[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] The biggest problem I face when writing posts in this series is deciding how much background explanation to put in. If I included only the stuff I do to get the answer, the...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] Continuing our series on the many ways to get the center deflection of a uniformly loaded beam, we come to another energy-based technique: Castigliano’s method. Castigliano’s...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] Today we’ll use the Rayleigh-Ritz method again, but this time we’ll avoid dealing with an infinite sum. In case you’ve forgotten, this is our problem: We’ll express the shape...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] I just learned that people are listening to music pitched slightly down because it makes them feel better. Instead of the A above middle C being set at 440 Hz, they have it...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] Continuing our trip through various methods to derive the equation for the center deflection of a uniformly loaded simply supported beam, today we’re going to do the first of...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] The sixth way we’ll derive the formula for the center deflection of a uniformly loaded simply supported beam is the Myosotis method, which I wrote about over a decade ago. This...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] The next technique we’ll use to derive the formula for the center deflection of a simply supported beam with a uniform load is the slope-deflection equation:...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] The fourth way we’re going to derive the formula for the center deflection of a simply supported beam with a uniform load is the conjugate beam method. This is probably tied...

In Paul Krugman’s post today, he includes two charts. One is fine, the other isn’t. Here’s the first one: Generally, I’m not a fan of putting stuff in the margins that could be within the body of the plot itself, but at least it’s clear which label goes with which data series. Too bad that’s not the case with Chart...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] Continuing our odyssey through various ways of calculating the deflection at the center of a simply supported beam with a uniform load, today we use the moment-area method....

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] In the introductory post to this series, I mentioned that the shear is the derivative of the moment. It’s easy to see that for our specific problem, the simply supported beam...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] Here’s the first of the derivations for the center deflection of a simply supported beam with a uniform load. We start with the differential relationship between the bending...