2004-09-17 - 6:33 p.m.

today I have a suggestion on how to diminish the likelihood of tornadoes.

Through my observation of the weather and the behaviours of fluids, it has become apparent that a tornado is the result of a large mass of air "falling into the middle of" another mass of air.

many liquid materials display surface tension characteristics. Water droplets can bounce on each other because the "surface tension" of a patch of the edge of a mass of similar-energy-level particles has an inherent stable arrangement such that it can withstand a force proportional to that exerts by gravity and all outside forces applied according to the molecular density of the substance. If you scale the density of material and strength of surface alignment to the levels found in a large mass of air, the result could be the same, with a large mass of cool air building up over a larger, comparatively moist mass of warm air.

As the cold air mass builds up, sitting on this warm mass, it will naturally push downward such that a well will be made that is centered underneat it, with it's lowest point potentially kilometers lower than the upper edges of the mass.

I surmise that if this weight of water were to reach a critical mass, an initial breakage of cold air would slip down to the ground and "break the seal" as it were, causing a steady spread of the cold air along the ground, under the body of the warm mass of air. This would cause a downward flow of the cold air mass, which as it built up momentum, would cause an increasingly powerful funnel to appear.

Now this is total guesswork and speculation. I'm no trained meteorologist. For instance, it could be the warm air mass that sits on top of a cold one, the point is the surface tension between them is could be sufficient to set up a natural waterfall.

And now to a completely different line of thinking.

What do you suppose the likelihood is that releasing an atomic bomb in the Earth's atmosphere increases the amount of energy stored in the atmosphere?

Further, what do you suppose happens to the probability that a violent storm will be "spawned" in "the tropics" if the amount of energy stored in the atmosphere increases?

It is amazing how many things we as a species don't have a grasp of because the equations needed to comprehend it don't fit in to the rigid structures we teach our children? Linear equations, cellular automata, statistics? How about non-linear dynamics? That sounds like something I want to teach my kid. Something that will help them understand the true meaning of the word "ecology". Something that will give them an insight into what their generation has to comprehend to improve the state of things for everyone.

Things like how sublte the effects of releasing more and more poisons into the atmosphere and oceans, and ingesting more and more of them in increasingly synthetic foods can really be. Effects so subtle that they happen on a much larger time span, meaning they could never be traced back to what actually caused them. At least not directly.

But effects that can be fatal nonetheless. And which can lead to huge disbersements of funds to try to understand why the general population is suffering.

What needs to stop is the allowing of individuals to funnel resources away from groups. If a group is willing to donate resources to that individual, or group, then great. That means the individual or group must have done something nice for them. Like maybe given them something in exchange for the resources. Like money, perhaps. And in fair trade, too. Materials, raw, irreplacable, un-re-minable materials, should always cost the greatest percentage of the product.

An engineer's "thinking time results", while not even as material as the medium they're recorded on, are often considered automatically more valuable than the material used to build the product. A brief ponder should dispel the notion that this is a good idea. Especially when we look back a few centuries at what engineers come up with, and although they forever remain clever considering the state of human knowledge at that point, all but the very best invariably end up being replaced as wrong, or too slow over time.

Wow.. Rambling thoughts.

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