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.

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.

In case you need to get from Standford to Stockholm

Google advise on travelling from California to Sweden. Check out direction number 33.

Pushing the envelope

This is an interesting story, which you may already have seen, about how to clone the new UK passport. It particularly annoys me when ignorant fuckers like Peter Hain and John Reid get up and tell the world that these things can't be copied, that they'll provide extra security and solve the populist xenophobic agenda of middle England when this technology will do nothing of the sort.

Quite a long way from Cairo

Lots of miles from Vietnam.
Spent the last couple of days in Finland, which has been significantly warmer than London this weekend. In fact, it hasn't snowed in the south for three weeks. Even Moscow is experiencing a winter heatwave of +7 degrees. This hardly constitutes climate change, but the Scandinavian experience is a little weird without snow.
The country came across as pretty quaint, without wishing to sound too snobbish about it. Wooden houses and birch forests (keep all those children in check), very sparsely populated, with lots of homemade Christmas trinkets being sold in outdoor markets; all contributed to the sense that you had stepped back in time 50 years.
Do you know what the two most popular Finnish names are? Matt
& Gloss.

Rules of the game

I wonder if I'll ever understand commuters' mentality. The insular disposition that people adopt on a tube train is reflected in their complete disregard for what anyone else is doing. I am — admittedly — a demanding person. But why do people fart-arse around so much when they catch the tube? Are they being deliberately obstroperous or does their idiotic selfishness come naturally?
Example: today at King's Cross only one ticket barrier was open on a particular exit; consequence, twenty-odd people in the queue. When it comes to my turn to go through someone barges me out of the way, only to find that he doesn't know how to insert his ticket properly and holds the entire queue up. Was he a wanker or just a plain knob?
Escalators carry a sign saying "stand on the right". It does not add "and take up as much room as possible making sure to elbow or handbag whoever passes you". Nor does it say "stand on the right and dawdle on the left". If you're trotting along really slowly, why force others to go around you? Do you drive at 50 mph in the middle lane on a motorway? Probably. And when you get to the end of the escalator, do you then decide to stand around blocking off anyone else trying to get off it?
On reaching the platform everyone seems to think that the least crowded carriage is the one that's closest to the platform entrance. No need to move along. Unless of course you see a particularly fascinating poster advertising online gambling, which causes you to hover in the centre of the platform forcing anyone who's got past the platform entrance brigade to tightrope walk along the platform edge.
Then try to board the train. Standing by the door is clearly the most comfortable place to be. Don't these dickheads realise that at every stop people will have to clamber over them? Are they just stood there for the cheap thrills, a crafty brush against a frazzled fellow passenger? Or must they stand by the door so that at all costs they're onto the platform first at their stop, to amble up the centre of the corridors and turn the left-hand side of the escalator to treacle once more?
It's all I can do sometimes to hold in all the abuse I want to hurl at these miserable idiots. At least this blog entry was cathartic.

Delays on the underground

Police are finally beginning to release names of those who died in last Thursday's attacks. There have been lots of reasons cited for the delay in reporting who has died: a complex judicial system, the difficult conditions investigators are working in, a necessity to get the details absolutely right, the condition of the remains. All of these are, I'm sure, valid. But it is also worth remembering that Madrid suffered from many of these conditions too and had identified almost everyone within three days. So why is it taking so long here?
I would suggest that this is because for every DNA check, there's a police and security service background check to go alongside. This takes some time. Any person on each underground train and particularly on the bus could potentially have been implicated in the attack. My colleague who was on an underground train passing the one that exploded near Liverpool Street was interviewed by police after having stood in the carriage for an hour waiting to be rescued, then being led back up the tunnel. And can you imagine the police turning around to the relatives of the deceased and telling them that they just want to make sure the person who's missing isn't a terrorist?
Similarly, if we look at the delays between the bombs going off at 8:51 and rescue teams arriving on the scene around 9:20, this can be explained by police uncertainties. Emergency services could certainly have reached the scene in a third of the time. But if a bomb goes off, particularly in a confined space, who is to say that there aren't further devices targetting the rescue teams? This has certainly been a system used across the world by many organisations. Or worse still, that the bomb is a "dirty" device, including anthrax or something similar to spread longer term damage and impede access. But could the police tell the public that if they are victims of a terrorist attack they'll need to wait half an hour before anyone comes to rescue them while they check out the safety of the emergency scene? That people will die who could have been saved while all due diligence is performed?
Amid the unspeakable acts, there remain resolutions that are unspoken.

Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome

I spent the long weekend waiting in the Vatican. It was my wife's birthday, so we went to Rome and she wanted to see the Pope. So we hung around St. Peter's square getting elbowed by eager septagenarians waiting for Joseph Ratzinger to show at the window...
and when he appeared there were gasps from the throngs, applause as he berated politicians for promoting IVF (in Italian), cheers as he told South Americans how important they were in Spanish, and assorted flag waving has he polyglossed to Slovenes, Poles and his compatriots.
The papal cult, where so many congregate in a massive square to hear such a distant tiny figure surrounded by giant statues who has been invested by a conclave to which they ostensiby belong but in reality could never form part of, reminds me of Beijing and Mao. Indeed I noticed a recent sculpture of John Paul II that strongly resembled the monument to the Long March; wish I'd taken a picture. Of course if the Maoists wanted a cult to imitate they could do a lot worse than one which has survived over two thousand years. But do those who are imitated see any resemblance? Do they perceive this to be the sincerest form of flattery?

Kind Zeitgeist

The BBC reports on a policeman in India who is only five years old. While it's quite cute to think of a policeman who needs to hide behind his mother if you get too close, the article rightly highlights child exploitation in the country, just as I expressed in my previous reservations about Indian social order.