Ah, now I get it sixties!! You'd fit right in with us engineers with a joke like that.

As you are, no doubt, well aware, for all practical purposes, the Angle of Repose (AR) is also the Angle of Internal Friction (AIF)in a loose cohesionless homogenous soil (material). It's most basic use is the computation of the height attainable for a given base width. Of course, not only does this then allow estimation of the total load and load distribution upon the supporting structure, but also leads to an estimation of the forces acting along the surface of the supporting structure. Given the AIF, the base width of the material, the unit weight of the material, and the coefficient of sliding friction (CSF) between the material and the supporting structure, we can estimate the tensile forces acting upon the supporting structure outward from the centre of the base of the material.

Briefly, given the AR and the CSF, obtained by simple measurements, we can easily estimate the vertical and horizontal loadings upon a supporting structure.

You may well ask, "Why is this of such importance?" Well, you can easily estimate the safety of a pile of material..... are you ready for it???... Sittin on the Dock of the Bay.

Now it's a music thread.