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| “Clearly”, says the engineer, “the glass is twice as big as it needed to be”. This sort of humor doesn’t bother me, especially as an engineer, even though it contains an aura of exaggeration and stereotyping. Leave it to an engineer to skirt the issue of optimism vs. pessimism with a practical but totally irrelevant solution. Some things deserve making fun of if done in the right way. But I found a recent Target advertisement to be more than annoying. In the ad a semi-talented would-be musician, representing a stereotypical music teacher, sings about all the things that his students will need for school, principally denim. I thought the commercial was done in bad taste and not at all complementary to the teaching profession, not even in a humorous way. Moreover, the music teacher in the ad introduces his song with a lie, “In order to sound good”, he says, “You need to look good”. Now the music teacher that I know (my wife) teaches that each student has an individual beauty that can and must be developed in order to be realized, regardless of outward appearances. The proposition “In order to sound good you need to look good” is presented in the ad as a maxim, which is to say, a universal truth that is in and of itself beyond question. The rest of the message follows from and depends upon this maxim. Once identified as a maxim, however, it is not merely sales puffery. It’s a heinous lie, exchanging the lasting value of your child’s self image for a commodity that serves only to enrich its perpetrators. Identifying this method of deception not difficult, but it is essential in teaching young minds to think critically – so I am hoping that this advertisement will be transcribed and used by teachers everywhere as an instructional tool. | | |
| Huckabee’s cartoons were even more horrific than I had anticipated. By giving young people categorical answers governed by racial stereotypes, the cartoons stop bona fide learning in its tracks. Summarized by the preview on its promotional web site, the cause of WW II was the evil propensity endemic to Japanese and Germans. Young people will be inclined to look no further. Will they find out for themselves that Germany was virtually dragged into the prior war by the alliance Serbia made with Russia subsequent to fighting between Serbia and Austria–Hungary (Russia was already threatening Germany’s eastern border). Will they uncover the history behind the amassing of French troops on Germany’s western border just prior to WW II? - the Allied effort to threaten a forceful break-up of Germany in order to enforce payment for WW I reparations with money that, especially due to the worldwide depression, Germany did not have? Will the young people who watch these cartoons learn to identify and resist the temptations that confronted Germany prior to the racially charged insanity that was soon to overwhelm it? I don’t think so. Will the young people who watch these cartoons discover the refusal by the United States to ratify the racial equality clause which Japan introduced into the peace negotiations of 1919 (after they fought on our side) as Japan's only hope for economic survival in the newly emerging world of international commerce? Will they identify the effect of our racial bias as the compelling force of Japan’s alternative survival method: colonialism in China leading to WW II? No! Why should they bother, once convinced that “those people” were simply evil and we were not, which is to say, they were as morally inferior as the cartoons suggest. Then there was Huckabee’s cartoon about Reagan. It didn’t surprise me that Huckabee characterized the threat that poverty presents to our country with a black man ready to mug you with a knife. Seeing this, will young white people be encouraged to explore avenues of faith and courage developed by hardship in the black community (it is obvious from Scripture that God selects those who poor to be rich in faith), or will they be more inclined pursue a trickle down economic to keep “those people” from acting up? I think the answer is obvious. I won’t even get into the broad based characterization of Muslims in the first cartoon, where much of the media has concentrated its attention. What bothers me the most is that this bald faced racism is being packaged and sold as Christianity. It bothers me more that there is no apparent groundswell of outrage among Christian spokesmen. If I were Muslim, I would have nothing to do with this thing that they are calling "Christianity". | | |
| Who knows if the media figures are right - but it's all we have to go by - so let's multiply! Today the news reported that BP is spending 1 million dollars a day on the clean-up effort. Wow! That's a lot of money. The news also updated the figure of the amount of oil that's being skimmed from the surface to 50,000 barrels a day. Wow! That's progress. Ok, now 50,000 barrels a day times $78 per barrel = 3.9 million dollars a day. There's no financial reason to plug the leak (for BP). Why not plan a time consuming operation that will take as long as possible, like the "bottom kill"?, says BP. Americans will go for it. | | |
| The enormity of the operation in Louisiana hides the easy math. Pressure multiplied by area equals force. Divide force by length to get the frictional force per foot that a cylindrical plug would need to withstand.
Here are the figures, all available from the media: 2,300 lbs/sq inch pressure at the mouth of the well times the area of a 21 inch pipe divided by 5208 feet, which is the length BP demonstrated it was capable of inserting a 4 inch tube into the well. Answer: 150 POUNDS OF FORCE PER FOOT!
Naval Weapons has been contacted, and are aware of these figures. Today, as the media prepares us to “accept” a continuous increase in contamination until BP can supposedly fix the leak in August, I think I am entitled to know why our armed forces have not been authorized to design something as straight forward as an explosively expandable plug capable of withstanding a force as little as 150 pounds per foot.
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| It didn’t take long for me to discover that the statutory limit on liability for mishaps on oil rigs, which is a law that supposedly protects smaller operations, is about 75 million dollars. So now that the disaster substantially exceeded this limit, the 75m becomes a “fixed cost”and it is financially more expedient for BP to stick a tube into the well and extract revenue than it is to plug the leak. I am expecting the condition to worsen beyond the extent that anyone had imagined unless our government more forcefully intervenes in the engineering effort. | | |
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