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3D Printed Steel Pedestrian Bridge Will Soon Span an Amsterdam Canal
ErnieKey writes: Amsterdam is famed as the "Venice of the North," with close to 1,300 bridges in use. The next bridge to be built over one of the city's canals will be easily its highest-tech, as it will be constructed via 3D printing technology from MX3D. The steel pedestrian bridge, brought about by a collaboration between MX3D, Heijmans, Joris Laarman Lab, and several sponsors and supporters, will be built using 6-axis industrial robots that will begin construction on either bank and build in toward one another.
I thought Venice was the Amsterdam of the south. And the small Dutch town of Giethoorn was the Venice of the north.
They are actually welding the structure one drop of molten metal at a time. The energy expended must be staggering compared to classical construction technologies, and I'm pretty sure the resulting metal is seriously inferior to standard steel...
Did they have an actual engineer check the statics, weight durability, corosion and weather/temperature resistance/durability?
Or did they just have that artist draw different cute pictures of Rivendell-Style bridges and pick the prettiest/easyest to print?
I'd rather ask before I break my neck and drown crossing one of these. Just saying.
Aside of that: Neat project. This is where things are headed. I like the outlook of this.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Linguistically speaking, the whole eskimo-snow thing has been mostly debunked.
However, for those interested, I cam across this (Dutch) page (google translate). Apparently, there is a branch of science called hydronomy that deals with the etymology of names for bodies of water...
Canal, channel, and dutch kanaal is from the latin canalis, while "gracht" is from the germanic graven (to dig, in English in grave and groove). Dictionaries are unclear on a real distinction between kanaal and gracht, but in my intuition in general a gracht is in an urban setting (including moats around cities and castles) and has a dual purpose of defense and transportation, while a kanaal is longer and aimed at transportation.
Of course, both kanalen and grachten are also extremely important for drainage, where they are joined by the "wetering" (water-ing), which is a dug canal with drainage as its original purpose. In general, it would be dug parallel to a river to help drain the land next to the rivier, and would drain to a lower point, often a "spui" (spew) which would drain into sea at low tide using a sluice. A well know example is the boerenwetering (farmers watering) in Amsterdam, which used to run from around Ouderkerk to the Spui square in central Amsterdam. The water near the Rijksmuseum (Hobbemakade / Ruysdaalkade) still bears the name, and if you look at the map you see how along a straight line from the Spui to Ouderkerk there are still a lot of remains of the old Wetering.
TMI, I know :)
Weird to hear about this on SlashDot first
Amsterdam officials had intended to keep this tech under wraps until this test project was successfully completed, as they were hoping to convince US leaders to use it to build themselves a bridge to sanity.
Sadly...[sigh]
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I'm Dutch. Gracht is just a type of canal ('kanaal'). There is no a linguistic or translation problem, it's perfectly valid to call it canal.
And live to tell?
Yes, it's not exactly clean water, but now that all houses and house boats are supposed to be connected to the sewer system for a few decades, it's definitely less filthy than it used to be.
How many window-sitter prostitutes wind up in those a month?
Zero-point-something. Not nearly as many as drunk tourists.
Can you smoke cannabis on the streets of Amsterdam? Hashish?
Sure, it's not necessarily a healthy idea, but it's allowed (and done a lot).
Is there an age limit to smoke dope?
Drink spirits? Wine? Beer?
Sure, 18 years for alcohol/sigarettes, I assume for dope too, not sure.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
A gracht IS a canal. A city-canal to be more precise.
Nope. There are seven distinct things that in English are all "canal". In Dutch, they are distinct, different things. No Dutch person would call a gracht a canal. Nor a singel, vliet, wetering, sloot, vaart. It's as if English wouldn't have separate words for truck, car, bike, motorcycle, van, bus but rather would call each of them "vehicle".
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Dear God, save us from the marketing department.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Like I said above, moats are also called grachten, and moats do not typically have houses on both sides, so that can't be a necessary condition for something to be called a gracht.
As a native Dutch speaker, I associate the term 'kanaal' with man-made waterways that are typically much wider than grachten, so a gracht is not a kanaal and a kanaal is not a gracht, even though they're both man-made and therefore differ from rivieren, beekjes, and (some) sloten.
The technical term for what the English would call a moat - if it's not used for a transport, and it doesn't have houses on both sides, is a singel. As a dozen Dutch and you'll get a dozen answers. Most will tell you that if it runs through the city is a gracht. Ask a dozen Dutch kanaal historians and you'll only get one answer. I got my definitions from them, and a quick look at Wikipedia shows the same definitions. Any Dutch drainage ditch or river that's been "improved" is a kanaal - but most Dutch will give it a more definitive name. Just like the English don't point to any body of water and say "that's a body of water" - they'll say "river, or lake, or creek". I point to what I was told was a gracht and get told it's a singel - I say "everyone calls it a gracht" and I'm told "they're idiots - there's a castle on one side and a park on the other, and no tow path or moorings - that section is a singel". (sigh)
Being of Dutch descent and having chosen to live in The Netherlands for a number of years to reconnect with my (soggy) roots, it pleases me to no end that a Slashdot headline featuring 3D printing AND bridge construction, so quickly devolves into the nuances of Dutch linguistic syntax.
Nothing evolves faster than the word of god in the minds of men who think themselves divinely inspired.
However, as it has been pointed out before, for reasons that are not immediately clear, Venice is not commonly known as "the Manchester of the South"...
I'm Dutch. I live in Amsterdam. It's not perfectly valid to call a gracht a kanaal. The issue here is not what the Dutch call our canals and grachten and sloten, the issue is that the fact that English has one word for a collection of things that the Dutch have individual words for affects more than just language. It affects the way people think about them.
Again, read Babel 17 and you'll see.
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