Where the Real Skyscrapers Are (Hint: North Dakota) | Hacker News Reader

Where the Real Skyscrapers Are (Hint: North Dakota)

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Here's a video of a tower worker climbing a 1700' tower that really gives me sweaty palms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDYK0zaQuZs

I've also been impressed with the amount of high quality content on Medium over the last several months. It seemed like a glorified blogging platform at first, but there have been a number of really interesting stories like this one and the one about the inventor of the Aeropress.

https://medium.com/backchannel/first-alan-adler-invented-the...

At first I thought, "oh, i'm sure there's a line you can attach to your harness to keep you from falling..." but then he gets outside the tower, free-climbs 140 feet, finally positioning himself on the very top of a 1,700 foot tower, with zero support and a tiny piece of foothold, all the while carrying 30lbs dead weight [to say nothing of wind], whereupon he finally clips in his harness.

Jesus fucking christ.

Yeah, i was kind of gripping the table almost unable to contain shouts of "attach yourself already" :/ The worst is the final 20 seconds when he dawdles and fumbles the clip with two hands, simply standing at the top looking down :/ But i guess from his point of view that's easiest, he's not climbing any more...

I've heard those videos caused a lot of flack for the workers, due to the lack of safety equipment use.

there was another series done where a tower climber showed the proper way to climb a tower https://youtu.be/9b9LahaBJIk

It gives me sweaty palms too. I wonder why that particular physical reaction happens, surely sweaty palms is the opposite of what you want?

Probably a byproduct of generalized "increase sweat output b/c you might have to run / fight in the near future" response.

If I recall fun trivia from my childhood correctly, slightly damp skin has better grip. Obviously drippy hands won't work, but it makes some sense in the context of cartoons showing the character spittin on their hands before putting their back into something (like an axe whose head inevitably flys off the handle (which was expected to have better grip now)).

I doubt this. Rock climbers carry powdered chalk to constantly dry their hands. It's my own experience that dry hands grip better, as well.

Note, we like other apes evolved to climb trees not rock walls.

I will note also that compared to climbing rocks, climbing trees with slightly sweaty hands is MUCH easier than with dry or chalked hands. I think its due to bark being the grip target versus rocks.

Nothing more than my experience but sending a cliff is nothing like climbing trees.

Eh, if you can wrap your fingers around something like a branch, then it probably doesn't matter. I find that for that first ten feet of bare trunk, however, dry hands are better.

Just noting climbing a tree is infinitely different than sending a 5.10b route.

The strategy involved in the two is night and day. One focuses on fingertips not slipping and the other involves not losing grip.

Actually there's a moisture level that is ideal for climbing on rock. Chalk just helps climbers stay near that ideal level.

In fact there's a high level climber who's sweat glands do not work and to compensate he has to bring a water mister around with him so that he can climb.

For some more sweaty palm fun, check out professional climber Alex Honnold "free soloing" various rock walls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR1jwwagtaQ

The whole video is worth watching, but the meat and potatoes starts at about 11:30

Another heartstopper is this POV video of two Ukrainians illegally scaling the 650-meter Shanghai Tower while it was still under construction, which gets really nuts when they start climbing the construction crane at the very top:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLDYtH1RH-U&t=120

These top-level guys try to climb when it's really cold and at night to prevent sweaty fingers.

Kevin Jorgeson climbing the Dawn Wall in Yosemite this winter for example:

http://www.climb.pl/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/pitch15_crux....

omg, my fear of heights is much better now than it used to be, but I felt physically ill watching that movie.

"After a tower project gets FCC approval, it takes about a year to complete. While the KVLY tower cost $50,000 to build in 1963, a typical 2,000-foot tower today costs about $3 million."

I'd love to see the full breakdown as to why exactly. That seems grossly unnecessary.

Wolfram says $50,000 in 1963 dollars is $393,000 in 2015 dollars. So there's an almost 10x increase on top of inflation. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2450000+in+1963+dollar...

Might be due to improvements in architecture, engineering, materials science, and so on. Modern skyscrapers are a lot more sophisticated (not to mention durable) than their 1960s counterparts.

The article mentioned a couple of towers falling down. it might no longer be acceptable - either to investor or regulators - and so the extra money on materials and design would explain it.

The price of technological goods such as TVs and computers have been going down constantly, and this means inflation of non-technological goods will be higher than the official inflation rate.

The price of gold is around $1150 in 2015, and $35 in 1960, a 32 times increase.

The price of a KVLY tower increased 60 fold from $50,000 to $3m.

Compared this way, 60x vs 32x is much less extreme.

I like your line of thinking, but gold seems like a really poor point of comparison. I tried to find inflation adjusted prices over time for things such as energy and steel and had difficulty. There's lots of easy data on oil but anything else is tricky. Hrm..

You can compare other goods like college education, property, medical care besides precious metals. Things that take a lot of skill and labor, and where technology have little to no downwards pressure on the price.

I use this site: http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/ when trying to calculate inflation adjusted prices, as it gives results using different methods.

So, this page gives the adjusted price between $300,000 and $1.5 million.

North Dakotan checking in. I've seen this tower many times, from the road and up close, it's pretty uninspiring. Hard to get a sense of scale when it's so thin and transparent. Also, you can't see the view from the top (legally). What fun would the Space Needle, Empire State or Burj Khalifa be if you couldn't see what the view is like from the top?

Empire State Building. Empire State is New York State.

I think from the context it's fairly obvious what he's referring to.

The tower in Dallas, NC (on the map) is less than a mile from my childhood home. It sits in the middle of a cow pasture -- I grew up catching bluegill and catfish in a cow pond a few hundred yards from the tower. Never realized that it would be the 4th tallest building in the world if it were a skyscraper. Thanks for sharing.

One thing the OP missed is the fact that Tokyo Skytree is also a broadcast tower. Just a bit better on the aesthetics than the American ones.

Here's the tallest structures in the USA of which many are towers:

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

Interesting, especially since the replacement for the WTC claims its height using a similar structure mounted on top.

The experts decided its the tallest building in the US based on that non-building "architectural element", which could later be extended to re-capture the "title", for whatever that's worth.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/12/world-t...

Can you imagine witnessing one of those towers when they fell down?

Or climbing that ladder all the way to the top?

You can simulate this in Battlefield 3 :D

What's the limit on structures of this type? It seems unlikely that the radio towers we have now are the best we can do; it sounds like they just stopped making them bigger because there wasn't anyone that wanted a bigger one badly enough to justify the cost.

Legally (in the U.S.), the FAA restricts the height of towers to about 2000', with rare variances granted.

Technically, we don't need supergiant towers, now even less than ever before. High frequency broadcasters (TV) need line of sight to their customers, but -- economically -- TV transmission also has huge energy costs (wide bandwidth), and you're fighting the inverse square law the whole time. So in the low-populated areas where you might reach more people at the margins, it just doesn't make economic sense. In denser markets, the next city will be better served by a local station.

Also economically, the general rule of thumb is that the cost of a tower increases as the square of its height.

But I think you were asking about the physical limit. These masts are typically made of galvanized steel tubes. Pipe OD size and wall thickness (and therefore compressive strength) will vary, but that is the ultimate limiting parameter.

The galvanized steel guy lines are in tension, but it's easy to add more of these as height and footprint increase.

Just the first part is key. The FAA won't let you. The article mentions that there are many towers close to the 2000 limit placed by the FAA.

Other countries besides the US could build one, if they had a compelling use case. I was mostly just wondering what the physical limits are on this kind of thing.

Calling what happened in 1997 "a freak ice storm" is a bit of an understatement. Most of a state without power and only one of these amazing towers still transmitting. I do wonder if there is video of the aftermath of the fall.

On December 10, 1989, two of these 2,000 towers collapsed near Raleigh, NC. It was as the ice was melting after a really bad ice storm.

Pictures of the aftermath: http://www.oldradio.com/archives/warstories/WRAL.htm

These towers are usually "disqualified" from height records by using the weasel words "free-standing structure" or "self-supporting" or similar.

In the photo, you can clearly see the numerous guy wires holding it up.

I may be old school, but a 3MB (mostly images) web page seems a bit over the top.

For a large display (iMac), it's glorious, but agreed, on a MacBook Air (let alone an iPhone), it's overkill.

There should be a way to determine the resolution of a target device, and just send the appropriately sized images.

What you're thinking of is probably similar to foundation's interchange http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/components/interchange.html

The images could've been compressed a bit with a tool like https://imageoptim.com/ I'm seeing a little 20% (half a mb) could've been shaved off, but the bigger issue is the 1.7mb medium bundle js file. Not sure what that is, but it isn't minified all the way.

It's coming: http://caniuse.com/#feat=srcset

I think that people are starting to realize that a one-size-fits-all approach to images isn't really feasible anymore. If you serve gigantor images that look good on retina or 4K screens to low res devices, you just wasted a lot of bandwidth and tanked your page load time for no reason. The opposite is also true: 640x480 images don't look super great on 4K screens.

You can resize your images to a few key sizes, but it can quickly get out of hand to support all the various permutations of size and format for every potential user (and who knows if most of these objects will ever even be served).

There are some solutions to the problem out there, such as the one from my employer: http://www.imgix.com/imgix-js

Basically though, to do responsive design with image heavy content, you need to make the images responsive as well.

"You can resize your images to a few key sizes, but it can quickly get out of hand " - This shouldn't be a problem. Just resize dynamically as needed and cache. Resizing on the server is a pretty fast operation, and you only need to do it once for any given form factor.

Is there a resource somewhere to see how do they build a tower so tall?

I was wondering the same thing... If you've ever seen a construction crane go up, it's the same process apparently. Check out this older video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KvjwdXA89w

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