“I won’t meddle [with the Wall Street Journal] any more than Arthur Sulzberger does [at the New York Times]." -- Rupert Murdoch, quoted by Editor and Publisher

Heh!â„¢

Posted by: Old Grouch in The Press at 15:13:35 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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The night the voicemail lady called him back.
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[Stumbled upon while getting caught up at Dustbury, and dammit C.G., this means that now I've got another blog in my bookmarks!]

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 00:40:16 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Here are details pulled from 2 images in Eric's (ebrandt78's) Flickr set (images link to the complete photos; the entire set is worth a look):

South Piers (looking approximately south-southeast from the north shore). The piers (tops marked by red arrows) appear substantially unchanged. The trusses appear to have walked off the piers to the left (west).
North Piers (viewpoint is from downstream-- east-- on the north side of the river). The north piers tilt noticably to the south. (The western pier is mostly obscured by the eastern one. A part is just visible to the right.) The decking to the north (right) tilted northward, exposing the trusses (see SDB's first photo), which could have created a twisting torque before the attachments broke loose.


Cause or effect?
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UPDATE 070807 19:36: NTSB Chairman on the investigation, below...
more...

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 22:11:07 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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There's been a discussion of the Minneapolis bridge failure over at Steven Den Beste's. In the comment thread, "ubu" linked to his post at Houblog, in which he pointed out some signs of structural failure near the center of the span that appear early in the security camera video. [That last link not verified: I can't do video on this computer.]

In the interest of experimentation, I grabbed the two frames he posted, and overlayed them using The Gimp. The striking thing is that in the time between the first and second frames, the entire right section of the structure dropped what looks like about 10-15 feet. Here's an animation:

It's important to note what you're not seeing here: This is not a sequence of images. It is a "fade" from the first image ubu captured to the second one. Still, the effect is quite pronounced. From this, it appears to me that the buckling in the deck and the deformation of the arch (green arrows) are both results of whatever happened off-camera to the right, but, as ubu points out, failure at the center of the arch could have pushed the bridge's near "feet" off of their concrete piers. (Although the vertical members don't appear to move shoreward at all, they wouldn't have had to move very much.)

So we speculators are not a lot nearer the answer than before. Guess we'll have to await the verdict of the experts. Still, the image is interesting, and I thought I'd share it.
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UPDATE and linkage 070803 16:37: Materials engineering glossary by "notfromaroundhere."  Hattip to commenter "FOH," who posted the link in this comment thread at buzz.mn.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 15:38:23 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Americans have been squandering the infrastructure legacy bequeathed to us by earlier generations... Many of the great public works projects of the 20th century—dams and canal locks, bridges and tunnels, aquifers and aqueducts, and even the Eisenhower interstate highway system—are at or beyond their designed life span. -- Stephen Flynn

Bridges... don’t vote... It has already been calculated that it is cheaper to pay off the aggrieved after a New Orleans drowns, or a Minneapolis’ primary bridge falls into the river, than to actually fix our ancient infrastructure systems - since doing so would divert too much money from the more politically attractive system of direct bribes to voter segments.
-- Bill Quick

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 22:25:51 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Melanie Phillips examines some… um… inconsistencies in global warming climate change theory:

Hang on, you murmur: in any event, aren’t we simultaneously being told that global warming will mean parched summers and winter deluges? Sure — but global warming is a truly miraculous theory. It means that, without a shadow of a doubt, we will have dry summers and wet winters, and wet summers and er, well, wet winters...

Bewildered? Wake up at the back there —haven’t you got it straight yet? We’re going to be frying and freezing, drowning and dehydrating at the very same time. And carbon emissions will be to blame for the planet getting hotter and getting colder, getting wetter and getting dryer. Because global warming means that whatever happens to the weather, wet dry, hot, cold— it’s all our own fault.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 23:28:21 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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