wrote:

Did your physics professor ever teach the "law of parsimony"?

No, we were still on the "law of persimmons" at the end of the
semester. I can go back and look in my old textbook if you want.

"Persimmons"? Where you perchance, in a culinary class?

Cheers
Martin

wrote in message
...
Maybe the keel you're looking at is a ballast strut and the leeway is
being eliminated by an asymmetric foil daggerboard or a toed-in
leeboard or a controllable twin foil, all of which are well proven
configurations and can produce zero leeway.

"Charles Momsen" wrote:
They produce zero leeway for the boat. I'm talking about relative
direction
between the keel and the fluid as the leeway angle.


Same thing.

Then we agree!


An exception would be a gybing centerboard, or a foil mounted in such
a way that it can assume an angle to the boat's centerline... but
again that would be changing the conditions after stating the problem.
Cheating!

I had a boat that did that as a result of poor design.





Maybe the boat is being towed to windward by a giant.

Or by midgets.


With tiny leather harnesses!
And Argyle socks!!


No, not the argyle socks! Anything but that!




Did your physics prof introduce new conditions after the problem had
been stated and answers given? Mine didn't.

Neither did mine, but when someone was confused or didn't understand they
did offer to explain the problem more.


That reminds me, why does a catamaran make zero degrees of leeway?

The sails are down?



But he did encourage a
wide range of correct solutions rather than dogmatically insist on a
single prosiac answer.

That's great! Did any of the wide range of solutions involve adding new
information/parameters to the question? If not, could you explain how a
science problem can have 2 correct but different answers?

Did your physics professor ever teach the "law of parsimony"?

No, we were still on the "law of persimmons" at the end of the
semester. I can go back and look in my old textbook if you want.

It's another name for Occam's Razor.


DSK

Charles Momsen wrote:
Why doesn't a keel achieve maximum efficiency with a leeway angle of 0
degrees?



How do you know it doesn't?

Jim