Home → Archives → by month → January 2005
Endangered Machinery: Condensers
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Inside the exhauster building, Kaiserstuhl III coke plant, Dortmund, Germany. Most likely, the machinery shown here are condensers, but I am not sure. Exhausters or Gassauger are fans producing a mechanical draught in the Gasvorlage, tubes collecting the coke gas rising from the ovens, making it available for further processing.
This equipment does not only look brand-spanking-new, it also is brand-spanking-new. Its sale to China has been a then much hailed decision to finally get rid of this kind of industry in our region. Currently, the responsibles are having daily meetings in which they whip each other for their indescribable stupidity. Then, they creep back into their offices where they watch the coke price jump from one all-time-high to the next.
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Endangered Machinery: Slide Valve
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Sliding valve of a hot-blast stove (Cowper). In the flowery language of the steel worker, this is a Cowperkuh or Cowper Cow. Ruhrstahl Henrichshütte, Hattingen, Germany, mid-1990ies.
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Sprengtourismus
Da ich immer mal wieder danach gefragt werde, wie man am Besten Sprengungen fotografiert, weiter im A bis Z der Photograhie: S wie Sprengtourismus.
- Früh da sein - Je eher man vor Ort ist, desto mehr Zeit hat man, einen geeigneten Standort zu finden und desto weniger stören aufmerksame Hilfskräfte. Vorherige Erkundung auch von Ausweichpunkten ist sehr hilfreich, um je nach Lage am Sprengtag schnell umdisponieren zu können.
- Früh aufgebaut haben um bei etwaigen Vorverlegungen des Sprengzeitpunkts gewappnet zu sein. Eine Stunde vor dem offiziellen Termin bereit zu sein ist kein Fehler. Ist man beim ersten Signal (ein langer Ton, "Deckung") nicht fertig, wird es knapp.
- Früh auslösen - Spätestens mit dem zweiten Ton des zweiten Signals (zwei kurze Töne, "Zündung") auslösen - wartet man auf den Knall, ist alles schon vorbei: Gebäude üblicher Größe sind meist nach zwei bis vier Sekunden unten. Oft reicht der Abstand zum Objekt dank der geringen Schallgeschwindigkeit aus, um einen Zündung und die ersten Winkelgrade des Falls in Stille erleben zu lassen.
- Autofokus aus damit die Kamera nicht auf etwas fokussieren will, das plötzlich nicht mehr da ist und unnötig Zeit zwischen den Serienauslösungen verschwendet.
- Serienbildauslösung auf schnellste Stufe schalten und die Belichtungszeit kurz halten. Fotografiert man mit einer analogen Spiegelreflexkamera mit Motor, ist man auf der sicheren Seite: übliche Kameras können zwischen ca. 2 und 5 Bilder pro Sekunde transportieren, schickt man einen 36er-Film hindurch, hat man den gesamten Bewegungsablauf in der Tasche. Bei Digitalkameras setzt der Zwischenspeicher oft Grenzen: bei vielen Modellen ist nach 8 Bildern in voller Auflösung erstmal Schluss - das Herabsetzen der Auflösung hilft oft entscheidend weiter. Daran denken, daß Interessantes oft erst passiert, wenn der Fall fast schon abgeschlossen ist: Stahlbetonkamine und -gebäude z.B. fallen strukturell unbeschädigt und zerbersten erst beim Aufprall, so daß eine Bildserie hier länger dauert, möchte man die Staubwolke auch mitnehmen. Gemauerte Kamine zerlegen sich oft schon während des Falls, so daß man mit knapper bemessenen Serienbildfunktionen klarkommen könnte. Vor Beginn der Sprengung ruhig ein letztes Vergleichsfoto schießen.
- Der Bildausschnitt ist weitgehend Geschmackssache. Ein Objekt kippt, wenn es denn kippt, so gut wie immer in die vorgesehene Richtung. Etwas Luft zu lassen ist dennoch kein Fehler - Ausschnitte kann man später noch ziehen. Fehlgeschlagene Sprengversuche sind insbesondere bei sehr wuchtigen Bergbau-Tagesanlagen und Stahlkonstruktionen wie z.B. Fördergerüsten, zu denen sich keine oder nur unvollständige Zeichnungen auffinden lassen, keine Seltenheit - ganz zur Unbill des Sprengmeisters, der es dann meist plötzlich mit einem statisch unbestimmten Gebilde zu tun hat.
- Termine herauszufinden ist oft Glückssache und eine Frage der Mundpropaganda, sieht man von Sprengungen von Landmarken mit den dann einhergehenden Menschenaufläufen ab.
IN DIESEM BLOG
Das A bis Z der Photographie: S wie Sprengwut
Das A bis Z der Photographie: Index
IM INTERNET
Unfallverhütungsvorschrift BGV C 24: Sprengarbeiten
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:: in category Das A bis Z der Photographie
Website des Tages
Eine Adresse, bei der Postleitzahl und Ort vergessen wurden - beim Verlag Stahleisen hat es seit vier Jahren wohl noch niemand gesehen.
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Moving
I am moving this blog to a fresh installation of MT. If things should look a bit weird during the next short while, I am on the right way ;-) Fixed. Everything should look the same like it did before, except that I can use MT again. Single change at this point: to speeden up the posting process, I now only ping http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ instead of pinging all the different services individually like I did before.
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Allright, Allright
This is so old school that it's fun again. Best enjoyed on car stereo: Allright, Allright by Norge's The Carburetors.
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Error 500 again
Out of the blue, I cannot post entries longer than this without having a 500 error. Hang on as broadcasts will continue.
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Endangered Machinery: Action, Baby
FACILITY: Saarstahl AG - LD Steel Mill
Location: Völklingen, Saarland, Germany
Photo taken: January 2005
LD Torch: Any decent LD steel mill has a torch to burn excess gas from the blowing process that has too low a caloric value for further use. While there has been just one real torch, the Hoesch Phoenix torch, this one features the major advantage of still being alive. The flame shown here has an estimated height of 25 meters.
No enlargement: For now, there is no larger view available as it does not have the quality you are used to. Cranked up the ISO number way too much and have to familiarize myself with editing shots of this kind first. Stay tuned for results.
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More rel="nofollow"
A quick follow-up to yesterday's story. The number of writers not buying the "a simple tag will stop spam"-story is growing. Let's sum it up:
- It will not stop spam, as the cost to send out spam remains zero. This has nothing to do with spam. Zero.
- Applied universally, it would finally allow search engines to tell a website from a blog, as Dirk Olbertz points out. That's the whole point of it.
- Applied universally, it would severely reduce the power of links. Think Kryptonite or, in Germany, Jamba and Planetopia. Think implicit metadata. Think distributed discussion. Think smart conversation. Why the heck should we mess with a most important part of blogosphere without thinking about the implications first? John Battelle sums it up best so far.
Put simply, do not use it.
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rel="nofollow" a good idea?
In an attempt to battle blog and wiki spam, Google has introduced a rel="nofollow" tag for hyperlinks:
"From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results [...] to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists."
It might also solve the nasty problem of weblogs ranking very high in search results, beating or sitting right next to BigCo sites. Think about it. Blogging or distributed conversation is about linking. If we unselectively apply the tag to links to sites of comment and trackback authors as proposed, Google and other key search engines will see the blogosphere as much less connected and rank it considerably lower. Six Apart is proud to announce having done just that: all visitor-submitted content on TypePad sites gets tagged automatically, read: gets considered potential spam. If someone posts a comment on my blog, giving him Google credits is what I actually want. Just as I did with TypeKey, I sometimes begin to wonder what's really on a company's agenda.
Applied selectively, the tag could be interesting. It is good to finally have something to tell search engines to ignore certain links. Public lists of Technorati inbound links on blog homepages or other lists that do not add to a discussion might be good examples.
Other thoughts:
- MSN Search and Yahoo Search will parse the nofollow-tag, too, and MSN Spaces, Six Apart, Blogger, Flickr, Wordpress instantly all agreed to make use of it. Keyword 1: Google's power within the industry. Keyword 2: Quick cooperation among vendors is possible. Keyword 3: People shouting "web standards" don't seem to necessarily have a problem with shouting "propietary extensions", too.
- If some companies introduce something new, considerable parts of the blogosphere say hooray no matter what it is.
- Obviously and unsurprisingly, TypeKey failed. It is a long way from claiming to have the cure for spam to automatically tagging all visitor-submitted content as potential spam.
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Veranstaltungshinweis: 7. Dortmunder Architekturtage
Morgen finden nach langjähriger Pause wieder die Dortmunder Architekturtage statt. Es reden Architekten, ein Musiker und Koch zum Thema Stadtbaukunst: Das Ensemble - homogene Stadträume statt nur das selbstgefällige Nebeneinandersetzen von Architekturunikaten. Auf die Beiträge der beiden "Fachfremden" bin ich gespannt, sind aktuelle lokale Errungenschaften der Branche wie der U-Neubau doch eher Beispiele dafür, wie es gerade eben nicht geht. 11 Uhr im Museum am Ostwall.
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This is the last hurrah
"'This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,' the former high-level intelligence official told me. 'Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah - we've got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.'" - Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker on The Coming Wars.
And you thought the "Perpetual" in "Perpetual War on Terrorism" had been overheated 9/11 rhetorics just because the very concept of perpetual war was dismissed decades ago in some parts of the world.
In unrelated news stories
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Endangered Machinery: A look back
While my current enthusiams for industrial photography is no older than some two years, there has been a short "first wave" in the early and mid 1990ies. Here, some photos from that time, taken on Ilford bw- and various color films with a Nikon and a Mamiya MX-1000 SLR. Note that the scans are several years old and that the digital processing isn't exactly fresh either, so re-scanning might considerably increase the quality of some results, but it's a look back, so let's keep them in their original digital version.
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EXHIBIT I: Forge, Hoesch Nahmertal, Hagen-Hohenlimburg, Germany, ca. 1992
One of my very first industrial shots and the first one I liked. Site last checked last summer: minus the debris, nothing seemed to have been touched throughout all the time.
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EXHIBIT II: Thomas steel mill, Hoesch integrated steel mill UNION, Dortmund, Germany, ca. 1995
The only steel mill of this particular kind in my collection. Torn down. The once full grown UNION works are almost forgotten and information on the interweb and in books are scarce. Today, this site holds a ThyssenKrupp Schulte Stahlhandel installation.
Click to enlarge
EXHIBIT III: Heat exchanger, power plant, Hoesch integrated steel mill UNION, Dortmund, Germany, ca. 1995
Simple, but effective. One of my all time favorites. The foundations of the power plants have never been removed as the plant's site might remain unused for an indefinite space of time.
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Semantic tagging
Fist, the examples:
So what's this?
This is about applying the idea of faceted navigation to tagging. If you have a look at my del.icio.us links, you will find tags consisting of a prefix, a colon and a suffix like is:quicklink, project:ilm or via:papascott. Buzzword: structured tagging. Rainer Wasserfuhr is playing with similar things. Now let's build facet:topic-style tags: a facet is a perspective from which to look at a data pool or a characteristic of an item, e.g. company, kind of industry, location or site name, a topic a facet's value like Berlin, Hamburg or Munich (location-facet). Now let's query for intersections of tags describing different facets, and voila: the power of faceted navigation combined with the freedom of a tagging. Buzzword: semantic tagging. Above is a simple proof of concept in del.icio.us. I will use this kind of faceted navigation in my photobase. In a later posting: tool requirements and vocabulary issues.
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Endangered Machinery: Preview 1
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Industrial Night and Magic, my photo site, is in need of a major overhaul. It will go hand in hand with a renaming. The old name doesn't say too well what it should say, so Endangered Machinery is the new working title. Step 1: Draw my photos from the various places I have published them into a single spot. Have it work and feel nice, but no additional magic. Step 2: Bring in the semantic stuff. Step 3: See what "loosely coupled" tools can be derived from step 2. For now, a first preview of how the category archives of the Step-1-version might look like. It is a sketch that still lacks the elegance and white space equilibrium the current photo site has. Let me know what you think via IM or email.
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Erbärmlich
Dirk van Klev, Lehrer der Klasse 7.5 der Dortmunder Gesamtschule Gartenstadt, bastelt mit seinen Schülern Modelle des künftigen Phoenix-Sees und freut sich, daß auf Luftaufnahmen des Geländes, "die die Stadtteilzeitung der Schule zur Verfügung gestellt hatte" "noch die Zeche zu sehen" sei. Die Zeche. Van Klev meint die 1839 von Hermann Dietrich Piepenstock gegründete Hermannshütte, einer der Haupt-Stahlstandorte Europas in den folgenden 160 Jahren. Vermutlich möchte er seine Schüler gar nicht absichtlich in die Irre führen. Vermutlich ist es einfach nur Unwissenheit und Ignoranz - und damit symptomatisch:
Lehrer, die ihren Schülern nichtmals Geschichte und Bedeutung des engsten Umfeldes nahebringen können. Hat hier jemand Gesamtschule gesagt? PISA?
Die sich immer wieder durch völlige Ahnungslosigkeit und fehlendes Lektorat auszeichnende Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, deren Lokalreporter auch nach jahrelanger Berichterstattung über das Ende der Dortmunder Hüttenindustrie und die Folgenutzung der größten Industriebrachen Europas nach wie vor keinen Hochofen von einem Stahlwerk unterscheiden können, Jahreszahlen bunt durcheinanderwerfen und jüngst erst noch davon ausgingen, daß ein komplettes Stahlwerk höchstens irgendwas "zwischen fünfeinhalb und sieben Tonnen" wiegen könne.
Die Phoenix-See-Gesellschaft, die einmal vorhatte, das Areal des Stahlwerk Phoenix in einen See größer als die Hamburger Binnenalster zu verwandeln, hübsch angereichert mit einigen tausend Wohnungen. Still und heimlich wurden die Planzahlen dann leicht verändert, halb so viel See, doppelt so viele Wohnungen, und heute weiß vermutlich niemand so recht, wie das Ganze nun aussehen wird. Was ja ins Bild passt.
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One for the Day: City of Industry
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FACILITY: Blast furnace 5, Dillinger Hütte, Dillingen, Saarland, Germany
Photo taken: January 2005
Dillinger Hütte is a complete Integrated Steel Mill owning the complete steelmaking process including sinter and coke plants, blast furnaces, LD steel mill, secondary metallurgy and hot rolling mills of convincing dimensions. The sinter, coke and blast furnaces plants are operated by Dillinger Hütte but owned jointly with Saarstahl in order to ensure pig iron delivery to the Saarstahl LD steel mill in Vöklingen.
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Zwei Minuten
Die Wikipedia ist immer wieder faszinierend: gestern legte ich eine Liste von Kokereien in Deutschland an und stellte hinter das "Status: abgerissen" des Eintrags zur Kokerei in Lauchhammer ein Fragezeichen - vom Abriss war auszugehen, aber ich hatte keine Angaben dazu. Zwei Minuten später wurde das Fragezeichen entfernt - von einem Bewohner Lauchhammers, der den Abriss verifizieren konnte. Beeindruckend und motivierend zugleich.
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Anders Jacobsen: Give to tsunami victims and I'll give too!
Anders Jacobsen's idea: "Whether you give money, time or whether you decide to share your link-power; if you create a post on your weblog front page or create permanent links in your blogroll and link to the below organizations, then link to my blog and this posting, I will pay US$ 1 to the British Red Cross." Using blogosphere's link power and Google guice for the benefit of sites raising Tsnuami relief funds. Anders is wanting to give 500 US$. Here we go:
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One for the Day: Dry room
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FACILITY: Dry room ("pithead bath" in some regions, "Schwarzkaue" or more general "Waschkaue" in German)
Site: Kaiserstuhl Colliery, Hoesch Bergbau AG, Dortmund, Germany
Status: Closed down in 1966, dormant since
Photo taken: November 2004
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One for the Day: Bochumer Verein
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FACILITY: One of two remaining water towers
Site: Blast furnaces plant, Bochumer Verein für Gußstahlfabrikation / Kruppstahl, Bochum, Germany
Wonderful architecture, but nearly all gone: closed down decades ago, a small number of buildings around this water tower is all what remains of this once huge plant. Most facilities torn down long ago, the grounds have converted into a public park.
Photo taken: December 2004
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One for the Day: Skip Extraction System
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FACILITY: Headgear and skip extraction system, shaft 1
Site: Fürst Leopold colliery, Dorsten, Germany
Status: Coal extraction closed down, few remaining activities
Photo taken: December 2004 during rainfall and haze
While many consider older headgear designs and lorry extraction systems more beautiful, I like modern layouts like the one shown here very much. Their beauty lies in their simplicity. The headgear with the four cornered shaft as the main constructional element is aesthetically pleasing and efficient in material use at the same time: the distribution of forces is obvious to the bare eye, and high flexural strength is reached with a very limited number of parts, making welding and installation easy. Skip extraction is of similar beauty to the engineer's eyes: instead of cumbersomely handling single lorries that have to be uncoupled in the underground, lifted individually to the surface, recoupled, emptied, uncoupled, taken back into the underground individually and recoupled again, self extracting skips just require belt conveyors to fill and empty them, greatly reducing the number and complexity of daylight facilities. No more than the few tiny buildings visible right next to the headgear are required to feed the extracted coal from the shaft into the processing plant.
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