We previously saw a Fox News pie chart that had a couple extra slices (here). Now, fair and balanced math adds up to 120 percent of voters indicating that they view the science on global warming to be rigged.
This is an interesting Rasmussen poll when you add up the number and discover that you are in a parallel universe.
The question is: “In order to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, how likely is it that some scientists have falsified research data?” According to the poll, 35 percent thought it very likely, 24 percent somewhat likely, 21 percent not very likely, and 5 percent not likely at all (15 percent weren’t sure).
This rather dubious poll is offered to show that people are dubious about the science and math of global warming experts.
For the full story, click here
And the math for WTC 7?
Gyges: “Which is in fact simpler: having a conspiracy well coordinated enough to place explosive charges without detection in several buildings that I assume had good security, highjack several planes, fly them into said buildings (making sure to crash one to make it look more realistic?) then detonate the charges, all with ONLY revealing the parts of the plan they wanted public to law enforcement and intelligence personnel (unless of course you assume that everyone involved investigating the events was in on it).
Or: a conspiracy well coordinated enough to highjack several planes, and crash most of them into their intended target buildings, some of which then collapsed and caused damage to another building.”
If you’re going to apply Ockham’s razor to a problem it would be greatly appreciated if you did so properly.
“Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora” [“It is pointless to do with more what can be done with less”]. Thus, according to Ockham, we ought never to postulate the reality of any entity unless it is logically necessary to do so.
Your confusing of simplicity with truth has nothing to do with the law of parsimony.
Thus the question is never “which is in fact simpler” but “what must be true;” and given that ‘we ought never to postulate the reality of any entity unless it is logically necessary to do so,’ the negative implication of the law of parsimony is that we must postulate the existence of another entity when it is logically necessary to do so. And when might that be? How about when the explanation offered reveals a gap between knowledge and its object? IOW when said explanation is, how shall we say, untrue?
“My theory predicted that 100 gigaJoules was available for demolition work, Robert’s estimate given 154 gigaJoules required. This is excellent agreement for this sort of model”.
Not so fast. You completely forgot about pulverizing the concrete. (or did you conserve that energy for later re-use?) :>)
Buddha,
I agree with the rest of the stuff you said asteroids (at least, what I know about agrees with what you said and I trust you on the rest). In my research I saw that there may have been 3 major impacts 65 million years ago, the result of a collision over 160 million years ago far out in space. This stuff is cool.
Thanks for the compliment in your latest post. If I can stop posting for a bit, I’ll run the real numbers so we can use them in the discussion.
Bob said:
“Not for nothing, but your reluctance to apply your theory to WTC 7 is proof positive that you’ve set forth an ‘irrefutable theory’ making it untestable anywhere but your thought experiment with the two towers and therefore unscientific.”
My theory predicted that 100 gigaJoules was available for demolition work, Robert’s estimate given 154 gigaJoules required. This is excellent agreement for this sort of model (As I’ve said I have to rerun the numbers, but I’ll be more precise about it later). I said that I wouldn’t be surprised if my numbers were within an order of magnitude and I would be surprised if they weren’t within two. Right now I’m sitting at 0.19 orders of magnitude – I’m pretty pleased with myself.
Byron,
You’re including the weight of the floor itself. I’m talking about the load of personnel and equipment. The floors were designed to support 1300 tons beyond their own weight.
Buddha,
Check your email.
Slart,
What Buddha said, Good on ya.
Slarti,
That’s why I was so careful to point out the differences in magnitude that first time. We are both right, but we are at such disparate ends of the PE transfer scale that we are not dealing with events that have uniform effects on materials – such high energy levels as to actually change the behavior of solid rock to liquid. Phase changes carry consequences. I’m was only challenging that part of your characterization.
Robert,
“Unfortunately, I’m not a liberty to say, but I can assure you that many things that you would not expect to take place do actually take place.”
You owe me a new keyboard. I just spit up coffee all over mine.
So, do they often give double secret information to people who can’t even be trusted to keep it’s existence a secret? Does your Engineer friend know about these secrets, or do you only blab about them on the internet?
I know there’s more under the stars than my philosophy can account for. Luckily my philosophy is pretty flexible in what it can absorb, you just have to be able to PROVE things for them to fit in.
Slarti,
I’d also like to take a minute and say you have once again displayed honor in brining your corrected calculations to the table. That certainly earns style points with me. Uncle Albert would be proud. You put accurate in front of ego. That’s good science.
Buddha,
You are correct, impactors bounce. However, given the tremendous kinetic energies involved and the fact that the coefficient of restitution is nearly one, the kinetic energy retained by the impactor is effectively nil. When the land around you for 90 kilometers liquifies, you’re not worrying about the rock that did it. I excluded many such nuances from my analysis – you can’t say everything, and I stand by all of the assumptions I made.
Robert:
for example A36 steel has an ultimate strength of 58 ksi +/- and the yield strength is 36 ksi and we design around 24 ksi. I doubt the WTC is any different.
Design is about 0.42 of ultimate or 0.66 of yield which is what we usually talk about when we design something. So if the floors were designed for a factor of safety of 5 against yield it would be around 7 ksi. Those buildings would be incredibly heavy and they are actually very economical structures.
I think your friend needs to explain where he is getting a factor of safety of 5.
Gyges,
Unfortunately, I’m not a liberty to say, but I can assure you that many things that you would not expect to take place do actually take place.
If, after the 1993 attempt to take down the WTC, you realized what would happen if a 1400 ft. tall building was to fall over in downtown Manhattan, what would be your course of action? How would your course of action impact operation?
And Slarti,
Not for nothing, but your reluctance to apply your theory to WTC 7 is proof positive that you’ve set forth an ‘irrefutable theory’ making it untestable anywhere but your thought experiment with the two towers and therefore unscientific.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiable
Byron:
You said:
“how are you accounting for the energy required to separate the floors from the main structural members?
A 3/4″ diameter A36 steel rod/bolt fails at a force of around 43,000 lbs give or take.
I am guessing the concrete was only 3″ possibly 4″ thick.”
What my analysis shows is the energy available building demolition given the ‘natural collapse’ hypothesis. My analysis said this was on the order of 100 gigajoules. Byron said that it required 14 gigajoules to break loose each floor. Therefore we have 154 vs. 100 gigajoules much closer than the order of magnitude I said was excellent agreement for this type of calculation. I’m pretty pleased with my analysis.
Slarti,
I have only one problem with what you are saying.
The Moon. Oh, and the assumption the mantle acts like a solid all the time.
You are incorrect about inelastic explosions and extraterrestrial impacts. At those masses and speeds, there is most certainly bounce. The Earth’s mantle acts like a fluid under those conditions. And if you doubt asteroid strikes are elastic? I wouldn’t bother looking up at the Moon tonight. It was created by an impact of a body slightly smaller than Mars. Bloooop! Whether the Earth is solid or not is a matter of perspective in time (over short time spans, the mantle acts like a solid hence activities like mining – over the long term it acts like a liquid as it does with tectonic drift) and relative energy in the system at any given time (it acts like a liquid past X threshold of KE and/or heat). Ejectamenta, just as the glass spherules found from the Chixalub crater are exactly bounce related phenomena. It’s glassine material that precipitated back to Earth after impact threw it into the air – a mixture of molten rock and gasses from both the mantle and the impactor. Like all that iridium.
This is an aside but I’m getting back to bouncing so bear with me. You should also know there is division in the geological community about whether the KT boundary is one impact (Chixalub – leaving both spherules and the iridium layer) or two impacts (one for each phenomena with one unidentified crater) and that both theories now contend that the dinosaur population had been under pressure for some time before the impact(s) due to naturally occurring changes in sea level wiping out their environments. Big animals need LOTS of food. Absent the impacts, they may have survived the downturn, but the theory is the impact(s) was the tipping point now, not so much the direct cause of the extinction. It ruined the environments capable of feeding such large creatures and ergo their chance of surviving the natural downturn in populations.
It’s unlikely Chixalub killed all the dinosaurs for another reason: the mechanics for that scenario call for global fire or global winter – both of which would have killed off both amphibians and crocodilians. There is also a lack of uniform evidence of either carbon deposits or crystalline structures fire or freezing would cause. There’s evidence there were some big fires. Just not global. There is also the fossil record. Statistical surveys of KT contemporaneous life showed there was a lot of life that survived. Just none of it big. I’m in Louisiana right now. I guarantee you both crocs cousins the alligator and frogs are still around just like they were in the time of the dinosaur. This rules out the acid rain scenario too.
I see the point you are making. Within the gravity well and with smaller energies, you are correct. The WTC is an inelastic explosion and rock is a solid. From an astronomical and physical geography standpoint regarding asteroids, it’s incorrect.
I’m not saying the WTC wasn’t an inelastic explosion. It was.
But asteroids most certainly can be.
It’s apples and oranges. They are both edible, but they are very different.
I did mention that I used to tutor astronomy, right? In another dimension, I’m probably gunning for Geoff Marcy’s or Roger Penrose’s job. This isn’t idyll speculation. Large rocks can and do bounce because past certain energy thresholds they behave as a liquid. We have a bounced rock orbiting us right now. Planes? Not so much bouncing. They don’t generate enough energy to create the reflexive shock waves needed to make an elastic explosion in stone: either from lack of mass or lack of momentum. They behave like those pictures of bullets flattening out. But asteroids? It’s more like dropping something in a pool. The waves radiate out and as they rebound through the liquid back to the point of impact they create ejectamenta. This clip illustrates my point about the difference between the propagation of energy through a liquid vs. a solid.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ-AX1G0SmY&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
The Moon would be the single red drop. It was just thrown high enough to reach orbit. You are indeed correct about the WTC’s inelastic nature. You are not correct about asteroids though. I think these pictures speak as to why. Well, that and the Moon.
Slarti, (I’m tired of writing the whole name)
The energy of an earthquake is estimated from an event that takes place in the bedrock, not on the much softer surface of the earth.
How did the KE convert to thermal energy? What is the method of conversion? Bob has asked you this a number of times.
Why didn’t the KE of the WTC transfer into KE in the earth? If you want to claim that some if it was transfered to the earth or WTC remains via friction, I’ll but that, but what percentage and how did you come up with that?
Byron,
I get what you mean, but here’s what I want everyone to think about.
Which is in fact simpler: having a conspiracy well coordinated enough to place explosive charges without detection in several buildings that I assume had good security, highjack several planes, fly them into said buildings (making sure to crash one to make it look more realistic?) then detonate the charges, all with ONLY revealing the parts of the plan they wanted public to law enforcement and intelligence personnel (unless of course you assume that everyone involved investigating the events was in on it).
Or: a conspiracy well coordinated enough to highjack several planes, and crash most of them into their intended target buildings, some of which then collapsed and caused damage to another building.
Of course there are unexplained elements, nothing like this has happened before. Can you name a single thing that science has witnessed for the first time that someone was able to say “well that’s exactly what I expected, we learned nothing from this other than that our theory was 100% correct?”
Slartibartfast: “I’m sorry, I thought that you would understand that each bit of energy would be required to either stay in the box or exit the box. The important thing is that we keep track of it, as it is neither created nor destroyed.”
Isolated, closed or open?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_system#Overview