Read Online Hieroglyph by Ed Finn - Free Book Online

place. Not only that but it demands more steel below to support its weight. This feedback loop produced exponential jumps in the Steel Bill whenever anything got adjusted.
    It wasn’t long before someone pointed out that, from an aerodynamics standpoint, the tower was a horror show. Basically every strut and every cable was a cylinder—one of the draggiest shapes you can have. If we snapped an airfoil-shaped fairing around each of those cylinders, however, leaving it free to pivot into the wind, the drag went down by an order of magnitude and the Steel Bill dropped like—well, like a wrench dropped from the roof of a Top Click casino. And those fairings would have other benefits too; filled with lightweight insulation, they would reduce the thermal ups and downs caused by sunlight and direct exposure to space. The steel would live at a nice in-between temperature, not expanding and contracting so much, and brittleness would be less of a problem.
    Everyone was feeling pretty satisfied with that solution when Carl raised an idea that, I suspect, some of the engineers had been hiding in their subsconscious and been afraid to voice: Why not fly the tower? If we were going to all the trouble to airfoilize everything, why not use the kind of airfoil that not only minimizes drag, but also produces lift?
    Wings, in other words. The tower’s lateral braces—the horizontal struts that joined its verticals together at regular intervals—would be enclosed in burnished-aluminum wings, actuated by motors that could change their angle of attack, trimming the airfoils to generate greater or lesser amounts of lift. When the jet stream played on the tower’s upper reaches like a firehose slamming into a kid’s Tinkertoy contraption—when, in other words, the maximum possible crush was being imposed on the downwind legs—the wings on that side would be trimmed so as to lift the whole thing upward and relieve the strain. Performing a kind of aerodynamic jujitsu, redirecting the very energy that would destroy the tower to actively hold it up. The tower would become half building, half kite.
    Â© 2013, Haylee Bolinger / ASU
    People’s understandable skepticism about that scheme had accounted for the need to maintain a huge empty swath downwind of it. Many took a dim view of a building that wouldn’t stand up without continuous control system feedback.
    When we had boarded the helirail, I’d exchanged a bit of small talk with Joe, the engineer sitting across from me. Then he had unrolled a big display, apologizing for hogging so much table space, and spent most of the journey poring over a big three-dimensional technical drawing—the servomechanism he was going to take a look at. My eyes wandered to it, and I noticed he was studying me. When I caught him looking, he glanced away sheepishly. “Penny for your thoughts,” he mumbled.
    â€œOh, I spent years talking to concerned citizens in school gyms and senators in congressional hearings, selling them on this idea.”
    â€œWhich idea?”
    â€œExactly,” I said. “You’ve grown so used to it you don’t even see it. I’m talking about the idea of flying the tower.”
    He shrugged. “It was going to require active damping anyway, to control oscillations,” he said.
    â€œ ‘Otherwise, every slot machine on the Top Click will have to come equipped with a barf bag dispenser.’ Yeah, I used to make a living telling people that. ‘And from there it’s a small step to using the same capability to help support the tower on those rare occasions when the jet stream is hitting it.’ ”
    Joe was nodding. “There’s no going back,” he said. “It snuck up on us.”
    â€œWhat did?”
    He was stumped for an answer and smiled helplessly for a moment. Then threw up his hands. “All things cyber. Anything with code in it. Anything connected to the Internet. This