When some fragile item may be damaged by a fall the best place to put it is on the ground. There it can fall no more. Since the “spontaneous evolution of an isolated system” tends to disorder and things fall apart, the most stable place to be is where things must come to a stop. Because “once the system eventually reaches equilibrium and stops evolving, its entropy becomes constant.” That’s to say things can’t get any worse. Something on the ground or at the center of a gravitational mass has nowhere left to go and stays there.
The enormous effort required to keep complex systems full of useful energy is at the heart of Victor Davis Hanson‘s observation that Japan is an example what happens when a complex system experiences a disruption.
Japan is a place where thing must happen just in time. Miss a connection and the consequences ripple on. It is like a watch; exquisite but dependent on a windup or battery charge to keep going. Let it run down and it stops. Dr. Hanson argues this is precisely the kind of society which planners — the smart controllers of all stripes — want to construct: complex, ordered, surveilled and refined. For Japan, complex systems were required for survival. For America, complex systems were required, not by need but the imperative to power; ambitious men who hankered after ant-heaps because they were born bureaucrats.
Japan’s high density, central planning, mass transit, demographic uniformity, and a culture of mutual dependence allow millions to live humanely and successfully in quite crowded conditions (in areas of Tokyo at 6,000 persons and more per square kilometer). And compared to other Asian and African cities (Mumbai or Lagos) even Tokyo is relatively not so dense, though far more successful. Yet such urban societies are extremely vulnerable to the effects of earthquakes, tsunamis, “man-caused disasters” and other assorted catastrophes, analogous in nature perhaps to tightly knit bee colonies that have lost their queens.
I don’t know quite why many of our environmentalists and urban planners wish to emulate such patterns of settlement (OK, I do know), since for us in America it would be a matter of choice, rather than, as in a highly congested Japan, one of necessity. Putting us in apartments and high rises, reliant on buses and trains, and dependent on huge centralized power, water, and sewage grids are recipes not for ecological utopia, but for a level of dependence and vulnerability that could only lead to disaster. Again, I understand that in terms of efficiency of resource utilization, such densities make sense and I grant that culture sparks where people are, but in times of calamity these regimens prove enormously fragile and a fool’s bargain.
But catastrophe has a way of killing ants in ant-heaps more easily than when they are spread out over the ground. Then all the supposed disadvantages of unsophisticated America vis a vis “planned systems” become reversed for two reasons. The first is that subsidiarity — the ability to addresses some needs at an individual or local level — is more survivable than centralized systems. Dispersed housing, individual transportation, armed citizens and a tradition of community stop becoming “urban sprawl”, “wasteful driving”, “gun-toting” and “bigotry” and become objects of envy to helpless people cowering in their high rise, foodless apartments. Subsidiary forms of social organization are sustainable at greater levels of national disconnection. They can work, if need be, by themselves. It is an argument which Leo Linbeck III has been making about governance and health-care, but that is another story.
The second reason is that subsidiary systems are more adaptable. Complex societies are often locked into their adaptation. They can function only when enabled by a larger system. An Ipod is just a paperweight without a network and a power source. In a crisis world you would trade a Bugatti Veyron for a pickup truck. The Veyron is a specialized babe-magnet. The pickup truck does lots of other things. But even pickup trucks have become more complex over the years. In the old Willys Jeep a lot of things could be fixed with a screwdriver, Vise-grip, a few socket wrenches and a file. Today very little can be fixed without the help of “they”. “They” is a term coined by Victor Davis Hanson to represent that faceless, anonymous source of help without which we are powerless to go on.
This fragility of complexity has especially bothered me the last 80 days, well before the tragedy in Japan. Some random experiences: I am teaching one morning a week at Pepperdine for the spring 15-week semester, each week alternating between flying and driving. One week in January, the power at terminal one in LAX just went out — no explanation, no rhyme or reason, no notice when or if it would return. Thousands of travelers were rendered helpless — no running water, bathrooms, overhead lights. All flights delayed or cancelled, as mobs packed flight counters or simply walked out of the darkened halls to the curb. Then abruptly later it went back on — again, no explanation. The attendants at the counter simply shrugged and said “they” must have fixed it. To paraphrase those in the Wild Bunch, who are “they”?
“They” is who we are going to call if we break a leg or an intruder is at the door. “They” are who we ask to help us when we are lost. “They” are the ones who are going to enforce the “nuclear free zone” in Berkeley and the no-fly-zone in Libya. “They” are the guys who provide the physical basics, the hard power who the kings of “soft power” are destined to command. There was a time, not so long ago when “they” for the most part meant “us”; because we knew how to supply at least some of these things for ourselves. Knew how to punch out those who bullied us without having to carry the scars of trauma into the Oval Office. But no longer.
The complexity of modern pickup trucks is emblematic of our complex, interelated world. We need each other far more than is safe. Already Chinese factories are slowing down because of disruptions of deliveries from Japan. What do you do in a just-in-time production system when the shipment from Yokohama doesn’t turn up? Only hope “they” will fix it. And what do you do when the oil disruptions threaten in the Gulf, the bond markets look scary and unemployment looks like it will never ever go down. You hope “they” will fix it.
At the highest political level of our complex world “they” means people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. These were the final “fixers” of the system when something went wrong. Of late they seemed to be capable of very little. Why? Because their power to fix depended on the systems they were supposed to control. Their “smarts” were judged by their ability to manipulate the system through which they rose. Once the system itself began fraying at the edges their true quality became evident. They were not very smart and not very adaptable.
There are signs that our complex world is running out the enough “useful energy” to keep its welfare, entitlement and physical systems together. Perhaps as important, the ability of people like Obama and Clinton to understand what is happening may be decreasing correspondingly. This happen ironically because they think they are smart. Their blinkered minds will tend to draw the wrong boundaries around the emerging system in order for it to be comprehensible to their mental models. In the process they thereby increase entropy. When they “smooth” the system to conform to their ideological biases it creates a loss of knowledge which eventually adds to the problem.
People who know all the answers are the worst offenders of all. Their ideological solutions and “investments” make things worse. One way to minimize the effects of imperfect understanding is to shorten the feedback loop. By frequently updating our understanding of a changing system the amount of “error” introduced is smallest when they are drawn at the most subsidiary level. The greatest and most catastrophic errors are created when an monolithic regime clings for too long to an old paradigm. When forced to change, it draws the new paradigm around a bigger volume of enclosed space thus maximizing the error. Here again the simpler system has its advantages. As observed earlier, highly complex systems are less adaptable, less subsidiary. Ideologically driven complex systems, like Europe and the proposed Hope and Change are least adaptable of all.
In history the cumulative process of failing to adapt is called a Revolution. Writers have usually ascribed such upheavals to the personal failings of wicked kings. But at least part of it may be due to the system trying to reach a new equilibrium while the ancien regime stands in its way while they wait in vain for “they” to come and fix things. But things are never fixed; and something else always comes instead, something only dimly glimpsed in the present and fully visible only when it finally arrives. As Forrest Gump once put it, “My momma always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.’”
Try telling that to those who know what we should get and what we should think.
In retrospect the desire for one world, a master energy plan and single health care system will be recognized not as imperatives of the human system, but the requirement of bureaucratic ambition. It may also be seen as one of the key blunders of the current political system. It emerged at a time when elites believed history had ended and all that remained was to freeze the 20th century welfare systems in place and etch their faces on Mount Rushmore. But reality proved too hard for them to handle. They would do well to recognize their limits.
“No Way In” print edition at Amazon
“When some fragile item may be damaged by a fall the best place to put it is on the ground.”
I thought that too, until my wife tripped over her Great Aunt’s antique lamp.
“they” will fix it because “they” have a vested interest in resuming shipments, just as “you” have an interest in receiving them.
that’s if “they” were honest. our banking system failed in its complexity because “they” isolated themselves from all risk, that’s called rent-seeking at its worst, where you have no money in the game yourself – eg, all politicians, and most modern bankers. or perhaps they – both bankers and politicians – were simply crooked to begin with. probably some were, and then when they got away with it, more piled in, more fool if they did not, right? when the mills of the gods grind slowly, the fleet of foot can steal a lot of grain.
–
as to urban density, in mumbai, shanghai, or los angeles, virtually all the residents are there by choice, the complex systems allow them to do so, it takes heat to allow the particles to jiggle together so closely, complex systems live in energy flows on the edge of chaos.
embrace the vibe.
I’ve seen the Forrest Gump quotation several times in the past 2-3 weeks, whether because there is something in the air on the Ides of March or just a lot of unexpected occurances I don’t know. It’s a clever line, but misses the point you made earlier, W: whether Obama and Clinton are faced with lots of unexpected events doesn’t matter to the rest of us. What matters is that they don’t know how to respond. The 3 AM phone call evoked in Clinton’s presidential campaign has come and guess what? neither one of them is prepared to handle the problem. Now we’ve had a series of 3 AM phone calls in a row and the president decides it’s time to predict the outcome of a basketball tournament and to go to Brazil. This is a classic example of voting “present” and it’s what Obama best understands.
Obama and Clinton are not “fixers” in the sense of correcting what has gone wrong, they are fixers in the Chicago way: they can put in the fix to square the deal to their own benefit. That’s ok on the street corner in Chicago because the real fixers are much higher up the food chain and they keep the big things working. Now that Obama and Clinton are at the top of the food chain we see that things don’t keep working; there are no fixers to save their sorry a$$es.
The irony is that America is what it is because of the individualism of its population. The old Frontier Hypothesis is not just some academic exercise — we really do take care of ourselves and our own when allowed to do so. This administration has wanted from the outset to do away this the rugged individualism that made us who we are, and has succeeded to some extent. Hanson’s example of the Willys Jeep is correct — try to repair your own car today and you can’t even figure out what’s wrong without going to the service station or owning your own diagnostic code reader.
The question is, has Obama taken us beyond the tipping point? Can we return to a place where we can take care of ourselves without appealing to Washington to “fix” things for us? I believe we are not yet there, but injecting $1.7 trillion into the economy has given Obama more leverage than we could ever have imagined. Only time will tell if we can walk this beast back from the edge. F
Great Post Wretchard and VDH. And “they” will never admit there is a huge price to pay for their complex, dependent, ever expanding, fragile systems they demand we submit to.
I used to make my living as a maker of tools for precision flint knapping in the defense industry. But after peace treaties were established with the Errks and Gaggs I was laid off. I tried to get work on the civy side but they told me the market was for utility tools like hide skinners bird gutters and they preferred younger guys with more experience than I had in that field. They recently came to me an said they needed my skill set but I had to turn them down I’m old, and have cataracts. Then they said they’d pay me a stipend just to train people. I told them that after my period of near starvation and my new line of admittedly low paying work as a dog milker I didn’t want to lose my position and go through that cycle again, and Mralk them anyway. They wouldn’t help me when I was in need so be dorkedy if I’m going to help them.
There’s a Black Swan in the last room of the Hilbert Hotel.
No matter how good your planning is, there will always be something you overlooked. Something won’t happen as planned. Improvisation will always be required.
I should add that centralization provides one benefit: the formation of a reserve. A power grid which enables the delivery of power to parts of the system which have failed; an army reserve which can meet the enemy where he is breaking through; a food buffer, etc. These are all examples which serve the same purpose.
But all real reserves are supplementary in nature. Otherwise they unitize the system and it is no longer meaningful to speak of “reserves” at all, since they are no longer reserves but part of the current operating cycle.
Some things which start off a reserve become a unitary system. And then we are back not to multiple points of failure with a backup, but to a single point of failure with no backup.
What worries me is that Japan bought big time into the ‘spend, spend, spend’ meme when times were good. Now what? The one who used the phrase clusterflock for the idea of more than one black swan hitting at once may be on to something.
My understanding is that even though Japan’s debt is huge it is owned by Japanese citizens. I think that’s good.
What has struck me most the past few years is the idea that what we are used to is normal–this wrong narrative can be applied to politics, economics and nature. We do not know what is normal because our time frame is too short. The idea of the 29th day keeps popping into my mind.
http://29thday.org/
Hope and change……
7) w,
Centralization also allows for much easier access to specialization – in medicine, education, culture.
That is changing with modern communications to a significant degree, though.
The term hysteresis keeps floating around in the back of my mind. Things start out simple but as time goes by they get more and more complex and inputs stop relating directly to outputs. Your car has become loaded with small computers, senor modules, and what not, so you need a computer to fix it. So now there are adapters and software coming out to enable you to diagnose the car without resorting to the manufacturer’s and special to the trade expensive diagnostic equipment. However consider the number of people who can actually use a laptop or do things like change the oil on their car. So it seems that cultures/governments grow more complex until they become uncontrollable, break down and then the cycle repeats. I always thought the checks and balances of the US Constitution were made in anticipation of loss of control. There would be mechanisms to enable a strip down of the system to get controls working again. Unfortunately the add on bits have really buggered it up, and it remains to be seen if major replacement and repairs can be done in time to prevent the flow of blood.
“The greatest and most catastrophic errors are created when an monolithic regime clings for too long to an old paradigm.”
Consider that paragon of advanced thinking and technological progress, NASA. This year we had the 25th anniversary of the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Now go back 25 years before the loss of the Challenger and you get January 1961. At that time the US had not launched a single man into orbit. In the ensuing 10 years we had the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo Programs and put men on the Moon. But while on 28 Jan 1986 we found out that the Shuttle was nonviable for its stated purpose, 25 years later NASA was still launching Shuttles, and its people literally were shedding tears over the fact it was all going to stop soon.
“Perhaps as important, the ability of people like Obama and Clinton to understand what is happening may be decreasing correspondingly.”
When Hillary Clinton was working on Hillarycare back in the early 1990’s she asked for more and more and more and more data. Whenever asked how the plan was going she replied “Excellent, but we need a little more data.” With enough data they would figure it all out and know how to make government-run health care work. Eventually they got enough data, or thought they did, and decided the problem was that there were too many doctors you had to pay so the answer was to get rid of some doctors.
The scary point is not that they think they can understand complex systems but that they think they do when they have not a clue.
As for “they”…. A couple of years ago my neighbor was having problem with his car. The dealer told him a diagnostic period would be required and that would run $90 an hour for at least 3 to 4 hours. I told him that it sounded like the alternator was bad and that I could figure that out with my volt ohm meter. The alternator was bad, I confirmed it with a test at an auto electric shop, and he ordered a new one I found on the Internet; we put it on and that fixed it. Total cost $110. Asked how I knew this stuff I replied that my Dad had owned his own auto electric shop. But funny thing is, my Dad never took me in the shop and explained anything to me – I just absorbed it somehow .
“ …highly complex systems are less adaptable, less subsidiary. Ideologically driven complex systems, like Europe and the proposed Hope and Change are least adaptable of all.”
“The question is, has Obama taken us beyond the tipping point?”
I believe the real question is can the tipping point be avoided?
For me, an ongoing mystery is why Lefties are so unwilling to consider that things are as bad as the Right proclaims. Very few arguments are made by them, mostly name calling. When they make new proposals they are only variations on a tired theme…throw money and exert more control. Billions (trillions?) of dollars have been spent but fundamental social problems are not solved. Not only not solved but in many ways worsened (i.e. education, family structure).
Propose a solution that conflicts with their ideology it’s Lefty Sunday every day. Most recently in Wisconsin, but in any Lefty protest or with any Lefty talking head (albeit, more eloquently) we hear the same Lefty liturgy. We all know it, we’ve heard it beyond numbering, ‘hey, hey, ho, ho, anyone opposing us has got to go.” Marxist mind-locked attitudes appear to be impregnable. No argument, no matter how compelling seems to breach the ideological walls. The correctness of Lefty fundamental ideology is not to be challenged nor revised. They are literally articles of faith.
What can shake such faith? When will voters no longer believe in their entrancing dream? When will they realize that their nation, their rights, their way of life is at risk? Will it be a slow realization that ice is on deck, but lifeboats await? Or, will it be societal equivalent of the frigid Northern Atlantic swirling first around ankles, then knees and finally the stars dim to liquid darkness.
Will “too big to fail” take the ironic tone now associated with “unsinkable?” I’m hopeful, but not confident.
RWE, or someone:
Is the Worldwide fabrication of the Dreamliner the dumbest thing Boeing has ever done?
I also like their wholesale transfer of trade secrets to the Chi-Coms.
““The administration made a mistake.””
Who made the mistake? They made a mi…..
The disaster plan was a ….
“Of the estimated 1,000 people huddling in the three buildings, the only survivors were 100 people who made their way to the top floor of City Hall.”
…-
“Tsunami preparation leads citizens into low-lying death traps”
“When the tsunami warning buzzer rang out over this sleepy port on Japan’s northeast coast, people knew what to do because they’d practised for the moment all their lives. They calmly left their homes and made their way to the gathering places designated by the municipal government: City Hall; a community centre; the local gymnasium.
For hundreds of people, if not more, the shelters they were ordered into proved to be deathtraps. Rikuzen-Takata’s disaster plan had been designed to deal with the three- and four-metre waves the city had seen in 1960 after an earthquake in faraway Chile. No one had anticipated the 15-metre tsunami that crashed through the city on Friday following a 9.0-magnitude earthquake just offshore, one that flung boats, shipping cranes and people inland, drowning those who had done as they were told and gathered in the low-lying shelters.
Of the estimated 1,000 people huddling in the three buildings, the only survivors were 100 people who made their way to the top floor of City Hall. The rest were swept away by a tide so high and fierce that it blew out the walls and windows on all three floors of the neighbouring shopping centre.
“People just relied on the bureaucracy. They became too obedient,” said Tsuyoshi Kinno, head of the neighbourhood committee in one of the districts of Rikuzen-Takata closest to the Pacific coast. “The administration made a mistake.””
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/tsunami-preparation-leads-citizens-into-low-lying-death-traps/article1943381/
John Gall in the mid 70s wrote “Systemantics” that put all of this very nicely.
I favor the earliest editions, but it’s been revised and expanded and is still around.
Wiki page here with a list of laws.
Two of them:
All systems fail.
Fail-safe systems fail by failing to fail safe.
Perhaps this story is an example of some of the advantages to a company that is vertically integrated.
http://kevinrose.com/blogg/2011/3/14/apples-role-in-japan-during-the-tohoku-earthquake.html
If you make any system sufficiently complex it will eventually fail catastrophically.
When the tsunami wiped out the backup generators at the Japanese power plant they brought in mobile generators only to find they couldn’t plug them to system because the plugs literally did not match. For want of a nail the shoe was lost etc.
The more complex the system the thicker the operators manual needs to be and the more crap goes on underneath that he doesn’t fully understand. Many simple and multiply redundant systems are almost always less prone to failure.
The greatest and most catastrophic errors are created when an monolithic regime clings for too long to an old paradigm.
that’s what regimes do, it’s all in kuhn.
if you push something hard enough, it will fall over
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/I_Think_We're_All_Bozos_on_This_Bus#Future_Fair
Bureaucrats and leftists hate the Church because its doctrine espouses the primacy of individual, family, locality, and government, in that order. In other words, subsidiarity. Here’s a greatest hit from John XXII Pacem in Terris: ”
26. The dignity of the human person involves the right to take an active part in public affairs and to contribute one’s part to the common good of the citizens. For, as Our Predecessor of happy memory, Pius XII, pointed out: “The human individual, far from being an object and, as it were, a merely passive element in the social order, is in fact, must be and must continue to be, its subject, its foundation and its end.”[23]
But the leftists say that Pius was “Hitlers’s Pope,” and the leftists are honorable men. (Couldn’t resist an ides of March allusion.)
The left generally exhibits what Catholics call “invincible ignorance,” unable for various reasons to listen to reason. As a result, you can always tell a leftist, but you can’t tell him much.
The leftist struggle against religion and the individual are one and the same, though the leftist will proclaim himself the champion of the individual and the Church the enemy of the individual.
Surely one reason people are attracted to Sarah Palin is that she can do what she needs to do to take care of her family, even challenged members. She doesn’t need the state, beyond it providing the basic and reserve services she pays it to provide. Therefore she is a threat to the left.
Between Obama and Palin there must be a middle. And that dynamic, contested, hard to balance place is where virtue, individual and social, resides. Hey, don’t take my word for it; I have it on good authority from Aristotle and Aquinas, who may be even more smart than Barack and Hillary.
Of the estimated 1,000 people huddling in the three buildings, the only survivors were 100 people who made their way to the top floor of City Hall. The rest were swept away by a tide so high and fierce that it blew out the walls and windows on all three floors of the neighbouring shopping centre.
“People just relied on the bureaucracy. They became too obedient,” said Tsuyoshi Kinno, head of the neighbourhood committee in one of the districts of Rikuzen-Takata closest to the Pacific coast. “The administration made a mistake.””
This story instantly brought to mind the story of the people who sought refuge in a Tokyo theater during the great firebombing raid of 1945.
Follow this link to view a list of Japanese cities incinerated in 1945. Page down and page down. Each of those attacks likely killed more people than the tsunami. But the worst of all was the Tokyo fire raid, arguably the single greatest loss of civilian life to aerial attack ever, including both Atomic Bombs. On that night, 335 B-29s destroyed 41 sq kilometers of Tokyo and killed more than 100,000 people. To put that in perspective, that is ten times the number who perished in this tsunami.
How can anyone comprehend numbers like that? They underscore how savage and vicious the Second World War was. The firebombings would have been the merest suggestion, the slightest hint, only the introduction to the terrible carnage that would have taken place had Olympic and Coronet taken place, preceded by 15 additional A-Bombs and God knows what else.
There were similar situations in the Battle of Manila, which suffered loss of life on this scale. People fled to the “safety” of convents, churchs, embassies, hospitals, strong buildings — only to be massacred by the Japanese Naval Infantry there. Safety in war is a matter of physics and distance. Human pity is no longer a factor.
The important thing is to put out the fires while small. To simplify when you are able. But to kick the can down the road? To let the pressure build up because you want to “win an election”; because you want to “reward your friends”? Cause it can’t happen here because “they” won’t let it happen, when that “they” is you? That attitude will in time lead to a collapse of the system. The last time that happened on a global basis was World War 2.
We’ve forgotten that it can happen. We’ve forgotten what happens when it does. And if it occurs we will remember, with futile fondness, how wise were those who held the ring and gave us 70 years of peace and prosperity until we got too lazy and threw it all away.
there is a penalty and a benefit to evolution in general – biological and mechanical
In my garage is a pickup truck that looks and runs like it is three years old –
it is 83 years old –
i look like I’m 62 years old – I run like i’m three years old –
life is funny
also have 3 mid-40′s jeeps – all repairable with simple hand tools –
me – not so much —
i’m measurably smarter than i was at 3 -
my old pickup can’t keep up with modern traffic
not sure what to make of all this -
I’m not sure that complexity is the right concept for what you guys are talking about. For example, if all food comes from a small number of suppliers through a small number of channels, this is far less complex than if it comes from numerous suppliers through numerous channels. It might be that simplicity is more prone to catastrophic failure. I recognize that systems that I am calling simple are actually complex, but perhaps this is because needless complexity is added on to them, not because they are complex in their essence.
Wretchard wrote,
“Ideologically driven complex systems, like Europe and the proposed Hope and Change are least adaptable of all.”
In reading this essay, I was reminded of another system gone awry, for much the same reason. See “Babel”. Also, have a look at the EU Parliament in Strasbourg.
link
The diesel-electric sets are a critical node in atomic safety, that much is very apparent now.
The logical requirement is to have double diesels — and in particular to have one of them located up a hill side linked by buried conduits.
Further, multi-tap transformers are going to be required.
If it really was as simple as the wrong plug they would have been swapped out and the connection wired directly. Such tap set-ups are the norm for portable power rigs. They also have the ability to switch Hertz at will via engine speed.
It seems far more likely that the portable power rig did not generate medium voltage power. ( 2,400VAC + )
Additional errors: dry stand pipes leading to the cooling ponds are missing. Such pipes are routine in heavy commercial construction. If they were in place then water could be feed from a distance by fire engines without extreme hazard to their crews.
With a forty-year track record it’s surprising that these elements weren’t retrofitted.
It’s plain that the design didn’t have a layered defense at all, just semi-layered.
“They” is what the sons of Mary call the sons of Martha.
http://www.online-literature.com/donne/920/
When the sons of Mary blithely increase the stress on the system, they should be aware that the sons of Martha are not amused, and not certain to always prevent the ensuing disaster.
How comforting to know that They
Are there to help us on our way
To heal our bodies, mend our minds
To fix disasters of all kinds
To wait with patience ‘til we see
That They know more than you and me
But thinking ‘bout it let me say
That being ruled by such as They
Is Heaven’s way of showing us
That somewhere we have missed the bus
Roger Penrose has a nice discussion of entropy in his book “The Road to Reality”
but it is still not an easy concept at its root…although everyone
facilely claims it means randomness and/or hidden information. Anyway,
Penrose likes Boltzmann’s definition: joules per degree Kelvin times log of a volume that is macroscopically distinguishable from its neighbors. The units are important. Again, energy per degree K. Temperature is the kinetic energy of the molecules or particles but there can be more energy than kinetic: potential; bosonic fields, gravitational fields and these can add to the joules per degree.
Penrose is notorious in claiming that the big bang primordia stuff had extrememly low entropy and hence was peculiar: high temp and low total joules. Entropy had to be low because we have been gaining entropy ever since. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
Looking at Japan’s NE coastlne reveals a wonderful but sad example of a sudden increase in entropy.
Complex systems and engineering hubris. The engineers thought they had covered all the possibilities, so they put 4 reactors within yards of each other so that if one went up, all were affected. They put them on a coast that is known for tsunami events and had the emergency salt water intakes all in the same place – so if one was affected, all were. This plant was efficient and “elegant,” to use the engineering term, but was a disaster waiting to happen.
“Perhaps as important, the ability of people like Obama and Clinton to understand what is happening may be decreasing correspondingly” –wretchard
“Young Leaders of Egypt’s Revolt Snub Clinton in Cairo….” –current Drudge headline
***
Allen, clearly the Strasbourg building has deliberately recreated the several recorded features –at least, recorded in the earliest written descriptions and drawings –of the Tower. The question is “why?”
***
“Who’s ‘they’” sneered with maximum disdain at the end of this soliloquy by Old Freddy, Freddy Sykes, played by Edmond O’Brien in The Wild Bunch.
Is the Worldwide fabrication of the Dreamliner the dumbest thing Boeing has ever done?
Not sure they really had a choice. Several nations indicated the only way their national airlines would continue buy buy Boeing products was if they got a piece of the manufacturing action. When you throw in the fact that WA State politicians and labor leaders had shown themselves far too incompetent to keep the state where Boeing had the majority of it’s manufacturing facilities a viable place to do business*, well, Boeing probably figured they had to move their manufacturing somewhere…
* Seattle/Tacoma/Everett were great places for Boeing to run their plants in the past because dirt cheap electricity from all the hydro plants made putting together aluminium cheap. Electricity is now expensive in the area because generation facilities haven’t kept up with demand, plus Dreamliners are made of composites anyway. And transportation in the area is poor, with congested roads and poor rail access. Taxes are creeping up, cost of living is rising, the labor environment is poor, the Worker’s Comp system is the most crooked and expensive this side of California, and health insurance costs are spiraling out of control thanks to idiotic insurance laws and even dumber insurance bureaucrats who have left the state with basically two health insurance providers.
blert, even with all that has failed, it has not (a) caused a fission bomb explosion, or (b) gone naked core like Chernobyl.
I suppose more and better active backups are important, but better inherent design is better yet – either inherent safe designs that cool (much) faster and return to ambient with no active systems at all if power fails, or a “self-destruct” that blows the components into a pool sufficient that they cool passively after that very brief active intervention.
I guess all the inherent safe designs cost a little more and/or run a few percent less efficiently, but that’s the cost of insurance, and those active backups are hardly cheap either.
–
btw,
where oh where has our president gone,
oh where oh where can he be?
with his ears not cut short
and his golf drive so long,
oh where oh where can he be?
maybe he’s got tired of hearing himself blither.
but if so, what about the entire white house apparat?
they can’t be happy.
has somebody scrammed our administrative branch?
God bless those who “held the ring” and continue to hold the ring for us.
OT: re: Japanese Nuclear emergency
Saw an article about the failing reactor and failed efforts to cool it. I hope the Japanese haven’t forgotten about the advantages robots. Seems like they could use one of those robots used for bomb disposal right about now, i.e. strap a couple of firehoses on one, and roll it in.
I’ve seen robots that roll, walk, climb, talk, and do everything but chew gum. Seems like the Japanese need a small army of the most maneuverable robots available to get inside and put water on the core, ASAP.
Puzzling why they were thinking of dropping water by Helo, a dangerous and marginal pursuit, when robots should be able to get up close and be effective.
Sympathies for the Japanese, and best wishes for their future. They deserve better, and hope the world pitches in to help.
O.S.
Those of humble means shall inherit the Earth.
People went with Obama because he looked like he could restore things to the way they were. On the face of it, he looked good- Harvard Law, multiracial and multicultural, cool and cerebral. Under normal circumstances he should have been just fine. The system had used Keynesian spending and monetary manipulation to keep things moving for decades, and as long as those tools worked, a guy who could give a nice speech every once in a while would do fine.
The problem is the system is broken and these tools don’t work any more. Nobody knows why; they were taught at Harvard that these tools would always work. All Obama, Geithner and Bernanke can do now is splutter and insist everything is going fine.
There is a real danger to believing your own BS. It is far worse to believe somebody else’s. The people who set up the New Deal probably understood it didn’t really work as advertised, but knew it had to be sold as such so people would go along. Another generation came along that didn’t think selling the rubes was that important, that the key was *more*, more power for them and more benefits for their clients, so we had the 60′s. There was a lot of backlash against that, but Keynesian macroeconomics continued to be taught in the universities, along with a new competitor, monetarism.
As fiercely as the two camps fought each other, the real message of both camps was one way or another the government could keep the party going forever. Communism might collapse, but Republican or Democratic administration, the US version of social democracy would last forever.
Doug #13 and JMH #30:
The other people to take a similiar approach was Motorola with the Iridium satellite system. They figured that countries like China and Russia would never allow the operation of such a system in their countries, which can bypass the ground-based communication systems – unless it was something in it for the government. So they launched part of the system on Chinese and Russian boosters and made those government partners in the system. But they were depending on those governments to do the marketing in those countries as well, something they are clueless about.
Combined with the high cost of the user equipment – thousands of dollars – and the fact that it took a fair amount of effort to set it up, not like flipping out a cellphone – the result was an economic disaster. They at first planned to shut the system down and deorbit all of the satellites but in the end sold it to another company for pennies on the dollar. And the main user of it became the US DoD.
By the way Boeing separated its Wichita division and it is now an entirely separate company, but one that Boeing depends on. That seems less than brilliant, either.
The MIC ( military Industrial Complex) is in trouble. They have gotten used to selling 40$ computer chips for 1.2 million dollars and now that has stopped.
Lockheed was on the edge of bankrupt when they bribed their way into the F-22 project. There they got so piggy that the F-22 was next to cancelled. Now the F-35 is in trouble.
Boeing is toast. The dreamliner is a desperate last grab at the thread they hope to hang by.
Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the rest of the hogs are heading down the chute now. By 2016 there won’t be a single one left.
There’s an old maxim: “If you can keep your head while everyone around you loses theirs, you don’t understand the situation.” So there is a simple explanation: President Obama, the Democratic Party and their fellow traveling journalist — whose reports they all read — just don’t understand the situation. They are too busy feeding each other false information and believing it. The cure for this “affliction of the mind” is total societal collapse. And then, after a decade or so of chaos, you end up with Vladimir Putin in charge, as kind of the chief warlord. It is called Perestroika.
rwe @ 36: Iridium was just snake-bit. It took too long. It cost too much. Terrestrial cell-phone technology showed up and had much higher bandwidth at much lower cost.
Tell me it wasn’t a goofy idea in the first place, blasting signals a hundred miles in the air so one of fifty satellites could hopefully catch it and pass it around, not to mention irradiating fifty square miles with a signal to reach only you. Just the computation of which satellite had to do what, when, was scary.
And those big Iridium satellites are still whizzing around up there making big flares in the sky for astronomers trying to look at something else. One of your bigger tech fiascos, though I suppose elegant in its own grand way, like the B-70 or the pyramids.
W: I’ve always thought the firebombing of Dresden was the most horrible human against human carnage; I’ve read some KIA variances but I’ve left it at around 130,000 on that terrible night. Sad. There’s debate over whether it was warranted or simply civilian slaughter. Some evidence that many Ger. troops had moved into town, maybe leading to the raid.
You know,………, when you have VDH and RF (aka W) together in a thread, it’s about as good as it gets!!!
Complex systems don’t have to be centralized. You can perfectly well have decentralized complex systems. It’s the centralization and the central planning which is the problem.
It may well be that the complexity of our modern industrial civilization creates new problems that cannot be dealt with effectively except by central planning. But old Hayek declares “ ..it is not these problems, like those of public utilities etc. which are uppermost in the minds of those who invoke the complexity of modern civilization as an argument for central planning. What they generally suggest is that the increasing difficulty of obtaining a coherent picture of the complete economic process makes it indispensable that things should be co-ordinated by some central agency if social life is not to dissolve in chaos.”
That’s what ‘they’ say. Things are so complex and decentralized that only central planning will work. Horsefeathers; the opposite is true.
Hayek again – “the more complicated the whole, the more dependent we become on the division of knowledge between individuals whose separate efforts are co-ordinated by the impersonal mechanism for transmitting the relevant information known by us as the price system. … if we had to rely on conscious central planning for the growth of our industrial system, it would never have reached the degree of differentiation, complexity and flexibility it has attained. ….any further growth of its complexity, therefore, far from making central direction more necessary, makes it more important than ever that we should use a technique which does not depend on conscious control.
“They” are the central planners. In a complex system there must be division of knowledge but it will hang together in a decentralized market based system. A decentralized complex system should be more resistant to major systems pertubations than a monolithic centralized complex system.
Placing 6, 40+ year old reactors, which were only designed for a life of 25 yrs, next to each other by the sea in an earthquake zone with the emergency generators vulnerable to waves?
Must be a NIMBY issue—lets locate it in a low rent retirement community.
Apparently the last 50 workers have now left the plant because the radiation levels are too high.
–throwing up your hands in a crisis is an odd strategy.
Anderson Cooper looks like he really wants to get back to NYC— ASAP
veracious, what are you talking about? hitler and stalin each killed millions. muslims (and Christians) probably killed a million Jews in the second millenium. the Europeans killed a couple of million native Americans. Chinese emperors starved millions of their own people. Pol Pot. the cro magnon probably wiped out the neanderthals. does it really matter if it happens over minutes or years?
and what about, they asked for it?
The problem is the system is broken and these tools don’t work any more.
I’m not so sure the tools ever worked, although the conventional wisdom was that they did. Macroeconomics is a but a dim guide which may point roughly in the right direction, plus or minus thirty degrees on either side. The actual outcomes are probably dominated by effects we only understand retrospectively, if ever.
The role of the World War 2, which destroyed industrialized Europe, the population boom, which has only recently wound down and the relative expansion of freedom, which the planners have not yet succeed in completely throttling, may have played a much more important role in the postwar economic explosion than any Keynesian theory ever did. This is not to suggest that we can use these variables going forward to plan our recovery; these may not be the relevant variables any more; only to say that happenstance and luck often play a part which politicians are more than happy to ascribe to their own genius.
In general we can guess what works, but only as a heuristic; and ultimately through what can only be verified by measuring in the direction of improvement. It’s like you’re in a darkened room looking for a way forward and all you hear is God’s voice whispering in your ear: “you’re getting warmer … warmer …. colder again … warmer!” Every now and again you stick your foot in a hole and you withdraw it as quickly as you can.
And that may not be too bad a guide. After all, educated blundering got us this far — from the wild savannahs to the verge of outer space.
The real danger I think, isn’t ignorance but pretended knowledge. We have to know the limits of our models. Models are fine, to any degree of complexity, provided we are prepared to throw them away at the drop of a hat if they don’t work.
But unfortunately bureaucracies and public officials get invested in models because they are the source of their authority; the basis of their funding. They become identified with themes. Barack Obama is probably in Afghanistan mostly because it isn’t Iraq. And he won’t back down from Obamacare because he can’t. In politics the worst thing you can do is admit you made a mistake. That would be like Phil Jones admitting he had gotten it wrong on Global Warming. He probably did, but can he admit it? And since of course everyone makes mistakes, the evidence must be adjusted rather than admit error so that Eurasia is always at war with Oceania.
Public policy took a bad turn when we accepted the idea that there was a privileged point of view from which to solve problems of the future. That some knew more than others; that we ought to be governed by the “smartest woman in the world” and “that genius from Harvard” instead of someone from the first 50 names of the Boston phonebook. The Founders probably had the better idea: that where the future was concerned we were all equally ignorant and the best way to prepare for it was to elect men of sound sense — any men — and let them do their best.
Yes education and training counts, but in complex systems it counts for less than we think. In fact the idea we should be led by a technocracy may have done more harm than good because it reserved leadership to those to whom we ascribed aristocratic qualities which the make-up industry has been at pains to supply.
The only way to face the future is to accept that we don’t know much about it and to approach it from first principles. The price of projecting the illusion “being in control” has been to lock society into political narratives instead of solving things through common sense. But reality cares nothing for such pretense. It twitches away the fool the way the tsunami smashed through houses.
Barack Obama should get on the radio and say, much as FDR once did, that “the only certain thing to fear is certainty itself. I know nothing special about how to solve the problems of the world, but I sure am willing to listen. Other leaders know no more than I do, but at least, I know it.” The problem is that such an admission would undermine his own magic priesthood. And magic and beating drums don’t work. Pride doesn’t work, though humility and the willingness to learn often does; the sad fact is that mankind has made more progress against the future on its knees or low-crawling through the mud in the face of incoming than it has through all the boasting and incantation in history. You cannot advance against the future full of yourself. That would be, as the Knight in Indiana Jones once said, to choose poorly.
22) The individual elements are more robust, but when they do fail, the failure has a far greater impact.
http://reason.com/archives/1997/07/01/adieu-to-the-avant-garde
(h/t instapundit)
Adieu and bon chance –le avante-garde will be needing it –
@41 Hangtown Bob
What I read recently indicated Dresden was ordered under pressure from the Soviets because it served as the logistical supply staging point/hub for German defense efforts in East-Central Europe. Obliterating it kicked the stool out from under the supply chains to Romania, Hungery, Czechoslovakia and the like. Which, of course, handed them over to the Reds, who needed the help since as they left their own (narrow guage) rail network their ability to maintain supply for offensive tempo degraded rapidly. (This is why the RA was so disorganized by the time they took Berlin, and had limited air cover.)
Anyway.
Statism, in its various specific forms, is functionally a religion. It is a morphism of Humanism (which is a recognized religion in the US), and punches all the required buttons human beings need in order to satisfy their “other” belief requirements. This is also why conservative approaches to reasoning with statists fails so miserably: they approach it as a philosophical disagreement between reasonable men and women, while the statists approach it as an evangelical argument–with a fall back to conversion by the sword.
Because it functions as a religion, belief in each statist is sustained by faith. You must, if you wish to convert such a person back to reality of any kind, reveal that faith to be misplaced. Misplaced faith demands correction through proper placement (otherwise it will gravitate back to something familiar and equally virulent–such as Islam).
The systemic social and economic chaos of the current End of Design Margin represents a–perhaps the–opportunity to preach an alternative faith to the statists. As a Christian, I of course believe Christ is the best and only real alternative for filling that “faith void” the collapsing humanist edifice leaves in a constructive fashion. There are other religions that can give less offensive (to society) structures, but I do not think they offer long-term solutions that can hold the ex-statist.
The likely scenario, if statists are not peeled away from their religion en-mass during this time of opportunity/crisis, is that they will metastasize on the remains of the old society and form their own version of the “1000-year kingdom” in a kind of second coming. Everything fell to ruin before? So? That was because there were outsiders contaminating the Holy Church of the State! Now, everyone will be required to worship the god of Government, sing the song in perfect harmony, and pay taxes. Or else.
To these people the perfection of humanity is at most 9mm away. This kind of thinking can take care of an awful lot of error left in that circle the size of the planet.
–JC
The current leadership kind of reminds me of a day trader who has had the luck to be in a market with a long trend. All of a sudden his magic formula for making trades doesn’t work any more but he is emotionally invested in it. He doesn’t set up stop loss orders, he doesn’t make any off set bets. He just doubles down and holds as his holding nose dives. He gets leveraged deeper into a hole, then one day he has to pay the house for his use of other peoples money and he can’t do it, and he isn’t allowed to trade anymore.
It is impossible to make a system idiot proof because idiots are cleverer than the people who design the systems. When the quake hit and the reactors automatically shutdown all they needed was clean water and electric power for the pumps to cool the damn things down but when push came to shove they had neither. In hindsight the failure points were so obvious and so relatively easy to eliminate.
We are about to have a catastrophic breakdown of the worlds monetary system and it too is/was avoidable but our best economists and central bankers failed to see the flaw in their system of fiat currencies and quantitative easing. It is almost as if thy never heard of John Law and the Mississippi Bubble. Ah but Bernanke and Geitner are so clever they wold never make the same mistakes Law did because they can add 2+2 and it will equal 5 if the Fed just says it is so.
I am reminded of Bryan Ward-Perkin’s book, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization where he makes the point that people were actually worse off after the fall than before Roman times because they had forgotten how to do simple things for themselves, things like making pottery from local materials. An interesting interview with Ward-Perkins is here.
Who you gonna call?
They are the Ghostbusters, with suspect degrees on the wall and unlicensed nuclear reactors on their backs.
Ah, the Willys Jeep
http://www.bcsportbikes.com/forum/showthread.php?t=127160
Point to ponder – at the center of a mass (gravitational nexus) gravity is zero.
I have followed Roger Penrose for many years. I still peruse “The Emperor’s New Mind”. Maybe some day it will make abundant sense.
As versatile as Penrose is (probably the greatest natural philosopher of the 20th Century) I note that he has never delved into information theory. IT (no, not Information Technology) is the extension of thermodynamics into realms not possible until Alan Turing’s ideas became palpable. Among the concepts of IT is that most (meaning almost all) systems are “non computable” – np-complete. It is the ultimate hubris to think you understand them. Kinda like poking the dragon.
The novel One Second After deals with one such scenario — the aftermath of an EMP attack over the continental U.S.
Don’t read it if you want to get any sleep.
“Perhaps complex systems, such as biological systems, manage to modify their environment so as to operate as much as possible at this edge-of-chaos place, which would also be the place where self-organization is most likely to occur.”
Michel Baranger — Chaos, Complexity, and Entropy
If Professor’s Baranger’s speculation is correct, many doors will open to science, including many that have been closed by the science of the past.
The recent robo-signing brouhaha, where an entire industry cooperated to bypass a non-responsive bureaucracy, is something I hope to see more frequently. It’s a sign of health amid the general sickness imposed by the would be elite.
Here is my metaphorical take on the bureaucratic problem.
The films Blazing Saddles and Monty Python and the Holy Grail each make use of an ironic ending which unmakes all that came before it. Instead of bringing closure, the movie spills out into the real world and the wild cast of characters is either hauled away by police or comically juxtaposed against contemporary mores. It is perhaps the most dissatisfying type of ending a movie could have, as it mocks the transcendent possibilities of life and art. It is more like the uncomfortable experience of having to leave the theater than it is like the cause of one’s leaving the theater, as the end of a movie must be in any case. Who does not recall, as a child, being utterly uplifted by some movie which depicted acts of heroism and freedom and natural beauty; and then, with the magic of the film still suffusing your mind like an incense, being rudely deflated by the trauma of emerging from the cool dark of the cinemaplex and out into the world, where there was nothing to greet you but the noonday sun glinting of a thousand windshields, and your loud-mouth friends who couldn’t give a damn that you were just briefly in the company of God? Awakening from the sweet dream and finding that nothing has changed on this side of the wardrobe, you begin to resent that the parking-lot world offers so little in the way of transcendence. When that kind of ending is brought into the movie itself, you feel like your very aspiration to transcendence has been rendered ridiculous, that it was silly to ever hope for anything in the first place.
It is the task of every modern bureaucracy to always bring about the ironic ending. “They” are the bobbies who lock up the crusading heroes, the boom-and-mike intruders who trample into the picture and poison the dream. As long as the bulk of mankind still cherishes a transcendent ideal, society moves along unconsciously and the sublime things that we all know to be true are left relatively unmolested. The highest aspirations that burn in the hearts of men—aspirations for love, victory, and permanence—can find adequate expression. Certainly such a society does not turn all its inhabitants into saints, for there is much unbelief and selfishness in every era. But the norms are there, the paths of virtue are clearly marked out; and a man finds that whenever he desires to do good, he is able to do good.
Not so in the bureaucratic state. The vulgar-souled apparatchiks live entirely in the world of glass and concrete. They have never been to Neverland, and they don’t know how to fly. You cannot do good in a bureaucracy because, for the bureaucrats, the term has an entirely artificial meaning. Authentic charity is replaced by brittle utopian solidarity for the procurement of “rights.” Faith, family, property, country, and everything most dear to the heart, is proscribed or brutally repressed. This is the end of genuine humanity. We do not often see it under this terrifying aspect because we live too close to it, are too painfully involved in it. But it is now fully possible to sketch out just what a horrible price we have paid for the false hopes of modernity. Why have we made war against the family? Abortion and no-fault divorce have ruined more lives than a thousand tsunamis. When beholding the ruin of Japan, let no one lift up his eyes to the heavens and say “God, why did this happen?” For then God will show us the faces of 50 million babies and say, “Why did THIS happen?” The bigger catastrophe is the one we’ve inflicted on ourselves. And why, for what?
Now it occurs to us that we need to fight back, only that isn’t so simple to do. Your every attempt to act like a hero will be met with stony repression. Nothing authentic can be permitted in the parking-lot; heroism lives on only inside the theater. It is okay to cheer for the Greeks at Thermopylae—in the theater. Don’t you dare try to act like that in real life, or it’s hemlock and exile for you. Or perhaps you’ve just seen The Sound of Music and you’re inspired to throw some pebbles at your girlfriend’s window. Forget about it—the neighbors will call the cops. If you want to get her pregnant in the Taco Bell crapper you can have a state-sponsored abortion, but don’t try being romantic. It’s politically incorrect.
So what can a defender of truth do when the enemy is inside the fortress; and not only inside the fortress, but sitting on the throne? At this point the most effective measure is the Heideggerian concept of “releasement,” otherwise known as the Puddleglum Solution. Do not listen to the lies any longer; give them no place in your being; stomp out the bewitching fire and say, “I look around me and I see no trace of Narnia. In my despair I cannot recall that Narnia ever existed. But I would rather live as if Narnia existed than put up with you anymore. I am not going to live in the parking-lot!” This will at least create a bastion behind which others can get to work. The first step in the struggle is necessarily spiritual. It is a matter of conscience and resolve.
Blert, Arkroyal, Victor,
“It’s plain that the design didn’t have a layered defense at all, just semi-layered.”
Arkroyal rightly talks of Hubris. It takes a certain kind of arrogance to think you can design a nuclear power plant in a area that must withstand stresses and forces 126 times that of the Northridge quake. And Northridge for those who don’t know, forced a drastic overhaul of the seismic codes so great was the number of unexpected failures. Japan has forces and challenges that are way off the charts. The unexpected combination of events, that could strike a nuclear power plant in that location and that could likely occur with forces that huge, is just mind boggling. But with the risks involved, to make the simple conceptual errors they did and then not fix them over time is just astounding.
As much as I hate to say it , our overwrought American Legal system’s concept of criminal negligence forces a designer to constantly worry about the really big oops. And that is a good thing. Obviously, JEPCO and the designers of these plants didn’t worry enough.
matt, you is on fire –great stuff –
An interesting story from Afghanistan is the view from the ‘other side’.
When interrogated, the Afghans have provided insight in to our societies.
When fighting the Russians, they’d shoot the officer and the men would retreat.
When fighting the British or French, they’d shoot the officers and the men would hunker down and wait for instructions.
When fighting the Americans, they’d shoot the officers and the men continued to attack.
7. wretchard
I should add that centralization provides one benefit: the formation of a reserve
…
I do not think that is accurate.
The benefit of centralization is that is allows an existing reserve to be utilized efficiently. This is because a single decision making entity is deciding where to put the resources for best effect. For example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff decide which forces to deploy where, based on intelligence projections of global events, the interests of the USA, and the overall force structure of the military. Since they have their eyes on the ‘big picture’, their decision-making is much more effective than having the commanders of those units or their troops attempt to decide who goes where.
But the fact of centralization itself did not create the units that can be deployed.
The colonies were able to fight off the British because of centralization of command under General Washington. Washington could decide which commanders and troops would be used to meet the enemy and where, based on best information he had.
But the reserve he used – the actual troops who fought and died, and the officers who led them – only existed because each town and county had for decades raised and trained their own reserve militia force with its own arms and officers.
You wrote that when a reserve become a unitary system this system breaks down – since there really is no more reserve, no “stash”, no extra carrier battle group to park in the Med. That’s only half the story we are reading today.
The other breakdown occurs, as you hinted, when the central decision making entity itself becomes unable or unwilling to make proper allocation of reserve resources. Perhaps they lack the big picture, the right information, or are overwhelmed and pretending they don’t need to make a real decision. Whatever the cause, a slow down or stoppage at the top completely negates the benefit of centralization.
j/60; therefore, for joe and jane & the kids and grandparents in Smallville, Anywhere, that centralization, which seems the last word in worry-free expert leadership, is actually the very opposite –and not only when it goes wrong, but ALL the time, due to the potential of its going wrong.
The occluded feedback loop from end-users persists, being no problem unless there is an emergency, and then just being part of the emergency when there IS one. Entropic by nature and immune to evolution except in the hands of true leaders.
Aha, you say, “this is tribal” –but, what if the system itself discards poor leaders? Disallows candidates without the talent? And that takes us to where these thoughts always take us –we can’t function without an honest communications system –a dishonest one is infinitely worse than none at all.
I’m puzzled that fire boats have not long ago been sent to the scene.
The storage pools at all six reactors are in urgent need of a refill.
W: maybe one of your Top Ten topics ever. Really well-developed stuff. All: wonderful pursuit of the main theme, and of others. It’s that ability to adapt, to probe, to explore the “problem space” which, in fact, characterizes a complex system at its best. This gets at the point, above, about “central reserve.” Per Hayek, when the information arriving across the surface of the system has to be integrated and re-integrated (memo to boss, who sends report to her boss, who does quarterlies for his boss…) there is a huge cost. Unless there is an equal or greater gain (in “signal strength” or “pattern recognition” or “novel adaptive response”) then this cost will eventually kill the system. A central reserve is both “there” and “not there.” It has to be physically present in the overall headcount across the system, from those volunteers and previously-trained citizens of which Jay, Beltway, speaks. So it is “there.” But unless it can be recognized, organized, mobilized by the “central command,” then it really is “not there.” Both are needed: the actual capacity, and the virtual capacity (organizational recognition of the capacity, and the will to use it). One other aspect of central command/coordination is the “best learnings” role. If HQ just sucks up information and spits out opaque orders, the system learns much less than it could and should. Local learnings and adaptations may be idiosyncratic, good only for Sector N; or they may be scaleable and spare other localities, and thus the system, a world of waste. Internal marketing of good ideas, particularly good-enough ideas that are timely and robust, is not just a smart career move. It’s how the system prospers. And it cannot be done from the center.
What could go wrong?
2008 was different – belongs in a different solution space. What transpired during the decade leading to what I expect will be a prolonged Republican wandering in the wilderness cannot be folded into Big Picture generalizations.
The financial “correction” was caused by a chain reaction of criminal behavior – with intent and knowledge – that vaporized ten years of accumulated wealth. It had nothing to do with spirituality, post-modern culture, systems organization, information management, unintended consequences, caution or precaution, or bureaucratic sclerosis. The only oaths that were involved came after the fact that massive fraud had just been committed on a breath-taking scale.
“They” knew exactly what They were doing. And I am not one of Them. The institutional “citadels” of finance remain fortress strong, but I will never excuse Their behavior as some unfortunate secondary cross current lost in the bigger picture post-modern spiritual malaise. They were – and are – simple criminals who should be treated as such.
Everything else is fine.
Best piece in a while wretch the cat.
.51 chuck “people were actually worse off after the fall than before Roman times because they had forgotten how to do simple things for themselves, things like making pottery from local materials.”
That and there are a lot more of them, that dont know.
Matt, way to skariphasthai! It is absolutely a “matter of conscience and resolve.”
That combined with Jay beltway’s last point are what make the times so troubling from my limited perspective.
ybr/64; i would be as sanguine as you, as philosophical and even-tempered about what happened and the corrective needed –except the perps haven’t been run to ground yet. Elliot Ness couldn’t take a bow after he fingered Capone –he had to wait until he had Capone behind bars.
http://porcupinerim.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/home-for-failed-bankers-campaign-obama/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usvG-s_Ssb0
See what i mean? Not that you don’t know it –i’m just ‘presenting’ differently than you might.
bl@66: See what i mean?
Very well. Pristine is not a word I would use to describe either the Pritzker’s or the Paulson’s.
I will admit to contrarian motivations, however. Outside of sites like BC, the still vibrant take-away from 2008 clearly tainted the Republican brand, current Congress notwithstanding (whose performance has yet to impact the public consciousness in any meaningful way.) “It” happened under 8 years of the Bush watch – and multiple Congressional warnings. What’s the cowboy expression – all hat and no cattle?
Of the couple of both theoretical and empirical divides on this site – and among people who “lean” Right (unpopular as leaning is) – one lingering divide is “the Politicians all need remedial lamp post training” versus “the evil Dems (Repubs) leading the valiant Repubs (Dems) into unfortunate acts of political desperation.”
I would hardly label my thinking as “sanguine”, but I am firmly in the first camp. There is no doubt in my mind that the the clowns at F/F will leave a pitiful legacy of two-bit amateurs relative to the serious professionals on Wall St. Not even in the same ball park.
Not to argue. It’s all priorities to me. Cut off the corrupt limbs first. Then have a political dialogue. The Grand Unified Theories of Everything strike me as being a reach too far, with a whiff of arrogance perhaps(?), at least for now.
How DARE you call me arrogant!
–no seriously, you have just hit an enormous nail on the head –the nigh-unsaleability of the concept that the ”wall street bankers” the left rails against (see WI teachers of late) IS the left, or ‘of’ it. Start with the CVs of the bankers in question –’progressive’ histories every one, even to such unpolitik matters as who they donate their miserable little ‘public admission’ monies to. But that’s just the start.
And yes the cognitive improbability of the inner-sanctum Dems running such a long scam under the noses of eight years of GOP is huge and of course precisely what the cabal counts on, offering up the delicious double whammy that our betters so love.
But it goes beyond my comment space compression talents to describe in detail here how such a thing came to be, but do lemme assure yez that that very question has been a preoccupation during many doleful days of disgusted distraction when i find myself once again mired in the search swamps of the long day’s journey into night. I have 1000 anecdotes and a Twenty Questions.
Reactors and spent fuel pools need water… who moves water?
Fire Boats 4-6-8″ lines
Dredges 2-3-4′ diameter pipe
(Dona Zanita – a medium sized dredge, will pump 400 cubic meters per hour, 2000 meters, through an 18″ pipe)
Civil works contractors routinely set up temporary water and sewer lines and pump around sections that that need repair 8″ to 8′ diameter
Concrete contractors use booms and pumps to move/place concrete vertically and horizontally (a system that moves concrete will laugh at dirty sea water)
Oil field fire fighters (Red Adair, Boots&Koots etc) build temporary resevoirs, pipe lines and distribution systems to deliver firefighting water.
TEPCO is running a new power line to the site –that news has somehow crazily not been emphazized –hence it has for days now seemed as tho they had just given up –
69. visitor…
Sure makes you wonder why they didn’t at least keep the spent fuel pools topped up, doesn’t it?
Wish I knew.
The Kobe earthquake was used to improve the system, but human minds refused to register that mother nature can throw something much worse.
Also the economics comes to play. Do the ‘planners’ plan for every eventuality (i.e. asteroid, > 9 scale earthquake, 30 ft wall tsunami, etc, etc) for the remote possibility, and at what cost?
Sometimes, you just throw up your hands at some of these events, and recover from there.
Diablo plant is ”built to withstand a 7.5 Richter scale earthquake” –i think i heard said.
So, what if it’s bigger than 7.5? How much more would it have cost to engineer to 8.5, i wonder.
Wretchard said:
“Since the “spontaneous evolution of an isolated system” tends to disorder and things fall apart, the most stable place to be is where things must come to a stop.”
Last week I went to Lawrence Livermore National Lab to examine a CT scanning rig that was being used to scan one of our aeroshells (a Mars entry vehicle prototype). The CT scanning rig is normally used for scanning nuclear weapon parts and located right next to the Superblock (easily one of the scariest places in America). While I was there, I was shown a fossil of archeopteryx that was being CT scanned by the same rig. Archeopteryx was the missing link between dinosaurs and birds (it’s about the size of a pigeon and it’s fossil looked like chicken bones embedded in sandstone). A young Ph.D. student in paleontology was supervising the scanning work and I had the opportunity to converse with him (the conversation was absolutely fascinating). I learned many interesting things from this paleontologist. For example, the “Dinosaur Heresies” of Robert T. Bakker are now established cannon. The paleontology community now accepts the concept that “birds are dinosaurs” and dinosaurs were/are warm blooded. I like to have in my garden evolutionary survivors, e.g. Ginkgo, Bunya Pine (Araucaria bidwillii), horse tails, ferns, etc. These plants coexisted or pre-dated the tyrannosaurus rex. I naively asked the paleontologist what’s so special about the genetics of the Bunya Pine that it could out-survive the tyrannosaurus rex. The paleontologist told me that I had it backwards. There was nothing really special about the Bunya Pine’s genetics but rather with its environment. Evolution is driven by environmental change. If the environment does not change then the local ecosystem reaches equilibrium and evolution stops. The Bunya Pine has existed in environments that have not significantly changed since the Triassic era. Consequently there was no evolutionary force acting upon the Bunya Pine and it has remained unchanged.
Wretchard also said:
“But catastrophe has a way of killing ants in ant-heaps more easily than when they are spread out over the ground.”
For the longest while my house was plagued with ants. They were coming up from everywhere and getting into everything. There’s a crawl space under my house and I was tired of fooling with the ants. I put on my bunny suit, gas mask and gloves. Then armed with a bunch of bug bombs and queen ant poison, I searched under the house for the ant hill. I found it right on top of sewer line where it leaves the house. The whole colony was right there in plain view. I hosed them down with ant poison and scattered bug bombs all around the crawl space. My house is now ant-free.
Josh @ 39 said:
“And those big Iridium satellites are still whizzing around up there making big flares in the sky for astronomers trying to look at something else. One of your bigger tech fiascos, though I suppose elegant in its own grand way, like the B-70 or the pyramids.”
I’m a sucker for that sort of technology. I’ve toured the pyramids and think the XB-70 is one of the coolest planes that every flew. I also invested in Iridium and had my pants pulled down (a total loss). I wish I had obtained the stock certificates for Iridium. I’d frame one and hang it in my office to remind myself about how stupid I can be.
stoicheion @ 37 said:
“Lockheed was on the edge of bankrupt when they bribed their way into the F-22 project. … Boeing is toast. The dreamliner is a desperate last grab at the thread they hope to hang by. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the rest of the hogs are heading down the chute now. By 2016 there won’t be a single one left.”
For the aerospace community, SpaceX is our last hope. All the other guys choked on greed.
Matt @ 56
Sublime. You just showed that it still lives outside the theatre.
Don Alejandro Garza Tamez, 15 kilometers out of Cuidad Victoria did too. He offered the world another venue…and showed us the value of dignity, honor, courage, and manhood.
Buddy,
I am not a SE, but I had a fair amount of structural engineering in college, and have worked with structural engineers ever since. From what I know the idea that they have engineered to a 7.56983 or a 8.3452 is pure bunk. As far as I know, no one anywhere has accurately simulated an earthquake and it’s forces on a structure. With the latest computers they probably do an infinitely better job than they used to. But back in the days when they actually designed and built nuclear power plants, the formulas and simulations used, kind of estimated it, and that’s it.
Also, an 8.5 is roughly ten times the power of a 7.5. So a structure has to be ten times as strong to resist that force. That’s a lot. A 7.5 generates one hell of a force. 8.5, OMG. There’s only so big a conventional beam or column or strut can be without the price tag exponentially going through the roof. And sometimes with forces that big, the combination of beams, welds, bolts can’t put together in a conventional way so it calcs. To give you an example of what could go wrong: if you are directly over some unknown finger of a vertical thrust fault when an 8.5 hits, and the ground drops unevenly five feet like it could, your foundation had better be mighty special or you are done for.
Are the valves, pumps, pipes, generators and whatever widgets used in a nuclear power plant designed to take the shaking of a 8.5 or 9? And one last thing, when designing a typical structure for a 7.5, the design intent is that under those forces the structure won’t fail, that is to say, it won’t collapse. It doesn’t mean it won’t be broken up quite a bit. With nuclear power plant, things can’t be all broken inside after an earthquake.
yeh –you’re right, unsk –i was committing the moron’s categorical error, words for things represented by words: ”hell it’s just as easy to say 8.5 as it is to say 7.5”. There oughtta be a word for that –maybe ”Biden”. I did a biden.
If you know of any good nuclear fire-fighting teams, I’d like to invest in one of them.
Red Adair had a good thing goin, but the real gold may have gone from black to glow (radioactive).
While all eyes were all the reactor buildings, somebody flat forgot about the storage ponds, the water level !!
bl@73: How much more would it have cost to engineer to 8.5, i wonder.
I am unclear which caused the serious damage to the reactors – the quake or the tsunami.
The nuclear site was protected by seawalls, was it not? The question you pose is highly relevant to factoring in the cost of an extra few ft of height. But in deference to the designers, half a century ago the hydrologic statistics were essentially synthetic guesses. Still – there is a design lesson there. To be absorbed at the proper time.
bl@68: How DARE you call me arrogant!
It could have been worse. I could have called you a provincial Canadian. Tell me that wouldn’t sting. I have a biting edge when riled.
I normally like what Wretchard has to say, but the problem here is less density or urban planning than a lack of extreme self-reliance. How many people in suburbia or rural areas can maintain their own cars? How many own their own generator for power? Most people operate on the reasonable assumption that if worse comes to comes to worse, they can evacuate or hunker down until the people who know how to fix the power/water/sewer/etc. take care of things. What should the people in the terminal have done – rip open the nearest junction box or randomly replace lightbulbs? I honestly can’t imagine my rural hometown doing much different, except that people would probably know some electrical lineman or electrician involved in fixing the situation.
In first world nations, people have a sense of trust that power will come back on, that the internet will come back up. This is not something to dread. It represents something to preserve, and to remind other of how rare such a feeling is outside of the first world. In other words, don’t take civilization for granted.
The Japanese certainly aren’t. The reason Japan is surviving this calamity is real social responsibility. Forget giving money to trendy causes – social responsibility is doing what need to get done, especially in a crisis. It’s what the Good Samaritan parable actually references, and it is part of our nature as social animals. Get rid of that concern, and you have post-Katrina New Orleans.
79. YBR
I am unclear which caused the serious damage to the reactors – the quake or the tsunami.
The nuclear site was protected by seawalls, was it not?
…
Right now no one is clear if the quake itself damaged the reactors or containment at all. The only folks who might now are the ones babysitting the reactors. However, even if there was damage inside the reactors, as long as containment was intact and the power was on they could pump water and cool it off.
The tsunami was the problem, as it destroyed the backup generators (2 sets) or at least their fuel. Apparently there was a seawall but the tsunami was higher. The plant used battery power for a few hours. Then the available portable generators could not match voltage to the plant. So they are trying to hook up to what grid is intact.
If the grid was down for days here, our plants would get hot when they ran out of diesel for the backup generators. It seems the only solution for emergencies is resilient, portable power.
Jay: It seems the only solution for emergencies is resilient, portable power.
I’m assuming the design standards, including emergency protocols, are governed by an international regulatory body (through the UN??), as opposed to independent national agencies, although I expect those pertain as well.
One of the aspects of engineering that I find appealing is the promptness with which failure analyses are incorporated into the “book.” Not to excuse or ignore the fact of malpractice, but the design profession as a whole is fairly square, if I can put it that way. My gut reaction is that the product – over the course of history – reflects the personality of the practitioners. Of all the major licensed professions – accounting, law, medicine, and engineering – the pencil pushers are a pretty sober group.
Having said that, designers can get lost in their analytics, to the extent that simple (and cost-effective) solutions are overlooked – such as adding a few feet to the seawall to help mitigate against what can surely be described without hyperbole as catastrophic failure. Too often the matter is judgment – or lack thereof.
But I hasten to add, the time for failure analysis is not now, but later, after the facility is stabilized. I will also add that I think the general public should rightly have input into formulating risk management design metrics. Level of protection is a public cost born by The Commons – and the numbers are all over the place from the common one in a hundred to the upwards of one in a thousand or million (structural design).
At any rate, here’s to regulatory reform and risk management. Screaming for some solid technical attention.
(Apologies as required – had to squeeze that in.)
OmegaPaladin wrote @80
‘The reason Japan is surviving this calamity is real social responsibility. Forget giving money to trendy causes – social responsibility is doing what need to get done, especially in a crisis. It’s what the Good Samaritan parable actually references, and it is part of our nature as social animals. Get rid of that concern, and you have post-Katrina New Orleans.’
Yes. Isn’t that a very key point? Social breakdown is not decided by the degree of Central Planning or Cowboy Independence; the internal dynamics determine the consequences when disaster hits. Indeed, if the central planners are genuinely driven by a desire to serve their fellow man, won’t they maintain the humility to avoid corruption and abusive tendencies?
I would think the breakdown is internal, not from the design structures. The solution is to revitalize the community churches and bring Biblical morality back into the social discourse.
Want to see true devotion? Watch this Japanese dog:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/dog-in-japan-stays-by-the-side-of-its-ailing-friend-in-the-rubble
Best regards, Peter Warner.
Jay, beltway @ 81 said:
“The tsunami was the problem, as it destroyed the backup generators (2 sets) or at least their fuel. Apparently there was a seawall but the tsunami was higher.”
I think the root problem is the residual heat in the reactor core that becomes unmanageable if there is a “loss of coolant accident” (LOCA). This problem is intrinsic to boiling water nuclear reactor designs. A nuclear engineer’s opinion would be more valid than mine but I suspect the best solution is to go to gas cooled nuclear reactor designs. It is my understanding that a graphite ball nuclear reactor is fail-safe against a loss of coolant accident. However what I don’t understand about graphite ball reactors is what aspect of the design insures that the graphite doesn’t catch on fire as happened in Chernobyl. Perhaps a gas cooled reactor core suspended over a pool of boron saturated water could be the basis for a fail safe design? I appreciate that there is devil in the detail such as manufacturing and operational costs, etc. No doubt that was the original justification for using boiling water reactor designs.
I remain convinced that nuclear power is our only real alternative to fossil fuels (so called “green” energy sources have economic issues). We need to come up with fail safe nuclear reactor designs. Otherwise we’ll keep having these nuclear accidents with the consequence that the lunatic left and MSM prohibits use of nuclear technology.
84. Eggplant
Right, the loss of cooling is the real problem, and that was due to the loss of power. If they had power on they could have kept the pumps going and the core and fuel cool.
One irony is that the automatic emergency response is to shut off the reaction with control rods, which of course stops all power generation. In retrospect this may have been a bad idea. Assuming they had one reactor working, that could have provided the power needed to cool the other ones and keep the spent fuel pools topped off.
So my conclusion is not that we need less nuclear power, but more of it. The major threat to older reactors is loss of power which causes loss of cooling. The solution is a resilient power source to keep the big reactors running. A “reserve” if you like. Reactors are more resilient than diesel generators. A small reactor with passive cooling, kept in a safe place (buried) could keep the big reactors safe.
In my earlier comment, I said:
“However what I don’t understand about graphite ball reactors is what aspect of the design insures that the graphite doesn’t catch on fire as happened in Chernobyl.”
Graphite ball reactors are cooled with an inert gas, e.g. helium. If the reactor is functioning correctly then the balls never come into contact with air. However a fail-safe design would assume that a 747 piloted by a terrorist impacted the side of the reactor’s containment structure, ruptured the pressure vessel and released the helium allowing it to be replaced with air. It’s not clear to me how a nuclear engineer would address that scenario. The glib response is this scenario is very unlikely and designing against it would be uneconomical from an actuarial standpoint. However an 8.9 Richter earthquake followed by a tsunami is also unlikely but happened anyway. At this point the argument gets delicate. When doing the actuarial analysis, how much value do you assign to “political damage”? There comes a point where nuclear power becomes uneconomical if you assign too much value to political damage. Of course, the watermelon greens and moonbats know this and have factored it into their narrative.
Jay, beltway @ 85 said:
“One irony is that the automatic emergency response is to shut off the reaction with control rods, which of course stops all power generation. In retrospect this may have been a bad idea.”
The tsunami would have washed over the steam turbine and generator galleries. It’s very unlikely that hardware still functions. Shutting down the reactors was the correct decision.
The main point that I see open to criticism was the failure to address the possibility of a tsunami. However (again) there’s the actuarial consideration. By definition, nuclear engineers are not stupid. Someone would have suggested the possibility of a tsunami very early in the design process. An actuary would have been assigned the task of calculating the probability and expectation costs of a tsunami while the nuclear engineers came up with the cost for a tsunami resistant design. I suspect that the expectation cost of a hypothetical tsunami was less than the remedial cost in building a tsunami resistant design.
–they’re calling it a “300 year tsunami” –man, that’s a bitch to pay way up for, when building a 50 year structure.
bl – don’t confuse design life with risk of failure. Two different concepts.
yep –it would be a statistics project, to find where the last dollar –or yen –is best spent, in terms of the barrier height required against the next meter of tsunami wave height and barrier depth against the next 10 km/hr velocity, amnd then all that against the odds of a 300 year event in any given half century. Tho that last would appear to be one-in-six, it would be hell to pay to insure on that basis.
YBR @ 89 said:
“don’t confuse design life with risk of failure. Two different concepts.”
Over the years, I’ve seen these “failure trees” for nuclear reactor designs where someone calculated the failure of some process at a fork in the tree and ultimately calculated a total probability of failure for the entire system. We actually immersed ourselves in that process when designing the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. It was recognized that there was the potential for returning an “Andromeda Strain” from Mars so we had to go through the process of determining the probability for accidentally releasing a Mars bug during a Mars sample return. In the end the whole exercise proved “too hard” and MSR was abandoned. However it was interesting to look at the nuclear reactor design process. One thing that struck me was the nuclear engineers were calculating the probability of failure for specific components to 4 significant digits. How is that possible? How would I know that a water pump has a 0.9876 reliability? The only real way to do that would be to build 10,000 water pumps and test them to failure. However nobody does that. We were supposed to do that with MSR but how do you do that if you’re building only one of them? I suspect the nuclear engineers get their reliability numbers with an Ouija Board. The first digit is probably valid but the other three digits are random numbers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribology
Eggplant 91
There is a discipline, tribology, which has procedures for predicting failure rates.
It arose directly out of NASA’s man-rating concerns WRT the Atlas, Titan and Saturn launch vehicles.
That’s where the 0.9876 figures come from.
——
bl…
Everyone should adopt my tsunami proof design. It can survive Noah’s flood.
Placing the reactor below sea level stops all of these headaches.
Since most of humanity lives close to the coast — and that will be even more true in the future — we should settle for coastal-only nuclear power plants.
They’ll provide the cheapest power with safety even if Homer Simpson is at the controls.
blert @ 92,
I’m confused. Tribology is the study of lubricants and has nothing to do with failure analysis. I suspect that you linked the wrong page of Wikipedia.
blert and Eggplant,
It’s the Trouble with Tribols.
*runs and hides
BFtP/94;
Okay, go to your room now.
IIRC — this is decades old reading — their ‘Journal of Tribology had a complete work-up on failure predictability — for rocket motor assemblies.
The gist was that failure came from two angles: manufacturing defects and ‘aging.’
So NASA fired off every man-rated assembly ( F1 engines, etc. ) for two or three times as many minutes as it would see in flight. The purpose was to prove by fire the elimination of manufacturing defects in a complex assembly.
Beyond a certain threshold the odds of failure stopped dropping and turned back up. This sweet spot is what NASA wanted. All of the Saturn Vs went through this procedure. That’s why there were so many test stands.
The same logic goes into rating gear-rotor pumps and their failure expectancies.
One can deliberately over stress an assembly by heat or pressure and generate a failure curve with less time. This new curve will map linearly to the unstressed curve. Again, we’re talking about a rate of failure tempo.
Most of the failures that plague engineering occur at surfaces in motion.
Solid state failures have similar curves, also. Vibration and heat shake up the molecules.
The failure curve vs time starts modestly with all failures due to manufacturing/ assembly defects. It drops, reaches a nadir, and then smoothly begins a long rise. The rise is amazingly linear.
This phenomena has been studied to death and is behind the Japanese design method. It’s directly responsible for Toyota’s reliability. They copied NASA.
The critical systems in a nuclear plant are atomic rated — a variation on NASA’s man-rated qualification.
The electronics of digital control systems fail differently than materials.
No point really except material failure doesn’t seem to have been a critical problem (even though the 40-yr old hardware was near the end of the estimated 50-yr design life.) I keep going back to the simple mitigation measures – back-up hardware and power, and maintenance – all three of which – at present – seem likely to be included in the post-stabilization evaluation as critical factors in the emergency response protocols.
IOW, the unsexy stuff that gets routinely short-changed.