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Water Flows Uphill
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC are reporting James Dyson's new garden feature, a waterfall with water flowing uphill. Apparently, he wanted to recreate an Escher drawing."
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That would look really cool if it was a small widget-type zen thing, so I can have one on my desk to contemplate while trying to be inspired. :-)
The ENIAC Demo Competition
but using a different technique. I used a strobe on a small waterfall in a dark room- this works in the same way you can sometimes see car wheels spinning in the wrong dirrection.
:^)
When i saw dysons outdoor version while touring the flower show I hoped he had somehow used lasers to implement the strobe technique outdoors in full daylight - that would be cool. But no he is just using pumped air - no surprise really considering hes a vacuum genius
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
Check this animation out from an old IRTC round.
a ll.mpg
:-) )
a ll.txt e nts/h20fall.comments
http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/anims/2000-07-15/h20f
(setting up a BT would nice for this so IRTC.ORG doesn't get bandwidth destroyed. I'd do it, but I should be really studying for final exams
Notes
http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/anims/2000-07-15/h20f
Comments
http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/anims/2000-07-15/comm
From here
http://www.irtc.org/anims/2000-07-15.html
All credit for the animation goes to Joe Wise.
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Check out my blackbox styles
This brings back fond memories of an illusion I first saw when I was a kid. I saw it in Springfield Mall. It was put on by a plumbing contractor, or a hot tub installer, or somebody like that.
It was a faucet, seemingly suspended in mid-air, with an endless supply of water coming from it.
I marvelled at it for several minutes, pondering how it could be done, yet my child's mind, while knowing it wasn't real, was beyond fathoming any art or science that could accomplish this.
Leaning closer to inspect it, my suspicions were aroused by the strange apparatus in the catch basin, but I still needed a full explanation from an adult:
All you do is run a pipe up to the faucet. The pipe supports the faucet. The faucent contains a concavity that directs the water to flow in a hollow cylinder that hides the pipe and completes the illusion.
You can buy table-top models of this, with yellow-dyed water flowing into a mug of beer.
Kudos to this guy though, for taking the concept and wedding it to Escher in a novel way.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If it looked like it's flowing up then it wouldn't "work." You follow the water from the waterfall down, then as it flows horizontally for a while, and everything seems normal, except that you've somehow gotten back to the top. At that point you get the standard "WTF?" Escher moment.
I always thought the most famous of these things was at the bay of Fundy. The level of the tide rises higher than the river level and causes REAL uphill rapids, and a semi illusionary uphill waterfall.
I havent seen it myself, but I understand its quite a mind bender to see.
There is also an optical illusion near there in..Moncton i think? You go to the base of the hill, put your car in neutral, and your car will roll up the hill. Its an optical illusion, you are actually rolling downhill, but you look and it looks uphill, no amount of thinking its downhill dispells that.
Some very neet stuff, and example of an Eschery world in real life.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
That thing would look awesome in your garden. I'd buy one. (If I had the money, and if I had a garden to put it in.)
I'd also want to put one of those non-linear water wheels. You have buckets on a wheel and they get filled up by a source of water. As they fill, they begin to rotate the wheel. However, the buckets have holes on the bottom. This causes the water in the buckets to flow out. What results is a wheel that moves in a decidedly non-linear fashion. That'd be a nice companion to the Escher waterfall. :)
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
This reminded me of something I read in the paper years back, turns out back in 1996 some scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering a liquid that actually flows uphill, some sort of special property about temperatures approaching absolute zero that cause liquid to move in a coordinated manner and lack all inner friction. That's the extent of the stuff I can understand, check the article out for yourselves.
no no, Escher invented it then Dyson told Phillips to build it, Phillips had the job of overcoming the hurdles, so Dysons involvement seems to be only financial oh and taking the credit of course
I remember seeing this ridiculous pop science show that was trying to come up with any evidence to support various bible stories. In one of them the tried to support the splitting of the red sea by showing some researchers who got water to flow up a gradient of decreasingly hydrophobic material (teflon I think). I remember thinking, "Oh yeah, Moses was an expert in poly-flourinated chemistry!" Does this ring a bell for anyone? The teflon gradient that is, not the cooky show.
Those Escher Lego Pictures from a while back.
:)
Escher's work is damn cool.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
In Moncton, NB, Canada (where I was born), there is a tourist attraction called Magnetic Hill. It is a really cool experience where you park your car on a hill, and it (seemengly) rolls *up* the hill. This was not designed by "imagineers" or anyone else, it is a natrually occuring illusion... something to do with the way the land grades there in relation to the center of earths gravity. Water also flows uphill there.. totally naturally. Its the only place I know of in the world where this happens.
The laws of physics have been defiled for years over at Gravity Hill.
Where have you been?
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
When I was in Italy, not far from Rome, there is an entire mountain where not just water, but everything appears to be rolling uphill.
Couldn't find any links in Google on it, but I think the Italians called in La strada contrario (the contrary street).
All over the road cars are pulled over, as drivers take off the handbrake and laugh as their car rolls uphill.
People tried to explain to me how it works, but my Italian wasn't good enough.
That didn't use any bubbles to create the illusion either!
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?