Slashdot Mirror
Las Vegas Hotel Vdara an Accidental Death Ray
evanism writes "A hotel in Las Vegas is accidentally designed to be a massive parabolic dish that focuses the suns rays into a death ray! Burns hair, plastic and causes pain." It apparently lasts for several minutes during afternoons of bright sunlight, but if you need to perform science on it, you better hurry since they plan to ruin/fix it.
http://goo.gl/maps/ZpTd
So it looks like if the sun is high up in the sky, from probably a S or SSE angle, you'd get some good ant burning action..
So how would they fix that? Put up one of those porous billboard/shade deals that Flamingo does?
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
It's not a euphemism, it describes exactly what it is. 'Death ray' on the other hand is a dysphemism, coined by bad journalism.
The article they probably got this story from is a bit more informative - complete with diagram!:
http://www.lvrj.com/news/vdara-visitor---death-ray--scorched-hair-103777559.html
Since the building is basically parabolic, won't the spot stay mostly stationary? I mean, isn't that the whole point of parabolic focusers?
Try it some time and be surprised. Moving the sun with respect to the parabola is equivalent to moving the parabola with respect to the sun. And there is a strong microwave analogy. So, if the spot never moved, that would make radar systems rather hard to build (you'd have to use 80s era phased arrays instead of 40s era rotating dishes)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
He's closer to being right than you might think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_reflector
It's mostly because the building isn't angled at the sun and isn't a perfect parabolic curve that the hotspot moves around.
If you RTFA they knew this could be a problem so they put a plastic film on the windows to make them 70% less reflective.
And the video I got, all 20m of it, was about Las Vegas pool parties being the new trend. It didn't even mention the Death Ray.
Another day, another update to a Google android app.
Indeed. The embedded video had nothing to do with the story and made no mention whatsoever of the 'death ray' phenomenon supposedly exhibited by the hotel. And they didn't even have a NSFW tag anywhere. There I was waiting for something about the death ray hotel and all I got was a flood of images of drunken assholes jumping up and down in hotel pools. Crap story.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
The simplest thing is to dull the reflective surfaces of the offending parts of the building. This problem isn't unique, it's happened before elsewhere.
They did that. When they designed it, they thought of this and added a film over the windows that reduces reflected energy by 70%, according to TFA.
It still manages to raise temperatures by 20-30 degrees in the affected zone, and on a 110 degree day thats enough to melt plastics and people.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
You've given one example, which is a building by Frank Gehry. He's an architect who made his millions by converting software made to develop jet fighters into "architecture". Is it any wonder his buildings attack people?
I am a practicing architect, so please, let me fill you in. Architects take classes on sun angles and reflected light. Understanding how to make use of and control natural sunlight is a major part of modern architecture. I counter your example with a modern building designed by Steven Holl (a much more impressive architect IMHO). If you note on one of the diagrams, the building has been designed to strategicly filter light into different areas of the school based on certain landmark days. No death rays here.