At least a
mile
of the 1/9 IRT subway under the World Trade Center will need
to rebuilt. The project is likely to take two years,
and nobody is prepared
to estimate the cost yet, because they don't want to guess too low.
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
At least a
mile
of the 1/9 IRT subway under the World Trade Center will need
to rebuilt. The project is likely to take two years,
and nobody is prepared
to estimate the cost yet, because they don't want to guess too low.
About 575 feet of the line is totally collapsed, in two separate locations, but subway engineers who have explored the tunnels say that hundreds more feet are structurally unsound, with thick I-beams bent like paper clips and ceilings sagging under the weight of millions of tons of debris from the World Trade Center on the street above.The N/R BMT tunnel also needs work, and will probably be out of service for at least six months. [free registration required]In several places, individual beams from the trade center weighing tons punched through the street, through about seven feet of earth and through the concrete-and-brick tunnel ceiling, and then kept on going into the tunnel floor, where they remain lodged like spears.
Ursula K. Le Guin has a Web page, with a gorgeous color map
of Earthsea as the front page. Inside, along with links to her most
recent books, are excerpts, nine poems, and a short essay
"On
Despising Genres".
[via More
Like This]
Defying expectations, the spacecraft NEAR-Shoemaker
has found not only boulders, but
ponds
of fine
bluish
dust on the surface of the asteroid Eros.
Robinson's paper postulates an electrostatic effect, similar to that indicated on the moon's surface by the Surveyor spacecraft. Particles can build up photoelectric charges with long exposure to the sun, and this charge might separate out finer particles, says Thomas. But he concedes, "This requires a lot of assumptions, and does not explain all the mechanisms."
Tracking down refutation of the latest scare email
got me to the Centers for Disease Control's list of
Current
Health Related Hoaxes and Rumors. Unsurprisingly,
many are related to needles or HIV.
The Onion is back, with a bite:
life has turned into a
bad
disaster movie.
"There are Air Force jets flying over Manhattan and warships in New York harbor, but none of it is exciting or entertaining at all"....Shocked and speechless, we are all still waiting for the end credits to roll. They aren't going to.
A profile of the
Northern
Alliance, the main anti-Taliban force, and some comments
on the haste with which Australia, and the US, are embracing
dubious regimes.
[via Red
Rock Eaters, where Phil Agre and his network of informants
are doing an excellent job of keeping up with current events]
NOAA has a very impressive collection of
altitude
maps of Earth. They're Mercator projections, so you get
lots of Greenland, but you also get North America and Europe
in the familiar, if distorted, shapes.
Sure, with a billion Web pages, it makes sense that one of
them is devoted to the
AK-47. What seems
weird is that guns.ru is a second-level domain.
[via the muted horn]
Derek Brown states
the
case against identity cards:
I am middle aged and middle class, and I live in middle England. It seems I am soon to become, for the first time in my life, a criminal.That's because I will not accept an identity card. If I am issued with one, I intend to commit an offence by destroying it, or maybe sending it back with a polite note saying thank you, but I already know who I am.
The idea that I must prove my identity on demand is abhorrent. And the notion that such a scheme will help to foil terrorism is just plain ludicrous.
It's at best a diversion, and at worst a fundamental assault on liberty.
Too strong? I think not. Frankly, I don't expect to be discommoded by an identity card system, for the reasons given in the first sentence of this article....
If I were black in Brixton, I would not be so sanguine. The whole point of a uniform identity card is that it can be checked on demand....
Fight crime? Is a criminal less likely to rob, defraud, or commit violence if he or she is carrying a bit of plastic? Prevent terrorism? Too silly for words.
CNN has a good three-dimensional
graphic
showing damage to all the buildings around the World Trade Center,
including the undamaged buildings in the area.
[via Red Rock Eaters]
The
Center for Backyard
Astrophysics is a network of amateur astronomers, studying
the light curves of cataclysmic variable stars, including "eruptions
of unusual dwarf novae," and charting the paths of possible
black holes. This is serious research that the big professional
observatories can't dedicate enough observing time for.
The Guardian has a profile of the exiled
ex-king
of Afghanistan, who is interested in going home and heading a
transitional government.
The Web is full of cat pictures; these
shop cats made me
smile. (No pictures of my own cat; she's too shy to work
in a shop.)
A common species of caterpillar, Drepana arcuata
scrapes and drums to defend
its territory when another caterpillar approaches its leaf.
When caterpillars were placed on a leaf they set up housekeeping, nibbling away at the leaf edge and spinning a nest that protects them from the weather and predators.The arrival of another caterpillar prompted the resident to stop eating, back into its nest and begin scraping the leaf with its "oars." That would be followed by drumming with the jaws - one to eight taps per oar scrape - and, as a last resort, scraping with the jaws.
The sounds were loud enough to be heard by humans more than 10 feet away.
Lucy Huntzinger's online journal bears
witness
to the beauty that still exists.
"that government of the people, by the people, for the people
shall
not perish from the earth."
This
montage
of photos from around the world, offering sympathy, is
slow to load, but brought tears to my eyes: the flags are
flying at half-mast over the Kremlin, and the people of Dresden
are lighting candles for us.
The
planned Large Hadron Collider may be able to create
tiny
black holes, and study how they disappear. This will work
only if certain speculations in string theory are true; more
reassuringly, the theorists explain that if they can do it,
100 or more such black holes are created in our atmosphere every
year, and disappear without being noticed.
Jon Carroll points out some
differences
between what happened yesterday and Pearl Harbor:
The maxim should be obvious: first the enemy, then the war....We have now officially joined the global village. It doesn't look a lot like those Intel ads, does it?...
There will be pressure to suspend our freedoms, to allow the government to invade our privacy and control our speech as part of the glossy new war. If terrorists force America to give up its freedoms, then they will have won. If we are stampeded into imprudent action out of fear, then it will once again be true that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. If we use our rage instead of our wisdom, we'll be just another dictatorship, and Sept. 11 will become the day we destroyed ourselves.
The anti-abortion terrorists who call themselves the Nuremberg
Files may be about to discover the limits of their free-speech
protection: they have added
George
W. Bush to their hit-list. [Note: this link is to a story in a
magazine sympathetic to their cause; you can find the extremists
on your own, if you want, but I'm not going there, let alone linking
to it.]
Miss Manners has a
good
answer to intrusive strangers who ask where adopted children
come from.
"Toxic Sludge Is Good For You" is the newest book by
John
Stauber, showing how the PR industry controls news and opinion.
(They don't like the term "toxic sludge," because they're selling it
as fertilizer. But it still stinks.)
An important reminder, from
struckbylightning.org:
Always remember - a statistic is an answer to a question. Etch it into your brain, for this is the rock on which rafts of human interest statistics splinter. When you see a statistic or factoid offered by the media, always remember to play "Jeopardy" with it and ask yourself, to what question is this an answer?
Copyright 2001 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.