X-Message-Number: 2134 Subject: CRYONICS Square buckets; ice sublimation; earthquakes Date: Tue, 20 Apr 93 13:28:41 -0400 From: These are all minor points in response to Brian Wowk's suggestion of using buckets (barrels?) of water as ballast. None of them defeat the idea. If you're assuming round buckets, then you have to decrease the amount of ballast you expect to store because circles don't tile the plane. You may have done this already. I suspect there will be enough ballast either way. Patient cross sections don't tile the plane either. Some wasted space is inevitable, so maybe dealing with buckets wasting space isn't important. I wonder to what extent the ice will sublime from inside the buckets and redeposit itself on the outside of the buckets? Things could conceivably become an unmanageable block of ice despite the use of buckets. Sealing the buckets isn't an option because there has to be a hole to let the air out as the ice expands. (I guess that if the ice cubes in Bedford's capsule were still recognizable as ice cubes when he was moved, sublimation shouldn't be an issue.) Tall piles of buckets of ice seem to not be earthquake-proof. If you hanged them from the ceiling you wouldn't have to worry about the stacks falling over. Or you could just assume that the cold room is not built in an earthquake zone. Or you could pile them up in some bricklaying-like configuration so that the pile is as wide as it is tall. (But then making room for another patient is awkward.) Tim Freeman Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=2134