Grew up in LA. I don't recall wildfires in the winter, generally. There were Santa Ana Winds this past week though, and I'm pretty sure that's the cause. In the mountains near me, wind speeds were said to be 80-100 mph. They were probably lower where I am, but my neighbor's backyard canopy blew over the wall to my backyard. I helped them hoist it back over the wall today and we estimated it was about 100 lbs.
These are gusty and dry winds coming from the desert, so I assume these fires spread from some manmade source.
> Does this suggest even bigger fires are to be expected in the summer this year when it is actually hot?
I would assume so, yes. Some insurers have been pulling out of CA in 2024.
The issue here seems to be that human memory is going to be just short enough to be dangerously useless against a natural phenomenon that is decently regular, but happens in a 30 to 150 years intervals.
Relatively rare, but SoCal in particular sees dry-ish winters and high, dry winds, the Santa Anas. Humidity has been in the single or low-double digits. During the recent Malibu fires I saw a 7% RH reading, in the past week ~17%. Both of those are quite dry.
Much of the area sees repeat fires at ~20 year intervals or so. Several of the fire maps I was looking at were showing prior burns within the past five years, of which there were several in the vicinity of the Palisades fire. I've yet to check back to see how the burned-over areas fared in the current burn, but I'm suspecting that even recent fire activity is no longer the protection it once was.
Ironically, heavy rains in recent years can also compound fire hazard as the precipitation promotes plant growth and hence fuel load. Unless rain is recent (within the past 14-30 days or so) it's not going to be protective.
Keep in mind that average annual precip in Los Angeles is less than 15 inches (38 cm). San Francisco sees roughly double that, and isn't a particularly high-rainfall region itself.
They rarely happen in winter (in modern times at least) because it usually rains starting in late fall. But there's been zero measurable precipitation since, I think, May 2024. It's that issue combined with the extreme winds this week that made the conditions on the ground ripe for this type of fire. Note that the winds themselves are somewhat typical (they're called Santa Ana winds and they happen every year like clockwork), but the severity of the winds this week was extreme. Don't think there have been winds as severe in decades. It was a somewhat predictable cocktail and all of these ingredients aided the severity. No moisture + high winds = high fire risk. High winds = embers easily carried forward igniting additional fires. High winds = grounded firefighting planes and helicopters.
There are two types of good books: short ones, and longer ones with indicies and summaries after each chapter. Then there is the other 95%. Or is it 99%?
Its hard to write a good book. That makes them so valuable.
People who ever lived on Earth is just over a magnitude more than were alive in 2020 (7% of all people every alive lived in 2020) [0].
But interestingly if you divide a light-year by 117 Billion (the number of people ever alive according to [0]) it comes down to about 80 000 km per person (coincidently 2x the Earth circumference). If the average life-span was 80 years, that would bring the daily travelled distance to 2.7km per person, or 5.4km if average life-span was 40. 5.4k is easily done in an hour (especially by people walking as their main mode of transport).
So yeah, maybe all people that ever lived together walked somewhere between 1-10 lightyears together. So all in all, not that much compared to US airlines in the last 15 years.
The original plan was to have 18 trains running every hour in each direction between London and Birmingham [0]. This is tube frequency, and very difficult to do. Therefore the specs and designs were quite expensive. But however sophisticated (or not) the trains where, a _lot_ of money is needed to buy out property holders and construction.
However, this is a complete paradigm shift in the way of travel. This would have made Birmingham a suburb of London, as you can just go to the train station and hop on the next train as you do if you were to travel from anywhere within London.
The newspapers kept reporting the "faster" travel times which only shaves off "a few minutes" for a huge amount of money. But that was not the point. The point was capacity through frequency.
Over the years, this has been watered down. Now still a huge amount of money is spent on property buyouts and nature preservation / protection (the same higher frequency trains would have needed as well), on a marginally better service.
It seems to me (maybe thats wrong) that a lot of the fancy tech that is needed for increasing frequency could be had at relatively low extra cost, because there is this high base budget that needs to be spent whatever the performance of this new rail-line. So now HS2 is the worst of both worlds: expensive works delivering only a small improvement.
Mm, the point was increasing capacity on the WCML, for which there is large demand right now
What's murkier is what capacity is needed 50+ years from now on the new line. It was never going to be full day 1, but you don't build new expensive things hoping to run them at 100% capacity from the very start. Passenger growth was (pre-covid) only going up, so a design that could cope with passenger flows for the next 50 years was inevitable.
I did not know that they have such a high frequency. Thats amazing.
I think I heard somewhere that the rail operator(s?) in Japan (like Hong Kong) own a lot of real-estate close to the stations. Therefore they have a high incentive to provide an effective service, because it props up property prices. In the same time the property prices can be used to fund public infrastructure.
This is something else that the UK could learn from other countries. Because by just operating trains it is hard to make back the money needed to build and maintain the infrastructure. Its almost like the inverse of the tragedy of the commons, where instead of externalising costs, the UK is externalising the profits of these works.
100% this - there are massive developments around major stations & you can see it even in rural areas. A local operator just so appears to have a hotel next to their railway station or run the gift shop in the museum where their buses go.
I'm pretty sure the UK government knew all of this.
Rail privatization wasn't done with honest intentions. I'm sure the investors who got a stellar deal on the land around the stations when they cut up British rail and sold the pieces off were very well connected. It wasn't a mistake, it was corruption.
> This is something else that the UK could learn from other countries. Because by just operating trains it is hard to make back the money needed to build and maintain the infrastructure. Its almost like the inverse of the tragedy of the commons, where instead of externalising costs, the UK is externalising the profits of these works.
Yeah, the other way is the "classic" european way of the train being a state monopoly operated as a benefit to society, in which case it doesn't really need to "make back the money", because the economic value it builds for the country is the "profit margin". Sadly the deregulation sprees of the late 90s have mostly consisted of selling off the crown jewels or setting up weirdo groups engaging in growth for the sake of growth with no regard to socioeconomic benefits for the people.
The Shinkansen runs the fastest Nozomi service about every ten minutes throughout the day at around 5 trains per hour on the most popular routes like Tokyo to Osaka, then during peak hours there's another 5 added in on top of that as well. Plus there are some other slower, cheaper services that run as well and some trains will be express an others stop at more stops or go to further destinations and so on.
I think altogether they probably come to one train every 3 minutes during peak times, but they are not all the same trains and don't all go to the same place and stop at the same stops. There is generally about one train every 10 minutes per platform at a station in my experience, but of course there are usually well over 20 platforms per big station, it's not like there is one platform with a train stopping every three minutes.
> The Shinkansen runs the fastest Nozomi service about every ten minutes throughout the day at around 5 trains per hour on the most popular routes like Tokyo to Osaka, then during peak hours there's another 5 added in on top of that as well.
Your numbers are out of date. The current timetable is 16 trains per hour per direction (12 Nozomi and 4 slower services that stop at more stations) on a single line - some go further than others but they're all going to the same places at least as far as Nagoya (and all but one go to Osaka).
> There is generally about one train every 10 minutes per platform at a station in my experience, but of course there are usually well over 20 platforms per big station, it's not like there is one platform with a train stopping every three minutes.
The stations have multiple platform faces connected to the same line, even intermediate ones, but in general it's a two-track line, one up, one down.
That kind of frequency is not unusual in the Netherlands for normal trains during rush hour. Unfortunately trains need a minimum distance from eachother and building new tracks is impossible because they go straight through some of the most expensive real estate in the country.
Sort of a nit, but the parent says 18 trains/hour in each direction, which is actually 36 trains/hour total, vs 20 trains/hour if departures are every 3 minutes.
Additionally, it looks like Hiroshima station serves a few distinct lines (I see at least 3 separate branches about a mile east of the station ). So even 20 trains/hour may not be 20 trains/hour on one line.
18 per hour, that's one train every 3 minutes or so? Doesn't that seem overly excessive? Every 10 mins is probably more than enough, just make trains slightly longer to accommodate capacity and the logistics would be easier.
I was looking at London-Plymouth trains a few months back and the timetable was like once every 2 hours and the last one was at around 5 PM. I think going to maybe once an hour and more than like 3 trains per day would be a decent first improvement before trying something this ludicrous lol. Perfect is the enemy of good.
> I was looking at London-Plymouth trains a few months back and the timetable was like once every 2 hours and the last one was at around 5 PM.
Not quite sure which timetable says that; the GWR timetable K1 says there are at least hourly trains down to Plymouth starting at 8AM from London Paddington on the Great Western Main Line; the last train is usually at 18:03 and there are occasional night trains too. In addition, you can travel on the West of England line from London Waterloo and change at Exeter onto one of the Plymouth-bound trains coming from Leeds or Edinburgh; it won't be as comfortable* but it gives you more options.
* Not everyone will agree with me here but I find the class 800s on the Great Western infinitely preferable to the tatty old Super Voyager sets - the Sprinters are nice though!
> 18 per hour, that's one train every 3 minutes or so? Doesn't that seem overly excessive?
No, that sounds pretty normal. You've built the train line and the stations which is the expensive part, it would be a waste not to use it to full capacity.
> Every 10 mins is probably more than enough, just make trains slightly longer to accommodate capacity
It really isn't. You'd need to operate, what, 40-coach trains to match capacity, which would mean massive amounts of station rebuilding. Think of how much you'd have to demolish to extend Euston to accommodate that.
> I was looking at London-Plymouth trains a few months back and the timetable was like once every 2 hours and the last one was at around 5 PM. I think going to maybe once an hour and more than like 3 trains per day would be a decent first improvement before trying something this ludicrous lol. Perfect is the enemy of good.
Plymouth's urban population is literally 1/10th that of Birmingham, and travel need scales superlinearly.
The connection from London to Exeter is better. From Plymouth to Exeter the line runs right along the coast and they don't seem to be able to improve the capacity or speed.
The HS2 money would probably be better spent fixing bottlenecks like that to improve the overall capacity, not just to put so many trains between London and Birmingham.
>This would have made Birmingham a suburb of London, as you can just go to the train station and hop on the next train
At the moment you can just pop to Euston and jump on a train, a few per hour, taking 1hr18m. The problem for most people though is, were I to do so now, a single is £94 which is quite steep for most people. In actual london suburbs you can hop on a train which takes like 20-60 mins and the big difference is the fare is more like £5.
If the designers were building what the customers want I think they'd go for something cheaper. The design seems to suffer from it being government money so it's free so what's another £50bn?
The £100m bat cover is quite impressive https://archive.ph/HLQD0 They reasoned there are bats nearby and they might fly into the trains, I guess bats not being very good at hearing things coming, and so better build a roof over the tracks if any may be around.
A false positive is essentially a false negative (the airbag cannot inflate twice), plus the consequences of knocking the drivers hands off the steering wheel, obscuring their sight and causing a shock that will in most cases cause an accident.
So a false positive seems strictly worse than a false negative to me.
Yes, I guess at speed that is likely the case. It's more the 5-mile-an-hour fender-bender that tends annoy the user when it harmlessly/needlessly deploys the airbags
I would really push on the visual aspect of it, perhaps by showing some videos on YouTube or some cool interactive demo. That would have definitely captured my attention, as a kid :)
I totally agree with this. From an academic perspective this makes total sense. But they will keep asking why "why would I want to do this?" until they see a real-life impact.
I have tried this, and it works to some extend with the parents. Because I can probe them about their work and interests and point out all the way software is involved. But that leaves the kids out in the cold. Because they dont yet understand how "work" works. So they don't understand how software helps with it.
Also from the diagram it looks like the secret key is stored unencrypted on the server, or do I read it wrong?
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