Editorial
Returning From The Wilderness
After spending half a week sleeping on top of a mountain in Wyoming, I'm back. What can I tell you about staying in a lookout tower? Well, this is my second time, and the first time I got to encounter a lightning storm while staying in one.
As the tallest thing for literally miles around, they're generally at risk of being hit by lightning, so they of course come festooned in lightning rods and grounding systems - though you are told to sit on something wooden if one does come your way.
That said, even knowing I was technically safe is no substitute for the raw fear of being on a mountain surrounded by lightning strikes, though fortunately there was no a direct strike on the lookout. I've read first-hand accounts of the people who used to do this as a job, who describe how all your hair stands on end right before a strike - maybe I'll get to experience that one day, though I'm not sure if I want to. We'll see!
Land
Oh Look, It's Maglev Again
Every so often people get seemingly bored with normal, reliable, predictable train systems and instead embark on building something odd. This week's contenter is TSB, who appear to have made a maglev system for moving cargo containers around.
Now, maglev does have some advantages - it's very quiet, there's no moving parts, and it doesn't need to physically push against the track to get traction, so there's no risk of it ever slipping. That said, it also has an astonishing cost-per-kilometre to build the track - those magnets don't come cheap - so all of us on the Infrastructure Club Slack were somewhat confused what market segment this is for.
Maybe it'll find a good niche in storm-battered ports near housing, or something. Still, as you know if you've read Tales for a while, I'm generally always a fan of people building weird new transport, so good luck to 'em.
Parametric Insurance Does Sound Cool, Too
This article is a good look at "parametric insurance" - insurance that pays out a fixed amount based on a metric, like winds being higher than a certain speed during a storm event, rather than having assesors come out and try to manually work out the damage accrued.
It's common in some parts of the world, but not in the US, which is facing down increasing numbers of natural disasters as climate change really kicks into gear. Parametric insurance can pay out instantly, as opposed to waiting for the damage to be tallied up, which can be useful for some larger communities where that process could take weeks or months.
Sea
Breaking Water In Style
Japan, in case you weren't aware, has quite a lot of coast, and the sea has this annoying tendency to be very good at eroding and damaging our built environments. Sea defences vary around the world, but Japan has a particular fascination with giant concrete breakwater units - and they come in a dizzying array of shapes and sizes, as this Tweet thread shows.
One of the most interesting things is that they're so big they can't easily be transported - instead, they are nearly always cast out of concrete on-site, leading to some truly marvellous-looking moulds that tower over the workers using them.
The linked site that catalogues them all unfortunately appears to be down at the time of writing, but I do encourage you to look at some of the photos on the tweets and, should you be so inclined, you can always 3D print your own moulds and make some tiny ones yourself.
Space
Let's Hope It Actually Gets To Space
The James Webb Space Telescope - widely billed as Hubble's replacement, though it's not quite the same kind of telescope or mission - has finally completed ground testing this week and is ready to be shipped to the launch site.
Of course, there are worries that pirates might steal it en-route, worries about the Ariane launch vehicle performing well, and worries about it actually unfolding properly out in deep space where it's going to end up - but let's hope that all goes well, eh?
Silicon
Goodbye, Copper Landlines
After many years of IP-based telephony slowly taking over the world, the UK is taking the plunge this decade and officially ending traditional, analog phone lines and switching everything to voice-over-IP-style technologies.
What's notable is that it's not just having to switch the communications protocol for a load of old equipment - some equipment actually relied on the voltage delivered over the network to operate, and they're going to need batteries and power supplies added in as well.
Overall, it's a huge undertaking, but at this point even I think it's time to say goodbye to the analog, circuit-switched phone line in favour of a much more efficient use of the infrastructure - wireless communications and UPS systems on mobile phone towers have filled a lot of the previous emergency infrastructure gaps that just using VOIP would have left.
The Rogue ARM
China is an odd place to do business - you can't run a company there unless it's majority Chinese-owned - and that seems to have gone rather amiss for ARM Holdings, chip-maker extraordinaire, as it appears their Chinese "subsidiary" - which they are legally only allowed to hold 49% of - has "gone rogue", and are developing their own chips and doing their own R&D.
It's probably rather a galling loss of intellectual property - ARM have been leading the way in power-efficient processor design for, arguably, over a decade - but we've yet to see what actually becomes of this.
Nature
Back To The Necrobiome
You may not think that death plays a vital role in the ecosystem, but it does - and the species which depend on dead and rotting creatures are having a hard time across Europe, as humans have this annoying habit of not liking dead bodies of things lying around.
Germany is now on an investigation to help restore this "necrobiome", and make sure these cruicial parts of the ecosystem are not left without the food and nutrients they need, starting with doing a lot less corpse cleanup in their national parks.
It's always going to be a tricky subject, leaving corpses of animals around to just rot and decay in the way nature intends, but hopefully we can find a decent balance that keeps both humans and the necrobiome happy.
Heists
Sardinia Says: Stop Stealing Sand
Sardinia, the Italian island noted for its natural beauty and long, sandy beaches, has a slight theft problem - and it's not cars, laptops, or even any sort of personal property. It's sand.
Tourists stealing natural resources from places of beauty is sadly still common, but it seems that Sardinian sand is particularly in demand, especially for those with aquariums. The local authorities are taking a very zero-tolerance approach to the sand theft, but you do have to wonder quite how possible it is to catch every single case of it.
That said, some people do feel guilty and return the stolen sand - there's apparently a museum in Caprera with returned sand and apology letters on display. Probably best not to steal natural resources in the first place, though.
They're Really Quite Hard To Steal Quietly I Guess
It's only a minor heist, but you have to admire the brazenness of the people who turned up with a digger and just... took an apparently-active phone box while members of the public were around and even told one of them to guard the now-exposed electric cables.
Of course, these phone boxes are in relatively high demand as collectors items these days (if you're not aware, they're very much one of those UK national symbols), but there's so many disused ones it seems odd to go pull one out that's still wired in!
And Finally
Ah Yes, A Jeans-Fuelled Rocket
A fellow with the very appropriate Twitter name "rocketpoweredkeith" has illustrated one of the wonderful principles of rocketry this week - that you can get almost anything to burn with enough oxygen - by creating a jeans-powered rocket.
Yup - it's a rocket motor whose main fuel is, apparently, denim. There's a video of him getting a little bit of thrust out of it too, though apparently it suffered a containment failure soon after, as the rocket casing was also made of jeans. Might need to fix that before we send a mission into space on one.