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Submitted via IRC for Bytram
In the 160 or so years since the first skyscrapers were built, technological innovations of many kinds have allowed us to build them to reach astonishing heights. Today there is a 1,000-meter (167-story) building under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Even taller buildings are possible with today's structural technology.
But people still don't really live in skyscrapers the way futurists had envisioned, for one reason: Elevators go only up and down. In the "Harry Potter" movies, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and others, we see cableless boxes that can travel not just vertically but horizontally and even diagonally. Today, that future might be closer than ever. A new system invented and being tested by German elevator producer ThyssenKrupp would get rid of cables altogether and build elevators more like magnetic levitation trains, which are common in Japan and China.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2017-08-reengineering-elevators-21st-century-cities.html
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:43PM (4 children)
it always takes less than 10 minutes from sitting at my desk to entering the locker room of my gym two miles away
Ahh yes, the old "drive 2 miles to the gym, run 4 miles on the treadmill, drive 2 miles back" gig :D
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 09 2017, @09:13PM (2 children)
treadmills are like boats, lots of fun to use someone elses, but an expensive PITA to keep operating.
I have one in front of my rarely watched TV. Hipsters like walking desks but I have a walking TV at home. A replacement belt is $150. Something I find a little weird is I have to replace the belt every ten or dozen times I replace running shoes. I don't know why shoes cost $75 and you only get 500-1000 miles on a pair but a treadmill that you step on gets 10k miles and only costs twice as much. Carefully engineered obsolescence to maximize profit, I suppose. The idea of running shoes lasting 10K miles is interesting and the fact my treadmill (and car tires) last tens of thousands of miles seems to imply its possible but the marketplace won't permit it, which is interesting. Anyway, the best treadmill is one you don't own.
As the old saying goes, if it flies, floats, or ... is a treadmill, you're better off renting it.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday August 10 2017, @10:51AM (1 child)
I have a footpath, it's like a treadmill but the belt is 25,000 miles long
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 10 2017, @11:43AM
Hows the HVAC? Where I live the wx outdoors is really nice about 4 months per year. Not so good the rest of the year. I really enjoy hiking but its more of an "extra luxury" when ma nature cooperates, rather than something I do every day more or less before lunch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @09:47PM
I make the same assumption. However, some athletes are able [dailymail.co.uk] to run 2 miles in under 10 minutes. It would be fair to compare that with travel via stairs. A study [springer.com] of people "with an average age of 23.4 years" (supposedly representative of the general population in South Korea) found that
That's for 50 storeys of stairs; for the first 20 storeys, ascents were consistently faster by about 60%. Assuming 200 feet is about 20 storeys and is about 61 m, an average female college student could be expected to ascend the distance in 79 seconds: (160% / 100%) * (60.96 m) / (0.48 m/s). Ascents, surprisingly, could be slightly faster (I'm going by what the abstract says) at around 82 seconds: (60.96 m) / (0.74 m/s). Men are faster.
I don't suppose the poster runs to the gym, but instead takes a private car. The great-great-grandparent post [soylentnews.org] asserted that high-rises are "inefficient." The comparison of a private car to an elevator is a fair one, although an elevator is more like mass transit because it's shared. The use of people's time is certainly a form of efficiency. Other obvious forms are the use of money, energy, land, and materials. In the design of the building where elevator trips took more than 10 minutes, travel time was obviously not the priority. Where it is, multiple, fast elevators are used. That takes more money, energy, land, and materials, but I would hazard a guess that it's still more efficient in all of those than having private cars for everyone and the attendant roads, parking and maintenance for them. I pose it as an either-or proposition because when people live in tower blocks, amenities such as a gym are often in the same building; a group of tower blocks can house enough people to justify a bus or train stop and/or a taxi stand; hence private cars are not a necessity. An elevator is egalitarian: it can be readily used by people who use wheelchairs, are blind, are otherwise in ill health (e.g. needing oxygen, subject to seizures or narcolepsy) or are very young or very old. Such people have difficulty driving cars. Having a car is a considerable expense; for people who work for their money, that means that they spend time working for money to buy, fuel/charge and maintain the car and a place to park it (whether in a garage or on the street). Mass transit in a suburb--where it exists at all--can be frustrating in the distance walked to a bus stop and the amount of time spent waiting for a bus.