This Machine Produces the Largest Humanmade Waves In the World 64
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.
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Re:humanmade? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re: Commercializing... Yes! Where I live, there is a wave pool that has one of those wave machines and it's lots of fun. Unfortunately, I don't think that a typical wave tank is designed with swimmers in mind, so it would probably be quite expensive to adapt it.
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Not in the lingually ignorant, politically correct portions of Northern Europe. Misogynist.
Man is a species determination.
Wo- is the female prefix.
Were- is the male prefix.
I will honor feminist word redefinitions only if we return to the classical meanings of those terms. I demand that I be referred to in all documentation that chooses to focus on gender as a 'wereman.'
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It's used, though very rarely. Werewolfs were historically believed to all be male.
hu-person-made surely? (Score:5, Insightful)
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'.
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No, that's not it. The English language (and just about every other language) assumes the default person to be male unless otherwise specified. Though English is rather light on that assumption as we actually have a common pronoun for gender neutral (namely, it) which a lot of other languages lack (and they refer to objects as our equivalent of him or her.) That, and some languages like Spanish if you have a big stadium of a thousand women you refer to them as ellas (them, fem) but if you add just one man t
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I was under the impression that the English language, lacking a neuter, uses the masculine when the gender is unknown. The distinction is that the listener may interpret this to be an assumption of actually being male, but that would be his mistake, not that of the speaker.
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Are you sure about that?
I was under the impression that the English language, lacking a neuter, uses the masculine when the gender is unknown. The distinction is that the listener may interpret this to be an assumption of actually being male, but that would be his mistake, not that of the speaker.
Well you could always refer to classic literature, which is generally considered authoritative proper use of language. It's practically unseen. In recent times however, most people have used "their" instead of "his", "her", or "his or her" but their is plural, and thus is not correct usage for one person. Also, I don't know about you, but I've found it kind of jarring when people use "her" when the gender is unspecified, and I don't think I'm alone in that.
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Re:hu-person-made surely? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, that's not it.
Sorry but you are wrong [wikipedia.org]. 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 [worldbank.org] in its national parliament than the US. In many European countries the ratio is in the upper thirties to forty percent.
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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.
Yeah, when the set of "societies out there" only includes countries using the Imperial system.
For majority of the developed world, who've already had female heads of state, your claim is laughable.
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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'.
Yeah, but we all know those Dutch Delta Flume guys probably only had one or two chicks on the team (and they got hired 'cus they were cute).
It's impossible to "educate" away connotations of words by explaining esoteric etymologies. Modern English is stuck with man = male. AUE on the subject. [google.com]
The linked-to article used "artificial." Submitter should have just followed.
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Friday fun on Slashdot. The channers are bored with planning school shootings, I guess.
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Not in the politically correct portions of Northern Europe.
Not in Europe, or anywhere else. This device [wikipedia.org] created far bigger human-made waves more than half a century ago.
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They should commercialize the thing. You could make it into the ultimate water park.
It's already been tried! In a little piece of heaven called Action Park [wikipedia.org] Selected quotes from the Wikipedia:
Nevertheless, the director of the emergency room at a nearby hospital said they treated from five to ten victims of park accidents on some of the busiest days, and the park eventually bought the township of Vernon extra ambulances to keep up with the volume.
...
Water-based attractions made up half of the park's rides
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Oh man, they should not retire the thing.
Why didn't you say "Oh person, they should not retire the thing"? It doesn't sound any more awkward than "Humanmade".
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I think "human-made" is a stupid replacement for "man-made", which itself is a stupid replacement for "artificial".
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An "artifice" is a forgery, a fake, or something used to trick other people. "Artificial" means that something is used as an artifice.
This is a story about a very real machine, that really creates waves. It does not trick or deceive. It merely simulates. It is man-made, not artificial.
But I agree that "human-made" is dumb.
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The etymology is: "made from skill". A classic case in the evolution of the language, of attributing a very negative connotation to a very positive/neutral word...
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I don't believe for one second you looked up "artificial" in the dictionary. You might have looked up artifice and then jumped to conclusions on the basis of a common etymology.
You don't have grounds to complain about human-made vs. man-made if you're introducing the same nonsensical distinction between artificial and man-made.
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My thoughts exactly. This reminds me of the last round of this nonsense... "They are now called peopleholes" FFS this is far too much. Referring to something as being man made is clearly a shortened form of "human made" because human made sounds stupid and doesn't roll off the tongue. A man hole is a management hole. A manager manages people, shall we call that human-ager?
Yet, we've done nothing to change the wage gap, and right now several different "developed nations" are still deciding what woman can
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Look, keep using man-made, I'm not on a crusade, and I'll keep using man-made. But FFS, humanmade does roll off the tongue. Human rolls off the tongue, and man-made rolls off the tongue, and human-made doesn't introduce any special linguistic controtion by joining the two terms.
But this is how we fix that? I'm living in bizarro world where anything, literally anything, that has the 3 letters M A N together, must be changed because it's clearly sexist
Not to pick on you in particular, but you are an anonymous coward so you can represent the group. Do you not realize that YOU are the PC police when you jump on everybody's tiniest difference in language usage, even when it's comp
Here's how it's done (Score:2)
by Calvin and Hobbes http://www.gocomics.com/calvin... [gocomics.com]
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I think the important question, and the most important question, is can I surf on one?
Ha! Just kidding. I can't surf worth a damn. I have a scar to prove my ineptness.
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No, they meant "kunstmatige". "Artificial" is a more accurate translation than "humanmade" or "manmade".
Incorrect (Score:4, Insightful)
Incorrect the largest waves were made by humans when the detonated an H-Bomb.
Your measly wave pool is tiny compared to real power.
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Incorrect the largest waves were made by humans when the detonated an H-Bomb.
Your measly wave pool is tiny compared to real power.
The goal is to produce tsunamis without the nuclear fallout.
Re:Incorrect (Score:4, Funny)
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?
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Umm, no. Pure water does not suffer from the creation of dangerous isotopes due to neutron activation. However, water as found lying on the surface of this planet contains many minerals, particularly salt. And the isotopes produced can be quite nasty.
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deuterium to tritium would be an activation with dangerous isotope produced
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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?
Dude, what kind of bong do you have, and what are you smoking with it?
This sounds like the plot of a Cheech and Chong movie.
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Incorrect the largest waves were made by humans when the detonated an H-Bomb.
Your measly wave pool is tiny compared to real power.
The goal is to produce tsunamis without the nuclear fallout.
You can with enough TNT.
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If you want to get silly with different transmission media, economic transactions can show traveling disturbances with wavelengths from New York to Hong Kong.
We may need a non-car analogy... (Score:1)
So the Netherlands, country which is build behind walls to repel unwanted waves, has built the biggest domestic wave generator to help improve the walls?
Well, that solves the US election puzzle... We just need a domestic illegal immigrant generator!
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What are the highest waves it can produce (Score:2)
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"...the maximum significant wave height—a measure of a storm's intensity—is 2.2 meters, but individual waves may top out at 4.5 meters."
Holy Michael Crichton, Batman! (Score:2)
State of Fear (2004) excerpt [writerswrite.com]:
Jonathan Marshall was twenty-four, a graduate student in physics from London, working for the summer at the ultra-modern Laboratoire Ondulatoire-the wave mechanics laboratory-of the French Marine Institute in Vissy, just north of Paris. But the suburb was mostly the residence of young families, and it had been a lonely summer for Marshall. Which was why he could not believe his good fortune at meeting this girl. This extraordinarily beautiful and sexy girl.
"Show me what it does,
Make up your mind.... (Score:2)
Are they made by humans or made by machines?
Simulation... (Score:1)
Have they never heard of simulation?...