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#66049 04/20/02 01:58 AM
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Carpal Tunnel
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Nobody will probably believe this, but, honest to goodness, last night I dreamt I was trying to walk down a steep berm at the shore. Really. I think it must have been a precogniscient dream about today's AWAD berm talk. An aside about that dream, as I was trying to walk down the steep incline of this brown sand berm, I saw a huge dinosaur foot print in it...like that of a T-Rex.

Berm regards,
DreamDub


#66050 04/20/02 02:13 AM
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edit: you sneaky thang, DJ! - and you got me thinking with your 'missing link' that you were saying there's no such usage context...

Well, akshually® the first link wouldn't click off the cache, so I was off fishing for the page url when you popped in...very fortuitously, I might add. Couldn't've planned it better meself. And as far as the "Napoleanic" thing...well, I just went and found ya the biggest gun berm goin'...that one oughtta hold ya for awhile!


W'ON when did you stop being our Happy Epeolatrist? When did your epeolatricity start waning? Poor sweet thing.

Waning, my dear Bel? Never! Rather gaining in epeolatricity, fueled, of course, by the legendary and envigorating exploits of Don WO'N!...the only WO'N! hey, watch it, mav, I heard that!




The Only WO'N!

#66051 04/20/02 11:19 AM
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Then, of course, there's that whole country of berms...Berma. Myanmar

The Only WO'N!

#66052 04/20/02 11:26 AM
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When the waves hit the berm and slice it even more, could you call it a Berma Shave? Anybody remember those ads?


#66053 04/20/02 01:25 PM
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one about 20' tall sometime in the 50's

That must of was the one that stuck the word in my retrievable memory bank. Any idea what causes them? That's the part that escapes me.


#66054 04/20/02 01:46 PM
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Re:Burma Shave Ads? Any idea what causes them?
Ad men.

Berm can be man made as has been pointed out.. they sometimes run along hiways, and act as sound barriers, or as Mav pointed out are used for defences.

Shore berm are natural creations of sand, wave and wind. and they are defence barriers. they are the backbones, as it were, of barrier island, and barrier islands protect the main portion of the shore line.

Flood devistate places like the hamptons and wildwood, but rarely the main portion of Long Island or NJ. Berms, 10 to 20 feet higher that normal high tide, they are protections against storm surges too.

A storm doesn't actually have to come on shore to do damage. a big storm at sea, with strong winds, can push water, the way a push broom might. when combined with high tides, you can have a wall of water, not a tidal wave, but a slow, relentless surge of water.. berms help limit the damage the surge can do.

While we have our feet wet.. can some one explain to me again, (i promise this time i'll master it!) the rule of 12?

it is about the normal volume of water that moves with each hour of a tide.. when i first heard it, i final understood why sailors in days past, "sailed with the tide".


#66055 04/20/02 03:46 PM
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Any idea what causes them [seiches]? That's the part that escapes me.

You got me interested, faldage, and you'll find in the links below what is summarized here.

Waves (however they are caused initially) may happen to occur with a time-period, between them, that matches the natural resonant frequency of the lake or harbor. In that case the successive waves (including the waves "rebounding" from the shore) will reinforce each other, building higher; the result is called a seiche. Its defining characteristic is thus not what has caused the initial waves, but the fact that they have "piled up".

Every enclosed body of water has a number of natural resonances. If you sit in a bathtub part full of water and rock back and forth you'll find that at the right period (about a second) you can easily get the waves to grow until they overflow the bath. The resonant oscillation of the water is a seiche.

Swiss seismologist F.A. Forel brought the word (pronounced "sigh-shh") into science in 1890. However, it seems the word was commonly used in German-speaking Switzerland to mean oscillations in alpine lakes.

A tsunami is a wave caused by underwater seismic activity, such as an earthquake or and erupting volcano. A tsunami can be massive and, if it hits the shore, incredibly destructive.

http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/ASK/seiche.html
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/text/students/waves/waves1.htm, and continue to successive pages.
http://www.weathernotebook.org/transcripts/2001/04/18.html

#66056 04/20/02 04:09 PM
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At Planning Boards here in the NorthEast, sidewalks which have been built in the last ten-or-so years all are all required to have a sort of slope, or ramp, every so many feet and at intersections to facilitate wheelchair use. We call 'em berms!

What you all call Coriolis Effect I was introduced to as Coriolis Force! The late, great, Love of My Life explained it to me and since then when all the forces of the world seem aligned against me .... I blame the Coriolus Force (or perhaps now, the Coriolis Effect!) Like when posts go wide for no reason, the board is slow, the dog is driving me crazy, my hair is growing in crooked, my teeth itch, etc., etc.



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An on-the-spot news account of this Chicago seiche: http://www.kacm.com/Tidalwave.htm

Information picked up from various sites:
Large seiches are particularly dangerous because they hit suddenly and without warning. This seiche was about 10 feet [3 meters] high (about the maximum on Chicago's lake), and was quick: at one location "the water surged more than 10 feet within a few minutes."


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Keiva, Please allow me to explain the events of the 1954 rouge seiche event that claimed the lives of ten Chicagoans.

A storm passed through Chicago and then moved on across lake Michigan.
Lakes, like bowls, slosh. The 55 mile-per-hour winds pushed the water to very high slosh hights to the northeast of the Lake Michigan bowl, and then, on the slosh back, the ten foot waves, killed the ten Chicagoans.

This event was cited in the book "EL NINO" as an effect of wave build up that can also be applied even unto the twelve thousand mile bowl that is the Pacific Sea.

The Coriolis Effect modifies the sloshing, as I will later explain to those who haven't read the book.


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