OT: Why are 3 door cars allowed on the road?

[Commander Kinsey]

You can't have got to an adult age and confuse vertical and perpendicular, surely?

[Commander Kinsey]

I've ever head of normal to mean at right angles. Perpendicular, or in Maths, orthogonal.

[Commander Kinsey]

Dunno what a prime mover is.

I've seen one do so. I asked a friend how fast they can stop, so he showed me, without much warning I might add.

Who cares about low speed stuff, you just drive around that.

[Commander Kinsey]

Don't try evading the police in Dubai:

[rbowman]

[NY]

"Normal" meaning right-angle, is a fairly specialised usage, limited to maths. I wonder how . In typical speech, "right-angle" or "perpendicular" is far more common. And it's every day speech that we are talking about.

There's also the little matter of the normal distribution in statistics. As far as I am aware, there is no sense of orthogonal/right-angles/90 degrees in that.

I certainly agree that "regular" to mean "typical" or "unexceptional" gets my goat too. "Regular" to me implies at equal intervals of space or time - a ruler marked at regular intervals of 1 centimetre or a clock which ticks at regular intervals of 1/2 second. But I accept and understand that Americans also use it to mean "typical". But as a British person, I don't use it this way: I've never felt the urge to adopt Americanisms to sound "cool".

[Commander Kinsey]

Ah, I do remember that from university now. But it wasn't used often.

[Commander Kinsey]

So you'd never explain something to me by saying "now what you're gonna want to do is tighten the screw" instead of the British version of "tighten the screw".

[rbowman]

I use it all the time to geocode addresses. You don't want the coordinates of a building to fall on the street centerline so you create a line normal to the curve with the length being your desired offset and query the endpoint of the constructed line to get the coordinates.

[Commander Kinsey]

Why can't you use the less ambiguous term "perpendicular"?

[Commander Kinsey]

And the government only release stats selectively too.

Less than being crushed or burned in the car.

A bridge is a common thing to crash into the edge of. Side winds and so forth.

[Commander Kinsey]

Then blame the search engine.

10kg weight hits 1kg weight head on, both going at 50mph. End result is both travelling at 41mph in the direction of the 10kg thing. So the big thing changed by only 9mph, while the little thing changed by 91mph. Simple - the momentum before the crash equals the momentum after the crash. This is why it's crazy when people say two cars hitting head on effectively doubles the crash speed. It does no such thing. If the cars are similar weights, they will both come to a halt, just like if you hit a concrete wall.

Cars are curvy for that reason.

I wasn't driving a bus.

Hey, check this out if you want a laugh:

You really need to pay more attention on the road.

Nope, I drive fast when I can see that distance ahead.

[Commander Kinsey]

Actually, in more. As it won't be used outside.

[Commander Kinsey]

How come you're rich if he wasn't?

[Commander Kinsey]

How does that stop the load sliding?

Have, see below. Maximum legal weight, 50 tonnes.

You really need to pay more attention on the road.

[rbowman]

That would be more ambiguous. You would have to say 'a line perpendicular to a line tangent to the curve'. By definition a tangent touches a curve at one point and you cannot construct a line perpendicular to a point. Even if you go with leibnitz's definition of two points infinitesimally close together you have a problem.

[rbowman]

If you're going to crash into the edge of a bridge do it right:

[Commander Kinsey]

Because of the soft water.

[Commander Kinsey]

It gave me a number. It didn't need interpreting.

Why not?

Simple application of conservation of momentum. m1v1 = m2v2

With precisely the same force as if they hit a non-moving brick wall. As I said, you don't add the speed of the other car.

They have to be a little bit curvy for health and softy laws.

I can assure you the centre of gravity (the stinky guts) ended up sieved into my engine bay.

You predict them not paying attention, trying to overtake, etc.

Compared to most people, yes.

[Commander Kinsey]

You have admitted the same yourself.