New Mars Forums

TWO POINTS:

I agree with you, Ranger.  As a matter of fact, if we don't build those buildings bigger and better, I think we should make an EXACT REPLICA.  It might bring back some bad memories to some New Yorkers, but I think it would be a great tribute to the Amerian spirit to see that building towering over New York Harbor once again.

On the Nanotubes point, buildings need some give so they can sway when the wind blows.  I'm not a structural engineer, but when the wind blows, won't all of the energy of the wind be transfered to the fibers in the building?  Although, I suppose if it is 100x stronger than steel, the building won't sway at all!

Just some thoughts...

HEY PAGANTORIS!  Nice grammar.  By the way, do you think that the leader of the free world goes down to Texas to "get some Presidential tips from the 'ol man?"
     President Bush is fufilling his promise to the nation to defend against ANY and ALL terrorist threats, Saddam being one of them.  He's not sending 250,000 soldiers into combat to fufill his dad's dream.
     By the way, Bush Sr.'s dream wasn't to dethrone Saddam.  I can just see you, PaganToris, imagining Bush Sr. in his Barney PJ's snuggling a teddy bear and dreaming about killing Saddam.  No, he went to war with Iraq to defend the helpless Kuwaitis (sp?), and to prevent the Iraqis from invading Saudi Arabia, a major military center for the US and a tremendous oil exporter.  If it wasn't for our actions, a ruthless dictor (Saddam, PaganToris) would have controlled a major portion of the world's oil supply and used that wealth to develop weapons of mass destruction (which coincidentally are the only things we want to destroy in Iraq). ???
     I won't go into the fact that Saddam LAUNCHED MISSILES at innocent Israelis, which is probably the reason that we invaded as far as we did.  (I still don't know why Bush Sr. and Swartzkopf didn't capture Baghdad.  Anyway, that's a story for another day.
     To end, have no fear of our troops in battle, PaganToris.  They are the best trained, best supplied, and best commanded fighting force in the history of the world.  We will destroy his troops WITHOUT QUESTION if he chooses to fight us, and if he uses biological or chemical weapons, we will destroy those and remove him from power.
     It is the Iraqi's blood that we will trail across the desert.  Have a nice weekend, PaganToris. :angry: Try doing your English, History, and Political Science homework before you spend all of your time on this message board... :angry:

Phobos said something to the effect of "I can convert units easier with the metric system because it is based on 10."

Because of my Physics classes in High School, I had to get adjusted to using the metric system.  My main problem was that I could do conversions very quickly, but I had a hard time applying what I'd converted.  With the Imperial system, I could look down a road and say, "that hill is 3 miles off" or, "there must be 5 gallons of water in that bucket" and I could eyeball my measurements.  With the metric system, I had to relearn my approximated distances before I could begin to apply the system.

I think many Americans are afraid of the transition to metrics because they would lose their ability to approximate size.

Just a thought...   -CALTECH2010

PS  If you want to convert to the metric system, run track in High School.  It helped me to be able to guage distances using our track size (I still use it to recall how long 100 m is!)