Wednesday, September 29, 2010

More Destuction from Windows Reflecting Sunlight

I've written in the past about sunlight reflecting off windows in a concentrated fashion leading to damage on neighboring houses. That however, is small stuff. The MGM Mirage Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas has built more or less their entire building into a concentrating mirror. Look at the picture of the building: and don't tell me you're surprised that there is a problem. According to The Register,
...an employee confirmed: "Yeah, we know. We call it the death ray."
The strange thing to me is that they seem perplexed about the solution.
[The Hotel's spokesman] explained that there's no easy fix for the problem, since the hot spot will shift according to the season... He said: "This is quite literally an astronomical challenge. We are dealing with a moving target."
Predicting the path of the beam can't be too challenging. The analemma was known to the ancients, and the rest is geometry, right?

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