Author Archives: Jon

Permeable sidewalks –

Permeable (that is, water-

permeable) sidewalks is an example of the confluence which is the principal principle (or conceit, if you like) of Popular Logistics. 

  There are at least two materials from which permeable sidewalks are made – a type of concrete and a hard rubber composite.

Here’s how it works: like a sidewalk. The weight of people and objects are borne by the sidewalk. But not liquid, which goes through.

Three welcome consequences:

  1. Trees planted near sidewalks get watered right through the sidewalk; their roots don’t need to keep travelling laterally to seek water, bursting through the sidewal. Tree gets to live; sidewalk doesn’t need to be replaced as often; tree continues its photosynthesis thing – and often cools the street and houses, making people more comfortable and reducing the need for air-conditioning. (We assume that all Popular Logistics readers are sufficiently caffeinated to make the next jump – that this creates a net reduction in energy consumption. Stay with me- this is only one immediate effect – and look at all these benefits.
  2. Water doesn’t pool on sidewalks, creating mosquito habitats.
  3. Water – once on the sidewalk – doesn’t evaporate – but can make it back into the water table, making more water available.
  4. During floods, the environment has additional capacity to absorb water – at least mitigating the effects of the flood.

The University of Alabama Cooperative Extension Service has a press release about their project – with an extensive set of links to information about permeable or “pervious” sidewalks. Given the sound of “pervious” – I think we’ll stick with “permeable” for the time being.

Link here. Tip of the hat – or the chapeau de fromage to IT goddess Lauren Dohr.

Mark Kleiman on WaPo coverage of Russia

If you’re not already persuaded that the current state of affairs in Russia should be a cause of great concern, Mark Kleiman makes the point quite concisely in this post.

I’ve been reading Kleiman’s work since dinosaurs roamed the Grand Concourse, carrying betting slips for wise-guys. When getting a copy of one of his article or books meant long waits via interlibrary loan, and many quarters spent printing microfilm reprints. He was one of the first people to look at drug policy in a methodical way. These days he posts at The Reality-Based Community

– and lots of other stuff.

While I was law school, and a bit after, I did some work as a ghostwriter and book editor. I was approached by aides to someone that I’ll refer to here as One of Many Current Candidates. OMCC wanted me to ghost-write a book persuading America that (illegal) drugs were evil, as great a threat as threats could be, and that only someone with the particular skills, experience, and temperament of OMCC could save America from the dreadful prospect of the universal availability of drugs, mandatory

drug use (an idea which, sadly, has not gotten the consideration it’s due), the whole country taken over by Colombian drug cartels.

I talked myself out of that job – and, in fact, I talked OMCC out of being one of many politicians who’ve written drug-war memoirs. One of the arguments I used was that to make the case he wanted to make, one would first have to take account of – and rebut – the work of a number of serious scholars who’d already addressed the issue – and who hadn’t necessarily come to the “no penalty too harsh, no intrusion sufficiently invasive” position this politician had come to. I’m sure I mentioned Kleiman, and Norman Zinberg, of Harvard Medical School. Their work was part of my introduction to drug policy, before I was involved in enforcing it, or criticizing it, or writing about it.

So I talked myself out of a well-paid gig; the politician – now a candidate for the presidence – never did have that book written.

I don’t know if Kleiman is the coiner of the phrase “Reality-Based Community.” I’ve been reading his stuff on the Internet since I found out that I could do it without using the microfilm machines or filling out an interlibrary loan slip and waiting two months. His current blog includes his contributions and those of a handful of other people – mostly scholars – who aren’t familiar to me. But The Reality-Based Community blog is worth checking out; its current skewerings of the Administration’s prevarications and obfuscations regarding the “overblown personnel matter” (the firing of eight United States Attorneys) are precise, and to the point. Each new statement from the Administration is like the Coyote’s new order to the Acme Company; Kleiman’s posts are like the Acme merchandise, unwrapped and in action. See, Coyote v. Acme, U.S.D.C., S.W.D., Arizona (No. B191294) (1990).

Must-read: Gary Wolf’s interview with Art Botterell

is short, incisive, and, alas, some of the most accurate explantions of dysfunctional government bureaucracis. Here are some excerpts:

Botterell suggested that we begin, rather than end, with the notion that the federal government can’t protect us.The federal failure should be the starting point, and, he suggested, it could be a liberating starting point. Once free of the illusion that Mommy and Daddy are going to make it all better, we can ask smarter questions about what it will take to protect ourselves. Botterell is not a naive libertarian, and he was not talking about buying assault weapons and hunkering down in the basement. Instead, he was talking about identifying the native strengths of our communities, and reinforcing these strengths with technology.

….

Botterell has made or helped to make [important inventions] including California’s Emergency Digital Information Service (EDIS), and the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP).

….

No matter how much research is done disproving their assumptions, people insist on believing in panic. Panic actually occurs only in specific circumstances – this is all pretty well understood. Some of the research goes back to the Second World War, when there was attention paid to the behavior of sailors trapped in submarines. The research shows that where there is a dreaded hazard shared equally, panic almost never occurs. Reasoned flight is not panic. When people were running away from the collapse of the World Trade Towers, they stopped to pick up other people who had fallen. That was not panic. Only perceived competition for the means to escape creates panic. If panic is a myth, why is it mentioned so often in discussions of warning?There’s a tendency to believe in the myth of panic because it reinforces a sense of bureaucratic elitism: we can’t trust the citizens with warning information, because they might panic.

Read the whole interview here. Botterell’s blog is here.

 You can read another Gary Wolf’ piece – Reinventing 911 – How a Swarm of Networked Citizens is builing a better emergency system, from the December 2005 issue of Wired, which discusses Botterell and others.

One thing Texas has in common with Iraq – Solar Eagle- the Navy Plan to beat the insurgents and help Iraq go solar

Clifford Krauss, writing in yesterday’s Times, points out in

With Coal Plans Cut Back, Texas Faces Energy Gap[Link to article here ] that the recent TXU deal – in which the energy firm made a commitment to withdraw applications for several coal-fired plants, doesn’t necessarily address Texas’ projected consumption.

Environmentalists and some state officials see an opening for renewable energy in a state that is already the national pacesetter in wind energy production. About 4 percent of the state’s power is now produced by wind and other renewable sources, and state officials say they expect a quadrupling of wind power generation in the next 20 years.

Wind has the potential to help fill the shortfall, said Jerry Patterson, the Texas land commissioner, whose responsibilities include leasing state lands for wind energy development. Every day that passes, renewables make more economic sense.

Texas now produces 2,800 megawatts of energy a year from wind, enough to serve 500,000 homes. Mr. Patterson said an additional 2,000 megawatts would come online by 2009. Most of the production now occurs in the blustery Panhandle, but two offshore farms are in the planning stages and should be online by the beginning of the next decade.

Still, few experts think enough renewable power can be developed quickly enough, given the lack of transmission capacity and high costs. Natural gas, which provides nearly half the state’s electricity, is set for another surge because gas plants can generally be built faster than nuclear or coal facilities.

That Texas currently gets 4% of its electricity from renewables is striking; Popular Logistics

is trying to find out if that’s solely the result of energy “market” forces – it’s hard to think of our current energy situation as a real market, complete with vigorous competition and invisible hands- or if Texas has been subsidizing renewables all along.

However, perhaps Texas should take heed of the Naval Postgraduate Center’s recommendation for making the power grid in Iraq more robust: widespread decentralized use of solar power. The current administration, ever keen to take advice from military professionals, hasn’t publicly commented on the Navy’s proposal to put a PV panel on every Iraqi roof. A copy of the report is available from The Project on Government Secrecy

at the Federation of American Scientists.

Krauss’s skeptical experts are probably correct, if one assumes little or no subsidy for renewables, and a focus on large-scale “farms.” But the Navy “Solar Eagle” proposal is for a decentralized system (a chicken in every pot, a PV panel on every roof), principally because decentralization and redundant connections are what make networks robust and resistant to attack – and reduce the need for transmission capacity, as more power is generated at or near the site of production. (One of the reasons, we’re told, that the Internet was designed the way it was. Just ask Mr. Gore).

"The Unthinkable" – Steve Coll article on the risk of nuclear terrorism

The March 12 issue of The New Yorker

contains an article by Steve Coll, discussing the present risk(s) of nuclear terrorism and the adequacy of the Administration’s responses.

THE UNTHINKABLE: Can the United States be made safe from nuclear terrorism  is an education in the complexity of the issue, and points out, inter alia, the variety of fissile and “dirty” materials, their ubiquity in everyday commercial and industrial enterprises (e.g. denture cleaner, which generates false positive results in government radiation detection equipment).

Bad advice: why are CERT teams encouraged to wear non-compliant vests?

CERT teams all over the country are acquiring safety vests, often at generous prices, and generally in green, with a CERT logo. Here are a couple of examples: R&B , DMS,

and Wholesale First Aid Supply and GSS.

What these garments have in common – excessive price aside, is that they’re forest green, and employ little, if any conspicuity (reflective) materials. The green CERT vests  don’t, for instance, remotely comply with the ANSI Class III standard: visible, 360 degrees at 1,000 (I think, in fact, the rule calls for 1,250 feet), in low-light, poor-visibility. That’s about as much time as a driver, driving 30 miles an hour, would have to stop if he or she noticed the person at 1,250 feet. (That is, a driving, in a crisis, foulweather, at thirty miles an hour, has about thirty seconds to stop).

Some of these vendors do sell ANSI-III compliant vests, at reasonable prices. But few of them have any pockets at all – those that do have very few pockets. None seem adjustable so as to be usable in cold weather (over many other layers) or hot to be worn over summer clothing, and comply with the ANSI visibility standard, and be useful for securely carrying the gear which CERT or SAR team members should and will have: radios, batteries, food, hand tools, etc.

There’s the way in which the forest green vest constitute bad advice: in a chaotic situation – why would we be assuming that amidst a power failure or flood, CERT members aren’t going to be walking around, running messages, and even directing traffic.

Apart from the direct virtues of wearing vests: (visibility and the consequent reduction of accidents, carrying tools, and in some cases, of course, flotation and insulation) they’re also useful for keeping track of team members – they’re also useful for inspiring confidence in the public in an emergency. Since CERT teams are often self-financed, the vest may be the only “uniform” component. They should also convey confidence and functionality because – as generals have known for hundreds, if not thousands of years – the “uniform,” whatever that is, can be a recruitment tool (“I want to wear one of those”) or an obstacle to recruitment (“This CERT thing’s a great idea, but I really don’t want to wear that, especially if anyone I know is anywhere around”), especially among younger prospects. (I’m a member of a CERT in which the average age of members is in my view, somewhat higher than one would like. Put another way, we’re not turning away lots of 20- and 30- somethings who spend a lot of time in the gym.

So wouldn’t we prefer that CERT members will have, train in, and, in emergencies, wear highly visible, ANSI compliant, sturdy, flattering cargo-carrying vests. And affordable – did I mention that?

At the other end of the market are well-designed and manufactured SAR vests, like the Robert Rutter vest now manufactured by CMC rescue. This vest commands the dramatic sum of $369. It’s my understanding that CMC’s own manufactured gear is excellent. Price saide, however, wouldn’t it make more sense for search-and-rescue workers to wear vests (generally the outermost garment) in a color other than black and olive drab? We’re considering the possibility of purchasing these and adding reflexite or other prismatic  reflective panels – but the price – in excess of the cost of a new 16-channel 5-watt radio – seems very high.

The search for an optimal CERT vest continues. Popular Logistics would like to hear from any of you that might help us, and our other readers, who are responsible for procurement for CERT’s, SAR,s and similar groups.