141–150 of 255 posts
To give some sense of the scale of the disaster that would follow a failure, the US considered bombing that dam and releasing all that water in response to a potential chemical attack on US troops during Gulf War I, according to Colin Powell ( http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/script_b.html - search for dams).
They considered an attack that would have killed ~1M people, presumably mainly civilians? sigh smh
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quote from the conclusion: """Extrapolating these results from even the most conservative experimental measurements of the tension under which cavitation occurs it is possible that the cohesive strength of fully degassed water is able to support a continuous vertical column greater than several hundred meters. While the experiment performed here did not reach anywhere near the absolute limit predicted it does shed li…
I wasn't implying that the result from the paper is applicable to draining the dam, just that we should stop explaining the siphon effect in terms of atmospheric pressure now that we know it's not the case.
As long as you are below the limit, you can still claim that the "two sides" of your siphon are held together by the pressure extorted on both sides by our atmosphere. And only as you exceed this limit you'll require the water to resist actively to be "pulled apart".
Unfortunately this interesting property is pretty irrelevant in real-life situations where water you'd like to siphon contains dirt, rocks, crockodiles... And these impurities will make your "water cable" break as soon as (or probably just a little later when...) you reach vacuum on the top, at 10m.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1+atmospheres)+%2F+(d...
You can blame ISIS all you want, but aren't the 1M people who'll be affected by this basically supporters of ISIS? As you said, they're ISIS's own citizens. So basically they're being hoist by their own petard. Every nation gets the government it deserves.
Do you seriously believe that an organization known for publicly beheading people, imposing arbitrary violent pseudo-Islamic rule, cultural genocide, etc... is supported by a significant part of the population of the territory they took over? The answer is - no, they are not basically supporters of ISIS. A few certainly are, but not many. They're people trapped under the tyrannical rule of strongmen who came to power…
If you're not willing to stand up and fight when a tiny number of people is oppressing you, then why do you deserve anything better? Who else is supposed to liberate you? Do you think that you're entitled to having a bunch of foreigners come risk their lives to liberate you from your own people (ISIS is headed by people who are native to the area, they're not foreigners, though many of their fighters are). That sounds like a pretty big entitlement mentality to me.
The power vacuum you talk of only existed because the people in that area allowed it to exist.
And yes, I do believe that a significant part of the population of their territory supports their actions. And no, their ruls is not "pseudo-Islamic", it's Islamic in the truest sense. Go read the Islamic holy books: they're following them to the letter. They're doing Islam correctly, just like every fundamentalist does their religion correctly; everyone else just cherry-picks the parts they like and ignores or whitewashes the really horrible parts.
You can blame ISIS all you want, but aren't the 1M people who'll be affected by this basically supporters of ISIS? As you said, they're ISIS's own citizens. So basically they're being hoist by their own petard. Every nation gets the government it deserves.
> Every nation gets the government it deserves. This is a somewhat radical stance. When an armed group seizes the control of a city, the citizens don't always have the ability to fight back. There are plenty of people who are risking their lives and have lost it in ISIS control territory, telling them they "deserved" it is really rash. Let's reverse the point of view and let's take 1M of Americans. Do you think I wil…
Now with Mosul, we're talking about 1M people. That's far, far more than the number of active ISIS fighters and other staff in the city. Have you never heard of guerilla warfare? If a population revolts, there isn't much a poorly-led and ill-trained military force can do to stop them. The people there are not revolting, so they're either cowards or complicit (and likely both). The people always have the ability to fight back, even if it has to be done as a war of attrition (use makeshift weapons to ambush small numbers of ISIS troops). Even in Nazi Germany and occupied France, there were resistance efforts from the local populations. Ever hear of the Maquis? ISIS doesn't have anywhere remotely near the resources and training that the Wehrmacht had in occupied France.
To give some sense of the scale of the disaster that would follow a failure, the US considered bombing that dam and releasing all that water in response to a potential chemical attack on US troops during Gulf War I, according to Colin Powell ( http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/script_b.html - search for dams).
They considered an attack that would have killed ~1M people, presumably mainly civilians? sigh smh
[0] https://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_cha_chapter13...
[1] https://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_cou_us_rule42
> The dam was designed by a Swiss firm of consultants and built by a German-Italian consortium in 1984. Water began seeping through in 1986, when it became apparent that the geological issues were worse than the consultants had predicted. I doubt that this was an innocent failure on their part. There was a huge financial incentive for these firms to find some way to validate this project. Successive foreign consultan…
I just don't understand why you assume that the risks were not disclosed to the government. In my eyes, it's way more likely that the government decided to go ahead anyway. This was one of Saddam Hussein's prestige projects - telling him that it couldn't be done could've been fatal.
I'm not suggesting science is apolitical, but I feel like there's some merit to "We wanted to build a broken dam because {political considerations}, but the {science branch} vetoed it."
Kind of like a Supreme Court, except informed by scientific knowledge rather than law.
To add to my prior comment, it seems like expending military resources to retake this area is a waste, since the citizens there support ISIS. Instead of getting soldiers killed fighting to "liberate" people who probably don't want to be liberated, maybe they should have just dropped a bunch of leaflets on Mosul, explaining that the dam isn't being maintained under ISIS control, and without maintenance will fail in a…
You can blame ISIS all you want, but aren't the 1M people who'll be affected by this basically supporters of ISIS? As you said, they're ISIS's own citizens. So basically they're being hoist by their own petard. Every nation gets the government it deserves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every nation gets the government it deserves. This is a somewhat radical stance. When an armed group seizes the control of a city, the citizens don't always have the ability to fight back. There are plenty of people who are risking their lives and have lost it in ISIS control territory, telling them they "deserved" it is really rash. Let's reverse the point of view and let's take 1M of Americans. Do you think I wil…
Do I think you'll find 1M people in America who support Obama's administration? Um, yes... He was elected by about half the population, after all. I can easily find 1M people who still prefer to have him as President. Heck, right now with our current frontrunners, there's people who'd like to have another 4 or 8 years of Obama rather than Trump or Hillary. Now with Mosul, we're talking about 1M people. That's far, fa…