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A comment on MIT students build a roller coaster in one week. Parent comment

Re:MIT students build a roller coaster in one week by moeamaya on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @09:30AM (#8722860)
Ben mentions his frustrations in his blog: Despite my personal opinion that these changes were unnecessary and frankly absurd (in addition to costly: 1" bolts cost around $10 apiece), we didn't really have any choice but to make the changes. After all, for the Cambridge and MIT to let us build this thing and have people ride it, we absolutely needed our plans to be signed off by a professional engineer.

The Roller Coaster used to be an annual tradition but was put on hold the past few years because of EHS regulations and safety concerns. I know they really wanted to build it this year, so they obliged with the request.

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Re:MIT students build a roller coaster in one week by msandford on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @09:44AM (#8722940)
Seems like that PE maybe shouldn't have a stamp. I'm not saying they're definitely incompetent and should have it taken away, but it kind-of makes you wonder.
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Re:MIT students build a roller coaster in one week by tonyarkles on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @07:26PM (#8726818)
I'm guessing it was "err on the side of overkill". Probably better than "err on the side of someone dying" while not wanting to bill too many hours doing detailed analysis to figure out what the cheapest solution would be that would still meet safety requirements.
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