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A Physicist Says He Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest With 1,000-Foot Walls
meghan elizabeth writes: Temple physicist Rongjia Tao has a utopian proposal to build three massive, 1,000-foot-high, 165-foot-thick walls around the American Midwest, in order to keep the tornadoes out. Building three unfathomably massive anti-tornado walls would count as the infrastructure project of the decade, if not the century. It would be also be exceedingly expensive. "Building such walls is feasible," Tao says. "They are much easier than constructing a skyscraper. For example, in Philadelphia, the newly completed Comcast building has about 300-meter height. The wall with similar height as the Comcast building should be much easier to be constructed." Update: 06/28 04:14 GMT by T : Note: originally, this story said that Tao was at Drexel rather than Temple -- now corrected
...kaiju protection.
Homeland Security will jump on this as the perfect opportunity to build a prison large enough to hold us.
Now we know why there are no Tornados in Westeros.
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
If you can go with a slope and build it as a triangular prism then it is easy to build, like a long pyramid. Jobs, jobs, jobs!
The only natural predator of trailer homes are tornadoes. Are we prepared for the inevitable population explosion if we defeat tornadoes in the Mid-West? I don't think we'll be able to build Wal-marts fast enough.
Construct mighty engines of fearsome complexity and madness-inducing size to redirect the gyronormous aetheric power of these "tornadoes" towards the hated enemy.
Nobody thinks cyclopean these days, that's what's wrong with society.
That it only works for square tornadoes on an infinite plane of uniform density?
Yes! Lets make a giant 1000ft tall bird shredder! We might get some food out of it too >:)
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Hey, those could be Solar Freakin' Walls and they could be made out of scratch-proof glass, topped with windmills and LEDs that you can see in the daytime and generate eleventysix times the electricity of [[transmission garbled]]
They're coming here, stealing our jobs. We need to build a fence to keep them out, and allow warrentless searches of anyone who looks like a tornado. Ironically, to save on costs, most of the wall will actually be built by tornadoes.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
More importantly, how many tornadoes did Berlin have while the wall was up?
> This idea is so batshit crazy...I think we should do it. I don't even care whether it works as advertised. The Great Wall of China will pale in comparison.
The idea of doing a gigantic project just because it's batshit crazy has an appeal, I grant you.
> This could be our Apollo.
Erm... we already had our Apollo... unless you're talking "our generation", in which case, get off my lawn.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
at the corner where Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin meet, three farmers were talking over the fence. they find a magic lamp, and the Iowa farmer rubs it. out comes the genie, and splits the three wishes between them. the Iowa farmer says, "I would like this place to be green and fertile forever, rich and promising." BANG! the corn is ten feet tall. the Wisconsin farmer says, "Our state is so beautiful, I would like a thousand-foot wall all around it, so we can enjoy these hills, this water, the land forever without interlopers." BANG, fence.
the Minnesota farmer looks at the wall, and says, "Genie, we love our lakes. Fill that fence with water." BANG!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It would be much cheaper just to dump large amounts of powdered soap and water on them from a C130 to knock them apart. It would work better on a hurricane, dumping it on the rain bands would cause it to break up. The worst case scenario would be a 20 foot wall of suds moving at 80 mph, but it would be a clean city afterwards.