Gooch

There is some excellent info on that link. Thank you for posting it.

I sortof disagree. No cyclists should be on Westheimer. Better alternates exist. However... Two factors to consider. First, motorists aren't looking for cyclists on sidewalks when turning right. Right hooks are one of the most dangerous threats between cars and motorists. They are (understandably!) looking left for crossing traffic. This makes it necessary to stop at every single intersection to look for turning motorists. Second... depends on your average speed. When I'm out training, I'm averaging between 20-25+mph. Far too fast to mix it up with pedestrians walking along the side walk. Those closing speeds are far too high to be safe for ped or cyclist, especially when adjacent to roads where the automotive traffic is (supposedly) limited to 35mph. I can't even begin to tell you of the close calls, dirty looks, and curses thrown my way in Memorial Villages, where bikes are forced upon the sidewalks. Sidewalks in the long run can provide a false sense of security.

BikeHouston Annual Meeting - Tues 1/26/10, 6:30p CST Gina Mitteco, pedestrian-bicyclist coordinator of the Houston-Galveston Area Council, will talk on the future of bicycling in the region Tuesday, January 26, 2010, at the Annual Meeting of BikeHouston, Houston’s organization that advocates making the city safe and accessible for cyclists. The meeting will begin with a reception at 6:30 p.m. followed by the program at 7 p.m. in the first floor conference room at the Houston Environmental Center, 3015 Richmond. Food and refreshments will be provided by El Meson Restaurant. Mitteco, who joined H-GAC in 2008, will give an overview of H-GAC’s Pedestrian-Bicycle Program, discuss upcoming initiatives and update BikeHouston on the Regional Bikeway plan. She has a Master of Arts degree in Community and Regional Planning from the University of British Colombia and worked as a transportation consultant before taking her current post. While living in Vancouver, Matteco enjoyed the benefits of car-free living by relying on the city’s extensive network of bicycle boulevards, pedestrian friendly destinations, and transit for all of her transportation needs. In addition to Mitteco’s talk, Robin Stallings, Executive Director of Bike Texas / Texas Bicycle Coalition from Austin will provide a legislative update on bicycling initiatives pending before the Texas Legislature this year. BikeHouston is a local Houston organization promoting bike access, safe bicycling, education, and public awareness of the personal and community benefits of cycling. The meeting is open to all cyclists and anyone interested in learning about cycling in Houston.

Not entirely unreasonable... but 'runaway' temperatures did not happen during the Mideival Warming Period when Greenland was green and temperatures were warmer than they are predicted to become in the next 100 years. I think the greatest danger from GW is that it takes focus away from much more threatening problems. We're taking research resources and diverting public attention from far more hazardous things like smoking, waterway pollution, polluted drinking water, particulates, and volatiles in the air. Threats that stand to kill us dead from cancer, lung disease, and lack of clean water. Threats we know can be quantified, mitigated, and elimated as risk to our well being. Instead... we get an attempt at global taxation on a minor problem that may, or may not, be a significant threat. Something seems out of whack with that.

If it were only that simple. There's a ton of derivative work based on EAU-CRU. For example, we learned this week that NASA and Univ. of Alabama Huntsville sattelite-based temperature measurements for the last 20-ish years have been calibrated against EAU-CRU's "processed" historic database. So now those measurements are suspect. Unfortunately EAU-CRU disposed of the raw data used to create their "processed" data series. We can't reconstruct it sans "processing". Plus we do not know how many contrarian papers were barred from publishing. I know of a remote-sensing paper that was shunned (because?) it concluded temperatures have not risen significantly over the last 25-years. The reason cited... it wasn't calibrated against NASA or CRU's data series... We need to be careful with doomsday scenarios. Remember in the early 70s we were doomed to an ice age. In the late 70s we were going to run out of oil in less than 25 years. Then in the 80s it was ozone hole. In the 90s it was Y2k. Then it was "global warming". Now we're hearing about the 2012 Mayan calandar thing. It seems there's always something going cause our immediate demise. Besides...There are enough thermodynamic holes in the AGW theory to not fear it. You inadvertantly pointed one out. Why would we supposedly see GW effects in the polar regions first? GW is powered by one single thing - sunlight. CO2 cannot create, store, or transfer a single watt of heat. None. GW effects should be obsereved first -and greatest- where the sun has the greatest energy. At the mid-lattitudes.

Thats a great summary! Unfortunately... these guys actively tried to subvert Step 12 by stacking the review boards. There were so many examples I don't know how to whittle them down to quote them here. These are two famous ones... Blah. That's not so bothersome. It happens all. the. time. in peer reviews. Bothersome is subverting Steps 13...?? Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have for years been trying unsuccessfully to duplicate the published results coming from the UEA-Hadley and Mann. They are referred to as "the two MMs" and "M&M" in many of the hacked emails. They asked for help, because they could not reproduce the results and were stonewalled by UEA-CRU. They asked for input data and were told No! After filing FOI requests they were told the data had been accidently deleted. Then suddenly it was located, but they still couldn't have it, because it was too dangerous that the data would be used "incorrectly". Phil Jones said: This was all reported by BBC earlier this year. Jones refusal to disclose set off alarm bells in the scientific community. Perhaps that inspired the hacker/whistleblower? Finally they said they didn't have permission to disclose. That's where it stands today. Behind the scene; the emails tell a different story.... The CRU station data is believed to be the the data on the graphs I posted above. They didn't like publications that required data submission for review very much either... (For context: RMS=Royal Meterological Society)

More info on the "40's Blip"... Keep in mind they are discussing how to remove actual measured temperatures. As a modeler, measured data is your best friend, not something to impeach. The raw data is in this ...PDF File... UEA-CRU fought against releasing this data for years, including evading FOI requests. The reason's pretty obvious. It looks nothing like a hockey-stick curves included in the IPCC and Al Gore's movie. While some stations show spikes in the 2000's, many stations show hotter decades in the '40's than the '00. IOW the temperature rise we've seen over the last decade could very likely be an anomoly rather than a trend. There's observed climatic precendent for it. This is a direct contradiction of the IPCC conclusions that the present warming is unusual, and will continue going forward.

I did. Remenber the IPCC "consensus"? Some background, they want to stick with a post '61 time period to avoid the "40's Blip". This was a time period for which many temperature stations reported temps hotter than present. Thus debunking the "hottest decade on record" and "hockey stick" curves. IOW, the current warming we're seeing this last decade have occured (and abated) this century. The raw data was hacked, confirming this.

Accept the premise, but the emails and data don't cover a single incident. They reach back to 1996 and included cooking the books for the landmark IPCC reports. Mike Mann (Al Gore's personal climatologist) is busted in these emails. Not the first time. He comes across like a complete crybaby twit (not that it matters). Everything at EAU-CRU's questionable from the hacking. At this point any derivative works based on these guys need to be reexamined. Hansen's work (NASA) had been discredited previously. The amount of "validated" work is shrinking rapidly. It is possible that the same conclusions could be reached if the flaws were "fixed". But it begs the question... why cook the books in the first place? It's kinda like the OJ trial when Furhman got caught giving false statements. As a juror.. what parts of a liar's work is truthful, and how do you determine? Someone needs to start from fresh. With an open approach. The groundwater modeling community took that approach years ago. And today there are numerous fully documented (incl. flaws), well validated, widely accepted modeling tools available. Until the climate community does... this their validity will always be called into question.

The larger point is that if relying on the ad hominem argument... that if funding sources invalidate the skeptics, they would also invalidate those promoting global warming. It's mutually assured destruction of science... Actually, it's not not a scientific technique at all -it's a political technique. As a numerical modeler... It isn't important who pays for it! What matters are the input data>method>calibration>results. Until this hacking... UEA-CRU were hiding their input data and method. Now it's coming to light and there are significant scientific questions in all four areas.

Tha's funny. Because the UEA-CRU guys were working with Exxon too. From one of the hacked emails... They were also taking funding from Siemens and some other corps who have large interests in alternative energy business. This would be the same conflict-of-interest the skeptics have, just the other direction. You can read ALL of the emails at this link: http://www.eastangli...s.com/index.php Some pretty egregious stuff in there. I'll work up some exerpts this evening and let y'all decide for yourselves...

NICE!! Actually, plastic doesn't refer to the material substance. In engineering terms plastic is any material that when bent, stretched, etc. doesn't return ( 'spring back' elastically) to it's original shape. At those temps if you bend steel... it won't bend back... thus it has no substantive strength...

Unfortunately, that's misleading to some folks that can't (or won't) read a table. Steel doesn't suddenly lose its strength at this magic temperature. It's strength slowly degrades with increasing temperature starting as low as 250F (4% loss) By 800F it's lost 40% and by 1100F it has no practical elastic strength. It's plastic.

Something else I thought about... the Windsor didn't have two massive collapsing buildings adjacent to it. We think of buildings as static and immovable. They are not. The WTC1 and WTC2 collapse no doubt shook the crraapp out of WTC7. Given that earthquakes are not common in NYC, the building likely wasn't designed for this type of motion.

I'm sure 110 degrees is a typo. Two samples of temperature de-rating tables regularly in use. They are for tubulars, but the stress formula are based on tensile strength of the material. 1) http://www.controlan...4200TS-0604.pdf Scroll to Page 3, Table 8. Steel loses roughly 30% of its design strength by 650F. By 800F it's lost 40%, and it falls offf a cliff after that so fast as to be unrecommended. 2) You can go to http://www.cycla.com...s_GRI000076.pdf Scroll to Page 33, Table 4.3. Roughly same values in the ASME code. If my somelady wasn't calling me to spoon duty I could come up with more... It's not like it's a big secret. You simply can't say steel generally fails around any specific temperature. Failure temperature will depend on how it's loaded. And every beam is loaded differently. If the beam is strong enough to sacrifice 20% of its load it would fail somwhere around 700F. If the beam were designed with 30% extra capacity it could endure to about 1000F. Typically in my industry, we designed for ~50% safety margin. But if a beam were distorted by... say... an aircraft or debris impact... the remaining neighboring beams would be carrying the failed beam's load with no safety margin. Meaning you could see heat induced failure as low as 2-300F. Perhaps someone can confirm, do building structural engineers typically analyse for damaged columns, beams and trusses? I suspect they don't...

Yes! And the steel gets much more flexy starting as low as 200F. You don't have to melt steel to weaken it tremendously. Two types- tensioned members and compression members hold the building 'up' vertically. You only need very small distortions in compressed members and singular failue of a tension member to cause incipit collapse. Think of it this way for compressed members... you can stand on a soda can. But the minor distortion caused by plucking causes a complete instantaneous collapse. Building columns are similar. The structure relies on columns being both vertical and straight. Add some heat, and they are not only weakened but distorted by warping. Collapse requires little damage. Think of tensioned members like a piece of fabric. Tension members are make up a lattice just like fibers in a fabric. Pull on a piece of fabric with a solid edge and it's very strong. Cut a small slit in the edge and pull again, and it rips easily. The WTC Tower collapses and they followed this ripping pattern, starting at the top and continuing until reaching the bottom. Floor-by-floor, lattice-by-lattice. Ripping down from the original small damage locus, pulling away to the sides slightly. Rember the mushroom-top shape of debris as they fell? Collapse can occur quite slowly too. This it makes it look 'controled' and progressive. First one colum fails, which overloads its two neighbors. Those two neighbors hold for the moment, because we always design building "too" strong. But, eventually they fail because they are carrying the load of the first failed column. This overloads the 4 surrounding members which overloads 8, then 16, then 32, etc.. This is why it's an implosion, and the building doesn't fall over like a Jenga. That's a far too simple comparison. Right off the top, the Windsor did not have parts of it's truss structure compromised by impact. (Remember the fabric & can examples) We don't know what factor-of-safety was used in the steel design loads; or how heavily the members were loaded. Lightly loaded beams would have more excess strength to lose due to heat before failing. We don't know what alloy of steel was used. Diffrent alloys = different heat effects. We also don't know what the truss/column structure design pattern was. The are certainly different. And different load paths will tolerate weakening/warping better than others. Tension members would survive heat better than compressed members for example. Were the colums O-shaped or I-shaped? That too would make a difference on how much distortion they could tolerate before failure. Gussets would also make a huge difference. Did either builing include them? Donno. IOW there's a lot more to consider than they both had a fire and are both steel framed.

Why do you say that? Perhaps, because not everyone agrees? It's tempting to label dissenters stupid or non-thinking. It's course and debasing. I *do* hear a lot of that in this thread. Labeling the opposition stupid doesn't make it so. By legislation or regulation? No. By initmidation? Yes. First he publically calls out ABC to stop co-op with FOX news. (Co-op is a huge deal in WH coverage). This was followed with an attempt to bar FOX news from a pool interview- amounting to censure. That's an overreach, and the other networks called the Administration out on it. The attempt is offensive, and *perhaps* telling of this Administration's mindset. To dismiss the attempt would be... er... not critically examining the Administration's actions. :-) They don't like the FOX coverage (understandibly). They made an run at shushing them. And failed. That may be bad for Obama's agenda, but in the long run, good for the nation.

What is the WH is so scared of? It's a question worth asking. If FOX is so unbalanced... and their commentators absurdly out of whack... people *will* figure that out. They did when Dan Rather forged documents -in less than 24hours! Does the WH believe the American people are too stupid to think ciritcally? How insulting and elitist. One can only wonder why they feel so threatened. Regardless of intent... It's incredibly dangerous to let government filter news though intimidation, much less cheer for it. Manipulation of the press is something all totalitarian governments have in common. There's a reason the press' freedom is secured in the *First* Amendment. We should trust the American people to figure out the truth from an open set of sources, more than we trust government to tell us the truth about their own actions and failures.

More than you ever wanted to know about business NBER's cycle timing: http://wwwdev.nber.o...recessions.html From CalculatedRisk: Also keep in mind NBER doesn't make cycle declarations until some time after they've occurred. They always operate in hindsight, which makes things a lot easier.

Work on the trestle bridge continues. . .

Nice smear. Opposition to illegal immigration is not in most cases founded in xenophobia. It's the rule of law, national security, and Constitutional responsibility of the Federal government. Selectively enforcing law is a dangerous practice. If the border and existing immigration laws were enforced this wouldn't even be an issue.

http://washingtontim..._cube_position1 I'm not sure his words lead to the conclusion in the slug paragraph and headline. But he is taking a pretty vague position in the pull quotes. It's also significant to recognize who the audience was. Pragmatically, I don't see how we can start turing away illegal aliens from health benefits at this point. We don't do it now. And it's moral bankruptcy to create an underclass that are 2nd class human beings. Yet another reason to enforce the border and existing immigration law.

You're putting a lot of words into my mouth. I didn't say any of that. It's just another data point. Take it for what it is. I'm not interested in arguing over it. "The time for bickering is over".

http://www.investors....aspx?id=506199

I've long stated that we already have socialized medicine, veiled as "insurance" and "medicaid". Much of the failings we're seeing now are symptomatic of socialized systems -not free market failures. It's a radical idea, but I wish we could go back to the days of paying for our own healthcare. Everyone says "but I can't afford it". Incomes always grow to meet the necessity level. Or we'd see rising costs subside. There's no greater power for reducing costs that if customers refuse to pay the industry-inflated rates we see today. Does a Tylenol really need to cost (or worth even) $13? Overall, we could probably, as a society, survive just fine with a lot less healthcare. Or grandparents certainly did. Everyone talks of the shambles of the "system". But I can't name a single hospital that doesn't have an ongoing or recent expansion project. Business seems to be booming, and there's no shortage of capex in the industry.