Earnest driving

Given my recent post about biofuels and how they might do more harm than good, here's an interesting article about how driving an electric car may still require fossil fuels. The article doesn't propose any real alternative, but short of getting on your bike I did find a car that doesn't pollute, although I'm sure the construction process can't be too green. It's also unlikely to go on sale in Europe any time soon, as it's even less safe than the electric "cars" currently on our streets.

Solid foundations

This building planned for Dalston really impressed me. It's supposed to be environmentally friendly and affordable.
I found the link via TreeHugger, but take a look at the Dezeen design magazine site, which has lots of interesting stuff.

Single points of failure

At what point is a train over-crowded? I think it's when people can't get on it, otherwise it's just crowded when you're packed in like sardines.
The new summer timetable on First Capital Connect introduced on Monday has obviously brought chaos to the system... each day this week that I've tried to catch a train it's either been late, cancelled or had only half the carriages.

Which makes me wonder: when you're designing an infrastructure for running a website, you try to eliminate single points of failure.
These are places in your network, your hardware or your applications where if there's a fault, you lose the service. This concept must exist in trains too, but how is it applied?

Most of these trains are actually made up of two units, that is two shorter engines hooked together each with their own set of carriages. This should give you fail-over: if one engine breaks down you can use the other to pull the train. Except it doesn't seem to work like that. You lose one engine, you get only half the carriages. So the solution doesn't restore the service, it just allows you to run a diminished service instead.

• How often do trains break down? Hard to say, but this is obviously an important consideration when trying to work out what's a viable solution. If a unit breaks down once a year, so that 40% say of passengers are delayed, then there's no real issue. But if it happens every week in summer to stock over 10 years old, then you clearly have a problem.


• How do you solve it? The level of investment is going to depend on how big the problem is, but having engine that are capable of running eight carriages rather than just four would be a start. Add to that the infrastructure required to decouple the units so that the right engine can be put at the front. Does this mean that you need an engine that has twice the power and therefore costs (probably more than) twice as much? I doubt it. Hybrid cars only use power from their petrol engine when they need it, so it must be possible to design an uber-efficient engine that runs on 50% of resources when doing a normal job, but can kick in to do extra work as required.

Of course, I may have got completely the wrong end of the stick and single points of failure really lie elsewhere. Most obviously on the track; if that gets impeded (by a fire for example) then you've had it, even if you can share parallel rails. This is one of those areas of risk with high impact and low likelihood. The system with high impact and higher likelihood of failure is -- for all you Northern Liners out there -- the signal system. I can't believe it's not possible to have a fail-over system in this environment that kicks in automatically when there's a failure in the main. This is what computer networks do all the world over and has to be worth the investment. It means you can take one system out completely for maintenance or improvement and still run the system, albeit at increased risk. No brainer.
I get to think about these things on my train-sauna, when I have no seat and have been delayed for half an hour, so forgive me for just spouting on about it now. If you're delayed on a train yourself, however, it may provide a few minutes of mental escape from the drudgery.

The perils of converged devices

When implementing new technology, there are always two angles: the technical side (i.e. does it work) and the business side (does it do what it's supposed to). My forays into converged devices leave me wondering about the success of the implementation.
Firstly, bloody Active Sync just doesn't work properly. It's different whichever PC I hook up to, and so many things go wrong with it depending on environment. On the laptop I use currently it sometimes works properly, sometimes throws up errors and sometimes just does nothing. What a git.
Secondly, there is an issue over perception. If you sit in a meeting with a PDA and a stylus, people will generally figure you're taking notes (even if you're just doing Sudoku). If you type into what looks like a mobile phone in a meeting, people think you're sending text messages.
Still, the browser's decent.

Dashboarditis

This is so true. And highly representative of where my former company thinks it's going to find a niche in the marketplace.

Financial nuts and sledgehammers

Inflation is falling. That's good news after the Bank of England keeps telling us we're spending too much and using interest rate rises to batter anyone with a non-fixed rate mortgage.
I phrase it that way, because people who don't have a mortgage at all, who've already paid for their house, are way better off, with lots of opportunities for cash savings. People who got a fixed rate mortgage early enough are ok too. But if you have a mortgage at a discounted rate (if it's not discounted you need to renegotiate) then all these interest rises have been costing you.
Thing is, are the people with variable rate mortgages the same people spending money on credit cards and going into debt? Are these the same people having such an impact on inflation? And can we trust the inflation figures anyway, as they've been so tinkered with over the years for political ends?
My point is, if you want to stop people spending, then increasing the base lending rate isn't necessarily going to change it. Those with the fewest debts will continue to spend, while those with debts bear a greater burden. Wouldn't it be better to encourage people with debts to spend the additional amount they're having to pay to meet a rise on a personal investment instead? 20% of the population isn't saving any money at all, let alone investing it seriously. If we don't save, we'll always be in debt. No way out of it.
Wouldn't a more "outside the box" approach be to increase the amount of tax relief on pensions? So if you pay into a pension you get some more money from the government, rather than just paying it all back into a chain of banks? This encourages better personal financial practice and stops people spending frivolously.
Ok, it's no panacea, as the wealthier will continue to be better placed to take advantage. But it is an improvement on money going back into banks and people falling into heavier debt.
By the way, it's Credit Awareness Week this week, if you're interested.

Since when is networking anti-social?

Bloody tautologies.
I'm in a critical mood this morning because I was sleep deprived last night, but I've never liked tautologies. There were some other things I was going to complain about, but I thought I'd have a go at tautologies instead. I might have a go at repetition too one day.
Do you think tautologies are evidence of ignorance in the subject matter, as well as linguistically? I suggest they might be: as in "abseil down". Alternatively, they're just bullshitting, as in "social networking".
Take this blog entry as an example. Now I'm not encouraging you to join the mass-debators over at the Telegraph. I've nothing to say about the entry really. You can judge for yourself what news value this brings a newspaper (is this the web equivalent of abandoning the broadsheet?), what value it brings a blogger to be associated with the newspaper, and whether the article itself has any substance.

Look how tough I am

If ever there were any doubts about the new era that Nicolas Sarkozy will usher in, you need only look at the response to protests in France following the presidential elections. (See Le Monde).
A student who protested in Toulouse has been sentenced to a month in prison for aggravated assault on a police officer. Ok, so the protests were violent, but let's take a look at his crime: the assault was aggravated because the culprit used a weapon, which was an empty beer can. Although this was thrown in the general direction of the police, it didn't actually hit anyone. The student didn't deny his involvement and had no previous record for misdemeanours of any kind.
Sarkozy wants to show everyone how tough he is and wants this message relayed across the country via the judicial system. But what kind of justice will this bring? The parallels with early 80s Britain are there for all to see. How long before a repeat of Brixton / Toxteth / Handsworth, or a power struggle with a union that opposes his crushing form of "free enterprise", in the style of the miners' strike?

Salad days

Like Cleopatra, we are often green in judgement. But it's hard not to be green in intention and judgement these days. On the one hand you have TV documentaries purporting to be scientific but carrying a hidden agenda, while on the other you have genuine efforts to reduce the human footprint having a genuinely negative effect.
Take biofuels, for example. If ever there was a topic to assuage the guilty conscious of the liberal west, here it is. Developed by Papuan Soloman independentists, the major fuel companies have seen its commercial value. But at what price? It'll be more profitable for the nations that can grow high yield crops like sugar cane to do so at the expense of crops that feed their people. Why would they do that? Because as usual, this land is in the hands of the few rather than the many. The crops can be harvested easily without mass labour. The industrial world will drive up the price of biofuel but processing will be carried out by labour well away from the plantations. Trade agreements will impose higher tariffs on the raw produce than on the processed fuel, so Brazil will sell sugar cane to the US at a fraction of the cost it takes to get it back. It's another form of colonisation of capital.
Ok, so that all sounds like a bit of a rebarbative Marxist agenda, and I know that there's potential for generating biofuel without taking land that can be used to produce food (by exploiting algae, for example), but wait and see. Biofuels may answer one problem -- peak oil -- but they'll cause many others.

Dire-gnosis

Well, this happened to my dad: misdiagnosis of pancreatic cancer. How can anyone get it so wrong? All you have to do is have a biopsy before you tell people that they have an incurable and rapidly terminal condition.
A word to the wise: if ever you're in hospital for abdominal pain and they tell you it's a cancer, ask them how they know. If they tell you it's shown up on CT or ultrasound, ask them how they know it's not gall stones causing pancreatitis. If you continue to eat, the head of the pancreas will be so inflamed that it'll look like there's tumour there. The only way to confirm the tumour is to go nil by mouth (this may be for several weeks) until any swelling disappears, and then do a needle biopsy. It ain't pleasant, but it's accurate.
By the way, this is a particular problem for men over 50. I don't know the situation behind this particular case, but doctors may put abdominal pain and an elevated PSA count together and call it pancreatic cancer: 2 + 2 = 5. Now it may be that these are indications of malignant tumour, but you need to wonder where the other 1 in that equation is coming from. In this case, the diagnosis was clearly incomplete.

What you may have missed

HG Wells and JRR Tolkein would be impressed. New Scientist reports great strides into invisibility. Do I understand how this works? Not really, but it should be magic.

May Day

No, not May Day as in m'aidez, which is where the Mayday call comes from, but May Day as in international workers' day. I came upon a little known (to me) history of the day's credentials for demonstration and representation. Indeed, as I type this, I'm sat in an office where I can hear public sector employees protesting, while onlookers blame them for working in the public sector and just being a waste of money...
Anyway, May Day has its origins in the United States, of all places. In 1884, unions protested for the right to limit the working day to 8 hours. The 1st of May was chosen as a day of protest because it was the start of the financial year for many companies. In 1886, the majority won their cause, but many were left disenfranchised. There were strikes and on May 3rd, a bomb at a demo that caused a dozen police deaths. By 1889, the annual May Day marches had spread to France and on the third anniversary, the army was called in. 10 protestors were shot. May Day then became a day of workers' resistance across Europe and following the First World War it became a state holiday in France and a number of other UK countries. Harold Wilson's government followed suit in the UK in the 1970s.
Is any of this right? I haven't checked. But I'm sure you'll comment wikipedia style as necessary.