractical be used in something ultimately beautiful and amazingly complex!

Very needed complications indeed.

What were the odds that a person running a project in an up and coming, "revitalized", former industrial area NOT wearing a hat and having a beard?

@Vinemaple

9 ай бұрын

Too low to calculate

@SnakePlissken25

9 ай бұрын

That person still decided that pointless manual labour and wasting time are things that are worth it for the sake of "the poetry in it", so...

I love this, this is cool. A needlessly complex solution to a fairly easy problem, but in an area like this it is just perfect.

Very nice design 👍🏻 Wish we could see more of this kind of solutions

What if they made it a stationary bike rather than a hand crank?

@scarcesense6449

9 ай бұрын

I don't see why we don't have more bike powered things tbh.

but did they add a tray/gutter to catch all the change and junk that will slide off the leading side of the deck and into the water every time it's inverted? The tray would need to have an overhang to retain the items when inverted and sloped one shore to bring all the catchings to one side or the other upon being righted

@kempo_95

9 ай бұрын

No I don't think so. But I don't think any draw bridge has anything to catch items. Not on purpose at least.

@valinhorn42

9 ай бұрын

Artists came up with the idea, of course they didn't. Sensible people would have gone with a circular cross section, the entire thing just screams "It's more important to be a special snowflake than being practically minded".

@oneeyedziggy2

9 ай бұрын

@@kempo_95 the thought only comes up here because while typical draw bridges would naturally collect small dropped items at either shore by the hinge, this just flips them into the canal... it could be a kind of neat passive mechanism to also be able to check the little tray at one end of the bridge for coins or lost keys or misc treasure as you cross... and keep that (admittedly small amount of) stuff out of the canal

@jamesphillips2285

9 ай бұрын

You could make sweeping the bridge part of the opening ritual.

@TeamBonkersConkers

9 ай бұрын

This reminds me of Minecraft item-farming.

Fabulous! There's hope for us yet!

THIS is art! Bravo 👏

Seriously, they should have added a gearbox to the crank so you could get it going and then switch gears to make it go faster with more resistance on the crank as a side effect. It's one thing for it to be very easy to crank, but a whole other when you have to keep cranking for 20 friggin' minutes!

@valinhorn42

9 ай бұрын

Noooo think of all the added complexity (and ignore the fact that gearboxes in cars with several hundred horsepower last for hundreds of thousands of kilometers with nothing but semi-annual oil changes).

@VeteranVandal

9 ай бұрын

Bring your powertool with a custom tip, and boom.

@CMDRunematti

9 ай бұрын

It's not just that, it's also very uncomfortable to crank something that's too easy to crank. And dangerous. For me it was when my bike threw the chain off and I tried pedaling, leg slipped off, into between the wheel and frame, ending in a front flip onto concrete. In this case it's probably only maybe hitting my arm into the box... But humans are made for slower, more torque kind of crankage

@efeyzee

9 ай бұрын

No they can't do that because then it would make sense

@CMDRunematti

9 ай бұрын

@@valinhorn42 those cost way too much. A bike chain and sprocket set should be enough for this

If you change the handle to a hex bolt, you can use a drill to mororize the bridge. That will maintain the simplicity and the ability of a human to interpret feedback and xan speed up the process.

@MichaelOnines

9 ай бұрын

And you can still have a crank handle if someone doesn't want to bring their battery-powered drill.

@jasonpatterson9821

9 ай бұрын

But that's not the fedora solution, and that's what we apparently needed here.

@drooplug

9 ай бұрын

@@jasonpatterson9821 fedora solution?

@rakninja

9 ай бұрын

@@drooplug the guy who designed this has all the earmarks of a "hipster," which in internet terms is sometimes a "fedora" because of how prevalent that hat is in that culture.

Awesome video! I love how you let the interviewee just talk, they really are the star of the show!

I just finished your Humble Pi audiobook. It was delightful.

So my question is how many crank rotations does it take to rotate it?

@rakninja

9 ай бұрын

seems like the normal pace was ~2 rotations a second. that's 120 revolutions a minute, so around 2,400 rotations to raise or lower it. double this number for the "round trip."

I wonder if the maths was really necessary. It seems to me that it would be possible to discover the needed bends of the track using accurate scaled technical drawings. Design the square first, and then rotate it and mark the distances from its centre of gravity.

@troycongdon

9 ай бұрын

On a smaller scaled object I’d agree. Because the weight of the bridge is so much, if the center of gravity moved up or down a measurable amount, the ability to move it by hand would be greatly reduced. I think the tricycle shown in the video is a really good example. It used simpler mathematics because the corners were still sharp but the construction was less than perfect so you can see that it still hops a bit and the rider is not putting in consistent force to the pedals.

@lindybeige

9 ай бұрын

@@troycongdonI suppose it depends on how accurately the design can be realised full-scale. Even if you have the location of the pins in the wall of the canal down to fifteen decimal places thanks to maths, what workman could install them that accurately? Concrete needs to set, and things shift when setting.

@troycongdon

9 ай бұрын

@Lindybeige I think that is why all of the important bits are made of steel. At least 12 of those 15 decimal places are irrelevant but whatever tolerance you choose to work to is the tolerance you accept for the vertical motion of your center of gravity. Steel is easier to work to higher tolerance than concrete and the interface between the two can be shimmed then grouted to make placement of the steel precise. I do have concern that as parts settle the bridge will become stationary. They mentioned that as they checked their work they found they had fabricated to a fraction of a unit over the length of motion so it appears their workmanship was kept to the same standards as their maths.

@stevenstevenson9365

9 ай бұрын

@@lindybeigeI imagine it was just a case of if they could be certain the maths was right, there’s no harm in doing it! But I think doing it as a drawing would work, it would just depend on how accurately you could get it. They could be working to a tolerance of 1mm, in which case on a 1/10th scale drawing you’d need an accuracy of 0.1mm which would be pretty tough to do.

@dziubo1

9 ай бұрын

Of course it was, for many other, than mathematical reasons. First, you must assure that project is safe and won't end in lawsuits. Also, a lot of extra forces aome as factor, you have to measure ability to bend, wind, temperature that causes steel to compress/extend and so on...

I can't even describe how amazing this is

10/10 animations, 10/10 Information, 10/10 Guy, 10/10 Video! Well done, mate!

You lost me a 4:27, YES motors can know when something's wrong there's an entire safety automation industry out there.

@TricksterRad

9 ай бұрын

I guarantee you this bridge is gonna end up with either a motor mounted on it, or just "stuck" in the pedestrian crossing position within a year.

@beeble2003

9 ай бұрын

His argument is that, because there's no motor, you don't need those sensors. It's a stupid argument, but it's the one he's chosen to justify his impractical design that denies pedestrians the ability to cross the river for 45 minutes at a time.

@beeble2003

9 ай бұрын

@@TricksterRad I bet it actually gets stuck at some random angle.

@johnladuke6475

9 ай бұрын

@@TricksterRad Not to mention the chances of vandalism. If that handle's not locked down securely the bridge will end up the wrong way whenever a miscreant has 20 minutes to burn. Alternately, undoing or cutting the crank cable will render it motionless.

@DanielsPolitics1

9 ай бұрын

I have serious concerns about the engineer who allowed the architect to remove all the safety features.

Nice - if only the guy who decided to make it hand cranked was there to crank it every time it is required to open it 😉😉 Pretty sure he'd soon fit a motor

Totally awesome!! Shared!! ❤

I am surprised that Tom Scott has not visited this interesting bridge! Seems right up his content alley. Thanks for the upload Matt.

The maths of this is way beyond what most engineers would dare to try to understand

@ddognine

9 ай бұрын

False, these sort of integrals are taught to every engineer in a standard calculus II class. And, every engineer needs to take a differential equations class after calculus. And most, if not all, must take a numerical methods class (although most calculus texts also cover numerical methods of integration and differentiation). That is why engineering is so hard. The math is no joke, but it is all applied math versus the highly theoretical/abstract kind that mathematicians study.

I'm expecting Matt to calculate as many digits of pi as possible from the rotating bridge.

Great video but what, I really discovered is that amazing theme song you have. Totally hooked up! ❤

I did a corporate volunteering day here last year, absolutely fantastic group of people running this place!

I suppose that it's classed as green energy when operating the bridge and it's good to see that engineers and architects can get along. 🥴👍

why not use a bike instead of a hand crank? you can put in significantly more power and if you got some killer legs you can just shift up and get done with it in 2 min rather than 20

this very kool gratz all who made this!

Interesting content, thanks for show the math in a practical way! So, there are lots of advantages on human powered infrastructure, that is super radical to me in this age of automatization!

So interesting, but so sub-optimal, in so many levels.

Laughed too loudly for the 'applied mathimatician' joke 😀

Worth mentioning the material. It's probably that corrosion resistant steel, with a protective layer of rust.

This is officially my most favorite bridge now! I didn't have a favorite bridge to begin with.

The electrician in me couldn't leave that manual. Automate!

@ParasocialCatgirl

9 ай бұрын

What happens if there's a powercut?

Isn't this a path that you could discover simply by rotating the shape while sliding sideways, and tracing/mapping the appropriate bottom edge?

@iain3713

9 ай бұрын

Yeah that’s what I thought

@bramvanduijn8086

9 ай бұрын

You run into a limit of scale models where the mass and material interaction can cause tiny differences leading to large gear/pin mismatches, so you'd have to do it real size. And then you'd have to build an axis, which would add weight, which means you'd have to remove that weight equally from both sides, then roll the bridge while the axis is carried by two very strong very stable vehicles that move perfectly parallel and level with gravity at the bridge's centre of mass. And once you've done that you'd need to remove the axis and add the removed weight. With another big downside: The removed weight would be structural, so now your construction isn't structurally sound. Which means you have to build two near-identical bridges (except one has the axis) so you can place the axis-less bridge after measuring out the path with the axis bridge.

@iain3713

9 ай бұрын

@@bramvanduijn8086 using a program obviously, not a scale model

@DigitalArchmage

9 ай бұрын

@@bramvanduijn8086 software model. The point is to trace the path of the bottom edge of a rotating square - why use math (or physical models now). The math isn't accounting for material interaction either.

That bridge looks fun ☺️

Another beautiful sunny day in England I see. Blech!

I’d imagine that if instead of rounding the corners with circles they did it with ellipses, and put one of the foci of each ellipse at the centre of mass, finding a curve to roll on would have bean much easier. I didn’t do any calculations, it’s just an intuition

Dereked Tom Scott?

Really channeled Tom Scott for this video. I half expected it to end with "One take!"

I'm glad we got to hear from Alfred, the real star.