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October 16

Container islands in New York East River

I don't know what words to use to get a good search for this topic. If you look at satellite images of the East River in New York, you will see multiple rectangular "islands" that look like shipping containers stacked up. The images are very low quality, so it is possible the appearance is just artifacts of image compression. Are there actually stacks of shipping containers or something of similar appearance in the East River? If so, what are they? I originally dismissed it as the satellite picking up container ships moving along the river, but many of them are in the exact same place across more than one satellite image. So, they must be stationary. An example of one is off shore from the Rose M Singer Center on Riker's Island. On Google, it looks like a stack of containers. On Bing, it lookse like a rectangular building. Neither one labels it. Another one is halfway between Soundview pier and Ferry Point Park pier. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 14:28, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A mystery! To me on the satellite photos they look like they could be barges either filled with loose material or covered in a light coloured tarp. To get a different angle, I looked for some near Google Street View coverage. There are a couple of mystery objects just east of the Bronx end of the Whitestone Bridge, and Street View coverage looking out over the East River at the south end of Robinson Avenue in Throg's Neck. Looking south on Street View, you can see what look very much like barges around the same location as the objects in the satellite photos.

As for what they're doing... Is the East River dredged regularly? That might explain them being there frequently/with long linger times, but also moving around - as a barge is filled up it moves off to deposit the fill elsewhere. 91.194.221.225 (talk) 14:54, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Lokking on Bing Maps, [1] the object off Rikers Island looks like a lighter with six or seven piles of material (maybe sand or gravel) onboard. There is a much smaller circular object close by, probably a bouy. Alansplodge (talk) 16:36, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe those are anchor spots for barges when not in use. That would explain why they are in the same location, but appearing rather different, from two obviously different satellite passes. I didn't try a street view of the first one because I assumed there is no street view on Riker's Island. It turns out there is a "street view" from a sailboat, but the sail blocks view of the object. However, following that sailboat's path, I did see that the object between the piers is clearly a flat, red-sided barge full of containers. It is too flat to be a container ship (assuming that refers to those massive ships with hundreds of containers). Assuming these examples (and the many others I found) are anchor spots, I can start googling for official anchor spots along the East River. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 18:51, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A guide once pointed me at such buoys during a school excursion to the port of Rotterdam, floating in the Waalhaven. You can view them there too. They're meant to tie vessels to, to moor away from the dockside. This can be to store empty barges, to use barges as floating storage or to transship directly from one ship to another, using floating or on-board loading facilities. Traditionally, cereals are transshipped that way. A giant floating vacuum cleaner comes alongside the ocean going ship, sucks up the cereals and dumps them in a river barge for transport deeper inland. If you scroll a bit in time on Google, you can find some ships transshipping bulk goods in the Waalhaven.

There's a lot of sand extraction along the Maas and Waal rivers, where I used to live. It's collected by dredging and sometimes dumped directly into a ship. It looks quite different from the piles you see in the barges near New York. The dredged material is pumped into the cargo hold as a very wet slurry. The sand sinks to the bottom of the hold; the water flows out. There're no visible piles. The material in the pictures was dry when loaded and must have been loaded by chute or conveyor belt.

If the material in the hold isn't sensitive to weather, the cover of river barges is often left off. This saves time. The cover consists of segments of sheet metal, optionally painted, that can be moved using a small portal crane. Sometimes the segments have wheels running on tracks, so that one segment of the cover can be rolled over another. PiusImpavidus (talk) 18:54, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

With all the information here, I've found plenty of documentation for anchorage regulations throughout the rivers around New York and the locations where there seem to be barges are in fact official anchorages. They are not digital encoding artifacts in the satellite images. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 18:59, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

New York (as well as other cities) used to accumulate its garbage on barges, prior to its being disposed of in landfill sites or elsewhere/otherwise; finding places to do so became problematical – see for example Mobro 4000. Such procedures may still be in operation to some extent, and such barges can remain moored in place for long periods: I have seen similar barges remain for weeks at a time in Southampton harbour, beside which I used to work (there is a large refuse incineration plant on the Western shore of the harbour). Storing refuse thusly is relatively cheap, and keeps it from causing onshore problems with vermin, smells, fires, etc. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 23:25, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Road signs in China

Do road signs in China also inculde place names in pinyin? At least some signs in urban areas do that, but how widespread is this? Do they use toneless pinyin as English names? --40bus (talk) 15:43, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It depends entirely on the area. Hong Kong has a lot of English signs due to the history of English rule and many English speakers still residing there. Beijing is an international city, as with any capital city. It has not only English, but other languages depending on the area of the city and who will likely be using the signs. Shainghai is a big business city with a lot of foreign residents and tourists. They adopted English and Pinyin as the alternative language for most signs. There is always an argument to remove English and Pinyin from the signs, but it doesn't progress much. If you travel away from locations with a lot of foreign residents and tourists, the chance of finding a sign in English or Pinyin drops. If you get near country borders, you will find signs with the other country's language along with Chinese for the same reason that English is found on signs where many people are expected to know English to some degree but not Chinese. 64.53.18.252 (talk) 21:20, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In the top 20-50 cities destination signs are in characters and pinyin. DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 23:44, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

While falling asleep, I thought that this is closely related to another topic. Many languages use similar words, so it is not necessary to translate. For example, police in English is police in French, Polizia in Italian, policía in Spanish, politi in Norweegian, poliţie in Romanian, pûlis in Kurdish... etc... Because the word is so similar across languages, there is no need to translate it. When it is different, as in Russian, you will often see it translated from полиция to politsiya. But, in Chinese, there is no way that a person who does not read Chinese to mentally shuffle the phonetics of 警察 to jǐngchá to Police. There is a need to translate words to a language that most visitors will recognize enough to understand. As English has borrowed so heavily from everyone else, it is a good choice for a catch-all/sounds-alike language. My personal experience is that most countries do not translate much. Instead, they use signage that doesn't require translation. I was easily able to get by in Spain, Italy, Turkey, India, Brazil, and Panama without having any knowledge of the local language. In Norway, I was amazed that their written language is so much like English that I thought they were translating. They simply pronounce the words different. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 14:54, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]