Bell Labs gave up its roof to patch the Statue of Liberty(nickvsnetworking.com) |
Bell Labs gave up its roof to patch the Statue of Liberty(nickvsnetworking.com) |
I think about this a lot when it comes to "eyesores", particularly wind turbines. When you think of how windmills are considered picturesque, it always makes me a little surprised when people moan about modern wind generation, because I think they look great. Especially when most of the areas they are put up are crisscrossed with overhead power lines anyway, which are much less appealing.
Where I'm from in the Netherlands there's is much less resistance to them anyway because we know the alternative is for our country to be under the sea ;)
But generally I’m with you. I just don’t get it. Windmills look neat and do neat things.
The "real" complaints tend to be some absolute insanity about "medical issues" that are caused by the windmills. Or harm to wildlife, even though study after study debunks these views. Sometimes they try an environmental move, bringing up the waste from retired blades - all while ignoring the alternatives and their environmental harm.
The real story is, these are people who just don't want progress. They don't want change. They are perfectly content with their Folgers coffee in a styrofoam cup and iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing. They want their news in paper form. Those windmills are just totems representing a world that scares them because it doesn't fit into their neat little navel-gazing bread basket.
What I've noticed is that anger toward windmills in our area has grown over the decades since they started installing them rather than dissipated, as more of those angry old grumps realize that they won't get their old world back.
I don't think anyone would ever have gone for a field of tens or hundreds of them.
The wiki article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation-restoration_of_th...) has a lot of it, but IIRC after they installed stainless steel, at some point they passed electricity through it, which had the effect of making it susceptible to corrosion, and then had to do something else to restore its resistance.
I wish I could find it now, as it was a fascinating read, but I can't see anything easily online.
This WaPo article talks about it more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/07/02/b...
This article suggests that the DC current treatment was to avoid corrosion (also has some nice illustrations of the support framework for the skin):
https://copper.org/education/liberty/liberty_reclothed2.php
A related blurb just says they built some equipment (probably the equipment to do the DC annealing, but who knows):
https://www.romanmfg.com/roman-manuacturing-helps-restore-th...
The Wikipedia article mentions the annealing and then sand blasting to remove iron from the surface (contaminants on the surface of the stainless can compromise the oxide layer that forms).
Maybe something in there will jog your memory.
edit: I rabbit holed a little bit. apparently its not that straightforward. the acid encourages the iron to leave the surface layer (probably through oxidization and dissolution) with just the chromium and the nickel. this then oxides in the presence of air, leaving a protective layer without the surface iron to start to rust
From Wikipedia:
> Publisher Joseph Pulitzer, of the New York World, started a drive for donations to finish the project and attracted more than 120,000 contributors, most of whom gave less than a dollar (equivalent to $30 in 2021)
with "reparations" from the people of haiti
>Initially focused on the elites, the Union was successful in raising funds from across French society. Schoolchildren and ordinary citizens gave, as did 181 French municipalities.
That said, why did they go to Bell Labs rather than a building constructor in the first place? It's not like copper is an exotic material. Did the NPS just completely forget that people had been using copper on roofs for centuries... excuse me, millennia.
I don’t know the real answer, to be clear, and I had the same question when reading the story. But I suspect the answer is a combination of prestige (everyone wants to work with bell labs, not John smith of idahos metallurgy shop) and connections (someone at bell labs knew a local politician who knows a guy who knows a NPS worker in that team).
That’s usually what everything is.
Whilst this is interesting, Nick maintains a fantastic website full of interesting information about telephone software, antennas and all sorts of fascinating telephony articles.
Could you have imagined.
/snark
Stainless steel is an option. That lasts, and you can pressure wash it. There's some nice Art Deco stainless work from the 1930s, most notably at the Chrysler Building. But it's too shiny for most artistic uses.
Especially when you drive over a hill and it's all foggy, and there's this big field of red dots flashing. It's like the robots are coming :) I like it.
We had several radio masts in an opening near our home growing up. I'm going to start incorporating those into my story. "It was then, gazing at those red lights as a two year old, that I knew I was destined to spend my life writing YavaScript."
Probably some truth to it, tbh. That and locomotive engineers honking when we'd drive by making the universal "honk the horn" sign.
The article is in Norwegian, but look at the pictures. It must be stressful to have all those read warning lights blinking all night.
Why?
Knowing the history of these kinds of things, they will be left to rot and dangle in the fields they were planted.
(Sometimes farmers do complain about windmills - that's because farmers are a kind of landlord and their actual problem is that it's harder to sell the land with a windmill on it.)
You may not be a fan of the old school windmills but I think they are a marvel of engineering. They were built without finite element analysis, CAD and all the rest. Take a look at say the iconic row of mills on Kinderdijk. They are pumps with sodding great archimedes screws that shuffle water from low to high. It has to be said that the Netherlands really go to grips with mills.
The old school job is a tower mill - a tower with some sails on it and a simple pair of gears or a pulley system to turn a grooved round stone over another one to mill flour.
I believe that most of the subsequent innovations in windmill technology were largely invented in the Netherlands and then copied or sold to elsewhere. By the time your forefathers (and mothers) had finished with them, you have things like a smock mill (the upper section looks a bit like a smock worn by rural workers) with a tail vane that automatically rotates the upper section of the mill into the prevailing wind. The sweeps are adjustable and can be rotated like an aircraft propellor - even feathered for a storm and the sails can be reefed much like a sailing boat's sails.
There was the post mill - with a wooden trestle that a boxy shaped mill sits on with the sweeps and sails attached. The post mill was ideal if only wood is available and no bricks or whatever to make a tower. The smock was handy if you have some bricks to make a base and a lot of wood to make a lighter structure on top. The tower is basically very strong. There are several more options. There is an awful lot more to mill construction and design choice than you might idly imagine. Stuff built 300 years ago was absolutely using what we might consider cutting edge design decisions.
Some relatives of mine renovated a towermill with an onion cap and tail vane to move the cap in Northamptonshire about 30 years ago. It took quite a few years but the flour it eventually produced was delightful. On the opening day we had to use long poles to get it started because the breeze was a bit naff. The bread baked from its flour in a big old wood oven tasted amazing.
(edit - speling)
source: am people
Not a blanket statement to say all change is good tho
Also, all measurement systems are functionally arbitrary - be it the kings foot, a rod in a library, or some mathematical constant - all are arbitrary, ours is just a little less rational and certainly less relational than others.
Fahrenheit is just fine however thank you. (My ideal system would be a zero to 200 system, water would freeze at zero and boil at 200, gives you the best of both worlds, and less need for half degrees in measuring the weather - or other human centric temperatures.)
The US government is an original signer of the Metric Treaty, and if you deal with the federal government you're often supplying measurements in meters and weight in kilograms. The military is metric too. Just not so much anything else.
Even bolts on our cars are metric, at least mostly. Every car I've had from MY1986 on has been more metric than SAE.
In fairness however, we're not the only English speaking country using miles still. For that matter, aviation (in most of the world) still uses feet too - inventors privilege I suppose. ;-)
Most Americans are aware of the metric system and have a vague idea of how long a meter is for example, we also know the 0 is freezing in Celsius. I don't think the costs of changing the places we use customary units would pay for the benefits, our soda cans even are usually clearly labeled at 355ml.
I agree we should get rid of the penny, and probably dollar bills, but for a bunch of historical reasons americans don't like dollar coins. (Mostly the size we picked is too close to the quarter)
> Still using a penny
Sorry, too easy... :)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Don_Quij...
I think they look great, but I agree, there is a limit to how many people will tolerate.
On top of that, they of course need access roads for maintenance crews to come do their thing once in a while, if located in a former pristine environment that isn't ideal. To say nothing of when the construction actually takes place, again, if it all happens in a pristine location then it's not ok.
Access roads required for wind generator maintenance are neither large nor busy: there's no fuel to bring, and no ash to take away.
Daily cleaning up the evidence with ruthless efficiency or just FUD by the NIMBYs?
It's an issue, but if they were that concerned about birds they would be screaming about glass windows and skyscrapers.
In Canada, the penny is gone. It was too expensive to keep (cost of producing them is just silly, for their value of 1 cent.). So prices are just rounded when using cash:
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/programs/about-canad...
In as the penny was effectively worthless even a decade ago (when this was done), it just makes sense. I can't think of a single person, or retailer, who cared.
Most approved of it.
So, that's probably what someone meant by the penny comment. Whether the US should do the same? I don't know. I just know it worked out very easily, and well, in Canada.
I don't understand this argument. A penny is not disposable. They last for decades, being used in thousands of transactions. It only has to generate more economic value in its life than it cost to produce. The face value is irrelevant.
Dropping the penny just means you changed the resolution of your currency from 100ths to 20ths. Can I still run a credit card transaction for $1.17 in Canada?
> I just know it worked out very easily, and well, in Canada.
What benefits did Canada realize with this change?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(Canadian_coin)#Abolitio...
The real problem is that pennies are worth nothing, (1 cent has no real value for people), so people hoard them, or don't care if they are damaged/lost.
Add to that, the cost of the metal is more than the face value, so illegal or not, people can buy them and profit by destroying them.
Look at these stats:
* A 2007 survey indicated that 37 percent of Canadians used pennies, but the government continued to produce about 816 million pennies per year, equal to 24 pennies per Canadian.
* In 2011 the Royal Canadian Mint had minted 1.1 billion pennies
Spending millions yearly, because people don't care, isn't sensible.
And yes, electronic means to the penny, cash means rounding.
Who cares? It all evens out in the end, and 2 cents is nothing, yet it saves tens of millions a year.
Not to mention, counting all those pennies for no reason.
You know how it worked for me? I'd get paid in cash, get a few pennies, and at end of day throw them on my dresser. Do you think I put them in my pocket, to count out next time?
No. No one did. Because it isn't worth the energy or time.
We'll probably phase out the nickle soon.
(I love cats, and keep two. They have their serving of fresh air in the fire escape.)
It's not a question whether they are arbitrary, it's a question if they are technically consistent within themselves.
The metric system is: Everything is orders of magnitude, powers of ten, throughout all the measurements. Consequently, everything measured by base units of distance and mass follows the same rules: A Watt is 1 Joule per second, which is 1 Newtonmeter per second, which is 1 kilogramm per meter squared per second per second per second. 1 Grey (Gy) is 1 Joule of radiation absorbed in 1 kg of mass. If I have to do a calculation, I simply put the different weights and whatever in, and everything just falls into place on its own.
Additionally, measurements of distance and mass are not independent, but based on one another, also by powers of ten. 1000 cubic centimeters (a litre) of Water at maximum density is 1kg of mass. 1 Millilitre of it is 1 gram of mass. 1 m³ of it is 1 metric ton, which is 1000 kg.
Not only is that consistent, it also fits into our radix 10 numerical system like a hand into a fine glove.
I have yet to find any internal consistency in the various imperial systems of measurement. Everything is based on yet another arbitrary comparison with real life objects or references, and so nothing is consistent with anything else. A mile is 8 furlongs, a furlong is 10 chains, a chain is 4 rods, a rod is 5.5 yards, a yard is 3 feet, a foot is 12 inches. Land is measured in acres, which is a furlong by a chain.
Measurements of mass don't follow measurements of distance. A ton is 160 stone, or 160 * 8 "hundredweights", or 160 * 8 * 14 pounds, or 160 * 8 * 14 * 16 ounces. Not only is it not dependent on the distance measurements, the conversion rates are also dissimilar.
Woah woah woah, don't put that evil on us in the USA, that stone madness is all British.
A US hundredweight is 100 lbs.
The metric system didn't invent water volume and weight correspondence -- a pint's a pound the whole world round. 1 pint of water weighs one pound, and one fluid ounce of water weighs one ounce.
> A US hundredweight is 100 lbs.
The fact that there are more than one sort of imperial measurements, and that they are different, makes matters worse, rather than better. The metric system works the same, everywhere, in all countries, and in all languages. The only thing that changed since its inception, was switching from defining base units through comparison to physical templates, to defining them by natural universal constants, aka. making it even better than it already was.
> The metric system didn't invent water volume and weight correspondence
I didn't say it did, I said they depend on one another. And in metric, that works for ALL weights and measurements, and does so consistently. Cool, so 1 pint of water == 1 pound. How much is a pint in cubic inches? How many cubic furlongs of water do I need for 10 imperial Tons?
Oh, and btw.: What exactly do you mean when you say "pint"? Because there are many different ones. Just a short list of examples:
- Imperial Pint (568ml)
- Liquid Pint (473ml)
- Dry Pint (551ml)
- Indian Pint (330ml)
- The Australian pint (570ml)
- The South Australian pint (425ml)
If I have to rely on context, locality and customs to have a chance to understand what a unit of volume actually means, then there may be some issues with the underlying system. One reason why the metric system was invented, and why today almost every country in the world officially uses it, was to solve exactly these problems of ambiguity.
When I say "liter", there is no ambiguity, it's always 1 cubic decimeter.
It's important to note that the US does not and has never used the "Imperial System" which didn't even exist before 1826 which is post-revolutionary war. US Customary units evolved around the same time as the Metric system and used names from the Dutch and English systems for historical reasons. The motivation being global compatibility, not internal consistency. The US was an original signatory of the treaty of the Meter. The British Empire (and thus, Canada) was not.
Personally I think internal consistency is overrated. It's nice to have but really reads like marketing wank. What matters to people doing work is if they can do their jobs. In those contexts change is far more costly than conversion to a new system. Tooling will already be built to deal with appropriate units.
One example of this is in metalworking machines. Those tend to last for decades and entire companies have built portfolios of designs and programs in thousandths (base 10 for those playing along at home) of an inch. It is unlikely that converting all those designs to microns would justify the cost, so we don't.
Almost all food packaging in the US has both systems printed on it but I am unclear how my dinner will taste better if I measure the ingredients in SI units. It just doesn't matter in that context.
All the more reason to officially switch to metric. Because as of right now, only 3 countries in the world (US, Liberia and Myanmar) officially use imperial units, while the rest of the world uses the metric system.
> The US was an original signatory of the treaty of the Meter.
So? If I have a gymcard and don't go to the gym, it's not doing me any good.
> It's nice to have but really reads like marketing wank. What matters to people doing work is if they can do their jobs.
Indeed it does. That's why science and engineering are using the metric system. Including NASA btw. Being able to convert measurements easily, and have them correlate with our most common, radix 10, numerical system, is not "marketing wank", it's a built-in advantage.
If I want to figure out what mass of water falls on an area in the metric system, I can do the calculation in my head. If I have to figure out hundredweights per acre, given that X inches of rain fell, I'm gonna need a calculator, a conversion table, and social context to know which kind of "hundredweight" I'm supposed to use.
Oh btw. people "do work" in all these other countries. And guess how they measure things when doing that? Exactly: In meters and kilograms.
Regardless of everyday usage, in mechanical engineering/metalworking, the switch to metric has already been happening slowly since the 70s. Old machines and designs can stay in inches but most industries are already moving to metric unless there’s a compelling reason not to. You can see in Canada what things have stayed in inches because of regulations and material availability. House framing and steel weldments come to mind.
As a result to the extent all the systems are arbitrary, all the traditional units are automatically one step more arbitrary.
[1]: https://www.simscale.com/blog/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metr...
I'm also surprised you like the dollar bills all the same size and colour. I don't know how I'd pay in a bar while drunk lol.
Though I guess like most people these days I just slap my phone on the reader.
And.. basically yeah, we pay with cards now, lol
I only played during PE lessons but don’t recall anyone ever referring to measurements during play. Just “the box” or the “halfway line”.
I would believe that there's some standardization from NAFTA and similar agreements with our northern (and southern) neighbors. But I think Canada's usage of the Metric (and Imperial) systems has more to do with being part of the commonwealth and less to do with the US being nearby.
https://www.packaginglaw.com/ask-an-attorney/are-both-imperi...
"Labels on packaged food regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must provide the statement of quantity in both metric terms (grams, kilograms, milliliters, liters) and U.S. Customary System terms (ounces, pounds, fluid ounces). For meat, poultry, and poultry products, which are regulated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the statement of quantity need only be expressed in U.S. Customary System terms. The use of metric measurement is voluntary because the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act (FPLA), which regulates labeling of consumer commodities, exempts meat and poultry products from metric statement requirements. (See 15 USC 1459(a)(1)."
And just so it's easier to put that number into perspective, how would it compare to, say, spending more on defense than the next 10 countries on the list combined, having the most expensive Healthcare system in the world, or having trillion-dollar tax cuts?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
https://www.statista.com/chart/8658/health-spending-per-capi...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2019/10/10/trum...
For what its worth, our system was standardized in 1832, and has been bound to SI equivalents since 1895.
For a broader comparison of the differences - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_imperial_and...
But then why not just switch to using them directly? Having arbitrary units of measurement, and then going on to define them in SI units anway, is like dividing the day into 17.5 "Foobars", each of which consists of 4200 "Baz", and then defining that 1 Baz == 1.1755102040816328 seconds.
If there was some tangible advantage to doing that, I wouldn't say anything, but there isn't. Sure, 1 inch is roughly something-with-thumb-idk, only it isn't really, because everyone has different fingers, feet, arms, etc., so the entire "advantage" of having a real world comparison is out the window anyway.
Where it matters we already did. There's really nothing to see here.
This is not true. The US has never used the Imperial system, we use the US Customary system, which has been based on the metric system since 1893.
> If I have to figure out hundredweights per acre, given that X inches of rain fell, I'm gonna need a calculator, a conversion table, and social context to know which kind of "hundredweight" I'm supposed to use.
Nobody is doing this.
> and social context to know which kind of "hundredweight" I'm supposed to use.
Since as you say everyone else uses the Metric system it should be pretty easy to figure out. As an American I have never even heard of a hundredweight, not sure why you are so fixated on this unit.
So how is using yet another different system defining arbitrary measurements that cannot be easily converted, do not directly correspond with the radix 10 numerical system, and are also not widely used make things better?
> Nobody is doing this.
Yes, people are doing such calculations all the time. How many concrete transports will a construction company need to make a foundation, if the depth is 2.2 m², the size is 97.2 m² and the specific weigth is 2.5 tons per m³?
How much rain did fall on Hamburg in 2022 given a city size in square kilometers, and an average fall of cm/day.
What kind of energy output can a solar farm provide given a conversion rate, panel efficiency, panel angle, and land size? Easy to do if all is in SI.
> As an American I have never even heard of a hundredweight
It's an official unit of the us customary system:
For the same reason the metric (literally international standard) system was created. There were many similar systems in use. US Customary was a standard system for the whole country. The problem being solved was different standards for the units. US Customary solves that problem. Only the standard definition of the unit changed. This has been done within the metric system as well, even very recently.
> > Nobody is doing this.
> Yes, people are doing such calculations all the time.
What I mean is that specific conversion with hundredweights.
I’m unclear why anyone would do any of your example calculations in their head. They’re all so important that it would be done precisely on paper or electronically. All a worker pouring a foundation meeds to know is the desired dimensions. All the truck driver needs to know is the quantity ordered. Nobody is actually converting precise quantities of concrete or solar panels in their heads.
You act as if these calculations are simply impossible in customary units, they're not and we do them all the time.
To go on from this, we've converted everything that meaningfully effects our external competitiveness, as I said in a parallel comment I dont think our competitiveness would be helped or harmed if meat was sold in kilograms vs lbs or if we have temperature on the weather forecast in Celsius.
Oh, now you're in US customary unit territory.
Let me introduce you to the acre-foot.
The acre-foot is the unit of measure for reservoirs. For instance, the Ashokan reservoir is 8300 acres with an average depth of 46 feet. Its volume is 381,800 acre-feet.
If an area 10,000 acres received 3 inches of rain, you need 2500 acre-feet of reservoir to put the outflow in.
How big do you need to make your 2500 acre-foot reservoir? Well, if you're working with 100 acres, you make it 25 feet deep.
No I don't. I said they are more difficult than they have to be, and for no good reason.
> I dont think our competitiveness would be helped or harmed if meat was sold in kilograms vs lbs
https://gizmodo.com/five-massive-screw-ups-that-wouldnt-have...
Maybe not, but it would probably have helped in not having a 125 million dollar space probe go up in flames.
In the places it matters the US already uses the metric system. This has been true for more time than Germany has used the metric system.
Since the time the metric system was created a world war was fought, centered around a misguided sense of supremacy. The people with a sense if moderation and the ability to compromise in the face of real constraints won the war. The adherents to strict philosophy were destroyed.
The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed because of a miscommunication. We could have done it all in IS Customary units. Nobody did any calculations in their head. This is a hard task. We learned from that, as we always do. The US has still led the largest presence on Mars. We know what we are doing.
Out of the countries that won that war, all but one have either switched to the metric system, or were already using it. So did all the countries who lost that war. In fact, every country other than Myanmar, Liberia, and the US officially uses the metric system.
So what exactly does WWII have to do with using, or not using the metric system, the ability to compromise, or the mathematical, economic, scientific and technical fact that the metric system is more widley accepted, and for good reasons?