infrastructure

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.