Thoughts and prayers go out to everyone who was impacted by the bridge tragedy in Minneapolis tonight.

That's for sure. Hopefully they'll find out how this happened and whether there was any cupability on the part of the contractors that built the bridge. I hope and pray that it was not a greedy cutting of corners to get the bid that caused this.

The bridge has been doing wonderful things for 40 years.

The issue is the lifetime of the bridge, and how to work out when the bridge ceased to be safe.

This is best done prior to catastrophic failure.

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Calm, quiet, smooth, devastating

^^^ What Oldfart said

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Eudaimonia

I'm almost afraid to turn on the news or check the newspapers online to see what the fatality count is now.

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It takes a gutless mouse to play only when the cat's away.

No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever. ~~ Francois Mocuriac

Confucius say, "He who masturbate into cash register come into money."

An optimist looks at the glass and says it's half full. A pessimist looks at the glass and says it's half empty. A Cubs fan looks at the glass and says, "When's it gonna spill?"

Deus Impetitio Esuritori Nullus

IM, last night it stood at 7...this morning, it had been revised *downward* to "only" four.

Still scrags your whole day if you were one of the four.

And the problem is apparently, not that the bridge is forty years old, but that and inspection done just last year or the year before found some structural flaws that were deemed to not be safety issues. Of course, we'll have to wait for the word on whether or not *that* inspection got the call right: perhaps those flaws were really more serious than they were made out to be, or perhaps whatever caused the collapse was much more deeply hidden.

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On the kinkometer, my kink measures as a sine wave.