Bell Labs gave up its roof to patch the Statue of Liberty
nickvsnetworking.comI feel like it might look quite cool if it was patched with new copper (at least if it was done well). A bit like kintsugi pottery.
Often the kind of thing people hate for a while, and then with enough time becomes iconic and you'd probably end up with an article about how they were debating whether to preserve it or not as it aged.
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.
Yeah I don't understand why people hate them so much either. I think they look nice too. Better than old-fashioned windmills.
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 ;)
The "Levels" in Somerset (UK) were drained from the C12th much of which involved Dutch engineers later on. It's not quite the same as your polders but quite a lot of village names here basically mean "island". Glastonbury Tor may well be the origin of the fabled Isle of Avalon. The Tor is a hill that was surrounded by marshland and waterways - it was only accessible by boat. Nowadays you drive up to it. There's a tower on it - the Tor.
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)
People just hate change
source: am people
Not a blanket statement to say all change is good tho
Change is awful, so is a lack of change. We should hope the balance wheel of progress is kept near centered and that we get needed change, but somewhat slowly.
I find Americans really don't like change. Still using a penny, still using dollar bills, not using the metric system, still using Fahrenheit.
Dislike of change is a worldwide constant, like gravity.
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)
> Also, all measurement systems are functionally arbitrary
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.
> 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.
> 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 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:
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pint#Other_pints- 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.
US Customary Units (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units) is not the same as Imperial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units)
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...
> and has been bound to SI equivalents since 1895.
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.
> But then why not just switch to using them directly?
Where it matters we already did. There's really nothing to see here.
> It's not a question whether they are arbitrary, it's a question if they are technically consistent within themselves.
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.
> The motivation being global compatibility, not internal consistency.
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.
> Because as of right now, only 3 countries in the world (US, Liberia and Myanmar) officially use imperial units
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.
> This is not true. The US has never used the Imperial system, we use the US Customary system
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:
> 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?
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.
Not to mention, you can do those calculations in your head if you're familiar enough with the subject matter, concrete guys do it all the time.
Yes hundredweight is an official measurement, but it's not a widely used one (I think it might be used in the sale of nails only?) - which is the parents point. We'd just calculate it in pounds or fractional tons.
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.
Hundredweight show up in agricultural settings -- you'll see the price of pork being $123/hundredweight, instead of $1.23/lb. I assume this is because the price of meats used to be pennies per pound, and people wanted the numbers to be bigger, $12.50/hundredweight instead of $0.125/lb.
> You act as if these calculations are simply impossible in customary units, they're not and we do them all the time.
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.
125 million dollars is precisely nothing in the scheme of interplanetary exploration and we already learned our lesson. I would expect someone so obsessed with radix 10 as yourself to understand orders of magnitude.
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.
> 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.
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?
> How much rain did fall on Hamburg in 2022 given a city size in square kilometers, and an average fall of cm/day.
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.
Machinists have no problem working with designs in SI units on an inch-based machine. Lots of American companies use metric in designs and machine shops have to deal with it, although shops are moving to metric more and more. When they do this they keep and use their old machines with no problem although it’s an annoyance. Conversely metric machine shops can make inch-sized parts with no problems. Lots of material stock is inch-sized in the US, so even when you design in metric you have to consider this. But over time there is more metric stock available in the US, and for things like precision shafts there’s no cost difference anymore.
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.
In terms of arbitrariness, note that your "traditional" units are only actually defined in terms of the SI system ("metric" units). Metrication is expensive and although the US is rich it declines to spend the eye-watering sums it would cost to do adequate metrication separately for its own unit system, so the pound is defined as some number of kilograms, the inch is defined as some number of metres and so on.
As a result to the extent all the systems are arbitrary, all the traditional units are automatically one step more arbitrary.
The number of layers of arbitrary dont bother me very much. We've metrified our industry (gradually over 50 or so years), dealing the the government is metric, etc. I think we've adopted the metric system in the most important places - I dont think our competitiveness is harmed or helped if I have to buy meat by the KG at the grocery, or the weather forecast comes in celsius or not.
Then why not just officially ditch what is, at this point, a quirky anachronism at best, and a potentially really expensive source of mistakes [1] at worst?
[1]: https://www.simscale.com/blog/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metr...
Largely, the because the costs to change what remains, isnt worth the savings we'd get from doing it. Moreover the people who would have to bear those costs, are often the people in business least able to do so.
Out of curiosity, how much would that cost?
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 a bunch of historical reasons americans don't like dollar coins. (Mostly the size we picked is too close to the quarter)
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.
They are now subtlety different colors, anything 10 dollars and above has their own shade. I dont personally I think it matters very much, I actually mostly carry 2 dollar bills around, for novelty (and rememberability) factors (they make great tips).
And.. basically yeah, we pay with cards now, lol
Anyone involved with chemistry uses the metric system. As does anyone who plays soccer. It's everywhere. Go look at any item in your pantry, metric units will be printed on it.
The metric system is great but measurements in football (aka soccer) pitches are more naturally expressed in yards than metres given its historical standardisation in Britain.
I only played during PE lessons but don’t recall anyone ever referring to measurements during play. Just “the box” or the “halfway line”.
Yeah, that was largely my point, everyone who complains about america not being metric has not been to the store, I think we're around as metrified at the UK, the one difference is we still use Fahrenheit, and anything sold bulk measure is sold in pounds - packaged goods have Metric on them either because of a legal requirement, or because of bleedover from Canada and Mexico, most store scales can do KG or Pounds - but are set to Pounds.
I'm not convinced re: cross-border sales. When Canada was on the imperial system they were on the actual Imperial system. The one the British adopted in 1826. That's post-revolution so the US was on the US customary system which evolved alongside the Metric system and for similar reasons. This means that gallons were different sizes. Today Canada sells milk in bags, I'm not sure that's even available in the US. Cars in Canada have different gauge clusters to support primary-kph. There are probably additional differences in packaging. Does Canada use the same nutrition facts label?
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.
I googled, and this was the answer, there is a separate similar requirement for metric labeling for cosmetics and the like.
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)."
> really don't like change
> Still using a penny
Sorry, too easy... :)
Americans use the metric system every day. And what's wrong with a penny? Decimal currency has to retain a fundamental unit or there are some amounts that can't be created.
I don't have a horse in this race, but I think what the commenter meant was, some places don't use the penny any more.
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.
> cost of producing them is just silly, for their value of 1 cent.
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?
Read some of the info / stats here:
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've corroborated this by reading the fictional book Don Quixote
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Don_Quij...
It's not so much a wind turbine, as when you have dozens or hundreds of them in view at the same time.
Living in the North East of England, we have several dotted around in the surrounding fields of my home. There are about 8-10 turbines across a 360 degree view.
I think they look great, but I agree, there is a limit to how many people will tolerate.
Some of them kill a lot of birds and bats.
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.
House cats kill an order of magnitude more birds and bats than windmills. Practically no one calls domestic cats ugly, or suggests to ban them.
Access roads required for wind generator maintenance are neither large nor busy: there's no fuel to bring, and no ash to take away.
I hope people don't let their cat go to outside. problems are problems.
Cats belong outside where possible. And birds have predators, it's just nature.
Birds have predators, but most predators don't have humans to shelter them at night, feed them when food is scarce so they are always well fed when they hunt, and take them to the vet to protect them from disease, parasites, and heal their injuries. And human development has pushed out most of the predators that would keep cat populations in check (like coyotes)
Indoor cats live longer and have fewer health issues. Sorry kitty, I like the idea of native wildlife existing and less vet bills more than your freedom.
Safety over freedom and happiness certainly is an increasingly common way of viewing the world.
It's not safety. It's more like extermination: domestic cats kill to play, not to eat. They have plenty of energy, compared to wild animals, and vets keep their life longer and more healthy. So the balance goes even more off.
(I love cats, and keep two. They have their serving of fresh air in the fire escape.)
Mine has an enclosed back verandah, a 3x15 meter space with lots of hideyholes. She also gets (supervised) time in a backyard with long grass. Doubtless she kills lizards and rodents during this time. But it's about as good a compromise as I can give her.
Thanks for being a relatively responsible pet owner. There aren’t enough of them.
Also there are just SO GODDAMN MORE CATS than there naturally would be, and SIGNIFICANTLY FEWER BIRDS than there naturally would be.
yes but we killed off or drove off many of those predators.
I've always been suspect of the 'kills birds' argument. I lived near some turbines on an extremely windy coast, and never EVER saw any dead birds anywhere near it.
Daily cleaning up the evidence with ruthless efficiency or just FUD by the NIMBYs?
Some wind turbines in some places kill some birds sometimes. There is research going into reducing it with different blade coatings or paints. Fox news and AM radio turns this into "Wind turbines kill thousands of birds" as if they suddenly care about birds like some make love not war hippies.
It's an issue, but if they were that concerned about birds they would be screaming about glass windows and skyscrapers.
The 'pristine location' you're talking about was most likely already formed by humans. There's barely any location on earth which hasn't been significantly altered by humans already. It's an arbitrary standard.
As a kid that grew up on the south plains (Texas panhandle). I have a love hate relationship with those windmills. On the one hand it's neat seeing all that green power generation. On the other, it does ruin the landscape to some extent, it can be visually jarring to be driving some back road, go over a rise that, and be smack in the middle of a wind farm. It also can be a little distracting at night, where the darkness is awashed in blinking red lights.
I think the red lights make them more mysterious at night.
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.
I love the red dots. My partner and I drive out to Big Bend every couple years to spend a week or so there, and on the drive back there's a stretch of road where at night there's a huge number of the dots juuuust barely visible over the horizon, and then you start to crest a certain hill and suddenly BOOM there's even more! It's always glorious and I wake her up everytime so at least one of us can fully appreciate the majesty. Unfortunately my partner doesn't drive these days, her epilepsy has gotten bad enough that they (honestly thankfully) yoinked her license, so I don't really get to take it all in since I'm also driving the car at the same time and trying not to die while staring at the pretty lights :(
Everybody likes to tell their "...and that's what inspired me to go into a technical field" story.
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.
After seeing a video of someone showing how the nearby windmill cast a rotating shadow on their living room window some months of the year I understood it is a legitimate issue for some.
But generally I’m with you. I just don’t get it. Windmills look neat and do neat things.
For sure, not saying there are no issues (sound, shadows, etc...) especially when very close, but some people object to them literally just being in sight, which is wild to me.
People hated the Eiffel Tower for a long time.
It is said that Guy de Maupassant ate lunch everyday at the base of The Eiffel Tower, because it was the only place in Paris where he couldn't see it
It's a great story, but surely even at places that had a clear view of the Eiffel tower he could simply sit facing away from it?
I live in an area with lots of windmills, where land owners of otherwise useless scrub ground have made good money providing a space for them. It has become a political issue for people literally "titling at windmills" as it were. Any conversation you have with them isn't about the windmill at all, apart from as you point out, some highly subjective statements about "eyesores" (which is ironic considering the ground on which these things are most commonly installed).
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.
People like a single windmill, standing picturesquely in the middle of the village.
I don't think anyone would ever have gone for a field of tens or hundreds of them.
Tell that to the Dutch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmills_at_Kinderdijk
I kinda wonder what is gonna happen to them when they reach end of life.
Knowing the history of these kinds of things, they will be left to rot and dangle in the fields they were planted.
They're replaced obviously because we really need the electricity they produce.
Not if solar keeps improving or we get the fabled affordable nuclear.
Solar and wind peak at different times, and windmills don't compete with farmland. They're complementary.
(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.)
They're buried in places like Wyoming currently.
They are obnoxious at night when a large cluster of them are all flashing their warning lights.
Here are some gif showing the effect: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/mdg-mener-vindturbin-i-vindpark-...
The article is in Norwegian, but look at the pictures. It must be stressful to have all those read warning lights blinking all night.
>It must be stressful to have all those read warning lights blinking all night.
Why?
Because what was once a dark hill side is now lit up every 5 seconds by bright flashes.
Looks beautiful to me.
The modern wind turbines are absolutely massive and dominate the landscape in a mocking, domineering, ignorant hatred of nuclear power.
the only time I'd appreciate windmills from an aesthetic point of view is when they are very very far away. Nearby, they are horrible to all senses.
See this recent artwork by Danh Vo which plays with the idea of fragments of the copper skin. https://www.publicartfund.org/exhibitions/view/danh-vo-we-th...
In (I think) the first edition of Zumdahl's chemistry textbook, there was a great summary of some of the things they had to do to preserve the statue, and it went beyond just repairing the skin.
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.
One of the NYT articles at the link mentions the stainless steel.
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.
stainless passivation usually involves an acid to form an oxide layer. wiki says nitric and citric, but we used to use an HF gel which was pretty damn nasty
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
That's fantastic, thank you!
This is an issue with bronze statues. Washington, D.C. has many of them. The ones at Memorial Bridge are occasionally cleaned and polished, but most of the others are not and have turned green. New York City has some statues polished, some not, depending on who owns them. The Prometheus statue at Rockefeller Center and the Charging Bull at Bowling Green are kept shined up.
Isn't the oxidation of the green sometimes part of the aesthetic though ?
I would’ve liked to have seen the Statue of Liberty in its original copper glory. The green has certainly become iconic but I’m sure the copper brown color was a sight to see.
There's monel metal, which has copper and nickel. That resists corrosion and remains a smooth dull brown for at least a century. There were some monel metal sculptures in the art deco era, but it never caught on.
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.
The statue was crowdfunded
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)
The Pulitzer fundraiser wasn't for the statue but for the pedestal on which it was to be placed. The statue was a gift of the people of France. That being said, crowdfunding campaigns were also a part of the the fundraising for the statue (that is, in France), together with a wide mix of other sources: state money, cities, chambers of commerce, and several other groups, huge donations by companies, banquet events, operas and other spectacles, merchandising, lottery etc.
> The statue was a gift of the people of France.
with "reparations" from the people of haiti
That’s what the broken chains on the bottom are for
The statue itself was as well, just in France.
>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.
AIUI, the fundraising was for the pedestal, not the statue itself.
A classic scam. Free statue, just pay shipping and pedestaling.
Sometimes they don’t even send the monument and you’re just stuck with a random plinth.
TIL the etymological origin of "The Zócalo" in Babylon 5.
We'll continue to ship you a new one each month until you finally remember to jump through the hoops, er, call our operators who are standing by to cancel
I’m currently reading the book this site referenced, “The idea factory” a wonderful account on Bell Labs with portraits of Shockley, Shannon and the other fathers of the information age.
It's very "Bell Labs" for them to be given a vaguely defined problem (So I hear you know a lot about copper.), immediately recognize that the solution is more complicated than it was suggested (Can you artificially weather copper so it looks 100 years old?), but rather than merely reject the idea instead come up with an alternate and unexpected solution that does what they wanted in the first place but didn't know how to ask. (No but 20-year aged copper looks the same as 100-year old.) Bonus points for making use of leftover parts they had lying around anyway.
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.
> That said, why did they go to Bell Labs rather than a building constructor in the first place?
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.
Link is currently down; here's an archived copy: https://archive.is/PJlEX (missing pictures, unfortunately).
What a strange article to see Nick featured on HN.
Whilst this is interesting, Nick maintains a fantastic website full of interesting information about telephone software, antennas and all sorts of fascinating telephony articles.
When she was delivered, the statue had a copper colour like you’d see in Copper piping, not the green patina we see today
Could you have imagined.
This donation in 1986 was also approximately the last time that Bell Labs contributed something noteworthy to the country.
/snark