Quotulatiousness

February 26, 2011

The increasing length of freight trains in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:22

Some eye-opening statistics on the length of freight trains being run by Canadian National (CN) and Canadian Pacific (CP) these days:

Transport Canada launched a six-part study into the long-train strategies at the country’s largest railways this month with an eye on developing policies for how these longer, heavier trains are assembled and run. The goal of the two-year study is to develop science-based regulations that will hopefully reduce the number of derailments in the country.

Despite the concern from regulators, these longer, heavier trains in recent years have been a godsend for North American railways, which swear by their safety. Not only do they improve the efficiency of the rails by reducing the number of trains required to transport goods, but they in turn reduce the crews needed and the fuel used to move their shipments.

If properly built, they can also reduce wear and tear on the trains and the tracks themselves by cutting down on in-train forces, lowering maintenance costs substantially over time.

The cynic in my asks why, if CN (for example) actually managed to reduce the number of rail accidents to an all-time low last year, the regulators are now launching the investigation. Fewer accidents now equals a point of serious concern on the part of the regulators? Why?

Up until the 1990s, the average freight train in Canada was about 5,000 feet (1.54 kilometres) long and weighed 7,000 tons. But it is now not uncommon to see these trains stretch to 12,000 feet, sometimes as much as 14,000 feet (more than four kilometres), weighing up to 18,000 tons.

While CN is comfortable sticking with the size of its longest trains now, about 12,000 feet, CP continues to push the boundaries of how long it can build its trains by developing some of the industry’s most cutting-edge technology in recent years to help it do so.

The benefits are clear. CP estimates, for example, that the labour costs alone on a typical transcontinental train are now 30% lower than they would be if it was using smaller trains.

So, the trains are longer, carry far more freight, cost less to run, and customers are happy. The government must act!

Spammers getting more clever

Filed under: Administrivia, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:02

I’ve noticed a significant shift in the spam comments being posted to Quotulatiousness lately: they’re less likely to be link-stuffed pharmaceutical spam and more likely to resemble real comments. I also notice that lots of the spam showing up now comes from .pl domains.

Just over the last 24 hours, there have been more than a dozen spam comments that almost qualified as real: they’re actually related to the blog post, they’re relatively well written, and they aren’t studded with links. If they’d arrived one at a time, I might well have approved them, but because they arrive in batches the pattern becomes too obvious to ignore:

  • They all have real-sounding user names, but the email addresses are all to the same domain.
  • They’re all from the same IP address.
  • They all have a link to something that looks remarkably like a commercial site, rather than a personal one.

Views of a future that didn’t arrive

Filed under: History, Railways, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

The Future That Wasn’t: Failure to Perceive Hidden Costs and Risks

Two other entangled obstacles to technological inevitability must also be considered: unappreciated psychosocial reservations and genuine, but unappreciated hazards that either slow, or virtually inhibit the adoption of what would otherwise be hugely transforming technological advances.

As a child, I was told about what my future would be like and how much better it would be in almost every way, technologically, from the world I then inhabited. I was, literally, a child of the atomic age, and the molecules in the DNA of my brain still bear the 14Carbon isotope signature of the open-air nuclear testing era, just as surely as my bones, made radioactive in my infancy and childhood by the Strontium 90 (90Sr) in the milk I drank are still, ever so slightly, more radioactive today, than are those of people born before, or after, the era of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing.

But beyond these physical stigmata of the atomic age, my mind bears the stigmata of a world promised, but never delivered. Scientists and laymen alike were quick to understand the truly staggering potential benefits of what we now call nuclear power. Countless pronouncements were made that the arrival of an era of cheap, clean, safe, and virtually unlimited electric power was at hand. Electricity generated by ‘atomic power’ and nuclear fusion, we were told, would be so inexpensive to produce that it would not even be worth the expense of metering its use to bill the customer for. People would simply play a flat rate for the service, as is the case for long distance or computer telephony today. In a speech given by Lewis L. Strauss (1896-1974), Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to the National Association of Science Writers, in New York City on September 16th, 1954, Strauss commented on how scientific research then underway would transform life for the next generation of Americans, the generation that would be born in then and in the coming decade, my generation:

“Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter…will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”

The Santa Fe Railroad, then as commercially important and as technologically credible as Apple or Microsoft are today, anticipated fission reactor powered trains within 20 years, and ran ads in national magazines featuring a youngster only a few years older than me, asking to buy a ticket on an atomic powered version of the Super Chief which was then the preeminent way to travel across the country from Chicago to Los Angeles, in both speed and comfort.

An excerpt from Cryonics and Technological Inevitability.

H/T to Andrew Coyne for the link.

Arrested, beaten, tortured, and charged with treason . . . for watching viral videos

Filed under: Africa, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

No matter how you say it, Zimbabwe is seriously screwed up:

Munyaradzi Gwisai, a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe’s law school, was showing internet videos about the tumult sweeping across North Africa to students and activists last Saturday, when state security agents burst into his office.

The agents seized laptop computers, DVD discs and a video projector before arresting 45 people, including Gwisai, who runs the Labor Law Center at the University of Zimbabwe. All 45 have been charged with treason — which can carry a sentence of life imprisonment or death — for, in essence, watching viral videos.

Gwisai and five others were brutally tortured during the next 72 hours, he testified Thursday at an initial hearing.

There were “assaults all over the detainees’ bodies, under their feet and buttocks through the use of broomsticks, metal rods, pieces of timber, open palms and some blunt objects,” The Zimbabwean newspaper reports, in an account of the court proceedings.

Under dictator Robert Mugabe, watching internet videos in Zimbabwe can be a capital offense, it would seem. The videos included BBC World News and Al-Jazeera clips, which Gwisai had downloaded from Kubatana, a web-based activist group in Zimbabwe.

This week in Guild Wars 2 news

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:03

I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.

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