[Mika]

Referring to the Winter Storm threads, there was a picture of a curiosly shaped skyscraper, whose information I tried to look in the internet. I eventually found it, but also did a major surfing trip as a side effect. The train of thought went somehow like: skyscrapers -> tallest constructions by made by man -> oil rigs -> Bermuda triangle and other related areas -> freak waves. Most of them I found to be of interest. I also found out the home page of a Spiderman guy, who climbs up skyscrapers without any additional safety gear. I'll put some links here, if you have something of similar lines to share, I would be interested to read them.

It seems Arabs have gone crazy tall towers, reminds me of ancient Babylon!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Dubai (800 meter skyscraper with 600 m already completed!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madinat_al-Hareer#Construction_of_Mubarak_al-Kabir_Tower
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Burj
Note that the last two will be over 1000 m high if completed!

Some other remarkable work of engineering:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipei_101 (Some interesting architecture here!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petronas_Twin_Towers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_St_Mary_Axe (Constructed by Swedes??!!! I'm sure Londoners have several funny names for this thing.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_World_Financial_Center (look at the construction pictures!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jin_Mao_Tower (Colossal lobby in the hotel part of a skyscraper, take a look at the photos!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Spire (giant drill shaped skyscraper, foundations laid)

Here is the homepage of the guy who climbs skyscrapers without safety gear.
http://www.alainrobert.com/en/index.htm
Take a look at the gallery!

Oilrigs and related problems. Good to know for anyone who studies to become a mechanical engineer.
http://www.oilrigdisasters.co.uk/

Freak waves.
It turned out they existed, as sailors have told for hundreds of years. Only now scientific community starts to believe what sailors have said about the ocean and the behavior of the sea. Also, this is a pretty interesting phenomenom from the Physics point of view, it seems something of the Schrödinger stuff can be applied to real life situation. But I think we physicists owe an apology to all sailors who we have pretty much silenced for hundreds of years! "No they don't exist as the mean amplitude of the waves is 5-10 meters and are not predicted by the linear model" - "I know what I saw!"
Nowadays Physics needs more stuff like this to happen.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3917539.stm
http://www.math.uio.no/~karstent/waves/index_en.html
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMOKQL26WD_index_0.html

Some of the pictures there are downright amazing! Huge wall of water incoming! Note that this is not at all the same thing as Tsunami!

So, anyone having interesting stuff up in the attics?

Mika

[haloboy100]

thats pretty interesting Mika, congrats.

[CP5670]

I've heard about those waves too. It's related to the fact that the nonlinear PDEs describing this stuff give rise to soliton solutions, in just a classical mechanics framework. Some of those equations are still not well understood at all.

[Mika]

It would be interesting to know the prequisites of the freak wave phenomenom, and could it happen in air. Note that the phenomenom was confirmed only in 1995! I'm betting sailors have told about it for hundreds, if not thousands of years!

The thing about these waves is that most of the ships (with the exception of military) were never designed to withstand such energy levels. What will be the future course of the ship construction, will the commercial ships be reinforced or will the phenomenom be neglected by the industry, as it is supposedly relatively rare?

Mika