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Tracking the Cracks
Roland Piquepaille writes "Israeli physicists from the Weizmann Institute have used a new approach to study how materials break. In a short news release, brilliantly titled "Breaking news", they explain their new method for analyzing the progression of a forming crack. The news release even says that it could have help engineers predict 'exactly how much pressure the levees protecting New Orleans could withstand before giving way.' This method could be used by engineers and material scientists in a vast variety of applications."
I'm hard from watching football preshow. Dunno why.
Yeah, isn't it wonderful that they find a way to test them *after* they're broken and the city destroyed?
Do you Gentoo?
... notice that many scientific and engineering discoveries are by Israeli scientists. It seems they are innovating at a rate that far exceeds other countries/groups/ethnicities.
Ashkenazi are said to select for intelligence when they mate. Is this a manifestation of this phenomenon?
So your saying that you don't mind if the walls of your home are 2m thick? That's about an order of magnitude. What about if speed limits were 10km/h? That would be an order of magnitude better, wouldn't it? And you know those pipes in the basement you live in? We should make sure that they are at least 3cm thick, just to be on the safe side. That would make them, what, 7cm diamter copper pipes? Cheap as hell, oh yeah.
In other words, go and get yourself a glass of STFU.
Oh, and if your wondering, a sustained 20-30% past the maximum limit is pretty standard. But these values vary widly with due consideration to impulses, redundancy, complexity, and other operating conditions.
Sig
The news release even says that it could have help engineers predict 'exactly how much pressure the levees protecting New Orleans could withstand before giving way.'
The situation in New Orleans wasn't the lack of precise technical knowledge, it was the unwillingness of federal government to use the allocated funds for levee strengthening and protection.
Studies had been done and money had been allocated for improving the levees that surround the city. But the money was stolen from the city of New Orleans and redirected for use in the Iraqi war instead.
When the 100-year Cat 5 super-hurricane did come to New Orleans, the levee in its weakest places broke. The levee was battered by a huge barge that was illegally anchored in the industrial canal where the levee was breached. That illegal barge still sits in the streets of the 9th ward.
New Orleans was destroyed by a combination of federal illegal reallocation of funds and typical Louisiana corruption, a mean combination.
What happened was a deliberate act to get the Black people out of New Orleans through a multi-stage action. One, levees were not strengthened even though global-warming forecasts indicated a higher than normal probablity of a super-hurricane. Two, the breach in the levees destroyed (in the city of New Orleans) primarily black housing. Given the legacy of strict racial segragation, the outlining areas destroyed were primarily white. Three, the feds determine that the black areas are too damaged and/or polluted (as a result of the refusal to clean up the previous pollution) to be rebuilt. Blacks are offered a 'take it or leave it buy-out' to get out. Four, with the blacks gone, the feds rebuild the levees to the strength that they were supposed to be years ago. Five, the feds sell the cleared black neighborhoods to Bechtel and Haliburton for pennies on the dollar. Bechtel and Haliburton rebuild the housing and bring whites in from other parts of the country, for enormous profit. Blacks lose and get chased out; whites get rich; media ignores story completely; typical corrupt Louisiana business-as-usual.
It doesn't matter if someone finds a new way to analyse the strength of the levees when the power structure is more than happy to use the situation of weak levees for its own gain. When you understand this, you understand Louisiana and the American South in general.
Thank you,