NPR's All Things Considered had a short interview with ACC's American agent Russell Galen on Tuesday.
The Mianus River Bridge, carrying I95 in Connecticut, collapsed in 1983 from the failure of just two pin and hanger assemblies.
All Things Considered has an interview with Conservapedia founder Andy Schlafly today.
Seen on a health care email list: "Our hospital was in the mist of a project ..."
I've been in hospitals like that.
Not that it's a major plot element (and I'm enjoying the book so far), but if the opening of Spin is set on a more-or-less contemporary Earth, circa 2005, the Internet and worldwide phone service would *not* have collapsed when the satellites went away. "Losing satellites ... rendered the long-distance telephone system unreliable ... it gutted the World Wide Web ..." "News stories traveled like whispers, squeezed through transatlantic fiber-optic cables rather than ricocheted through orbital space ..."
Fiber-optic cables have *far* higher capacity than any satellite, and now carry 99% or more of telephone and Internet traffic. SF readers will know why; the time lag ("latency") for signals carried by satellites in geosynchronous orbit is about 1/2 second, round-trip, which makes phone conversations hard to maintain and cripples otherwise fast internet connections. Fiber has essentially no latency, and is used wherever it can be laid, with satellites used mainly as a backup to cable or for areas where a ground station can be installed cheaper than fiber, this being mostly in developing nations. Satellites' main advantage (and use) is for one-to-many distribution, such as network TV program relays, and for direct TV reception in the home, competing with cable TV.
Here's an article on the subject (from 2001), which notes that even then over 80% of traffic was carried on fiber:
http://www.iw.com/magazine.php?inc=030101/03.01.01internettech2.html
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