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Icelandic Company Designs Human Pylons
Lanxon writes "An architecture and design firm called Choi+Shine has submitted a design for the Icelandic High-Voltage Electrical Pylon International Design Competition which proposes giant human-shaped pylons carrying electricity cables across the country's landscape, reports Wired. The enormous figures would only require slight alterations to existing pylon designs, says the firm, which was awarded an Honorable mention for its design by the competition's judging board. It also won an award from the Boston Society of Architects Unbuilt Architecture competition."
This is the same as the gravity powered lamp (http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/20/1446256). It is a good idea that looks cool (cool enough to win awards) but has major drawbacks which make it completely impracticable to build.
Pylons typically have four large legs widely spaced apart for good reasons. Reducing them to two and making them very narrow isn't a good thing (TM). They also typically have 6 arms so as to keep the cost per cable down and each different design has to go through a lot of testing to ensure it can cope with the loads.
Nice blue sky thinking but an engineer hasn't been anywhere near the plans. If you want to give me an award, I to can come up with a nice pretty picture of a car that runs on one fried egg per 1000 miles. It's a nice sound bite but just as impossible to build.
wot no sig
Reading TFA (I know, I know...) I'm not sure if it's a design contest to _actually_ build the thing or simply to draw something nice to sell to a news agency and fill empty time in tv shows.
BTW, looking at the photos my first thought was "traditional pylons doesn't need chains to maintain verticallity"
A lot of people like to make this claim that in a few thousand years society will have forgotten its ancestry and it will seem so ancient and primitive and confusing.
While obviously we won't seem as technologically advanced, I have a hard time as thinking of ancient societies as primitive. While their technology wasn't advanced their society isn't all that different from todays. There's an upper and a lower class - a work force and a ruling force - I mean we won't get into the complexities of politics or anything - but even people who think ancient greek religion is dead are actually half wrong: If you've ever read a horrorscope you have encountered a reminance of ancient greek society. All the zodiacs are based upon greek mythology, and a lot of greek mythology is based on the stars which still hold signifigant influence in that zodiac culture.
The main difference between now and then is that a lot more people have put emphasis on historians. Before the 1800's there really wasn't such a thing as "Archaeologists" - there were "grave robbers" who would break into tombs and sell the valuables but nothing in the interest of preserving history. (Just as a side note, thats why King Tut's Tomb was such a big deal, the first undisturbed tomb of a pharaoh, with valuables and everything still in tact). But now we have Libraries, Museums, historical conservation acts, basically a whole set of society in line with preserving our history. Yes - there WERE libraries in ancient times, but they were nothing like the libraries we have today. Specifically that libraries were not a public resource, only the aristocracy could use the library (both physically and by law, I mean illegal to enter the library if you don't have permission but if you didn't have permission you were probably illiterate anyways). Anyways, since this age of historical preservation has come about, we haven't really "puzzled" over much of society anymore. There are a few small quirks here and there; debates on how they erected the pyramids, how far back "writing" goes, etc etc. But much of it is just 2 widely accepted answers that keep going back and forth on who is right.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is, 3000 years from now, they won't be going "How did they have electricity back then?" - because we have MANY records of how Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in 1752, and that really sparked development on it. Whereas it was difficult to have the historical records from 1 library survive the test of time way back when, this new fangled internet thing has caused the spread of information so great that the redundancy on our data is so huge that even if every piece of paper is burned and Wikipedia goes down - there are still thousands of documents from every junior high school student that the information is preserved in some form or another. And quite honestly - the sources that AREN'T big are usually the ones with more accurate information. (Every king and pharaoh and emperor claims that they were great - however the accounts from a peasant or soldier are better indicators of how well a nation-state was doing).
The towers of the George Washington Bridge were originally to be given a faux masonry facing.
To our great good fortune that never happened:
"The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson is the most beautiful bridge in the world. Made of cables and steel beams, it gleams in the sky like a reversed arch. It is blessed. It is the only seat of grace in the disordered city. It is painted an aluminum color and, between water and sky, you see nothing but the bent cord supported by two steel towers. When your car moves up the ramp the two towers rise so high that it brings you happiness; their structure is so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture seems to laugh. The car reaches an unexpectedly wide apron; the second tower is very far away; innumerable vertical cables, gleaming against the sky, are suspended from the magisterial curve which swings down and then up. The rose-colored towers of New York appear, a vision whose harshness is mitigated by distance." (Le Corbusier, "When the Cathedrals were White")