08 February 2012

An amazing road


The cars and trucks drive along this road, then they have to go up this really steep hill to get to the tollbooths, then they drive back down the hill to where the road flattens out again.

Found at 22 Words.

15 comments:

  1. This hurts my mind :( Anyone know where it is on google maps.

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  2. Tongue firmly in cheek, no doubt...

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    1. Totally. Notice the category label for the post.

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  3. I think I've seen an artist doing this, manipulating images from google earth in this way. I don't know if zogotunga made it or they just didn't source the image. Cant think of the artist's name.

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  4. Found this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcwRJNYZWrA) further down the comments on 22Words. I guess there's not actually a hill. I don't mean to and apologize if I come off as brash, but through the time I've spent reading tywkiwdbi it seems like you won't take it as such.

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    1. Agreed, it seems to be an optical illusion created by actual widening of the road rather than a hill.

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  5. Though it makes perfect sense - saves brakes on the way up and recovers the potential energy on the way back down again.
    Quite a few London underground stations (and quite possibly other networks as well) do this - improves safety and energy efficiency.

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    1. If natural topography lent itself to this, it would be perfect. It's a great energy store as long as you make it up the hill to a flat spot before having to stop and idle...

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  6. Oh, for goodness sake. This is not a "manipulated" image or 'shopped in any way. James is right. It's just an aerial view of a set of tollbooths in a widened section of the highway. The appearance of an elevation change is an optical illusion.

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  7. Looks like it's somewhere in (South) Korea. On the top center of the marquis, I can make out what seems like "Seoul," both in English and in Korean.
    --Sam.

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  8. More info: Bdga says: January 31, 2012 at 1:28 am
    I lived in Seoul and have driven through this toll booth many times. It’s just the widening of the lanes and toll booths that make it appear this way. When driving through this area, it turns into a free or all with everyone crossing numerous lanes to get to the shortest line.

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  9. McGurk Effect: The McGurk effect is a perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. The illusion occurs when the auditory component of one sound is paired with the visual component of another sound, leading to the perception of a third sound.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0&feature=player_embedded

    I'm just curious as to whether you really do never post suggested topics because this is really cool

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    1. Bub, it's not the case that I NEVER post suggested topics. The problem is the abundance of material to choose from. In my bookmark folders of 'things to blog' I had 1461 bookmarks, which I recently thinned down to 1027 because so many of them were too old and had undergone linkrot.

      Of things sent to me, the next two I hope to blog were sent to me in Sept and March of 2011.

      Re the example you suggested - it's interesting enough, but the video (like so many television programs) spends over 3 minutes illustrating an effect that could have been done in 1 minute, and unfortunately there's no TL;DR shortcut for videos. So I'll give it a pass. But thanks for thinking of me.

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