Slashdot Mirror
China Abandons Long-Distance Maglev Effort
Ralph Lee writes "China has chosen to abandon its Maglev train effort from Beijing-Shanghai, according to this AP story: 'Besides cost, "the maglev technique was excluded because it does not match the wheel-track technique used by railways in China," the report said, citing Wang Derong, vice-chairman of the China Transport Association.... The scrapping of the 9-year-old maglev project - two weeks after the country's first maglev, a short stretch in Shanghai, began regular operation - represents a setback for the development of the technology in China, which many had seen as one of its key markets.'" The short 18-mile MagLev run mentioned earlier remains in operation, but China is not going to use magnetic levitation for the planned 750-mile Beijing-Shanghai link.
If you're american, you just proved them right. There is 1.6 kilometers in a mile, not 2.
Perhaps you've heard of this thing called "rounding"
...
The school teacher taught me about rounding, yes. She also warned the class to use rounding sensibly, that is, you can round somebody's weight to the next kilo up or down because more precision doesn't mean anything, whereas you don't want to round the exposure time of a film camera to the next second up, for example.
In your case, your mile-to-kilometer rounding just cost China $9.6M
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
2010: China Abandons Red Flag Linux Effort
"The Linux operating system was excluded because it did not match the Windows Update patches used by computers in China"
I remember seeing an article last year regarding China's Internet connectivity. Their copper wire phone system is so fractured, that they were moving to wireless access points.
Maybe they scrapped maglev, and are working on a Star Trek styled transporter.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
If it were truly cheaper to maintain in the long run it would be in much wider use, ESPECIALLY in command economies like China. Welcome to the world of Economics.
Uh, right. I present the following parable:
So, this economics professor and his student are walking along the street, and the student spots a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. Being a starving student, he says, "Look, there's a twenty! We should pick it up and buy some lunch."
And the professor, being an economist, shakes his gray-bearded head and says sagaciously, "No, no, that's impossible."
"What are you talking about?" asks the student. "It's right there!"
"Well, you see," says the professor with a chuckle, "if there were really money lying on the sidewalk, someone would have picked it up already."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Are you kidding? It's a government project.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Isn't that sort of the point of maglev? Isn't that like saying that we decided not to use word processors because they don't match the paper-on-pen technique we've traditionally used?
Surely it didn't take them nine years to realize that there were no wheels. I suspect this was imprecisely translated, and I'd love to know what they really said (or meant).
Because of the Lorentz transformation. At those insane speeds, 1 Kg of uranium becomes 1.00000000004 Kg of uranium. That's why.