Perpetual Skislope 241
the hollow room writes: "How about skiing on a never ending slope? A story at New Scientist suggests that some fool is going to try to build one of these. Built like a huge tilted record player, it can spin at up to 30 km/h.
Any takers?"
hmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
The perpetual slope already exists (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: disk advantage (Score:2, Interesting)
Doesn't the snow get worn out? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like a winter wonderland for lawyers.... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm just not convinced that taking EVERY naturally occuring (and read "free") effect of nature and turning it into a private, man-made, man-controlled, homogenized, and lawyer safe sport is a good thing. It comodotizes nature, and creates a situation which blurs the distinction between real life and "Real Life (tm)"
I see this trend with surfing too, artificial wave generators, controlled "fun-parks" where people have to "Pay-per-Wave"....Yeah, Mother Nature does not create the exact same wave every time, but that's the fun of the sport!
Both of these are, in my view, attempts by corporations to get people to pay for something that's inherently free. Surfing for instance...paddle out, ride back for free....Sking too, climb to top of hill, slide to bottom for free...Only with sking, you do pay for the lift (but you can walk for free too)
Perhaps I'm not looking at the best side of this though.....the rotation of the hill might counteract the rotation brought on by too many Irish Coffee's at the bar! Now that would be something.
Natural equivalent (Score:5, Interesting)
I even found a very cool video (8MB) [uni-magdeburg.de] demonstrating riversurfing on the Eisbach in Munich.
Re:The perpetual slope already exists (Score:0, Interesting)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think tucking is entirely about aerodynamics.
You know how figure skaters pull their arms into their bodies to increase their rotational momentum? Or how you expand your body (read: pump your legs) in order to swing on a swingset?
My guess is that tucking has as much, if not more, to do with momentum than aerodynamics. The physics of a tight, compact body with a low center of gravity differ in more ways to a big upright high-centered body in more ways than drag.
Subject to the ``Skating Force'' of LP days (Score:5, Interesting)
If you've never operated an LP phonograph -- the skating force is due to the differential friction on opposite sides of the needle on a phonograph, and tends to draw the needle inward toward the center of the record. It's large enough to cause a needle to skip, bump bump bump, right over the grooves unless a counteracting force is applied. Low-end turntables used springs to pull the needle outward and combat the skating force; high-end turntables used little weights with little mechanical linkages that were designed to match the changes in the skating force with radius.
You can see skating force in action at the bottom of a teacup if there are a few tea leaves floating around down there at the bottom. The tea leaves (after they're waterlogged) sink, so spinning the tea in the teacup "ought" to make them fly outward in the local gravity field. But in fact, tea leaves at the bottom of the cup tend to pile up in the center (when you spin the tea). Counter-intuitive and mysterious, until you realize that the leaves are also dragging on the bottom of the cup and therefore are subject to the skating force.
Shorter videos (Score:1, Interesting)
of shorter videos [surfxchange.net] of the Eisbach. Looks
spectacular. I gotta try this.
PS: I hope I didn't spoil the evening of some sysadmins in
magdeburg by linking the first movie.