Sorry for the slow posting lately. I am insanely busy with all kinds of stuff, some of which I will tell more of sometime later (how utterly exciting, eh? 
). Anyway, in order to keep the blog from dying altogether, here are a few photos from a week ago. As you can see, if you look closely enough, there is growth in the dusty and soon-to-be-pollen-filled spring air of Finland. Click to get a bigger version.
How resilient is modern society?
The answer in short, it seems, is “not very”. And that’s because modern societies are so massively reliant on two things: electricity and fossil fuels. Our dependence on electricity in particular and how vulnerable our delivery system for it is, is highlighted by a recent report from NAS. The New Scientist has a good article on it (see links below) and it outlines how a simple, big solar storm (similar to what has taken place before, and will take place again) could wreak havoc almost instantly. It’s best to just let the article speak for itself:
According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people. From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.
First to go – immediately for some people – is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.
There is simply no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that supermarket shelves would empty very quickly – delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.
Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites – but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare.
The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. “From the surveys I’ve done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more,” says Kappenman. “A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two.”
Within a month, then, the handful of spare transformers would be used up. The rest will have to be built to order, something that can take up to 12 months.
Even when some systems are capable of receiving power again, there is no guarantee there will be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. Coal-fired power stations usually keep reserves to last 30 days, but with no transport systems running to bring more fuel, there will be no electricity in the second month.
Read the article and the report for more. But all this provides some serious food for thought; isn’t a society that could collapse within days or weeks just a little bit too reliant on electricity? Shouldn’t we be better prepared for events like these?
You bet – and I bet we aren’t even thinking about it in the right places.
Resources / further reading
Which Internet services will you pay for?
Most of us use many Internet services without paying much attention to the underlying business models – or lack thereof. The following observation by the Economist a couple of weeks back has a more profound impact than people are so far willing to admit:
Perhaps most dangerously, Web 2.0 still had only one business model, advertising, and the Valley was refusing to admit that only one company (Google) with only one of its products (search advertising) had proved that the model really worked. The older internet firms, Yahoo! and AOL, were doing their best to grab a piece of the action. But the “next big things” were selling negligible advertising, often on one another’s sites. Not one of them has become an advertising success in its own right.
Pretty much the only proven business model remains search advertising; what’s more, only one company has managed to really pull that one off. Think of all the Internet services you use, most of which are free for you to use. But since there are no free lunches, someone is paying for them. Chances are that most of the services you use are losing money and are thus unsustainable in their current form. Take Facebook for one – a loss-making business. Youtube? Estimated to be losing money at a whopping $500 million per year.
Clearly a service that only loses money cannot last forever. So, there are basically two options: come up with a way to financially support the service or eventually kill it. Advertising cannot feasibly support everything on the Internet and we can hardly rely on benevolent venture capitalists to keep pumping money forever, so in the end it’s you – the end user – that will have to pay for what you do. “Freemium” models work well for some services (e.g. Flickr), but it’s unlikely to work for all.
The billion-dollar question then becomes: what would / will you pay for?
While I already pay for several services, there are interestingly also services for which I’d like to pay but that do not offer a possibility to do so – in particular, I’m dying to pay for GMail; I would love to have a premium version of @gmail.com GMail with guaranteed up time and other nice things.
The joys and dangerous of a spring cleanup
Spring seems to be finally making some headway into Finland, with temperatures reaching +12C today. With every spring, there comes some sort of a desire to clean up a little at home. If you ignore the urge long enough, you can get away without actually doing anything about it – but unlike most springs, this spring we actually went ahead and started doing a major spring cleanup. And when you do that, at least the following observations can be made:
I wrote about clutter about a year ago and I can now wholeheartedly agree, along with 66% of the population, with the statement “It makes me feel better when I get rid of some of the clutter in my home”.
This isn’t important, and neither is this or this … hey wait a minute!
There are also dangers in cleanups, especially if one is a bit over-zealous in the execution phase. A day after throwing away lots of old books that nobody, including myself, wanted, I was looking for a pile of library books I was supposed to return to the library. I couldn’t find it anywhere and neither could my wife, so she told me to go check the trash, just in case. So I’m thinking “no way are they there”, but after enough unsuccessful searching at home I did go check, just in case.
Turns out it’s a good thing the trash room isn’t emptied every day. I found the library books sitting neatly in their own paper bag, along with lots of other books that I actually intended to throw away.
*oops*.
Oh cool – but what the heck is it?
Finally, one of the joys of doing an inventory of things is finding weird stuff. Like this one below; DVDExpress was an excellent store for ordering DVDs from some 10-15 years back and I used them extensively. One time I found this card along with my order:
I still have no clue whatsoever what that’s supposed to mean. But it was weird enough for me to keep it all these years – until now. Now I tossed it.
