Building Melts Car 151
eionmac writes "A new London skyscraper dubbed the 'Walkie Talkie' has been blamed for reflecting light which melted parts of a car parked on a nearby street."
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Building Melts Car
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Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel
I'm melting! I'm melting! (Score:5, Funny)
What a world... what a world...
Re:I'm melting! I'm melting! (Score:5, Funny)
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Eat that mythbusters! Archimedes was right! (Now all we need is to sail a trireme in to Fenchurch St somehow...)
Just don't forget to pick a trireme with wing mirrors.
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Happened in L.A., too... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Disney Concert Hall actually had to be "brushed". It was originally too shiny, and focused the sunlight in places. They had to give it a brushed finish after the fact to avoid this.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-02-24-concert-hall_x.htm [usatoday.com]
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At least at Disney Concert hall the developers claimed that they had anticipated the problem but that the finished building was a little different then designed*. Am wondering if they did mean to aim it at the sky or if they tried to make the focual point of the "mirror" somewhere in the air.
*BTW, Am tried of CAD "engineers" who never gotten grease under their figure nails, because they don't know how to put in proper tolerances for real life.
Catcha: Shameful
Re:Happened in L.A., too... (Score:5, Funny)
The Captcha probably referred to your spelling. ;-)
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There were many legitimate concerns about the Disney Concert Hall's reflectiveness, though I don't believe car-melting was one of them.
Re:Happened in L.A., too... (Score:4, Informative)
Locally, I worked in a building that had an IBM mainframe on the 9th floor. A large building erected across the river had an an angled base and reflective sides and about 4 in the afternoon, the focal point was right on us. Had to install solar film to keep from overheating.
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There's also the "death ray" [google.com] in Las Vegas caused by a concave building with lots of reflective glass.
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Conveniently, both are designed by the same architect.
No, the architect was not Dr. Evil.
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But I can't help picturing a lavish architect's office with a shark tank in the background.
Talk about a sensationalist headline (Score:4, Informative)
If you say "Building melts car," I expect to see a photo of an entire car melted. Seriously.
Re:Talk about a sensationalist headline (Score:4, Funny)
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I was disappointed too. I expected the building a metaphor for a business now sagging under it's own weight, and the car an analogy for their products melting down.
Don't tell me, I know what you're thinking. The Committee for Inverse Automotive Analogies (CIAA) was unimpressed too; Hence my disappointment from the bored board of boredom...
Firies will tell you (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Firies will tell you (Score:5, Interesting)
yep - for the same reason, always pick up any glass bottles you find in the woods. It may be wet and rainy today, but they last a *long* time.
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And don't forget to find the fucker who left it there and shove the bottle, broken end first, up their arse where it belongs.
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Also, don't leave your records in the sun [youtube.com]:
Don't leave your records in the sun,
They'll warp and they won't be good for anyone.
Don't leave your records in the sun,
They'll get all wavy and they just won't run.
They just won't play (skip)
just won't play (skip and repeat about 15 times)
no more.
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So how am I gonna keep the neighborhood dogs from pooping on my lawn, dagnabbit?
The developers are gonna melt, too - or get blind. (Score:2)
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...on the masturbation?
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Don't look at building with remaining eye!
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*golf clap*
No! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No! (Score:5, Funny)
Remember, remember
The Second of September
The Walkie-Talkie Building Parabolic Reflection
And plot
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Don't build big convex glass buildings (Score:2)
This has been a problem with other big convex glass buildings. A hotel in Vegas had this problem.
Another no-no is building tall buildings where the ground floor level is mostly columns with a small enclosed lobby. Some of the air hitting the building face is forced through the columned area. In a windy area this can produce high wind speeds. MIT's Green Building had this problem until more buildings were built around it.
Re:Don't build big convex glass buildings (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure you meant "big concave glass buildings".
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This has been a problem with other big convex glass buildings.
The problem with biconvex buildings is that they roll away. (I think you meant 'concave [wikipedia.org]')
Re: Don't build big convex glass buildings (Score:2)
His point of reference was from inside the building.
Re:Don't build big *concave* glass buildings (Score:5, Informative)
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I actually stayed at this place and happened to be sitting in the wrong spot on the pool deck soon after it opened. I quickly found another spot. Hard to believe the same guy would screw up the SAME WAY again.
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I actually stayed at this place and happened to be sitting in the wrong spot on the pool deck soon after it opened. I quickly found another spot. Hard to believe the same guy would screw up the SAME WAY again.
Hey, if you can't be right, you can at least be consistent.
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Construction on the Vdara began in 2007 and completed in 2009.
Major news coverage of the Vdara death ray appears to begin summer 2010.
Construction on the Walkie Talkie began in 2010. They'd reached the basement level by January 2011 according to Wikipedia.
It seems to me that implies plenty of time to alter the design of the rest of the tower.
On the Vdara:
"Designers foresaw the issue, and thought they had solved it by installing a high-tech film on the south-facing glass panes"
(didn't work, looks like they
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Seriously? Oh my.
This guy just wants to watch the world burn. Literally.
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He must have thought it wouldn't be a problem in London, what with all the pea soupers and drizzle.
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Kids these days. No respect for your elders. Now, get the hell off his lawn.
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As a Londoner myself, I think I'm allowed to take the piss out of Americans who habitually bring up that stereotype, even though it's blatantly not true. As somebody who's lived in a few places around the world, my chief complaints about the weather are that it doesn't get hot enough in summer and the winters are pretty mild and boring too! It doesn't stop the locals whinging like a bunch of babies.
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Maybe he's the world's most sophisticated and patient pyromaniac?
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The first time is NOT understandable. This isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Does the "Archimedes death ray" ring a bell?
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The first time is NOT understandable. This isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Does the "Archimedes death ray" ring a bell?
No, it was designed to burn ships. Sheesh, rays ringing a bell, how ridiculous.
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A better statement of the problem is: if you're going to hire a architect from the southern hemisphere to build a building with a big convex glass exterior, make sure he realizes that north of the equator the concave side should face north.
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Yeah, because the sun never shines from the north up here! It's complete misconceptions like this that cause these issues.
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And also for morning sun, bedrooms should face east, rather than west as in the Southern Hemisphere.
Had you going for a second?
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....It doesn't. That's why moss tends grows on the north side of trees here in the northern hemisphere.
Build big concave reflective structures (Score:2)
Missed opportunity for solar power collection, if you ask me. Instead of not building curved structures, curve away but do so in a manner that's actually useful and shows some foresight. It's not like we haven't given you ray-tracing technology to make pretty print outs of the damn designs anyway; Use it to map the paths of the sun too you damn dirty apes.
Headline (Score:2)
Worst headline ever.
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Man bites dog
Hyperbole (Score:3)
Worst headline ever.
It's OK to use it sometimes. Parabole on the other hand...
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Worst BLAH, BLAH, BLAH ever.
Most exaggerated phrase ever
This is what happens (Score:2)
This is what happens when someone takes the concept of an Ice Cream Truck too literally.
Prior art in Las Vegas (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminded me of this article a couple years back:
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/09/29/1622250/las-vegas-hotel-vdara-an-accidental-death-ray [slashdot.org]
Re:Prior art in Las Vegas (Score:4, Informative)
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Cringe! (Score:2, Insightful)
This building looks exactly like the facetted mirrors for solar power plants. Some idiot probably considered it cute to evoke that image. What's next? Evoking the toppling tower of Pisa in Kyoto?
How can one be an architect and not recognize the cases where optical similarities imply physical ones?
Re: Cringe! (Score:2)
Because they are so up their own arse that they think the derisory nicknames given to these monstrosities of glass and steel, such as Gherkin, Shard, Walkie Talkie, etc., are actually affectionate and we want London to look like Dubai, seeing as most of the prime estate is owned by sheiks.
So far this bullshit hasn't spread across the pond, but they're trying and what is worse, US councilmen are wowed by the opportunity to have a new building designed by dickheads such as Lord Foster (knighted for services t
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This is the point. Making big curved mirrors is expensive, so they use lots of straight pieces of glass to make a nice downwards focussing concave effect. So you take a new building with refelctive film on the windows, and you have a pretty good concentrator. Luckily not a very good one because there is a structure in Spain that gets to 4 figure temperatures.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Florida Is Better (Score:2)
We have had incidents in which parts melted in summer in Florida from time to time. I recall a ford Pinto steering wheel having melted and slumped off of the wheel. We also see windows burst in cars with good door and window seals every now and then.
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Though I do remember the woman with the can of, what was it, Pillsbury rolls? that burst and she thought she'd been shot.
£946 ??? (Score:1)
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You're absolutely right. I wouldn't pay £5 for that car.
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For severe bodywork damage on a modern Jag? In London? Bullshit!
Well.... they're apparently made of cheap plastic.
Reaim (Score:1)
Or focus it on a spot that can handle it. Perhaps a salt container. Use the molten salt to make steam and use that to make power (as has been done before).
Practical execution of re-aiming a building is left as an exercise to the reader because I have no idea how to do that.
Hello (Score:3)
Crikey (Score:3)
You have to admire the owner's restraint on finding his car's been melted.
"'I am the owner. Crikey, that's awful."
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Decades ago, my parents were on a trip with us children in England. It was a seminal drive where my sister terminally established "I get a window seat because I'm getting sick otherwise": we brothers just managed to hand her through to the next window before she exploded barf all over the side of the car and the outside. A few hundred yards onwards my father stopped the car and we started cleaning it up, reverting to sage and other grasses and herbs on the side.
That's when a pair of British pedestrians st
Thank Tata, who got rid of any Britishness in them (Score:2)
As many corners that had to be cut, thank Tata for such a lower-quality car. At least Ford kept it British.
A variant of...... (Score:3, Funny)
Melts some plastic trim on a car (Score:2)
Could have been worse... (Score:2)
The guy's car could have been smashed by a large chunk of rotting whale carcass.
Link to the video in case you don't get the reference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBgThvB_IDQ [youtube.com]
Ants (Score:2)
Re:if your car is made of plastic... (Score:4, Interesting)
The car isn't made of plastic, it was sail trim and not the entire car. Not the first building to do this and even residential homes have been accused of doing the same to neighbors siding when low E windows are installed...
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Balance (Score:2)
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Amazing how just twice as much sun as normal will melt our world. This third rock is an uniquely hospitable, thank Dog.
If the world wasn't this hospitable, life would never have evolved. From what I understand, there are plenty of solar systems where such is the case. Does Dog hate those solar systems?
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If the world wasn't this hospitable, life would never have evolved.
That's a load of crap, what about life forms on earth that thrive in 500+ degree underwater volcanic vents?
I'd say "they're not up here posting on Slashdot", but with some of the commenters I'm not sure that's completely true.
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I'd also ask if they're really "thriving" or just getting by... the ones that apparently can live around high levels of arsenic are the ones that intrigue me!
Re:if your car is made of plastic... (Score:4, Interesting)
That's pretty funny, hey did you know that there was an entire line of cars and vans made using poly-composite plastic body panels? Funny enough, switching from steel to plastic or even fiberglass can cut the weight of a vehicle by 30% and give you massive savings on fuel. The downside is, 20 years later as long as you take care of the car it still looks new.
Trabi... (Score:2)
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"Far ahead" is not a phrase I would normally associate with the Trabant. It was a car that enforced breaks on the user every half hour to get away from the noise of the engine. Made cross-country trips (I did one across Ireland in a friends trabbie once) a bit more of an epic than usual.
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Hmm, the Trabant was made of plastic composite and used a two stroke engine. It was far ahead of its time...
The two stroke engine would have been it's death knell, they're hellishly bad on wear and tear as you might expect, especially with people fudging up mixture ratios. For myself though, I owned a '96 saturn and that thing would easily get 40-45mpg, just as much as some companies are trying to push now on their cars.
Of course if people missed what I said about 20 years later and the car still looking good, that had more to do with the automakers, and the fact that they really didn't rust out like everything
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Trabant was supposedly indestructible - the plastic composite was a right nightmare to dispose of.
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Is this some new super villain with heat vision, the ability to morph into giant skyscrapers, and telepathy?
When 30 St Mary Axe (that's the street address) was under construction there were several proposed nicknames. Things like the Dildo. Fortunately "Gherkin" stuck, and since then several of developers / architects have tried to choose their building's nickname, but journalists have been more successful.
See also: the Shard, the Cheesegrater, and the Pinnacle / Helter Skelter.
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It should be an automatic rejection if the nickname is chosen by the developers or architects.
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What kinds of idiots are designing these things?
Rafael Vinoly, apparently.