Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

I made a typo on my post, but at FIVE thousand feet (not the TWO thousand feet I accidentally typed), my numbers would be right. 62.4*5000/144 = 2167.  Two is right under the 5 on the numpad, so my finger must have drooped when I tried to type 5000 feet.

And I wasn't trying to argue with his assertion of "over 2000 psi".  The numbers are within 10% of each other.  An engineer that relies on 10% as being sufficient is a bad engineer; many projects, they try to overengineer by 2x or more, just to be safe.

I was just thinking that ski resorts don't want to hire journeymen steamfitters to maintain their snow-making apparatus.  They want a system that a garden-variety handyman can maintain, so breaking the water transport system into low-pressure runs instead of using one high-pressure run, is sensible. 

And I wouldn't want to get sprayed with a leak that has more than a ton of pressure per square inch behind it.  Bull Connor knocked me off their feet by turning a fire hose on them, and the usual working pressure of a fire hose can vary between 8 and 20 bar (116 and 290 psi).  I imagine a 2200 psi leak would slice through a man like a hot knife through room-temperature butter.