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China Vows to Stop the Rain
Since the Olympic stadium doesn't have a roof, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau has been given the task of making sure the games remain dry. According to Zhang Qian, head of weather manipulation (best title to have on a business card ever) at the bureau, they've had success with light rain but heavy rain remains tough to control. I see a hurricane cannon in some lucky country's future.
what the post-opening propaganda will be like if that day turns out to have sunny blue skies...
He always wanted to know "who'll stop the rain?" The Chinese.
P226
So they can control the rain. But where does all of that energy go?
Am I the only one seeing this retarded mess of a theme on idle.*?
Any of you ever played that game? This reminds me of a quote by the evil genius: "Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about the weather. Well, I'm going to do something about it".
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I think I'd prefer to get wet or use an umbrella than breathe the horrible smog that blankets Beijing. In fact, the rain is often the only thing that reduces the smog and air pollution for a shirt while.
NPR had a story about how they're forcing 1/3 of the cars to stay off the road and shutting down a bunch of factories to try to reduce the air pollution for the olympics. Maybe just letting (or making) it rain, instead of stopping it from raining, would do even more good.
everything in moderation
Yes, we see it, too.
So that explains the snow...
...who used to sell earthquake pills to Wile E. Coyote?
Not exactly 'new' tech...the silver iodide version's been around forever, and the liquid nitrogen version doesn't sound particularly revolutionary.
It does, however, go along with the Chinese cultural desire to control the elements, which heretofore has been embodied mostly with the rivers--the legendary "Yellow Emperor" was the first to stop the flooding of the Yang Tze; the current government has thrown massive resources into the Three Gorges dam. Controlling the rivers has been traditionally (as far as I recall, anyway) seen as evidence of controlling the land, and thus of being a legitimate government.
Controlling the rain, then, would be an extension of this.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Rather than worry about the weather, China should release everyone arrested for "inciting subversion of state power", and remove the charge from its criminal law.
Until then, the athletes should boycott the country...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Chinese military transport aircraft will take off from Beijing loaded with kids and gigantic loudspeakers. You will hear chants of "Rain, Rain, Go Away, Come Back Again Another Day".
Bush threatened China with force in an emergency press conference on Thursday, demanding the extradition of terrorist leader Cobra Commander.
I highly doubt it - they're more likely to be able to get human rights (and not by some economist's perversion of it) improved to US/Canada/EU levels.
I (and a non-ignorable amount of others) will boycott these Olympics.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
China kinda reminds me of the dog running in circles chasing it's own tail and then yelps when it catches it.
And then does it all over again oblivious to anything around it until the stupid dog twirls it's own self into the hot fire place. The look on it's face is priceless.
Then it grows up and starts chasing parked cars... and misses.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
But can he make the trains run on time?
Why go through all the trouble of controlling weather when they could just build a roof?
Would this in any way have anything to do with China trying to impress anyone? I might be wrong but why the hell would they want to choose the instability and unpredictability of controlling weather patterns than just simply building a roof?
Before you say that building a roof is not cheaper than shooting some chemical in the air, it's not just about price, it is also about certainty of results. You can get really really really lucky and it will NEVER rain and you'll never need a roof! But chances are that it will and your chemicals aren't going to stop it on time. Then what?
Whoops! We're so sorry, we fucked up?
Roofs have been around a long time, they've been proven to do what they're supposed to do...
Maybe someone can enlighten me on their decision in the first place to not include roofs.
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. -- Groucho Marx
I hate to imagine what will happen if he fails. My money is on him becoming the Chinese Olympics Symbol
What is the Best Part of Being a Super Villain?
One weather controlling, doomsday device, please!
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
that's how rain making works with silver iodide
with that effect in mind, china has a surefire way to stop the rain: stop producing so much particulate matter
turn off the coal plants in may
by 8/8/8, you're good to go
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
My wife thinks cooking and fucking are two cities in China.
After the games are over, the Chinese plan to use their technology to cause massive droughts in North America, eventually causing our submission to the supreme red army. I for one welcome our new Chinese weather-manipulating overlords.
Using FF3B2, BTW.
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their orbital mind control lasers into weather control platforms?
Vote:
*All your weather are belong to us
*Only old North Koreans need dry stadiums
*In Maoist China, rain drops YOU!
*Imagine a Beijing-Wolf cluster of dry stadiums!
and the obligatory
*I for one welcome our new weather-controlling communist overlords
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
is not only made up of water, depending on where you are, it's one of the most severe case of acid rain on the planet.
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Is anyone else concerned about the health of our athletes in a situation where China might disperse large amounts of chemicals into clouds to stop the dangerous rain?
....a tag line for a bad summer action flick where some big explosion save the planet from certain doom. Seriously, don't they have other more pressing issues to spend money on like abject poverty?
Looks like the Chinese cleared up a bit more then just rain.
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
He says that during his Live in Red Square concert, it looked like there was going to be a storm, and officials sent a bunch of fighter jets scrambling over them causing the clouds to disappear, and soon after, it was a warm, sunny day. The story was much more detailed than that. It involved some official giving him assurance that the weather would be good on the day of the concert and other bits. A lot more interesting than I am able to recall right now.
I wish I could remember when he said that, I could post a link to something.
As the recent example in California shows, it never ever rains in an area where there are wild fires. Simply set the area around the stadium on fire and it will practically guarantee that there will be no rain. If a few clouds do gather, they can be easily dispersed by exploding a dozen or so nuclear weapons directly above the stadium
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Or maybe Saul Zantz still gets the check.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
"Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand." - Mark Twain
Now that we know the true source of Global Warming what are we going to do about it?
US record on human rights is absolutely pathetic esp. since W. We employ death penalty JUST LIKE CHINA. We lock people up on an island, hold them horrible conditions and deny them rights for years, our prisons of today are what 3rd world countries had for eons. All in all America and China has more in common than differences.
The idea that you are going to boycott them because of human right violations has to be one of the biggest jokes. You are the type who backs W's inhumane, immoral, and illegal actions.
This thing isn't new at all: Eighteen years ago, at the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing, the organizers already managed to control the rain quite successfully. For instance, the opening ceremony which would have been disrupted by rain without intervention, ran smoothly in fairly sunny weather instead.
The technique is simple: Detect in advance the clouds which could cause rain in Beijing, then send airplanes to spread special dust particles to cause those clouds to rain immediately, thus "empty" them before they reach Beijing.
I'm quite convinced the Chinese aren't the only ones who's done this.
Apparantly, the soviets worked this out for the Goodwill Games in 1994.
... the levee's gonna break
No thanks, I'd hope there was a version of this or this walking the earth. At least they'd have the motivation to get rid of that country should that be necessary.
Unlike the Bond movies, they'd have a greater chance of success.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
It's great that they can control weather and all, but what's wrong with the roof?
Roofs are usually 100% waterproof, regardless of light or heavy rain, with close to 100% success rate, does not need to many PhDs to deploy it.
...the rain stops you
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
and redundant...
but still. Worst... Theme... Evar.
Bring back OMG Ponies!
Make everything babycrap brown like "IT". But make this horrible theme stop!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
that fall to the ground shall be collected taken to a dark dry room and be electrocuted with 10,000 Volts
Having lived in Beijing for half a year I can testify that it almost never rains anyways.
Yeah I always knew China would be able to control the weather. They'll just haul it away and have it shot.
I have nothing compelling to say
That story was disappointing. I was hoping to hear something more exciting, like they've been sending their spy satellites over Alaska for the last 15 years, spying on the activity at HAARP, and have built their own, that's twice as big, and powerful enough to do almost anything they'd like.. Like, they could give a nice big rain storm a couple days before the Olympics, and then let it dry out for the people. Like, It'll be comfortable. (not dusty, not wet). Maybe induce just enough cloud cover so it won't be too hot.. :)
:)
It would be a bigger show if they could cause a huge area to have inner-cloud lightning strikes that would form the Olympic rings. hehe.
Seeding clouds is boring old tech. I wanna know how to control it from my living room, without needing to get out of the Lazy-Boy..
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
... it rains pitchforks & sino-girl babies on those bastards.
There is a war going on for your mind.
for staying dry in the rain. They called it the Umbrella! What will those crazy chinese invent next?
Though I doubt he'd be willing to sell his weather control device to China.
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Ahrrrr! My slashdot, what are they doing to it!?!?
The layout doesn't seem to be broken in any way other than concept, being a Web 2.0 Layout (TM). I mean, check out the rounded corners gradient semi-transparent overlay "Headlines from Slashdot" boxes to the right of the story text. Stuff doesn't just break and end up looking that way.
This looks like a bunch of digg users hacked slashdot and redesigned it according to their screwed up sense of what a website should look like. To their credit, it renders fine in Opera.
Only a Hotwarts-trained wizard should dare to represent himself as a Head of Weather Manipulation. Lesser muggles will surely fail.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So if they stop a hurricane in China, does that mean a butterfly here will stop flapping its wings?
I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV...
I'm going to laugh if it downpours the entire time.
But that business card would be kick ass to have...
but that's just 'cuz of my juvenile taste in fiction.
China gets some pretty awful dust storms. How are they going to stop those ?
because me and family has used their 'service' to 'move' the rain's location or time.... yes, without any satellite information or whatever technology
Really, it's hideous, and I can't even put my finger on why it's hideous. It just is. Gotta go uncheck the "willing to participate in new testing" box.
They're running out of webpage layouts that look like ass.
.. belong to you...
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
Is Zhang in charge of Gundam, too? Somebody's got to be.
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
Am I the only one envisioning the Dining hall from Harry Potter here?
Picture it...storm clouds overhead, rain, winds, and inside, a temperate, dry 72degrees.
We could also do it with millions of freakin LASERS.
I really think this is a disgusting idea. Stopping the weather.
Why the hell didn't they just build a roof on the stadium and let the weather do its thing?
Believe it or not, the United States already has this technology. And it's in the hands of the rednecks.
There's a stock car track in Bristol, TN that holds 165,000 people, and has 43 800+ horsepower cars running around an oval just a shade over a half mile long. This generates a lot of heat-- body heat, engine heat, heat from tires cornering on concrete fast enough to turn fifteen second laps. Enough heat that, as long as the race is still running, rain clouds can blow over Bristol, drench the entire city with rain, but the pocket of high pressure due to the heat (and possibly some counter-clockwise swirling motion due to the cars) will keep the rain from passing directly over the track.
If the caution flag flies and the cars slow down for too long, thus slowing the heat output and cooling the track, the rain may start to fall on the track, but it takes one heck of a storm to make the rain fall while the race is green-flagged.
-F
I heard that before parades in the Soviet Union, jets would pass overhead if it were cloudy, to disperse the clouds. An incredible waste of fuel, if true, but a clear sky IS nice for a good parade.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
Winters are dry and summers and not really wet, it's very much a dry city which is why the dust is such a problem. So maybe that'll make their jobs easier :)
;) Except for that time they forgot...
They do *make* it rain by exploding these sulfer/salt bombs though. It covers car in this yellowish coating sometimes.
Before big visits it always rains for a couple of days before because they're doing this sort of thing. Then when the visitors arrive it's blue skies all round
Seriously. After having had a long discussion with a very propagandized Chinese student who was filled to the brim with all kinds of English-hating, One-China, Taiwan-is-ours, imperialistic lunacy which is being fed wholesale to the half billion horney and doomed-never-to-have-wives young male population, I got a bunch of the bad chills and had to change my prosaic views on what China was all about.
This weather manipulation thing is almost certainly propaganda for its own people designed to instill even further levels of insane national pride.
-FL
Firstly, small scale rain manipulation is very possible. Secondly, yes, chinise are fun to talk to. Ask them about The Tiananmen Square Massacre, most will have no idea what you are talking about. The rest will argue against your so called facts, its all western lies and/or its a great thing the goverment protected the country. Funny to watch them attack you for no real reason :)
If only the US farmed out the PR work to the chinese after kent state. Vietnam would have been the substitute for sliced bread in comparing the best things in life.
On a side note, in sydney regular protests by chinese over the, ehm, bad treatment? :) of Falun Gong, Tibetens, well alot of people. I never quite understood their point, china has poor human rights, no shit. Its the chinese populous who dont know what happens, not the rest of the world, and I dont see too many of the chinese journalists covering your efforts. Guess when you aren't being persecuted you have too much free time.
"English-hating"?
I'm English and living in China. I can't say I've noticed...
Japanese-hating? Certainly.
American-hating? Yes.
English-hating? Not so much, I think.
Max.
Just to be clear, I was speaking about English in the nationalistic sense rather than the linguistic.
The guy I was talking to was chock-full of horrible stories about British imperial officers razing and plundering national monuments, summary executions of civilians, etc., and he was bristling with anger while describing it to me. Hopefully, he represents a minority.
-FL
It'll stop falling on Blighty too, br> the start falling on the US - for a change.
RR.
Just to be clear, I was speaking about English in the nationalistic sense rather than the linguistic. Well, yes, so was I, obviously - I'm not the English language; I'm an English man. The guy I was talking to was chock-full of horrible stories about British imperial officers razing and plundering national monuments, summary executions of civilians, etc., and he was bristling with anger while describing it to me. Hopefully, he represents a minority.
Well, perhaps he is somewhat in a minority with the degree of his anger, but there's a certain degree of two-facedness[*] too. Of course, to blame just the British for that sort of behaviour is, so I'm lead to beleive, incorrect. The American and other nations (French?) are to blame too. Of course, America's more recent behaviour might well trump any anger for their behaviour back then, so making him forget that they were involved - or the defunct status of Britain as a super power, while the US is still one.-FL
You can be sure that it's nothing compared to the bad feeling against America and especially Japan, IMO. Of course, that could be just due to them being two-faced [1].
However, I can't help feeling that China has done much more damage to itself than any other single nation, and maybe even all other nations combined - even when it comes to monuments. No, I don't have any numbers to back that up, just feelings from stories I've been told.
This does make me wonder about my own feelings towards the Danes (and other Scandinavians) and (more recently) the Germans. I can't say I have any particular bad feeling towards them despite their terrible behaviour towards England[2]. I wonder if it's because they had different names back then - Vikings, Normans and Nazis - that have now disappeared into the past. The English (and Japanese) are still called the same thing as they were when the corresponding atrocities were committed. I think the English are generally aware of their poor behaviour in history and somewhat repentant of it (depending on who you speak to). The Japanese, on the other hand, don't appear to be (from the Chinese point of view at least), for whatever reason - I suspect the atom bombings made them feel somehow the victim rather than the aggressor.
[1] Of course, having bad feelings towards a nation as a whole is a lot different to having bad feelings towards individuals you might meet that are from that nation; though not in the case of Japan, I think.
[2] Yes, they were worse to other people.
Max.
Given that I've been in Beijing when a typhoon (correct name for that part of th world) has been parked off the coast, over the water there, it isn't a joke to speculate about a hurricane. And if that does happen, the weather for the games is not going to be pretty as I'm pretty sure a few planes with "special dust" is not going to be very significant.
Beijing does, at certain times of the year (earlier than the Olympics), receive large amounts of tropical rain in the evening from weather that blows in from the coast as the rising air from the land sucks in moist air from the coast.
Last year, a couple of days before August 8 (i.e. just before one year from the start of the games) there was really strange weather in Beijing. Short random thunderstorms, Torrential downpours, and all sorts of other strange weather conditions. Then on August 8, it was blue skies and sunshine for a week. Maybe it was just coincidence, but it sure got a lot of people wondering just what the government was up to.
As for mucking about with the weather not causing too many problems, well, just look at what's happening in southern china at the moment. Normally the weather is almost subtropical and you can wear tshirts at this time of year. Currently they're knee deep in snow and 600,000 people are stranded trying to get home for the Chinese new year.