Manmade

Posted on May 18, 2009 by sheila

… yet it looks almost prehistoric and organic. Like the Giants Causeway in Ireland.


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Giants Causeway:

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5 Responses to Manmade

  1. Michael Thomas says:
    May 18, 2009 at 12:03 pm

    Fabulous photos. Almost make me want to go to the West Side, but I haven’t gotten my shots updated!

  2. red says:
    May 18, 2009 at 4:42 pm

    So cool, right? I took about 20 more and there are some angles where it looks like they go all the way to Jersey and you could just leap across.

  3. mutecypher says:
    May 18, 2009 at 5:41 pm

    Strange and beautiful.

    From an engineer’s viewpoint, I wonder what required so many posts. I suspect that the mud was very soft. I have been thinking about over-engineered items after reading that one of the covers that the astronauts just finished replacing on the Hubble had 111 screws in it. And they replaced it with a cover that had just two bolts and two locking pins.

    The folks who designed the new cover were probably not appreciably cleverer than the guys who did the cover with 111 screws.

    And they folks who put so many posts into the river were probably about as clever as the folks who build wharfs and piers today.

    Incidental, incremental changes that result in accidental beauty.

    I wonder what the cover with 111 screws looks like.

  4. red says:
    May 18, 2009 at 7:20 pm

    Mutecypher – fascinating – I love the bit about the 111 screws!

    I was curious too about why they needed so many posts. It looks so crazy!

  5. mutecypher says:
    May 18, 2009 at 11:22 pm

    And what happened to whatever all those posts were holding up? It appears that they are all cut at about the same height – so someone chose to actively remove the structure above instead of letting it just collapse. Was something toxic stored there that shouldn’t get into the water? Was it valuable and re-usable?

    We’re looking at a man made structure that reminds us of a natural structure – that itself appears too regular to be natural or unintentional. How recursive!

    If you want to see the 111 screw cover (and the cool panel that NASA designed to keep the screws from floating off) you can go to this url and scroll down. It’s the 12th image.

    http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/09/preparing_to_rescue_hubble.html

    It’s more science-projecty cool than beautiful. But some of the other images are wonderful.

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