usenet weirdness

Am Mittwoch000025, 25.03.2026 um 11:31 schrieb Bill Sloman: ...

Sure, I have never build a bridge.

But I know a few things about electronics and chemistry.

My specific 'flavour' is called 'economics engineering'.

It is kind of mixture of economics and building machines.

That is quite difficult and not a very common topic in other countries.

(It's among the 'crown jewels' of German education.)

TH

Sure, if a comet smashes onto, say, the Moon, then the large momentum of the comet falling onto the Moon needs to be stopped somehow by the surface,

You could use several methods, but 'conservation of momentum' has advantages, because it would provide intuitive understanding for the formation of craters:

The crater is so large, because the missing material inside the crater was needed, to balance the momentum of the moving debris.

IoW: the material on the ground got struck by the falling part and unless the momentum is transferred to material from the ground, the falling piece would continue to move.

That's why the velocity of the material from the ground could become very high and the crater very large, until finally the projectile is stopped.

Actually the velocity was more than 300 km/h and I would regard that as fast.

We could also encounter 'elastic recoil', which could allow speeds of parts or the material on the ground to be faster than the falling debris.

Well, possibly.

I have never been there and don't know the exact street names. But you could gues what I meant:

the surface of the ground level of the entire WTC-complex.

That's not how things fall, if they hit something hard below.

If you would drop something breakable from some hight upon something breakable, but with high resistance against breaks, you would expect a different pattern:

the upper part of a collision would cause breaks in the parts below, but also braks of the same kind in itself, because the both parts were assumed to have the same strength.

If we concentrate on the upper part only (for a moment), we would expect parts of the falling piece to splinter off and fall partly outside of the former building shape, hence would fall in free fall outside down to the ground.

Doesn't matter that much, what percentage would break of the upper part, because at least some parts would do that.

But even at the hight of the actual impact zones, sections of the perimeter wall of the twintowers would fall down with enormous mass and velocity.

IoW: possibly you were right and not that many 'cannon balls' or 'fright trains' would have hit the ground, but certainly some.

But apparently this didn't happen, because every single of those sections of the perimeter walls would have pierced through the street level like a hot knife though butter.

In this didn't happen, because the street level was mainly intact.

You could easily see that, if you look at any pictures of the aftermath of 9/11, which show the remains of the twin-towers.

E.g. you can see, if you look carefully, remains of fire-trucks and other cars in the rubble, which remained astonishingly undamaged. For instance some had still unbroken windows.

This wouldn't be possible, if a just screw-driver would fall from that hight, let alone sections of the perimeter wall, weighing more then 20 tons. ...

TH

One might study meteorology and find out that it isn't.

Day to day weather is hard to predict beyond about a week. Climate is more reliable.

It would if it were true.

It is called meteorology and people have doing it for a century or so now. Satellite observations now help quite a lot.

There are other random distributions.

A perfectly obvious statement, if totally unhelpful.

Not all of them.

You've got it backwards. The trends in the climate driven by global warming affect both the mean and the extremes.

What you need to notice is that a warmer ocean surface evaporates more water -

Most dramatic weather events are powered by this water water vapour condensing out and dumping the heat of evaporation into the air, which produces more powerful winds and heavier rain or snow that it did before global warming set in.

So there's about 10% more extreme weather around than there was about a century ago.

My wife was a director of a Max Planck Institute. I do know a bit about German education, and value engineering isn't one of it's crown jewels.

If you want to build a machine more cheaply, you don't study it's economics, you study what it does and work out a way to do that differently with a different, cheaper and faster machine.

I'm aware that Fraunhofer Institutes tend to be more applied than Max Planck Institutes, but I doubt that you work for any of them either.

The instrument problem is huge. We haven't had weather satellites, or millions of realtime sensors, or radar, for very long.

Hurricanes at sea, or even hitting land, were poorly measured or entirely missed. Ditto tornadoes and temperature/precipitation extremes.

Great books:

A Weekend In September by Weems, about the deadliest hurricane in US history, the great Galveston storm of 1900. There's a song about that, "Mighty Day" by the Chad Mitchell Trio.

Isaac's Storm by Larson, same hurricane.

Rising Tide by Barry: about the great Mississippi River flood of 1927. Randy Newman's song "Louisiana" is about that.

I used to ride dirt bikes (illegally) in the Bonnet Carré Spillway. I very much remember Hurricanes Betsy and Camille.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

The science fiction magazine "Astounding Science Fiction" published a story in mid-1944 which described an atomic bomb in enough detail to frighten the life out of the American security services, but the author had got it all from the open scientific literature.

The momentum ends up spread over the entire mass of the moon.

It isn't missing but rather pushed deeper into the moon.

There a lot more mass of ground than there is of "falling part". None of the bits of ground have to move all that fast to soak up the momentum, and if you create a shock wave travelling into the ground, the hemispherical shell of shocked ground get rapidly larger as the shock wave propagates out into Manhatten Island

Only in your fertile imagination.

It doesn't. The walls and bottom of the crater move out a bit and the ground that each bit is in contact with moves out a bit further - but not as far because there is more of it

That's the number you get if you imagine that the debris fell freely from the very top of the tower. There no evidence that any of it did.

The entirely hypothetical falling debris.

Predicting the eccentric results of your bizarre guesswork isn't a useful activity.

How would you know?

Spies help.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Don't bother.

Here the "value engineering" is much inspired by the "Miles Value Foundation", with regards to Miles and Deming and so on.

That used to be a common sort of story while though it seems a bit lost on the modern sorts of the anarcho-crapitalist who don't know their roots and where their food came from.

I know a guy who knows Miles who knows Deming, ....

The "value engineering" used to be a central tenet of the "operations research" of the "United States Government".

Here the idea of "value engineering" is quite distinct from the "cheapness" or the "planned obsolescence", and of course not at all about "the values of morals and ethics their engineering", instead it's as of an aspect of Value and Quality the values that contribute to quality, and where long lifetime is a value itself.

The "value engineering" is not "the cheapo-nomics of anarcho-crapitalism".

The "value engineering" was simply a primary analysis of cost drivers, which over the lifetime engage both parsimony and fullness and the quality.

The "value engineering" is not "disposable society".

The "value engineering" basically used to keep costs of government services in check.

The economist Samuelson's "total utility function" also includes matters of aesthetics and ecology, not just the payout of the greed-grab.

Talking about "Planck scale" and "Planck regime" and the "Trans-Planckian", ....

Logos 2000: infinitary kinematics

This thread is too long, my newsreader balks at it.

But we haven't had significant global warming for very long either. And you can tell quite a bit from historical data - the antarctic ice cors go back about a million years.

But the change in their behavior and their frequency since global warming got bigger than La Nina/ El Nino type flucuations is pretty well documented,

But you aren't a particularly quantitative measuring instrument, nor any kind of unbiased observer.

Am Mittwoch000025, 25.03.2026 um 15:26 schrieb Ross Finlayson: ...

Stephan Jones was a proponent of a theory, that can't possibly be true.

Jones assumed, that the WTC buildings were destroyed by explosions of nao-thermite.

But the buildings didn't explode!

What really happened that was far stranger than mini-nukes or nanothermite:

The twintowers simply 'dustified' in mid-air and vanished.

Since Stephan Jones was also the expert for cold-fusion of the Department of Energy, I assumed, that Jones knew what had happened and wanted to divert the attention away from cold fusion. ...

TH

Am Donnerstag000026, 26.03.2026 um 15:00 schrieb Thomas Heger: ...

To give you something to compare the tremendous force of falling debris with, I had figured out, how many Joules of kinetic energy a piece of the perimeter wall had, that falls down from the highest floor at, say,

The kinetic energy is easy to calculate, if you simply equate it to the energy you need to lift the piece that high.

It is in Nm:

That is five times the kinetic energy of an artillery shell.

One single piece of that size would punch a significant hole into the ground, large enough for a car to fall down.

But each tower consisted of more than half a million tons, hence not only one piece would fall down, but more than 25.000 pieces.

TH

Am Donnerstag000026, 26.03.2026 um 16:03 schrieb Bill Sloman: ...

'Wirtschaftsingenuerswesen' is called 'Engineering managment' in English:

The title I actually have is 'Dipl.-Ing.' and in English called

The rather strange thing was, that I have never seen Prof. Spur personally (not a single time!).

TH

Thermite isn't an explosive. It just burns and gets very hot.

It would have been very strange if it had happened. I've not seen anybody sane claim that it did. The concrete got hot as the towers burned, and got smashed into small rubble as each floor fell down on the floor below as the steel frames got hot and failed. There was a great deal of dust around after the Twin Towers had fallen down, so by no means all of it "vanished" - if any of it did

Cold fusion is weird - not because of anything it has been observed to do, but because people have kept on looking at it since 1989 when Pons and Fleischmann first reported it. I'd run into Martin Fleischmann when I was post-doc at Southampton 1971-73, and he was a professor there and he was perfectly respectable electrochemist back then.

What happened to the Twin Towers was that the towers caught on fire and got hot, weakening both the steel frame and the concrete.

When they got weak enough the Towers collapsed, floor by floor. About the only stuff that fell a long way were the supporting columns, which leaned way from the building and eventually fell outwards, hitting adjacent building. Each floor collapsed inwards, stopping at the next floor (but not for long) before the next floor failed

Why? It's all tied together by a steel frame, which may be failing, But stuff isn't going to "splinter off". There don't seem to be any reports of that.

An unsupported assumption.

I saw it happen on TV. They didn't.

Why "certainly"?

Really?

A screw driver has a rather low terminal velocity. A human falling from any height can't reach a terminal velocity above about 190km/hour.

It the perimeter wall broken up into less massive pieces - only 10 or

You'd like each piece to have weighed about 20 tons, but you haven't explained why it should have.

That is terminal enough.

The colloquial term for it in English is "management bull s*it".

The kind of managers who have been taught how to manage engineers have been told that engineers procrastinate, and have to be pressured to make up their minds rapidly.

In practice means that if you have doubts the manager will make their own choice, essentially at random, and call you incompetent if their choice turns out to have been the wrong one.

One particularly irritating clown thought that design reviews were a waste of time, and sent out circuit designs that had been completed by sub-contractors for sub-contract printed circuit layout without letting me check that the circuit design actually satisfied the specification that I had written.

I got to review the printed circuit layouts on site, but I didn't get an opportunity to work through the circuit's functionality until we'd got the board pretty much working, and could see where the sub-contractors detailed design has slipped up.