Objects
- Ballast tank, a device used on ships and submarines and other submersibles to control buoyancy and stability
- Ballast weights, metallic plates used to bring auto racing vehicles up to the minimum mandated weight
- Electrical ballast, used to stabilize the current flow in lamps
- Sailing ballast, ship's ballast, used to weigh a ship down
- Track ballast, the layer of crushed rock or gravel upon which railway track is laid
- Ballast carried aboard an aircraft, for example:
- in gliding to increase speed and/or adjust the aircraft's center of gravity
- in a balloon as a buoyancy compensator
- Ballast tractor, a heavy haulage road vehicle designed to pull or push heavy or exceptionally large loads
Read more about this topic: Ballast
Famous quotes containing the word objects:
“But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)