User talk:Demonburrito/Archive 1

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Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~&#126;); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Where to ask a question, ask me on my talk page, or place  on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! -- Longhair | Talk 17:58, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
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There Is No Cabal
Welcome to Wikipedia. Now you've had the official welcome, here's mine. There Is No Cabal. Honest to god there isn't.

Regarding breaking the wiki, it can't be done, so just be bold and edit to your heart's content.


 * Enjoy your stay. Your brain may be collected from luggage upon departure. Rob Church Talk 05:11, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Trade winds and Hadley cells
Hi Demonburrito,

that was a good edit in the meteorology article, removing the inner contradiction, and retaining Hadley's achievement.

The meteorology article has been a bit of a project for you, and over the past months the coriolis effect article has been a project of mine. Unfortunately, the current version of the article is contradicting itself, because of edits by disagreeing contributors.

I am currently working on a version that is aimed at merging the various inputs, while maintaining inner consistency and of course presenting solid physics. Here is the Work-in-progress-version of the coriolis effect article

No less than fifty different meteorology-related articles link to the coriolis effect article, so it is really up to the coriolis effect article to deliver the goods. The article I am writing is of course based on articles that have been written by specialists on the subject of wind dynamics; it is solid meteorology.

All the animations have been manufactured by me. Some of them mayhave to go, too much animations make the amount of KiloBytes very large.

I hope I have aroused your interest. Please have look at the work-in-progress version. --Cleon Teunissen | Talk 17:14, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

coriolis and meteorology

 * I really enjoyed your version of the Coriolis Effect article, and I found it to be clear and educational. I would be sad to see any of your excellent animations go.


 * The article seems to load plenty fast for me, but I am not experienced enough (or allowed, maybe) to know if the article is relatively large. --demonburrito 07:29, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Hi Demonburrito,

Here is the problem I ran into. I am faced with opponents who are not buying the rotational dynamics I describe. Initially I felt it was so obvious that I did not list references in the scientific literature that the article is based on. This led my opponents to believe that the story I present was an invention of my own.

The mechanism I describe is correct, but it relatively unknown.

Let me give a comparison. When people first tried to figure out for themselves what it is that propels rockets, they would often assume that the exhaust of the rocket is pushing against the air, compressing the air, and this compressed air would then push the rocket forward. That is a tempting explanation, but it fails outside the atmosphere. Outside the atmosphere the rocket exerts the same thrust, while there is no atmosphere. So sometimes people latch on to a wrong explanation, and sometimes it is very hard to persuade people to think outside the habitual patterns.

That is the sort of situation I find myself in, in presenting in the article the rotational dynamics in the atmosphere. My opponents are accustomed to an appealing, but actually wrong explanation, and I have not been able to dissuade them.

I need support, I need it really badly. I hope you can help me, by thinking the logic through, so that you get confidence in defending the content.

Also you may find possibilities for trimming the article down (I even sacrificed discussing the trade winds to reduce the length of article)

Animations are a lot of kilobytes; 60 to a 100 kilobytes per animation. That is no problem at all for people with ADSL, but there is still a percentage of people with dial-in connection to internet. I am undecided about the animations with rotating weights connected by pistons that are still in the public coriolis effect article.

The length of the text is in the 20-kilobytes range, which is no problem at all, the kilobytes load is in the gif-animations.

I'm curious: have you learned what it was exactly that Hadley had in mind, and how he was later corrected? Hadley can't be blamed for his mistake, even Laplace, the foremost expert in mechanics of his time overlooked it. --Cleon Teunissen | Talk 08:12, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Rotational dynamics in meteorology

 * Much of my research was from sites like this: . What I gleaned from it was this: Hadley pointed out that equatorial solar heating would make tropical air lighter than air at high latitudes. Tropical air would thus rise, high latitude air would sink, winds at the surface would blow towards the equator, and winds aloft would blow towards the poles. Hadley realized that the rotation of the earth would cause the surface wind blowing toward the equator to veer towards the west, thus producing the system of trade winds familiar to the mariners of his day.


 * Concerning your cause: As this is a subject that I am fascinated by, I would like to spend a few days sussing this out. [...]


 * So, in short, hit me.--demonburrito 08:54, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

You're on, buddy.

First: my background is physics rather than meteorology. My knowledge of history is second hand. My source is the meteorologist Anders Persson, who I believe to be very meticulous in his historical research, going back to original publications.

You can read the the following two publcations by Anders Persson, but while the content is the same, his terminology is quite different from mine, reading them takes rather a lot of conceptual translation, so the articles may not be helpful to you at this stage.
 * How do we understand the Coriolis force? PDF-file. 13 pages. A discussion of the physics of the Coriolis effect by the meteorologist Anders Persson.


 * The Coriolis Effect PDF-file. 17 pages. A general discussion by Anders Persson of various aspects of the coriolis effect, including Foucault's Pendulum and Taylor columns.

Hadley was of course right in recognizing the Hadley cells. Saying it in my onw words: air mass is heated at the equator, it rises, generating a pressure gradient that induces air from latitudes away from the equator to move towards the equator. Low altitude air mass will move to the equator, and the risen air will move at high altitude away from the equator.

Suppose there is no friction or any other influence, how fast will air mass from, say 30 degrees latitude, flow when it arrives at the equator? (this is a huge simplification, ignoring everything but the major contributor)

At the equator the circumference of the Earth is 40.000 kilometers (Yeah, I'm gonna go all metric on you). That corresponds to a tangential velocity of 465 meters per second. ( 40 000 kilometer divided by  86 400 seconds 

At a latitude of 30 degrees you are not 6370 kilometes from the Earth's axis, but (6370 x cos(30) ) = 5510 kilometers, tangential velocity there is 400 meters per second.



When air mass from 30 degrees latitude flows towards the equator, something happens that is comparable to the example of sitting in a rotating chair with weights in your hands and you are rotating. If you extend your arms your rotation rate will go down, and vice versa.

So when air slides from 30 degrees latitude to the Equator, it has only about 340 meters per second of tangential velocity left, when it arrives.

Hadley and Laplace didn't spot the double effect. Hadley assumed that the tangential velocity of the air would be conserved in moving to the equator. Hadley assumed that the air would still have the 400 meters per second tangential velocity, so he expected the air to only come up 60 meters per second short, (coming up short with respect to the 465 meters per second that corresponds to co-rotating with the Earth at the equator.)

That is the reason I wrote the section rotational dynamics in machines with rotating parts, to give a feel for what is happening to the air.

I hope you have a good time munching on this stuff. It was fascinating journey for me to learn about these things in the publications of Anders Persson. Very cool newtonian dynamics. --Cleon Teunissen | Talk 09:57, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

New animation
Hi Demonburrito,



I have completed another animation. I will soon replace the public version of of the coriolis effect article with the version that I have been preparing.

My version of the article is a bit "overengineered" now, I think. Much of it is not written for the interested reader, but written to persuade my opponents that the story that is being presented is solid. Hopefully the article can be trimmed down in the future --Cleon Teunissen | Talk 20:11, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

Texas Ranger Division
Hi DB, sorry it's taken me a bit to get back to you. I'm afraid I really know nothing about the subject, so I would feel uncomfortable trying to summarize the related issues because I'm basically proceeding from a base of no knowledge on the topic. Anyway, I read that you're going on break/vacation for a while, but I can assure you that the article itself isn't going to be nominated for FAC anytime soon (the momentum behind the Texas COTM seems to have waned lately -- BTW, you should join). My point being that it'll still be there, probably utterly unchanged, when you get back. I'd welcome any properly sourced criticism in the article. Hope your break is good; I'm about to head to Costa Rica myself. &middot; Katefan0(scribble) 16:12, August 18, 2005 (UTC)

John Courage
I removed alot of information from John Courage because it lacked sources. WP:BLP encurages us to be quite strict about this kind of thing. The stuff I removed is still in the history, so feel free to revert me when you fine a source or two.

Thanks! ---J.S (t|c) 02:32, 21 October 2006 (UTC)