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Earthquake Invisibility Cloak
BuzzSkyline writes "The same folks who brought us the tsunami invisibility cloak last year have now come up with an earthquake invisibility cloak. They show that a platform made of just the right configuration of elastic rings could make a structure invisible to earthquakes by effectively steering a quake around the structure. It doesn't work well for compression waves, but the researchers claim it could hide buildings from the slower-moving, more destructive shear earthquake waves. The research is due to be published soon in the journal Physical Review Letters."
If you're in marketing you call it an invisibility cloak. If you're an engineer you call it a tuned resonator and ask yourself why oh why you didn't go to medical school.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Having seen my share of rivers, I can pretty much say that the water pattern DOES change when it hits a rock.
And that the rock is more solid than the water.
With an earthquake, isn't the building less solid than than Earth?
And because it is done "smoothly", the top of the rock will never have water splashed upon it.
Maybe their technology does work, but their analogies do not.
we have enough trouble predicting when they will come as it is, if you make them invisible we wont stand a chance.
It's not an invisibility cloak. A nearby building could still fall on the cloaked one, with the usual result. Also, it's not a cloak, as in a piece of fabric. Last, anything can be made resistant to earthquakes, but to make it earthquake-proof is something only an arrogant designer or a project manager would say. Every design component can fail, and most catastrophic engineering failures are rooted in miscalculation or failing to test the model with a particular cascade of failures.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What will happen when all buildings in a certain area will be "cloaked" to earthquakes?
Will mechanical waves skip the entire area?
What if all buildings in a certain large area will be made that way?
I fear that the "solution" is good only when a few of them are made that way. The other ones will need to collapse.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
It would be much more useful if this technology could be retrofitted onto older buildings.
But is it effective versus the Juggernaut?
Does this render you invincible to ground pokemon, that is unless they use non-ground attacks?
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
You do realize that the point of this is to build it into all new buildings, right?
Additionally it's unlikely that the amount of extra energy from a few buildings would have a noticeable effect in the other buildings. Of course we can't violate the laws of physics, but when you're talking about that much energy and when most buildings are built to sustain much larger earthquakes than what's realistically going to happen it isn't worth worrying a whole lot about.
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If you're an engineer you call it a tuned resonator...
Not necessarily. One other way to make a building "invisible" to the shear waves of an Earthquake would be to float it. Shear waves cannot pass through liquids. Of course this is probably somewhat less practical...
We're working on this. We've got this perfected for cars, we just need to perfect the bigger hydraulic cylinders needed for buildings.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The illusion that medicine is well-compensated for the effort is just that -- an illusion.
Relative to what, exactly?
http://www.cejkasearch.com/compensation/amga_physician_compensation_survey.htm
There isn't an entry on that list below six figures. And I'd say the average is easily 250k plus.
An electrical engineer "1" in the 90th percentile (ie making more than 90% of his peers), according to salary.com makes 67k. Unless he gets promoted to management, (and does less engineering and more managing) he's going to have a very tough time cracking 6 figs.
A nuclear physicist, cracks six figures. But even his 90th percentile at 126k doesn't quite reach the expected STARTING wage of "Pediatrics - Adolescents" - 130k, probably the lowest number on that list.
Couple of things to point out here...
A "starting" physician is 6 years behind a starting electrical engineer. 4 years of med school + 2 years of residency (at a minimum!) and they have a tremendous amount more debt for those additional years of schooling. Even at that point they are considered to have very little experience.
In addition try looking at malpractice insurance for physicians, or something called "tail insurance", ie if you leave the practice and 10 years down the road someone you treated decides to sue you the tail insurance takes care of that, but it means you're paying insurance against the chance of a lawsuit forever basically, even if you leave medicine.
Not to mention the fact that if differences were that significant in salary and the work was actually the same amount of effort or easier I have absolutely no doubt that we would see more physicians but instead of that we're actually seeing *fewer* physicians. I've often heard from physicians that anyone could do it, there's nothing special about them, just a matter of lots and lots of hard work. Most physicians I know actually recommend to their children that they *not* go in to medicine. How's that for an indication of how the field is doing?
It's not the sheer magnitude of an earthquake that actually determines damage. Damage should be much more correlated with how much of the energy gets dissipated into a building or other structure.
Try looking at it like this: If you are standing out in a field when an earthquake hits, you personally may be the only thing on top of the ground, that could absorb any energy from that part of a wave passing through the whole area. Just you. Now if you are on the bottom floor of a big concrete parking garage, that whole garage and all the cars in it could absorb various parts of the energy, so if energy really determines the damage, you are safer on the bottommost floor of that garage than out in the open. Doesn't seem at all likely, does it?
Energy in physics is sometimes defined as the ability to do work. A lot of energy means a lot of work can happen, not that it invariably happens where you might expect, or even happens at all. (and yes, knocking down a tall building counts as work for most definitions in physics, even if gravity does most of the job once you get it good and started).
So, we have a structure which doesn't couple strongly to the energy of a quake wave. You can say it deflects the wave, or channels it, or lots of other verbal descriptions, but the point is, not a lot of the energy of the wave passes into the building. That energy could go on to get absorbed by another building, but alternately it could keep on going until it dissipates in the relatively empty countryside many miles from the city. Not absorbing a lot of the locally available energy doesn't mean the energy has been deflected to target some other building, or somehow focused. It also doesn't necessarily mean the energy has changed overall direction, or that you have created more turbulence in the earthquake waves, or lots of other things that could possibly happen but maybe really won't. To see if any of them are really probable, you have to do math, not reason from a verbal model that is already just an approximation.
Who is John Cabal?
Good thing we invented the earthquake invisibility cloak! Now the earthquakes won't be able to see me!
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
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Most physicians I know actually recommend to their children that they *not* go in to medicine. How's that for an indication of how the field is doing?
It's like investment bankers dissuading their children. The past generation of doctors (along with the past generation of insurance agents and the past generation of politicians) has brought the health system to its knees, and there will be lean years ahead. I doubt they are listening though, since medical school acceptance rates are still in the single-digits.
IANAP but the basic idea I got from the design of the "Tsunami Cloak" was that there was simply a path of less resistance along the concentric corridors than along the radial ones, so that the wave tended to flow around the center rather than through it. Correct me if I'm wrong about this. Sometime later I was wondering if the same principal could be used to redirect strong winds around a vulnerable structure. I was thing along the lines of metal posts rather than concrete pillars, but then I started considering the "green" factor and wondered if a precisely planted grove of trees would have the desired effect. My assumption of course is that since air and water are both fluid, then they would have similar waves that can be manipulated, but since I'm also not a meteorologist, I could be wrong.
What do you think, would it be possible?
you keep using that word. i don't think it means what you think it means.
Wouldn't the intensity of the waves be concentrated around the periphery of the rings? Would two or more earthquake shields in particular arrangements have a focusing effect, unwittingly completely leveling a nearby building from a otherwise mild shake?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Um, no. The physician also has a 4 year degree obtained before medical school.
The intake of doctors into med school is tightly controlled. They are not going to start raising their intake, oh, just because the market wants it. How else could they command the high salaries that they do?
Earthquake Invisibility Cloak
Enchantment
{1}{R}
All creatures have flying.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Compensation? Is that what they call it when you make a lot of money? I earn a "wage". My student loan debt is greater than my annual "wage". Maybe I should have gone into medicine as well...
A "starting" physician is 6 years behind a starting electrical engineer. 2 years of residency (at a minimum!) and they have a tremendous amount more debt for those additional years of schooling. Even at that point they are considered to have very little experience.
Not really. They start getting paid as residents. Granted not 6 figures, but already well above the national average.
Meanwhile a comp sci or phys grade with a BS is what? Not a whole lot, you need your MS or PhD. Which adds years (and dollars) to the education. And yeah PhD grad student might get a bit of grant money funding while he works on some professors project while working on his(or her) thesis but they are usually living at the poverty line... if they're lucky.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The intake of doctors into med school is tightly controlled. They are not going to start raising their intake, oh, just because the market wants it. How else could they command the high salaries that they do?
I recently helped a friend prepare the physics part of her MCAT and in the processed learned a lot about medical school in the US. I came away with exact feeling you have that medical school is but an exclusive (not only by grades, but other standard) club that is rather convoluted to join and to be brainwashed in, with the understanding that some day down the road by reciting memorized stuff from thick books that one can command high salary and demands respect.
I also teaches run-of-the-mill freshmen physics. Judging from the amount of physics/chemistry the pre-meds manage to master in our classes---and they seems to be rather water down and targeted for future CMAT taker---I learned that in the future when I need a physician, extremely caution and comparative shopping is required. If medicine is a science, I just don't have a lot of faith in its practitioners.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
Just tell them to use headphones when working on their Mac. Problem solved.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Unless you mean masters or PHd, medical students do have more years of school. Med students go to a 4 year college/university, then med school, then residency. Maybe more years of schooling if they specialize.
I do not agree with fact that more years of school == higher paycheck. But that is the way the world currently works. I have heard of and seen some really crappy doctors. With all those years of training, one would think that all doctors would be really really good.
...the epicenter of the quake is *inside* the ring? Imagine a future skyscraper with a huge base and this installed.
Now imagine a quake in the middle of that protective ring. Would the waves reflect off the inside, ripping the building apart in seconds?
That would be one giant nelson munz "haah-haaah" moment. (Except for the people in the building!!)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.