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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?"
You travel up the hill, go into the equipment area, get sprayed with man made snow, and turn into a mogul.
I want to see it built just for the entries into the Darwin Awards it will generate.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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.
...that it's all downhill from here.
Why not just use some treadmill like contraption? Seems like you'd circumvent all the centripetal force/motion problems that way.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
Professional skiiers use this to hone their skills and perfect their form! :) :)
Newbies also uses this to learn how to ski... I know of some places in Holland (of all places) that they have this - It's like another post here says, it's a big rug you ski on, the instuctor is at the bottom directly in front of you, telling you what to do...
Never tried it myself though. I don't plan to turn pro, but I do enjoy the occasional trip to France to ski the alps
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
When this thing is running at full tilt, how the hell do you get off it? Or worse yet, where do you go if you fall, as is sure to happen.
:p Be nice if the article was more than a brief overview.
Seems to me there's a lot of issues with physics involved as well, ignoring the problems of getting the thing to actually operate.
People learn to ski on solid, non moving surfaces. What happens when you try to stop.. do you overbalance and fall down? Or how about the race track problem.. you're always turning left, cuz if you turn right you run into the wall.
Basically I see this thing creating more questions than solutions.
for all those faulty IBM hard disk drives, perhaps.
:-/
Built like a huge tilted record player, it can spin at up to 30 km/h. Any takers?
Couldn't we somehow merge all those screwed-up IBM Death^H^H^HskStar drives into a pseudo Beowulf cluster that would spin that fast?
Of course, I wouldn't want to be skiing on it when a few drives totally die
EricKrout.com officially endorses Ximian GNOME
and when you go to an actual ski resort, all you can do is left turns, just like how nascar drivers turn right, by 3 left turns.
geek page at KY speaks
Wouldn't riding on a never-ending snow treadmill get a little tedious? Also, how would you accomodate the "green circle skiers" and the "black diamond skiers" on the same device? I assume the slope of this thing would not be very aggressive.
So how do I get onto this thing? It seems like it would be hard to get started on it since it's constantly moving - and even harder to get off of it.
It would also get pretty boring to ski around in a circle for hours on end... no new scenery. If they put up a big contiguous screen along the edges, and maybe some of the sky too, to prevent you from getting quite so dizzy and provide some additional entertainment.
Then again you could also just go VR skiing and never have to go outside or worry about all these physical limitations.
I remember 15 years ago as a kid I went to buy my first set of skis with my parents. At the shop there was a big carpeted slope that, with the flip of a switch, started to move like a giant belt sander. I can't remember wher it was but I just asked my parents and they thought it was at a some ski expo. Anyone else remember something like this?
Tom
it rotates at a constant speed
It has a constant RPM - but the speed of the skier over the ground depends on how far away from the centre of the disk they are. if the skiable area is sufficiently wide, the difference in available speeds could suit a whole range of skiers abilities.
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.
Movies of a working ski-trak!
Okay, it's just a model but they answer the everyone's question about getting on and getting off - there's a stationary area in the middle
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.
Seems like an awful lot of work when simulators are getting better and better. Seems you could spend that money to develop a better electronic version.
BTW, a google search turns up a number of links to simulators which use treadmills (as has been mentioned earlier as an idea).
Google link
"However, Nenad Bicanic of the University of Glasgow says that the structure may be feasible. But he says precautions would be needed to ensure skiers could not be pulled into the mechanism at the top of the slope."
I think I'll let them work the bugs out first.
Either way, eugoogly is pretty funny. 'Yougooglie'
-- Dan
Oh wait, that was steps...
Would this mean the motion of the hill moving upwards actually make you keep going downhill?
Anyone else thinking of an embedded Linux system to recognized where a skiier is on the hill and adjust the speed accordingly? =)
The japanese have been skiing indoors for years. You can have climate controlled fun year round here at the Tokyo Skidome:
Indoor Skiing
This is actually very new. This is no rug; it's actual snow which they create on the fly as the contraption rotates. Sounds pretty silly to me, and even if they do manage to make it work, I can't imagine it'll be any sort of a hit.
I'm really wondering why they had to make it a rotating structure though; I don't see why they couldn't use a conveyor belt-like design. People will get dizzy this way.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
"Scientists debated for weeks over whether 33, 45, or 78 rpm was the best speed for skiing"
When I go skiing fast, it is of course important to move quickly relative to the ground. This model works fine for that. However... an equally important aspect is the fast wind in your face. I would imagine skiing would be much less fun without the relative air movement.
My server
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.
So couldn't this somehow be used so that someone could end up walking to school, in the snow, uphill BOTH ways?
"We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it" -- Winston Churchill
I suppose he wont be skiing straight down so he will need to make turns. Yet when he is making turns, if he is on one side of the slope it will be moving faster under him then if he is on the other side. I have a feeling this discrepency will quickly cause him to fall.
how would they rescue somebody with a broken leg or something? shut it off? they would have to shut it off ASAP and the inertia of that thing would be hard to stop. not to mention the inertia of the skiers...they would be flying as it decellerated. not to mention the fact that stoping the thing every 5 minutes when somebody fell down and couldn't get up would be hell for business.
I know it is a model, not the real thing, but watch Movie #1.
The inventor seems to think skiers will be able to ski where they want across the entire moving area.
No chairlifts sounds nice. If you out-ski the turntable you just pull off to the side and ride to the top, then hit the trail again.
But chairlifts also meter traffic. I'm talking out my butt here, but I'm sure that ski slopes do some kind of calculations involving skiers/hour and trail capacity. Without a traffic limiter, the turntable could get 'too busy' on heavy days.
The last time I was in Japan I saw something similar to this in concept, if not scale. There was a wide conveyer belt with a carpet-like material on it tilted up at an angle similar to that of a ski slope. A snowboarder was carving turns on this surface, and looked to be having fun. With real (ok, fake real) snow this idea might be popular in Japan.
Just curious.
"How can the children learn to ski if they _can't even fit on the slope_!"
It seems like always skiing to your left would get old after a while.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Years ago i was at a expo for well stuff and they had some one just skiing in there stationary but kept sking.
It was basicaly a large carpet on a large coveigher belt making an endless loop of carpet.
think huge treadmill that slops down and rolls upwards. i think it tilted side to side and up and down for vaitation in slope and whatnot. it was really kinda cool then.
a large disk just doenst sound like a good idea.. the inner area of disk would prolly suffer much more wear and tear sinice it goes faster. not to mention the uneven speed across the surface of it.
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.
What about the centripetal forces on the snow at the outside of the disc? Is the snow going to go flying off?
30km/h ~= 10m/s
The radius sounds like it's a little less than 100m (if 300m is the circumference of a half of the circle
a=v^2/r
So acceleration at the edges will be about 1 m/s^2
You'll have to add or substract that to the 9.8m/s^2 vector.
Actually, in retrospect of this calculation, I think it will be that 9.8m/s^2 accelleration vector spinning like a top that will have the worst effect on the snow. First you're an upslope, now you're a downslope!
Hope they groom it well.
When the tea is spinning steadily, the leaves are honogeneously distributed near the bottom. The centrifugal tendencies are cancelled by the pressure gradient: the surface of tea becomes parabolical, so at the bottom there is greater pressure towards the edges.
However, when you stop spinning the tea, viscosity starts to slow down the rotation. The bottom layer will, for a while, rotate slower than the rest of the tea. But the parabolical shape of the surface is still there, along with the pressure gradient it causes. Therefore, at the bottom layer, the inward forces are greater than the necessary centripetal force, so the leaves are pushed to the center.
Do try it, it's essential to notice the difference between steady spinning and slowing down.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I seem to remember some little factoid somewhere that said PERPETUAL MOTION IS IMPOSSIBLE! The kinetic energy (your speed for the illiterate) when you ski comes from your potential energy (your height) at the top of the hill... assuming this contraption works, you will be constantly at the same elevation meaning your change in potential energy is 0 meaning your change in kinetic energy down the hill is 0. All that this thing is is a giant teacup ride.
300 m slope? how boring would that be? give me a real mountain any day....
Nevrar
I'm pretty sure anyone who is capable of carving (ie., has at least a couple years experience) wouldn't waste their time on this. It sounds like a tool that would be more successful at teaching beginners who are too afraid to actually start moving on real snow, since this thing could be stopped whenever they want.
That brings up an interesting point though: how are you supposed to learn to turn properly if you move at different speeds when you turn left or right? One of the biggest problems I had when learning was that I was better at turning left than right for a long time, and it really hurt me when skiing tougher terrain like moguls and deep snow. Eventually I figured it out, but that's a problem that will have to be resolved before I would send my kids to learn on this.
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.
On the disk, the slower skiers would rise up toward the top, from which the down-hill path is toward the center where the track circumference is shorter. OTOH, faster skiers would move down the incline and be forced toward the outside where the surface is moving faster. The motor would turn the disk at a constant rate and provide the customer with a fully graduated range of speeds based on the radius of the skiers track. The geometry would ensure that the skier was always at the best location based on their current speed.
I would suppose that the best place to get on/off would be at the hub where the surface is moving the slowest. Getting flung off the outside edge or sucked over the top would be issues.
Unlike the tracks, the disk can have lumps, bumps and possibly jumps. It should also be able to handle quite a few people at once.
I suspect that skiing toward the outside of the disc will simply accelerate the skiier in the same way that a slope would - one could quickly become acclimatized to the feeling, although it would be totally different from a real ski experience.
the shape of a bowl provides a more natural surface to ski on (as opposed to flat disc) and would tend to keep the snow where it belongs.
Didn't Sonny Bono have one of these?
you should be pretty good at turning left.
-W
I'm not sure I get the physics involved in this assertion, but it seems like it you could discourage people hitting the spindle by building up the middle of the disk such that you have to ski "uphill" to get to it.
I play Nerd-Folk!
Too bad Chuck Jones just died (see /. story nearby). He could have had a field-day making cartoons based on this wacky gadget.
Its so dithththpickable!
Table-ized A.I.
This isn't like an artifical wave machine for surfing. The only thing this perpetual slope is good for is burning VC money.
Nice idea, but it won't work. People want variety. I've spent months on multiple-mountain slopes. Unless you're there during peak times, most of the runs are empty. Why do they keep the maintenance costs? People want something new. You want to fill that need, you landscape a new mountain. You can spend an entire day on a single mountain, then ski the next one over the following day. Or you could spend you're entire day going from one mountain to the next, only touching a chairlift a few times during the day.
Forget the breakdown of these chairlifts. If something mechanical goes wrong, the entire facility is down for however long it takes to repair. I can't see the advantage of the business model in this idea. It appears the farthest it will go from a consumer's perspective is atop someone's desk, plugged into a power outlet with little lego men falling over themselves and getting churned up in the mechanics.
I do, however, see the advantage for trainers. Less time on the lift means more time on the slopes; if you have the stamina, you could get much more training benefit out of an hour on this contraption than you would at a typical ski resort.
Although it looks like a snow-covered tilt-a-whirl, but I think I'll save my money and spend time at a real ski resort.
Cool, so someone finally created a perpetual motion machine. And it turned out to be an oversized record player! All I can say is "WOW"!
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
So pretty much every time you fall, you're going to end up at the top of the slope. They have two choices - let you continue through the cold chamber and get snowblasted and groomed, or pick you, your skis, poles, etc, off the slope in some safe way that copes with many people all ending up at the same part of the top in rapid succession.
Neither option sounds to me like a fun way to learn skiing.
-Fzz
That's a cool idea. Maybe for driving practice, you could take a stretch of road, and wrap it around so the end of the road is connected back to the start, and you'd have a perpetual... uh, wait, never mind.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
They seem to like to build high tech gizmos. I recall they built the first fake wave generator for indoor surface and have many artificial ski slopes. They are bit shy about investing in the current economic climate.
I think I may actually know someone involved with the business side of the one being built in the Sydney, Australia. He's also a semi-techi type person sooooo..... Is there anything people would like to know about this? Post below and I'll put the good one's to him.
Can't think of a good way to fix the constant left turning problem, but if they could find a way to get a crew or machine to throw in a variety of hills and jumps at the bottom, then take them back off again at the top for reuse, it would make for a heck of a lot more interesting skiing. Then you wouldn't be stuck repeating a neverending loop of the same thing.
I don't respect your opinions, but I respect your right to hold them
From the ski-trac web site (http://www.ski-trac.com)
"Global climate warming will do the Ski Trac a great favour. Scientists have recently declared that the future of snow skiing will be indoors!"
In other words, (mine), "marine life is being irreperably disrupted, coastal cities will soon be navigated by canoe, and everyone will die of melanoma. Whoo-hoo! Indoor skiing!"
I can't wait.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
...as a giant hampster wheel.
Since you have obviously never skied perhaps the following story will be illustrative:
I was at Alta one day and it was blowing so hard that the only way to get downhill was to get into a tuck. If you stood upright the wind would actually blow you UP the mountain. After two runs they shut down the lifts since the chairs were swinging wildly. I guess I could have simply started at the bottom and skied up the hill with the wind blowing my up and then come back down in a tuck but the ice that had formed on my beard was telling me that I should stay in the lodge.
p.s. What does sort of "rotational momentum" does a object that is not rotating have?
Lasers Controlled Games!
Would there be wear on particular spots in the hill since it always goes the same way? Would it be bad for a person's body to always be turning the same way? For instance, on a walking track at the local YMCA, every other day the people switch the way they walk around the track. This is supposedly for reasons of wear on the track, plus something about people always walking the same direction and the unequality of how it wears on their bodies - turning on the same foot all the time and stuf I guess.
I know I'm rambling. Just ignore me unless you have an explanation for me.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Their business plan also points out that global warming increases their potential market. May take a while for that to kick in, though.
The Anaheim, California Gotcha Glacier project was somewhat similar, minus the big turntable, but financing fell through late last year. Somehow I expect that may happen to this project, especially since the first site is planned for Wales, instead of near some major urban area.
These guys have bad timing. Three years ago, you could have IPOed something like this. Today, forget it.
N'sick
My mom has said she would never tell me I have too much time on my hands ever again...
I wonder if they will pipe in 'Crazy Train' by Ozzy or 'Slip slidin' away'???
I'm guessin' the snow grooming machine is going to resemble a giant record player arm that starts at the edge and works i's way in... unless they go high tech and then it will have to be a lazer device that starts at the centre and moves to the edge...
this brings up another question... will the RIAA nail you for copyright infringement if your skiis make any sound?
flinging poop since 1969
This is great, when geeks go skiing they can bring their favorite avian friends. There is a special place for them underneath. Have a look under the disk at the hotel and rookery. I guess that would be the rookery on the right (or would that be it in the center of the picture.)
The song is "Meine Freunde" by "Die Ärzte".
The text translates to "is this allowed?".
After the Eisbach got popular and accidents
cumulated, police tried to drive the surfers
away. Until is was decided that it is not
legally possible to disallow the surfing.
Can you imagine a beowulf clus....what the hell...this is Slashdot right? Since when is anything related to physical activity news for nerds?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
If so, think about it - you won't actually be moving relative to the ground!!
The snow will not be moving relative to you (in a horisontal direction). So how are you supposed to turn? Your ski's won't be moving relative to the snow.
Think about it - if you moved relative to the snow - I don't care what the machine is doing, eventually you will reach the bottom of the slope.
Don't be fooled by the slope (angle). Look at any individual piece of snow (looking down from the top). It will simply be moving in a big circle. Any rider sitting on the machine will also simply be moving in a circle.
Because the machine is moving so fast in a circle, the only force you will experience is an outward force, to the edge of the machine, and an upward force (if the machine is moving too fast), or you will slip down the machine to the bottom (if the machine is moving too slow). But in no way will you be skiing perpetually. Either you will be standing still, or moving up or down to the ends of the machine.
It's not like an escalator - or any of those contraptions described in the posts. In those cases the belt that you are standing on is moving up and coming back at the bottom. So the ground is moving relative to you. It not just going in a big circle.
If that's what this guy wanted then he would have made the machine in a straight line - but imagine just how many tons of snow the motor would have to move!
As far as I can tell he wants the whole machine to rotate as one solid unit. When you do that and stand on it - absolutely nothing at all will happen!! If you balanced the speed of the machine exactly to the speed of you falling, you will stay in one spot. But you could sit in a chair for all the difference it would make.
The only possibiliy I can see is to make a big FLAT disk and spin it. You would get some skiing effect then, but eventually friction will speed you up to the speed of the machine, and you'll be standing still.
-Ariel
Because when you eXPerience that fantastic "perpetual slope" thing, when you look at the surroundings you'll be standing still relative to them, and keeping you in that gravity pull - friction counteract would be ridiciously easy, and..frankly, quite boring I guess..just hanging with your sticks, feeling the snow move under you, gradually automagically moving towards that mysteriously expensive cafè at the center.
Being on the mountain, in the slopes, is about fresh air, sun, speed and an ability to control where you go (which we open source geeks sure adore)...all of which the Ski-Trac will lack.
But I guess it's a day out for the rich kids.
-skeff
Either way, it can't beat the real thing (always wanted to try one of those).