BuzzSkyline writes "The same folks who brought us the tsunami invisibility cloak last year have now come up with an earthquake invisibility cloak. They show that a platform made of just the right configuration of elastic rings could make a structure invisible to earthquakes by effectively steering a quake around the structure. It doesn't work well for compression waves, but the researchers claim it could hide buildings from the slower-moving, more destructive shear earthquake waves. The research is due to be published soon in the journal Physical Review Letters."
If you're in marketing you call it an invisibility cloak. If you're an engineer you call it a tuned resonator and ask yourself why oh why you didn't go to medical school.
Guenneau said that it's possible to shield an object, even a building, so that an incoming earthquake wave behaves as if the object weren't there. The building in the path of the wave is like a rock in a fast-flowing river, he said.
Having seen my share of rivers, I can pretty much say that the water pattern DOES change when it hits a rock.
And that the rock is more solid than the water.
With an earthquake, isn't the building less solid than than Earth?
"It's the same picture, the wave pattern, as for a water w
Maybe their technology does work, but their analogies do not.
It's an analogy, not a model. Analogies are always their to bridge the gap between complete ignorance and knowledge. Grasping onto the analogy and complaining it doesn't work is like floating while holding onto a life preserver while trying to cross a stream and complaining the life preserver isn't getting you to the other side.
In other words, if you want to understand what's going on you need to start understanding the model and throw away the
> With an earthquake, isn't the building less solid than than Earth?
Solidity isn't necessarily good protection against an earthquake. A hunk of granite bedrock a mile thick is a fairly solid thing, but a medium-grade earthquake will crack it without breaking a sweat. The atmosphere, on the other hand, is not generally considered to be solid, but it's difficult to imagine an earthquake powerful enough to damage it.
> With an earthquake, isn't the building less solid than than Earth?
IANASiesmologist (but I play one on TV (ok, I can't back that up))
Actually, sometimes it isn't. Depending on the properties of the quake (strength, depth, etc), the ground itself (particularly soil) acts a lot like a liquid. A "slab" house might float while a bedrock based building may have major structural issues due to compression of the major structural elements. This is one of the big reasons that building in earthquake zones have "f
An informal survey done my one of my coworkers at a party with his fiance's family and coworkers (a group largely composed of doctors and lawyers -- she's doing her residency) found that only 25% of the doctors would do it again (given the costs and stresses involved); many indicated they'd have stayed in medicine, but have gone for a cheaper job title (such as FNP). For the lawyers, the would-do-it-again ratio was closer to 50%.
Many doctors and lawyers go into the field for the money. That's not really true of the hard science/engineer types. So most engineers would do it again because they actually want to spend their time engineering, and enjoy it.
That's true of a lot of doctors too...but a lot of them just picked their career by the expected income. How many engineers or mathematicians or computing scientists or physicists etc chose the career for the paycheque*. Sure we can get paid well, but lets face it... its not the license to print money being a lawyer or doctor can be.
(*Other than the brief rash of worthless eng. and comp.sci. grads chasing the.com bubble)
Many doctors and lawyers go into the field for the money.
And doctors going into it for the money is one of the big reasons why healthcare is so broken in America. Doctors aren't doing it in order to help people (though it is a secondary motive for some). Rather, they're mainly doing it to enrich themselves. Is it any surprise that healthcare is so expensive?
if there is such a difference of incentives between US doctors and, say, Canadian doctors, then i find it hard to believe that that is the root cause of the problem. rather, i think it's probably much more of a consequence.
There isn't an entry on that list below six figures. And I'd say the average is easily 250k plus.
An electrical engineer "1" in the 90th percentile (ie making more than 90% of his peers), according to salary.com makes 67k. Unless he gets promoted to management, (and does less engineering and more managing) he's going to have a very tough time cracking 6 figs.
A nuclear physicist, cracks six figures. But even his 90th percentile at 126k doesn't quite reach the expected STARTING wage of "Pediatrics - Adolescents" - 130k, probably the lowest number on that list.
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday July 19, @01:44PM (#28749067)
Couple of things to point out here...
A "starting" physician is 6 years behind a starting electrical engineer. 4 years of med school + 2 years of residency (at a minimum!) and they have a tremendous amount more debt for those additional years of schooling. Even at that point they are considered to have very little experience.
In addition try looking at malpractice insurance for physicians, or something called "tail insurance", ie if you leave the practice and 10 years down the road someone you treated decides to sue you the tail insurance takes care of that, but it means you're paying insurance against the chance of a lawsuit forever basically, even if you leave medicine.
Not to mention the fact that if differences were that significant in salary and the work was actually the same amount of effort or easier I have absolutely no doubt that we would see more physicians but instead of that we're actually seeing *fewer* physicians. I've often heard from physicians that anyone could do it, there's nothing special about them, just a matter of lots and lots of hard work. Most physicians I know actually recommend to their children that they *not* go in to medicine. How's that for an indication of how the field is doing?
The intake of doctors into med school is tightly controlled. They are not going to start raising their intake, oh, just because the market wants it. How else could they command the high salaries that they do?
A "starting" physician is 6 years behind a starting electrical engineer. 2 years of residency (at a minimum!) and they have a tremendous amount more debt for those additional years of schooling. Even at that point they are considered to have very little experience.
Not really. They start getting paid as residents. Granted not 6 figures, but already well above the national average.
Meanwhile a comp sci or phys grade with a BS is what? Not a whole lot, you need your MS or PhD. Which adds years (and dollars) to
(now spends another 20 minutes with that patient covering what the real issues were, and is now 15 minutes "behind" which physicians *hate*, but they have no control over)
I hate to break it to you, but that is par for the course in ANY profession where you need to meet with other people for any reason whatsoever.
Doctor. Plumber. Network Admin. Baby Sitter.
I don't book 16 15 minute appointments in a 4 hour afternoon, because there is no way in hell I'd ever get through them all. 8-10 would be pushing it.
If they want to address this, do what everyone else does: wake up to reality and stop over booking yourself. Yeah, you'll make less money if you can't book 32 patients in a day anymore. So what?
And on that note, why do I have to take half a day off work, so I can come in and meet with a doctor for 7 minutes (after waiting 40+) who has nothing important to tell me and barely looks at me. Fuck, unless they need to poke or prod or sample something I have better things to do than to lose half a day of work to see them. -- you want to tell me my test came back fine, or that I need to book another blood sample at some lab... pick up the phone tell me.
The horror! The inhumanity! Why, they'd have to violate their ever-so-precious HIPAA guidelines, or so they seem to think anyway.
Seriously, every time I've tried to get basic medical info over the phone, usually simple blood test results, I've had to make an appointment, and always because HIPAA somehow prevents it (or so they claim), even though they know perfectly well who is calling. My guess is that, despite the time saved by both parties by making a
If you're an engineer you call it a tuned resonator...
Not necessarily. One other way to make a building "invisible" to the shear waves of an Earthquake would be to float it. Shear waves cannot pass through liquids. Of course this is probably somewhat less practical...
It's not an invisibility cloak. A nearby building could still fall on the cloaked one, with the usual result. Also, it's not a cloak, as in a piece of fabric. Last, anything can be made resistant to earthquakes, but to make it earthquake-proof is something only an arrogant designer or a project manager would say. Every design component can fail, and most catastrophic engineering failures are rooted in miscalculation or failing to test the model with a particular cascade of failures.
Fabric, I think you're on to something there. Maybe they're selling tents? I guess they'd be pretty good in an earthquake. In fact, they seem quite popular afterwards, so just save time and live in one to start with.
Central/Western VA, WV, TN, KY... those are all pretty immune to most natural disasters. Hurricanes are all petered out by the time they hit here, the biggest earthquakes are like magnitude 4, the mountains kill the tornados quickly in general, there are no big rivers that cause massive flooding, etc.
My part of TN, we have the occasional tornado. F2s. No big ones so far in over 200 years of settlement. One tornado fatality in the last 20 years within a 50 mile radius, and there's claims the wall which fell there was single thickness brick constructed by the amateur homeowner. Floods? My home is over 500 feet above the local river. Earthquakes? If the new Madrid fault lets loose and literally hits Memphis TN with a Richter 10.8 quake and not a building is left in pieces bigger than marble sized, I would
Actually, I'm pretty sure those arrogant designers at NASA are quite confident that the International Space Station resists earthquakes.
And it would be just like them to focus on earthquakes, which can't happen in space, instead of say, solar flares.
the problem is to resist earthquakes in a cost effective manner, or alternatively stop people from doing stupid things.
Well, the second half of that is clearly impossible, so I'd suggest focusing on cost efficiency.
why do people knowingly locate in known flood areas behind dikes, in arid deserts, underneath volcanoes, or in known high-intensity earthquake areas
Curiously, the most fertile land, plentiful sources of water, and temperate climates, are located in those places. Except underneath volcanoes -- evil overlords live there, not joe average.
and not expect disasters to happen?
Oh, I think they do expect disasters to happen. And everyone else to pay for it thanks to this con game we call "
What will happen when all buildings in a certain area will be "cloaked" to earthquakes?
Will mechanical waves skip the entire area?
What if all buildings in a certain large area will be made that way?
I fear that the "solution" is good only when a few of them are made that way. The other ones will need to collapse.
It should be perfectly safe to cloak all buildings. Buildings only absorb a tiny fraction of the shock of an earthquake; you don't need to have something man-made fall over just to keep the waves from going further. Now if you somehow made huge chunks of land cloaked to earthquakes, I would agree that the shaking may have to come out somewhere. But anyway at that point you're talking about making an isolated chunk of land whose borders crunch and stretch a lot more than everything else -- people wouldn't go for that. And I don't see how you'd do it anyway, you can't just seismically isolate a chunk of land.
We get all the buildings to jump up, at just the right time we should be able to avoid any earthquake related problems. I am sure that the ACME company must carry all the required components.
The way that all invisibility cloaks work (at least theoretically) is that you create a structure whose materials parameters vary in such a way that it effectively performs a coordinate transformation, mapping points in the cloaked region to points outside of it. In real space, the wave curves around the object, but in transformed space, it still travels in a straight line. For electromagnetic cloaks, it is the permittivity (refractive index squared) of the structure that is engineered. I don't know much ab
IANAP but the basic idea I got from the design of the "Tsunami Cloak" was that there was simply a path of less resistance along the concentric corridors than along the radial ones, so that the wave tended to flow around the center rather than through it. Correct me if I'm wrong about this. Sometime later I was wondering if the same principal could be used to redirect strong winds around a vulnerable structure. I was thing along the lines of metal posts rather than concrete pillars, but then I started consi
Wouldn't the intensity of the waves be concentrated around the periphery of the rings? Would two or more earthquake shields in particular arrangements have a focusing effect, unwittingly completely leveling a nearby building from a otherwise mild shake?
You do realize that the point of this is to build it into all new buildings, right?
Additionally it's unlikely that the amount of extra energy from a few buildings would have a noticeable effect in the other buildings. Of course we can't violate the laws of physics, but when you're talking about that much energy and when most buildings are built to sustain much larger earthquakes than what's realistically going to happen it isn't worth worrying a whole lot about.
It's not the sheer magnitude of an earthquake that actually determines damage. Damage should be much more correlated with how much of the energy gets dissipated into a building or other structure.
Try looking at it like this: If you are standing out in a field when an earthquake hits, you personally may be the only thing on top of the ground, that could absorb any energy from that part of a wave passing through the whole area. Just you. Now if you are on the bottom floor of a big concrete parking garage, tha
Marketing vs Engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget the bad analogies! (Score:3, Interesting)
Having seen my share of rivers, I can pretty much say that the water pattern DOES change when it hits a rock.
And that the rock is more solid than the water.
With an earthquake, isn't the building less solid than than Earth?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe their technology does work, but their analogies do not.
It's an analogy, not a model. Analogies are always their to bridge the gap between complete ignorance and knowledge. Grasping onto the analogy and complaining it doesn't work is like floating while holding onto a life preserver while trying to cross a stream and complaining the life preserver isn't getting you to the other side.
In other words, if you want to understand what's going on you need to start understanding the model and throw away the
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Solidity isn't necessarily good protection against an earthquake. A hunk of granite bedrock a mile thick is a fairly solid thing, but a medium-grade earthquake will crack it without breaking a sweat. The atmosphere, on the other hand, is not generally considered to be solid, but it's difficult to imagine an earthquake powerful enough to damage it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> With an earthquake, isn't the building less solid than than Earth?
IANASiesmologist (but I play one on TV (ok, I can't back that up))
Actually, sometimes it isn't. Depending on the properties of the quake (strength, depth, etc), the ground itself (particularly soil) acts a lot like a liquid. A "slab" house might float while a bedrock based building may have major structural issues due to compression of the major structural elements. This is one of the big reasons that building in earthquake zones have "f
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
An informal survey done my one of my coworkers at a party with his fiance's family and coworkers (a group largely composed of doctors and lawyers -- she's doing her residency) found that only 25% of the doctors would do it again (given the costs and stresses involved); many indicated they'd have stayed in medicine, but have gone for a cheaper job title (such as FNP). For the lawyers, the would-do-it-again ratio was closer to 50%.
I think we engineers have it good.
Re:Marketing vs Engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we engineers have it good.
Many doctors and lawyers go into the field for the money. That's not really true of the hard science/engineer types. So most engineers would do it again because they actually want to spend their time engineering, and enjoy it.
That's true of a lot of doctors too...but a lot of them just picked their career by the expected income. How many engineers or mathematicians or computing scientists or physicists etc chose the career for the paycheque*. Sure we can get paid well, but lets face it... its not the license to print money being a lawyer or doctor can be.
(*Other than the brief rash of worthless eng. and comp.sci. grads chasing the .com bubble)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
And doctors going into it for the money is one of the big reasons why healthcare is so broken in America. Doctors aren't doing it in order to help people (though it is a secondary motive for some). Rather, they're mainly doing it to enrich themselves. Is it any surprise that healthcare is so expensive?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Myth of doctors as "high paid" (Score:5, Informative)
The illusion that medicine is well-compensated for the effort is just that -- an illusion.
Relative to what, exactly?
http://www.cejkasearch.com/compensation/amga_physician_compensation_survey.htm [cejkasearch.com]
There isn't an entry on that list below six figures. And I'd say the average is easily 250k plus.
An electrical engineer "1" in the 90th percentile (ie making more than 90% of his peers), according to salary.com makes 67k. Unless he gets promoted to management, (and does less engineering and more managing) he's going to have a very tough time cracking 6 figs.
A nuclear physicist, cracks six figures. But even his 90th percentile at 126k doesn't quite reach the expected STARTING wage of "Pediatrics - Adolescents" - 130k, probably the lowest number on that list.
Parent
Re:Myth of doctors as "high paid" (Score:5, Insightful)
Couple of things to point out here...
A "starting" physician is 6 years behind a starting electrical engineer. 4 years of med school + 2 years of residency (at a minimum!) and they have a tremendous amount more debt for those additional years of schooling. Even at that point they are considered to have very little experience.
In addition try looking at malpractice insurance for physicians, or something called "tail insurance", ie if you leave the practice and 10 years down the road someone you treated decides to sue you the tail insurance takes care of that, but it means you're paying insurance against the chance of a lawsuit forever basically, even if you leave medicine.
Not to mention the fact that if differences were that significant in salary and the work was actually the same amount of effort or easier I have absolutely no doubt that we would see more physicians but instead of that we're actually seeing *fewer* physicians. I've often heard from physicians that anyone could do it, there's nothing special about them, just a matter of lots and lots of hard work. Most physicians I know actually recommend to their children that they *not* go in to medicine. How's that for an indication of how the field is doing?
Parent
Re:Myth of doctors as "high paid" (Score:4, Insightful)
The intake of doctors into med school is tightly controlled. They are not going to start raising their intake, oh, just because the market wants it. How else could they command the high salaries that they do?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
A "starting" physician is 6 years behind a starting electrical engineer. 2 years of residency (at a minimum!) and they have a tremendous amount more debt for those additional years of schooling. Even at that point they are considered to have very little experience.
Not really. They start getting paid as residents. Granted not 6 figures, but already well above the national average.
Meanwhile a comp sci or phys grade with a BS is what? Not a whole lot, you need your MS or PhD. Which adds years (and dollars) to
Re: (Score:2)
Um, no. The physician also has a 4 year degree obtained before medical school.
Move to jupiter (Score:2)
Re:Marketing vs Engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
(now spends another 20 minutes with that patient covering what the real issues were, and is now 15 minutes "behind" which physicians *hate*, but they have no control over)
I hate to break it to you, but that is par for the course in ANY profession where you need to meet with other people for any reason whatsoever.
Doctor. Plumber. Network Admin. Baby Sitter.
I don't book 16 15 minute appointments in a 4 hour afternoon, because there is no way in hell I'd ever get through them all. 8-10 would be pushing it.
If they want to address this, do what everyone else does: wake up to reality and stop over booking yourself. Yeah, you'll make less money if you can't book 32 patients in a day anymore. So what?
And on that note, why do I have to take half a day off work, so I can come in and meet with a doctor for 7 minutes (after waiting 40+) who has nothing important to tell me and barely looks at me. Fuck, unless they need to poke or prod or sample something I have better things to do than to lose half a day of work to see them. -- you want to tell me my test came back fine, or that I need to book another blood sample at some lab... pick up the phone tell me.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The horror! The inhumanity! Why, they'd have to violate their ever-so-precious HIPAA guidelines, or so they seem to think anyway.
Seriously, every time I've tried to get basic medical info over the phone, usually simple blood test results, I've had to make an appointment, and always because HIPAA somehow prevents it (or so they claim), even though they know perfectly well who is calling. My guess is that, despite the time saved by both parties by making a
Re: (Score:2)
and ask yourself why oh why you didn't go to medical school.
And AFTER the earthquake, you will ask yourself why oh why DID you go to medical school...
Physics (Score:2)
If you're an engineer you call it a tuned resonator...
Not necessarily. One other way to make a building "invisible" to the shear waves of an Earthquake would be to float it. Shear waves cannot pass through liquids. Of course this is probably somewhat less practical...
Re: (Score:2)
Instead of Invisibility Cloak, I would call it "Earthquake Deflector Shield"
Same coolness, more accuracy
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I just wonder how they cope with the tachyon field and quantum neutrinos. Maybe they reversed the polarity?
Well thats useless. (Score:4, Funny)
Reality decloaking off the starboard bow. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not an invisibility cloak. A nearby building could still fall on the cloaked one, with the usual result. Also, it's not a cloak, as in a piece of fabric. Last, anything can be made resistant to earthquakes, but to make it earthquake-proof is something only an arrogant designer or a project manager would say. Every design component can fail, and most catastrophic engineering failures are rooted in miscalculation or failing to test the model with a particular cascade of failures.
Re: (Score:2)
Fabric, I think you're on to something there. Maybe they're selling tents? I guess they'd be pretty good in an earthquake. In fact, they seem quite popular afterwards, so just save time and live in one to start with.
Re:Reality decloaking off the starboard bow. (Score:4, Funny)
Live in the big flat mid-west plains, it might be boring, but it is safe.
(Taps Cassini2 on the shoulder and points to the huge tornado) "Is anywhere safe?"
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Central/Western VA, WV, TN, KY... those are all pretty immune to most natural disasters. Hurricanes are all petered out by the time they hit here, the biggest earthquakes are like magnitude 4, the mountains kill the tornados quickly in general, there are no big rivers that cause massive flooding, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
My part of TN, we have the occasional tornado. F2s. No big ones so far in over 200 years of settlement. One tornado fatality in the last 20 years within a 50 mile radius, and there's claims the wall which fell there was single thickness brick constructed by the amateur homeowner. Floods? My home is over 500 feet above the local river. Earthquakes? If the new Madrid fault lets loose and literally hits Memphis TN with a Richter 10.8 quake and not a building is left in pieces bigger than marble sized, I would
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Taps Cassini2 on the shoulder and points to the huge tornado "Is anywhere safe?"
Cassini: Ah, I'm sorry, but I'm over 746 million miles away right now. Try asking a satellite a bit closer.
Re: (Score:2)
Live in the big flat mid-west plains, it might be boring, but it is safe.
As long as you're not near New Madrid, MO.
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Live in the big flat mid-west plains, it might be boring, but it is safe.
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The ISS doesn't resist earthquakes, it simply isn't subjected to them.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, I'm pretty sure those arrogant designers at NASA are quite confident that the International Space Station resists earthquakes.
And it would be just like them to focus on earthquakes, which can't happen in space, instead of say, solar flares.
the problem is to resist earthquakes in a cost effective manner, or alternatively stop people from doing stupid things.
Well, the second half of that is clearly impossible, so I'd suggest focusing on cost efficiency.
why do people knowingly locate in known flood areas behind dikes, in arid deserts, underneath volcanoes, or in known high-intensity earthquake areas
Curiously, the most fertile land, plentiful sources of water, and temperate climates, are located in those places. Except underneath volcanoes -- evil overlords live there, not joe average.
and not expect disasters to happen?
Oh, I think they do expect disasters to happen. And everyone else to pay for it thanks to this con game we call "
Will it work for everyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Will mechanical waves skip the entire area?
What if all buildings in a certain large area will be made that way?
I fear that the "solution" is good only when a few of them are made that way. The other ones will need to collapse.
Re:Will it work for everyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Would there potentially be constructive interference though? That could make it worse for neighbors.
Re: (Score:2)
In other words, it's a great idea for your next Arcology project, not so good for the new apartment block?
I can live with that.
What if ...... (Score:2, Funny)
We get all the buildings to jump up, at just the right time we should be able to avoid any earthquake related problems. I am sure that the ACME company must carry all the required components.
Re: (Score:2)
EARTH QUAKE! (Score:2, Funny)
Flying (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes
Now they can't see me! (Score:4, Funny)
Good thing we invented the earthquake invisibility cloak! Now the earthquakes won't be able to see me!
Wind Cloak? (Score:2, Interesting)
IANAP but the basic idea I got from the design of the "Tsunami Cloak" was that there was simply a path of less resistance along the concentric corridors than along the radial ones, so that the wave tended to flow around the center rather than through it. Correct me if I'm wrong about this. Sometime later I was wondering if the same principal could be used to redirect strong winds around a vulnerable structure. I was thing along the lines of metal posts rather than concrete pillars, but then I started consi
Montoya: "You keep using that word ..." (Score:2)
you keep using that word. i don't think it means what you think it means.
I'd call it geodynamic lawsuit generator (Score:2)
So, in Magic: The Gathering terms... (Score:2)
Enchantment
{1}{R}
All creatures have flying.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Additionally it's unlikely that the amount of extra energy from a few buildings would have a noticeable effect in the other buildings. Of course we can't violate the laws of physics, but when you're talking about that much energy and when most buildings are built to sustain much larger earthquakes than what's realistically going to happen it isn't worth worrying a whole lot about.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's not the sheer magnitude of an earthquake that actually determines damage. Damage should be much more correlated with how much of the energy gets dissipated into a building or other structure.
Try looking at it like this: If you are standing out in a field when an earthquake hits, you personally may be the only thing on top of the ground, that could absorb any energy from that part of a wave passing through the whole area. Just you. Now if you are on the bottom floor of a big concrete parking garage, tha