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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.
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
One advantage of a disk is that you get different speeds a different points on the radius. if you want to ski faster, you just move out instead of moving to a different treadmill.
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.
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.
well, actually, a skier's top speed is mostly determined by the slope of the run, weight of the skiier, type of skis etc. your maximum speed relative to the track would be no different on the inside or outside. of course, if you ski too fast on the inside then you get to the bottom. ski too slow on the outside and you would rise to top.
"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 --
I believe this is basically the treadmill idea, where the skiier stays basically stationary relative the the real earth, it's just that the ground is moving beneath them. So no centripetal force problems. This has the benefit that the snow pack isn't doing anything funny like going upside-down.
"Scientists debated for weeks over whether 33, 45, or 78 rpm was the best speed for skiing"
there are some things a simulation just can't capture
1. laughing at that guy, who just crashed, as you ride the chair lift
2. the sense of irony as you face-plant into a snow drift
3. extracting snow from your thermal underwear
4. marching up the hill to retrieve your skis
5. realizing those guys in the chair lift are laughing at you.
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.
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.
No clue, I moved out of Seattle about 10 years ago and haven't been to Northgate in any of my visits.
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.
Heh, I was about to post how the Olympic Sports in Seattle (Northgate) had one of those, but you got it first. I don't know if it's still there, but it was last time I was in that store (probably two years ago). My mom and my sister learned to ski on that conveyer belt before taking to the real slopes.
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.
So, this conveyor belt carpet device, it was covered with machine-generated snow, was it? Oh, wait - it would all fall off the bottom of the belt.
:)
No... there is no snow involved. Alot of people have already mentioned this and have called it "carpet" for lack of a better term, but this isn't your average gray indoor-outdoor... it's really more like a foamy shag. It's enough to allow you to cut directly on the surface. I think it actually solves alot of problems that snow on any kind of conveyor or turntable would cause, but I wouldn't go on it, for the sake of my edges.
That's a shame. They used to be one of the best sports stores in the seattle area for skiing equipment and such. Small world though, heh
Two ppl colliding can easily break a leg. As for keeping the old off it, there's plenty of keen older skiers, and if they face-plant then they're more likely to bust something. And a rule saying "no-one over 50 may ride this" ain't gonna get past the lawyers...
Grab.
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!
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.
With some people pointing out the boredom of a repeating slope, option #1 has the advantage of dynamically creating moguls and other random surface formations for the enjoyment of variety seeking alpinists.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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!
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.
It's funny, I went skiing this weekend with some friends who are very beginner, and they were talking about trying it out and taking lessons this summer on that conveyer belt. Fortunately, according to Yahoo Yellow Pages at least, it still exists.