Infrastructure

As someone who takes the train to DC from time to time, the construction of a new rail bridge across the Potomac River is great news. Amtrak is a fairly convenient way to get to DC but it is not reliable. Last time I took the train, I had a 7 hour delay on the way back. That was due to equipment problems, not the bridge, but it is typically a slow go once you get up to the Potomac and anything that will make the trip quicker and more reliable is welcome.

I wrote about wood buildings last year. It’s a trend that seems to be on the upswing. An article in Knowable Magazine outlines the methods and benefits of using mass timber construction. I love the aesthetics of these buildings. They just feel warmer than the more typical concrete and steel construction. An interesting bit is how the mass timber is made in the same way as plywood. That is it’s a bunch of smaller pieces of wood glued together under pressure.

Sometimes, the world seems to hang together with bailing wire and duct tape. Like today when a botched update by a key internet security provider caused Windows systems all over the world to go into a boot loop. Really fun stuff. The direct impacts to me are a cancelled code review meeting because Azure DevOps was unavailable and a flight delayed by a couple of hours. Not too bad in the scheme of things, but annoying nonetheless.

I wrote a post last year about wood buildings which are very interesting. Just recently, I read about a wood satellite. That is just way too cool. Especially intriguing is that it “was assembled using a traditional Japanese technique that doesn’t require any screws or glue”. Plus it just looks cool. Maybe we need to give some serious consideration to bringing back the Woodie? To make it more modern it would have be the Lignite or something like that to make it sound more high tech.

WaPo had a article about tall wood buildings that was quite interesting. I love the look of The Wood Hotel. The clean lines and the color and warmth of wood really works well. The article points out that using wood as a construction material is good at reducing the carbon footprint of big buildings which typically rely on very carbon intensive concrete and steel. The fire risks to wood construction are dealt with by sprinklers, fire retardant treatments and the sheer mass of the wood which tends to char rather that be consumed by flame.

I wrote a few weeks ago that we might be able to use fiber optics to monitor infrastructure. That’s pretty cool and all of that but wouldn’t it be much better if we could just roll across the bridges watching a TikTok and generate useful data to monitor infrastructure? Apparent, that might just be possible. It’ll take some time to become a reality, but someday maybe our bridges will be safeguarded by lasers and iPhones.

Elon Musk’s takeover at Twitter has been interesting. He fired a bunch of people and many more resigned. Many of these people were responsible for stuff that Mr. Musk doesn’t think Twitter needs (e.g., content moderation) but others who got the axe did the critical development and infrastructure work. Twitter hasn’t had a catastrophic technical failure yet. That has raised some eyebrows about staffing levels at other Big Tech companies. It’s too early to tell.

The ability to detect earthquakes on fiber optic cables in really interesting. I’m impressed with how accurate and flexible this seems to be. The concrete use cases for early detection of earthquakes and tsunamis is great. That the accuracy allows for detection of more subtle things like traffic is really interesting. This seems like an excellent way to monitor things like bridges and dams for signs of damage and wear. Given the state of the infrastructure in the US, this could be a very good thing.