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Perpetual Skislope
the hollow room writes: "How about skiing on a never ending slope? A story at New Scientist suggests that some fool is going to try to build one of these. Built like a huge tilted record player, it can spin at up to 30 km/h.
Any takers?"
A neverending halfpipe...something tells me this just would not work but it would be damn cool anyway. There are such things actually as skiing treadmills, terrain can be put on them, and stuff like that (obviously you can't do nearly as much as really being on snow), but this idea just doesn't really sound all that new or plausible. Maybe I'm just being pesimisitic.
I learned how to ski as a kid riding a huge conveyor belt made out of a big rug in the bottom of a sporting goods store. It doesn't sound like much, but it was fun as a kid. The coolest part was that you could turn it on and off with a garage door opener type gadget. I always wanted to turn it up really fast and see how much speed I could get up tucking, but my ski instructor wouldn't let me. Now that I look back, tucking really wouldn't matter. There's no wind resistence to worry about when you aren't actually moving.
But wouldn't that also mean that skiiers who tend to carve/zig zag often would experience large swings in percieved speed as the travel from the inner disc to outer disc and back again? Or perhaps with a big enough disc, this wouldn't be a problem, but then skiing at the edges would be at some seriously scary speeds!
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
The problem I'm seeing here is pretty major. If you take a 3000m ski run and compress it into a 300m run, there's still going to be 3000m worth of "snow damage" per skier/run, but it will be compressed into 300m of distance. So the snow is going to be 10 times as chopped up in any one place. And real ski resorts have multiple runs that reduces the traffic on any one run... to even begin to pay for this thing it's going to have to be packed.
I mean...in the real outdoors, there's nobody to sue since you can't "serve" Mother Nature with a summons....but in a Man-Made fun park, with rotating snow hill and man-made mountains and snow guns.....well, I can just see the lawyers slobbering now.....anyone who falls....well it MUST be product liability....nobody SHOULD design and build a hill where people could fall down....should they? "My client was hurt through the negligence of those Snow-Hill-Builders....I demand compensation for this tragic twisting of my client's knee. She's been disfigured and will not walk untill Tuesday!"
I'm just not convinced that taking EVERY naturally occuring (and read "free") effect of nature and turning it into a private, man-made, man-controlled, homogenized, and lawyer safe sport is a good thing. It comodotizes nature, and creates a situation which blurs the distinction between real life and "Real Life (tm)"
I see this trend with surfing too, artificial wave generators, controlled "fun-parks" where people have to "Pay-per-Wave"....Yeah, Mother Nature does not create the exact same wave every time, but that's the fun of the sport!
Both of these are, in my view, attempts by corporations to get people to pay for something that's inherently free. Surfing for instance...paddle out, ride back for free....Sking too, climb to top of hill, slide to bottom for free...Only with sking, you do pay for the lift (but you can walk for free too)
Perhaps I'm not looking at the best side of this though.....the rotation of the hill might counteract the rotation brought on by too many Irish Coffee's at the bar! Now that would be something.
If you think about it, there are natural perpetual slopes: Standing waves (wakes?) on rivers.
I even found a very cool video (8MB) demonstrating riversurfing on the Eisbach in Munich.
If you've never operated an LP phonograph -- the skating force is due to the differential friction on opposite sides of the needle on a phonograph, and tends to draw the needle inward toward the center of the record. It's large enough to cause a needle to skip, bump bump bump, right over the grooves unless a counteracting force is applied. Low-end turntables used springs to pull the needle outward and combat the skating force; high-end turntables used little weights with little mechanical linkages that were designed to match the changes in the skating force with radius.
You can see skating force in action at the bottom of a teacup if there are a few tea leaves floating around down there at the bottom. The tea leaves (after they're waterlogged) sink, so spinning the tea in the teacup "ought" to make them fly outward in the local gravity field. But in fact, tea leaves at the bottom of the cup tend to pile up in the center (when you spin the tea). Counter-intuitive and mysterious, until you realize that the leaves are also dragging on the bottom of the cup and therefore are subject to the skating force.
In case you're interested in river surfing, I found a couple
;-)
of shorter videos of the Eisbach. Looks
spectacular. I gotta try this.
PS: I hope I didn't spoil the evening of some sysadmins in
magdeburg by linking the first movie.