ABG: Permanent sculptures. First, this adorable puppy.
And then, the lizard herd:
Which, for reasons that escape me (oh, I’m tired, the visuals are odd, oh so odd), reminds me of a very charming T-Rex built of scrap metal in Faith, SD. RoadSide America provides a bit of information and this lovely picture:
The artist is John Lopez, who I linked to yesterday.
A sort of ultimate found object sculptor, John Lopez has done some interesting work with scrap metal when not doing his day job – which is …
For the past ten years, John has been working on The City of Presidents project in Rapid City, SD. John Adams, John F. Kennedy and John, Jr., Calvin Coolidge, Teddy Roosevelt and Ulysses S. Grant are a few of the presidents John has placed on the street corners so far.
And here’s a sample of his off-hours work.
More here.
Amazing stuff, dragging a wreck off the seabed.
And for all that I know it’s impractical, and even a negative in many cases, I’d still like to see humanity clean up its messes just like this: pick the whole thing up, salvage what can be salvaged, and make the sea clean again. There’s a few ships, such as World War II oilers and munition ships, that really need to be neutralized and removed.
Who would think that drilling a few holes could stop an earthquake? Kate Ravilious writes about the ambitions of physicist Sébastien Guenneau in NewScientist (23 July 2016, paywall):
But in 2001, French seismologist Philippe Guéguen realised that getting buildings to sway could have unexpected benefits. He was studying the effect on Mexico City of a magnitude 7.4 quake that hit it in September 1995. While various parts of the city should have responded in the same way, some neighbourhoods shook for nearly twice as long as others. Softer sediments wobble more than solid rock, but underlying geology wasn’t enough to account for the discrepancy. Instead, it turned out that tall buildings were creating secondary waves in the ground around them, prolonging the shaking but muting the original surface waves. This suggested that the swaying high-rise towers were redistributing the earthquake energy, and providing some protection.
The idea that the waves themselves could be modified, rather than simply withstood, turned earthquake engineering on its head, says Guéguen, who is based at the Institute of Earth Sciences in Grenoble. The key is controlling the way in which the ground responds to incoming waves.
Guenneau had a surprising idea for how this could be achieved. While simply drilling holes in the soil may not seem like it would have much of an impact, he knew that the principle on which it was based had already achieved the impossible.
A small-scale test nearly worked to perfection, with only the small problem that rather redirecting the energy in another direction, or harmlessly dissipating it, the energy was reflected. They are now working on an improvement.
I have a couple of thoughts.
In a sidebar, another scientist is investigating a similar system for mitigating tsunamis, inspired by the 2004 disaster.
