Vérinage

Apparently the French have been demolishing buildings 9/11-style (sans aircraft) for quite a long time and consider it a standard demo technique, called "vérinage". The general idea is that the weight of the top portion of the building, even though it can be supported by the building, contains such a massive amount of potential energy that once it's fallen a story or two it can easily sheer through any and all support beneath it.

To my uneducated eye this looks exactly like the World Trade Center's collapse, especially in the three aspects of

1. Massive ejection of dust & debris
   
2. Near free-fall appearance ("near" because if you can eyeball the difference between a 9.8 m/s*s fall and an 9.0 m/s*s fall, you're a better man than I)
3. Sheer vertical collapse similar to standard U.S. explosives-based demolition.

While I cannot declare with absolute certainty that the twin towers falling was the work of physics and not a nefarious plot by an evil vice-president and his secret legion of freedom-hating evil-doers, it's good enough for me.     :D

"A compilation of demolitions conducted using the French demolition technique of vérinage. This is achieved with hydraulics that push structural members out of alignment, allowing the top portion of a building to then demolish the structure below via gravity alone, without the use of explosives. Note that the collapses are rapid and produce copious dust."

Energy Storage is EASY

I was astounded by another article I saw this morning talking about the problem of storing energy that photovoltaics, wind-power, etc. all face. The article went on to talk about truly massive (city-sized) electrical batteries, ultracapacitors (which'll be great for cars) and other devices. For small-scale use, the problem remains, but for broad-scale power production where energy is only produced during the day, but the amounts of energy being produced are massive, why hasn't anyone thought of digging a big basement and almost filling it with a massive concrete block? When you need to store power, you lift the block up to ground level, and when you want to draw power, you lower it. If you want your power I/O to be very sharp-edged, you use a simple pulley (or massive rotating beam serving as a pulley); multiple pulleys can be rigged for any level of I/O you want. Now, granted, conversion back and forth from mechanical to electrical energy will have losses, but given the non-linear response to compressing a gas (not to mention keeping a pressurized cavern airtight), friction losses from flywheels, etc., it can't be that bad.

But what really gets me is that no-one's mentioned it before even though potential energy is part of high-school physics -- could it be that hard? Really?

Why California is Doomed

I motion that logic, rhetoric and economics be taught in Junior High School, and that any students receiving less than a C on a standardized test thereof be immediately fed to rabid stoats.

Obama Looking Weak

So the full-court press is on to label the Republican opposition to the Rush-to-Health-Care as political obstructionism is on. This is a bad move and an advertisement to anyone watching that the democrats are playing a weak hand. Just like the Bush administration couldn't get any of the democrats to participate in their attempt to reform Socialist Ponzi Administration Security Administration, the Republicans are wisely (per their constituents) dragging their feet on the federal health-care takeover (which may or may not constitute "reform", depending on one's faction of choiceperspective). The Democrats promised up and down to reform the way health-care is provided in this country, and, since they own both the Legislature and the Executive, have no excuse not to pass such a reform. But the thing is, they know it'll suck: until money and stethoscopes grow on trees, such reform will include all manner of rationing, and is liable to have the kinds of customer service made famous by Marge Simpson's twin sisters. If the "reforms" pass by a party-line vote, then the Democrats get all the credit or blame for however it shakes out, and those in power know this'll mean a lot of blame. Such a party-line establishment of nationalized health-care would constitute electoral red-meat for the Republicans, and everyone on the hill knows it.

And Obama & his aides just admitted they don't know what to do about that -- on national TV.

The left-wing will fall in line behind the repudiation of the Republicans for being "political" (OMG, Legislators being political?! How shocking!), and this will work to stave off their constituency temporarily, but in the end they'll either have to gut their program sufficiently that the Repubs can take that home to their 2010 campaigns as a legislative victory, or they'll have to take the larger risk and completely own their health-care program forever-and-ever-amen.

While ex-President Bush could claim that he couldn't line up enough votes to defeat a filibuster (which is the normal way a faction advertises that it hasn't the balls to sign its own checks), President Obama owns his Congress, so if he tarries too long he'll risk being branded a coward, to boot.

If I were a Republican congressman, I might even risk smiling.

California Politicians Slimier than Ever

So the folks here in dreamland have cooked up a way to fix the $26B budget defecit:

* $16B in cuts, except that six $B of that is really just borrowing from the school budget and must be paid back eventually, to the tune of $11B
* $2B in revenues legally belonging to municipalities diverted to state coffers, also to be repaid with some unspecified level of interest -- This isn't the first; if I were a mayor I wouldn't be holding my breath.
* $4B by accellerating withholdings by 10%, temporarily increased taxes that get paid back later come tax-time. Except: by the time you're getting your refund you've already gotten zapped with the latest withholdings. This's the slimiest it's-not-a-tax tax I've ever heard of.
* $1.5B of robbing Peter to pay Paul (at the state level: the municipal level's already been robbed)
* Moving a payday out from this calendar year into next year so that the state workers lose the float on the money and so the payment doesn't have to be calculated in this year's payouts.
* Other unspecified gimmicks.

So while claiming, to great fanfare, that they've finally fixed the problem, California's politicos have done what they've always done: kicked the can down the road so their mess will be Somebody Else's Problem. You know the old joke that you can tell a politician is lying if his lips are moving? Our current pandererspoliticians are doing their part to make even the folks in Beijing and Brussels look honest.