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An Intelligent Speed Bump Uses Non-Newtonian Liquid (businessinsider.com)
turkeydance quotes Business Insider: A Spanish company has designed a speed bump that won't hinder slow drivers but will still stop motorists driving too fast. The speed bump is filled with a non-Newtonian liquid which changes viscosity when pressure is applied at high velocity. They've been installed in Villanueva de Tapia, Spain and there has also been interest from Israel and Germany.
There's a video on the site showing the speed bump in action.
There's a video on the site showing the speed bump in action.
It would be useful for temporary use at events and similar, but won't work in winter conditions as it would suffer from snow plows and change viscosity at low temperatures.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
These liquid-state speed bumps will never survive real world conditions. Solid-state ones, since well designed, work just as well. They need to be sufficiently long (> 1.5 m) and have a sinusoidal shape.
But looks like they're hard as hell to build and made of solid gold, because they're f*king hard to find.
You know, many generations of language reformers have tried and failed to fix the sloppy way humans naturally use language .
Perhaps the most famous attempt was in 1668 by Royal Society Fellow John Wilkins, who created a language intended as a replacement Latin as the universal language of scientific (then called "philosophical") communication. The first order of business was to get rid of all that figurative cruft and replace it with precisely defined concept-signifiers. The attempt, while attracting great interest, was a dismal failure. Exactly one paper was ever written in Wilkins' "philosophical language", an essay by Robert Hooke (of Hooke's Law) titled "The Universal Character of Pocket Watches".
The reason these attempts never go anywhere is human beings have a powerful, context-aware language processing computer inside their skull that effortlessly interprets fuzzy, associative and figurative language with near-perfect accuracy. Not absolutely perfect, mind you, but good enough that improving on it results in a language that so painfully awkward that it is impossible to use with anything like the perfection the creators envision.
This doesn't stop every new generation of pedants from trying, as most attempt are such irredeemable failures nobody has ever heard of them. The only one to have any kind lasting success was a theologian named Peter Mark Roget. His philosophical language was as useless as any of them, but the detailed concept index he compiled for it turned out to be quite handy for writers looking for just the right word.
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That's the point: people use technically incorrect buzzwords all the time until the buzz is used up and then it's just another alternative meaning for the word.
Some time look up a list of dead metaphors, like "deadline". A "dead line" was originally a boundary past which a prisoner would be shot. "Deadline" as applied to projects was a humorous metaphor, but as with "software", it's no longer a joke; it's just a word.
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I have been told that speed bumps being ineffective at higher speeds is actually a feature- a normal person who wants to go medium slow is now forced to go slow slow, but an emergency vehicle that has a siren blaring can go fast safely.
Of course, this also lets a normal driver just go fast as well, but trade offs are always made I guess?