Duking It Out Over Southern Electricity
Everybody has something to say about electricity in the South. Duke thinks it needs to cost more; Duke, on the other hand, thinks there’s no reason it needs to be more expensive.
Stories by Scott Huler
Mind
A Word in Defense of the Witnesses and the Word Is "Ambiguity"
You and I – and every single other decent person on the planet who has heard about the Penn State abuse allegations – are having the same revenge fantasy.
Sustainability
The Robots Who Could Have Saved Fukushima Are Coming
This remarkable piece in IEEE Spectrum giving a timeline of the hellish first 24 hours at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant makes the expected observations: the entire crisis could have been averted with a couple of nineteenth-century or earlier engineering fixes: don't put your generators in the basement when you're in an area that might flood, and if your generators could be at risk during a crisis that would require evacuation, don't put your backup generators hundreds of kilometers away on wheeled vehicles that will have to fight the fleeing traffic, on ruined roads, to get to the crisis.But that's engineering: you always learn what's wrong by having it go wrong...
Sustainability
More Power at the Ballpark
St. Louis and Arlington host the last two groups of people in the country not worrying about power shortages around the baseball stadium. Everybody else is thinking about next year.As usual, that includes the Cleveland Indians -- but this time they're thinking of power in the stadium, not just at the plate...
Sustainability
Protest Infrastructure: How Much Trouble Are Protesters, Really?
In the staring contest between the Occupy Wall Street protesters and New York City, Mayor Bloomberg blinked first, deciding that the occupiers didn't represent the kind of safety crisis Brookfield Office Properties, the owners of protest epicenter Zucotti Park, described in its letter to the NYC police commissioner...
Can There Be Well-Timed Infrastructure Failures?
Yes, there can, and they happened September 8 and September 12, 2011. As you well know, a worker was replacing a wonky piece of monitoring equipment at an electrical substation in Yuma, Arizona, and — zzt!...
The Sciences
Storm Center: New Tools for the Postmortem
Another storm has come and gone, and as the cleanup gets started another series of cities sends armies of people with clipboards out to survey, assess, reach out.Except things have changed...
The Sciences
The Earthquake App -- circa 1859
Okay, so we all had a swell time: the floor starts jiggling like a jello-mold, and those of us who didn't run outside ran to Twitter, and it was on .
Tech
Awake in the City
Okay, so pretty much all of us live in cities now, or we soon will; that's a given. There's lots of good to come from that and plenty to worry about too.Something that people don't think about much, though, is that so many of us take urban living as an excuse to turn off our senses: when it’s time to observe our surroundings, to pay attention in that naturalist, scientist way, we jump in a plane or a car and go out yonder somewhere: state park, national park, even a local farm,where we whip out a Peterson’s Guide and wax lyrical over identifying a scarlet tanager or a rufous-sided towhee.Except, no: that’s exactly wrong...
Sustainability
The Electric Car and ... Electricity
I went to the public night of Plugin 2011 in Raleigh, the annual electric car extravaganza, looking for what was happening on the edge of electric car science.
Sustainability
Maybe ... a Half of a Cheer for Shale Gas? Maybe?
I had a whole post prepared about how the Geographic Information Services people helped in the response to the April tornados that devastated Raleigh, which seemed like a good way to introduce the infrastructure-plus-connectivity-plus-how-do-they-DO-that?...
The Sciences
How Does Sewage Treatment Work?
Sewage treatment turns out to be a somewhat less nasty business than you probably thought
