The Rocky Mountain News--a paper I took for 4 years while living in Denver--has closed its doors. Some might argue that this is symbolic of the death of the newspaper in general, and the rise of so-called "new" media. But perhaps its parent corporation was poorly managed, and perhaps the existence of two newspapers in the one town was too much. In the 1980s San Diego's two newspapers, the Union and the Tribune, merged to form the Union-Tribune. Saved!
Meanwhile, the ever-eloquent Historiann reminds us that electronic delivery ain't all it's cracked up to be. Her entry here reminds me why I love reading blogs.
And, "The Rest of the Story" is over.
Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread
Ahistoricality on 3/01/2009 1:42 PM:
Funny, I was making quite the opposite point to the one Mr. Jones took: that the staged nature of the protest doesn't necessarily delegitimize it, as long as it's part of a movement with real leadership and real followership. The collusion of a member of the news media, however, is problematic: while "unbiased" may be more than we can ask, "actively campaigning" seems like something his bosses might want to discourage.
Ahistoricality on 3/06/2009 10:44 AM:
Just read a fascinating piece on chimpanzee-human relations; as we integrate environmental studies into history, our relationship with animals is clearly going to be one of the new areas, and one fraught with ethical and political implications.
This article below is an extremely interesting analytical observation.
http://heiwaco.tripod.com/nist3.htm
"What is wrong with debate and listening to both sides of the defining issue of our time? If the official line is so correct and defensible, what does it have to fear from skeptics?"
Paul Craig Roberts (Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration).
Previous analysis of progressive collapse showed that gravity alone suffices to explain the overall collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers.
Abstract of [2] by Zdenek P. Bazant, Jia-Liang Le, Frank R. Greening and David B. Benson
That result applies, strictly speaking, only to a one-dimensional homogenous crush down. Since the top portion was tilted and the sturcture (sic) was not homogeneous, no damage to the top portion is only an approximation to reality.
David B. Benson, writer of [2] to author, 27 January 2009
Read also Anders Bj?an on WTC 7
WTC 1 - Introduction - Learning from Ship Collisions by Anders Bj?an (M.Sc), updated 2 February 2009
The author is a naval architect with 40 years of steel structural design experience including structural damage analysis. He has investigated the structural damage from many ship collisions. The destruction of WTC 1, a plane colliding with a steel framed tower and what follows, is in many respects similar to a collision between two steel ships!
At the moment of contact of A) the 'WTC 1 upper part and lower structure' or B) 'two ships in collision', a certain momentum (mass times velocity), energy (momentum times velocity divided by 2) and force (energy divided by displacement) are involved. Local failures occur, energy is absorbed, friction between failed parts in contact develops, forces and loads are re-distributed and the destruction is always arrested after a while as will be shown below.
It is quite simple to learn what happens in collisions or impacts! Gravity alone will not suffice to crush anything. You have to check more!
Just drop Anything on Something
http://www.ae911truth.org/info/46
There's a rumor afoot that the Santelli rant was astroturf, and the subsequent "tea party" demonstrations the beginning of a new round of fake outrage trying to shift the discussion rightward.
Then I remembered: Rosa Parks wasn't alone, and the resulting boycott was planned in advance. These things can work, if they're planned carefully, and there's nothing really wrong with planning, if you don't misrepresent yourself.