Not that there's anything particularly mentally challenging in forcing people to rote-memorize a set of equations and other numbers.
That's just the way trig is taught... but you can learn trig in a historical context starting with chords of a circle, then the idea of a unit circle, and then a half chord (i.e. sine), and then the cosine.... and it all makes logical sense, because that was the order in which it was developed.
And instead of making students memorize the trig identites, they should be taught how to derive them. Most of the derivations are pretty neat.
Most kids hate math, because most of the math teachers hate math and don't really understand the underlying beauty of it... and they just teach it as memorizing a set of formulae and equations to get high standarized test scores.
Re:discovering someone else's data isn't a discove
on
One Find, Two Astronomers
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· Score: 2, Insightful
We found a very bright slowly moving object in three images while checking some of our older images of the modest TNO survey that we carry out from Sierra Nevada since 2002.
And what made them look at those images? How did they find that needle in the huge mountain of old data?
If they did a systematic search, where's the evidence? To me is seems very likely that they used Brown's data to calculate an orbit for the object, and then used that orbit to find the old images.
Based on what I've seen, Ortiz's story is just as plausible as Brown's. If you had discovered a new object and you read an abstract about another such discovery, wouldn't you also try hard to determine whether the other object was the same as yours?
If that is so, why didn't they mention Brown's observations in their announcement. They were aware of Brown's data and didn't cite it. That is academic misconduct, and they should be dismissed from their institutions.
I've made what was a big discovery only to find prior work by another group that was similar enough for me to not be able to claim the discovery (even though they didn't know what they really had). And I made a point to cite their work. It was an obscure sviet-era russian publications no one would have found, but I cited it and pointed out that they had made the same discovery years before. Sure it sucks to lose the glory, but it was the ethical thing to do.
Generally, in science, if you don't protect your experimental results or if you carelessly talk about new ideas to other people, don't complain if people scoop you.
It's one thing to be scooped, it's another to have your work used without attribution. Brown has proof that they viewed his data and they didn't mention it in their announcements. That is misconduct plain and simple.
I think what Slashdotters find annoying is that people leave their data unprotected and then try to blame others for the mere possibility of having misused the data.
This isn't the possibility of misuse, Ortiz et al viewed Brown's data multiple times, and they didn't cite it... It doesn't matter if Borwn left the data on a table at a restaurant for Ortiz to find or if it was on a public server... Ortiz *knew* it was Brown's data, and he should have mentioned that he used it.
in any case, let's keep this in perspective: the discovery of a new planet, at this point, is not a crowning intellectual achievement, it is simply sweat and a lot of luck.
maybe in your view. But when kids dream of being astronomers, discovering a new planet is the sort of thing they dream of doing. If I found a new planet, I would view it as one of the main achievements of my career. And its one thing to be scooped, and another to be stolen from.
But monopolizing an object for half a year or longer is just bad style and when somebody discovers it, too, then losing the fame is your own fault.
Conferences are often only once or twice a year. Most new discoveires are presented at conferences... ergo almost every scientist sits on their discoveries for at least half a year.
dumbass.
Taking time to write a paper doens't mean it's ok when your data is stolen.
discovering someone else's data isn't a discovery
on
One Find, Two Astronomers
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· Score: 4, Interesting
And now, they want to claim credit for the discovery of the object because, essentially, they were the first ones to publish the existence but not the data for the new object
Brown had no problem with Ortiz beating him on the announcement and gave Ortiz full credit for the discovery... until he found out Ortiz used his data... then he had a problem.
If Brown had waited with his announcement, then Ortiz couldn't have searched for the images on the web.
But he wanted to present it at a conference, which meant he had to submit an abstract.
I don't know whether Ortiz committed scientific misconduct
well he did. He used Brown's data without attribution.
but there is obviously something wrong with what Brown did: his abstract shouldn't have contained identifiable information, and/or he should have asked to be kept private.
ok Brown made a mistake, but that doesn't mean its ok to steal his data. That's like saying it's ok to rob a house that left its door open... or to steal a print out of his data that he left lying on his desk. It's misconduct to take someone else's work and pass it off as your own.
Brown's behavior itself may have been an innocent mistake, or it may also have been scientific misconduct. In particular, if he submitted the abstract announcing the find without actually having all the data ready, that would constitute scientific misconduct.
That's bullshit. 1) An abstract isn't the whole paper, and you don't put data or results in an abstract 2) he had the data when he wrote the abstract 3) it is perfectly reasonable (and common practice) to submit an abstract before all of the work is done, its just an abstract not a whole paper.
in no way is what Brown did misconduct. What Ortiz et al did is some of the worst kind of misconduct. He stole Brown's work and passed it off as his own. Ortiz and his whole group should be fired and should never work as astronomers again. If his institution doesn't fire him they will lose all credibility.
To me, it looks like both Brown and Ortiz made serious mistakes. So far, however, I haven't seen any concrete evidence for misconduct in this story.
Brown made a dumb mistake of not protecting his data. Ortiz made an ethical mistake of stealing that data. I cannot understand why you don't think what Ortiz et al did was not misconduct.
I don't understand why so many slashdotters are defending Ortiz. It's just like someone taking GPL code from a CVS server and passing it off as thier own without mentioning where they got the code and after they're caught, saying its ok because the project was taking forever to make an official release.
There's nothing wrong with telling people "hey, I think there's something here". The only thing it will do is let other people corroborate your observations faster. That's a -good- thing. It also has the side-effect of getting proper attribution.
What's the rush of announcing a new KBO? This is a once in a lifetime discovery, they should get a chance to do a thorough job, write a paper, and have a big surprise at the conference.
They did the work and they should get a chance to enjoy it without someone stelaing their data and using it to claim the discovery as their own.
Ortiz has no credibility left since he hid the fact that he used Brown's telescope logs before making his announcement. The logs most likely helped him calculate an orbit and find the object in his own old data.
Ortiz and his group should be fired. This is just as bad as the cold fusion people faking data.
I did RTFA. This supports his claim that Ortiz pointed his telescope at the same location as Brown.
Ortiz found the object in two year old data. It is likely that he used Brown's logs to calculate an orbit so that he knew where to find the object in his old data.
TFA did not mention if Brown had any documentation supporting his claim that he had in fact found the object.
Brown had mentioned the object to several people who kept the secret, but was planning on announcing it officially at a conferance in September... He submited an abstract for the conference that mentioned the object, and shortly thereafter Ortiz's team announced their discovery via email.
Also the entries in the server logs weren't found by Brown's team, but by a third party. (and the IP addresses in the logs match computers used to send the email announcements)
If you use some elses data, then you are suppossed to at least acknowledge that you used it, and better yet you should get their permission.
Ortiz et al did neither, and I think they should be fired for doing so. What they did was underhanded and it destroys the trust so vital to academic collaboration.
I think the evidence is pretty strong that Ortiz found out Brown's preliminary designation from an abstract for a conference paper and then looked up the object in google to find the telescope logs. This then enabled Ortiz to calculate an orbit which he used to find the object in his own old data.
Without Brown's abstract, and observing logs he would have had bupkiss.
Your residence was most likely built based on a large chain of rules of thumb. Contractors who build almost all residential structure don't do finite element analysis of planned buildings; they simply build to code, which is a conservative set of rules of thumb.
building codes are built on conservative rules of thumb. Your wetland rule of thumb is optimistic. Rules of thumb are fine, I just have a problem with your hand-waving.
I worked as a computational fluid dynamics engineer for over 3 years at a major jet engine manufacturer, now I am an applied super computing consultant at a major academic institution.
Then you should know the difficulties in modeling reacting flows with many complex species. now imagine that with sand and mud and plants and debris and topography you don't know well.
One thing I have learned is that although you can get a better answer from really high fidelity analysis, you can usually get on that is right enough with low fidelity analysis.
And until you do the high fidelity analysis (or better, real world testing) you don't know how much to trust the low fidelity analysis.
There are times to use the best modeling, and times to use less. When you can get 80% of the answer in 5 minutes or 99% of the answer in 1 year, it is often better to take 80%, and apply a safty factor.
To do so, where people's lives are at stake, you need to know an adequate safety factor. I've seen many screw ups resulting from fudge factors pulled out of engineers asses. (Columbia springs to mind)
I doubt anyone knows the right safety factor for the placement of wetlands to absorb storm surges.
I don't doubt that nobody could do acurate first principles based modeling of the wetlands problem, but as much as I hate it, first principles models are not alway the best tools to use... There are several assumptions you could make for this problem to get good enough answers, I suspect that is where these rules of thumb came from.
How do you know those answers are good enough? Has any wetlands-based-hurricane-abatement system ever been tested? Without testing such a mound of assumptions is little more than hot air.
But when it comes to levees and the like there are millennia of real world experience with failed levees. We know the bad assumptions, and therefore we can build a safer levee system than we can a swamp system.
I have nothing against expanded wetlands... there are lots of good biodiversity and pollution reasons to do so. But I am skeptical of their use for protection from category 5 hurricanes.
Actually, at it's basic level, it's really mostly a volume calculation.
I think that's too basic a level.
I believe the models that they use are more complex to accurately calculate the influx and uneven water levels at different points, but the result is that a single square mile of restoration equals a reduced surge of one foot.
This is the sort of complexity needed. The flow will be uneven, and the uneveness will depend on the direction of the storm amoung other things. I am sceptical that such complex flows can be accurately modeled by computers.
Such computer models need a lot of expensive testing with scale models... and I doubt that this has been done.
but the result is that a single square mile of restoration equals a reduced surge of one foot.
I wouldn't bet my family's lives on such a rule of thumb. I am familiar with the complexities of modeling fluid flow... especially mixtures of mud, sand, air, water, and seasonal vegitation. I seriously doubt that anyone can accurately model this.
Do you not know the meaning of "just", as in "The levee didn't just break"?
The storm surge overran it, and without wetlands to flood into, the water piled up to six feet over its normal level.
It seems like an awful lot of handwaving to say 'wetlands' would have stopped the disaster. It would require some very complicated computer models to accurately predict how much storm surge could be absorbed into given amount of wetlands. Where as building a dam on Lake Pontchartrain is a much more tractable problem.
Preserve wetlands for environmental reasons, but don't count on them for flood control without hard numbers.
The levee didn't just break - it overtopped.
Actually the flood walls overtopped and then broke as their foundations washed out.
New Orleans sits on hundreds of feet of muck (about 600 ft) and lacks access to the bedrock
And that is different from the Netherlands how?
Ultimately, if we do not address the issue that the above have caused the wetlands to decrease, New Orleans will be a coastal city that sits below sea level in 2040.
it is already below sea level. So are the Netherlands... which has much fewer wetlands left than New Orleans.
The estimates I see range from $8-$15 billion spread out over 25-30 years to make New Orleans safe from something bigger than Katrina. (that's roughly $500 million a year). That's seems like a reasonable amount to spend... especially if state and city governments pay for part of it.
my home town (New Orleans) is famous for its corruption. Nothing that nice will be done.
A side effect of Katrina I think will be to reduce corruption in New Orleans. Something like 500 New Orleans police are MIA... somhow I doubt the corrupt cops are the ones who stayed behind to risk their lives fighting looters.
They move north of the lake (all my family has, was safe during this stuff), or move east of New Orleans
Those areas will sink too... in time. The delta silt and drained swamps will compress over the years just like they did in New orleans and in the Netherlands. More Levees will be needed there too.
As someone else pointed out, Amsterdam is not in the path of hurricanes.
Holland has been hit by large storms several times. Most recently in 1953 with hurricane force winds. Granted, not as stron as Katrina, but strong enough to cause several large disaster over the past thousand years. That's why the Dutch have put so much effort into protecting themselves from monster storms.
Sure New Orleans gets bigger storms... but its nothing engineering can't handle if we're willing to pay for it.
Read my links before you go all political. There's 30+ years of the federal government putting off upgrades to the levees. The letter to the President is complaining about the FEMA non-response, not about the state of the levees.
but New Orleans is unique in that after a disaster is over IT'S GOING TO STAY UNDER WATER, BECAUSE IT'S UNDER SEA LEVEL. It's a stupid place to build a city
Yeah, it the only place where a large population lives below sea level.
..but is there some rule that says it must be rebuilt below sea level, so it becomes another disaster-waiting-to-happen right from the start?
Just because it was built below sea-level it is not a disaster-waiting-to-happen. Holland is proof that you can have a system of levees and pumps and live safely on a river delta below sea level.
For example, they could drain Lake Pontchartrain to the low tide level like the Zeider Zee in Holland... and put up flood gates to keep the high tides out, lower the gates to allow water out of the Lake at low tide. And dredge the bottom of the lake to build the city high enough that water will flow down into the lake from the city... thus having passive flood control. And where you need pumps, use windmill to help pump water (so as not to be dependent on electricity).
You could also use dredged mud to expand the swamps around lake Pontchartrain so as to build a natural barrier to disperse the energy from hurricanes.
That's just one solution. There's lots of ways to make New Orleans safe... and safer than many other major metropolitan areas.
In 1953, the dyks weren't high enough: http://www.thehollandring.com/1953-ramp.shtml That disaster is what prompted Holland to upgrade their system to what it is today... something that is an excellent model for what can be done in Louisiana .
I suspect that after this disaster, New Orleans will expand their levee system (the levees didn't fail, but some areas still had flood walls which did fail). And I suspect the new system will be able to withstand over 30' storm surges.
But by the time such a new system is completed (20+ years from now). I doubt New Orleans will remain a major city. Baton Rouge will probably take over as the largest city in the region just like Houston took over from Galveston after the 1900 hurricane.
But New Orleans will continue, and it will continue on as the great center of American culture that it has been for almost 200 years.
New Orleans is built on delta silt, notoriously unstable and has been documented for decades to be slowly sinking, eventually turning into Venice of the Gulf. For decades the artifically channeled river continues to silt up, raising the water level ever higher, faster than dredging or levy improvements can check.
shh... don't tell holland that it is impossible to live safely on delta silt. They'd have to move their whole country and give up their elaborate system that supposedly protects them from storms.
Oh and by the way, the levees in New Orleans didn't fail. What failed where flood walls. You see the storm surge was higher than the flood walls, and it began to flow over the top of them. This flow ended up washing out the foundation of the flood walls and they collapsed.
Although the worst part of Katrina's storm surge didn't hit New Orleans (It was 30 feet in Mississippi, the highest ever recorded... higher than the Tsunami), but what did hit was higher than the system could cope with.
New Orleans was just a disaster waiting to happen. They built a large city, mostly below sea level, next to the gulf coast. The gulf coast is known for it's hurricanes, so it was just a matter of time before it got hit. If we rebuild it, it will once again just be a matter of time before another storm comes in and wipes it out.
New York is just a disaster waiting to happen. They built a large city full of large sky-scapers that concentrates the population in a small area, making it a tempting target for terrorists....also how many of New York's sky scrapers could withstand a class 4 or 5 hurricane? (hurricanes can hit New York, heck Toronto was hit by a hurricane)
Los Angeles is just a disaster waiting to happen.... earthquakes... wild fires... riots... San Francisco -- earthquakes.... St. Louis --- another large earthquake on New Madrid fault will destroy the city...
Fact is new Orleans is one of the oldest cities in the US, and it has weathered many disasters before this one. It is *the* most vital port for American agriculture, and it is one of the most important centers of American culture (without the influence New Orleans you wouldn't have the Beatles or most of modern music)
The New Orleans Times-Picayune (which in 2002: published this report which predicted much of the current disaster.) has a scathing open letter to the president that spells out a lot of the FEMA incompetence.
There is almost no fact in modern physics. Therefore everything is a matter of opinion.
Are you a troll or just an idiot? If physics were a matter of opinion, I'd be able to fly by flapping my arms. Modern physics is every bit based on facts that have been experimentally verified.
If everyone accepted as truth the popular beliefs of their peers we would yet be living in a flat world assaulted by mythical gods.
There is no reason to rpeat every experiment ever done in physics... you just read about the ones that were done and repeat them if you see an error in their methodology... to do otherwise is to waste your time.
We're not talking about metters of opinion here... we're talking about things that were tested, failed, and then the failures were explained by a better understanding of the physics.
It is typically those who do not accept the findings of others as substitute for their own findings that change the face of human knowledge. The others at best make significant logical progressions.
No it is typical for such people to never do anything useful. A human life is finite, and you have to manage your time to get anything done.
Sure you can't accept everything at face value... but you also have to admit you're wrong when confronted with the evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that there's anything particularly mentally challenging in forcing people to rote-memorize a set of equations and other numbers.
That's just the way trig is taught... but you can learn trig in a historical context starting with chords of a circle, then the idea of a unit circle, and then a half chord (i.e. sine), and then the cosine.... and it all makes logical sense, because that was the order in which it was developed.
And instead of making students memorize the trig identites, they should be taught how to derive them. Most of the derivations are pretty neat.
Most kids hate math, because most of the math teachers hate math and don't really understand the underlying beauty of it... and they just teach it as memorizing a set of formulae and equations to get high standarized test scores.
We found a very bright slowly moving object in three images while checking some of our older images of the modest TNO survey that we carry out from Sierra Nevada since 2002.
And what made them look at those images? How did they find that needle in the huge mountain of old data?
If they did a systematic search, where's the evidence? To me is seems very likely that they used Brown's data to calculate an orbit for the object, and then used that orbit to find the old images.
Based on what I've seen, Ortiz's story is just as plausible as Brown's. If you had discovered a new object and you read an abstract about another such discovery, wouldn't you also try hard to determine whether the other object was the same as yours?
If that is so, why didn't they mention Brown's observations in their announcement. They were aware of Brown's data and didn't cite it. That is academic misconduct, and they should be dismissed from their institutions.
I've made what was a big discovery only to find prior work by another group that was similar enough for me to not be able to claim the discovery (even though they didn't know what they really had). And I made a point to cite their work. It was an obscure sviet-era russian publications no one would have found, but I cited it and pointed out that they had made the same discovery years before. Sure it sucks to lose the glory, but it was the ethical thing to do.
Generally, in science, if you don't protect your experimental results or if you carelessly talk about new ideas to other people, don't complain if people scoop you.
It's one thing to be scooped, it's another to have your work used without attribution. Brown has proof that they viewed his data and they didn't mention it in their announcements. That is misconduct plain and simple.
I think what Slashdotters find annoying is that people leave their data unprotected and then try to blame others for the mere possibility of having misused the data.
This isn't the possibility of misuse, Ortiz et al viewed Brown's data multiple times, and they didn't cite it... It doesn't matter if Borwn left the data on a table at a restaurant for Ortiz to find or if it was on a public server... Ortiz *knew* it was Brown's data, and he should have mentioned that he used it.
in any case, let's keep this in perspective: the discovery of a new planet, at this point, is not a crowning intellectual achievement, it is simply sweat and a lot of luck.
maybe in your view. But when kids dream of being astronomers, discovering a new planet is the sort of thing they dream of doing. If I found a new planet, I would view it as one of the main achievements of my career. And its one thing to be scooped, and another to be stolen from.
But monopolizing an object for half a year or longer is just bad style and when somebody discovers it, too, then losing the fame is your own fault.
Conferences are often only once or twice a year. Most new discoveires are presented at conferences... ergo almost every scientist sits on their discoveries for at least half a year.
dumbass.
Taking time to write a paper doens't mean it's ok when your data is stolen.
And now, they want to claim credit for the discovery of the object because, essentially, they were the first ones to publish the existence but not the data for the new object
Brown had no problem with Ortiz beating him on the announcement and gave Ortiz full credit for the discovery... until he found out Ortiz used his data... then he had a problem.
If Brown had waited with his announcement, then Ortiz couldn't have searched for the images on the web.
But he wanted to present it at a conference, which meant he had to submit an abstract.
I don't know whether Ortiz committed scientific misconduct
well he did. He used Brown's data without attribution.
but there is obviously something wrong with what Brown did: his abstract shouldn't have contained identifiable information, and/or he should have asked to be kept private.
ok Brown made a mistake, but that doesn't mean its ok to steal his data. That's like saying it's ok to rob a house that left its door open... or to steal a print out of his data that he left lying on his desk. It's misconduct to take someone else's work and pass it off as your own.
Brown's behavior itself may have been an innocent mistake, or it may also have been scientific misconduct. In particular, if he submitted the abstract announcing the find without actually having all the data ready, that would constitute scientific misconduct.
That's bullshit. 1) An abstract isn't the whole paper, and you don't put data or results in an abstract 2) he had the data when he wrote the abstract 3) it is perfectly reasonable (and common practice) to submit an abstract before all of the work is done, its just an abstract not a whole paper.
in no way is what Brown did misconduct. What Ortiz et al did is some of the worst kind of misconduct. He stole Brown's work and passed it off as his own. Ortiz and his whole group should be fired and should never work as astronomers again. If his institution doesn't fire him they will lose all credibility.
To me, it looks like both Brown and Ortiz made serious mistakes. So far, however, I haven't seen any concrete evidence for misconduct in this story.
Brown made a dumb mistake of not protecting his data. Ortiz made an ethical mistake of stealing that data. I cannot understand why you don't think what Ortiz et al did was not misconduct.
I don't understand why so many slashdotters are defending Ortiz. It's just like someone taking GPL code from a CVS server and passing it off as thier own without mentioning where they got the code and after they're caught, saying its ok because the project was taking forever to make an official release.
There's nothing wrong with telling people "hey, I think there's something here". The only thing it will do is let other people corroborate your observations faster. That's a -good- thing. It also has the side-effect of getting proper attribution.
What's the rush of announcing a new KBO? This is a once in a lifetime discovery, they should get a chance to do a thorough job, write a paper, and have a big surprise at the conference.
They did the work and they should get a chance to enjoy it without someone stelaing their data and using it to claim the discovery as their own.
Ortiz has no credibility left since he hid the fact that he used Brown's telescope logs before making his announcement. The logs most likely helped him calculate an orbit and find the object in his own old data.
Ortiz and his group should be fired. This is just as bad as the cold fusion people faking data.
the old article didn't mention the Ortiz connection...
I did RTFA. This supports his claim that Ortiz pointed his telescope at the same location as Brown.
Ortiz found the object in two year old data. It is likely that he used Brown's logs to calculate an orbit so that he knew where to find the object in his old data.
TFA did not mention if Brown had any documentation supporting his claim that he had in fact found the object.
Brown had mentioned the object to several people who kept the secret, but was planning on announcing it officially at a conferance in September... He submited an abstract for the conference that mentioned the object, and shortly thereafter Ortiz's team announced their discovery via email.
Also the entries in the server logs weren't found by Brown's team, but by a third party. (and the IP addresses in the logs match computers used to send the email announcements)
If you use some elses data, then you are suppossed to at least acknowledge that you used it, and better yet you should get their permission.
Ortiz et al did neither, and I think they should be fired for doing so. What they did was underhanded and it destroys the trust so vital to academic collaboration.
I think the evidence is pretty strong that Ortiz found out Brown's preliminary designation from an abstract for a conference paper and then looked up the object in google to find the telescope logs. This then enabled Ortiz to calculate an orbit which he used to find the object in his own old data.
Without Brown's abstract, and observing logs he would have had bupkiss.
Your residence was most likely built based on a large chain of rules of thumb. Contractors who build almost all residential structure don't do finite element analysis of planned buildings; they simply build to code, which is a conservative set of rules of thumb.
building codes are built on conservative rules of thumb. Your wetland rule of thumb is optimistic. Rules of thumb are fine, I just have a problem with your hand-waving.
I worked as a computational fluid dynamics engineer for over 3 years at a major jet engine manufacturer, now I am an applied super computing consultant at a major academic institution.
Then you should know the difficulties in modeling reacting flows with many complex species. now imagine that with sand and mud and plants and debris and topography you don't know well.
One thing I have learned is that although you can get a better answer from really high fidelity analysis, you can usually get on that is right enough with low fidelity analysis.
And until you do the high fidelity analysis (or better, real world testing) you don't know how much to trust the low fidelity analysis.
There are times to use the best modeling, and times to use less. When you can get 80% of the answer in 5 minutes or 99% of the answer in 1 year, it is often better to take 80%, and apply a safty factor.
To do so, where people's lives are at stake, you need to know an adequate safety factor. I've seen many screw ups resulting from fudge factors pulled out of engineers asses. (Columbia springs to mind)
I doubt anyone knows the right safety factor for the placement of wetlands to absorb storm surges.
I don't doubt that nobody could do acurate first principles based modeling of the wetlands problem, but as much as I hate it, first principles models are not alway the best tools to use... There are several assumptions you could make for this problem to get good enough answers, I suspect that is where these rules of thumb came from.
How do you know those answers are good enough? Has any wetlands-based-hurricane-abatement system ever been tested? Without testing such a mound of assumptions is little more than hot air.
But when it comes to levees and the like there are millennia of real world experience with failed levees. We know the bad assumptions, and therefore we can build a safer levee system than we can a swamp system.
I have nothing against expanded wetlands... there are lots of good biodiversity and pollution reasons to do so. But I am skeptical of their use for protection from category 5 hurricanes.
Actually, at it's basic level, it's really mostly a volume calculation.
I think that's too basic a level.
I believe the models that they use are more complex to accurately calculate the influx and uneven water levels at different points, but the result is that a single square mile of restoration equals a reduced surge of one foot.
This is the sort of complexity needed. The flow will be uneven, and the uneveness will depend on the direction of the storm amoung other things. I am sceptical that such complex flows can be accurately modeled by computers.
Such computer models need a lot of expensive testing with scale models... and I doubt that this has been done.
but the result is that a single square mile of restoration equals a reduced surge of one foot.
I wouldn't bet my family's lives on such a rule of thumb. I am familiar with the complexities of modeling fluid flow... especially mixtures of mud, sand, air, water, and seasonal vegitation. I seriously doubt that anyone can accurately model this.
Do you not know the meaning of "just", as in "The levee didn't just break"?
levees != flood walls. The levees didn't fail, flood walls did.
The storm surge overran it, and without wetlands to flood into, the water piled up to six feet over its normal level.
It seems like an awful lot of handwaving to say 'wetlands' would have stopped the disaster. It would require some very complicated computer models to accurately predict how much storm surge could be absorbed into given amount of wetlands. Where as building a dam on Lake Pontchartrain is a much more tractable problem.
Preserve wetlands for environmental reasons, but don't count on them for flood control without hard numbers.
The levee didn't just break - it overtopped.
Actually the flood walls overtopped and then broke as their foundations washed out.
New Orleans sits on hundreds of feet of muck (about 600 ft) and lacks access to the bedrock
And that is different from the Netherlands how?
Ultimately, if we do not address the issue that the above have caused the wetlands to decrease, New Orleans will be a coastal city that sits below sea level in 2040.
it is already below sea level. So are the Netherlands... which has much fewer wetlands left than New Orleans.
I noticed another NYT story on lost cities, which would be interesting to the 'abandon New Orleans' camp:
h tml
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/science/06lost.
The estimates I see range from $8-$15 billion spread out over 25-30 years to make New Orleans safe from something bigger than Katrina. (that's roughly $500 million a year). That's seems like a reasonable amount to spend... especially if state and city governments pay for part of it.
my home town (New Orleans) is famous for its corruption. Nothing that nice will be done.
A side effect of Katrina I think will be to reduce corruption in New Orleans. Something like 500 New Orleans police are MIA... somhow I doubt the corrupt cops are the ones who stayed behind to risk their lives fighting looters.
They move north of the lake (all my family has, was safe during this stuff), or move east of New Orleans
Those areas will sink too... in time. The delta silt and drained swamps will compress over the years just like they did in New orleans and in the Netherlands. More Levees will be needed there too.
As someone else pointed out, Amsterdam is not in the path of hurricanes.
Holland has been hit by large storms several times. Most recently in 1953 with hurricane force winds. Granted, not as stron as Katrina, but strong enough to cause several large disaster over the past thousand years. That's why the Dutch have put so much effort into protecting themselves from monster storms.
Sure New Orleans gets bigger storms... but its nothing engineering can't handle if we're willing to pay for it.
Read my links before you go all political. There's 30+ years of the federal government putting off upgrades to the levees. The letter to the President is complaining about the FEMA non-response, not about the state of the levees.
but New Orleans is unique in that after a disaster is over IT'S GOING TO STAY UNDER WATER, BECAUSE IT'S UNDER SEA LEVEL. It's a stupid place to build a city
Yeah, it the only place where a large population lives below sea level.
dumbass
..but is there some rule that says it must be rebuilt below sea level, so it becomes another disaster-waiting-to-happen right from the start?
Just because it was built below sea-level it is not a disaster-waiting-to-happen. Holland is proof that you can have a system of levees and pumps and live safely on a river delta below sea level.
For example, they could drain Lake Pontchartrain to the low tide level like the Zeider Zee in Holland... and put up flood gates to keep the high tides out, lower the gates to allow water out of the Lake at low tide. And dredge the bottom of the lake to build the city high enough that water will flow down into the lake from the city... thus having passive flood control. And where you need pumps, use windmill to help pump water (so as not to be dependent on electricity).
You could also use dredged mud to expand the swamps around lake Pontchartrain so as to build a natural barrier to disperse the energy from hurricanes.
That's just one solution. There's lots of ways to make New Orleans safe... and safer than many other major metropolitan areas.
In 1953, the dyks weren't high enough: http://www.thehollandring.com/1953-ramp.shtml That disaster is what prompted Holland to upgrade their system to what it is today... something that is an excellent model for what can be done in Louisiana .
I suspect that after this disaster, New Orleans will expand their levee system (the levees didn't fail, but some areas still had flood walls which did fail). And I suspect the new system will be able to withstand over 30' storm surges.
But by the time such a new system is completed (20+ years from now). I doubt New Orleans will remain a major city. Baton Rouge will probably take over as the largest city in the region just like Houston took over from Galveston after the 1900 hurricane.
But New Orleans will continue, and it will continue on as the great center of American culture that it has been for almost 200 years.
New Orleans is built on delta silt, notoriously unstable and has been documented for decades to be slowly sinking, eventually turning into Venice of the Gulf. For decades the artifically channeled river continues to silt up, raising the water level ever higher, faster than dredging or levy improvements can check.
shh... don't tell holland that it is impossible to live safely on delta silt. They'd have to move their whole country and give up their elaborate system that supposedly protects them from storms.
Oh and by the way, the levees in New Orleans didn't fail. What failed where flood walls. You see the storm surge was higher than the flood walls, and it began to flow over the top of them. This flow ended up washing out the foundation of the flood walls and they collapsed.
Although the worst part of Katrina's storm surge didn't hit New Orleans (It was 30 feet in Mississippi, the highest ever recorded... higher than the Tsunami), but what did hit was higher than the system could cope with.
New Orleans was just a disaster waiting to happen. They built a large city, mostly below sea level, next to the gulf coast. The gulf coast is known for it's hurricanes, so it was just a matter of time before it got hit. If we rebuild it, it will once again just be a matter of time before another storm comes in and wipes it out.
...also how many of New York's sky scrapers could withstand a class 4 or 5 hurricane? (hurricanes can hit New York, heck Toronto was hit by a hurricane)
New York is just a disaster waiting to happen. They built a large city full of large sky-scapers that concentrates the population in a small area, making it a tempting target for terrorists.
Los Angeles is just a disaster waiting to happen.... earthquakes... wild fires... riots... San Francisco -- earthquakes.... St. Louis --- another large earthquake on New Madrid fault will destroy the city...
Fact is new Orleans is one of the oldest cities in the US, and it has weathered many disasters before this one. It is *the* most vital port for American agriculture, and it is one of the most important centers of American culture (without the influence New Orleans you wouldn't have the Beatles or most of modern music)
What governmental disaster relief?
The New Orleans Times-Picayune (which in 2002: published this report which predicted much of the current disaster.) has a scathing open letter to the president that spells out a lot of the FEMA incompetence.
There is almost no fact in modern physics. Therefore everything is a matter of opinion.
Are you a troll or just an idiot? If physics were a matter of opinion, I'd be able to fly by flapping my arms. Modern physics is every bit based on facts that have been experimentally verified.
If everyone accepted as truth the popular beliefs of their peers we would yet be living in a flat world assaulted by mythical gods.
There is no reason to rpeat every experiment ever done in physics... you just read about the ones that were done and repeat them if you see an error in their methodology... to do otherwise is to waste your time.
We're not talking about metters of opinion here... we're talking about things that were tested, failed, and then the failures were explained by a better understanding of the physics.
It is typically those who do not accept the findings of others as substitute for their own findings that change the face of human knowledge. The others at best make significant logical progressions.
No it is typical for such people to never do anything useful. A human life is finite, and you have to manage your time to get anything done.
Sure you can't accept everything at face value... but you also have to admit you're wrong when confronted with the evidence.