This is a picture I took this summer of a catherdral in Spain which is still under construction even though it's super old. The carthedral is pretty amazing but it was pretty irritating that there was so much construction equiptment and noise from power tools etc. Beyond that I never really gave much thought to all the cranes around the cathedral. At first glace, it seems amazing that the cranes can balance even though they have one really long end sticking out that is obviously not over the support base. If the horizontal part of the crane was uniform then the weight of it would create a torque(force x lever arm) in the middle of its arm, and it would tip over because of unblanced torques. However, when you look at this picture, you can see that the short end of the crane's arm has a lot of weight on the end of it. This makes it so the center of mass is closer to the right side and the center of mass is therefore over the support base. Now the crane wont tip over!
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