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."

Comments

Marketing vs Engineering

[florescent_beige]

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.

Re:Marketing vs Engineering

[vux984]

I think we engineers have it good.

Many doctors and lawyers go into the field for the money. That's not really true of the hard science/engineer types. So most engineers would do it again because they actually want to spend their time engineering, and enjoy it.

That's true of a lot of doctors too...but a lot of them just picked their career by the expected income. How many engineers or mathematicians or computing scientists or physicists etc chose the career for the paycheque*. Sure we can get paid well, but lets face it... its not the license to print money being a lawyer or doctor can be.

(*Other than the brief rash of worthless eng. and comp.sci. grads chasing the .com bubble)

Re:Marketing vs Engineering

[vux984]

(now spends another 20 minutes with that patient covering what the real issues were, and is now 15 minutes "behind" which physicians *hate*, but they have no control over)

I hate to break it to you, but that is par for the course in ANY profession where you need to meet with other people for any reason whatsoever.

Doctor. Plumber. Network Admin. Baby Sitter.

I don't book 16 15 minute appointments in a 4 hour afternoon, because there is no way in hell I'd ever get through them all. 8-10 would be pushing it.

If they want to address this, do what everyone else does: wake up to reality and stop over booking yourself. Yeah, you'll make less money if you can't book 32 patients in a day anymore. So what?

And on that note, why do I have to take half a day off work, so I can come in and meet with a doctor for 7 minutes (after waiting 40+) who has nothing important to tell me and barely looks at me. Fuck, unless they need to poke or prod or sample something I have better things to do than to lose half a day of work to see them. -- you want to tell me my test came back fine, or that I need to book another blood sample at some lab... pick up the phone tell me.

Well thats useless.

[wjh31]

we have enough trouble predicting when they will come as it is, if you make them invisible we wont stand a chance.

Reality decloaking off the starboard bow.

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:Reality decloaking off the starboard bow.

[Dunbal]

Live in the big flat mid-west plains, it might be boring, but it is safe.

      (Taps Cassini2 on the shoulder and points to the huge tornado) "Is anywhere safe?"

Will it work for everyone?

[VincenzoRomano]

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.

Re:Will it work for everyone?

[OrigamiMarie]

It should be perfectly safe to cloak all buildings. Buildings only absorb a tiny fraction of the shock of an earthquake; you don't need to have something man-made fall over just to keep the waves from going further. Now if you somehow made huge chunks of land cloaked to earthquakes, I would agree that the shaking may have to come out somewhere. But anyway at that point you're talking about making an isolated chunk of land whose borders crunch and stretch a lot more than everything else -- people wouldn't go for that. And I don't see how you'd do it anyway, you can't just seismically isolate a chunk of land.

Flying

[bertoelcon]

Does this render you invincible to ground pokemon, that is unless they use non-ground attacks?

Re:Myth of doctors as "high paid"

[vux984]

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.

Re:Myth of doctors as "high paid"

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Now they can't see me!

[Kenshin]

Good thing we invented the earthquake invisibility cloak! Now the earthquakes won't be able to see me!

Re:Myth of doctors as "high paid"

[indiechild]

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?

Re:Don't forget the bad analogies!

[Bandman]

> With an earthquake, isn't the building less solid than than Earth?

IANASiesmologist (but I play one on TV (ok, I can't back that up))

Actually, sometimes it isn't. Depending on the properties of the quake (strength, depth, etc), the ground itself (particularly soil) acts a lot like a liquid. A "slab" house might float while a bedrock based building may have major structural issues due to compression of the major structural elements. This is one of the big reasons that building in earthquake zones have "floating" structural members. They need to be able to "move" independently, relative to the ground, because the ground doesn't move uniformly. One particularly inventive solution stored inertia in a giant multi-ton sphere suspended in the top of a skyscraper. This reduced lateral movement while maintaining flexibility of the structure.