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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
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
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
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".
They don't actually *stop* the rain. It's most likely cloud seeding and similar... removing all the water from the clouds by making it fall early one way or another. Now, large scale weather manipulation is bad... but a few weeks in one city isn't going to hurt anything. Yea yea, butterfly effect and all... but also dynamic equilibrium.
My wife thinks cooking and fucking are two cities in China.
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.
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.
If it's too expensive to roof the entire stadium, they could just make hundreds of thousands of tiny roofs, and maybe put them on top of sticks. Then all they do is handle these little portable roofs out to all the people attending. The athletes of course might have a problem, but the actual area they compete in is much smaller and it should be much cheaper to build a roof there. Hey, someone call Bezos, maybe he can patent that portable roof idea.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
"Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand." - Mark Twain
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.
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...
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
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