The horror of a Bruce C has got me back into earthquakes. I think of my favourite line in the BCC Pride&P. "Not Bruce C, my dear, the foundations are terrible!"
It funny that I did once meet some bright earthquake engineers in California. They were building the giant, useless, campuses of the Big Tech companies. Now, those things can be warehouses. Anyway, they knew the importance of deep foundations and building stiffness.
Conventional earthquake engineering of the type you'll see in the East, relies on a shake table, which has no association with physics. It is 'tradition' and 'conservative', just like the misleading jargon of weather people. I moved on from earthquakes to long-term weather forecasts, as they are both the same, deep down.
All of earthquake engineering should be about energy, but it is all about peak acceleration, because that was the easiest thing to measure in the old days. It is stuck in a rut, much like 'high and low pressure' and 'Jet Stream'. For weather, it is stuck in what could be measured for D-day, and with earthquakes, what could be measured for the San Fernando earthquake.
Very few earthquakes damage buildings through resonance only, but we are stuck with that. That's why we have horrible constructions such as 'response spectra'. Just like weather people, earthquake engineers want to maintain a 'priesthood' of obscure jargon. This has led to huge mistakes which, for weather, can be cured by a powerful ice cycle, and an earthquake under the best that earthquake engineers can offer.
Although I have written about this many times before, I have new insights into groupthink, and how it maintains itself. As usual, I will be called a 'complete idiot'.
-- to be continued
ps. I decided that I don't have new insights, and I swore to let the BruceC beast go. No continuation.
No comments:
Post a Comment