Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Wed May 20, 2015 2:51 pm

I'm not a physicist, but it sounds batshit to me. The idea that two jets could produce anything like the necessary kinetic force to do dick to a weather system seems off by a lot of zeros.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed May 20, 2015 4:45 pm

BOMBS on the other hand . .
If the inside of a Tornado is basically a low pressure environment, would a sufficiently large bomb that produces huge ammounts of over pressure instead not be able to explode a hurricane?

sounds like this:
Yoko Tsuno 9
La Fille du vent (The Daughter of the Wind) 1979 Yoko goes to Japan to visit her father, who is researching the creation of artificial tornadoes but is being threatened by his rival Kazuki, who wants to use the tornado machine as a weapon. 2-8001-0633-6

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed May 20, 2015 5:00 pm

Also off by a lot of zeros. Maybe multimegaton nukes would do it.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed May 20, 2015 5:02 pm

Hmm, yeah, now that i looked it up, they used nukes in Yoko Tsuno as well i think.

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Wed May 20, 2015 6:16 pm

NOAA actually has a article explaining why this wouldn't work. They apparently get asked that a lot.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed May 20, 2015 6:36 pm

*pointy ears* fascinating!

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Wed May 20, 2015 9:19 pm

If the inside of a Tornado is basically a low pressure environment, would a sufficiently large bomb that produces huge ammounts of over pressure instead not be able to explode a hurricane?

Only if it's a Sharknado.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Thu May 21, 2015 1:46 am

And if you're Certifiably Australian and have access to a rooftop Home Depot that stocks explosives.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Fri May 22, 2015 2:19 am

Why'd the cock picture thread get locked? It seemed fairly innocuous.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Fri May 22, 2015 5:21 pm

I was actually wondering the same thing.

Post by **fbmf** » Fri May 22, 2015 10:32 pm

It also seemed pointless, even by the standards of The Den.

Game On,
fbmf

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
I suppose if there is a hue and a cry and it just has to come back, I'd be willing to merge it with the Image Macros thread.
[/TGFBS]

AndreiChekov · Post by **AndreiChekov** » Sat May 23, 2015 3:57 am

Shrapnel wrote:And if you're Certifiably Australian and have access to a rooftop Home Depot that stocks explosives.

Americans have access to tannerite.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Sat May 23, 2015 3:59 am

fbmf wrote:[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
I suppose if there is a hue and a cry and it just has to come back, I'd be willing to merge it with the Image Macros thread.
[/TGFBS]

That may not be a bad idea, actually, since it would save the gems from that thread from the mists of the back pages.

AndreiChekov wrote:
Shrapnel wrote:And if you're Certifiably Australian and have access to a rooftop Home Depot that stocks explosives.
Americans have access to tannerite.

Actually, I was referring to the rant/review I did of Sharknado a while back, which I admit is esoteric even by my standards.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat May 23, 2015 7:32 am

What am I missing about The Great Gatsby (the book)?

When it was assigned in high school, I thought it was vastly overrated and one of the more boring books I've ever been told to read by a teacher. And yet there are people who think it's the greatest, most important book ever written. I'm not saying my opinions are flawless, I mean, I liked Catcher in the Rye (for some reason I identified with a whiny middle class kid who felt like his life was meaningless on the edge of adulthood. I can't imagine why...).

Hell, I can even sort of understand why people might have liked it when it was written. But I really can't understand what people like so fucking much about that barrel of cocks.

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Sat May 23, 2015 8:51 am

I remember Catcher in the Rye in grade 12 English. I blew it off 2 chapters in and read my own books. The teacher in that class was a total fuckup and I ended up quitting it. What made my day on the day I left was that I got the top mark on the big test about Catcher in the Rye, beating out everyone that actually had read it. Couldn't stand it and it seemed predictable enough.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Sat May 23, 2015 9:33 am

The Great Gatsby is probably the best of the deconstructions of the rags-to-riches narrative, and that narrative is a really important part of the American identity.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sat May 23, 2015 3:11 pm

Prak wrote: Hell, I can even sort of understand why people might have liked it when it was written. But I really can't understand what people like so fucking much about that barrel of cocks.

Funny thing about this is that The Great Gatsby was largely a flop in its day.

But yeah, it's relation to Horatio Alger stories is a big deal, but I'd also argue that Fitzgerald's ambivalent view of women is pretty interesting. Daisy Buchanan is basically 1920s Skylar White--she's not particularly sympathetic and many people are tempted to view her as the villain even though it's actually a bit batshit to expect her to just uproot her life for the love of a fraud.

Count Arioch the 28th · Sat May 23, 2015 5:04 pm

I feel the same way about Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I always thought that if they want to ban books at schools, they should let the students ban one for every book they ban because I feel my life would be a lot better had I not had to read that.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Sat May 23, 2015 5:30 pm

Why are the books we read in school so... Horrid?

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Sat May 23, 2015 5:32 pm

Because they're selected to be significant rather than entertaining?

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat May 23, 2015 5:39 pm

Maj wrote:Why are the books we read in school so... Horrid?

Because post-modernism is in vogue and the curriculum is based on the Best Books selected by a bunch of old people who, when they were alive, generally agreed that tragedy and misfortune made for a good book. Or people being horrible people. And the Reading List has a lot of inertia.

Their tastes ARE predictable, though. When I read the first description of Phineas in A Separate Peace, I looked at the teacher and went, "Yep, he dies."

One of the things I'm most pleased about is getting one of my English teachers to read Small Gods. It popped up on the curriciulum at my high school a couple of years after I left, her having argued it up the ranks. It's not something gone over in class, but it IS an option for the 'read the book, take the test' field.

Edit: Re: significance.

I can't say I found much significant in A Separate Peace. Didn't come out a more insightful person after reading a Brave New World. Animal Farm did not give me any epiphanies. Mice and Men didn't do much for me.

Maybe I'm just a philistine, but I found a lot of the reading list just...predictable. And, honestly, dated. It's like Dune: Revolutionary and amazing when it came out, but the world's moved on.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat May 23, 2015 5:45 pm

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Because they're selected to be significant rather than entertaining?

Fictional books should be significant for being good at entertaining. If you want to show how powerful fiction can be, you don't want to choose something that is shit at entertaining people.

Personally my opinion, it comes down to:
1) When people force you to do shit, you enjoy it less (See, people get paid more they hate the activity, even the same activity).
2) Different people like different kinds of books, and so any curriculum is going to have a bunch of books that are not your favorite style.
3) Books that are "meaningful" are meaningful to a specific culture, and that culture is choosing the books that a different one has to read. Like, racism was a big deal, and still is a big deal, but the way it is a big deal is different now. So while something like that one about the court case translates pretty well, other racism books don't. Any like, holocaust books hardly work at all, because fundamentally the tyranny and oppression we deal with is completely different kinds now. And kids are the least capable of making the connections needed to figure out why this stuff is relevant.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sat May 23, 2015 6:12 pm

Personally, I have been unable to get more than halfway through The Great Gatsby despite multiple attempts.

As for Thomas Hardy's works, they expose a central problem with high school reading lists: books pointing out the issues with Victorian sexual mores and the disruption of traditional farming methods are totally irrelevant to contemporary teenagers. I am continuously disgusted at how poorly curricula manage to balance material that counts as "timeless classics" with material that counts as "currently relevant". Seriously, only about 2% of books on reading lists Link were first published in my lifetime - and I'm old enough to be a father to kids in high school now.

While kids absolutely should learn about timeless themes like Gilgamesh's quest for immortality, Beowulf's heroic journey, Romeo and Juliet's tragic love affair, Dickens's depictions of class warfare, Yossarian's desire to escape a system of insanity, A zillion folk's depictions of the evils of racism in the US (and the irony of how many of the works condemning hard racism are still racist themselves) Orwell and Huxley's fears of totalitarianism - there really are limits to how much you can expect them to care about the nuances of Victorian morality, the 1920's Expat situation in Paris, the legitimacy of former rum-runners during Prohibition, the plight of Migrant Farmers in the Dust Bowl years the ripples of 60s counterculture. And when you start having to ignore things like:

Stallman's manifestos and their implications for current IP law as it interacts with those gadgets all those kids are carrying around to fit those in;
or
I Am Malala and how it ties into the tradition of crusades between Christians and Muslims which is going to inform our next couple of wars;
or
50 Shades' legitimization of both fanfic and certain fetishes and how that ties into the type of writing as recreation current students are most likely to do.

to make room for the above categories, you are actually doing your students a disservice by not preparing them adequately for the life they are already living.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sat May 23, 2015 7:07 pm

The Books you get to read in school are terrible by definition, because they are not written for/meant to be read by children usually.
That's the same all around the planet i guess.
Germany at least has the very same problem.

The only time i enjoyed reading in school was when our english teacher basically said:"fuck the school teaching plan, we are reading stephen king in english."
That was what got me into wanting to actually learn english.
Not just the basic stuff tought in school anyway.
Slang, idioms, how to actually hold a fragging conversation be in in the form of text or spoken words.
When i went on to IT Training my teacher there was NOT happy about that, because i had done everything needed for an A in the first half of the year already.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Sat May 23, 2015 7:10 pm

Josh wrote: the 1920's Expat situation in Paris

Besides being about the 1920s expat situation in Paris, The Sun Also Rises is also a decent primer on existentialism, and it has puns and dick jokes. I would say that makes it worth reading.