A man in Russia has done something that would not be possible in America: He built his own private subway system, entirely on his own Soviet-era pension money. Not only that, but he also got all the correct permits and so on, and is legally backed by the Russian government.
Mr. Murlyanchik, the subway builder, has been at this since his retirement in 1984, and has been extending 1 meter per day since then. He has built it so that his neighbors can have stations if they request them, and plans to soon have automated cars capable of carrying 3-4 people patrol the rails that he is now placing in his elaborate network of tunnels. (His tunnels are narrower than commercial subway lines, and therefore of slightly lower utility.)
Also impressively, he has dug under a number of roads that have 60-ton trucks running across them, and his tunnels support that weight easily. This is a man with deep understanding of earth-engineering.
I say that this is not possible in America because here property rights extend from the surface to the center of the earth, and to dig under any other person's plot of land would require their explicit permission. So the subway would have to follow only public roads and lands, and even that would require explicit government permission, of which they are not likely to grant. Also, goods in America are expensive, and the average retiree likely could not afford the thousands of tons of cement that this would require.
I begin to wonder if Mr. Murlyanchik had additional sources of funding, could he reach all the way to Moscow?
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Friday, June 4, 2010
Saturday, February 21, 2009
The Soviet Archive
If you want outright crazy engineering, there's no better place to look than the early Soviet period of Russia. Cut off from the world in not only trade and communication, but also surrounded by hostile powers, the Soviet authorities backed all kinds of whack-jobs to try and get an elusive leg-up over the capitalist world. Worse for them, the Russia they had just conquered was a comedicly backward backwater and riddled with poverty, ignorance, shoddy infrastructure and nasty polar weather. Did I mention alcoholism?
So they funded quite a few whackjob "scientists" such as Dr. Ivanov's genetically ignorant attempts at created humanzees, or Dr. Bryukhonenko,and his attempt to revive the heads of decapitated dogs. Dr. Bryukhonenko did record a video of his project, made somewhat more dubious by the fact that he used photographic tricks to record that video and exaggerated the lifespan of his decapitated canines. Wikipedia's research claimed that decapitated dogs lived for only a few minutes, and the "Killed and revived" dogs lasted a few days. The mad doctor claimed that his decapitated dogs lasted for "days," and the killed and revived dogs lasted for "years."
If Dr. Byukhonenko's work had any use whatsoever, it would be that his "Autojektor" machine inspired later cardiopulmonary bypass machines, useful for open-heart surgery. As for Dr. Ivanov, his researched produced... um... well, nothing whatsoever.
As one last warning to history's parallels, which we must learn from or suffer their repetition, I'd like to bring up the case of Trofim Lysenko, a man with a kooky theory that plants were influenced by their surroundings and that genes weren't real. His "proof" for this theory was to plant a field of wheat and note that some rye plants grew as well. According to his theory, the high concentration of wheat made some of the wheat turn into rye. When people pointed out that he hadn't actually checked to make sure his wheat seeds were actually wheat seeds, and that he hadn't accidentally grabbed a few rye seeds in the process, he promptly used his connections to the communist party to have them arrested.
See, the communist party liked the part of his theory that proclaimed that any plant could be turned into any other plant just by changing the growing conditions. They also liked his theory that plants could be grown just as well without fertilizer somehow. Lastly, they liked the way that he was an uneducated peasant, thus "proving" the superiority of the working class.
So because Lysenko's theory fit communist orthodoxy, the competing theory, genetics, was suppressed in the Soviet Union. Which led directly to a number of crop failures as Soviet agriculture attempted to grow plants in places that couldn't possibly support them, like wheat in the polar regions during the winter.
I see direct parallels between Lysenkoism and the current pseudoscience fad gripping my own nation, Creationism. Creationism teaches that Christian claims of the world's origins, as described in the book of Genesis, are literally true, down to the word, and that evolution is fundamentally impossible. If it catches on, American biology, geology, and medicine will be terminally crippled, just as Lysenkoism crippled Soviet biology and agriculture.
So they funded quite a few whackjob "scientists" such as Dr. Ivanov's genetically ignorant attempts at created humanzees, or Dr. Bryukhonenko,and his attempt to revive the heads of decapitated dogs. Dr. Bryukhonenko did record a video of his project, made somewhat more dubious by the fact that he used photographic tricks to record that video and exaggerated the lifespan of his decapitated canines. Wikipedia's research claimed that decapitated dogs lived for only a few minutes, and the "Killed and revived" dogs lasted a few days. The mad doctor claimed that his decapitated dogs lasted for "days," and the killed and revived dogs lasted for "years."
If Dr. Byukhonenko's work had any use whatsoever, it would be that his "Autojektor" machine inspired later cardiopulmonary bypass machines, useful for open-heart surgery. As for Dr. Ivanov, his researched produced... um... well, nothing whatsoever.
As one last warning to history's parallels, which we must learn from or suffer their repetition, I'd like to bring up the case of Trofim Lysenko, a man with a kooky theory that plants were influenced by their surroundings and that genes weren't real. His "proof" for this theory was to plant a field of wheat and note that some rye plants grew as well. According to his theory, the high concentration of wheat made some of the wheat turn into rye. When people pointed out that he hadn't actually checked to make sure his wheat seeds were actually wheat seeds, and that he hadn't accidentally grabbed a few rye seeds in the process, he promptly used his connections to the communist party to have them arrested.
See, the communist party liked the part of his theory that proclaimed that any plant could be turned into any other plant just by changing the growing conditions. They also liked his theory that plants could be grown just as well without fertilizer somehow. Lastly, they liked the way that he was an uneducated peasant, thus "proving" the superiority of the working class.
So because Lysenko's theory fit communist orthodoxy, the competing theory, genetics, was suppressed in the Soviet Union. Which led directly to a number of crop failures as Soviet agriculture attempted to grow plants in places that couldn't possibly support them, like wheat in the polar regions during the winter.
I see direct parallels between Lysenkoism and the current pseudoscience fad gripping my own nation, Creationism. Creationism teaches that Christian claims of the world's origins, as described in the book of Genesis, are literally true, down to the word, and that evolution is fundamentally impossible. If it catches on, American biology, geology, and medicine will be terminally crippled, just as Lysenkoism crippled Soviet biology and agriculture.
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