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Zhang Fei Temple Digitally Remastered
gtaylor writes: "The Globe and Mail reports that the Three Gorges Zhang Fei Temple in China will be disassembled before the Three Gorges dam is completed (which will flood the area where the temple stands now), and reassembled somewhere drier. Meanwhile, the Canadian National Research Council has sent over some techs who have scanned the whole complex into super-accurate 3-D models as to be sure of rebuilding the temples precisely as they were."
be nice if they could just scan the whole damn and build that somewhere else.
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Although they had to do something as far as their river control problem, this might not have been the best solution
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
My CS professor has been researching the same technology however, his puts the entire laser apparatus on a robotic vehicle that is completely/near-completely autonomous. He recently got a $2 million NSF grant to do the same digitization of Egypts pyramids.
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"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Sorry to disappoint you, but the majority of the world uses Metric system. In fact, US and England are the few countries that use Unit system. In addition, most scientific measurements are made in metric. NASA/JPL was the one that messed up when they used unit system by mistake. I think after that fiasco, they banned unit measurements and unit measuring tools from NASA
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
When you alter nature it has negative effects on something... its benefits just need to be weighed against the negatives.
Millions of people may have to move, but it is obviously of some benefit or wouldn't be being built. Like moving people off an island and declaring it deserted so it can be used as a US military base, damning some other river somewhere, or knocking weeks off travel time by building a canal.. it causes big trouble for some people but benefits so many more.
I don't see how this dam can be equated to the Taliban blowing up budhist statues.
If you want to know who Zhang Fei was in detail, click here for the story of the Three Kingdoms.
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If you're looking for actual 3D models to view (in VRML) made using this (or similar) technology visit: The AMUSE Project. It contains 61 3D digital representations of various aboriginal artifacts. Very cool stuff.
The actual scanning resolution is much higher than what you see on the web, of course. The native resolution is incredible.
(Now assuming a certain friend of mine sees this, you'll get a better explanation since he actually worked for one of those companies...)
They did the same thing some 40 years ago in Egypt, at the temple of Abu Simbel built by Ramses the Great. When the Aswan High Dam was about to be built, engineers realized the temple would be buried under all of the water flow. So, it was moved to a higher location that would be safer. Of course, they did that without the use of supercomputers and 3D modelling, so it should be really interesting to see how China's project turns out. To see Abu Simbel is amazing. It was carved directly into the rock. They had to cut it out, divide it into pieces, move it, and put it all back together without Linux, Irix, or even some of the advanced heavy machinery we have today.
but having been around, Canada still is the best place on earth. You have nothing to whine about.
Canada is not *drowning* in debt. We are very well off. We could settle debt very quickly, just by dipping into our *vast* natural resources.
Why don't we? Because we can weather it out.. we don't because we can always do it later.
I think your negative outlook on how 'bad' Canada is would change quickly if you did a wee bit of traveling.
Believe me, if you didn't pay the taxes you pay, you'd be living 100 years in the past. Canada does not have the population base to support low taxation and still maintain the status quo.
So.. if you are willing to give up medical, the social safety net, good roads, relatively honest police, and our good name the world over, keep pushing for lower taxes and less immigration.
Sure would be nice if that Canadian National Research Council could make a copy of whatever format they're storing their 3D digital copy of into something that I could browse on my computer over the Internet. Off hand, I don't know about this domain enough to suggest anything, but maybe VRML or even a Quake 3 map would work?
I dunno, I sure don't have the time or means right now to be making a trip to the original Zhang Fei Temple in China, but it sure would neat to be able to do it virtually and walk around in the temple over the Internet on my computer.........plus this way I'd be able to see the temple in its original location like it was built, instead of moved to wherever is convenient after its reconstruction...
(heh, and if they released a Quake 3 map or something like that, that precisely modeled and displayed the original temple, it sure would be hilarious if they served it up too, even though I can't see that actually happening. You'd have the tourists walking around to look at the temple, when campers would jump out with whatever the default weapon is in Quake 3 and start hacking away at them)
(or how about this. They just open sourced Quake 2 right? Maybe that would make it a better medium to be releasing this on than Quake 3, seeing as it's free and all)
So it would show the current conditions of the sites, and if some archeologist(sp?) could create models of what they think it looked like in ancient times. Just like some of the books that have the clear pages that show original and current conditions of the sites.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Millions of people have to move out of the way of the dam
oh yeah? 13 million had to move out of the way of the *river* during one of the Yangtze's floods. The dam will control that - so in my opinion it's a good thing.
The forth one sucks the big time
I agree, but did you do any better? Compare his inflammatory statement:
executes thousands of them a year to sell their body parts!
with yours:
name them as terrism supporting country and nuke them
It sounds to me like both of you have difficulty expressing an opinion intelligently.
Quake mod coming soon.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
I'm trying to remember the specifics of the huge dam failure that happened many years ago. I was surprised to see it on the top ten human-made disasters of all time show on TLC a couple of months ago. (TLC's search on their site sucks) I had never heard of it (as most of the western world, it seems).
Ah, turned up this page on human rights watch with google. An
excerpt:
China's longstanding restrictions on public access to information, debate and decision-making about large dam-construction projects have had fatal consequences in the past. An example was the catastrophic collapse in August 1975 of two large water-conservancy projects in Henan Province, the Banqiao dam and the Shimantan dam. Hitherto almost entirely unreported beyond the confines of China's top party leadership and elite hydrological circles, this event represented by far the largest known dam disaster in human history. In the resulting floods, famine and health epidemics, fatalities amounted to anywhere between 86,000 (the government's internally-released figure) and 230,000 (an estimate produced by eight senior Chinese critics of the Three Gorges project).
It executes thousands of them a year to sell their body parts!
Yes, those evil Communists(TM) (R) dont even have the decency to scrawl "call 911" in lipstick on the bathroom mirror so they can save themselves when they wake up in a tub of ice...
I was there two summers ago, they put up big digital clocks counting down the time until the dam is built. Having spent several days on the Yangtze River, it's a shame all that beatiful scenary will soon be gone.
Marc Levoy's group at Stanford has been making 3D scans of artwork since 1992. They've now done Michaelangelo's David sculpture, several other major Italian statutes, and some famous buildings.
I think you are confusing a range of issues here.
Before I begin, let me state that I am fundamentally opposed to the Three Gorges project!
Firstly, their human rights record is atrocious, but that has nothing to do with the Three Gorges Project per se, and I don't understand why you mention it in this context (it may also pay to note that the USA executed 85 people in 2000, so its hands are hardly clean (I realise this is far below the scale of China))
Secondly, Large damming projects have often involved moving sections of the population. This is not unique to the Three Gorges Project. in that light, the archaeological treasures (i.e. things not readily moveable) need to have a high priority placed on them (not to the exclusion of the currently living human population). What hasn't been said is what compensation the Chinese government is making to the people it is moving. Without this information, it is hard to say whether they are being unreasonable or not.
thirdly, to say China cares more about tourisim than its billions [sic, its about 1.3 billion] of people is a little odd. Tourism is a revenue generating process (typically FOR the people). Surely by promoting tourism (ideally in a slightly more eco-friendly way than Three Gorges) they are demonstrating that they care for the economic well being of the local people?
Regards
Since they know exactly how this temple is shaped and how to build it, I wonder if someone will start putting up exact duplicates in other places. They could even have some materials from the original (e.g., while moving the original, replace some old parts with new copies, and use the old parts in a different building).
It would be even more interesting to build a replica of the temple in the temple's original location with new materials, and leave it for future archeologists to find.