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Laser-Scanning U.S. Landmarks
MeanMF writes "The New York Daily News reports in this article that the National Park Service is creating detailed 3-D maps of national monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore using high-resolution laser scanners. Their goal is to create highly-accurate blueprints that can be used to reconstruct the monuments if they are damaged by a terrorist attack or other means." The same story is also available at Yahoo!.
Would we really want to replace them though? Seems to me this would be like rebuildign the World Trade Centers exactly like they were, and noone is suggesting that, so why would monuments be different?
Lady Liberty is sexy sexy sexy! They forgot to mention her heaving bosom though.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
It's one thing to rebuild the Statue of Liberty, I can see how that might be accomplished (albeit at quite a cost).
What I dont' get is...why Mt. Rushmore? They're going to have one hell of a time re-carving that thing back into the mountain, expecially after being demolished by something...well, big enough to blow something like that up.
Cool idea, all in all though.
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
Not to sound crass or anything, but is that really what people would want? If an historic monument is destroyed, replacing it doesn't mean that it never happenend, it just means that it was replaced.
I would think that if something like this were to happen, then some new, awe-inspiring monument could be built. However, It seems to me that there has been a dearth in people eligible for immortalization in a mountain face (for example) for quite a while now.
Sure gives a new meaning to the phrase "disaster recovery", don't it? Altough, if restoring from tape is a bitch, now imagine this one...
I hope they release the raw data. It can be used by flight simulator games to enhance the visual quality when rendering these monuments.
no one would know the replacements weren't *exact*, would they?
How many millions do they intend to spend to replicate every ding and pidgeon dropping aquired over decades and not intended by the original artist in the first place?
When you total your car, you can have it fixed or you can buy a new one, but attempting to *duplicate* the old one down to the placement of the least little old molocule not only pretty much defines "prohibitively expensive", but A: Isn't possible, and B: As an idea is just plain doofey.
KFG
Step One of our diabolical terrorist plan: Destroy the National Parks Service Headquarters!
This is very important. If our monuments are destroyed, we have to build them again exactly as they were before. That's because the key thing about monuments is not what they represent, but their particular physical specifications. By rebuilding exactly as before, we send a message to the terrorists that we keep very good records, and aren't afraid to use them.
Contrast this to the way our enemies behave. When we bomb their command centers, rather than rebuilding them exactly as they were before, they rebuild them to be more bomb proof. This shows how little respect for their own history they have.
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and replace him with a robot replica.
If anything happens to the Statue of Liberty, why not just send her back to France and get them to do warranty repair. I'm sure the French wouldn't mind, especially if you've purchased the extended warranty :)
I think what makes most of the US landmarks great is that they're originals. Anyone that's studied the history of Mount Rushmore knows that one of the great things about it is that it was so hard to make. To reproduce something like that nowadays rids us of the pre-destruction history. I like what they're planning on doing at ground zero, instead of recreating the two towers, they are planning on doing... something else... I don't like "undoing" bad things that happen, I think bad things are important to everyone and should be left as such. Hmm, so maybe they can make 3d models in the future for us to remember it. Life is life, bad stuff happens, people die. I don't know why America wants to prevent ANYTHING bad from happening. Errr, anything bad happening to them.
--at least, not in the sense of building it the same way, even approximately the same way, as it was before.
Why does anyone think that we would try to rebuild exact copies of any other monument?
Surely the emotional resonance of these monuments comes from the knowledge that they ARE original to the time in which they were built. How could a replica arouse any more genuine feeling than those in Las Vegas or Japan?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Macka
[devil's advocate]
Shouldn't the US Gov concentrate harder on getting the DNA sequences of every American citizen, so that they can clone anyone killed in the terrorist attacks, wrather than focus on the materialistic parts of the country?
What's more important?
[/devil's advocate]
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
How about the USA changing its destructive foreign policy so we don't have terrorists trying to kill us and destroy monuments.
Like that would ever happen though...
And no. I didn't vote for Bush.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
Now, if only we had this before protoplasmic slime, a few wacky guys with a nintendo controller and bad music caused all those unsighlty stretchmarks on the statue of liberty..
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
Of course it is. Sure, we are the _largest_ deptor country in the world, sure we are spending billions of deficite dollars on the military; but isn't rebuilding an exact replica of Mt. Rushmore more important. After all, terrorists would never attack a major city, or infect our water supply, so there is no need to put some money into those defenses. We don't have people in our cities that can't make a living wage. As such a perfect country, we obviously have only to protect what really counts; a few statues and a mountain shaped like some dead peoples heads.
Okay, so the idea is kinda cool, but this is definitely _not_ what the government should be spending their (^our^) money on. Oh, well, that's what happens when Texans are in charge.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
From the title, I imagined that having accurate 3D models of monuments could serve educational purposes... But it was just to reconstruct them in case of terrorist attacks! I mean, really, is anyone else sick of terrorism being the number 1 excuse for everything?
Engage!
May not admit it, this project probably has a far more mundane purpose than the stated one of restoration in the event of terrorist attack. I think documentation and preservation are probably their goals. They want this information to record and document the process of oxidation on Lady Liberty, or how long Washington's nose is on Rushmore. However with the current climate it is far easier to get funding if there is a terrorism angle as opposed to boring old historical preservation. (When was the last time you read an article on monument preservation?)
So the project wasn't started as a direct result of the attacks as this headline would lead you to believe.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
I'd imagine that if we were to give these plans to Lego, we'd have some really kickass home versions of all of the monuments. Or how about the 3D puzzle people? Or a craft store? There's consumeristic profit to be reaped from these laser scans...I wonder if the park system will see it.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I agree, to some extent, that the idea of replacing the Statue of Liberty, Mt Rushmore, the Capitol Building, or any other well-known national monument as exactly as possible is slightly silly. The comment made about replacing a car after a crash, and not wanting to replicate all of the origonal dings and scratches is somewhat reasonable.
But I think you're missing the point about the symbolism and memories contained in these monuments. If my car was totaled, I would be sad not only because I would have lost simply a means of transportation, but I would have lost a location where memories were made. Driving on the highway while friends taunted the 18 year-old engine ("Wow! It hit 55! You think it can get to sixty?"), packing 7 people into a 2-door hatchback, etc. I'd miss all that had happened in the car, as well as the car itself.
Likewise, losing the Statue of Liberty to terrorists, a giant space-crane, Godzilla, or whatever won't simply mean there's new real-estate open on Liberty Island. It'll mean a national monument that watched over hundreds of thousands of immigrants, saw the USA through two World Wars, a presidential assasination, putting people on the moon, the Cold War, Vietnam, etc, etc, etc, will be gone.
I use the Statue of Liberty as an example because I think it's America's 'best' and 'most important' monument. I don't particularly care for Mt. Rushmore (I think it's vaguely creepy), and the Capitol Building doesn't impress me much. The Statue of Liberty represents ideals that America hasn't always been great holding true to, I admit. I'll be the first to criticize the current administration and have no problem pointing out ways we've screwed up in the past. We've fucked up a lot, both internaly and with the rest of the world, and I'm sure we'll continue doing it. But I think the Statue of Liberty, or the Lincoln Memorial, or the Jefferson, or the Washington represent what is, has, and (I _really_ hope) will continue to be great about the USA.
So. I don't think mapping these monuments down to a quarter inch is 'silly' or 'stupid' or a 'waste of time.' Having recently visited New York and seen Lady Liberty up close, and still strongly remembering my 8th grade clase trip to Washington D.C., I would be heartbroken if any of a number of our national monuments fell. I can't honestly say I would support rebuilding the Statue of Liberty exactly as she stood. It would be kind of weird, I recognize that.
But I definatly think we should have the option. At the very least, it will allow for faithful 3D models to be replicated. Maybe someday my kids will be able to walk through a 3D model of New York City _exactly_ the way it stood on September 10th, 2001.
So maybe these 3D models will be completely useless, either because the monuments will not be attacked or because people won't want to rebuild them exactly the same.
But I think it would be a horrible shame not to have the option.
-Trillian
Who leaves a job like this up to college kids. I can just see a post-apocolyptic era in which the statue of liberty is a girl in a bikini waving a sign that says "Texas A&M blows" on it.
From the article:
"The world-famous lady has posed for millions of photos, but since her creator left no blueprints and only minimal design sketches, replacing her in the event of a catastrophic loss would have been all but impossible.
Nonsense. The difficulty would be the engineering, but quite far from "all but impossible." What laser mapping the surface does is give us an accurate measure of the skin (both inside and out). Laser mapping doesn't tell us jack about the underlying structure which is where the vast, vast majority of the work would be. And the skin can be replicated from the extremely high resolution pictures we already have.
In other words this makes a difficult task a bit easier. This does not bridge some do-or-die gap where if we didn't have it we couldn't accomplish the task.
My
Limekiller
I want to know what they would do with the statue of liberty because it's made of copper so any repairs made to it would be bright shiny copper with the rest of it being the green corroded copper. I suppose they'd more likely knock the whole statue down and rebuild it. I think if there were large salvagable pieces of the feet, torch or face that they should be preserved some way as a monument instead of rebuilding it though.
boy, if you think this is waste, I've got a few government agencies to sell you. this is probably one of the better uses of our tax dollars (relatively speaking).
Just like our culture. Is this what the artists intended when they created these works?
It is a statue of Liberty, not a statue of Respect for History.
(imagines a giant copper statue of an elderly librarian with coke-bottle glasses, sitting behind a desk with a 'sssh!' gesture)
--
Benjamin Coates
Hence the bright shiny copper will become green after some time, as you should know if you are Dr. Science.
He's not a real doctor. He has a Master's degree.
--
Benjamin Coates
In fact, it is more likely that terrorist attacks will damage a landmark and not completely destroy it. In those cases, having accurate information on the original will be invaluable.
So they're reverse-engineering architectural features for the purpose of making replacement copies. I wonder if this falls under the jurisdiction of the DMCA?
Hopefully it would fall under 'fair use' as it is (reportedly) for backup purposes.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
so far every post I've read is complaining about "taxpayers money at work" or "why bother?"...you're looking at it the wrong way-
think of the uses of these maps!
ut2003, doom3, quake 10, counterstrike:anti-terrorist unit, etc... what ever.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
Yes, because after all, symbols don't have any importance to a people... I for one am glad to see my tax dollars spent on a project like this. And if the Statue of Liberty were to fall to terrorism, I would be among those donating for a replacement. Symbols matter. To same extent, they're all that does matter.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
About two years ago, I worked for Cyra, the company whose Cyrax 2500 they are using to scan these monuments. The device is pretty cool, but expensive at US $125,000 for one unit, not including any license seats of the Cyclone software you need to manipulate the HUGE data sets that the device generates. All you get from the device is a cloud of individual points. It really takes the software that runs on the PC (Cyclone) to turn the point clouds into surfaces and then into files compatible with CAD systems like AutoCAD and Microstation.
By the way, it is a good thing that none of these monuments that they are scanning with the Cyrax 2500 are red. The green laser used by the unit doesn't even see some shades of red. There was a bright red toolbox in the lab that would crash the scanner every time until we got the "no-return timeout" code right.
It's too bad the company is in such a bad financial situation. The device is really cool, but the slowing US economy has really put the brakes on large capital expenditures like the Cyrax 2500, even though many studies have shown that the labor costs savings and the improved accuracy of the results more than make up for the cost of the device and the training.
For those of you who live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a Cyrax 2400 (the previous model) was used to scan the existing I-880 / US-101 interchange in order to obtain a starting point for designing the new interchange they are currently building. The next time you are travelling south-bound on I-880 near the Montague Expressway exit, look at the paved shoulder and see if the spray-painted "scan 101" etc. marks are still there, indicating where the parked the "scan van" to take each of the scans they stitched together to get the entire interchange model.
I guess I've rambled on long enough...
Yesterday it worked; today it is not working; Windows is like that...
We had guy visit our lab from Japan a few months ago- he's been working on a similar project there to take laser scans of huge Buddah statues and temples. IIRC there were a couple of reasons for doing this- the obvious one being to preserve their cultural heritage. I think one reason was a ban on military research due to WWII, so they have to find ways to apply neat tech which don't involve blowing shit up. (don't quote me on that). I believe they also did a computer reconstruction of a temple which used to be around one of the statues but was destroyed in a tsunami, so you could do a virtual walkthrough of a nonexistent temple, with an accurate virtual statue inside.
He also talked about some of the neat texture mapping they're working on to map the images back onto the laser scanned models.
Ah, I see Mr. Ashcroft is going ahead with his plans of fitting her with a burqa.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Mount McRushmore.
4 Dead presidents and a set of golden arches.
Oh well guess I should cancel that trip to the Statue of Liberty.
The US Government has money troubles, and this technology is not cheap, definitely not to scan all the monuments. It takes time so you have to pay the workers to run the scanners, transport the equipment, and so on. Once the images are scanned they have to be processed using up computing power. The article mentions "But after 9/11, the project won a renewed commitment, increased funding, a speedier timetable and access to government helicopters for overhead photography." If the government is short on money but is funding these projects they think an attack is coming(and they should know, they sure take away enough freedom to spy on terrorists and everyone else). The real question is if the US Government thinks an attack is coming, shouldn't the US Citizens and non US Citizens who come to tour the country?
Does this violate the DMCA?
No, the DMCA only forbids reverse engineering where the intent is to create unauthorized copies of a copyrighted work.
This is not an issue with the Statue of Liberty because works created in the 1870s are now in the public domain.
This is not an issue with the Statue of Liberty because works created in the 1870s are now in the public domain.
Are you sure? She might have just snuck in with the last Mickey Mouse extention.
. . . and other classic sculptures because all of classical Europe is fizzing into oblivion because of acid rain.
The David sculpture is over 4 meters high and was scanned at 0.2mm resolution. The thing had 2.7 billion triangles in it!
You could see the tool marks in the pupil.
This was 2-3 years ago. Can't find the site.
It actually wasn't the Italians, but a team from my alma mater, Stanford University, lead by professor Marc Levoy. While I wasn't directly involved in the project myself, I knew many of the folks behind it.
The project site is http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
After the French got together the money to build the Statue to gift us with and built it, they couldn't convince us to pony up the money to actually have the damn thing shipped over. It took Hearst and a bunch of media work to get enough people to pay for the transportation.
May we never see th
It seems to me that there has been a dearth in people eligible for immortalization in a mountain face (for example) for quite a while now.
:w w.memri.org/index.htmle x.htm
."
....
That's crass. There's lots of people I care about more than anyone on a mountain face...
I think monuments with the faces of the innocent victims would be appropriate.
By the way, I'm tired of reading that 9/11 was our fault. It was our fault for not being members of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist invasion cult.
You know, 9/11 happened because Osama Bin Laudin is no weirdo to the Saudis, he's a pretty typical result of the Saudi Wahhabist education system. It's an education system that the Saudis use all that oil money to spread to the rest of the world (Pakistan and Afganistan are filled with their schools).
Sheikh Muhammad Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab was an 18th century Islamist cult founder who the Saudis princes claim to be descended from.
He taught that his followers were destined by god to invade the rest of the world that it is their duty to be everyone else's enemy, to take everything for themselves and to convert by the sword. Among his wonderful fatwas is one that forbids his followers to have friends who are not muslims - hatred is required. It is also forbidden to wish a non muslim well on his holidays etc. etc.. In Saudi Arabia, preaching Christianity is punishable by death.
Here's some quotes from modern Saudi society and education taken from various places
http://www.mideastweb.org/index.html
http://w
http://www.amarji.org/ind
Sheikh Majed 'Abd Al-Rahman Al-Firian recently stated in the Suleiman Bin Muqiran mosque in Riyadh: "Muslims must... educate their children to Jihad. This is the greatest benefit of the situation: educating the children to Jihad and to hatred of the Jews, the Christians, and the infidels; educating the children to Jihad and to revival of the embers of Jihad in their souls. This is what is needed now..."
A schoolbook for the 9th grade on Hadith introduces a famous narration known by the name, "The Promise of the Stone and the Tree."It tells a story about Abu Hurayra, one of the Prophet's companions who quoted the Prophet as saying: "The hour [the Day of Judgment] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.A Jew will [then] hide behind a rock or a tree, and the rock or tree will call upon the Muslim: 'O Muslim, O slave of Allah! there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!' - except for the gharqad tree, for it is one of the trees of the Jews."[27] The Hadith is accompanied by a number of statements:
"It is Allah's wisdom that the struggle between Muslims and Jews shall continue until the Day of Judgment."
"The Hadithbrings forth the glad tidings about the ultimate victory, with Allah's help, of Muslims over Jews."
"The Jews and the Christians are the enemies of the believers.They will not be favorably disposed toward Muslims and it is necessary to be cautious [in dealing with them]
The book asks questions for class discussion:
"Who will be victorious in the Day of Judgment?"
"With what types of weapons should Muslims arm themselves against the Jews?"
"Name four factors leading to the victory of Muslims over their enemies."
"On a television programme that provides religious counseling [fatwa] a viewer asked the counseling Sheikh if he could travel to Egypt to hand an item he had in safekeeping over to a Christian friend's family. The Sheikh reprimanded the viewer for having a Christian friend in the first place - Muslims were not permitted to take Christian friends. He then went on to advise the viewer to keep the item in question for himself, since all possessions of kuffaar [non-believers] were the rightful property of Muslims."
"The same Sheikh was asked for advice by a Saudi student who was leaving to the U.S to study, and feared for his virtue. The Sheikh advised him to marry an American as soon as he arrived to the U.S., on condition that he would not have any babies by that 'wife,' then divorce her once his scholarship was over and he was ready to head back home."
All the while the only really accepted view of Israelis in the Arab world is that every last Israeli (down to each baby) deserves death. Look out, we've always been second on their hate list.
As it's been in Israel it's going to be here.
The One Narrative Crisis
September 5, 2002
Dr. Mohamed Mosaad
A large group of Arab intellectuals, reflecting the whole spectrum of Arab intelligentsia, was presented in a talk show program broadcast on one of the Arab satellite channels. The subject was the Arab Israeli conflict, Intifada and the suicide bombing. The guests included Marxist, Nasserist, Nationalist, Islamist, and right wing intellectuals. One, thus, should expect a variety of conflicting ideas, a heated debate and an exciting show. One should, at least, expect an exchange of strong arguments, a reflection of different sources and a presentation of multiple analyses. Different ideologies, paradigms and historical, economic, political and cultural grounding of the subject must be displayed in a show like this, with guests like those discussing an issue like that!
The surprise, which is not really surprising to an Arab audience, was the absolute consensus prevailing on the stage. Israel is evil, peace is a big deception, the Israelis are monsters, Israel lives on extending its borders, and those who favor peace are daydreamers, not to mention betrayers and collaborators. There were some differences though. For instance the Nasserist representative said a suicide bomb is more effective than an atomic bomb. The Marxist representative objected, not to say it is immoral, Heaven forbid, but rather to say it is an exaggeration. Of course an atomic bomb is more effective; we should be objective and scientific, the Marxist said. The Nasserist, however, challenged him by saying that he is not exaggerating anything. An atomic bomb could be expected, but no one can know exactly when and where the suicide bomber will blow him/herself, he proudly commented. When the question of the victims being civilians was raised, the guests all murmured and waved their hands. There is not a single Israeli civilian; all of them are a part of the military establishment. The Nationalist frankly said that a one-day old baby living in Tel Aviv is an occupier who is naturally a legitimate target of suicide bombing.
This two-hour show is a drop in the Arab media ocean. But the other drops are no different. The same boring song has been chanted day and night for years in the Arab World. Western commentators are usually amazed and sometimes panicked by this propaganda, wondering how peace would be possible in such a context. My point, however, is not the content of the song, but rather, that it is the only song one can hear. The single narrative is not just the only view of Israel and the Arabs. It dominates the entire program of Arab national life. A conflict with a tiny country in a small corner of the Arab world has pushed almost all other issues off the stage for over half a century. Crazy people do say crazy things all the time, but we might expect to see and hear some other voices too.. Some other reasonable people should be also presented. Why are those reasonable people muted, and why is the crazy discourse flourishing?
I wonder how much these lasers are worth? I bet that if the rented them out to - for example - movie companies, they could get some nice cash inflow. If anything, the porno industry would probably have a great time animating real models/stars into meshes (make Brittney do anything you want, now in 3d!).
How much do these things cost for less industrial versions anyways, I'm surprised the slashgeeks haven't made on that runs on linux (if you have, please send me a link or put it up here).
Wow, you remember that? In 1886? Damn, you're old. ;)
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
Agreed. There's certainly no point in reprinting the poem at the bottom until it's true again. "Take your poor, your tired, keep them at home, or ship them off to some free country, but if you let them come here, we'll jail them for a while and maybe ship them back." This certainly isn't the country I grew up in, though it's becoming more like the one most of my ancestors moved to, a colony with a nearby theocracy and a distant tyrrany that was rapidly decreasing in its respect for the traditional rights of Englishmen.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
At first I agreed but then thought wouldn't this be denying history. I mean what if they had rebuilt the Alamo? The fact that a symbol gets damaged does not make it any less of a symbol. It just transforms it. Maybe reminding people of the sacrifices that need to be made to remain free. (fade out with patriotic music)..
Hang on - maybe we could just rebuild the monuments with Lego. Wouldn't that be a whole lot easier for all concerned..?
I mean, at one point the Aztecs had a little party where they had 86,000 human sacrifices in 3 days, killing more people per minute than the Nazis ever did on a good day.
86000/3 = 29000 daily, eh?
The European Axis did 10,000 daily, so that one (alledged*) mega-death incident is less than their average week. With an uneven rate of killing, it's very likely that Nazis occasionally did triple their average on a "good day".
In WWII, the US twice accomplished 40,000+ killings in a single day. (With a peak rate of 11,000 per second)
Between the Aztec losing control in 1519 and 1530 the population of Mexico went from 30 million to 6 million, so in that time there was a sustained death rate of 6,000 daily. Smallpox humbles the fiercest works of man.
* I've never read of Aztecs killing more than 20,000 in a year, and even that sounds exaggerated.