This Machine Produces the Largest Humanmade Waves In the World

sciencehabit writes: A new experimental facility at Deltares, a research institute in the Netherlands, has begun producing the largest humanmade waves in the world. Like kids building sandcastles below the tideline on the beach, scientists will let the walls of water crash on dikes of different designs and other structures—sometimes until they're destroyed. The Delta Flume, to be inaugurated on 5 October, is a 300-meter-long water-filled trough that is 9.5 meters high and 5 meters wide. At one end sits a gigantic metal plate called a wave board; four pistons move it back and forth to whip up the kind of waves that the sea can unleash.

Comments

Incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect the largest waves were made by humans when the detonated an H-Bomb.

Your measly wave pool is tiny compared to real power.

Re:Incorrect

[GungaDan]

Simple solution - just detonate the bomb underwater. All the nuclear nastiness will be cleared up by the water above it, just like smoking through a bong, right?

Re:humanmade?

[ColdWetDog]

Not in the politically correct portions of Northern Europe. Misogynist.

But more to the point:

The new Dutch flume replaces an older, smaller version that will be retired after 35 years of service

Oh man, they should not retire the thing. They should commercialize the thing. You could make it into the ultimate water park.

hu-person-made surely?

[Roger W Moore]

Not in the politically correct portions of Northern Europe.

Which is ironic since the use of 'man' to mean 'person' in English comes from German where 'man' means 'one' and 'Mann' means man. So man-made actually means 'person-made' not made by a male. So instead of making the language clunky perhaps we should just educate people as to what it really means otherwise next we'll end up having to use 'huperson' instead of 'human'.

Re:hu-person-made surely?

[Roger W Moore]

No, that's not it.

Sorry but you are wrong. In old english 'man' meant person without any gender specification because 'wer' meant male human where is where "werewolf" comes from: literally "male person-wolf". However because we started to use the word 'man' to mean male human this interpretation has now been retroactively applied to words which were derived when the meaning was gender neutral.

And for what it's worth, for all of the complaints given about the US, the US is perhaps one of the least male-dominated societies out there.

Seriously? So how many female government leaders have you had? Your congress has under 20% women compared to ~25% for Canada, UK and Australia and 30% for New Zealand. Even Saudia Arabia has a 1% higher proportion of women in its national parliament than the US. In many European countries the ratio is in the upper thirties to forty percent.