September 18, 2003

There are no stupid questions

Posted by Kieran

Well, as a matter of fact, there are.

Posted on September 18, 2003 11:32 AM UTC
Comments

Spoilsport!

Any question that lets the weather geeks write sentences like

“The heat release [in a hurricane] is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes.”

or understatements like

“To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion (500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye. It’s difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around.”

is a very good question indeed.

Posted by Doug · September 18, 2003 12:28 PM

Envy the dry-humored weather geek who gets to type this:

“Now for a more rigorous scientific explanation of why [nukes] would not be an effective hurricane modification technique.”

Posted by matt · September 18, 2003 02:26 PM

How about ‘Nuking a hurricane will make the situation so much worse that you will forget about the wind and rain’…

Posted by Matt · September 18, 2003 06:02 PM

Man that’s funny. But that question is about as real as the questions in Personality Parade. It comes up every season? Some questions, even if they are too stupid to be asked, are too much fun when answered.

Posted by david · September 18, 2003 06:17 PM

We believe that hurricanes are pursuing a program for WMD production…

Posted by Doc · September 18, 2003 06:50 PM

This reminds me of a Daily Show bit where Stephen Colbert said that what the U.S. needed to restore “freedom” in Iraq and peace to the world was a bomb that destroyed ideas - so that we could wipe out the idea of Saddam altogether.

My response is the same - don’t give the Bad Men any ideas!

Posted by brayden · September 18, 2003 07:09 PM

Why don’t we get all the airplanes to fly in the opposite direction to the winds?

Posted by Tripp · September 18, 2003 07:53 PM
My tagline henceforth:
In the words of Kieran Healy, “There are no stupid questions. Well, as a matter of fact, there are.”
Posted by Jeremy Osner · September 18, 2003 08:47 PM

This is the sort of thinking that results in beached whales being filled with explosives and distributed over a 5 mile radius as a chunky rain.

Makes for excellent TV though. . .

Check it out. . .

http://www.hackstadt.com/features/whale/

Posted by epist · September 19, 2003 12:22 AM

If a single hurricane releases half the energy used by the whole human race in the course of a year, then wouldn’t we be able to forget about both fossil fuels and nuclear energy if we succeeded in harnessing the energy of two hurricanes?

They said that space flight was impossible too.

Posted by zizka · September 19, 2003 01:09 AM
Followups

→ Neocon weather control.
Excerpt: I'm not gonna describe it because you wouldn't believe me anyway. http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html via Crooked Timber...Read more at Prometheus 6
→ And then use it to fix NYC's rat problem!.
Excerpt: Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber discovers that there are indeed stupid questions. I have an answer: because we have cerebral cortices.Read more at apostropher
→ FAQ?.
Excerpt: Is this really a frequently asked question? That's scary. (via crooked timber, which is rapidly moving up my list of favourite blogs)...Read more at Things I've Seen
→ Hurricane FAQ.
Excerpt: Kieran Healy explodes the myth that there's no such thing as a stupid question by pointing us to this....Read more at Invisible Adjunct
→ Conferencing.
Excerpt: I don’t know when “conferencing” became a verb, but I guess I’m doing it all the same. I’m at the...Read more at Kieran Healy's Weblog

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.