A number of incidents over the last days and years reinforce my sense that our society is excessively centralized, and as a consequence excessively vulnerable to points of failure. At some point soon, I expect the preference for efficiency will be changed to a preference for resilience.

There is no question that centralized facilities (cities, transit systems, factories, pipelines, communication hubs…) generally result in more efficiency. But natural and unnatural disasters make the disadvantages obvious too. Nearly all our infrastructure depends on peaceful normalcy to operate, and would break thunderously if a major catastrophe occurred.

For example, do you have a family plan for coordinated escape? Stored supplies? Mobility? Energy generation capability? Information access? First-aid knowledge? Self-defense skills and equipment? Any barterable physical assets? Most city-dwellers would say “no” to almost all of these, and hope that someone comes to their aid when the shit hits the fan. Well, that’s not good enough for me any more. Like an adolescent slowly realizing that they are not invincible after all, we have to take emergency planning for ourselves seriously.

The spectacle of New Orleans’ degeneration into anarchy gives people ample reminder about why self-sufficiency is so important. The Government (capitalised in irony – since many people don’t understand civic structures) is not an omnipotent guardian angel. You may only have yourself, your family, and your friends to count on. Everything else – strangers, The Government, and luck, is an unreliable bonus.

Decentralization at the public policy level would help. Let’s spread out populations, infrastructure choke points, “lines of communication” in the military sense, leadership, supplies, over the large unused area that is available in America. Yes, this could increase transportation costs if the spread-out communities are still very closely coupled – if people from different areas must frequently meet. Effort should be expended on decreasing that coupling. Unfortunately, politicians abhor devolution of the power concentration they built over decades, so this will be a hard task for tough people.

But I can’t wait for society to decentralize – soon or well enough to count on in dire times. I plan to start making changes in my life. I plan to contemplate emergency scenarios in real life, with the same seriousness I practice them in the airplane. I plan to leave the big city, and take up residence in a place where the mass of possible friends outweighs the mass of possible foes, where long-term self-sufficiency is materially possible.

Any suggestions?

As I write this, jets practicing for the upcoming Toronto air show are buzzing overhead the city. DAMN THEM. A tree outside my home office window is blocking the view. I wish GXRP was available so I could scoot around up there with them. I can’t concentrate on work.

I’ve been looking for this little ditty from The Onion ever since I caught a glimpse of it years ago. It’s from the 2000 April 19 issue.

Seeing a Juimiin spend the occasional utterly miserable day with offspring gives me pretty solid evidence that time machines will not have been invented over the next few years.

Let’s resume the story from part 1.
UPDATED with pictures.

As you climb back out of the cockpit after the initial checks, you stand up on the wing and look around. From this vantage point, the airplane still looks pretty big, but one can almost reach the other side of the fuselage. The upper surfaces gleam from the overhead lights, except for an oil smudge here and there. You try to jiggle them, but the antennas on the top are all tightly fixed to the airplane. You confirm overall left/right symmetry of the aircraft as a whole. Asymmetries will attract your attention.

You climb back down to the ground. You’re standing just behind the right side flaps, which were slightly lowered during the initial cockpit checks. Those checks confirm that the emergency hydraulic hand pump is working, that there is fluid in the system, and that the flap actuator is working. You look at the trailing edge of the flaps and the wings, and note how nicely tapered they are. A sharp, clean trailing edge reduces drag. You jiggle the flap by hand, to confirm that there is a small but strictly limited play in the mechanical linkages. You notice a smudge of oil near the flap’s central portion, which is directly aft of the engine. The oil it normally exhausts in small amounts must be blown backward right into the little crevices formed by the flaps. It’s just an aesthetic issue, but it’s worth a wipe if you have a rag handy.

You duck down to look at the wheel and its doors. The shock absorbing oleo should be clean and shiny, and the brake lines gently bowed. The tire is just slightly bulged on the bottom, as perhaps 40% of the aircraft weight is compressing it. Too much bulge, and the tire would rub on the brake shoes, so you would have to inflate the tire a bit. You get back off the ground, and walk a few steps along the wing to examine the ailerons. Similar to the flaps, you see a pleasantly sharp trailing edge. Several anti-static wicks are present. You move the ailerons up and down by hand, to confirm freedom of hinge/bearing movement. If you stand in the just the right place, you can see the cockpit yoke turn in response. You look for slack in the movement along other directions than around the rotational axis, but there is none.

You walk around the wingtip, and check out the lights there. The power is off, so all you can look for is whether the casings are intact. The wingtip is large, but it sounds hollow when tapped. There are airplanes that store fuel right up into the tip, but GXRP is not one of them. As you continue to the leading edge of the wing, you notice how different it looks on this side. For one, it’s positively chubby, curving gently along its 6-plus-inch thickness. For another, the leading edge is covered with a black rubbery layer. You recall that these are deice “boots”, which can be inflated in flight to break off ice accumulation. There are a few oval patches on it, suggesting the rubber is fragile, which it is.

Now that you are at the leading edge of the wing, the fuel tank doors are reachable. You pop open each door, release the compressed fuel cap, and look into the tanks. Each opening is about three inches in diameter. The plane was parked with the tanks filled, so you can see some fuel sloshing right near the top. Each tank contains 36 gallons and can feed both engines for a little under two hours. There are two tanks in each wing, for a total of 144 gallons and around seven hours’ endurance. With the fuel levels confirmed, you replace the caps and close the covers, checking that they are all secure. If the fuel cap is not properly pressed in, fuel would be syphoned out in flight with amazing speed. Before moving on, you kneel down to check out the underside of the wing, to look for any problems with the flat surface.

You come to the engine. You grab the exhaust outlet, looking for excess rigidity or looseness. You run your fingers along the propeller, looking for any imperfections larger than the tiny pitting that comes from normal flying. The spinner is a large dome at the front, and contains the pitch-control machinery of the constant-speed propellers, which those blue cockpit levers control. You open up the little door on the top of the engine compartment, feel around for the oil dipstick, and pull it out. It’s tight in there. A rag catches the oil drippings. The oil level is closer to nine quarts than to six, so is plenty for even a long flight. You can’t see it, but you hunt around for the right place to reinsert the dipstick, and secure it with a nice snap. You close the access door.

You take a look at the underside of the engine next. Boy, a good deal of dirt over here, or at least it looks like a lot. But really it’s just a little bit of oil being exhausted from the crank case during normal operation, plus dirt being flung off the tire while rolling. You check the tightness cowl flap doors, which open downward and out to provide extra ventilation for the engine. You get even farther down to take a look at the wheel and the doors again, this time from up close. The doors can move slightly, but aren’t loose enough to be of concern. Lookup upward from the ground, you can see the cavity where the wheels will be retracted after take-off. Finally, you find the fuel sampling valves hidden behind another little access door. You sample a bit of fuel from all three points, looking for water and dirt. You dispose of the sampled fuel, some onto a rag you can use to wipe off the worst of the oil smudging.

You turn to the nose of the airplane. The side of the nose has several large inspection panels, all of which are locked or bolted secure. The nose wheel and its doors are easier to get to here, without a wing to duck under. You will need to reconnect the scissor link in front of the nose oleo, which was disconnected to allow tight turns of the ground by crew towing the airplane. Since the rudder pedals are no longer aligned exactly with the nose wheel, you need to run to the back of the plane to move the rudder. Eventually the two halves of the link line up, and you can fasten them together with the bolt and castellated nut parked in one of them. The nose wheel is also just slightly bulged, and is otherwise symmetric in all the the right ways. You look up at the landing light just fore of the nose gear. That big bulb is used to see and be seen at night or adverse daytime conditions. There are several vent/exhaust tubes hanging out, including the big one that must have spewed carbon from the cabin heater.

You finally made it around the nose, and are faced with the left side of the airplane. You do all the same things you did to get here, but in reverse order, until you get all the way to the left side flaps. You notice a stall warning vane and a big L-shaped pitot tube under the left wing, but otherwise it’s the same. Then you walk backward toward the tail.

It’s really big – tall and wide, suggesting good low-speed flight controllability. You notice the same deicing boots that you saw on the wings, on the leading edges of both horizontal and vertical edges of the tail. You note that there is no elevator exactly, but a stabilator: the entire horizontal surface can swivel around a horizontal axis to change the pitch of the airplane. You walk all the way to the rear, and give the stabilator a gentle lift. You notice how the small trim surface moves along with the rest of the stabilator. You are too far now, but the cockpit yoke is moving forward and backward as you do this. There is only a little bit of play in the trim surface along its rotation hinge. You move the rudder a bit to confirm that it’s free. Having reattached the nose wheel scissor link, the rudder won’t turn very far before the shear force on the nose wheel resists you. You note the rudder’s own little vertical trim surface, which is generally manipulated only during extended single-engine flight.

Now you find yourself at a symmetric point again, walking back to the starting point along the right rear quarter. Before you get there, you take a few steps back, to get away from the airplane. You get down to the ground, and take a look for any asymmetry or imbalance. The plane looks good. Let’s go fly.

The civil servants working for our municipal government just can’t help themselves. When there is propaganda budget unspent, heads roll. With it spent on cartoons such as the following, only eyes roll.

Take this tasty tidbit from the transportation department.

It is subtitled “if only”. It features a jaywalking business woman crossing a busy street, colliding with a car. But in this alternate reality, it is the car and not the human that is smushed. Yes, up to the moment that pigs learn to fly, our employees in local government dream about breaking laws of physics, in furtherance of ideology. Perhaps they should frequently cross the street as depicted, in order to check up on the state of the universe. If only.

I’ve heard several times that “politics is the only game worth playing”.

The speaker may be correct. Politics is a deep application of game theory, having to maneuver between conflicting interests, constraints, populations, opponents, in order to gain and hold power. Reading military history books, I have begun to understand the triviality of most politics. If the nation is not in a crisis, political power may be exerted any which way, without there being a clear “right” or “wrong” signal from the universe, only the occasional election. In a way, it’s like business. The consequences of people making wrong decisions are generally small. Executives screwing up can be reshuffled within or without, still taking home big paycheques. Companies can go bankrupt with barely anyone noticing – people just move on to another job. There is little moral outrage at the omnipresent casual incompetence and dishonesty of power players during decadent peace time.

The military world is so different. Decisions have life-or-death consequences, and playing around kills. I envy the clarity which this fact should bring to the situation. It requires one to apply a rational mind to the fullest, respect real constraints, balance difficult conflicts, entertain no illusions. It’s the ultimate scientific experiment, precisely because of the stakes.

On an old Mythbusters episode, the silly hosts tried to investigate whether water can explode after being microwaved. They declared “myth true” after an experiment.

Normal tap water of course boils with vigour, but does not explode. It turns out that superheated water can indeed explosively evaporate, but that was said to require pure distilled water. One of the hosts then made an erroneous leap of logic, by claiming that such water is in fact widely available in households that purify their water by boiling.

But that is not so. Boiling water does not get rid of any impurities, except perhaps some dissolved liquids and gases. It simply kills most bugs that are swimming around in it. When the boiled water is cooled down, it will have about the same amount of particulate matter in it as it did before. It will boil just as vigorously as before.

What makes distilled water so pure is, well, distillation. Instead of keeping the unboiled water+gunk solution, one syphons off the freshly boiled water vapour, and collects its condensate. If the boiling temperature and syphoning schedule are carefully controlled, one can grab fairly pure water vapour, which turns into fairly pure water. Not many households will have this kind of equipment. Thus the mythbusters reached the wrong conclusion.

Distillation is of course also used in oil refining, to separate the many different compounds intermixed in crude oil, many of which have different boiling points.

I studied very little biology in school. To a better-informed reader, my new realization yesterday will surely be old news. But to me, brief bliss. The topic? Fruits. Eric loves to eat them. I love to eat them. Everyone loves to eat them. They are yummy. Why? Because the plants grow them in order to be eaten. I can think of no other plant/animal body part that evolved for that apparent goal.