Trunk Line

Following Sandy

Doc Searls — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 14:33:24 +0000

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:

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:

Sustainable production vs. consumption

Doc Searls — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:17:04 +0000

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:

Xtreme wiring

Doc Searls — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:45:32 +0000

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.

A new definition for boring

Doc Searls — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:44:48 +0000

“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.

Digging Andrew Odlyzko

Doc Searls — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 07:21:44 +0000

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.

Our Infrastructure Flickr Stream

Doc Searls — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:03:22 +0000

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:

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

Defining Infrastructure

Christian — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:25:21 +0000

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