Slashdot Mirror
Top Gadget of 2006 — The HurriQuake Nail
eldavojohn writes "Popular Science is naming its Best of What's New of 2006 and the one at the top doesn't have much to do with circuitry or computers. Instead, it's a nail. Not your average nail though, the HurriQuake nail [flash] spent six years in development." From the article: "As the Bostitch team tweaked the head-to-shank ratio, Sutt and metallurgist Tom Stall worked on optimizing high-carbon alloys, trying to find the highest-strength trade-off between stiffness and pliability — the key to preventing snapped nails. 'Meanwhile,' Sutt says, 'we were focusing on how to keep the nail from pulling out.' The team machined a series of barbed rings that extend up the nail's shaft from its point, experimenting with the size and placement of the barbs. 'You want the rings to have maximum holding power,' he says, 'but if they go up too high, it creates a more brittle shank that shears more easily.'"
I can't wait to use this in Quake.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
They are called screws, and they have been known for a few thousand years to be vastly better then nails. Most any floor that's nailed down squeaks for example. And if you want something really good, you use bolts.
And their "patent pending" features you'll find on most all the masonry nails in the hardware store.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
that long of development when they could have just wrapped about a mile of duct tape around each building and no parts would blow off or fall apart or anything! If you think that's stupid, look at step two of the flash. The nail has "fat head technology"
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
No, they just forgot to put a microchip in the nail. Maybe a RFID tag for finding them after the storm...
The issue is not that the structures can't handle the winds. It is that the construction codes are not being followed by the builders. Construction is so poor because of cost-cutting by contractors and/or unskilled labor and cutting corners. This was true with Andrew (Miami) and continues to be true. If contractors built to the code and inspectors held them to it, alot of the damage seen would not occur. I have a house that was only 5 miles from the eye of Hurricane Charlie (140+ mph winds) and suffered minimal damage (a few pieces of soffet blown off, no shingles or other damage). But ... we watched the contractors and ensured that they did everything by the book. Neighbors saw their (oftern much more expensive) homes literally blown to the ground. Older structures (60's/70's) also saw little damage.
... just make sure the builders build to the code. Adding a better nail won't cure sloppy cost-cutting construction.
So
Beavis and Butthead would be having a field day with that summary
Monstar L
They patented the fat head technology. I'm sure many people in Hollywood or Washington D.C. could claim prior art on this one
You just got troll'd!
And the construction industry will beat a path to your door. Yes screws are a better fastener but they take much longer to install driving the labor costs up. This is a case where they applied complex tech to the design of something simple and improved it.
you had screws you could hammer in and screw out if needed?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Of course, the last time we went over this, it was the OLPC project that was touted.
Was probably a more efficient way to make hurricanes and earthquakes.
The team machined a series of barbed rings that extend up the nail's shaft from its point
Boat Nails have been around quite a while; barbs on nails is not new.
disclaimer: no affiliation with linked-to company in any way; just using as a reference.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
Gee, nice Bostich commercial. Never heard of a ring shank nail? Try driving one. I've bought hundreds of thousands of tons of nails, I'll tell you there is a lot more to a nail than meets the eye. Not all nails are shot from nail guns, the nails on framing anchors have to be driven by hand . There's the angle on the chisel point, bending but not breaking, checkered heads, rust resistant coatings, uniformity, AND price. Nails are a commodity.
I don't think any house is built to standard these days. If the standard says 3 nails per stud, you're lucky to get two nails per. The resulting house is so flimsy that you can literally grab a house by the corner post after the framing in done and wobble the entire structure back and forth. Sometimes even after the sheathing in put on. Sheathing isn't supposed to be the main factor in structural stability, it's there for insulation. Housing inspectors aren't a help here. They're incredibily corrupt.
IIRC, a lot of the damage from hurricanes was to houses not built to existing code. So unless they use these nails on the builders themselves, I don't think they'll do that much good.
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Why did this whole article feel like a giant sears ad? I thought science included things other than home improvement items.
What about a nail that slips right into its target, opening barbs to prevent it sliding out, holding everything together with only tensile strength?
A nanofiber nail that's a single atom at the point, and maybe only a few hundred atoms across, braided to keep it straight as it's pushed from behind. Micrometer-long whips pointing back along the shaft for barbs, a flat back for pressing that twists off exactly flush with the surface into which the nail is driven. Bonus points for an electromagnetic effect that withdraws the barbs and forces the nail out of the target material.
--
make install -not war
They are marketing these nails as superior fasteners that will withstand a high wind environment. However, they are only fasteners, and the rest of the structure is still just as vulnerable to threats such as fire, water, termites, and so forth. For a truly robust, energy efficient, and long-lasting structure, the obvious solution is concrete.
Insulating Concrete Forms are basically like Legos made out of an insulating foam. You stack them together, insert rebar, and fill with concrete. The cost is estimated at 5% more than standard wood frame houses, and are superior in every way.
As the earth warms, storms will continue to become stronger and stronger. "An Inconvenient Truth" goes into more detail, and if you haven't seen it, you really should. In any case, it is about time that we started building more durable structures.
We can already build structures that will withstand any load that you can specify. The question is just one of how much you're willing to pay. The other question is one of getting the structure properly built. There's the rub.
Over the years Fine Homebuilding magazine has done post-mortems on houses that haven't survived natural disasters. http://www.taunton.com/finehomebuilding/index.asp One thing that usually stands out is substandard materials and workmanship. Usually the local building code adequately takes the expected disasters into account.
My favorite example: During Hurricane Andrew, shingles that weren't applied perfectly would lift. Rain would blow up under the shingles and soak the particle board (not plywood) roof sheathing. The sheathing would swell and the staples holding them would cut through the swollen wood (the staples weren't pulled out of the rafters). The particle board roof sheathing would blow off and, when the wind got in, that was it for the rest of the house.
So, what do I think of these marvellous new nails? We don't really need them. Some cheap builder will get an engineer to sign off on a design that uses half as many nails. A roofer won't get one of the nails in the right place and won't drive another one to compensate. The building inspector won't notice. The contractor will save ten bucks per house. Someone will die.
Why am I so cynical about contractors and tradespeople? I know building inspectors and engineers.
Good question, was wondering about that myself.
Sounds like the story of the three little piggies to me ;-)
I take life with a grain of salt...a slice of lemon and a dash of tequila
I'm guessing tradition, and wood there is cheaper than brick & mortar or concrete. Hence all the fires.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
I am not trying to annoy anyone here with this comment, just sharing an opinion. A house made of wood feels somehow un-solid (and unsafe, given the strictly positive probability of a fire that is always present). Plus, immediately after arriving in Canada (my first encounter with N. America), I was struck by the fact that all houses I visited (I was looking for a room to rent in Victoria, BC, Canada, and visited quite a few houses in my first several days there) had a strong, pungent, "chemical" smell. First I thought it has to be some commonly used cleaning substance. Later I decided that it has to be some chemicals that the wood had been treated with, probably to repel wood-eating insects or to prevent the wood from decaying. Interestingly, after having lived there for months I stopped feeling the smell -- but going back to my homeland for a vacation and then back to Canada, I would be struck by the peculiar smell again.
I realise wooden houses are cheaper and faster to build, but, IMHO, they are a poor substitute for brick-and-concrete ones.
'Meanwhile,' Sutt says, 'we were focusing on how to keep the nail from pulling out.
:)
Maybe I'm alone among Slashdotters, but if anybody here had ever seen my attempts at D.I.Y, they'd understand why I prefer to have a nail that I can remove and use again after I mess up fixing a chair
Sweet Jesus! How many people that you know would spend $525 for a desk lamp? Maybe I can apply for a government grant or something.
It's a bit like asking why so many computers keep getting sold with such flimsy or poor quality components. It's all about the profit margin, and targeting a certain demographic.
People want certain amenities in their houses, but are only willing to pay a certain amount, so they go with housebuilders that meet their price points.
Of course, that means shortcuts behind the scenes, perhaps even the corruption other people here seem to say is endemic, too.
Not to mention, a lot of people are just ignorant of what goes into quality building, and some just buy a house thinking they'll move with their job in 5 years or so, anyway, so why bother?
I only know anything about home construction because I watch a lot of home repair shows. Which means I really don't know much.
I'd pay $100 or more for a real, regularly updated text that explains what the newest, best housing materials and methods are, and how to manage a builder, so that when I finally go buy a house, I can look for a builder who will build with those things. I'm sure I'll need an architect, too, but I don't even know that process, either.
One of the primary purposes of sheathing is to brace the wall against sheer forces. A square plate and stud wall has no strength against sheer forces unless it's braced diagonally corner to corner. Plywood sheathing properly attached acts as that diagonal brace. Otherwise the top and bottom plates are free to slide parallel to each other and turn the wall into a parallelogram.
This
I can just picture it now... President Bush delivering a speech in New Orleans to the flood victims proclaiming his administration successfully found a solution to the problem thanks to good old fashioned American ingenuity. Of course, during this time military aircraft will do overhead drops of "Freedom Hammers" and "Salvation Nails". Pound it in the name of freedom, baby.
Even a screw gun / power driver with self-tapping screws takes a lot longer to drive each fastener, than a pneumatic nail gun. I don't think there's any way that you can drive a threaded fastener with anywhere near the speed that you can drive in a nail. In the time a person can drive in a screw, you can put in a handful of nails.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So instead of your roofing blowing off, now your whole house blows away!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The average contractor's response won't be "Great, I'll be buildinding something twice as strong". It will be "Great, I can use half the number of nails."
So the buildings will still fall down when a hurricane hits.
So we aren't considering using the earthquake brick?
Technoli
If a house is built to substandard specifications it's because the building inspectors in your municipality aren't doing their job. The standard job of a building inspector is to verify at each state of construction that the house is built properly and to specification; if the house is not built to spec, the building inspector has the power to demand that the house be torn down and rebuilt.
My parents are in the construction industry and I've seen a few times where building inspectors demanded a foundation be torn up and repoured, house framing demolished and rebuilt, and siding reapplied to a house so that it meets code.
Now in many areas of the country houses are not built to current code. But note the key word here: current. The Unform Building Code is regularly updated every two years or so, so it is possible a house built ten years ago isn't up to today's code--after five revisions to the code, eventually something is going to be considered "substandard" today that was up to code before. My house, for example, does not meet current code; today's building code in the Glendale area requires that all residental structures have an automatic sprinkler system in the house to meet today's code. But because my house was last remodeled in the 70's, there were no requirements then to install an automatic sprinkler system.
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Be yourself no matter what they say
Are you aware that local governments already set construction standards? Or do you think that companies should just be able to build whatever, whenever and however, without regard for safety? Have you never heard of Mrs. O'Leary's Cow (please, I know that it was an apocryphal story)?
The common particleboard housing materials in broad use today (in the USA) are decreasing rapidly in quality to the point that they'll soon need to be glued anyway.
I think a far more important question here is why are we (at least in the US) building houses much the same as we did 300 years ago?
Why bother with cutting a tree up into little pieces, and then paying some people to nail the pieces back together in the shape of a house.
There have been a number of more-efficient means to build houses found in the last 50 years alone--blown foam domes are probably the ultimate in simplicity, but there are lots of various prefab methods,,, -but oddly enough, most places (at least in the US) have housing codes banning them.
~
That question probably comes from a European. (I didn't look). Europe (overall) has been using their forests very carefully since about the time the first Theign or Jarl ordered all his peasants to stop cutting firewood from live trees in his woods. The US uses wood more (a lot more) for construction because for a while it was incredibly cheap and plentiful compared to European availablity, and now that it's getting more like it's been in Europe for the last 1400 years or so, the trades are still catching up. People build with what they know.
One drawback is there are less decently durable, low maintenance and inexpensive to heat buildings for many of our poorer people. One advantage is more homes are in houses on owned land, rather than in apartment complexes where the land belongs to someone else. There are lots of trade offs, both ways. (And of course both the USA and Europe are huge places with lots of regional exceptions to what I just wrote).
Who is John Cabal?
The biggest hurricane area is Florida and there is the problem that there is no stone or clay to use. The best they have is concrete block and most houses used to be built of that upto the walls. They have nasty insulation properties so if you build a house out of concrete brick, you have to then build another wall inside so you can get some insulation properties. Its also real hard to build a roof out of stone or concrete in a way that its heavy bits don't go flying when they do get ripped off.
How much of what you are looking at, in Europe, is new building, on a scale like in the US?
Also, how do the building codes compare in most European cities, compared to most American suburbs? Tighter external restrictions mean, of course, fewer options.
Also, what are the costs of lumber in the EU, compared to here?
In Australia they've been building out in some areas with wood-frame everything, and I think last year was when it really came back to bite them, with hurricane damage.
Maybe its because nearly 100 millions houses have been build on wood frames and had no problems at all?
The thing that burns in a house fire is the contents. It doesn't really matter if the house is fireproof or not, the contents will burn just as well. If the occupants aren't prepared, they will die just as well in a fireproof house. In urban areas, most house fires don't result in irreperable damage to the structure.
Most municipalities have laws that require smoke detectors in every dwelling. It is also standard to require construction that prevents a burning house from igniting its neighbor. The result is that death by housefire is far behind death by traffic accident. http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/causes.html
As far as being permanent, wooden structures last forever, as long as they are kept dry. Check out the thousand year old timber churches in Scandanavia.
The odor problem comes about because we permit all kinds of nasty things in our building materials and consumer products. Carpets and particle board are major offenders. Maybe what you're smelling is formaldyhide.
Okay, I know the pitch they're going for here is a nature-resistant nail that can withstand powerful storms and regular tremors... But I hope I'm not the first person who thought of a certain nail-gun from a certain game when I heard the name of this product.
Hurriquake nails - nails for real gamers.
But no one said anything about nailing her...
*crickets*...
Okay, sorry.
There are many possible sources of odor in a new house, treated lumber should not be one of them. The lumber used in framing houses is not normally treated, lumber on decks and some other outside parts of a house are treated to prevent insect damage and rot. Chemical adhesives are used in making plywood and particle board, both of which are common in new houses. Adhesive is also used in the construction of houses. One major item in new houses that contribute to the odor is the carpet. Many interior finishes have an odor, especially vinyl wallcovering. Window blinds and fabrics also have odors.
Fancy name or not, a nail is still a nail, I doubt 150mph winds launching cars and trees at your house are going to let up by a little piece of metal.
I saw a pic on that site showing a twist in a nail with "patent pending" on it. Come on. I mean, really? You're really going to try and patent a twist in a nail? Hell, ANY and I mean ANY blacksmith could show you where he did the same thing just for fun. I so very much call prior art and loser company.
Drop me a line at:
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Oh yeah? What do you consider a "heinous" amount, then? Is it on the same scale as the 72,861 (warning: PDF) private housing units built here in Atlanta in last year? Somehow I doubt it. And note that that's residential only, by the way -- commercial adds an additional 10,615 units.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Best gadget? A gadget is something you buy one of. I'd say a nail is more of a staple commodity.
*ducks*
What idiot dreamed up the name "HurriQuake"? That is amazingly poor.
How about something builders won't feel like a homosexual saying out loud? The less syllables the better.
Permafix
NailBolt
PermaNail
Relianail
SureNail
Safe-T-nail
SaferNail
SafeNails
PosiNail
FirmaNail
StrongNail
XtraNail
XtremeNails
TuffNail
OMG WTF LMAO BBQ nail
Schwarzenail
Nailinator
Securinail
SecuraNail
PermaFix
PermaHold
EQnail
S-Nails
T-Nails
There are lots more too.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
If you compare population numbers with that building quote, it becomes a rather sore stain: You wouldnt need such a huge turnover if you werent shitting crap into the landscape.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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And nails have an adverse effect on housing safety... how?
Think of the nail manufacturers people! If the government legislate mandatory screwing of houses it is unfair competition! Zomg! No free market!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
These don't look entirely different from the nails I just used to attach my decking to the deck joists (at least as far as the ribbing and flat head is concerned). I'm sure these nails really are stronger, but it seems to be a fairly small evolution in nail design.
I'm from Scotland and moved to the US.
Most british construction from the last 30 years is timber-framed with the bricks added afterwards. I believe the bricks provide some support, but the main weight of the roof is supported by the frame.
The biggest difference that I see in construction is in the roofing materials. My house in colorado has composite shingles that have virtually no weight to them. You can reroof a house easily in a day. My parents house has clay tiles and many houses in britain use slate - this results in the roof literally weighing tonnes and i'd imagine dictates a much stronger house design.
I'm not really sure which is better, but i feel a heavier house should be stronger.
I don't really see wood house construction as a major longetivity issue. If the house is well maintained then it'll easily last a few hundred years. I realize that a stone house will probably last longer, but I wont live long enough to reap the benifits. I have however lived long enough to realize that retrofitting Cat-5 into a building with stone internal walls is a pain in the ass.
It depends on the application. Screws are more brittle and the heads can shear off.
Tires that don't deflate after a puncture, nails that improve the structural integrity of a house, dish soap that actually moisturizes your hands. These are the marks of real progress, either in safety or comfort.
I wonder though... supposing this does get it's patent awarded (which I believe to be quite deserving), what would happen if building codes were made to be so strict as to require a nail of a performance level only the HQ1 and HQ2 could provide. Considering pizza and beer is more expensive than using these, cost really isn't a reason to deny such a change. Imagine if every county along the gulf coast made this buiilding code change; you would have legislated monopoly. Odd then, that it would be for the betterment of all (except competing companies, of course.).
I'm not sure how I would feel if some kind of revolutionary breakthrough in some field or another made a patened safety device that was legislated into a building requirement nationally, thus patenting other companies out of business in that particular product segment. After all, you're only requiring a certain minimum level of safety. It just so happens that a certain company holds the patent on that safety.
I'm interested to hear what the Slashdot crowd has to say about them patenting this. Six years is a long time to spend researching something. I'm sure they dumped a truck of money into it. (Without reading the article,) I'm guessing that it's probably relatively reverse engineer a nail and knock it off in a Chinese factory.
Most so-called houses in North America are more like wooden tents. There's the frame, and then some fairly thin covering (it hasn't been plywood in decades) that helps hold the frame together and keep the wind and moisture out (mostly). Sounds like a tent to me. You could cut a hole in the wall -- even an exterior wall -- with a good knife.
The chemical smell you noted may have been from the glue used to hold the pieces of wood together in the particle board used these days. Most new construction isn't designed to last any longer than the first mortgage.
(As a kid I lived in part of Toronto where they were tearing down old houses (circa 70 or so years old) to clear the way for construction of the Bloor St subway line. Good solid double-thickness brick with slate roofs -- with lathe and plaster on the interior walls. The wiring was downright scary, though -- cloth insulated wires slung on ceramic insulators nailed to the studs. Grounding? We don' need no steenking grounding!)
-- Alastair
One whar the end of the nail, just before angling to a poin, should be a little wider then the part by the head. Reason being wood swells and that would 'locl' the nail in.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Then why is brick, stone and concrete becoming increasingly popular...
concrete is really becoming a great option and from the outside or inside you cant even tell it is a concrete home.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
In the US most new brick and stone houses are veneer which is just a layer over a standard wood frame house.
Even with older construction methods the floors and roof consists of a great deal of wood.
Concrete is a lousy construction material if you have to deal with real heat or cold.
go look up concrete for homes, it is an incredibly efficient material to use, energy efficient to heat and cool and it is finally overcoming the stigma from the 50-60s when the homes were really ugly.
concrete is a great core, but you cant just make it out of concrete.
I dont really know what you mean by real heat or cold, I am sure the material has limitations, ie Alaska or in Death Valley it might not be great, but for the majority of the US...
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
2006 was a merciful one. Not a single Hurricane hit the east coast.
Living in Miami, I can see the need for good nails. The problem is, dade county has a building code which requires concrete block construction.
you don't need nails for cb construction. Those certainly don't look like roofing nails either.
Instead of building a better nail, which isn't a bad thing, try to lobby the gulf coast to adopt building codes like Miami/Dade County has.
That's the only thing that is going to help.
the second little pig built his house out of wood. And it got blown away.
the third little pig lived in Miami.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I thougth it was only a few fault here and there, and here you come and say the whole continent (particulary the north east) inclusive canada is full of fault and earthquake richter 7.9. Funny that.
Even then this is not a good argument for wood construction because a wooden house built with no respect of earthquake safety will fall down exactly like a brick house no respecting earthquake code (OTOH material price and material availibility is a good argument for wooden house).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
What kind of nails the Korean Homes of the Future use?
If nails are outlawed, only outlaws will have nails.
Free as in mason.
Wood is a versatile substance that meets several needs simultaneously.
As Dave Barry pointed out, wood is the only known construction material which both rots *and* burns.
Here's what we WON'T see in the wake of this invention:
-- Nailed-together case mods.
-- Trade press articles about whether or not Microsoft/Google can withstand the competitive onslaught of this new nailing technology.
-- Trade press articles about whether or not Microsoft/Google is going to buy the manufacturer of this new nailing technology.
-- Trade press articles about whether or not Microsoft/Google is going to buy the inventor of this new nailing technology.
-- Any product called the "iPod HurriQuake".
-- A Sharper Image catalog in which every third item is a so-called "HurriQuake accessory", and is a stuffed animal that lights up.
-- An HCSE ("Hurriquake Certified Structural Engineer") program, in which Bostitch tries to scare every construction company in the country into paying a zillion dollars so their carpenters can be "certified".
-- The National Association of Realtors running a national "HurriQuake Inside" TV ad campaign (sound sting: four hammer blows, different pitches)
-- A mad scramble on the part of hammer manufacturers to market their products as "HurriQuake compatible".
-- Any TV spots that begin with a 3/4-body two-shot of two guys saying, respectively, "I'm a HurriQuake" and "I'm a screw" (costuming left to the imagination).
-- Any youthful you're-such-a-rebel, pushing-the-bounds-of-taste YouTube offerings involving HurriQuakes, Roman centurion costumes, and Mel Gibson.
-- Any book entitled "Head Rush HurriQuake"
-- Any book entitled "Enterprise Fastening Strategies"
-- Any book entitled "Nailing down the HurriQuake" with a Victorian engraving of a hammerhead shark on the cover.
-- Walter What's-His-Butt from the Wall Street Journal bellyaching that nails are still too hard to drive and how he hits his fingers all the time and how unrealistic it is for the construction industry to expect people to live in houses if they can't come up with a nail that's easier to use.
Outside the tech sector the noise levels are lower, I'm tellin' ya.
http://www.amonline.net.au/fishes/about/fieldwork/ norfanz/psychrol2.htm
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I find the whole mostly-European "the best building material is stone or concrete" idea pretty funny. So far, I've owned two houses, both wood, and both old (the previous one was built in 1937, the one I currently live in was built in 1917). Both houses will last at least a hundred more years. Of course, it is true that if they were built of stone, they might last another 1000 years. It's hard to say, but regardless they're permanent structures. I have a feeling that this is much more about the types of home you grew up in rather than what the "best" building material actually is.
The other thing is that stone and brick are definitely not fireproof. You still need beams to support the floors and those are usually wood. Here in Baltimore there are a ton of brick row houses and they occasionally have terrible fires. A small fire starts inside and burns the furniture/floors/books/whatever and that ends up catching the beams on fire and you end up with an empty brick shell. Of course, since they're row houses, the fire ends up spreading through the brick walls to the neighboring houses and you lose 3 or 4 homes at once. Even though they're made of brick. Fire is a problem for everyone.
Too bad a spell checker wasn't on the list of innovations.
c t_35.html
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2006/produ
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Let's do some more math: the population of metro Atlanta is 5,103,766, and the population of London is 7,465,100, which means metro Atlanta is 68% of the size. Metro Atlanta built 72,861 residential housing units, while the UK built 120,000, which is a ratio of about 60%. So, what that more or less works out to is that in order to match our rate of construction, those 120,000 houses would have had to been built in London alone, not the entire UK!
Doubt it. Those statistics were for building permits issued. Somehow I don't think trailers require building permits.
Who said we replace houses here in Atlanta? It's only new construction that's crap; the older houses are of much better quality. The only time I've ever seen houses demolished around here is when they wanted to replace it with higher density residential or commercial stuff.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Wood is a great building material, or a poor one. As someone else pointed out, it satisfies many demands simultaneously. Market forces (cost and home type), environment (earthquakes, severe weather and other factors not existing in the UK, for example) and personal taste (ease of retrofit, etc.) all contribute to building material choice.
One of the factors that's interesting is that the quality of wood used in construction differs quite a lot from the long-lasting timbers in the old wood-frame houses. I owned an over-hundred-year-old house which had lasted through two of our age's most severe earthquakes, with aplomb. In a termite-endemic area the naturally pest-resistant, tight-grained old-growth redwood timbers and planking (it had solid heartwood plank sheathing, not OSB or plywood) had no damage (the "modern" addition, built with current farmed-fir 2x4s, was not so fortunate). I have no doubt that, properly maintained, the house will last another hundred years or more (possibly with more than one generation of modern-construction additions).
But that wood construction is not typical of current practice. By today's standards (it was built to no code but the good judgment of the original builder) it would be horribly material-hungry and overengineered. The pace of building in the U.S. demands cheaper materials and techniques--in fact, to do otherwise would be a criminal waste of limited natural resources; as to why low-quality timber is being used instead of more poured concrete--I bet it has much to do with consumer demand and tradition (that is, what contractors are used to working with and homeowners are used to buying) and little to do with actual economics.
demi
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
At the point you're talking about, you might as well use a "nanotape" to stick two pieces of wood together, instead of a nail. If you're going to go future-tech, you might as well go all the way.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Brick houses or "unreinforced masonry" performs pretty badly in earthquakes. After the Northridge quake, every brick wall and every brick chimney in the area was trashed while the wood frame houses did fine. Wood frame apartments do suck because you can practically hear your neighbors like they were talking in the same room, but it beats dying in an earthquake.
Bah, yes your correct that a function of particle board is supposed to be sheer force. A good builder lets in cross brace into the studs it's a few dollars of material but it's a bit more time. It's not required by code as code is at best made by comity including build builders.
:) and code is substandard to anything I would want my house built to. The big builders are spending there money chasing higher sales prices by installing things people will pay more for like jacuzzi baths and big kitchens and I cant blame them. It's the average consumer in America that does not care about there house as long as there home owners policy covers it.
I grew up in the building trade (did enough hard work to get me into computers
When I get to building a house my preference is the Amish to build the frame old fashion post and beam is near indestructible, now I don't want them fitting out my kitchen or my heating systems but the frame and exterior they know how to do and among the last with the skills to do so.
No sir I dont like it.
I moved to Linux in 1994 as my primary desktop and server OS. About three years ago I decided that I wanted to produce some video content. Video editing was theoretically possible in Linux - I hooked up my camcorder to my Linux box and did some editing, but the tools were primitive and cofiguration was unusually difficult.
:(
Eventually I looked at OS X and iLife. I decided to jump to a Mac. What a great move!
I found that Linux made it possible to do some things, but OS X made it simple to do them.
Fast forward a few years. I now have a few macs at home - their licensing policy makes it affordable to have several machines and a five user license for the OS and tools. My family loves the power and usability of the Mac.
Recently my linux server at home began acting a bit flaky. I did some analysis and determined that hardware replacement was needed. After checking prices for CPU/motherboard/RAM (and potentially hard disk) I figured out that I'd need a few hundred bucks to replace the CentOS box with a new one. After thinking about whether to drop a few hundred bucks or not on this server, it occurred to me that I might be able to move all of the services hosted on linux to OS X.
I found that samba,
hotwayd,
dansguardian,
uw-imapd,
fetchmail,
procmail,
spamassassin,
rsync,
rsnapshot,
apache2,
MySQL4,
PHP,
perl,
java, and
squid were all available for OS X.
Most of these are "in the box" with OS X. The only ones that I need to compile from source are uw-imapd and squid! Of course I need the bundled developer tools to get a compiler, and the Apple/BSD startup mechanism and the netinfo wierdness require some tweaks - but since when did Linux *not* require any tweaking?
What this means to me is that after more than a decade of running Linux at home (and work) I am *this* close to shutting down Linux for good at home.
Hope your experience is similar.
Regards,
Anomaly
PS - I share your recent comments about the loss of a pet.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?