I got a cold chill as I read this article yesterday on the Metro crash investigation:

“In the aftermath of the crash on the Red Line between the Takoma and Fort Totten stations, Metro officials analyzed track circuit data and found that one circuit in the crash area intermittently lost its ability to detect a train. The circuit would report the presence of a train one moment, then a few seconds later the train would “disappear,” only to return again.”

It sounded to me like the same problems that have been encountered on the Space Shuttle, nuclear power plants, and various military systems. And that problem is tin whiskers.

The backstory:  When people first started building electric circuits, they used tin metal to solder the interconnections between the copper bits.  It wasn’t long before they noticed the tin would get “furry”, growing spiky whiskers as the part was used.  These spikes could grow long enough to short out the circuits, and then were so weak that they would break off right after doing so.  A smart metallurgist figured out that adding a small amount of lead to the tin alloy stopped this behavior.  And so the electronics industry grew, and electronic circuits got so small and fast and reliable that they ended up in nearly every control system – with a bit of solder in every one of them.

In the early 2000’s two things happened:  Europe passed legislation that prohibited lead in consumer products, and at the same time, the production of interconnection technologies went global.  So even though only European markets mandated this change, producers all over the world had to comply.  And that means that consumers all over the world were getting lead-free electronics, many times without knowing it.  Many times the same part number started showing up with lead-free solder, making this trend very hard to track.

So yesterday, I dropped a note to one of my expert friends, who agreed with me that the circuitry in the Metro replacement part, more likely than not, contained lead-free solder.  And then, he pointed out the likelihood that the latest Airbus crashes had lead-free solder components in their flight controls.

Hence the cold chills.

Yes, it’s a bad thing to have lead where kids might put it in their mouths (especially drinking water).  Yet the activists admit that the amount of lead in electronics isn’t at dangerous levels; they say their ultimate goal is to shut down lead production entirely.   (In the interest of full disclosure, I facilitated a study back in 2005 that predicted this, and only now is the military starting to address those findings.) 

Hey, guys, maybe technology might need to trump politics for once?

Excitement and disgust.

Those are the simultaneous feelings I had when I heard the Real World DC cast had arrived at Regan National Airport.

First I was excited to hear that things are starting up and soon the stories of the debauchery at clubs and bars will keep me entertained all summer long. However when I saw the degree people have become obsessive of it makes me wanna puke.

Read these tweets.

“Jeep and crew just left, door by patio is open. Basement looks nice. No guards, 4 construction workers.”

Are we planning a covert mission here!?!? I can see the next tweet in my head:  “no guards, construction workers gone, Bravo team in position.” I wonder if any other city has had this problem before, are we going to see an episode next year where they have to explain how a mob of fans coordinated a stalk attack through twitter?

Check out #rwdc and #rwdcwatch for even more ridiculous stalkers.

Now I’m excited to have The Real World in DC and to be living in the same place they are filming the show. I will eventually take a walk down to the house to see it and say I was there- but I’m not holding my own stakeout to see people that aren’t even scandalous famous yet.

We live in the same city as The President of the United States, yet we have people stalking a bunch of quarter-life aged adults as they get drunk on basic cable.

Seriously DC calm down, I think I’m going to have more fun watching the show next season if there wasn’t paparazzi like crowds in every shot.

UPDATE (8:04)

Again another reason why we shouldn’t freak out- it appears that today’s news was only a drill. It is now uncertain if the cast is actually here or not- but it looks like it was all a false alarm to me. Today’s rumors and excitement  shows the power of groupthink that Twitter can exacerbate. I mentioned it last week in regards to the Metro Crash, early on there was a lot of mis-information being spread around through Twitter- and this is another reason why  we should all just calm down. Once they are here they are here for six months, we’ll get tired of them sooner than you think.

• If you have to have a huge underground pipe break in your neighborhood, a warm spring morning is not the worst day for it.  If you live below grade, it’s still pretty traumatic.
• I didn’t know pavement could do that.
• The overall response from the City workers was great; the sad thing is that they’ve done this so often that they have it all down pat.   I wanted to kiss them for working through the 4-hour downpour that evening that I’m sure kept it from getting any worse.
• The contractors were out in force; we had 3 business cards for specialists in water damage in our mail slot within 8 hours. 
• Now I know what rush hour sounds like without traffic on Florida Avenue.   And that articulated Metro buses can back up very, very long distances.   
• Life goes back to normal pretty quickly, all things considered.   Until the next one breaks…

Okay, well I’m glad somebody at WMATA is reading my posts-now if they’d only give me some credit!

NBC Washington is reporting that as early as this fall Metro might feature retail stores at 12 Metrorail stops.  Everything from dry cleaning to food will be available if things go according to plan. 

A plan they clearly got from my post a few weeks ago.  Okay-maybe we just had the same idea, but I’ll take credit for it until someone shows me different.

Here it is though, commuters of DC;  there isn’t much separation between selling food and drinks and being able consume them on the trains.  My opinion was made pretty clear in my last post, but just to restate it-I think the eating and drinking ban was pretty ridiculous anyway and at least Metro will see some money out of it.  Sadly, my gut says that it won’t bring a reduction in fares-but maybe it will keep prices from going up any time soon.

The  idea will be brought to the Metro Board later this month and, if approved, proposals for retail shops will be solicited in June.  Shops could start as early as late this fall.

Now maybe I should have realized this at some point during the first month of baseball, but I was too busy watching the Nats lose/get rained out.  I went to yesterday’s Cinco De Mayo businessmanperson special between the Nationals and the Astros (what were you doing at 12:35 that was so important?).  I put on my new T-shirt:

My New Favorite Shirt!

and saddled myself up to the Red Porch Rooftop and ordered my summer beer standby-Sunset Wheat.

(more…)

Thanks, NASA!

Of all the zillions of 86 Earth Day events in DC and zillions of 175 million helpful posts on Easy! Ways! To! Be! Green!… this one is FULL OF WIN.  (Also, the most irreverent. Just sayin’.)

props to Jonathan Hoff on flickr

The thing about air, you see, is that there is a lot of it.  And it’s free — there’s no “DC Department of Air” that delivers clean, tested stuff to your door.  Then again, a lot of things (that we don’t pay for) affect our air quality.  In the city, it’s mostly heavy and off-road vehicles — trucks, buses, earthmovers – and that coal-burning power plant on Capitol Hill.  But regular cars and light trucks, heating, ventilatilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, manufacturing, and even human and animal digestion — all affect the air we breathe, as well as do sun, wind, and heat.  Air is both chaotic and complex, two things that make a system very difficult to model using our limited tools of mathematics and computer science. 

The upshot is that we don’t understand it very well.  We mostly know there is a problem with the air and that the changing composition means the air is overall a titch warmer than it used to be.  And we mostly agree that this is a result of people using the air.  And we mostly think this warming trend is Not Good.  What nobody knows very well is what to do about it. 

In a situation like this, looking at history is always interesting to me; I like the example of the government’s well-meant efforts to make cars more efficient by regulating the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE).  Instead of resulting in more small cars on the road, the car industry figured out how to sell us trucks (ie, SUVs) that weren’t covered by the rule.  These larger vehicles will finally be regulated in 2011, more than 35 years after the law was enacted.  This is a great example of unintended consequences and the need to reckon with clever capitalists.  Well-meaning people regulated lead of out gasoline back then, too.  Lead is pretty awful stuff when it ends up in drinking water and the easiest way to keep kids safe is not to use it at all.  But recent speculation points to lower lead levels as a precursor to global warming (thanks to @2020science for the links!). 

Unfortunately, eliminating lead also means none of those kids can use their XBOX 360s, but those consequences, they just keep coming.  And now we mean well when we talk about limiting carbon emissions.  I fear the unintended consequences.  Who knows, we could be stuck with a lot of boring sunsets…

Blue Plains water treatment facility at twilight.

Wednesday April 22 is Earth Day, so let’s talk green this week.   Today’s topic:  Water. 

Those of us blessed with municipal water systems have been somewhat insulated from the massive water issues that many predict will dominate the next century.   Most people still believe that clean water is cheap and reliable — that water will come down from the sky, be filtered through the ground and return as it always has to provide fresh water to my kitchen sink.

But that’s less and less true.  As population and industry have grown, water moves through the system differently and “fresh water” is less fresh.  In our overbuilt environment, the water we pull out of the Potomac doesn’t flow back as it used to.  Treatment plants adds all sorts of things to the water to minimize health risks, but also to minimize risks to infrastructure (ie, lead leaching or other pipe corrosion).  And treatment doesn’t take out all sorts of other things, like anti-cholesterol or birth control drugs. And don’t even get me started on the vulnerabilities of aging SCADA systems.

The real point is that moving water around, even when it’s clean, costs energy.  Our water treatment and distribution systems are aging and not adequately funded as populations have grown; and many small municipalities have privatized their water systems, meaning that people are going to start paying the real cost of water, both here in the city and in the extended suburbs.  And we use a LOT of water.

Awareness is growing, but it will be a few years before we really start seeing the impact.  In the meantime, there are lots of ways to use less water.

Still to come: Earth, Air, and Fire.

Whoops!

As we leave another tourist-filled, sports heavy weekend behind us here in the District I’d like to share a few thoughts I have about eating on the metro.  Throngs of people packed into tiny spaces, tourists collecting at the bottom of escalators and failing to understand that the train extends all the way along the platform-you may think that, as fed up as I already sound about PT in DC, that I’d be calling for you all to not bring your snack on the train.

On the contrary-I’m all for it.  Full disclosure here- what follows is an updated post from my personal blog that posted just about a year ago (before my Metblog rebirth).  Still, it was time to update and reintroduce the topic to a much wider audience (that’d be you). 

The reason it all came back to me now is the picture above-taken during the cherry blossom weekend rush.  Some kid spilled his smoothie (which he wasn’t drinking) over the rug.  People had to step around it.  So why am I okay with it?  Well-read on!

(more…)

We attended a screening of the new documentary Orphans of Apollo at George Washington University on Friday evening, and have been mulling ever since. On the surface, this is a documentary that tells the ill-fated story of a dot.com millionaire’s attempt to lease the Mir space station back in 2000. A bit deeper, it’s a thought-provoking look at why commercial access to space remains speculative fiction.

The tagline is “Join this band of rebels out to change the course of history in space, as they board a private Gulf Stream jet, fly to Russia and negotiate one of the most remarkable business deals of the final frontier.” The story is told in interviews with the participants, mixed with some great footage of this bunch of starry-eyed kids who grew up watching the Apollo landings and reading Heinlein. When they teamed up with MBAs intent on leveraging post-Soviet technology, they sidestepped decades of global politics. Watching it play out was fascinating (even if you’re not a closet space geek).

The underlying message, however, still makes me squirm. Our government dangles space as the future, promising scientific discovery, technological innovation, and life on the final frontier. But as one of the participants observes, “the government views anything you send into space as a weapon”. And of course, that’s true, but it’s also politics-as-usual and therefore complicated. Control of space for communications, global positioning, as well as more traditional weapons is a huge priority for our government, and the Outer Space Treaty is ticklish at best.

Me, I’d love to see Dancing with the Stars in microgravity. But I’m settling for great documentary films like this.

Read the blog, order the DVD, or post comments at www.OrphansofApollo.com