Yesterday I attended a rather cold and blustery Cropredy Saturday with a rather diminished Bullet/junk crowd. The rain arrived *JUST* as the concert finished, which was very well timed.
You can see a same of of my photographs on my gallery.
The current strategy to prevent people intent on destroying aircraft is based upon the premis that by banning descrete items you can stop the event from happening. This, however, suffers from three problems: Firstly, the “enemy” is smart and adaptive. Secondly, it suffers from a law of diminishing returns. Thirdly, it ultimately makes the mode of transport unusable.
I’m going to concentrate on the first of those failings here.
In the current alert it has been determined by the powers that be that the danger can be limited by preventing any electronic item inside the cabin and any item which may contain an explosive substance. Hence, the small number of items which can be taken as hand baggage. Everything else has to be placed in the hold of the aircraft. This a problem for the airlines (extra space needed in the baggage holds), the passengers (valuable items have to be placed in checked-in luggage which is then both not covered by insurance and liable to theft or damage by baggage handlers) and the security services (who have to check double the amount of hold baggage).
These measures miss some glaring holes, however.
Firstly, what if an explosive device (using the liquid explosive they seem to be worried about) were placed in checked-in luggage? Well, it might be argued that this would be spotted by the security checks but as we know from cases where newspapers have succeeded in getting dodgy bags through the system, this is not infalible. Also, this assumes an electronic timer, initiator and detenator, which may not be the case.
It is not rocket science to design and build a chemical based timer device (O.K. it is, but nothing a well funded small laboratory in the Australian outback couldn’t handle) which is accurate enough to detonate an explosive “somewhere over the Atlantic.”
Secondly, what about the clothing the people are wearing? Lots of explosive matterials could be made to be parts of clothing with things such as buttons etc. being components. They’re checking shoes, but nothing else. Will it be too risky to allow people onto a flight wearing their own clothing?
Thirdly, there’s the person’s body. Remember these people are not expecting to survive so worries about medium to long term health are not a concern. What if a “terrorist” were to swallow a device with a chemical timer and detenator held in an organic container which has a similar X-Ray contrast to other organs?
So, basically, the only way in the end to prevent such attacks using this blunt instrument would be a total ban on luggage, clothing and people from the aircraft.
Now, the problem is what *CAN* you do instead? That’s a very difficult question and it’s one I’m not sure I have an answer for. All I do know is that the current stance is untenable in the long term.
Is this 20 minutes in the future or coming to a airport near you soon? 😉
It starts normally enough…
It seems that Alec has moved house and is now living in a georgian, cotswold stone manse (not quite a mansion, just a big house) so I go to visit him. He puts me up in a nice, ground floor guest bedroom with a window which opens out into a aluminium lean-to greenhouse with grape vines spralled over the upper half and one or two of the glass panes at ground level are broken, the door has been left open. Through the glass of the greenhouse it can be seen that it’s situated in a small courtyard bounded by a cream coloured rendered wall.
Now, it starts getting weird…
I looked down to the floor of the greenhouse.. instead of a normal floor there’s… a small, shallow swimming pool. In this swimming pool I could see a number of cats and a host of starlings and other garden birds all asleep. I wondered how they could sleep under water, surely they’d drown. I then looked up into the grape vines and saw a host of house flies hatching out and sitting around in a group, possibly warming up before flying off.. and a gecko running around eating them.
Anyway, I go outside to find Alec clearing up the courtyard and ask him about the cats and birds, to which he replies “Oh yes, they’re very good at holding their breath, though some don’t make it.” He points at the pool where at the bottom you can see one or two starlings which are clearly ex-starlings.
At this point a tiger walks past, out of the greenhouse. I look to Alec, who says, “Oh, she came with the house. She’s not really tame but she doesn’t seem to attack anything, so it’s O.K. There’s a panther around here as well, somewhere.” At which point a black panther saunters past.
Anyway, I’m not sure how, but the location is transferred to a house which I know is near Kimbolton (Huntingdonshire), where I used to live, and is a combination of the house I used to live in and some palatial dwelling. There’s a social gathering. Apparently, Alec’s lent me a super-dooper new computer which is housed in a frame (not a rack) as components slot in all around and all the insides are exposed. Apparently, it’s two AMD machines made into one, one with dual dual core chips and the other with dual 8 core ships.. but it’s all hush-hush. He warns me not to talk too much about it to an IBM chappy also at the gathering.
All very wired and random. I have *NO* idea where all that has come from, but it was entertaining enough that I really needed to bore all the readers of my whitterings to death with it. 🙂
The fact that I’ve been invited to a meeting to do with the design of the new building at work has set my mind on the task of how to persuade the head of department, the University’s Estates Directorate and the architects about the design for our new machine room. The problem is that this has been going around in my brain, so I’ve had to write it down,
Hence I’ve written an initial Keynote slidesshow detailing my thoughts, which are basically:
There is probably going to be a maximum of 4 clusters in the dept. at any one time, each being 2-3 racks in size. Each rack will weight about a tonne and output approximately 10Kw of heat, all of which will have to be taken away. So, that’s about 120Kw in total.
This is all OK so far.. now for the contraversial bit…
A conventional recirculation air conditioning system for 120Kw is BIG. Not only this but the failure modes when its near capacity are not graceful, with a catastrophic temperature rise due to thermal feedback. The systems would not be able to be shutdown quickly enough to avoid cooking of the disk drives in the room, leading to data loss.
My solution is based upon the premis that the external ambient temperature is less than or equal to the ideal machine room temperature for most of the year in the UK, so why not use that for cooling and vent the exhaust hot air out of the room? Not only this, if you design it correctly you can use convection to help the whole process (using a long enough chimney).
This idea has two advantages.. firstly you don’t have to cool 120Kw, merely tweek external temperature air to your required temperature, which should need far less than 120Kw. Also, if any one part fails the system fails gracefully. (If the chiller fails then the room maximum temperature will be slightly higher than external ambient. If the extraction blower fails then convection will keep at least some air flowing, allowing a slower heat build-up.)
I also suggested using a closed-loop ground heat exchange system for the air temperature control system, such as developed by a spin-off company from the Camborne School of Mines Geothermal Energy Project, GeoScience Ltd. and their subsidiary, EarthEnergy. This should be able to cut energy usage even further.
Of course, the exhaust warm air from the machine room could also be used as supplementry heating for the rest of the building as well.
Somehow, though, I think that the ever conservative Estates Directorate will veto any of these ideas, mostly because they couldn’t be implemented by their favourite contractors and the ever present “not invented here” syndrome.
So, what have I been up to since my last outing on this ‘blog thingy whatsit doodah?
Well, I spent 4 days on a course in Cambridge studying the Exim mail transfer program, being stuffed with good food by Robinson College and having a good time with similarly geeky sysadmins from UKC and Lancs, many of which were involved with the old Hensa/lancs.pdsoft archives.
Last week I was just trying to keep awake due to not sleeping well once the humidity went through the roof. Oh, and at work I was getting some machines ready so that one of our researchers could move up to Leeds.
This weekend was pretty well a wash out due to sinusitis which started on Friday evening. I spent most of yesterday afternoon sleeping with the telly watching the Grand Prix for me.
So, what are my plans for this week?
Well, other than continuing to prepare for the trip to Tromso (such as sorting out the medical travel card thingy and ordering a GPS unit), it’s work, work, work. The techical person from Q Associates is coming in to commission the expansion of our cluster. The additional 24 dual dual-core Sun galaxy x86_64 machines will more than double the processing power.
For the last week I’ve been down in Cornwall for a week’s holiday and it’s flown by.
Anyway, here are some edited highlights in pictures…
largish pictures
A mutual friend has just sent this e-mail out to the junk-not list..
Dear all, Please keep your fingers crossed for Alec Muffett, who has come off his motorbike in France. The fireman said that he will probably live, but we know no more than that currently. Mandy (his sister) and her husband Paul are Eurostar-ing out there tomorrow. We will keep you posted when we hear more. Graham and Rachel
I’m hoping that it sounds far worse than it really is.
Fingers (and everything else) crossed…
After getting not much sleep the night before last ‘cos the wind dropped out and it was too hot, last night was full of spectacular thunder and lightning for much of the night (continuously).
Having taken my iBook up to my bedroom I monitored the storms on the Met Office rain radar as they were being generated over the Oxford region and then wandered south-west. Oxford was at the boundery of a windy shear zone where the moist air from the continent, moving south-west, was hitting an atlantic stream which was moving north-east. I just wish it had met somewhere else.
Still, the ~12 hours of torential rain should have helped keep my garden plants alive. My apple tree is losing its leaves and a number of perenial plants are dying off.
No I have to go to work on reserve power. I think I must have ab IQ of about one and a half at the moment… just don’t let me anywhere near a root shell, that’s all I can say.
So, it’s coming to the end of another weekend.
This last week has been chocked full of conferences, mostly not ones I’m attending in any other capacity other than techical support. The first two days were the graduate mini-conference where 1st and 2nd year postgrads gave talks on thier research so far. (I got free lunch). Wednesday was a day off from conferences. Thursday was the IT Support Staff Conference, which I attended as an attendee.. and another free lunch (stuffed guinee foul with fennel stuffing, vegiatbles and salad followed by summer pudding and cream). Friday morning was the 4th year undergraduates’ turn for a conference, talking about their projects. It’s surprising how exhausting listening to talks is!
Anyway, add to this socialising on Thursday evening and the annual finalists’ party on Friday night and I was shattered by the time the weekend came around.
Still, my new big zoom lens arrived on Thursday, after ordering it Tuesday evening. I didn’t get to play with it at all until Friday lunchtime and it was only yesterday that I really had a good change to try it out, even if it was restricted to around my house.