Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Smoothly meshing gears or jammed gears


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A graphic designer could show us a set of three meshed gears (from a gif at Wikimedia Commons), as displayed above, to illustrate how different parts of an organization can work together smoothly.  

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A less careful designer instead might show us three gears jammed together and therefore stuck so none actually can move. That’s what the free Metroshuttle from Manchester Buses did. To engineers this is unintentionally hilarious. A blog post on February 13, 2008 was titled The Metroshuttle cogs “not a technical drawing.” There is a similar illustration on a poster at RJ Design titled “Education works best when all the parts are working” which shows teachers, students, and parents. A similar graphic also can be purchased elsewhere on a tee shirt.

 

You can get the Metroshuttle gears to move by assuming what was shown really just is a cross section of a three-dimensional assembly, as was shown on Reddit, in an article titled Explanation of the 3 stuck gears poster. I saw the education poster discussed at 5:08 in an hour-long YouTube video by Matt Parker at The Royal Institution titled What happens when maths goes wrong?

  


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