Author Archives: Jon

Majikthise : Hurricane Katrina

Journalist and photographer Lindsay Beyerstein has an excellent blog called MajikThise

. Here’s her account of encountering Blackwater personnnel while covering Katrina (internal links omitted):

The scariest people I’ve ever met were the Blackwater guys I found clustered around a van behind a New Orleans hotel shortly after Hurricane Katrina.I saw a lot of disconcerting things during those two weeks, but the one experience that haunts me two years later was a five-minute conversation that crew.

We’d already encountered a few other Blackwater guys during our trip. One juiced up freak in mirrored sunglasses and a Blackwater bearclaw t-shirt actually lunged at our car when my colleague tried to take a picture of the hotel he was guarding. He didn’t point his weapon or yell, or do anything a rational person in a defensive posture might have done. He just grunted really loudly and tried to stick his head in our window.

Mind you, he wasn’t holding a position in an emergency. We were driving in broad daylight through downtown New Orleans with a bunch of other traffic (military and civilian).

The Blackwater dude was acting as a glorified rent-a-cop on the sidewalk, about two blocks from the main media staging area for New Orleans, which was already amply secured by US military and law enforcement.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that these Blackwater guys thought of themselves as frontline soldiers in a literal war zone, ready to use deadly force at the slightest provocation. That was an unfounded estimate, in the middle of the day in downtown New Orleans several days after the city had been secured by the legitimate authorities. Continue reading →

Powerful Geospatial Suite of Free GIS

Mapz: a gis librarian  – a mysterious and anonymous GIS librarian, to boot – has a post which may well answer the question – what do underfunded and non-funded community-based groups do about their GIS needs.

In this post,  My Powerful Geospatial Suite of Free GIS , Mr. Mapz has a pretty impressive list of applications, about which he says:

These are the freely available applications and services that make up my own personal free GIS. Individually, many freely available applications do not of themselves constitute a full geographic information system, but when these are all pulled together within one suite of tools…Well, it is remarkable what someone can do without spending a cent. (And without needing to spend an enormous amount of time developing your own applications out of open source components or needing to learn, or install, complex applications, such as GRASS GIS.)

– snip –

For a more comprehensive freeware software list, see FreeGIS.org.

Mapz also points to a more exhaustive list of resources of desktop GIS applications, including not-free software, at this link on Very Spatial.

The GIS/map piece of the planning function is, without question, critical. There are two barriers, I think – cost and learning curve – that prevent community-based groups from doing more. This is especially true in communities where local government isn’t supporting community planning and response: it’s hard to get to thinking about a steep learning curve when you’re worried that your municipality is slacking on basic safety issues and you’re trying to persuade your neighbors to buy flashlights.

Jonathan Crowe: how the USGS really does it – or, why the USGS is a little like the O.E.D.

The Supreme Being in Time Bandits had Randall, Fidgit, Strutter, Og, Wally and Vermin. ((See alsoWikipedia entry about Time Bandits

for, among other things, theory that Terry Gilliam meant the Bandits to represent the Pythons.)) Jonathan Crowe of Map Room now brings us the new that the

The United States Geological Survey’s National Map makes use of a corps of volunteers, who are assigned a given area (a USGS quad) and report the names and coordinates of various map features, such as schools, town halls and other facilities, and any changes thereto. The sorts of things that aerial surveys might reveal, but not necessarily identify. Sounds interesting — something a dedicated individual with spare time and a GPS might have a lot of fun doing, akin to what OpenStreetMap volunteers are doing in the UK. (U.S. geographic data is in the public domain, so this may well be the next best thing.) Via Very Spatial

and Catholicgauze.

Maproom post here .

Another example of the amazing thing that can be done by volunteers – and by distributed and coordinated teams of people.
The United States Geological Survey’s National Map makes use of a corps of volunteers, who are assigned a given area (a USGS quad) and report the names and coordinates of various map features, such as schools, town halls and other facilities, and any changes thereto. The sorts of things that aerial surveys might reveal, but not necessarily identify. Sounds interesting — something a dedicated individual with spare time and a GPS might have a lot of fun doing, akin to what OpenStreetMap volunteers are doing in the UK. (U.S. geographic data is in the public domain, so this may well be the next best thing.) Via Very Spatial and Catholicgauze.

Suicide Bomber on Bike Kills 29 Iraqi Policemen; highest-ranking American to be injured in Iraq evacuated to hospital in Germany

From Alissa J. Rubin’s piece in this morning’s Times,Suicide Bomber on Bike Kills 29 Iraqi Policemen

Police training in the provincial capital of Baquba turned into a blood bath on Monday when a suicide bomber on a bicycle set off his explosive vest in the midst of policemen, killing 29, the local police said.

A suicide bomber killed seven people just north of Baghdad, and the United States military said a brigadier general had been wounded by a roadside bomb in northern Baghdad, according to The Associated Press. Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Dorko, the highest-ranking American officer to be hurt since the invasion in March 2003, was evacuated to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. His wounds were not life-threatening, The A.P. said.

That a brigadier general was hurt may be worth noting for the fact that it took so long to happen in a war without a “front.”

The combination of bicycle and suicide vest, however – I don’t think it’s entirely unprecedented. Butit may well make life in Baghdad even more dangerous for bicyclists, as those in the field become more cautious about bicycles. This in a country where – among all the other dangerous things – people are in harm’s way filling vehicle fuel tanks.

Exploding manhole covers

Got a question about this the other day; here’s what I know – we’ll add some more information later:

1. An exploding manhole cover is  a predictor of nearby manhole cover explosions. But not necessarily adjacent holes. So if there’s a problem with one – great caution about all area manholes is indicated. 

2. They’re very heavy – and they’ve been measured going as high as 400 feet vertical. After that, they descend (32fps squared, less  drag). Do the math.

Here’s one resource

“How Exploding Manholes Work ,”  by Kevin Bonsor, on HowStuffWorks.com

Instant Housing and Designing for Disaster

Jenna Wortham has a piece on Wired.com – “Slideshow: Instant Housing and Designing for Disaster

.”  futureshack.jpg

Above is an image of “FutureShack,” designed by Sean Godsell.  There are eleven others, some familiar to us, others not.  We’ll try to get  more of these up – but if you have time, look at Jenna Wortham’s piece on Wired. (Wortham hs been doing excellent pieces like this, on other appropriate technology, great pieces on RFID issues – and she’s also, apparenly, Wired’s

editor in charge of evaluating haggis and other things that at least some people have trouble thinking about eating. Are we missing a connection here?

"Dirty Water = Dead Iraqis"

AcademyWingman, points out in this post the folly of interrupting or slowing chlorine shipments because insurgents have used the trucks as weapons or targets (and as targets then immediately incorporated into the weapon, so to speak), creating deadly chlorine gas.

I urge you to read WingManX’s perceptive post – and assuming you have – I’d add the following points;

–  WingmanX contends that fear itself is a force multiplier for the insurgents; well put!  ;

– in a parallel manner, the chlorine becoms a force multiplier for an IED or truck bomb;

– But – the chlorine isn’t just chlorine  it’s like a big water truck – because the entire water supply’s cleanliness – the health of the entire Iraqi people depends  on potable water. If there were water deliveries – wouldn’t we devote great tactical and strategic forces – and intellectual resources- to making sure the population gets water? This is like letting people die of thirst – but slower  – because they’re dying not from dehydration (no water at all), but water-borne diseases, like dysentery;

In other words, if the enemy can bait us into depriving the Iraqi population of water – and our role there is to protect the Iraqis, and help them to rebuild, who’s winning if the chlorine can’t get through? The bad guys win big. They’re essentially dictating our strategy.
– See also last week’s coverage of Iraq’s power grid plans. They’re doing deals with the Chinese and the Iranians – for multi-megawatt systems. Entirely susceptible to attack. Apparently no one at the energy ministry has read the NPS “Solar Eagle” proposal – or anything abotu network theory.

– Robert Baer – in See No Evil 

described that sttae of sewer and water systems in one or two large Saudi cities – where subpar binLaden family construction has left the water system at risk for leaking from the sewage

system. (I’ll get a copy of the book and a page citation tomorrow).

We owe these people an infrastructure at least as good as what we found when we got there.

Pornography, organized crime and the military-industrial complex (is pornography's business model threatened by new websites?)

Reverse Cowgirl

– the ever-perceptive Ms. Breslin – has posted about a Claire Hoffman piece in Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com which notes precipitous declines in revenue at commercial porn sites, occasioned by the emergency of three free-download sites, in the nature of YouTube: Megarotic (megarotic.com), YouPorn (youporn.com), and Pornotuben (pornotube.com) (note links broken due to the positive correlation between porn sites and computer viruses and the negative correlation between porn sites and computer security. Ed.)

Link to Claire Hoffman’s piece on Portfolio.com.

WNYC’s On The Media– ran an excellent piece in 2002

interview with Jonathan Coopersmith, Douglas Rushkoff, and others making the case that pornography is often the driver of new communications technologies.

For my part, I’d put porn on a plane with two other markets which have different, but no less intense, needs for innovative advantage: illicit markets, and military/law enforcement uses. More my area of knowledge – I can easily name examples:

  • There’s no end to examples of military organizations as first adapters of new technologies: two -way radio, the fax machine (during WWII – before the War Department figured out what to do with telecopiers, they used them for a while over radio – placed in vehicles in the States – sending new information to soldiers and officers who were in vehicles, driving around, making death notifications to the families of service members who had been killed) ((Personal conversations with the late Jack Fitzstephens, whose first military assignment in WW II was in “graves registration” – following behind troops, clipping dog tags, preparing bodies for burial. But not so far behind that he didn’t get shot at)).
  • As soon as there were phones, organized crime (bootleggers, gamblers) used hijacked phone lines – called “cheeseboxes” in New York – so that when authorities followed a phone line to an address – they’d find an empty apartment – with a wired connection to another phone line – sometimes appearing in another apartment or nearby building – which redirected the calls. They could shut the line down, of course – but by the time the connnections got sorted out – targets and evidence had been moved away.An NYPD source has provided me with an explanation of “Cheesebox” as the name – one of the early such setups was hidden in a closet – the wiring then hidden in what had been a shipping crate for cheese.
  • The first mobile telephone I ever saw or used was in law enforcement. (The person I had personal knowledge of using a car-based “radio telephone”was a United States Attorney General; this may be public record now, but not when I came by the information, so we’ll hold the name for the moment, it not being necessary to make the point);
  • Let’s not forget what immediate use urban illicit drug-selling organizations made of pagers and then mobile phones;
  • The first reported use (that I’m aware of) of a “silent,” vibrating pager was by Richard Helms, then DCI, who was reported in the early 1970’s as been “paged” at dinner parties by the then state-of-the-art “beeper.”
  • The FBI was using portable audio recorder hard drives before anyone thought to add “i” to “pod.” Well

before.

Sex, drugs, and espionage in the same piece. We’ll try to keep connecting these things as often as possible.

I’m not sure, though – about the extinction of porn as a business – perhaps this is a just a lull before some newer, better porn medium – with some sort of DRM – makes people willing to pay more for better.

Design for the other 90%

The show we missed at the Cooper-Hewitt, the museum with the highest ration of cool-to-anonymity in New York City. Perhaps it’s actually a secret, classified facility – an “undisclosed cultural location.” Here’s what Design for the other 90% is about:

Of the world’s total population of 6.5 billion, 5.8 billion people, or 90%, have little or no access to most of the products and services many of us take for granted; in fact, nearly half do not have regular access to food, clean water, or shelter. Design for the Other 90%

explores a growing movement among designers to design low-cost solutions for this “other 90%.” Through partnerships both local and global, individuals and organizations are finding unique ways to address the basic challenges of survival and progress faced by the world’s poor and marginalized.

Designers, engineers, students and professors, architects, and social entrepreneurs from all over the globe are devising cost-effective ways to increase access to food and water, energy, education, healthcare, revenue-generating activities, and affordable transportation for those who most need them. And an increasing number of initiatives are providing solutions for underserved populations in developed countries such as the United States.

This movement has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s, when economists and designers looked to find simple, low-cost solutions to combat poverty. More recently, designers are working directly with end users of their products, emphasizing co-creation to respond to their needs. Many of these projects employ market principles for income generation as a way out of poverty. Poor rural farmers become micro-entrepreneurs, while cottage industries emerge in more urban areas. Some designs are patented to control the quality of their important breakthroughs, while others are open source in nature to allow for easier dissemination and adaptation, locally and internationally.

Encompassing a broad set of modern social and economic concerns, these design innovations often support responsible, sustainable economic policy. They help, rather than exploit, poorer economies; minimize environmental impact; increase social inclusion; improve healthcare at all levels; and advance the quality and accessibility of education. These designers’ voices are passionate, and their points of view range widely on how best to address these important issues. Each object on display tells a story, and provides a window through which we can observe this expanding field. Design for the Other 90% demonstrates how design can be a dynamic force in saving and transforming lives, at home and around the world.

They’ve got a promising blog – which is particularly cool – we take as a sign that the Cooper-Hewitt means to keep this dialogue going notwithstanding the closing of the physical exhibit.

We’ve got the crack Popular Logistics “fixers”

trying to persuade the press office at the Cooper-Hewitt that just because we’re a blog, we’re still part of the “press” for purpooses of showing our readers some images along with further posts about Design for the other 90% . Stay tuned for more.

Dog survives fire by hiding in tub; clever maneuver demonstrates intelligence greater than the combined intelligence of U.S. Legislators

Fire. Dog hides in tub. Not for water – but to breathe air through drainpipe

.  An old firefighter’s trick, apparently.

Coverage via neatorama.  We made up the part about Congress. Our libel counsel told us not to lose any sleep over it; truth is, after all, a defense.

Original Newsday article.

Via Arbroath (to Neatorama).

Large High Performance Outdoor Shake Table

Via Pruned: At the University of California San Diego, (UCSD) the NEES program (Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation )

has built a very large “shake table.” From NEES/UCSD:

The UCSD LHP Outdoor Shake Table is being developed at the Field Station at Camp Elliott, a site located 15km away from the main UCSD campus. The shake table, acting in combination with equipment and facilities separately funded by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), which include a large laminar soil shear box and two refillable soil pits, will result in a one-of-a-kind worldwide seismic testing facility. Continue reading →

Tunnel-digging as hobby

 From Pruned:


From one of the pages of Modern Mechanics and Invention, scanned and transcribed here by Modern Mechanix, we learn that “[o]ne of the oddest hobbies in the world is that of Dr. H. G. Dyar, international authority on moths and butterflies of the Smithsonian Institution, who has found health and recreation in digging an amazing series of tunnels beneath his Washington home.”

H.G. Dyar - Modern Mechanix

And he was quite the mole: digging and removing the dirt without the help of heavy machinery, “[a]lmost a quarter of a mile of tunnels has been completed, lined with concrete. The deepest passage, illustrated in the accompanying diagram, extends 32 feet down.”

In case you’re wondering: yes, Dr. H. G. Dyar is Geoff Manaugh‘s nom de plume. So watch out California, his tunneling activities will undoubtedly compromise the tectonic integrity of the San Andreas Fault.

It’s our thought that we’re going to need to encourage the hobbyists – if not, we may have to improvise uses of existing tunnels.