one pasadena photo posted every day from the beautiful crown city. join me on my journey!
Saturday, August 08, 2009
the caltech library
i've posted pictures of this building before, but i like this recent photo i took of the building on an angle, looking up into the beautiful pasadena sky.
You probably already know that the undergrads drop pumpkins and melons frozen in liquid-nitrogen from Milliken library (the other side from this shot) on Halloween night looking for triboluminescence, while other undergrads try to shoot them down with potato cannons armed with oranges.
What you may not know is that at the top of the library are counterweights - the type that large buildings use to counter-act wind resonances. They aren't used for this purpose... students in geology supposedly get to do a lab where they get those counterweights moving to set up a resonance in the building. This causes the building to sway a bit, then they can detect the motion with seismometers down near the Mexican border. Or, at least, that was the story I heard from the GPS folks when I was a grad student there...
2 comments:
You probably already know that the undergrads drop pumpkins and melons frozen in liquid-nitrogen from Milliken library (the other side from this shot) on Halloween night looking for triboluminescence, while other undergrads try to shoot them down with potato cannons armed with oranges.
What you may not know is that at the top of the library are counterweights - the type that large buildings use to counter-act wind resonances. They aren't used for this purpose... students in geology supposedly get to do a lab where they get those counterweights moving to set up a resonance in the building. This causes the building to sway a bit, then they can detect the motion with seismometers down near the Mexican border. Or, at least, that was the story I heard from the GPS folks when I was a grad student there...
woah, thanks for the insight newtomato!
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