As young man I tried jumping down a steep dune ~100+ meters tall. My plan was to run, jump and roll all the way down. I got enough speed and air that I was about 2m up, which is high enough even at steep slope landing on sand to knock the wind out of you. And then I rolled, and bounced, and each bounce hurt. It was like whoosh, oww, bounce, owwww, bounce, owwww, etc. Also, sand in every orifice.
Moral victory: I probably lost 60m altitude rolling.
Also, when people think of sand, they think of beach sand, which is somewhat wet or recently was wet than it have dried, but there is also the variant of very, very dry sand (sometimes can be confused with earth), which is just a little bit softer than a solid ground.
Source: Someone who fell on deserts of Arabia, repeatedly, and almost broke a couple of bones.
Still on the topic of sand, but more related to its dynamics than its softness, I would like to recommend the work of Per Bak [1].
Among other things he investigated and modeled the frequency and magnitude of avalanches in piles of sand, work that lead to the concept of self-organized criticality [2].
My best beach was Spiaggia di Is Arutas, Sardegna. It's a white pebble beach, grains arround half arborio rice size. Beach is soft to rest, umbrela still sticks well, wet or dry pebbles do not stick so your skin much. Just brush slighly and you're clean. Way better than sand.
That kind of sand is quite common in (at least) all of the north-western beaches of Sardinia, due to the fact that they are mostly composed of granite and granite is very hard and does not break up easily, I guess.
Sure, that's clearly the intent, but it's not what's written. What's written is that those industrial engineers who don't like sand, are also Anakin Skywalker.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 47.2 ms ] threadhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/science/randall-munroe-mo...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/good-question-randall-munroe-...
As young man I tried jumping down a steep dune ~100+ meters tall. My plan was to run, jump and roll all the way down. I got enough speed and air that I was about 2m up, which is high enough even at steep slope landing on sand to knock the wind out of you. And then I rolled, and bounced, and each bounce hurt. It was like whoosh, oww, bounce, owwww, bounce, owwww, etc. Also, sand in every orifice.
Moral victory: I probably lost 60m altitude rolling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory
Source: Someone who fell on deserts of Arabia, repeatedly, and almost broke a couple of bones.
Among other things he investigated and modeled the frequency and magnitude of avalanches in piles of sand, work that lead to the concept of self-organized criticality [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Bak
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality
Some proper subset of industrial engineers don't like sand, and some proper subset of Anakin Skywalker doesn't like sand?
Venn diagrams aren't a good tool for expressing set equality.