ayasofya, originally uploaded by YaS-MaNiA

(Nearly) a century of circles

One [air raid poster] in particular (above; click for larger version) is very revealing: it shows exactly whose bombers the Japanese were worried about, by plotting circles on a map of Japan and its neighbours, representing the radius of action¹ of bombers from potential enemies. It turns out they were afraid of everybody’s, except for the country they were actually at war with (China). The brown circle shows the radius of action of American bombers from the Philippines; black, British bombers from Hong Kong; green, Russian bombers from Vladivostok; yellow, American bombers from Alaska; and blue is in the middle of the ocean — American carrier-borne bombers, most likely. The circles are marked with a number, probably a distance: 2000 km? That would make some sense, as it was very roughly the radius of action of the B-17s that were just entering service in the US Army in 1938 (though not in substantial numbers until 1941).

Read more (Nearly) a century of circles.

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Imported, originally uploaded by Kaj Bjurman

Training Ground for Future Terraformers:

Those bored executives and hedgefund managers inexplicably unaffected by the worldwide economic freefall and seeking for new thrills that only a handful have ever experienced can peruse through the online catalogue of Cloud 9 Living.
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But one “experience gift” we wouldn’t mind giving to ourselves is a day or two or even a whole week spent at Dig This. There, at “the 1st heavy equipment play arena,” you can “play in the dirt – super sized” with an array of “empowering” heavy machineries.

Read more: Training Ground for Future Terraformers.

Super Mario Bros theme performed by an RC car on a row of liquid-filled bottles

C’4110809, originally uploaded by gmpicket

otherwise known as giant shaking plate…

We all know what the architecture of good-governance looks like – fire stations operating, roads clean and pot-hole free, &c, but what does bad-governance look like? Three events this week are good illustrations of the architecture of bad-governance looks like:

• The FAA’s grounding of MD-80’s
• The leaking of the Delaware Aqueduct in New York State
• The DHS is trying to move the Plum Island Foot & Mouth Quarantine to the Mainland

American Airlines grounds all MD-80 jets after a whistle blower uncovers serious safety issues:

N70054 at JFK, originally uploaded by ChrisI1024

Now they are in chaos, with airlines grounding more than 500 planes and thousands of flights so far because they may not meet safety requirements. Travelers have seen this before but only rarely, when all planes were grounded after the Sept. 11 attacks and when the government grounded all DC-10s after an engine fell off one of them in 1979, killing 273 people.
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What happened?
One answer is that some whistle-blower inspectors for the Federal Aviation Administration disclosed that they had been discouraged from cracking down on Southwest Airlines for maintenance problems, and they found a sympathetic audience with some Washington lawmakers.
That prodded the F.A.A. to order a national audit to check whether airlines were in compliance – and to propose a record penalty of $10.2 million against Southwest.

Because the Bush Administration’s close ties with industry, the FAA’s primary watchdog role was compromised much like the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s lack of oversight lead to the Crandall Canyon Mine disasters in Utah which killed nine men last August. In response, airports around the country became parking lots for airplanes as they were inspected for defects.

The Delaware Aqueduct in New York State is leaking

Aqueduct Tunnels Are Suspected in Dry-Weather Flooding of Homes:

It is the Delaware Aqueduct, a water tunnel that runs deep underground and delivers about half of New York City’s drinking water. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection has acknowledged that two sections — one in Wawarsing and the other near the Hudson River in Orange County — of a 45-mile-long stretch of the aqueduct known as the Rondout-West Branch Tunnel have been leaking for two decades.
Using dye tests, a robotic submarine and, most recently, divers, city officials have long studied the two leaks, which are estimated at 14 million to 36 million gallons a day. The department says it is committed to repairing the cracks in the aqueduct, but concedes that it will be tricky. Removing the water from the tunnel to make repairs could jeopardize its structural integrity — not to mention stress the city’s water supply.

Best part? Repairing the leak might collapse the whole aqueduct because waterpressure might be the only thing holding the 100 year old pipe together.

The DHS is trying to move the Plum Island Foot & Mouth Quarantine to the Mainland

The Bush administration is likely to move its research on one of the most contagious animal diseases from an isolated island laboratory to the U.S. mainland near herds of livestock, raising concerns about a catastrophic outbreak.
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A simulated outbreak of the disease — part of an earlier U.S. government exercise called “Crimson Sky” — ended with fictional riots in the streets after the simulation’s National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses. In the simulation, protests broke out in some cities amid food shortages.

The Plum Island Animal Disease Center is in the Long Island Sound, isolated from any livestock and away from human centers. Since the central plot point in science fiction is (besides machines enslaving humans) the outbreak of disease – primarily from the government (cf. Steven King’s The Stand or I Am Legend) this could prove disastrous. If people don’t want to live next to power plants, how does living next to a government research center which experiments on one of the most contagious diseases sound?