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The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

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Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

#31

Post by dmd »

boothby wrote: post #30
dmd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Area isn’t notably affected by fractal boundaries. Only perimeter is.

Can you explain this more? It seems trivial to extrude a 2d coastline along a third dimension to produce a paradoxical areal calculation corresponding precisely to the perimeter paradox...

If you extrude a coastline into a wall the wall's surface area will blow up the same way the measured perimeter does, but that;s because you've turned a boundary-length problem into the area of a different object. It still doesn't mean the country's ordinary map area becomes paradoxical, the extra boundary detail only affects a vanishingly thin strip near the edge, so the enclosed 2D area stays well behaved.

Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

#32

Post by boothby »

dmd wrote: post #31
boothby wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain this more? It seems trivial to extrude a 2d coastline along a third dimension to produce a paradoxical areal calculation corresponding precisely to the perimeter paradox...

If you extrude a coastline into a wall the wall's surface area will blow up the same way the measured perimeter does, but that;s because you've turned a boundary-length problem into the area of a different object. It still doesn't mean the country's ordinary map area becomes paradoxical, the extra boundary detail only affects a vanishingly thin strip near the edge, so the enclosed 2D area stays well behaved.

Aha, so you've misunderstood my joke entirely. We agree about the math, please reread my original comment with the understanding that I'm insinuating that the article has deviated from "ordinary map area" and is instead measuring the fractal surface area contained within Estonia's perimeter.

[now that the joke is explained, feel free to laugh]

Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

#33

Post by fallingfrog »

I visited Centralia about 20 years ago, I remember that we stopped the car on the way into town because there was a crack going all the way across the road with smoke coming out of it. But we kept walking and found a few abandoned houses and empty streets. We were too intimidated by all the scary signs to wander far off the road but took some pictures on a disposable camera and eventually returned home.

Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

#34

Post by vharuck »

mikkupikku wrote: post #25
themaninthedark wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be able to, however not easily like when you put out a simple structure fire. The ground is riddled with small vents that allow oxygen in. If you were to inject a foaming agent and then flood the space you could eventually lower the temperature below the auto ignition temperature. Might not be easy. Might not be cost effective right now. But there is a reason that Pagnotti Enterprises bought the land and I…

As far as I've been able to determine, Pagnotti Enterprises has owned land in that area for a very long time and has no apparent plans to mine there anytime soon. They got this new bit of land because the state renounced the right of way and sold it to the owners of the adjacent land. This wasn't a huge meaningful investment to Pagnotti, but they did get rid of the ruined road itself, probably because it was a touris…

I'm bummed the ruined road is gone. It was surreal to see and had some beautiful graffiti.

Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

#35

Post by tstrimple »

thejarren wrote: post #24

I grew up in Pennsylvania and have visited Centralia a few times over the years. When I was younger, I remember being able to see smoke rise from the ground, but in recent years, I haven’t seen anything almost as if the fire has subsided a bit. Pennsylvania is filled with old coal mining towns, and most of them are in a state of decay. Towns like Pottsville, Pennsylvania have buildings crumbling down on their main st…

It turns out basing entire economies off of resource extraction isn't sustainable. If only we hadn't had to re-experience this over and over again decade after decade. But I'm sure the next Republican candidates will promise more coal jobs so they will continue to be voted for and nothing will substantially change.

Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

#36

Post by lloydatkinson »

tstrimple wrote: post #35
thejarren wrote: post #24

I grew up in Pennsylvania and have visited Centralia a few times over the years. When I was younger, I remember being able to see smoke rise from the ground, but in recent years, I haven’t seen anything almost as if the fire has subsided a bit. Pennsylvania is filled with old coal mining towns, and most of them are in a state of decay. Towns like Pottsville, Pennsylvania have buildings crumbling down on their main st…

It turns out basing entire economies off of resource extraction isn't sustainable. If only we hadn't had to re-experience this over and over again decade after decade. But I'm sure the next Republican candidates will promise more coal jobs so they will continue to be voted for and nothing will substantially change.

> Pottsville, Pennsylvania

It was founded in 1808. Not exactly sure how they was supposed to know.

Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

#37

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

closewith wrote: post #28
B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonia Area • Total 45,335 km2 (17,504 sq mi) Some people are just oblivious to six orders of magnitude mistakes, and then go off about "folly, mistake, calamitous hubris, neglect, and plain stupidity" ...

Assuming this is about Harju, it seems the author read "245 million sq m" and assumed the m was miles, not metres. So the already large 24,500 hectare farm became a ludicrous 245 million square mile multi-planetary behemoth. Reading sq m as square miles is a surprisingly common error in the US, but usually gets caught before production or publication because the result is orders of magnitude out.

Quoted straight from the piece, as written by dude who just made one of the smallest countries around have abandoned farms larger than the whole world ...

But many people are really like this, no notion whatsoever of order of magnitude plausibility. Has to be beaten out of engineering students, but I suppose the majority of the population is untreated.

(LLMs are going to be a lot of fun too)

Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

#38

Post by parpfish »

thejarren wrote: post #24

I grew up in Pennsylvania and have visited Centralia a few times over the years. When I was younger, I remember being able to see smoke rise from the ground, but in recent years, I haven’t seen anything almost as if the fire has subsided a bit. Pennsylvania is filled with old coal mining towns, and most of them are in a state of decay. Towns like Pottsville, Pennsylvania have buildings crumbling down on their main st…

I was on a road trip a few months back and took a slight detour to pass through centralia, and there was enough smoke that I could see it from the road. Some local had set up a lawn chair and chained it to a tree so passers-by would know where to stop and take a peek

Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

#39

Post by pseudohadamard »

thejarren wrote: post #24

I grew up in Pennsylvania and have visited Centralia a few times over the years. When I was younger, I remember being able to see smoke rise from the ground, but in recent years, I haven’t seen anything almost as if the fire has subsided a bit. Pennsylvania is filled with old coal mining towns, and most of them are in a state of decay. Towns like Pottsville, Pennsylvania have buildings crumbling down on their main st…

There's some Youtuber who posts videos of driving out to these places and talking to the locals. It's pretty depressing, the closest I've seen to it is isolated towns in immediately post-Soviet eastern Europe, but without the meth problems.

Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

#40

Post by euroderf »

parpfish wrote: post #38
thejarren wrote: post #24

I grew up in Pennsylvania and have visited Centralia a few times over the years. When I was younger, I remember being able to see smoke rise from the ground, but in recent years, I haven’t seen anything almost as if the fire has subsided a bit. Pennsylvania is filled with old coal mining towns, and most of them are in a state of decay. Towns like Pottsville, Pennsylvania have buildings crumbling down on their main st…

I was on a road trip a few months back and took a slight detour to pass through centralia, and there was enough smoke that I could see it from the road. Some local had set up a lawn chair and chained it to a tree so passers-by would know where to stop and take a peek

That's my kind of civic-mindedness.
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