Dangling Conversations

Colour commentary on the world we live in

How did New Orleans arrange to be lower than sea level anyway?

Posted 01 Sep, 2005 at 12:20 by wendy in /History | Permanent link

Unsurprisingly this topic came up the other day. It didn't seem very likely that the city has been sinking, and yet, how exactly would you go about building a coastal city that was beneath sea level anyway? And why on earth would you do something like this? Doesn't it just seem insane? And just what is a levee anyway? Turns out that Wikipedia has the answers to these questions and more.

Comments (5 comments so far)
I'm sure a great many people in the Netherlands could answer these questions too. After all, a good portion of that entire nation is below sea level and protected by dykes.
Posted 2005/9/1 13:16:00 by Blue
At least most of the Netherlands isn't sinking due to water being pumped out of it. Or at least, I haven't heard of that being an issue. I have been making extensive use of Wikipedia recently for fact-checking, though. Great stuff. For example, I came across a reference in a SF book to a waterfall caused when the Atlantic broke through the Straits of Gibraltar to flood the Mediterranean. My thought was, "Did that actually happen?" Turns out it did. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_Salinity_Crisis
Posted 2005/9/1 16:43:40 by RobRoy

Also, does anyone know how I can get paragraph breaks into these comments? I'm wondering if that's the P option on the HTML tag list.

I'm going to try it. Let's see if this works.

Posted 2005/9/1 16:45:03 by RobRoy

option

Turns out the basic HTML tags work in here, RobRoy.

Also turns out you have to be a little wary of wikipedia, at least if you care for authouritative answers. Like Ward's Wiki (also known as the Portland Pattern Repository--a place I used to find pretty valuable in life[-1], and that I still browse occasionally), it's pretty nifty for getting information. Ward's Wiki seems to have developed a stable culture. Research oriented people (such as librarians) have been finding that the sources for wikipedia is far too untrustworthy, and so it's not really used by anyone who's looking for reliable information.

Interestingly, Ward's Wiki seems to be unaccessible at the moment.

Posted 2005/9/4 18:01:29 by Kael
Speaking of Wikipedia... in the August 2005 Canadian edition of Reader's Digest is found an article originally from The National Post dedicated to Wikipedia. It talks about how accurate Wikipedia is and it's strengths and weaknesses versus more traditional information sources. There are a surprising number of them.
Posted 2005/9/5 12:44:47 by Blue
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