The gem in the xkcd questions & answers was the dude asking about strapping c4 to a boomerang. Why indeed would you want to strap explosives on an object design to fly back to you if it misses its target.
At the end of the day, the energy released by a nuclear weapon is peanuts compared to the energy that drives a hurricane. A nuke would do quite literally nothing to a hurricane.
It is annoying that the link has been redirected and you have to search for a more mealy mouthed statement that says it won't work but not that it is a bad idea. More "no criticism of king Trump" bs.
Probably. I'll have to try on my computer to reach the page. But the quote "needless to say, this is not a good idea," is not in the mobile version.
Edit nope, the quote is there, it is just hard to spot in the mobile format (after I scroll past all the stuff that isn't the item the original link pointed to and expand the thing I was obviously looking for that was hidden.)
There is a small part of me that wants to believe that he's quite dumb, but not AS dumb as he comes across as, and that some situations like this he starts saying ridiculous shit just to see if people will have the "balls" to tell him no. Like it's a respect thing for him and he doesn't want people around who will tell him he's stupid, no matter how ridiculous his suggestions are. So I want to believe it's more likely that these things are kind of a test or a joke to him. Or we somehow allowed the craziest, unintelligent, unhinged, "millionaire" to be president for 4 years. That part just feels bad.
No, I think the joke is more of a superiority complex. Like " I can suggest the craziest shit and look at these guys squirm, they are too scared to tell me no." That would be closer to the mindset I would expect from trump.
I mean, it's an idea that a scientist proposed during the Eisenhower Era. It's not even Trump's idea.
When just spit balling ideas to stop a hurricane, it doesn't seem that absurd to think it might disrupt it. It doesn't work, as noted by some experts, but he isn't one and I doubt the briefer was either, so its not that bad.
It doesn’t matter it doesn’t work. Even if it did work would turning a hurricane into a mass spreader of radioactive fallout over massive swaths of ocean really be a good idea?
I literally didn't say it was a good idea. I'm just saying that it's literally not that absurd of an idea when spit balling ways to stop a hurricane. Again, the idea was first brought up by a scientist during Eisenhower's presidency.
Nuking a hurricane is an incredible absurd idea for obvious reasons, even if it would work.
Ok, Trump said bombing it, which is not as absurd, but when that came out he tweeted: "I never said this. Just more FAKE NEWS!", so wth should anyone do with this.
I agree that it's bullshit that he denied saying it. To me, that just shows his willingness to deny wrongdoing and his involvement in anything that goes bad.
But the idea itself is one that was initially proposed by a scientist long before Trump and was studied. Its not an absurd idea when it comes down to throwing out ideas with no input from experts or preexisting data.
And just so we are clear, as I assume half the people here assume otherwise, I fuckin despise Trump and I'm not defending him. I'm just saying the idea isn't actually that absurd, all things considered.
You're thinking too much. This person and his team thought that if they downplayed COVID and protections against it it would disproportionately it blue urban centers... without thinking that liberals would listen to the experts and his followers would take the brunt of the hit.
It's an idea that Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, proposed back in 1990 (much more recently than I thought) as part of his decades long obsession with finding peaceful uses for the atomic bomb to provide justifications for avoiding nuclear arms reduction treaties.
His idea was to kickstart multiple smaller hurricanes before a big one could form, to bleed the energy accumulating. Teller just proposed it as a "what if" without having done any of the math about it and floated the idea as something that needed research.
However, nuking an already formed hurricane would be futile (in addition to being as environmentally nuts as Teller's proposal). Hurricanes are massive, a movement of atmosphere on a scale that's hard to wrap your head around, and they can contain energy on the order of 10,000 nuclear bombs. A hydrogen bomb in a fully formed category 5 storm would be nothing.
Trump probably heard about it decades ago when Teller's proposal hit the newspapers and just kept the idea around in the back of his head without worry much about the details, because it sounds kind of awesome in a dumb way, or he got it later from some other pro-nuke non-scientist.
Yeah.. it was real. No, it wasn’t a joke. At first, people thought he was making a bland and slightly inappropriate joke, but Trump is incapable of understanding humor. He actually wanted to use a nuclear bomb to stop a hurricane because he was aware of how damaging hurricanes could be to his golfing schedule.
Domestic cats or windows, depending on whose data you look at. Either way they're neck and neck, with scopes so large it's impossible to estimate properly.
I actually did a project on this! Electric turbine manufacturers actually have faced large fines for killing endangered birds, but those big turbines also kill tons of bats every year. In fact, wind turbines are a leading cause of bat mortality in North America.
iirc, it’s partially due to the fact that they like to hunt near tall trees and mistake the turbines for a prime spot to feed. They don’t even need to be struck, the air displacement from the huge spinning blades actually ruptures their lungs.
In spite of all this, I support wind-based energy. But I hope we can find a solution for this complex issue soon!
Yea windmills aren't fantastic for birds but they're a drop in the ocean compared to cats, the whole "let's ban windmills to protect the birds" argument fails to land on its feet because of that.
I love how that was a bullshit reason and his supporters are it up. Never mind that he rolled back EPA regulations and hunting regulations that killed and will kill countless more animals than the windmills. But trump said it, so it must be true. God I hate his fucking supporters
So, I'm no fan of Trump's. I'm a Republican who hopped the aisle to vote against him, even. In this case, though, I really do think that it was a good example of the media latching onto anything they could to make him sound even dumber and more bellicose than he was. I have to think that every President since Truman (maybe with the exception of Carter, who was a Navy Nuke) must have at least idly wondered this. You have all that power at your fingertips and want to protect all of those people and all of that property for which you are responsible. I bet a few even vocalized it with more or less seriousness. It was just Trump where it became an 8 day wonder and symbol of his stupidity because the media decided to make it so.
DOCTOR: Mr. Burns, I’m afraid you are the sickest man in the United States. You have everything.
MR. BURNS: You mean, I have pneumonia?
DOCTOR: Yes.
MR. BURNS: Juvenile diabetes?
DOCTOR: Yes.
MR. BURNS: Hysterical pregnancy?
DOCTOR: A little bit, yes. You also have several diseases that have just been discovered in you.
MR. BURNS: I see. You’re sure you just haven’t made thousands of mistakes?
DOCTOR: No, I’m afraid not.
MR. BURNS: Well, this sounds like bad news.
DOCTOR: Well, you’d think so, but all of your diseases are in perfect balance. If you have a moment, I can explain. Here is the door to your body. And these are oversized novelty germs. That’s influenza, that’s bronchitis … Here’s what happens when they all try to get through the door at once. [Impersonates the Three Stooges] Move it, chowder head! We call it “Three Stooges Syndrome.”
MR. BURNS: So what you’re saying is I’m indestructible.
DOCTOR: Oh, no, no. In fact, even a slight breeze could …
Well if Windmills reduce CO2 emissions, and if reduced CO2 emissions cause extreme weather. And extreme weather causes hurricanes. Maybe windmills reduces hurricanes after all.
Give it 15 years and we’ll have “President Drumpf: President of America and Lord Defender of Earth” where the main character has a terrible fake tan, Brillo pad hair, and the same pout Zoolander perfected and there will be plenty of people who don’t see satire - but what could have been.
That to me sounded like a child’s interpretation of radiation therapy. It made me wonder if someone had explained radiation treatment to him as a child (or as a dysfunctional adult) and the take-away was “put powerful light into body to kill disease.”
If you watch the full presser, a doctor is on talking about some current research on what seems to work against it. This was his final slide. Moments later, Glorious Leader stood at the mic and shared his remarkable idea to bring the UV or bleach inside the body. This Incredible Insight™ arrived to his brain moments before it fell out of his face.
Laughed so damn hard at this! I'm so angry that defiantly unvaxxed anti-maskers are making the pandemic worse again, but I am so thankful we don't have Right-Wing Cheeto Jesus presiding over it anymore.
Have you read about his upbringing? Dudes dad was a monster.. children weren’t allowed to be hugged, the mother had to make a daily report of the children’s actions which he used to determine if he would beat them that day or not and he would mock the children for showing emotion.. no way Trump came out of that psychologically ok…
More evidence I believe he has "brain damage" at least.
You only have to watch a video of him from 20 years ago and the cognitive decline is obvious. His speech devolves from lucid and coherent to complete word salad.
The way targeted radiation works (in a way that can shrink tumors in 3D, with minimal damage to surrounding tissue) still amazes me when I think about it.
It sounds exactly like ultraviolet irradiation therapy, when you listen to the actual quote. Not realistic, but in to be taken in the context of the time when desperation was abound. And the disinfectant (not bleach) comment sounds exactly like lavage for lung treatment, to which he directly referred. No fan of Trump at all (who was the second-latest in a long line of terrible Presidents), but some of the hysterical reactions last year were actually laughable.
My favourite was the 'very nice people' nonsense, which President Biden kept repeating and was apparently the whole reason for his running.
Iirc he received a briefing earlier that day talking about how long the virus survives on surfaces (door handle, cardboard box, etc). The briefer went on to say something to the effect of 'when you inject uv light into the equation...' it reduces how long it survives.
So 'Ole moppy carrot decided to take that idea and run with it
What got me is he has this thought and the next one, before he says it, is not If this works isn’t it the cure for all communicable diseases? And also If this is possible, no one, not the doctors and scientists who explained it to me has thought of it before?I’m the first to make the connection?
If you watch the clip again- you can see how he is trying to sound "technical" the way he says, "though injection or some other means." Its like, he REALLY believes he just thought of something no one else had ever.
One thing I liked about him is that I never had to worry that he had secret plans. The man clearly spoke aloud every thought that ever entered his head with no hesitation.
Nah, he heard bullet points of something that was like four degrees of separation from this and it got garbled in his mind as "drink bleach" so people did.
Def he wasnt so wrong about bleach, since the hydroxychloroquine is basically bleach and in small dosages it has proved to help agaisnt covid19 .His monkey brain prob had the info abot it but tried to mention it as just plain "bleach"
He got enraged about them because permission was granted for an offshore windfarm in view of one of his Scottish golf courses.
There was an article I read some years ago about an agency booking people for a rent-a-mob to protest outside the British consulate in NY (iirc) against wind turbines. That was supposedly down to Trump and how pissed off he was about the view being ruined.
You might like this as well. Its about efforts being made for Trump to have to explain where he got the money to finance his Scottish properties and how he might lose them if he can't show they weren't financed from the proceeds of crime/money laundering
My boss, jokingly suggested that the windmills might actually be fans.
It never really seemed all that windy here before they installed hundreds of the things. And any time it's windy, if you look, there they are, spinning away....
He literally just says whatever he feels like and sees what sticks. If it rallies his base, or riles up his enemies, it's good in his book. He was constantly testing the waters to see what he could get away with.
Except that could actually work... if you had enough windmills that could operate in reverse as fans. It would be a stupid amount of windmills though and they would probably cause more problems than they solve if you could figure out how to build enough.
So did I, but it took me about 20 seconds longer to remember what he looked like and what show he came from. It's good to know my aural memory is still intact.
Why wouldn't this work? Like a generator can work as an electric motor if you send power into it, so why don't you just send power into all nearby windmills? Must have some influence atleast on the direction of the hurricane
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u/KirbyBucketts 29d ago
Tell him the only true way to stop hurricanes is with a massive wall of windmills.