edsdet, Right about the toilet, but it does not have to be as big as air masses or ocean currents. Any moving object TENDS to be influenced but if you are walking you are not moving fast enough to notice.

Since Jesus is Bush's purported "advisor" and "savior," how about that adage, "Judge the tree by its fruit." The FRUIT of this administration in every aspect of its engagement is depraved indifference to life. The Bible also relates that the LOVE of money is the root of all evil. For Bush & co it's only and all about the money. The troops are just fodder to them, as is the population of Iraq. Look at the way Katrina was handled? The way tax cuts gave money to those who least needed the extra, and STOLE from programs designed to help those in actual need. This is what JESUS would do? I asked a very intelligent oil man who ironically had begun life as a Jesuit how so-called Christian-followers of Bush could countenance these obvious inversions of the Master's teachings, and he related something significant. That the US began with those who espoused a view of Protestantism better known as Calvinism. Its central tenet is that anyone who is rich is demonstrating God's blessing, and conversely, the individual who is poor or struggling, is evidencing that he has somehow sinned or missed the mark. When I go into stores owned by fundamentalist Christians, there are very few if any esoteric titles, and yet titles like "God wants you to be rich," prevail. The callous disregard for one's fellow man (and woman), is a staple to this group; and the hubristic conceit that this actually conforms to the Deity's intentions, well, just about every religion believes in a Judgment Day and I hope I have a ringside seat when the names of all those designers of America as the new Pharaoh state with its multitudes of rendered slaves get their names called. Everything comes full circle, eventually. Scripture also says, "Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me." JUSTICE eventually prevails.

Siouxrose--

The sword we wield cuts both ways. All of will be judged by what we do or don't do in the face of such crises. This whole mess is as much about who and what "we" are as it is about who and what "they" are.

Shalom,Salem,Pax

By the way--
So does that mean that since my toilet flushes counterclockwise that those in, say, Brazil or Australia flush clockwise? Okay, science teacher, why is that? :)))

New thinking on some kind of reasonable solution to the Iraq disaster is needed.

Military leaders, DoD personnel, intelligence experts, Congress and the American people must take steps soon to end the bloodshed.

Endless killing and injuring of US troops and innocent Iraqi civilians cannot continue.

Ideas on this at:

"Intelligence, psychology and human heart: All are needed for success in war and peace"

PopulistAmerica.com
March 31, 2007

http://www.populistamerica.com/intelligence_psychology_and_human_heart

"...and let's go to the American people with our respective choices. If you dare."

You're right, and here are the REAL ones:

The Pentagon and UN agree - resources wars are coming.

So our choice is either agree to soldier-up and fight Russia, China, India, and everyone else with a bullet for every last drop... or not, and be destroyed.

Oh, right, choice three: we all get along and share while heroic scientists invent magic juice.

Mr. Atcheson:
You say, "Sunnis and Shiites have been at each others throats for more than a thousand years." Why do you repeat bipartisan propaganda? Do not mess facts, please. The fight is over oil, not Allah. It is also class struggle, Shiites in Iraq being poorer than dirt, while sitting on the second biggest oil reserve in the world. Bush will stay in Iraq as long as he can and so will any Democratic President. We, SUV lovers cannot afford to let Iraqi Shia to win, lest to give godd lesson oppressed Shia of Eastern Saudi Arabia to take control over their own oil, curren owned by Saudis.
Get your fact straight and keep driving your SUV.
Besides, American people cannot be occupiers in Iraq and anywhere else. It is American people who are occupied by rather small junta of oligarchs, with mercinary military on their payroll.

Poet: Do this little thought experiment and it may help you visualize the direction in which water spins when flushing a tiolet.
The direction of motion is caused by the Coriolis effect. This can be visualized if you imagine putting a pan of water on a turntable and then spinning the turntable in a counterclockwise direction, the direction in which the earth rotates as seen from above the north pole. The water on the bottom of the pan will be dragged counterclockwise direction slightly faster than the water at the surface, giving the water an apparent clockwise spin in the pan. But if you were to look at the water in the pan from below, corresponding to seeing it from the south pole, it would appear to be spinning in a counterclockwise direction. Likewise, the rotation of the earth gives rise to an effect that tends to accelerate draining water in a clockwise direction in the Northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.
Of course, there may be other factors involved - such as how the water enters the toilet bowl - that will change the direction of its spin. But I think the above thought experiment should help clarify this question.

But Hybridoma, my toilet located in the northern hemishpere has water that rotates counterclockwise and I know this because after reading Siouxrose little factoid I went in and flushed the thing and stuck the toilet brush in to make sure I wasn't seeing things and it went counterclockwise.

So are you saying that it really all spins the same way but it just appears different--sort of like an optical illusion on opposite sides of the equator?

Poet, sorry to take so long getting back to you. Try thinking of this in another way. Imagine you have a ball in one hand and a screw in the other. Next, you are going to put the screw into the ball. To drive the screw into the ball, you must turn the screw in a counterclockwise diection. Finally, the screw begins to emerge from the other side of the ball. If you turn the ball upside down and continue to turn the screw, from the bottom of the ball the screw will be turning in a clockwise direction while at the top, the screw is turning counterclockwise.
I don't think you could call it an optical illusion, but it is counter intuitive.
I wish what the Democrats where doing right now were an optical illusion, because it's hard to believe my ears and eyes when I consider how they are letting the neo-cons "frame" the debate over the ridiculus question of who lost Iraq. But as has already happened far too many times, they have pulled the wool over too many eyes that should know better and gotten away with everything. At times, what's happening to our country seems like an illusion, just not the kind where you believe you see water on the horizon of a desert. It's more like the illusion of Democracy.

Hybridoma--

Right on I think I get it now.

My metphor for the current unreality is "Alice in Wonderland" and you can just guess who is the White Rabbit and who is the Chesire Cat. This bringsx up thje obvious question: Are we all on drugs or are they?

Apparently it's almost impossible for politicians to be straightforward as John Atcheson has suggested. Perhaps there are too many fingers in the pie - but you would think that a statement like this would be so self evident that all self respecting politicians who disagreed with Bush would sign on immediately.

And, we the people would benefit - even we, the uninitiated, could understand this kind of straight talk. And, I'd wager that most Americans would rise up and cheer!!! As Mark Shields said last night on the Lehrer News Hour, the political definition of a gaffe is someone telling the truth!!!

"Lord. what fools these mortals be!"

Poet, Suggest you look up 'coriolis force'. Like centrifugal force it is an illusion but the effect it refers to is real.

If you take the time to look you will notice that all the flusher handles in the Southern Hemisphere are on the right side of the tank. That's why the water spins the other way.

hybridoma,

Coriolis effect has not much to do with which direction your bathwater spins when draining. This is a great myth. The reason is that coriolis effects are completely negated on such small localized scales. Unless of course your bathroom is rotating with respect to your plumbing.

Coriolis effect only takes hold only on a planetary scale with large bodies of air masses or ocean currents. These travel or migrate across the surface of the planet and hence are effected by the rotation of the earth. Masses starting at the poles have low velocities when compared with the relative speeds of air masses as you move toward the equator. The mixing of these air masses and speed differentials create the swirls which are intensified through inflows toward low pressure systems (hurricanes being an extreme example) and outflows away from high pressure systems and the major trade winds.

The use of the turntable metaphor is fine if it is a global modeling to illustrate a global effect. The problem of applying it to a local scale is that the distances and velocities you model (b/n the center of the table and the edges) do not exist in any meaningful way inside a toliet or a city for that matter. Hate to bust that myth.

I agree Nietzche. Floatsam in a still platter of water with enough time will eventually migrate in this way toward the edge in a curved manner. But all bets are off when any turbulence and flows are introduced to overwhelm and cancel out the slight effect.

Put, try the experiment with the screw and the ball and you will see what I mean. Large or small aside, the fact is that it's a question of perspective. I knew I shouldn't have begun with the Coriolis Effect!

edsdet and Nietzsche,

The following is from Scientific American and are the opinions of scientists. I also think that if you got your hands on a text book, it would mention nothng about size and certainly nothing about centrifugal forces(unless it was a text dealing with cylones). It's easy to look up a word on the Internet, but you ought to have gone to a credible source that wouldn't mention such things as centrifugal forces. As the Earth spins in EITHER hemisphere, centrifugal foces are going to exert themselves slowly buy surely. If you have a large mass of waste out in the ocean, then gravity tends to gain the upper hand and over time large amounts of garbage will gather together.
What this whole argument really depends on, as I said in my first post, is how the water enters the vessel being emptied. And if you read the last entry carefully, you will see that it is still true about the direction of spin.

Howard Bertolo
Toronto, Ontario

This question would seem to be one of simple physics, and yet it continues to engender sharp disagreements. The main problem here is the division between theory and practice: whereas in principle the earth's rotation could affect the direction of draining water, in the real world that effect is probably swamped by other, less uniform influences.

Brad Hanson, ( and this is the example I heard at Unniversity studying Astrophysics, a staff geologist with the Louisiana Geological Survey, presents the argument of why--in theory--water going down the drain would indeed spin in different directions depending on which hemisphere you're in:

"The direction of motion is caused by the Coriolis effect. This can be visualized if you imagine putting a pan of water on a turntable and then spinning the turntable in a counterclockwise direction, the direction in which the earth rotates as seen from above the north pole. The water on the bottom of the pan will be dragged counterclockwise direction slightly faster than the water at the surface, giving the water an apparent clockwise spin in the pan. But if you were to look at the water in the pan from below, corresponding to seeing it from the south pole, it would appear to be spinning in a counterclockwise direction. Likewise, the rotation of the earth gives rise to an effect that tends to accelerate draining water in a clockwise direction in the Northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern."

Fred W. Decker, professor emeritus of oceanic and atmospheric science at Oregon State University notes, however, that the Coriolis effect may actually have little to do with the behavior of real-world sinks and tubs:

"Really, I doubt that the direction of the draining water represents anything more than an accidental twist given by the starting flow. The local irregularities of motion are so dominant that the Coriolis effect is not likely to be revealed. An empirical test could help."

Robert Ehrlich, a physicist at George Mason University, expands on these ideas:

"Do bathtubs drain in different directions in the two hemispheres? If you had a specially prepared bathtub, the answer would be yes. For any normal bathtub you are likely to encounter in the home, however, the answer is no.

"The tendency of a circulation in a fluid to develop in a clockwise direction in the Northern Hemisphere and a counterclockwise direction in the Southern Hemisphere can be traced to the earth's rotation. Imagine a cannon fired southward from any latitude above the equator. Its initial eastward motion is the same as that at a point on the spinning earth. This initial eastward velocity is less than that at a point later in its trajectory, because points closer to the equator travel in a bigger circle as the earth rotates. Therefore, the cannon shell is deflected westward (to the right), from the perspective of a person standing on the earth. A gunner firing a cannon northward would find that the shell is also deflected toward the right. These sideways deflections are attributed to the Coriolis force, although there really is no force involved--it is just an effect of being in a rotating reference frame.

"The Coriolis force accounts for why cyclones are counterclockwise-rotating storms in the Northern Hemisphere, but rotate clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. The circulation directions result from interactions between moving masses of air and air masses moving with the rotating earth. The effects of the rotation of the earth are, of course, much more pronounced when the circulation covers a larger area than would occur inside your bathtub.

"In your tub, such factors as any small asymmetry of the shape of the drain will determine which direction the circulation occurs. Even in a tub having a perfectly symmetric drain, the circulation direction will be primarily influenced by any residual currents in the bathtub left over from the time when it was filled. It can take more than a day for such residual currents to subside completely. If all extraneous influences (including air currents) can be reduced below a certain level, one apparently can observe that drains do consistently drain in different directions in the two hemispheres."

Nietzsche: centifugal force is not an illusion. It's a real force the is a vector qauntity and is quite useful in explaining many natural phenomena.
Do you think that when you make a turn in a car and your body is pulled to one side that this is an "illusion?"