#1: If you are referring to Dr. Bill Gray, he's not "one guy in Colorado who will give the newspapers a prediction anyway" he's a well-respected academic meteorologist:
http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/Forecasts/
In past years, Dr. Gray's forecast for total number of tropical storms and named storms, as well as that of the National Hurricane Center (http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/), have been fairly good as long-range weather forecasts go (+/-20% or so, vs. 50%/50% for 3-month general forecasts). The computer tracking models for hurricanes keep on getting better each year as well, to the point where the NHC can predict within about 100 miles where a hurricane will make landfall. Impressive given the amount of data to be processed and the inherent unpredictability of weather patterns.
#11: I'd give no odds that FEMA is better prepared, after all, they've got no place to go up up compared to Katrina. Plus, they've got all those trailers and all that food left over from 2 years ago, although the tons of ice are probably melted by now . . .
Seriously, though, the FEMA web site actually has some useful information, especially disaster maps. Back in the last millenium, when FEMA was run by competent adults, they put all the hazard maps online. You can see how much risk you face from various perils here: http://www.fema.gov/hazard/map/index.shtm
Keep in mind, that the greatest risk your average homeowner faces is the risk of flood, usually the sort of flooding which doesn't make the national news. Moral: Don't build on flood plains and make sure that your sewer and storm drain systems don't connect to a water source which is likely to flood so badly that the drains back up.
The huge thing that scares me, however, is that people have become clueless about what barrier islands and salt marshes are and what they're good for (Hint: NOT FREAKIN' VACATION CONDOS!!). In so many parts of the U.S. people have build houses right at the high tide line on the outer edge of a barrier island usually filling in wetlands to do so. Those barrier islands and marshes should be protecting the mainland from the sea's fury.
In a hurricane, the storm surge will turn those houses, and anything in them, into water-driven battering rams which can block roads, or even knock down causeways and bridges leading to safety. One of the big causes of death during the 1903 Galveston Hurricane/Flood was storm-driven debris taking out the causeway to the mainland.
People on the Northeast coast (i.e., Baltimore to Boston) have forgotten that they can be hit by hurricanes, too. While the shape of the harbors in these locations protects them to some extent (that's why they were chosen as ports, after all), there is still some risk from storm surge.
The parts of the Northeast U.S. which are really at risk for hurricane damage are Long Island and Cape Cod. Both are heavily-developed, relatively low-lying areas, unprotected by (many) barrier islands, with limited access to/from higher ground. Even worse, they are (mostly) south-facing, so its likely that hurricane-generated storm surge will be pushed right into them.
If you're on the East coast within a few miles of the ocean you are at risk from hurricane storm surge unless you are 20 feet or more above sea level. And, if a hurricane storm surge hits, being underground is a very bad place to be - don't try to escape by subway.
#16: Add household bleach to the generic list of useful things to have in an emergency: 1 oz. bleach will kill the bugs in 5 gallons of water, 2 tbsp. in 5 gallons will sanitize any reasonably clean object soaked in it for at least 20 minutes (a good way to sanitize dishes, etc.) It can also be used as germicide and fungicide. Activated charcoal (from pet stores or wherever water filtration supplies are sold) will filter out chlorine/chloramines as well as common toxic metals. Alternately, you can remove chlorine from tap water by letting the water stand for 24 hours.
#21: Almost anyplace in the U.S. - Bits of the nation relatively close to the Great Lakes are at less risk, bits of the country in the central plains more so. Check the FEMA map link given above.
#29: Amen. The most important thing you can have in any crisis situation is knowledge and the ability to use it. Preparedness is just one part of knowledge. Ideally, in an emergency you will be physically fit, capable of performing at least basic first aid, know how to operate basic survival equipment - like fire extinguishers, and have a rudimentary knowledge of how to mitigate hazards in your environment - like turning off the gas and electric feeds to your house.
#30: Military surplus has the virtue of being cheap and (usually) extremely durable. If you're worried about the "political correctness" of khaki, I've discovered that a thin coating of enamel spray paint (or brushed on latex paint) works just fine to "demilitarize" olive drab canvas. Enamel paint also has the virtue of being water repellent. This technique isn't recommended for clothing, though, since the paint interferes with the breathability of the fabric. Instead, I'd imagine that a good fabric dye would be sufficient to make it obvious that you're a civilian. For many years, I've kept a mini survival kit in a converted U.S. Army surplus gas mask bag.
#36: A bicycle can also be easily converted to power a pump, pulley or generator. I've seen a bicycle-based reciprocating saw, as well as bicycle-based water pumps.
I'm going to patent "69" - both as a number and as a business technique - with my legions of trained attack lawyers I will soon rule the PrOn industry, then the Internet, and then the WORLD!
Dentist, Schmentist,
Just find a nice African riverbank to lie down on, open your mouth REALLY wide, and let those nice little birds to do their work. Bonus points if you manage to catch and kill some poor, dumb ungulate the middle of the tooth cleaning (Of course, that pisses off the birds since they have to start over, but not too badly since fresh meat scraps between your fangs more than makes up for the inconvenience). Serious points off if you eat the feathered dental hygienists, or if the other crocodiles make fun of your braces or your basking technique.
First, I hope that everyone calms down before they act. It's too easy to turn any national tragedy into a bloody Rohrschach test. When politicians identify and attack the wrong problems (or the politically-expedient or ideologically-driven ones, which are usually synonymous with wrong*), they turn isolated atrocities into chronic societal tragedies.
*Generally, any issue prefixed by the words "The War on . . ."
ACW @ 2
I believe that the argument over gnu control is related to arguments about the right to keep and arm bears.
On balance, it seems that the hypothesis that funky street layout = crazy drivers is proven false.
JESR @ 495
when I dreamed of dragons as a child,they looked exactly like logging trucks.
Being a denizen of the unfashionable bits of the nation I've never encountered logging trucks, but that's kind of the way I imagine them, too. Blame it on a few Jim McManus short stories I read when I was a teen.
Janet Brennan Croft @ 544
Lovely, a real Mike Ford moment!
Inspired by, yes. As good as, not by a parsec.
I started reading Making Light when I heard that Mike Ford - a friend of friends, who I'd always intended to meet some day - had died. Before I started reading his archived occasional posts I knew that he was good. After reading them, I wept because I realized that he was great. If there is cosmic justice, in the future he will be revered as one of the great late 20th/early 21st century American poets.
Joel Polowin @ 553
Malthus @ 549
IIRC Niven had a couple of variations of "impact armour", stasis fields, and force fields which became rigid or otherwise activated on impact.
Slightly relevant, but the ballistic armor worn by police officers appears to help prevent chest injuries in an accident. (e.g., http://policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=186&issue_id=12004)
567 ::: joann ::: (view all by) ::: April 17, 2007, 01:50 PM:
kate @ 514
This is Texas, and for at least four months of the year, you can't even *think* without the air conditioner on.
Would at least four of those months be around election time? That would explain a lot of things about Texas gummint.
Luthe @ 570
the differences in street plan come down to the ease of gridiron planning, the lack of American imagination in planning (Circleville, OH excluded), and, in the case of San Francisco, existing Spanish missionary planning.
That's not quite fair. When designing a city from scratch on reasonably level ground some sort of grid seems to be the preferred design the world over from antiquity on. (At least it holds for the Romans, medieval English and, IIRC, Chinese and Aztecs.)
(Unlike surveying most of the open West, where they forgot to take the drift caused by lines of latitude into account.)
Here's also the issue of relative lack of reference points on the high praries and imperfect knowledge of magnetic deviation by the surveyors. That plus the fact that the only liquid fit to drink was whiskey and being scalped by hostile natives or trampled by stampeding buffalo were real occupational hazards. I've heard that some of the township lines in North Dakota are "interesting" due to these problems.
Bruce Cohen @587
As far as Boston is concerned, I've heard that the downtown area (the Commons and Beacon Hill) was laid out by cows.
Not cows, but Indians and Pre-Columbian animals. Many of the old roads were game paths turned into Indian trading routes turned into wagon roads. U.S. 40, which crosses much of the Old Northwest Ordinance territories, is one of them.
Ethan @ 388 I'm extremely lucky that the truck driver was very talented and very aware of his surroundings, and that there happened to be a large open space one lane over.
That big space might not have been luck, but rather due to the driver's awareness of his surroundings. Experienced truckers tend to be excellent defensive drivers who instinctively use the Smith System, even if they don't know what it is. The trucker, from his perch 6 feet above the road , probably saw the emerging situation before you did (Aim high in steering), noticed that you were about to do something stupid (keep your eyes moving), and took appropriate action (Get the big picture) by changing his lane (Leave yourself an out). When you're driving a 70' long vehicle which bends in the middle, and which can weigh up to 80 tons, you learn to think ahead by a few seconds.
martyn taylor @ 395
Drivers who drive, routinely, faster than us . . . all wear 5 point harnesses and crash helmets. Do you think they wouldn't save that weight if they could?
Some of them do, but they pay the price for their stupidity. (viz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Earnhardt)*
John @402
I wonder how many people have been seriously injured/killed from items within the car striking them during a crash, and if this is possible to determine.
My guess is that it's damned hard to determine exactly what hit who when, unless the "what" gets stuck in a victim or leaves a distinct mark. I'll let the experts confirm or deny.
Addendum to the perils of trucking: An ugly truth is that the chains or straps holding the load in place on a flatbed trailer are really nothing more than a friendly suggestion to the load that it stay in place as you drive along. In an accident, the trailer and the load are quite likely to part ways.
This is why truckers who coils of steel refer to the two ways of loading the coils as "shotgun load" or "suicide load". Shotgun has the hollow centers of the coils lined up in parallel with the trailer length, like the barrel of a giant gun, so if you swerve very hard or roll over they fall off to the side, squashing whatever is next to the trailer. Suicide load has the center of the coils at right angles to the trailer, so that in an accident they either roll off the back of the trailer and squash whatever is behind the trailer or roll forward, crushing the tractor and the driver inside (hence the name). Moral: Don't drive along side or close behind flatbed trailers, especially in congested urban areas or in bad weather conditions.**
Janet Kegg @ 422
A certain aggresive stone wall on a narrow road in Wales scraped the side and broke the mirror of my rental car.
Friendly note for Americans driving rental cars in the UK:
1) Don't drive in London (or any other big city).
2) Be sure to get a rental car with pre-scraped hubcaps on the passenger side of the car. Off of the A routes, roads are narrower than in the U.S. so you will scrape the hubcaps against those lovely hedgerows and stone walls as you try to keep keep the "proper" distance between your car and the oncoming traffic. The rental companies will charge you for new hubcaps if you scrape them up. My wife and I lucked out and didn't get charged (we got pre-scraped hubcaps), but I got to hear a fine row between the rental agency manager and some poor schmuck who did.
Marrije @430
The high number of bikes and dedicated bike lanes seems to me like a good argument for helmets. Higher traffic density means collisions are more likely.
Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 442
Wear a helmet. Knee and elbow pads- that can be excessively protective. Children can learn to love scars- it makes for a conversation opener.
I hope you were being facetious. Kids will need to bend and bear weight with those knees and bend those elbows for the rest of their lives. Serious joint injuries are just as painful, limiting and expensive to treat for kids as they are for adults and old injuries sustained in childhood can result in chronic problems starting in middle age. I don't know how many 30- to 50- something people I know whose knees are screwed up due to high school sports injuries.
Use all the recommended safety equipment for every task you perform. Even if it makes you look like a dork, better a whole and healthy dork than a pretty corpse or invalid.
Janet Brennan Croft @451
That thing they do in Boston, they do in Pittsburgh too.
That sounds like the name of a Tin Pan Alley ditty.
[Cue the 78 up on spindle and wind up the Victrola.]
Shh..shh...shh...shh
[Tinny sound of Al Jolson-wannabe singing through a megaphone]
That thing they do in Boston, they do in Pittsburgh, too. They do it round the country, so let's do it me and you.
We'll do it both together, come on let's have some fun, don't let those folks in Pittsburgh, be the only ones.
The craze they've tried to ban in Boston, has swept the U.S.A., let's try it 'fore they can it, you and me, today.
Oh come and be my honey, come and be my girl, and we'll do the thing they do in Boston, all around the world!
Seriously, I wonder if there is a correlation between screwed up traffic patterns and rude/unsafe driving. Due to history and geography both Pittsburgh and Boston suffer from road networks which look like plates of electrified worms, with lots of situations where "you can't get there from here." By contrast, in thrilling defiance of topography, San Francisco's streets are (mostly) arranged in a grid and I've found it much less stressful to drive.
*My wife and I were living near Mooresville, NC - the epicenter of NASCAR - when St. Dale the Intimidator hit the wall at Daytona in 2001. There was great lamentation in the land of Cheerwine and vinegar-cured barbecue; every body shop, mechanic, oil change place, gas station, auto parts store, etc. from Charlotte to Greensboro had signs up reading "We miss you #13." [Earnhardt's car number]
**Steel-haulers are also notorious for grossly overloading their rigs, especially for short-haul trips where they are unlikely to face a weight check. To make things worse, they often get paid by the load, which gives them every incentive to speed. Logging trucks (although I have never encountered them personally) are said to be just as bad. Paradoxically, some of the safest trucks on the road are the tanker trucks filled with gasoline or other liquid nastiness. Not surprisingly, tanker fleet operators are very picky about who they hire. Tanker drivers also tend to be short haul truckers who get to sleep regular hours in their own beds, so they aren't likely to fall asleep at the wheel.
Fascinating discussion by interesting people is why I love Making Light.
One factor which hasn't been mentioned is when and how you drive. Once upon a time, in a particularly foolish career move, I learned to drive an 18-wheeler. The only good that came of it was that I got religion about defensive driving and turned into a decent car driver after several months of being a lousy truck driver.
The thing that really stuck with me from my training was that truckers have a lower rate of vehicle accidents than the general population, but if they do get killed, it is most likely to happen in a single vehicle accident sometime between 2-5 a.m.
The lower overall accident rate is because trucks generally drive on divided highways, which, despite their high speeds, are some of the safest roads because all the traffic is going in the same direction at roughly the same speed.
The single-vehicle accident rate in the wee hours is entirely due to driver fatigue. If you drive while wobbly due to lack of sleep the effects are similar to driving drunk.
Speaking of which, accident rates rise throughout the week, with peaks from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m Friday evening and on Saturday evening/early Sunday morning (at least in the U.S. I can't speak for other countries) when the drunk- and sleep-deprived drivers start to come out. After 2 a.m., however, not only do you have the drunks, but you also have the people who suffer from terminal "gethomeitis" which peaks at 4 a.m. This is typically when sleep-depped truckers go to the big honky-tonk in the sky. Sadly, they sometimes take out another vehicle when they go, and the truck always wins, even if the driver doesn't.*
There was, a few years ago, some talk of forcing all truckers to stop driving from 4-5 a.m. to prevent accidents caused by badly fatigued drivers. But horror stories about forged log books and sleepless drivers keeping themselves awake for days on stimulants aside, good truck drivers pull over and sleep if they're slap-happy due to lack of rest.
#105: Not to disparage the dead, or to cast aspersions on the living, but I suspect that in the accident which killed Sir Osis (King of Eoldormere) driver fatigue was a contributory cause. (That, plus the unconscionable decision by the Province of Ontario to put soft, narrow, sandy shoulders along the 401, the main highway from Montreal to Toronto to Windsor/Detroit.)
When I played in the SCA, if given the choice between day-tripping and coming home in the small hours of the morning or staying the night at an event, I always choose the overnighter. If I get really sleepy when I'm driving, I pull into a rest stop (or better yet, a truck stop, close to the building and in sight of the front doors) and take a nap.
304. James: One (New Hampshire, where I live) has no seatbelt law.
Which adds an entirely too morbid twist to the state motto.
*Obligatory ex-trucker rant: Don't tailgate the damned trailer. Even if you can stop faster than the truck, you can't see around it, so if the truck stops you will go into the safety bar at the back of the trailer. Even if you are in an up-armored Cattle-lack Ecocide you will lose the fight with the real truck. Not only will you mess up your toy, and possibly yourself, but you will cause no end of grief for the trucker by making him waste precious time dealing with the ensuing accident; time which he could otherwise be spending asleep or driving around lost.
Also, don't cut in front of the tractor. The space directly in front of the giant bumper is not meant for your car/SUV but is there so that the driver can brake safely. It takes a truck 8 seconds to slow from 60 mph to a stop, but only 5 seconds for a car to do the same. This means the poor dumb trucker has three extra seconds to lose his safe driver bonus, minus the time he doesn't brake because he can't see your brake lights from the cab, when you swerve in front of him and slam on the brakes. While you might not give a rat's about the driver's safety bonus or the grief the ensuing accident will cause him, the point is moot because you'll probably be beyond caring.
To misquote Occam's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by bureaucracy. While there are plenty of things that the Bush administration is doing that scare the hell out of me, this is not one of them.
I believe the deal is that some Coast Guard jobs require you to be proficient with the .50 caliber machinegun. (And no, this isn't a new policy: USCG vessels in the Caribbean have mounted machine guns for years, both to give the Coast Guard equivalent firepower to some of the drug runners and because a heavy machine gun bullet is the only thing that is likely to catch up to and stop a souped-up cigarette boat.)
Now that the USCG is part of Homeland Security, they're doing patrols around high-risk coastal installations along the Great Lakes - things like nuclear power plants and chemical factories that you really do want guarded by trained professionals and not just a bunch of rent-a-cops.
So, you've got all these Coast Guard ratings stationed along the Great Lakes and they all need to do their yearly (or whatever) qualification with the .50 caliber machine gun . For their test to be meaningful, they have to show that they can actually hit a target using a deck-mounted gun while firing from a moving boat.
You could waste time and money to ship all these people to the Atlantic seaboard to do their training, or your could do the logical thing set up designated firing ranges within U.S. territorial waters on the Great Lakes.
To make sure that nobody gets hurt, you publicize the policy, clear it with the Canadians and various other stakeholders, and give a year or so of lead time so that the firing ranges can be worked out, new charts published, buoys put in place, etc.
And no, this isn't some sort of Orwellean new policy. During WW2, both the U.S. and Canada had bombing ranges on the Great Lakes, and the U.S. operated two aircraft carriers out of a base near Chicago. Admittedly they were training vessels converted from steam-powered side-wheel lake ferries, but they were launching state of the art naval aircraft.
My favorite is "The War of the Texas Succession"
Thank you for (re-)posting these. While I've been aware of John M. Ford for years, it's only since reading his comments on this blog that I realized just how amazing he was, and why. Condolences to all who loved him. Shame on us who never took the chance.
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| 2007 | 9 |
| 2006 | 3 |
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