Knowing when it wasn't a hurricane won't help those injured or killed, or fix the damage.
No, but it might help to determine just WHY the storm was being hyped so much.
Because, face it, in spite of the 20-odd deaths from the storm (including one surfer), it really wasn't much of a storm. When NYC ordered its evacuation (which most of the few people affected by ignored), NOAA was showing that the storm was probably going to be no worse than a middling tropical storm when it reached NYC. Yet we didn't hear from the media (or any government involved) that this was a relatively minor storm that was going to make staying in your beach house a bad idea - what we heard was "it's going to be HUUUUUGE!!! Devastating!!! If we don't evacuate, it'll be like New Orleans after Katrina!!!"
It should also be noted that traffic fatalities that weekend nationwide would have been about ten times as high as the fatalities caused by the storm that weekend.
Key points: mass is invariant and does not change, and you do not notice any change to the passage of time only a "stationary" observer notices that time apparently passes more slowly for you.
Umm, no.
Your mass, as observed by you, does not change. That hypothetical "stationary observer" notices that time actually (not apparently) passes more slowly for you, and that your mass increases.
Note that since you are also a "stationary observer" (even when moving at 0.95c), the rest of the universe has the same properties - its mass has increased, and time passes more slowly for it.
Time dilation works largely because as we approach C our mass also increases. At.5% of C (not 50%) our mass will have effectively doubled and time will be noticeably slower than home, to keep accelerating at one G you need more energy to push the increased mass. As you approach 50% of C your mass will be thousands of times greater than at "rest" the energy required to continue to keep accelerating is unimaginable if it were possible to get within 95% of C your mass would be nearly infinite and it would require the energy output of a quasar to power your ship!
Umm, no.
At 0.5% of c, your mass will have increased by 0.00125%, and time will have dilated by a similar amount.
At 50% of c, your mass will have increased by a bit less than 15.5%, and time will have dilated by a similar amount.
At 95% of c, mass will have increased by 220% (to 320% of rest mass), and time will have dilated to a similar degree.
Hate to reply to myself, but a little more research shows that the law in question was originally passed in 1959.
If the identity of the signing governor is really important, he was Foster Furcolo (D).
Note that the law was first put into place to prevent abuse by the police of wiretapping, due to improvements in technology that made wiretapping simpler....
* - I bet it was Romney. He seems like the sort of constipated dickhead who'd think preventing the public from telling each other about what the government is doing is a good idea.
You'd lose that bet.
Romney was governor from 2003 till 2007, the law in question was passed before 2003 - there were court cases involving the law in 2000....
But if Tesla does what it said it will, Neil loses, and--being a journalist, not a multimillionaire entrepreneur--he will donate $1,000 to the same group.
Sounds like he's really confident in his prediction of failure, when he's betting $1 on it failing for every $1000 that Elon is betting that it'll succeed.
SpaceX gets $1.6B of government money (aka cash from the pockets of the masses) and you hold them forward as a model of how to do things without taking money from our pockets?
SpaceX gets a $1.6B contract to deliver supplies to the ISS, you mean? With no payment if those supplies aren't delivered?
Yah, that's pretty much how we do things without taking money from your pockets
They provide a service we need, we pay them for it. They fail to provide the service, we fail to pay them.
Republicans let New Orleans nearly go the way of Atlantis, the Democrats will say "Look at how well our new standard procedure evacuation went!
Hmm, the Mayor of New York is a Democrat. The Mayor of New Orleans was a...Democrat.
New York is doing its "standard procedure evacuation". New Orleans did its "standard procedure evacuation" (which, note, included EVERYONE, not just the people in low-lying areas of the city).
So, other than those differences (N.O. had a more complete evacuation plan, that was executed as intended), I fail to see how the Democrats are going to look better than the Republicans (who aren't involved in New York, and weren't involved in New Orleans).
The bonus is an additional amount that reflects that they did a good job.
Yep. And measuring whether they did a good job based on the performance of the next guy to fill the position is just silly.
It's pretty easy to argue that the standard system (stock price on the day the CEO quits, or whatever) is a bad system. It's also pretty easy to argue that basing his bonus on the performance of the next CEO is silly - you might as well base it on the result of the fifth race at Pimlico the first weekend after the seventh anniversary of the death of his pet at the time he quit the job....
A government which doesn't give bailouts probably has to be one which doesn't allow bailouts to become necessary - which, to me, implies some regulatory intervention that few people are really going to relish.
Umm, we managed to avoid giving bailouts for the first couple centuries of our existence just fine, thank you.
A common misconception about "too big to fail" and "bailouts" is that a company entering bankruptcy just stops. It doesn't. Business proceeds as usual, with the bankruptcy court trying to arrange things so the creditors get paid and everyone else is equally unhappy.
If the various banks we'd bailed out had been allowed to enter bankruptcy (or just write off the bad debt as bad debt), it would have had minimal effect on everyone except those evil rich guys - our local branch banks would have still opened every morning, our credit cards would have still worked.
Ditto the automobile companies that were bailed out. Only difference would have been that the government wouldn't have been able to give special preference to some creditors over others...
They're state legislators from Missouri. Finding out what is and is not in the constitution would require reading it, which would limit their ability to call things they don't like "unconstitutional" and would limit their ability to propose quick fixes and powergrabs.
Note that this statement would apply equally well to our Federal legislators in DC. Or legislators in any other State, for that matter.
I'm watching this from the other side of the world in a place that gets big cyclones and at least this time I'm not getting the "don't these people know what's coming?" feeling as I watched the leadup to Katrina and the horrible aftermath.
Yah, when we went through Katrina, it was waaaay different. We only ordered a mandatory evacuation of the City, instead of a mandatory evacuation of low-lying areas.
Didn't know that, did you? Yes, we executed our standard mandatory evacuation plan a couple days before Katrina hit. Worked exactly as designed, in that pretty much anyone who wanted to evacuate did.
Note that the people who remained didn't remain because they had nowhere to go and no way to get there. They didn't evacuate because, for the most part, they remembered Betsy, and Katrina was a baby compared to Betsy.
Note also that the majority of the Katrina damage in N'Awlins was a result of a levee breach. Unpredicatable, and unpredicted. Even worse, in the aftermath of Katrina, the authorities prevented people from returning to their homes in the area for a couple months. Much of the damage to individual houses would have been vastly reduced if people had been on hand as the floodwaters receded to clean things up, rather than leaving entire neighborhoods to (literally) rot for a month or two....
It is not something like 120mph winds. It's less than that now, and should drop down to the 50 mph range by the time it gets to New York, if it's even still a tropical weather event by then (small chance it'll dissipate completely before New York, larger chance of a weak tropical storm).
Oh, you know how hindsight is 20/20? A nuclear reactor in Virginia scrammed because of the earthquake. [nytimes.com] I guess you menly men don't worry about nuclear reactors reacting badly to earthquakes, but we liberal worryworts here tend to be concerned about stuff like that.
First, a nuclear reactor scramming is NOT a bad thing, necessarily. It's gotten a bad reputation from Fukushima, when it was done manually at a time it shouldn't have been done, but, on balance, an automatic scram is a good thing.
Secondly, remember Katrina? Remember that nuclear power plant I can see from my rooftop (assuming my oak trees weren't in the way)?
Yep, Katrina ran right over a nuclear power plant!! Remember the nation-wide coverage of the ensuing nuclear disaster? No? Because we didn't have one.
He got in trouble for writing a book explaining why the Copernican model was correct, and inserting into it a character who looked and acted like the then Pope. And he gave that character the name "Simplico" (simpleton).
Do try to remember that Copernicus was a priest, and managed to get away with developing the Copernican model (without calling the Pope a fool)....
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No, but it might help to determine just WHY the storm was being hyped so much.
Because, face it, in spite of the 20-odd deaths from the storm (including one surfer), it really wasn't much of a storm. When NYC ordered its evacuation (which most of the few people affected by ignored), NOAA was showing that the storm was probably going to be no worse than a middling tropical storm when it reached NYC. Yet we didn't hear from the media (or any government involved) that this was a relatively minor storm that was going to make staying in your beach house a bad idea - what we heard was "it's going to be HUUUUUGE!!! Devastating!!! If we don't evacuate, it'll be like New Orleans after Katrina!!!"
It should also be noted that traffic fatalities that weekend nationwide would have been about ten times as high as the fatalities caused by the storm that weekend.
Umm, no.
Your mass, as observed by you, does not change. That hypothetical "stationary observer" notices that time actually (not apparently) passes more slowly for you, and that your mass increases.
Note that since you are also a "stationary observer" (even when moving at 0.95c), the rest of the universe has the same properties - its mass has increased, and time passes more slowly for it.
Umm, no.
At 0.5% of c, your mass will have increased by 0.00125%, and time will have dilated by a similar amount.
At 50% of c, your mass will have increased by a bit less than 15.5%, and time will have dilated by a similar amount.
At 95% of c, mass will have increased by 220% (to 320% of rest mass), and time will have dilated to a similar degree.
Hate to reply to myself, but a little more research shows that the law in question was originally passed in 1959.
If the identity of the signing governor is really important, he was Foster Furcolo (D).
Note that the law was first put into place to prevent abuse by the police of wiretapping, due to improvements in technology that made wiretapping simpler....
You'd lose that bet.
Romney was governor from 2003 till 2007, the law in question was passed before 2003 - there were court cases involving the law in 2000....
Well, so far it's been less than 400 years. Archbishop Ussher came up with that bit of academic idiocy in 1650....
Only because they put fewer people into a spacecraft than we do. They've lost two crews, we've lost two crews.
Sounds like he's really confident in his prediction of failure, when he's betting $1 on it failing for every $1000 that Elon is betting that it'll succeed.
SpaceX gets a $1.6B contract to deliver supplies to the ISS, you mean? With no payment if those supplies aren't delivered?
Yah, that's pretty much how we do things without taking money from your pockets
They provide a service we need, we pay them for it. They fail to provide the service, we fail to pay them.
Yep. Even my daughter is wondering what all the excitement is about over a cat 1-2 hurricane....
Hmm, the Mayor of New York is a Democrat. The Mayor of New Orleans was a...Democrat.
New York is doing its "standard procedure evacuation". New Orleans did its "standard procedure evacuation" (which, note, included EVERYONE, not just the people in low-lying areas of the city).
So, other than those differences (N.O. had a more complete evacuation plan, that was executed as intended), I fail to see how the Democrats are going to look better than the Republicans (who aren't involved in New York, and weren't involved in New Orleans).
Yep. And measuring whether they did a good job based on the performance of the next guy to fill the position is just silly.
It's pretty easy to argue that the standard system (stock price on the day the CEO quits, or whatever) is a bad system. It's also pretty easy to argue that basing his bonus on the performance of the next CEO is silly - you might as well base it on the result of the fifth race at Pimlico the first weekend after the seventh anniversary of the death of his pet at the time he quit the job....
Yes, he's being penalized.
If the next guy is an idiot (remember, that next guy isn't chosen by the outgoing CEO), then the former CEO loses out on his bonuses.
Setting MY pay based on someone else's performance is a wonderful way to make sure I don't give a crap....
So, odds that Apple will fire him in the first week of August, 2016? Any bets?
Umm, we managed to avoid giving bailouts for the first couple centuries of our existence just fine, thank you.
A common misconception about "too big to fail" and "bailouts" is that a company entering bankruptcy just stops. It doesn't. Business proceeds as usual, with the bankruptcy court trying to arrange things so the creditors get paid and everyone else is equally unhappy.
If the various banks we'd bailed out had been allowed to enter bankruptcy (or just write off the bad debt as bad debt), it would have had minimal effect on everyone except those evil rich guys - our local branch banks would have still opened every morning, our credit cards would have still worked.
Ditto the automobile companies that were bailed out. Only difference would have been that the government wouldn't have been able to give special preference to some creditors over others ...
Note that this statement would apply equally well to our Federal legislators in DC. Or legislators in any other State, for that matter.
So, capitalism is broken right now because the government is stupid?
Sounds more like government is broken - maybe we should work on fixing that first.
Yah, when we went through Katrina, it was waaaay different. We only ordered a mandatory evacuation of the City, instead of a mandatory evacuation of low-lying areas.
Didn't know that, did you? Yes, we executed our standard mandatory evacuation plan a couple days before Katrina hit. Worked exactly as designed, in that pretty much anyone who wanted to evacuate did.
Note that the people who remained didn't remain because they had nowhere to go and no way to get there. They didn't evacuate because, for the most part, they remembered Betsy, and Katrina was a baby compared to Betsy.
Note also that the majority of the Katrina damage in N'Awlins was a result of a levee breach. Unpredicatable, and unpredicted. Even worse, in the aftermath of Katrina, the authorities prevented people from returning to their homes in the area for a couple months. Much of the damage to individual houses would have been vastly reduced if people had been on hand as the floodwaters receded to clean things up, rather than leaving entire neighborhoods to (literally) rot for a month or two....
It is not something like 120mph winds. It's less than that now, and should drop down to the 50 mph range by the time it gets to New York, if it's even still a tropical weather event by then (small chance it'll dissipate completely before New York, larger chance of a weak tropical storm).
First, a nuclear reactor scramming is NOT a bad thing, necessarily. It's gotten a bad reputation from Fukushima, when it was done manually at a time it shouldn't have been done, but, on balance, an automatic scram is a good thing.
Secondly, remember Katrina? Remember that nuclear power plant I can see from my rooftop (assuming my oak trees weren't in the way)?
Yep, Katrina ran right over a nuclear power plant!! Remember the nation-wide coverage of the ensuing nuclear disaster? No? Because we didn't have one.
"Mandatory evacuation" does NOT mean "we're sending the cops around to force you to leave".
It means "if you don't leave, don't call the cops begging for rescue when things go to hell"....
Matter of fact, just picked up a sixpack of Turbodog yesterday....
Title says it all. Cat-2.
It has a slim chance of being a hurricane still when it gets to New York.
It has a slightly better chance of 50 knot wind-speeds by then.
And it has a decent chance of being a weak tropical storm.
In other words, not even worth evacuating for....
For reference, I live in the Big Easy - I've sat out Cat-2 storms before, more than once.
But from the looks of it, this storm is being blown all out of proportion....
When we get some information more solid than "we saw an oil sheen last week", we can start worrying.
He got in trouble for writing a book explaining why the Copernican model was correct, and inserting into it a character who looked and acted like the then Pope. And he gave that character the name "Simplico" (simpleton).
Do try to remember that Copernicus was a priest, and managed to get away with developing the Copernican model (without calling the Pope a fool)....