{"id":889,"date":"2008-10-09T23:02:23","date_gmt":"2008-10-10T03:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=889"},"modified":"2008-10-09T23:02:23","modified_gmt":"2008-10-10T03:02:23","slug":"daily-vibe-vactrains-universal-dictionaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2008\/10\/09\/daily-vibe-vactrains-universal-dictionaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily vibe : vactrains, universal dictionaries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Vactrain\">Vactrains<\/a> : Very High Speed Transportation, <em>Planetran<\/em>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Channel_Tunnel\">Channel Tunnel<\/a> engineers<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I stumbled upon a lovely article on various &#8220;vactrain&#8221; ideas : for a high-speed train running in low-pressure tubes with minimal air resistance, powered by superconducting magnetics and regenerating most of the energy from each trip.\u00a0 1-hr commutes between NY and LA or across an ocean.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Robert_F._Salter\">Robert Salter<\/a> was in the 1970s the first promoter of this idea after it had become physically feasible.\u00a0 While he was at RAND, he published <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rand.org\/pubs\/papers\/P4874\/\">detailed papers <\/a>on the subject and applied for related patents on behalf of the government.<\/li>\n<li>Frank Davidson and Yoshihiro Kyonati are recent enthusiasts for a version floated above the ocean floor, anchored by cables.<\/li>\n<li>For fun, see also <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bernhard_Kellermann\">Bernhard Kellermann<\/a>&#8216;s million-copy bestseller, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Der_Tunnel_(novel)\"><em>Der Tunnel<\/em><\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Universal dictionaries : <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wikipedia:OmegaWiki\">OmegaWiki<\/a>, XOXO<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Back in 1998 I drafted a design for a universal dictionary, with detailed usage, history, etymology, synonym and translation information &#8212; similar to the OED but covering the major human languages.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll post more about this in a bit (parts of that design are going into OLPC&#8217;s XO-2 laptop, to my delight), but in the meantime it&#8217;s worth noting how far we&#8217;ve come with other massively multilingual dictionary projects.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Philip_M._Parker\">Philip Parker<\/a>&#8216;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.websters-online-dictionary.org\/\">Rosetta Edition<\/a> of Merriam-Webster&#8217;s online dictionary<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ethnologue\">Ethnologue<\/a>&#8216;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&amp;location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FEthnologue-Languages-Raymond-G-Gordon%2Fdp%2F155671159X%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1223607501%26sr%3D8-6&amp;tag=httpblogsla01-20&amp;linkCode=ur2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325\">Languages of the World<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vactrains : Very High Speed Transportation, Planetran, and Channel Tunnel engineers I stumbled upon a lovely article on various &#8220;vactrain&#8221; ideas : for a high-speed train running in low-pressure tubes with minimal air resistance, powered by superconducting magnetics and regenerating most of the energy from each trip.\u00a0 1-hr commutes between NY and LA or across [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-el","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}