Trunk Line

If Hurricane Sandy lives up to expectations, it will be the biggest storm to hit the Northeast in recent history, if not in all of it. With attention to infrastructure, I’m listing infrastructure-grade information sources here, and following the stories over at Riding out the storm, on my personal blog.

Web links:

• NYTimes River (by Dave Winer)
• NOAA (@NOAA)
• NOAA’s Natioinal Hurricane Center
• NOAA’s Sandy page
• NOAA Sandy RSS feed
• USGS Hurricane Page
• USGS Coastal Hurricane Hazards for Sandy
• Google’s Hurricane Sandy Crisis Map
• National Weather Service (@usNWSgov)
• NWS list of notices, mostly from amateur radio operators
• NWS Twitter Feeds
• Twitter search for Sandy
• Intellicast
• Weather.com (@TWC_Hurricane)
• Weatherbug
• Wunderground
• Wind map of the U.S.

TV and Radio (going southwest to northeast):

• Washington TV: WUSA WETA WTTG WRC WTTG WJLA WFDC WETA WHUT
• Washington Radio: WTOP (stream) WNEW WAMU
• Baltimore TV: WJZ WMAR WBAL WBFF WNUV WMPT
• Baltimore Radio: WBAL (stream) WYPR (stream)
• Philadelphia TV: KYW WPHL WHYY WCAU WTXF WWSI WGTW WPVI
• Philadelphia Radio: KYW (stream) WHYY (stream)
• Atlantic City/Wildwood TV: WMGM
• Altantic City/Wildwood Radio: WOND WPGG
• New York/North Jersey TV: WNBC WABC WCBS CBSlocal WWOR WPIX WNJU WXTV WNYW WNET/Thirteen.org
• New York/New Jersey Radio: WINS WCBS (stream) WNYC (AM stream FM stream) NJ101.5
• Hartford-New Haven TV: WFSB WTNH WUVN WEDH WVIT WTIC (stream)
• Hartford-New Haven Radio: WTIC WNPR/CPBN (stream) WXLM
• Providence TV: WJAR WLNE  WPRI WNAC
• Providence Radio: WHJJ (stream) WRNI-FM (stream) WRNI-AM (stream) WPRO (stream)
• Boston TV: WBZ WCVB WGBH WHDH WFXT WUNI
• Boston/Cape Radio: WBUR (stream) WCAI (stream) WGBH WBZ

Newspapers:

• Boston Globe (boston.com)
• New York Times
• Washington Post
• Philadelphia Inquirer (philly.com)
• New York Daily News
• New York Post
• Hartford Courant
• Providence Journal
• Baltimore Sun

I first heard “sustainable consumption” when John Wilbanks uttered it yesterday. At first I thought he was joking about his work around large international well-meaning entities such as the World Economic Forum. By that I mean, large economies with large industries wishing to keep consumption by served populations up to economy-sustaining levels. It was later that I looked it up and found at Wikipedia that a definition dates back to the Oslo Symposium on Sustainable Consumption, which called it,

the use of services and related products which respond to basic needs and bring a better quality of life while minimising the use of natural resources and toxic materials as well as emissions of waste and pollutants over the life cycle of the service or product so as not to jeopardise the needs of future generations.”

So my assumed definition was at odds with the Oslo one, and others raised since. I therefore sit corrected, but wish to retain the ironies around the topic.

And, since nobody had blogged anything here in a long time and I’d like to fire the blog up again, I thought I’d flag the whole topic, since in the long run it is bound to bear on infrastructure.

Not speaking of which, a service called Zemanta, which works as a plug-in with WordPress, suggests these as related bonus links:

• From Mass Consumerism to Mass Change: Hope for Sustainable Consumption  shareable.net)
• Using Consumers to Drive the Market for Sustainability  impact.webershandwick.com)
• How Will the $1,000 Genome Change Society? Hear From Wired’s Thomas Goetz, MDV’s Sue Siegel, Kauffman’s John Wilbanks on Monday  xconomy.com)
• BASF First Chemical Company to be Founding Member of The Sustainability Consortium  prweb.com)
• Sustainable Lifestyles 2050: Visions and Policy Actions  iflanewsbrief.wordpress.com)
• Sustainable Future for Our Natural Resources  jamieross.com.au)
• The imperative of sustainable production and consumption  http://www.iisd.ca/consume/)

Check out Cable Blues: Tangled & Crazy Wiring, Part 6 at Dark Roasted Blend. You have to scroll down a bit before the pix show up, but they’re all pretty amazing. Many of the subjects are a triumph of infra over structure.

“Therefore, we’re going to dig conduit directly through the Earth’s Crust from the sub-basement of 60 Hudson in NYC all the way to 350 East Cermak in Chicago,” says “a purported representative of DeepBore Networks” to Rob Powell of Telecom Ramblings.

A ruse, of course. But it suggests some fun thinking about infrastructure.

For anybody interested in the history of infrastructure, and lessons to be learned from many points in the history of the Industrial Age, Andrew Odlyzko, of the University of Minnesota, is required reading.

Here is a reading list.

Note the pieces on railway mania. Highly relevant stuff.

I’m writing this right now while leveraging one of the older forms of Industrial Age transport: canals. We are currently on one in Lorraine, France. Built in the early 1800s, it remains in use occasionally for barges, but is better known now for leisure boating. That’s what we’re doing here. It’s a small but thriving industry.

A few months back, partly in anticipation of this blog, I created a Flickr account for the Berkman Center‘s Infrastructure group. To my surprise, no account with the name “Infrastructure” was taken, so I grabbed it, and the site is now here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/infrastruct…

All the photo sets so far are mine, but I trust many more will come from other folks in our group. Here’s a rundown on what’s there now:

• Shots exploring Domodossolla, Italy, during a day trip from our family’s ski vacation this past winter in Zermatt, Switzerland. The trip was recommended by Urs Gasser, Executive Director of the Berkman Center.
• The rapidly-changing spire atop the Empire State Building, on a day pilots call “severe clear.” It is interesting to see how much electronic stuff has encrusted the blunt winged art deco made familiar by King Kong, and how much of that same stuff has been replaced many times over the years. Much of what’s still there is obsolete analog VHF TV transmitting antennae, that I expect will come down. What I’d like to see, personally, is the old building restored to something close to its original shape. Since most transmissions are now on much shorter wavelengths, using smaller antennas, this should be do-able.
• Fiberfete, a “celebration of our connected future,” in Lafayette, Louisiana. Lafayette is the first city in the country, I believe, to have a municipal fiber optic network that passes every home in town (more than 100,000 people live there), and can deliver 100Mbps service within the town. That’s interesting infrastructure right there. What should be done with it? That was a focus of the gathering.
• Tracking flights. For most of the history of aviation, following airplanes in and out of airports electronically — watching weather alongo the way — was a privilege only of a few professionals. Now it’s something anybody can do, with the help of services such as FlightAware. Here I tracked my 13-year-old son on his first solo passenger flights coast-to coast, all in one weekend.

Infrastructure sets with other Flickr accounts include:

• Touring tech sites with Tim Pozar (the subject of an upcoming Linux Journal column)
• Infrastructure study on the Minuteman Bikeway
• Post-Fire Infrastucture Tour (Santa Barbara)
• Sidewalk Signage in Cambridge
• Boston Infrastructure Photo Study
• Transmitters, Antennas and Towers
• A Visit to a Doomed TV Transmitting Site
• Fiber Optics Get Easy in Loma Linda
• The Tunnel Between Concourses B and C at O’Hare
• Mt. Wilson Before the Station Fire
• Bike Trip Through Cambridge
• Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge Flyby
• Chicago From the Air at Night
• Lake Mead From the Air
• A Photo Study of AM Radio Engineering
• New York From the Air

As a bonus link, here’s the Infrastructure Photo Pool at Flickr.

Trunk Line is about studies in infrastructure.  So what is infrastructure?

OED:
[Fr. (1875 in Robert), f. INFRA- + STRUCTURE n.]
A collective term for the subordinate parts of an undertaking; substructure, foundation.

substructure: That part which supports something else.

foundation: The solid ground upon which another structure is erected.

(OED usage dates to 1927.)

Encarta Thesaurus:

(1) substructure, organization, structure, setup, arrangement, groundwork, frame, foundation, base

(2) public service, public transport, communications, power supply, water supply, broadcasting, telecommunications, networks, transportation