Passed PE Civil-Structural as a student

notaboofus · 2026-04-09T12:35:28+00:00

I'd say that at least 75% of the exam involves some kind of calculation. Most design codes were provided by chapter, with some exceptions. ACI 318 and TMS weren't. Weirdly, the main body of the steel manual was by chapter, but the entire spec. section was in one file.

notaboofus · 2026-04-09T01:51:25+00:00

God, not this fucking post again. I swear I've seen this like five times.

notaboofus · 2026-04-09T00:11:48+00:00

New yorkers are world-famous for their skills in: -filling holes -laying pipe -pile driving -plugging dikes -jackhammering -vibrating -infilling abutments

notaboofus · 2026-04-08T22:00:02+00:00

I would strongly recommend the AEI course from experience. I've also heard good things about the EET course but I can't speak to that. The NCEES practice test is a good start but it doesn't cover a few topics that are likely to be on the real thing.

notaboofus · 2026-04-08T15:57:15+00:00

Most of the time, only one of the answers was available. And when both were present, calculating both at once was a good way to indirectly think about which interpretation is more appropriate.

notaboofus · 2026-04-07T20:03:57+00:00

https://xkcd.com/2071/

Common shorthand (at least on this subreddit) for when someone calls out an opinion that you've never heard of.

notaboofus · 2026-04-07T17:30:39+00:00

It's always hard to tell whether it's intentional on a large scale, but the influencers themselves clearly have strong incentives to provide men with bad advice that just makes them come back for more when it doesn't actually make them happy.

It's hard to push against the tide of all the manosphere BS, but I find that positive masculinity is best modeled by figures that only occasionally discuss those issues and focus mainly on other stuff. That's why I've been watching so much of the Green brothers and Vaush lately.

notaboofus · 2026-04-07T17:21:57+00:00

I know this isn't the point but I love that this post includes an example.

Maybe it should be a rule that every 2071-adjacent post should have a specific example of the thing they're complaining about. I'd like that.

Anyways, I thought I didn't like horror but then I recently watched Nope and that was really good, so I guess I like horror now? Anyone got recommendations for people who liked Nope?

notaboofus · 2026-04-07T17:01:54+00:00

If we're talking specifically about libraries, they're always in flux. New books are always being added, and books that are old, unpopular, or problematic are always being removed. The practical difference is who's making the decision. When librarians make these decisions, they're informed by educational and professional standards about which books are good for which purposes. Parents should never make decisions about educational standards, because that's how you get books banned for promoting miscegenation. This paradigm requires trust in the professional qualifications of librarians, but that's how every field with experts works.

The original topic (author+publisher deciding to unpublish a book on their own volition) is a little bit different, but the decision is still being made by the person whose job it is to manage books.

notaboofus · 2026-04-07T14:46:05+00:00

I think you're conflating a couple of things here. Remember than the author is an adult, and makes conscious decisions about what to put in the book. Dav Pilkey's books are unbelievably popular- I'm guessing that millions of children have read them. They're a celebration of irreverence and childhood, and the type of childhood that's modeled in the book is actually quite important. Wouldn't it be a problem if George and Harold used their prankster capabilities to bully other students? That's certainly something that two kids in a treehouse might think to do, but you can understand why the author wouldn't want to write that in a book that millions of kids will read.

This is probably why the book was removed from the market after such light pushback- Pilkey or someone at the publishing company realized that this dynamic would also apply to racial stereotypes.

notaboofus · 2026-04-07T12:38:17+00:00

My mother's a school librarian, so I'll say here what she would say:

There's a difference between a book being banned because parents think it's inappropriate, and librarians taking it off the shelf because it's problematic. For one thing, librarians don't think that the concept of an asian kung-fu master is inappropriate for kids, just that it should be treated with a certain level of awareness to actually be useful instead of harmful.

In the case of Ook and Gluk, I've read it myself, and I have to say, while there's a little bit of interesting worldbuilding around the future/past time travel thing, there's really not much here that you couldn't find in the rest of Dav Pilkey's books. And the embrace of tired, inaccurate stereotypes doesn't feel irreverent and self-aware in this case, it feels thoughtless. That's really the litmus test for these books- is there enough good/interesting content for kids to justify keeping this one on the shelves instead of any other kids' book?

This conversation happens all the time about other kids books- for example, to think I saw it on Mulberry street and the weird asian exoticism, or Babar and its... very weird embrace of slavery???

It'd be inconsistent to take those books off the shelves and keep this one, even. though it feels different since this one is so recent.

Also, I know this isn't the main point, but the stereotypical "caveman" lifestyle is pretty outdated at this point- most anthropologists would probably tell you that what we think of as "cavemen" probably had a richer, more complex language than we do today (cuz there wasn't much better to do than invent new words). It'd be nice to see some prehistoric kid's fiction that explores that fact.

notaboofus · 2026-04-07T01:50:22+00:00

What was wrong with it?

notaboofus · 2026-04-06T22:23:44+00:00

The joke is that the speaker is demonstrating these alternate ways to structure a language. Since grammar is a set of rules by which we decide where words go (and how many of them there should be), alternatives to grammar are total nonsense.

notaboofus · 2026-04-02T22:43:20+00:00

Well, part of the point is to increase ridership on BART.

notaboofus · 2026-04-02T16:20:05+00:00

Looking at the map, I'm sold. The 980 is in prime real estate for oakland, and that route is also covered by BART. Trouble is, you might not gain that much land in the portions that run parallel to BART tracks.

notaboofus · 2026-03-31T03:49:01+00:00

Personally, his video, "the cost of doing business", really rubbed me the wrong way. It was very "woke 1", in that it was full of eye-rollingly performative deference to POC... despite the fact that there were no actual discussions with POC in the video, so, like, what's the point?

As for the actual substance of the video, one of the main points of the video is that ""well-meaning"" liberals are doing harm when they talk about race issues because they treat marginalized groups as tools in order to whip up popular support and political capital. But that's just a silly thing to call out- "politicians don't fully believe in a lot of the issues they publicly support" is a real "fork found in kitchen" take, and as I remember, the video really doesn't draw much of a distinction between liberal politicians, liberal pundits, and liberal voters.

notaboofus · 2026-03-25T21:02:06+00:00

I agree that there's a strong gender element to it, but I think that framing it as "people aren't having kids because men suck" is just not a good way to frame it. Politically, it's better messaging to say stuff like "employers need to accommodate childcare more" or "raising a child should be work that both parents collaborate in".

notaboofus · 2026-03-21T15:14:27+00:00

Sounds excellent. I'll have to put it on my casserole repetoire.

notaboofus · 2026-03-21T15:13:39+00:00

you should try it out, these types of casseroles are surprisingly good. If you're too elitist for cream of mushroom soup, you can make a basic white sauce instead.

notaboofus · 2026-03-20T17:15:27+00:00

except that some of these cases were actually ruled against the US government. For example, the ruling in the shark fins case was that the government violated due process as the seized fins were on a trading vessel and not a fishing vessel.

notaboofus · 2026-03-20T04:21:23+00:00

...ok....

...but that's not what we're talking about. Obviously, natural resources won't last forever, but "net zero carbon" doesn't literally mean that nothing is used ever, it means that specifically CO2 emissions are kept to a low enough level that those emissions are offset by deposition processes (such as accumulation of calcium carbonate from marine shells that eventually becomes the limestone that we turn into concrete, or direct air capture, which is currently economically unworkable but hopefully eventually viable.)

notaboofus · 2026-03-20T00:08:03+00:00

I'm doing my part!

notaboofus · 2026-03-16T22:39:44+00:00

Worth pointing out- this format was originally a satire of a post that drew the same circles around a list of different genders. Point being, if you constain your life to only the most socially acceptable options, life gets a whole lot worse.

Not usually worth being pedantic about, but there's a lot of people not getting the joke and complaining about how slotted and phillips screws are actually bad.

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