whisper
Whisper - The whispering arch at St. Louis Union Station is pretty interesting. If you stand facing a friend across the entranceway under the arch, you will not be able to hear one another over the crowd of people entering and exiting. However, if you both face your respective walls and speak into the arch, you can converse just fine. The portion of the arch that is whispering is indented a few inches, making a groove in the wider arch, so I assume that the sound travels from one end to the other by moving through the trench of stationary air that curves up and over the cacophony below. Assuming this, I speculated that someone could disrupt the communications channel by disturbing the air flow through the trench. One way would be to use a fan to blow air from ground level directly upward into the center of the trench. This would cause circulation between the cooler and warmer air, and make the sound “fall out” of the trench. Thinking through this, it makes sense that warmer air would stand a better chance of making it up to the high point of the arch, since warmer air rises. However, this thinking seems to explain the reason for another feature of the arch that I noticed. The inside of the arch is lined with some very hot-looking lamps that undoubtedly keep the air inside warmer than the surroundings. The rest of the arch does not have such lights, so I’m betting that the lights are there to keep the air warm, and therefore keep the air channel isolated as much as possible from air exchange perturbance below. Perhaps the “whispering arch” as it was first constructed did not have the transmission quality to transmit such clear signals over the crowds, and the lights were added to keep fidelity.
It is sometimes interesting to watch the different headlines used to describe the same news. It seems that especially with news about Microsoft, the news organizations split between those who say “half-empty” and those who say “half-full”. Do 9 out of 18 states make a settlement “half-full” or “half-empty”?
The news says that two new super bombs have “failed to have the desired effect on Taliban morale.” As if morale has anything to do with their will to fight. They are way past caring about morale. These people have nothing left to lose and no hope of any material gains in this world. They fight because it’s the only thing they know. Other activities, like smoking, drinking, or talking to women who are not relatives have long been banned. They have the kind of determination and purpose that every living thing has, but I wouldn’t call it morale.