You've nailed it. Infrastructure has become invisible, unlauded, boring. Infrastructure is the original stuff that matters.

Aside from entering some engineering field, there are ways that nerds can make a difference. Take this dam for example, clearly a certain level of routine surveillance had not been performed . If divers discover a 2 inch crack, could there have been a half inch or hairline crack some time ago? And could a more thorough use of remote imaging or even acoustic technology have spotted it? What if someone who reads Slashdot has an idea for some economical and effective way to inspect dams should contact Thomas Stredwick at PUD and offer expertise and propose such a method? At times history favors those who make those phone calls.

I define a 'nerd' as someone technologically aware who is capable, by the multidisciplinary nature of technology, of useful insight. The biggest problem with nerd-culture today in my opinion is that they tend to be observers who are not out there looking for problems to solve.

If you consider yourself to be tech-savvy in some field or are just interested in what problems are out there, check out the InnoCentive Challenges. These are a collection of problems to solve, big and little, that someone has documented and put up cash money to solve. Some of the challenges are interesting and very specific. For example, if you can propose a good way to Detect Protruding Nails in a Wooden Pallet that is going past on a conveyor belt, there might be $20,000 in it for you. Also lots of chemistry, medical materials science challenges.

Infrastructure should be a part of your child's exploration of the modern world. Underground by David Macaulay gives readers an introduction to utilities by presenting awesome ink drawings of incredible perspective and detail. As they start reading. Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape is the kind of book you want your children to grow up with and browse long before they understand all the words. Because great books about interesting things deliver the words to them.

I am an infrastructure maniac.

___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

I think you mean a governor, guv'ner. The origin of the Motor-Operated Pushover is aptly described here, "To think, all I had to do was put the balls on the other side! Aren't they beautiful?"

I like the Future, I'm in it.

Replacement stinkbugs have been ordered and are on their way up through Florida's major I-95 and I-75 corridors. Thank you for selecting the two-day shipping option.

Add $5.75 to your order to qualify for free shipping, with your trial of Amazon Prime. With your Prime subscription your orders may qualify for additional bonus items such as 3, 5 and 7 year Cicadas and Party Fun Paks of dark crusty bastard fungus that will cover and consume everything.

A copy of this order has been sent to your email address but the stinkbugs will probably arrive first.

Project 'A'
1. scan/digitize and 'snap' maps to geo coords and add markup
2. create website using active server scripts and HTML/js for drag/zoom navigation
3. release to the world with great fanfare
4. site is slashdotted, then eventually settles down to several terabytes/mo bandwidth
5. one year in, site is on the radar of cost/benefit analysis as an escalating expense
6. two years in, routine site changes break the atlas with few to mourn it (and,or) the bean counters pull the plug on it

Project 'B'
1. just scan maps in high res, don't bother to 'snap' because they are not to be used for navigational porpoises. Embed them in low-loss huge PDF.
2. place the entire package on the BitTorrent network with the University committed to keeping a perpetual seed online
3. build a static website giving a low-res 'taste' of the product, instructing students on how to set up BitTorrent and explaining the advantages to human civilization if you obtain and browse your own local copy, and many people all over keep an archive of this this precious historical work.
4. ten years later, there are several thousand copies of the work stored on several continents, ten seeds online (including the University who never experienced any serious bandwidth inconvenience) and the walls of many places are adorned with countless prints of these maps.

I'm all for pointy and clicky forms of ENTERTAINMENT, but for the same purposes as is served by a library, Project B looks like a really sound endeavor.

OOPS, I meant THIS solar slump article, not this solar slump article on Slashdot. Apologies to all who are trapped in a recursive loop.

Going by a straight count of visible spots has served us pretty well since people started spotting spots. But while lots 'o spots have been spotted the magnetic flux and general energy release has been spotty. For another metric look at this comparison of spot-count to magnetic field data. Also see this solar slump article by Anthony Watts, and look for "pores" in the comments. The criteria for identifying spots is changing in ways that might overstate the count as compared with previous observational methods. Adjustment is inevitable -- we are using a sunspot count in historical record spanning the era of the naked eye right through improved optics to the whole-spectrum imaging of today.

I would like to point out a theory where a solar lull also results in lower global temperatures -- in a way that may be complementary with the UV-centric approach taken in TA... Svensmark's theories on cosmic rays and their effect on cloud formation. See this documentary Svensmark: The Cloud Mystery. Radiation-seeded cloud formation was first observed by Charles Thomson Rees Wilson in 1896. In BBC: Connections, Death In The Morning (index to 38:15) James Burke describes the events that led to WIlson's great invention, the cloud chamber. I highly recommend the entire Connections series, especially the original first season which begins with "The Trigger Effect".

On clouds... another Good Watch is the BBC documentary on the phenomenon of Global Dimming, especially its opening minutes where David Travis of the University of Wisconsin measured a 1 degree C change in temperature ranges in the days following 9/11, when all aircraft in the US were grounded. This (shocking!) correlation, that could only be ascribed to a particular human activity -- a lack of contrail cloud seeding -- reminds us that our contribution to climate might far exceed pure-chemical CO2 causation.

On clouds... while researching contrails years ago I had a true what-the-fuck moment to see that NASA had also noticed significant human triggered cirrus cloud formation but managed to leverage the presence of cirrus (Minnis et. al) into a net warming effect. This has led to extraordinary ideas like enlarging ice crystal size in cirrus by seeding to 'reduce' this 'warming' effect. I am old school and any claim that increased clouds (of any kind) are net-warming and not net-cooling is an extraordinary claim and should be confirmed by an extraordinary level of proof, not just computer energy-budget models of incoming versus outgoing long-wave radiation. And I'm glad to see that the cirrus net effect is not yet decided by everyone.

On survival during the coming solar minimum... those jolly old River Thames Frost Fairs look like a a real tonne of funne, but faced with the likelihood of global cooling it behooves us to fast-track the development of Thorium based energy. Because MSR/Thorium is the answer for both Global Warming and Global Cooling. I am generally behooved these days.

Also... the timely development of molten salt reactors and supplying the globe with cheaper grid-energy would improve the human race. It would help to offset the effect of driving on women's pelvises by relief from washing clothes by hand.

___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld.
When I die, they will put me in a box
and dispose of it in the cold ground.
And in all the million ages to come,
I will never breathe, or laugh, or twitch again.
So won't you run and play with me here
among the teeming mass of humanity?
The universe has spared us this moment.
~~Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

According to this reputable source, the volume of a Twinkie is ~140 milliliters and the volume of the goo inside is 42.8 ml or ~30.5% of its total volume.

If Yellowstone's magma chamber is its goo and its volume is 200 cubic kilometers (low estimate), then the Yellowstone Twinkie itself would have a volume of ~656 cubic kilometers. If Twikie's W:L:H dimensions follow the ratio 15:39:11 then the Twinkie would be ~18.2 kilometers on its longest side, or 716,535 inches.

But supervolcanic calderas tend to form in roundish not Twinkie shapes, so it would be best to use the circular Ding Dong or its ellipsoidal counterpart, the Long Dong.

People must take precautions to avoid breathing ash. While even wet cotton can help, the use of respirators is recommended because the finest particles can be as small as 10 microns.

While dry ash is not conductive, even a small amount of moisture produces a paste that is conductive enough to cause high voltage flash-overs. Tall pylons with ceramic insulators may manage to stay clean but electrical substations where ash can form piles, are especially vulnerable.

And if insulators accumulate ash after a rain or already have ice on them it's pretty much flash-pow grid down.

BBC did a great two hour docudrama depicting possible effects, Supervolcano [2006] along with a companion program Supervolcano.The Truth About Yellowstone

Beyond the ash fall there are long-term climate concerns. There have been two major eruptions that have affected climate severely in the Northern Hemisphere with a clear historical record, Tambora (1815) and Krakatoa (535AD). I cover these in this recent Slashdot post.

My plan, and I am being pretty annoying about it in the hope that it becomes everyone's plan -- is to fast-track the two-fluid Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor to commercial deployment in North America AS SOON AS IS HUMANLY POSSIBLE, specifically the 1GW unit design with multiple on-site units sharing core salt reprocessing infrastructure -- that is a best-fit for our base load grid supply. These plants would deliver an unprecedented level of safety even if they are modularly constructed and mass-produced, will continue to operate even if rail or roads are damaged, and can store years of fuel on-site.

In short, a best hope for survival under many disaster scenarios, both natural and man-made.

The electrical grid is more of a problem since its points of failure cover a wide area and the vulnerability extends to the transformers in your neighborhood. For the grid I advocate a build-out of buried High Voltage DC conduits to interface between the three major North American interconnects, and to progressively deliver bridge junctions that can route around regional failures.

In short, we should be powering up new base load energy and building cross-country energy pipelines -- in addition to oil pipelines.

Re-tooling the grid will take much more time and capital than the deployment of LFTR but it is no less important. One of the advantages to LFTR is that it need not be sited near a large source of coolant water, so (unlike water reactors) there is NO region of North America that cannot accommodate this technology, and these plants can be built as far away from population centers as desired.

But it cannot and will not happen without your help.

See my letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

And see the fascinating Thorium Remix 2011 presentation.

Also, here is an excellent overview on HVDC pipelines: Roger W. Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

[yawn] Bill Nye is jumping into an fight of squawking and feather-ruffling with no spurs on his toes. No clear victory is possible because the only referee who could call the plays and tally the score is God. Since God is strictly hands-off, there will be no thunderclap and deep booming voice to announce the winner.

Since Nye does not own a science theme park whose ticket sales could be bolstered by this event, he has already lost the debate.

Since Ham owns a theme park where it is fun to imagine Tyrannosaurus Rex as a vegan doggie being petted by a smiling cave woman in a sexy (loom-woven) tunic ... he has already won the debate.

Now if Bill Nye should instead choose to debate Christopher Monckton on anthropogenic climate change, the true nature of the CO2 as relates to the Greenhouse effect, and the applicability and veracity of long term computer models ... THAT would be a debate worthy of popcorn.

THANK YOU for adding some interesting vox punctus contra punctum to the steady throb of exploitation exposé. Appreciation of pure kameseru does exist in Western cultures as well, though we try to balance it with a certain measure of laziness that varies with the individual.

Disaster cleanup is noble work what ever the hazards, compensation or conditions.

Here's hoping that with the intense scrutiny that this operation is under, the loosened purse-strings towards refugees (see the October 30 entry) and a sense of parity will ensure that those who participate will find suitable recompense.

And no, this is not what I had in mind.

I feel you. Those wires were slow.

In the 90s I was toying with the ASN.1 spec and its many derivatives, trying to find a good balance between a wire-stream and random access storage protocol. It would consist of a series of synchronous streams transmitted in tandem with shifting, the most primitive being the raw ASN.1 transmittal of data, each successive meta-stream on top of it consisting of lisp-like primitives that act on the data and 'unroll' it into more symbolic form, providing entry vectors for traversal and parsing.

Each lisp instruction block received would be compiled into pseudocode, but also a cryptographically strong hash produced from it that was also transmitted as part of the data stream, the hash becoming so 'synonymous' with the operation that it pseudocode could be applied repeatedly. The whole purpose was to create within a dataset a nested roll/unroll philosophy which could take table data that has extremely compressible rows for example, and serialize it in such a way that the result is 'half data', 'half instruction' where the more compressible the data the 'half instruction' starts to approach 100%.

Then I realized that I was trying to invent a general-purpose sentient form of the bzip aka Burrowsâ"Wheeler transform, and for most practical purposes the non-sentient form for streams would overtake my own efforts as memory and processor power increased.

So I relaxed a bit (with my new found feeling of innovative inadequacy) and did other things, while I waited for simple Burrowsâ"Wheeler transforms to make their way into the texty streamy side of things.

They never did, because in all but rare cases simple stream LZW gets close enough. But that didn't set t5he world on fire either, not at first. Even mod_deflate and mod_gzip support for the mostly-ASCII web loads of yesterday was slow in coming. I remember triumphantly implementing mod_deflate in my Apache server only to disable it because some IEs would miss end of stream marks and hang. Things are much better now.

Amazing isn't it. Who knew??
I covered this exciting news back in September in this [failed] Slashdot submission,

Breakthrough: Manned Space Travel Achieved Using 40-Year Old Technology

TheRealHocusLocus writes