The Sky is Falling
 

The Sky is Falling
(so worried the man from Qi.)

Once there was a man from Qi, who was worried about falling sky and sinking earch.
A friend, worried about his worrying, came to calm him.

He said to the man, "The sky is all air, nothing but air. As you inhale and exhale, and breathe air into the sky all day long, there is no need to worry about falling sky."

The man then asked, "So the sky is just air. Then what about the Sun, the Moon and the stars falling from the sky?"

He replied, "These are only twinkling objects of air. Even if they fall, they won't hurt you."

The man continued, "What about sinking earth?"

He replied, "The earch is made up of solid blocks of earth, which filled up all spaces. There are no empty spaces. If you stamp you feet on the ground all day, the earth will not sink."

Hearing this, the man is very happy. The friend is very happy.

-Lie Zi, Han Dynasty

What is the moral of this story?
The man is worried needlessly. His friend calmed him with faulty explanations. Should you worry?
Have you heard the story of Chicken Little in the Western literature?

Re: The Sky is Falling
 

And then there is the story of Ramp J near King of Prussia. Ramp J was part of a project to move cars from US 422 I-76. It was to be built on nice solid ground. Unfortunately, the earth sank underneath it, resulting in huge holes. The engineers said "Oh, just dump some grout in and continue". They did. The holes just kept on coming. Eventually the engineers decided to build a grout-making plant on site, and many thousands of tons of grout were poured into the ground -- along with many millions of dollars, overrunning the budget for the project and delaying it enormously.

http://www.pahighways.com/USHwys/US202.html

The moral of the story is "don't hire the man from Qi to estimate sinkhole impact"

The sinkhole thing should NOT have been a surprise. The whole (tee hee) area is underlain by limestone, and there's an underground stream ... guaranteed sinkholes. (Friend of mine did a geomorphology project on these particular sinkholes in college). IIRC, if you dropped something in one of the KoP sinkholes it would eventually show up in the Norristown sinkholes.

The whole length of 202 is a limestone ridge.
I read that the reason they went so far over budget is that the "grout" was a mixture of cement and fly-ash from burning coal which was expensive to round up and truck in. Something about the fly-ash neutralizing the cement so it wouldn't eat the limestone.

But back to Billy and his story.
Little "white" lies to make someone feel better. We've all done it. I for one, have been burned doing it. Trying to make someone feel better and having your ass handed to you certainly is not fun.:(

Qi man's thought would be ture
 

Now the environment become so bad. The sky would be "falling" soon. He was a forecaster.

Not our sky. Our sky is alway clear and blue in Philadelphia. Except for the blue birds and rainbows, that is.;)

We live in the same sky
 

We are all the part of whole family. Passing bell are beating for all of us. We should hold together to protect the sky.

Re: We live in the same sky
 

We've done our part. The Monogahela River hasn't caught fire for years, Pittsburgh has clear blue skies. Even Cleveland has decent air. OK, LA doesn't, but there's some topography issues there.

There's not much we can do about China.

Re: Re: We live in the same sky
 

We had to send all our manufacturing somewhere. ;)

We do it ourselves
 

We should protect ourselves. If we all try our best to protect and help each other, the world would become more beautiful.