OK. I'll read the paper more carefully in the future.

 

Okay, let's forget the liability of designers, and go back to scientific rigor here, for just a moment.
Sandy is the single best example of how things can be viewed. Should we be putting the scientists in jail?

1. There is a storm brewing up south of Jamaica, but it's okay because it will go out to sea.
2. It is a hurricane and it is laying waste to Jamaica and will cause big problems for Cuba, and it does, but still the computer models having this going over Bermuda and out to sea.
3. Friday midday, I believe, the storm is not going to sea and will make landfall between Virginia Beach and Montauk, and it could be big.
4. Sat. the storm is going to come ashore and it is now Frankenstorm, whatever that could mean, it's Halloween, it must be wearing a mask.
5. It's Sun. morning and the barrier island/shore communities should seek shelter at evac centers on the islands.
6. It's noon the islands should be completely evacuated, within TWO hours the storm speeds up and winds build and the water is already covering Long Beach Island, wow where was the advance notice by our esteemed weather people. Between noon and 2:00PM the seas went from something that you could look at and marvel at, to leaving four inches of sea water standing on the island.

We need to put those guys in jail. We can see the devastation on TV, why didn't they tell us Friday.

Conclusion:
A. This has proven to be a "500 year storm", but no one told us, they just said it would be bad, not the worst storm in written history.
B. It has devastated the barrier islands of NJ which, according the our governor, will NEVER be the same, why didn't they know that.
C. It has devastated the island of Manhattan causing billions of dollars in damage.
D. It has destroyed the house of my inlaws on LBI which has been standing for ~70 years. The storm has washed out to sea WAY too many houses that people will NEVER be able to recover ANYTHING that they did not take with them.

What should the meteorologists have done, called it the storm of the millenium, they didn't becasue no one could know exactly what was to come. It would have been called overhyped by some, (and it fact it was called nothing but hype here on this board), because it didn't affect those people. So let's just lock up Al Roker and Jim Cantore. They either weren'T smart enough to tell us that this was a truly momentous storm, or they were a lying SOB for scaring those who were not affcted.

I go back to science is not opinion, science is provable fact or it's not science.

 

Interestingly the storm center in England did predict both the size and potential severity as much as 8 days before it hit - and still it was worse than they expected.

 

I started to write a really snarky sarcastic post about the Storm...
I was going to start it as "Actually I think we need to blame weather channel."
But with CNN playing in the background playing the never ending re-runs of tragedy after tragedy, It just doesn't feel right.
The reality is they have a show called It Could Happen Tomorrow
first they filmed the episode on New Orleans and the response was immediate.
Before they could even air the episode Katrina hit.
They've been warning about a major hurricane to hit NY for a while now,

The weather guys knew and broadcast it well before the storm.
Six days before the storm I posted asking Legal Bill if he was pulling his boat.

So everyone was truly warned. Sometimes they truly get it right.
It's remarkable that even after calling it Frankenstorm, super storm, etc, and after running out of superlatives, they still managed to understate it.

 

All of this leaves me thinking that the only "science" involved in analyzing and predicting acts of Nature is gained as we pick up the pieces after-the-fact. No matter how much we think we understand hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning, earthquakes, ice/snowstorms, etc, when nature decides to unleash it's wrath, our scientific knowledge and instruments of measurement only serve to document how vulnerable we really are. It also seems to be an exercise in futility to blame someone else for our misfortune if we're caught unprepared by the power of nature.

 

Our knowledge base is so small and changes on a daily basis. To truly understand the severity of any event you must be able to duplicate it over and over and look at all of the variables, "acts are nature" can not be duplicated, at least not at this point, and all we can do is review the variables as we experienced them and then try to hypothesize what would happen if things seem a like they are the same the next time, and of course they will never be exactly the same. We now equate it to the "butterfly" effect.

Next we will need to consider if "fracking" causes earthquakes.....I am sure that the natural gas companies will be certain that it doesn't.

 

But there is the real existence of 'systemic causation' in our knowledge and science.

'The fall broke his leg.' is an instance of DIRECT CAUSATION. It is individual and palpable. It brings about an immediate change.

SYSTEMIC CAUSATION involves a 'type' of cause against a 'type' of result. It may involve one or another of multiples causes. It may be indirect, resulting from a series of direct causes.

Examples of statements involving systemic causation from a discourse perspective would be:

'Driving while intoxicated is a systemic cause of accidents.'
'Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer.'
HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS.
and
'Global warming is causing hurricanes like Sandy.'

These are inferable correlations from observations of direct causation.

As UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff correctly explained recently in an interview:
The precise details of Hurricane Sandy cannot be predicted in advance, any more than when, or whether, a smoker develops lung cancer, or sex without contraception yields an unwanted pregnancy, or a drunk driver has an accident. But systemic causation is nonetheless causal.

 

^^...If we choose to live in "ancient and fragile buildings which have already been partially destroyed by previous earthquakes over the centuries," odds are the "systemic causation" of another earthquake will most likely result in our house falling down. And we need a scientist to tell us that?

 

I think that the issue here is in fact the system as cause. We can be sure that an earthquake will cause damage, but our system does not, as Lakoff says, provide the ability to predict an individual outcome, therefore predicting earthquakes is, most would say, impossible, but predicting that an earthquake will produce damage is a foregone.

BTW, thank you for that quote, I think I will borrow it,with attribution.

 

Since we're going into failure analysis...
Systemic failure is frequently not the failure of a single element but cascading of multiple elements which results in catastrophic failure.

The architect isn't clear in his drawings, the rebar has lower tensile strength than was spec'ed, the contractor reduced the amount of rebar and the concrete was of lower tensile strength than spec'ed and then the footbridge is overloaded as compared to what was originally estimated for loading and the are jumping up and down to the music.....

granted, that was from memory but I seem to recall something to that affect in the Kansas city hotel bridge collapse...
It's the chain of failures which becomes the dramatic collapse.