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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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It's a water elevator, or something.
Antiwater (two part antihydrogen and one part antioxygen) is repelled by the force of gravity.
(-:Stephonovich:-)
"Who needs reincarnation when we've got parallel universes?" -Me
Waterfall.
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
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
Since the 70's, there has been a cave on Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyworld in which water appears to flow uphill.
The Imagineers did it cleverly with a slanted room and no point of reference. Not as geeky, but a really cool effect nonetheless which amazed me back in the day.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
are at the World of Escher. The man was a genius.
I'm not Seth.
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]
Now, why would he do that? I know it might be a rhetorical question, but honestly though - all he would do, I presume, is to limit this neat but useless (admit it - this is as useless as your lava-lamp and plasma-ball (no seminal jokes please)) thing out of mainstream for a long time - instead of giving him eternal fame, etc.
Now - an interesting question to think about is what part of our pattern-recognizing brain is responsible for *falling* for such a visual illusion? Research like this can shed light on the workings of the mind, I think.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
A video would be much better but there is the iPix version.
(don't bother replying with a debunk of the "Coriolis force" - I already know)
RTFAWC:
The WC is for 'With Care' - the BBC write-up mentions the marching soldiers in an aside. Dyson himself mentions no such work directly (as quoted).
The first thing i would do having this invention in front of me, is to put a small floatation device (leaf, paper boat, etc...) at the bottom of the hill, to watch it float uphill.
Sadly, I would be completely dissapointed.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
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.
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
Actually, that was the Haunted Shack at Knott's Berry Farm, just down the road from Disneyland. It was torn down about a couple of years ago to make way for a thrill ride, which was also quickly torn down because it was unsafe. It is now a picnic area.
An identical copy of the Haunted Shack was built at the Calico Ghost Town where it was called the Mystery Shack, but it burned down in 2001 and is currently being rebuilt.
Perhaps some sort of spinoff of Marcel Duchamp's 1917 work of "art".
Those crazy dadaists!
It's the only exercise my brain gets outside of /.
My sympathies, really...
That's pretty well done! of course it's a trick, but it's one I haven't seen before, AND it's a *good* trick!
Machine9dotNet
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"?
No!!! IP laws are evil! They are outdated and wrong! There is no purpose to them other than giving the man a tool to keep his jackboot on my neck!
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
Dear Mr. Dyson, We, the FBI, have become aware of your projects. We understand that you have been reverse-engineering water, and this is in violation of the DMCA, PATRIOT, and PATRIOT II acts. You have been flagged for interrogation as a potential terrorist. Until you can be brought in, you are asked to cease all water reverse-engineering. Sincerely, Agent J. Mehoff
If you RTFA
Derek Phillips, the Dyson engineer who spent 12 months building the feature, told BBC News Online that his head was spinning when he was given his brief.
"James came up to me and said he wanted this idea to make water go uphill. My initial reaction was to look for Paul Daniels' phone number. But I've had to become a bit of an illusionist myself."
so i think the credit goes to Mr Phillips for actually pulling it off, Dyson loves taking credit for other peoples work
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.
The story leaves out that after the reporters were done taking pictures for the day, he put the big glass bowl centerpiece back in the middle and he showed them what it was really built for. Its rumored that everyone lost thier lighter.
And for his next trick, maybe he could do a mini "hell freezing over".
Hey, then we'd all get laid! Quick, where's his phone number?
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.
Still, this does look really cool even though it is a trompe l'oeil.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
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.
It's just north of Ayr, near a place called Dunure. Quite a bizarre thing, too. Website here
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.
This, of course, causes its normal downhill motion under gravity to occur retrotemporally, giving the fluid the appearance of syntemporal uphill motion.
I know we're supposed to concentrate on the content, and not the form of comments. But you pulled of the rare feat of making 3 simple grammatical errors in that sentence. I suggest you order the book "1001 Tense Formations", by Dr. Dan Streetmentioner, from your favourite Internet book store, and re-fresh your grammar. Next time Read It Before You Post.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
You are referring to the Reversing Falls in Saint John, NB.
Also, you are referring to The Magnetic Hill in Moncton, NB.
I've seen both. The Magnetic Hill is a cool illusion. The Reversing Falls isn't worth the drive. It looks cooler in pictures. It's really a reversing river more than anything.
It is official; BBC confirms: gravity is dying One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered gravity community when IDC confirmed that gravity market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all garden shows. Coming on the heels of a recent BBC survey which plainly states that gravity has lost more garden market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. gravity is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Dyson comprehensive water test.
You don't need to be a Newton to predict gravity's future. The hand writing is on the wall: gravity faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all because gravity is dying. Things are looking very bad for gravity. Red ink flows like an uphill river of blood.
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.
For his next trick....
Making the bubbles in a Guiness flow up!
www.eFax.com are spammers
Those who have visited Ayrshire in Scotland will most likely have visited Electric Brae, which is just about the wierdest place I've ever been. Things roll uphill here, or at least appear to.
Here's a link, and here's another.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
"a mile wide, an inch deep and runs uphill," as Lewis and Clark described it.
It's the Powder River, runs into the Yellowstone to the Missouri. There are places it appears to run uphill because the wind blows the surface backward. It's generally pretty shallow, hence 'the inch deep' and, well, the name.
There is no link I can point to on the web. Not even Google knows about it. Montana is very unwired.
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?
A lot of people have a lot to say about the causeway, they've have been fighting about it for 30 years.
I think the "rich landowners" thing is pretty funny, Moncton isn't known for its wealth. The houses along that artifical lake are pretty middle class, we're not talking about millionaires. Also, while those guys oppose *removing* the causeway, they didn't have anything to do with *building* it in the first place.
Also, as the linked article points out, the fishermen downstream oppose removing the causeway.
Lastly, the "let's get rid of the causeway" people conveniently forget about the old garbage dump on the banks of the river just downstream from the causeway. (A lot of really smart environmental decisions were made in Moncton in the 60's, can you tell?) If they remove the causeway there will be a lot more erosion along that stretch of the river, unearthing God knows what. So any plan to remove the causeway had better budget for shoring up the banks of the old dump.
Just to be balanced, the people who want the causeway to be removed have a website here.