Quotulatiousness

May 17, 2012

The sickly Raptor spawns another concern

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

As if the F-22 hadn’t already had enough issues, there’s a new concern called the “Raptor cough” (acceleration atelectasis) showing up among F-22 pilots:

Increasingly desperate to find out what is causing its F-22 (“Raptor”) fighter pilots to get disoriented while in the air, the U.S. Air Force is now investigating what appears to be excessive coughing by F-22 pilots. It’s being called “Raptor Cough” and is actually a known condition (acceleration atelectasis) for pilots who have just completed a high speed maneuver. But it appears to be showing up more frequently among F-22 pilots. That may be the result of months of tension over the reliability and safety of the aircraft. The F-22 pilots are perplexed and a bit nervous about their expensive and highly capable jets.

The air force believes that something, as yet unknown, is getting into the pilot air supply and causing problems. Despite this, the air force continues flying its F-22s. The decision to keep flying was made because the air supply problems have not killed anyone yet and they are rare (once every 10,000 sorties).

The 14 incidents so far were all cases of F-22 pilots apparently experiencing problems. The term “apparently” is appropriate because the pilots did not black out and a thorough check of the air supply system and the aircraft found nothing wrong. There have been nearly 30 of these “dizziness or disorientation” incidents in the last four years, with only 14 of them serious enough to be called real incidents. Only one F-22 has been lost to an accident so far and, while that did involve an air supply issue, it was caused by pilot error, not equipment failure.

May 16, 2012

Disruptive technologies and naval warfare

Filed under: Military, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Naval warfare has seen several revolutions as new technology disrupts the status quo. The pace of innovation has meant shorter spans of time between revolutionary developments, and this is a serious problem for naval powers as ships take so long to build and have to serve for lengthy periods of time.

Last year, I posted an article about how the Royal Navy had attempted to ride the technological changes during the Victorian era, with varying levels of success:

Fifty years later, the stasis is being broken technologically. Wind power is giving way to steam. Solid shell cannon are starting to give way to both larger and more complex weapons. Iron is starting to supplant oak as the material of choice for shipbuilding. The renowned duel between USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimac) sets all the major navies of the world busy considering how to protect their existing fleets and merchant vessels against the new threat of the ironclad.

The English government is suddenly faced with the stark reality that their entire fleet has become or is about to become obsolete. Neither Monitor nor Virginia are ocean-going ships, but the message is clear that no wooden vessel has a prayer of survival against the modern steam-powered ironclad. And even the greatest economic power in the world can’t replace an entire fleet overnight.

The Admiralty couldn’t depend on past experience for guidance, as everything they’d done for hundreds of years was now undecided: what kind of ships do you need to build? How will they be armed? How will they be armoured? How will they be propelled? Bureaucracies are, by nature, not well equipped to face challenges like this. The Royal Navy, from the late 1860′s until the late 1880′s struggled with finding the correct answer, or combination of answers, to meet the needs of the day.

It’s not just a single change — like the switch from sail to steam power — it’s multiple changes, each with their own array of materials, training, support, and maintenance changes that force organizations to adapt. This runs directly into the problem that it takes years to design, build, arm, equip, and crew a new ship. The pace of change was so brisk in that period that ships could literally be obsolete before they were commissioned into the fleet. And bureaucracies are by their very nature, ill-suited to cope with disruptive change: they thrive on routine and predictability.

Today, the US Navy finds itself in the same relative situation as the Royal Navy of Queen Victoria: the most powerful fleet in the world, but facing uncertainty due to technological changes. Strategy Page has a brief run-down of the potentially disruptive developments we may see in the near future:

The 21st century is barely underway, and much unknown technology is yet to be invented. Many of the key warship technologies were unknown in 1912. But we can already see some new stuff which is leading revolutionary changes in how navies will operate this century. Here some of the more obvious ones.

Unmanned vehicles. Unlike aircraft, which were a new vehicle, UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), UUVs (Unmanned Underwater Vehicles) and USVs (Unmanned Surface Vehicles) are radically new technologies. There are already examples of all three in service. There will be more and they will change everything by incorporating more powerful AI and new weapons. That said, UUVs were first developed in the 19th century (the modern torpedo) and 20th (guided missiles). But these two weapons were not flexible enough to change as many aspects of naval warfare as unmanned vehicles will be doing.

Super Sensors. Sonar (using sound to detect objects underwater) appeared during World War I (1914-18) while radar (using radio signals to detect objects in the air) was developed during the 1930s and widely used during World War II (1939-45). Widely recognized as the first electronic sensors (although the earliest sonars were all-acoustic), their 21st century descendants are much more capable. More powerful computers and transmitting technology has since produced several generations of cheaper, more reliable and more powerful sensors. This is continuing and the power of new sensors will make it much more difficult to hide. Stealth is still important for spoiling the aim of long range guided weapons. But the super sensors make it much more difficult to achieve surprise by coming out of nowhere.

Other items on this list include artificial intelligence (AI), all-electric ships, stealth technology, networking, composite materials, space-based services, nanotech, and laser weapons. Lots of ways for admirals to lose sleep over the next few years.

May 15, 2012

Nerd politics: problems and opportunities

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Cory Doctorow in the Guardian on the current state of “nerd politics:

In the aftermath of the Sopa fight, as top Eurocrats are declaring the imminent demise of Acta, as the Trans-Pacific Partnership begins to founder, as the German Pirate party takes seats in a third German regional election, it’s worth taking stock of “nerd politics” and see where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

Since the earliest days of the information wars, people who care about freedom and technology have struggled with two ideological traps: nerd determinism and nerd fatalism. Both are dangerously attractive to people who love technology.

In “nerd determinism,” technologists dismiss dangerous and stupid political, legal and regulatory proposals on the grounds that they are technologically infeasible. Geeks who care about privacy dismiss broad wiretapping laws, easy lawful interception standards, and other networked surveillance on the grounds that they themselves can evade this surveillance. For example, US and EU police agencies demand that network carriers include backdoors for criminal investigations, and geeks snort derisively and say that none of that will work on smart people who use good cryptography in their email and web sessions.

But, while it’s true that geeks can get around this sort of thing — and other bad network policies, such as network-level censorship, or vendor locks on our tablets, phones, consoles, and computers — this isn’t enough to protect us, let alone the world. It doesn’t matter how good your email provider is, or how secure your messages are, if 95% of the people you correspond with use a free webmail service with a lawful interception backdoor, and if none of those people can figure out how to use crypto, then nearly all your email will be within reach of spooks and control-freaks and cops on fishing expeditions.

[. . .]

If people who understand technology don’t claim positions that defend the positive uses of technology, if we don’t operate within the realm of traditional power and politics, if we don’t speak out for the rights of our technically unsophisticated friends and neighbours, then we will also be lost. Technology lets us organise and work together in new ways, and to build new kinds of institutions and groups, but these will always be in the wider world, not above it.

May 14, 2012

Dragon flight now scheduled for May 19

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

Brid-Aine Parnell at The Reg updates us on the SpaceX flight schedule:

The flight of the Falcon 9 has once more been rescheduled, with a new launch date of 19 May, as Elon Musk’s SpaceX decided to tweak the software one more time.

The first commercial craft to restock the International Space Station, a Dragon capsule strapped to a Falcon 9 rocket, has seen more than its fair share of push-backs for the test flight, but it will all pay off if the cargo ship can dock with the station.

SpaceX has already shown it can release and retrieve the Dragon, but getting it to motor alongside the fast-moving ISS and accurately berth with it is no mean feat and the firm has tested and retested the necessary software in the hopes it won’t end up with egg on its face.

[. . .]

Providing this test flight is successful, the Dragon will start to fulfil the contract for a minimum of 12 flights to resupply the ISS. Since the ship is reusable, it will be the only spacecraft capable of bringing cargo back with it as well. And, ultimately, SpaceX hopes that a version of the Dragon will be its first manned spaceship as well.

May 13, 2012

The military trade-off between protection and mobility

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Strategy Page on what’s weighing down American infantrymen now:

There is a rebellion brewing in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. It’s all about the protective vest. This lifesaving bit of equipment has saved thousands of lives in the last two decades, but has, because of political grandstanding and media distortions, become too heavy and restrictive. The troops want lighter body armor, even if it does increase vulnerability to bullets. Marine and army experts point out that the drive (created mainly by politicians and the media) for “better” body armor resulted in heavier and more restrictive (to battlefield mobility) models. This has more than doubled the minimum weight you could carry into combat.

Until the 1980s, you could strip down (for actual fighting) to your helmet, weapon (assault rifle and knife), ammo (hanging from webbing on your chest, along with grenades), canteen and first aid kit on your belt, and your combat uniform. Total load was 13-14 kg (about 30 pounds). You could move freely and quickly like this, and you quickly found that speed and agility was a lifesaver in combat. But now the minimum load carried is twice as much (27 kg) and, worse yet, more restrictive.

While troops complained about the new protective vests, they valued it in combat. The current generation of vests will stop rifle bullets, a first in the history of warfare. And this was after nearly a century of trying to develop protective vests that were worth the hassle of wearing. It wasn’t until the 1980s that it was possible to make truly bullet proof vests using metallic inserts. But the inserts were heavy and so were the vests (about 11.3 kg/25 pounds). Great for SWAT teams, but not much use for the infantry. But in the 1990s, additional research produced lighter bullet proof ceramic materials. By 1999, the U.S. Army began distributing a 7.3 kg (16 pound) “Interceptor” vest that provided fragment and bullet protection. This, plus the 1.5 kg (3.3 pound) Kevlar helmet (available since the 1980s), gave the infantry the best combination of protection and mobility. And just in time.

May 12, 2012

US Postal Service develops a lithium allergy

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

The United States Postal Service has announced that they will no longer allow shipments that include lithium batteries, as of May 16th:

If you want to send an iPad, a Kindle Fire, an iPhone, a laptop, or a similar device overseas, now is the time to send it, because as of next week, the U.S. Postal Service will be banning all electronic gadgets that contain a lithium battery.

The reason? Those lithium batteries can potentially explode or catch fire when devices are shipped with a full charge, improperly stored, or improperly packed. Lithium battery related fire incidents have occurred 17 times on passenger flights since 2004, and have been implicated in at least one major crash of a UPS plane.

As a result of the ban, people who want to ship electronic devices to troops or to family overseas will have to use a private delivery service, such as UPS, DHL, and FedEx, which are pricy alternatives.

[. . .]

USPS’s refusal to ship devices with lithium batteries will have the greatest impact on military serving overseas (DHL and UPS do not deliver to APO or FPO boxes) and commercial resellers, who will have to increase shipping costs and rely on FedEx, DHL, and UPS, which still have challenges in countries like Russia.

May 11, 2012

Britain’s government websites under attack

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

Perhaps I’m just cynical, but I had expected that any government website would need to be “hardened” against attack. The British government’s many official websites have indeed been undergoing attacks for quite some time:

The British Ministry of Defense has admitted, for the first time, that it is under heavy attack by hackers. It was also revealed that some of these attacks had succeeded. The good news is that the military is becoming more aggressive and imaginative in dealing with Cyber War defense. China was not directly accused of being behind any of these attacks, but it was mentioned that there are now discussions underway with the Chinese on the matter. All this is an old problem.

Last year, Britain went public to report a higher number of Internet based attacks. The report noted that the emphasis was now on economic assets. This included technology and business plans. For example, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was under heavy cyber-attack for several months, apparently in an effort to obtain secret details of government plans and techniques for supporting British exports. Government Internet security officials were making all this public to encourage British firms to increase their Internet security.

All this was nothing new. Two years ago Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, went public with numerous charges of Chinese Internet based espionage. MI5 accused China of using both agents and hacker software, to obtain secrets from specific companies and government organizations. This approach had Chinese personnel approaching specific British businessmen at trade shows, and offering gifts, like a thumb drive loaded with hidden hacker software that will load itself on to the victim’s PC and seek out valuable information. Internet based attacks, traced back to China, continue to send real looking email that has an attachment containing another of those stealthy hacker programs that seek out secrets, or even quietly take over the user’s PC. Three years ago, MI-5 sent alerts to major corporations warning them of similar attacks and advising increased security of their data.

May 7, 2012

Royal Flying Corps, 100 years on

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

April 13th was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), which was merged with the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) to become the Royal Air Force in 1918. BBC Magazine has an interesting article about the early days:

In most accounts of WWI, mention of the Royal Flying Corps goes hand-in-hand with stories of the fighter aces, men like Albert Ball and James McCudden, who downed dozens of enemy planes.

The romance of gladiatorial combat in the air — initially firing revolvers at one another from the cockpit, and then shooting machine guns through the propellers of the aircraft — makes their adventures against such legendary foes as the Red Baron some of the most stirring tales of the Great War.

But as a division of the British Army, the main role of the Royal Flying Corps, with its hundreds of pilots and thousands of ground crew, was very different.

It was the eyes of the army.

For the first time in history, it was possible not only to get a detailed view of the enemy lines from above, but to see what was going on behind those lines — the trench systems, the support routes, the railways and road vehicles that manoeuvred troops and weaponry into position.

The real heroes of the war in the air were the pilots and observers who flew in all conditions to maintain British air superiority, and to keep the ground troops aware of everything that the enemy was doing.

During the First World War, Canada hosted a training unit for British aircrew, the Royal Flying Corps Canada (Wikipedia link), from 1917 onwards. It operated the following air stations in southern Ontario:

  • Camp Borden 1917–1918
  • Armour Heights Field 1917–1918 (pilot training, School of Special Flying to train instructors)
  • Leaside Aerodrome 1917–1918 (Artillery Cooperation School)
  • Long Branch Aerodrome 1917–1918
  • Curtiss School of Aviation (flying-boat station with temporary wooden hangar on the beach at Hanlan’s Point on Toronto Island 1915–1918; main school, airstrip and metal hangar facilities at Long Branch)
  • Deseronto Airfield, Deseronto 1917–1918 (pilot training)
  • Camp Mohawk (now Tyendinaga Mohawk Airport) and Camp Rathburn — located at the Tyendinaga Indian Reserve near Belleville 1917–1918 (pilot training)
  • Hamilton (Armament School) 1917–1918
  • Beamsville Camp (Aerial fighting)

List sourced from the Wikipedia page on the RFC.

[Lt Col (later Brig Gen) Cuthbert] Hoare made several agreements with U.S. Brig Gen George O. Squier (US Army Signal Corps) and the US Aircraft Production Board. Squier had overall responsibility for the US Army’s air service, which was short of flight instructors. The RFC released five experienced American pilots to the US Army, where they became squadron commanders. The US Air Board acquiesced in the British opening a recruiting office in New York City, ostensibly to recruit British citizens, but in fact also soliciting US citizens, of whom about 300 were successfully signed up. The RFC would also train many US Army flight personnel: 400 pilots; 2,000 ground-crew members; and 20 equipment officers. These Americans would then collect aircraft and equipment from the UK, before coming under RFC control in France. Ten American squadrons would train in Canada during the summer of 1917, while RFC squadrons were allowed to train during the winter in Fort Worth, Texas.

During the last two years of the war 3135 pilots and 137 observers trained in Canada and Texas for both the RFC and the new Royal Air Force (RAF). Of these trainees, 2,624 went to Europe for operational duty.

May 6, 2012

Technology is not the panacea

Filed under: Education, Health, India, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:06

I’m generally very pro-technology, but the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort always struck me as putting the technology cart in front of the educational (and cultural) horse. A report at The Economist has examples of technological fixes that haven’t actually “fixed” the problems they were intended to solve:

The American charity has an ambitious mission — transform the quality of education in the developing world by giving every poor student a laptop. Targeting a $100 laptop, OLPC succeeded in creating a usable computer at a very low price point (the actual number was closer to $200). Unfortunately most of the attention in the project was focused on the technology and not enough on its efficacy. In the first rigorous evaluation of the programme, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) found little evidence that the laptops influenced educational outcomes. The study, conducted in Peru four years after the programme was launched, found no improvement in math or language. While the computers did lead to some gains in cognitive skills, the authors concluded that access to a laptop didn’t improve attendance. Neither did it motivate students to spend more time on their homework.

There is similarly disappointing news on cooking stoves. The World Health Organization estimates that indoor pollution from primitive cooking fires contributes to 2m deaths annually. One solution is to use clean cooking stoves. At a cost of $12.50, these stoves are an inexpensive way to reduce respiratory ailments and improve air quality. The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GACC), a public-private initiative, is making a big push for 100m homes in the developing world to switch to clean stoves by 2020. But a new NBER paper by Rema Hanna from Harvard University and Esther Duflo and Michael Greenstone from MIT, questions the long-term health or environmental benefits from this programme. The authors evaluated a clean-stove programme in eastern India, covering 15,000 households over five years. Their study found that after the initial year, enthusiasm for the stoves waned and households didn’t make the necessary investments to maintain them. As a result, the programme had very little effect on respiratory health or air pollution.

Both these projects highlight some common misconceptions in using technology for development. For one, solving intractable social problems requires fundamental changes in the target population. It also needs a supportive institutional framework to reinforce the right behaviour. Technology can complement this process, but it is no substitute for the human element. In Peru, simply adding laptops to the classroom, without investing in teachers who were proficient in computer-aided education, meant that the academic impact was limited. The IDB paper rightly points out that in poor countries where wages are low, development money may be better spent on labor-intensive education interventions than on expensive tools.

May 4, 2012

Printed electronics: from gimmick to gizmo

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:45

Bill Ray looks at some companies working in the printed electronics field:

“Printed electronics” is one of those terms one sees being bandied about without really knowing what it means or why it’s important. The premise of using printing techniques to create electrical circuits isn’t hard to comprehend, but not everyone agrees on what comprises a “printing technique” or why you might want to use one, so El Reg chatted to three companies at the forefront of the field.

According to these firms, the new printing technique is going to change the literal fabric upon which the electronics industry rests. That’s important as it’s not the electronics which change as a result of the printing process, but rather the material on which those electronics rest. So instead of being etched on silicon the circuits can be laid onto steel, plastic, or even paper, and it’s that change of substrate which links all the various techniques and makes printed electronics so exciting.

[. . .]

This is in contrast to Silicon Valley’s Kovio, which steps away from standard printing equipment but still uses ink-jet techniques to lay down working RFID chips onto a flexible steel substrate.

The mechanism is the same as a desktop ink-jet, only instead of ink the jets squirt out ca conductor into wires as little as eight microns thick, making up chips which will run up to 40MHz or so. But Kovio can print a lot of them very cheaply and hopes to get the Near Field Communications (NFC) standard extended to include its vision of printed RF barcodes, powered by induction from the reading device and able to respond with a standardised serial number.

[. . .]

Such a step is taken by PragmatIC, another Cambridge-based company and one we’ve mentioned before thanks to their light-up beer bottles and induction-powered screens. PragmatIC doesn’t so much print electronics as imprint them, creating a sandwich of materials and then, using a pre-cut die, press down and carve out the shape required.

That might be taking the concept a long way from printing, though PragmatIC reckons it takes printing back to its roots. Imprinting is also the process used to stamp out CDs and Blu-Ray disks, and so is known to work within very strict tolerances. PragmatIC reckons it can get down to 100nm objects placed with 10nm accuracy, leading to transistors around a square-micron in size which (PragmatIC claims) is comparable to silicon technologies.

That means chips can be made cheaper, but more importantly they can be laid onto any surface (there’s no baking in the PragmatIC process) so electronics can be dropped onto the back of polypropylene labels to create the flashing beer bottle or similar, assuming one can find a battery to power it and an LED to light up.

May 1, 2012

The Onion: Every Potential 2040 President Already Unelectable Due To Facebook

Filed under: Government, Humour, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

April 30, 2012

Twitter’s “Red Guard” of flag-spam abusers

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

Some nasty tricks being played by some Twitter users, abusing the report feature that is supposed to help cut down on spam posts to attempt to shut down opinions they find offensive:

Shortly after their video “If I Wanted America to Fail” went viral, Free Market America found themselves kicked off Twitter, a popular social media resource that allows users to post very short messages. After a few hours of confusion, their account was reinstated.

This past Sunday, the Twitter account of Chris Loesch, husband of conservative pundit Dana Loesch, was abruptly shut down. After a massive outcry, and the creation of a Twitter topic called “#FreeChrisLoesch” that swiftly became one of the hottest “hash tags” on the network, Chris’ account was reactivated… for a couple of hours. By Monday morning, he was gone again, after his account was restored and removed several more times.

What did Free Market America and Chris Loesch do to warrant suspension? After all, people like Spike Lee and Roseanne Barr flagrantly, openly, defiantly violated Twitter’s terms of service, and put human lives in jeopardy, by distributing personal information about George Zimmerman, the shooter in the Trayvon Martin case. Their accounts have not been suspended. What violation of Loesch’s compares to using Twitter to target someone for assault by an angry mob — and, for that matter, sending the mob to the wrong address?

These suspensions were apparently the work of “flag spammers,” digital brown shirt gangs that make coordinated attacks to silence conservative voices by abusing Twitter’s spam flagging feature. Al Gore coined the term “digital brown shirts” to describe the online squadrons supposedly unleashed to “harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.” Of course, he was talking about President Bush, and there weren’t any actual “digital brown shirts” at the time, but this is precisely the sort of behavior he was describing.

The F-35, the “supersonic albatross”?

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

Foreign Policy has a feature up called “The Jet That Ate the Pentagon” by Winslow Wheeler:

The United States is making a gigantic investment in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, billed by its advocates as the next — by their count the fifth — generation of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat aircraft. Claimed to be near invisible to radar and able to dominate any future battlefield, the F-35 will replace most of the air-combat aircraft in the inventories of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and at least nine foreign allies, and it will be in those inventories for the next 55 years. It’s no secret, however, that the program — the most expensive in American history — is a calamity.

[. . .]

How bad is it? A review of the F-35’s cost, schedule, and performance — three essential measures of any Pentagon program — shows the problems are fundamental and still growing.

First, with regard to cost — a particularly important factor in what politicians keep saying is an austere defense budget environment — the F-35 is simply unaffordable. Although the plane was originally billed as a low-cost solution, major cost increases have plagued the program throughout the last decade. Last year, Pentagon leadership told Congress the acquisition price had increased another 16 percent, from $328.3 billion to $379.4 billion for the 2,457 aircraft to be bought. Not to worry, however — they pledged to finally reverse the growth.

The result? This February, the price increased another 4 percent to $395.7 billion and then even further in April. Don’t expect the cost overruns to end there: The test program is only 20 percent complete, the Government Accountability Office has reported, and the toughest tests are yet to come. Overall, the program’s cost has grown 75 percent from its original 2001 estimate of $226.5 billion — and that was for a larger buy of 2,866 aircraft.

At those prices, there are few allies who will be able to afford them — Canada clearly not among them.

April 28, 2012

The eternal problem of “sea blindness”

Filed under: Britain, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 16:34

Unlike armies which used to be raised at the drop of a hat (relatively speaking), navies have always been slower to grow at times of need. To build an army in the pre-nuclear age, you called up all your young men, gave them the absolute minimum of training and there’s your army. It might not be particularly capable, but an army it was. You could call up as many men as you liked for your navy, but without the ships and a significantly larger proportion of trained officers and petty officers, you don’t have a navy.

Navies take time to build, and in peacetime few nations are willing to support the kind of naval establishment they may need in wartime. Sir Humphrey at the Thin Pinstriped Line discusses this age-long phenomenon of “sea blindness”:

The first question that comes to mind is ‘what is Sea Blindness’? Arguably it simply means that the public, and by extension Governments of nations do not understand the maritime domain, and do not understand the case for the maritime domain – not just from a military, but also from a wider sector perspective. Personally this author dislikes this term, as it implies a state of permanence towards the public view of the sea. The phrase implies that there is no cure to the notion that the public will never understand the maritime case, and that instead it is the role of senior leaders in the maritime community to act as guides or aids to a public which will never understand the importance of maritime power.

The next question is surely, has the public ever not been sea blind? Arguably since time immemorial the public have been unwilling to support the long term interests of the maritime case – one can only look back through history at the maritime wars fought by the UK, and other nations, and see cases of weak defences needing bolstering at a desperate hour. Conversely, the major combat indicator of a potential threat has often come through the augmenting or enhancing of fleets in other nations. It is rare through history to find examples of nations maintaining powerful fleets in a state of permanent existence – rather it is the case that great fleets are maintained only for the duration of a crisis and thereafter disposed of. Simply look to the case of the Royal Navy after the Napoleonic Wars, where the manpower was disposed of and ships returned to the Reserve. It seems fair to argue that the public have no interest in funding a great fleet when there is no threat – the demands on their pockets are simply too great to bear.

[. . .]

More broadly, this author would argue that ‘Sea Blindness’ when it comes to understanding the maritime domain is not a new condition – people have historically not understood the dependency that humanity has on the sea. In reality, although the UK is an island, very few people relatively speaking actively involve themselves in maritime matters. Outside of the small fishing / trading community, or those who work in the maritime support sector, it is probably fair to argue that most people simply don’t have the professional links to see the sea for what it is – an essential gateway to prosperity and survival. But then again, one could make the argument that few people really investigate or seek to understand the many different networks, links or dependencies that nations have on all manner of objects, trade and supplies. It’s likely that few people in the UK knew that the IT industry was reliant on factories in Thailand to make hard drives until the floods damaged production and prices soared. Similarly the automobile industry is struggling after a fire in a factory in Germany shut down production of resin, reducing the ability to make cars globally. The reality is that we live in an interdependent world on many fronts, but it is so complicated, and so networked that it is almost too difficult to follow.

April 20, 2012

Building High Speed Rail won’t do much to cut carbon dioxide emissions

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:11

Brad Plumer at the Washington Post on the latest straw that high speed rail enthusiasts have been grabbing to justify their expensive toys:

… Brown’s administration has proposed using money raised by California’s new climate law. Under the state’s cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, power plants and factories will have to buy permits to pollute. Brown has suggested diverting this money into high-speed rail. But there are two problems here. For one, this might be illegal, as the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office concluded on Tuesday. But second — and more broadly — high-speed rail turns out not to be the most effective use of money that’s meant to combat global warming.

Paul Druce at Reason & Rail offered up a few numbers on this topic last year. The California High Speed Rail Authority claims that by 2030, if the train ran entirely on renewable energy, then it would reduce the state’s carbon emissions by about 5.4 million metric tons a year. If you ignore all the energy used to build the system, that means the rail network would reduce California’s emissions at a cost of $12,506 per metric ton of carbon dioxide.

That’s a pricey way to cut carbon. To put this in perspective, research has suggested that you could plant 100 million acres of trees and reforest the United States for a cost of about $21 to $91 per ton of carbon dioxide. Alternatively, a study by Dan Kammen of UC Berkeley found that it would cost somewhere between $59 and $87 per ton of carbon dioxide to phase out coal power in the Western United States and replace it with solar, wind and geothermal. If reducing greenhouse gases is your goal, then there are much more cost-effective ways to do it than building a bullet train.

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