To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2003 20:21:04 -0500
Subject: [WSFA] Re: baseballs, priests, and newsgroups
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

On Sun, 5 Jan 2003 00:46:50 -0500 (EST) "Keith F. Lynch"
<kfl at KeithLynch.net> writes:

> Sure enough, I found one page discussing it, at
> http://www.baseball1.com/carney/index.php?storyid=73
>

... The article also mentions that these falling baseballs were
> going *slower* than thrown baseballs.

Perhaps.  A vigorously thrown baseball might initially be moving as fast
as about 70 miles per hour.  Found via google, the fastest pitch on
record, 98.6 miles per hour (144 ft/sec) was thrown by Bob Feller of the
Cleveland Indians in 1947.  100 feet per second is reported to be about
the optimum speed for throwing a curveball, and 100 feet per second is
said to be well within the ability of most professional pitchers.  But it
is not immediately obvious that terminal velocity is slower than 100 feet
per second.

Official baseball specifications (for a so-called hardball) are: 5 to 5
1/4 ounces in weight and 9 to 9 1/4 inches in circumference.  Going
metric, let's say a baseball is 7.38 cm in diameter, or 43 cm^2 in cross
section, and 145 grams in mass, weighing 1.42 newtons.  Let's say that
air density is 1.2 kg/m^3.  Can anyone calculate terminal velocity?  I
suppose the question is: how fast a wind would it take to exert 1.42
newtons of force on a 43 cm^2 cross section?

These data imply that the density of a hardball is 0.69, which means that
it would float in water (at least before it gets completely saturated).
That seems a bit surprising.  I would have thought a baseball (hardball)
would sink in water.

I guess there's nothing
> limiting a thrown ball to terminal velocity.
>

A thrown baseball, if thrown faster than terminal velocity, will slow
down until it reaches terminal velocity, at which time it would be
falling straight down, unless, of course, it hits the ground or hits
something else first.  But it approaches terminal velocity
asymptotically, so, strictly speaking, in a Newtonian world, it would
never reach terminal velocity exactly.

> In another conversation last night, Bob MacIntosh wondered what Joe
> Mayhew would have thought about the current molestation scandals in
> the Catholic Church.  I thought the scandals went back many years,
> rather than being recent.
>

Apparently, molestation within the Catholic Church has been going on for
many years, but it has only been in the past year or so that the
resulting scandal has come to the forefront of public attention.  So it
might appear, to someone who had paid little attention to such things,
that molestation has all of a sudden become a problem in the Church.  The
reality is probably quite the opposite.  Most of the scandals arise from
acts which took place many years ago, and the embarrassment to the Church
is compounded by the past failure of the Church hierarchy to deal
justly with the problem.  But the situation is now greatly changed
as a result of all the public scrutiny and outrage, and so the prevalence
of
molestation in the Church at this time is probably much lower than it has
been for many years.  One thing which has come to light is that have long
been Church facilities in operation to treat pedophilia, and the mere
existence of such facilities suggests that pedophilia has long been a
problem in the Church.

But to put things in perspective, what little statistical evidence has
appeared in the press suggests that only about one half of one percent of
all priests have actually molested children.  The problem is 'big' mainly
because some pedophile priests have molested many children over a long
period of time, and because molestation by priests and coverups by
bishops are regarded as egregious violations of trust, much more so than
molestation by some random individual who has not been placed in a
position of trust.  It appears that some have jumped to the conclusion
that there is something peculiarly wrong with the Catholic Church.
Before drawing that conclusion, one would have to ask what percentage of
adults (well, adult men) who are not priests have molested children.  I
have no statistics on that, but I think that some womens' rights groups
have claimed that a large percentage of women were molested as children.

> This time I had Google tell me how many newsgroup messages
> containing both "priest" and "molestation" were posted each half year.

> ... This technique can be used to track any topic ...

That sounds like a useful tool for tracking popular culture, especially
since it quickly yields numerical data which can be compared with
the corresponding data for other topics.  A big drawback, though, is that
the results will be highly dependent on how the search is formulated, and
properly formulating the search terms might require much trial and error
and reading of sampled messages to verify the relevancy of chosen search
words.  Another drawback is that while that research tool may show to
what extent people are discussing a given topic (and especially how that
has changed over time), it does not show what they are saying about the
topic.  You would have to sample the messages to characterize what is
being said.

Perhaps Keith can readily answer these questions:  About how many
distinct newsgroups are there which are reasonably active (at least a
hundred messages per month), how far back do the newsgroup archives go,
and has the use of newsgroups generally, as measured by the number of
messages posted, been increasing, stagnating, or falling off, in recent
years?

It might be interesting to compare the annual message volume of all
newsgroups with the corresponding data for some of the large email list
services, such as yahoo and topica.

Ron Kean

.

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