popular logistics

We’ll let Mr. Tiemann speak for himself:

In the middle of a cornfield in the middle of Iowa, there is a data center.

Not just any data center. It’s InfoBunker, probably the securest data center you’re ever likely to find. It’s built in a decommissioned Air Force bunker that once housed hardened military telecom equipment, as the giant radio tower that stands above the parking lot—and can be seen for miles around—attests. But that’s pretty much all there is that can be seen by passersby, aside from a small entryway hut and some storage sheds and old wire spools on a patched, 60s-era parking lot. The facility extends five stories below ground, with multiple data floors, employee areas, and living quarters (the 24/7 staff doesn’t see the sun very much).

- snip -

It’s not my place to go into too much detail about what’s housed in the bunker, as just to get inside under escort you have to agree to a strict no-photos policy (perfectly understandable); but suffice it to say that the simplex lock on the main hut door is only the very beginning. Many hardened, keycoded, and biometric-protected doors stand between the outside world and the NOC floors, including the self-sufficient power systems (six days’ worth of diesel fuel; 17,000 gallons of water, for drinking and fire suppression; military-grade NBC air filtration). It’s built to withstand a 20-megaton nuclear blast at 2.5 miles, according to the website, and I can believe it. Your data will be intact even if the rest of the Internet has been vaporized.

From Peeve Farm. Via Boing Boing

The Technisches Hilfswerk is the German government agency charged with responding to disasters at home and abroad. In a country of about 82 million (source: CIA World Fact Book), 80,000 people work for the Dederal Agency for Technical Relief. That’s roughly one person per 1,000 - 99% of whom are volunteers.

One of the THW logos, courtesy of Wikipedia.

According to the United States Census Population Clock, there were, as of today, 301 million peoplein the United States. If the same proportion of people in the United States were active as volunteers in disasters, we’d have over 30 million volunteer first responders.

Think about that - and we’ll be back to discuss it - as soon as we’ve gotten bug or two out of WordPress.

And at least a little sarcasm. Check out this post from Telstar Logistics, describing a recent test of Airbus evacuation employees. This test was done with Lufthansa employees, without smoke, fire, or other conditions which - assuming an emergency evacuation in the first place, would seem to be within the real of possibility.

How long would it take for everyone to get off the A-380?

In a best-case scenario, with no smoke, no fire, limited structural damage to the aircraft, and no one who sustained any injuries during the landing, it would take a little under 80 seconds to evacuate 853 passengers and 20 crew members from an A380.

…. even under those most ideal of circumstances, there were casualties: one broken leg and 32 friction burns.

It’s clear that the thing to do is just make sure that bad things only happen during ideal conditions.   There’s also a link to a YouTube clip of the evacuation exercise  - and an even more disturbing bit from the Wall Street Journal about a McDonnell Douglas evacuation exercise.

Derivative tip of the hat to  Upgrade: Travel Better. Direct tip of aforementioned chapeau to Telstar Logistics. Link to Telstar post here.

We’re given to understand that Stanley Wise (1900 - 1985), nine years old, saw two men capsize a canoe in the Roanoke River. Many people were present and watched the accident - but none had the toolsor expertise to attempt a rescue. Both men died.

In 1928, with nine colleagues from the Norfolk & Western Railway, Wise started a rescue squad - with communications support from the city of Roanoke; a local funeral home provided an ambulance.

Wikipedia reference here -

The wikipedia reference links to Ronanoke’s Volunteer Rescue Muesum

and to Pat Ivey’s EMT Rescue which title is new to us (ISBN-0-7592-4464-2), but we’re going to see if we can track down a copy.

Build Your Own PV Panel Workshop -Date: May 12, 2007

Cost: $50

Location: Lowell, MA

Learn how to assemble your own Photovoltaic (PV) panel for producing electicity. Richard Komp has pioneered PV panel production as a cottage industry in Nicaragua, Mali, and Haiti. In this workshop you’ll get to participate in assembling a PV panel. Depending on the number of participants, we will be making one or more 15 Watt panels, which are capable of charging 12 V batteries and thus are good for small applications.

• What You’ll Learn: How cells and panels are made and how they work. If you don’t know how to solder, we’ll teach you that as well.
• Time: 9 - 5 pm, Lunch included. Contact us if you are vegetarian or have other specialty dietary needs.
• Cost: $50; optionally, pre-purchase a 15 Watt panel for an additional $80 or purchase a panel during the workshop Participants: 10 maximum
• Instructors: Dr. Richard Komp, Virginio Mendonça

Phone: 978 453 4787
Email: virginio@virginiosbackyard.com
http://www.virginiosbackyard.com/workshops.html

FC AA 31 82 19 1C 34 8E 79 C8 74 B3 0C 7D D9 8E

We got this courtesy of Professor Ed Felten  of Princeton, which is a school in New Jersey.

Professor Felten has been up late, making unique character strings just like this one. You can have your own, but you can’t have ours.

Get one here.

We learned about it from this post in BoingBoing, which will explain it all to you.

A digression about Cornel West 

We hope that Professor West of Princeton gets his own 128-bit number; in our household, he’s regarded as the greatest living American orator. We’re still disappointed he didn’t end up in the open United States Senate seat for New Jersey a while back, to which Robert Menendez was appointed. Don’t get us wrong - we like Senator Menendez, and worked on his campaign. But we were hoping for Cornel West. Unfortunately, appointing Cornel West would have quadrupled the mean intelligence of the Capitol , and apparently the security people decided the Senate chamber isn’t able to handle the stress.

Popular Logistics promises that if we can, we’ll post a recording of Professor West reading his own number - or ours - he has our permission.

Writing in The Nation, Joshua Kors describes the Pentagon’s new way to save money. While we have been spending approx. $100 Billion per year on the war in Iraq, including the $Billions in unmarked bills that disappear from suitcases and satchels on the streets of Baghdad, click here and here we are saving about $1 billion per year - about one per cent - with an accounting move that Ken Lay and Andy Fastow (click here) would be proud to call their own.

Take an injured vet like Jon Town. Classify his injury as the result of a “pre-existing condition” and poof: he gets a Purple Heart but gets no Veteran’s Benefits. And remember that signing bonus? The bonus is contingent on serving full term. If you’re wounded and discharged half-way through your tour - kiss half the bonus goodbye. This is the “Enron-esque” beauty of Regulation 635-200, Chapter 5-13: “Separation Because of Personality Disorder.”

Several of Town’s fellow soldiers in 2-17 Field Artillery, including Michael Forbus, could have testified to his stability and award-winning performance before the October 2004 rocket attack. As Forbus puts it, before the attack Town was “one of the best in our unit”; after, “the son of a gun was deaf in one ear. He seemed lost and disoriented. It just took the life out of him.”

Here are some numbers: According to The Nation. In the last six years the Army has diagnosed and discharged more than 5,600 soldiers because of personality disorder. And the numbers keep rising:

• 2001: 805 Cases
• 2003: 980 Cases
• 2006: 1,086 Cases from January to November.

“It’s getting worse and worse every day,” says the official who handles discharge papers. “At my office the numbers started out normal. Now it’s up to three or four soldiers each day. It’s like, suddenly everybody has a personality disorder.”

Is this what America stands for?
Is this what President Bush means by “compassionate conservatism?”

Is this what George W. Bush, the candidate, meant when he promised to restore honor and dignity to the Office of the President?

Not according to Bobby Muller at Veterans for America.

Including a report that a petition, signed by 200 former FBI agents, has been given to the United States government, and quoting Levinson’s wife Christine, as follows:

“My husband, Bob Levinson, is still missing. We, his family, have not heard from him since March 8, and the silence is unbearable,” she said.

“Right now, we are living a nightmare. We need Bob to come home to us. We are aware of all the rumors out there which have raised our hopes, only to have them crushed by the reality that we still have no information. We are asking anyone who has any information of any kind to please let us know.”

Link to AP article here.  Via Staten Island Live.

A petition signed by 200 former agents, we guess, is one neither widely circulated nor circulated for long. The Levinson League, to coin a phrase, is both wide and  deep.

In a piece dated 6 May, Debka File   reports that Bob Levinson was releasedon 1 May, and that the Iranians are miffed that some or all of the five Iranians held by the United States in Iraq.

 Link to article here.

Since we’re empiricists here at Popular Logistics, and our chief medical advisor is from a state adjacent to Missouri (the “show-me” state), we would like to believe the Debka report, but want firmer evidence.

Since Levinson owes at least one dinner to a senior editor of this blog, we’d accept Levinson’s presence at a meal in Brooklyn as sufficient evidence.

Here’s Streetwriter, one of a number of projects from the nice people at the Institute for Applied Autonomy:

Apparently the Streetwriter has had more than one incarnation - first built into the body of a van - the more recent and advanced model being towable. From the IAA website:

The system consists of a custom built, computer controlled industrial spray painting unit that is built into an extended-body cargo van. The vehicle prints text messages onto the pavement in a manner much like a dot-matrix printer. The expanded width of StreetWriter allows for messages and simple graphics that are legible from tall buildings and low flying aircraft and is capable of rendering messages that are several hundred feet in length.

New! A radical redesign of StreetWriter has taken place. The new machine, tentatively called SWX, recently infiltrated the finish line festivities of the DARPA Grand Challenge. The earlier version of StreetWriter has been officially decomissioned [sic].

Text and other images here.

We’d like to propose an additional use for this technology - when government signage fails in emergencies - viz. certain of New York City’s “Flood Evacuation Route” - which may be signs leading to the flood, rather than away - these machines might be put to use correcting government misinformation. Which may, we think, have been the artists’ original intent. If anyone amongst the Popular Logistics  readership has a connection to IAA - an exclusive group, from what we hear - we’d like an introduction.

From Tyler Cowen’s post at Marginal Revolution.

Which cites a May 4, 2007 article in The Wall Street Journal:

According to a voluntary survey cited in the report, 48% of Caribbean adolescent girls surveyed described their own “sexual initiation” as forced.

A single rape is a great evil; assuming that this number is even remotely accurate - I’ve no reason to think otherwise - this suggests a widespread tolerance - or endorsement of forcible sex among men. And resignation to it among women. From MacBeth: 

when sorrows come, they come

not single spies, but in battalions.

On further reflection - I’m not sure what the other layers of meaning are here - only that rape - like torture, hunger, homelessness - it’s within our collective power to end them. Had we the wit and will among us to do it.

Independently powered - no wiring; indifferent to grid failures. This technology, we’d think, would be an urban planning no-brainer. Here’s one example, from a piece by Lloyd Alter in TreeHugger:

And here’s a whole street of them:

According to the manufacturer’s website, these photographs are of the system installed in Entebbe, Uganda.

It would seem that in the short run - it would be useful to have these in likely places of emergency assembly - school parking lots, parks, near government buildings. There’s also the question of portable configurations, which might be a good thing for FEMA to forward-cache. They don’t require generators - or fuel - and satisfy a primary objective - lighting - taking the load from emergency generators to power other things (blow dryers for ranking government officials?).

 We think that Stuart Brand’s account of the 1989 SF earthquake is - if anything is - a “must-read” for anyone concerned with emergency preparedness. WorldChanging has done us all the service of reprinting it here. 

From Brand’s piece:

Volunteer rescuers in San FranciscoÂ’s Marina District on the night of the 1989 earthquake outnumbered professionals three-to-one during the critical first few hours. And it still wasnÂ’’t enough. Only a small portion of the people present offered emergency help, despite the romanticized press to the contrary.

Considering the amount of money and bureaucracy spent (well spent) on preparing the Bay Area’s buildings for earthquakes, it is startling to realize how little is spent on preparing people. The widespread earthquake literature focuses on self-preservation, not on helping others, nor on the niceties of being helped. As a result, volunteer rescuers on October 17 had to make it up as they went—wasting vital time and making unnecessary mistakes.

My conclusions from Brand’s piece:

•  Preparation and organization of citizen groups can pay off - providing critical surge capacity
• investing in communications systems acts as a force multiplier - allowing, among other things, for the rapid reallocation of resources
•  In addition to the need for widespread advanced first-aid training and equipment - we need lots of people with construction and engineering skills - not only for the “emergency” - but also if we intend to rebuild.

Thanks to Gregory Cohen of NGO Consulting for giving us the Stuart Brand piece.

Here’s a thought for a presidential campaign plank - from either party:

1. A commitment to a citizen reserve corps
2. decommissioned military and law enforcement communications equipment given to citizen groups -especially the non-encrypted systems, which government agencies now think obsolete
3. Lots of free training in first aid, search-and-rescue, and construction techniques.

None of this is expensive; we’ll try to do the number later. We think it costs - done well - less than a month in Iraq.

Kris Alexander of the grossly misnamed Alexander the Average   had, some months ago, proposed a Civilian Reserve Corps.

Link to his PowerPoint presentation here. 

We’re not sure how much this would vary from the original national CERT concept - in which (1) CERT teams would be encouraged to have advanced training, and (2) teams in non-affected areas would be transported to assist in affected areas.

Apparently, the President likes this idea - so much that he proposed it in his State of the Union address. Which - we must admit - we missed. Alexander suspects, in a piece entitled “The President Stole My Idea”), what Mark Twain called “unconscious appropriation.”

Nothing is ours but our language, our phrasing. If a man takes that from me (knowingly, purposely) he is a thief. If he takes it unconsciously–snaking it out of some old secluded corner of his memory, and mistaking it for a new birth instead of a mummy — he is no thief, and no man has a case against him.

Unconscious appropriation is utterly common; it is not plagiarism and is no crime; but conscious appropriation, i. e., plagiarism, is as rare as parricide. Of course there are plagiarists in the world–I am not disputing that–but bless you, they are few and far between. These notions of mine are not guesses; they are the outcome of twenty years of thought and observation upon this subject.
- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), Letter to Robert Burdette, circa 4/19/1890. Link here.

Our question - and forgive us - we haven’t finished the first cup of coffee yet - is - what’s happening with this fine idea?

In the meantime - Popular Logistics takes this opportunity to, once again, encourage those just beginning to think of these issues to do the following:

If you’ve concluded you need to act, go to Three Steps.

If you still need a little bit of persuasion,  read Irwin Redlener’s book (cover in our left sidebar, if the CSS code is still working), and Stuart Brand’s account of the aftermath of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. Link here.  Via WorldChanging.

We’d like to see the rest of  - here’s Paglen’s description:

Military culture is filled with a totemic visual language consisting of symbols and insignia that signify everything from various unit and command affiliations to significant events, and noteworthy programs. A typical uniform will sport patches identifying its wearer’s job, program affiliation, achievements and place within the military hierarchy. These markers of identity and program heraldry begin to create a peculiar symbolic regime when they depict one’s affiliation with what defense-industry insiders call the “black world” – the world of classified programs, projects, and places, whose outlines, even existence, are deeply-held secrets. Nonetheless, the Pentagon’s “black world” is replete with the rich symbolic language that characterizes other, less obscure, military activities.

Paglen’s onto something. In our (limited) experience of this culture - some of this culture actually has some humor - in the choice of cover names, for instance, which are inside jokes. (We have a couple in mind that we think are pretty clever, but are hard-pressed to think of one we can discuss publicly and responsibly). This doesn’t, of course, detract in the slightest from the coolness of what Paglen has done;

Via Trevor Paglen.