For your reading pleasure, I have completed migrating additional content from the old hand-coded PushBack site to the WordPress-driven site. The latest addition is the Energy section, which covers the California energy deregulation fiasco.
Next up is the Justice section, which contains the archives of the Robert Womack case, among other campaigns conducted here over the years.
I nearly missed coverage of the food drop technique in Science Insider, a blog from the editors of the journal Science, until I happened to notice a reference to it while reading the journal yesterday.
The January 20th posting Scientists: Shower Haitians With Food From the Sky details the efforts of Bill Wattenburg, Richard Muller of U.C. Berkeley, and Richard Garwin of IBM to convince Washington to implement the method.
Using “Fluttering” to Feed Disaster Victims—The Tri-wall Aerial Delivery System
According to an Associated Press news story, two weeks after the quake, some of the Haiti food aid is still locked in warehouses or being stolen by thugs. This is not surprising, and is to be expected in a disaster like this—especially one where all the prisons collapsed.
This is a crying shame, because the U.S. Military has a way to distribute the food fairly, so that everyone can get at least some food, without the machete-wielding thugs grabbing it in bulk.
Fluttering food is the process of dropping foil-wrapped packets of food directly from the rear of cargo aircraft, so that the food is distributed widely such that gangs, thugs, and the military can’t monopolize access to the supplies.
This 4-minute YouTube video shows it being used in Afghanistan during 2001, with a C-17 dropping tens of thousands of food packets: http://bit.ly/TRIADSvideo
Read the full article about MREs From Heaven for the full details. And click on the bumper sticker below to buy one for your car, school locker, or whatever:
Use the Tri-wall Aerial Delivery System (TRIADS) to Feed Haitians Now!
The U.S. Army and Air Force have available to them a well-proven emergency food air-drop system that will allow us to quickly deliver emergency food rations directly to the starving Haitians without the need for secondary ground transport from the recently established air-drop zones. It was used widely during 1993-1994 in Bosnia, and again during 2001 in Afghanistan.
It is called TRIADS, for Tri-wall Aerial Delivery System, can be used with both C-130 and C-17 cargo planes, and is documented in U.S. Army Field Manual 4-20.147/Air Force TO 13C7-37-31, “AIRDROP OF SUPPLIES AND EQUIPMENT: Humanitarian Airdrop”, last updated in January of 2005. Chapter 2 of this manual details the complete rigging details.
The method is simple–simply drop foil-wrapped packets of food, such as granola bars, candy bars, and MREs (military Meals Ready to Eat) from the cargo ramp of a plane. Terminal resistance assures that these lightweight food packets will not harm anyone on the ground, and that they will remain sealed and edible, even if dropped from thousands of feet.
You can watch a 4-minute YouTube video showing an actual 2001 TRIADS mission in Afghanistan at http://bit.ly/TRIADSvideo
You can download the official Field Manual at http://bit.ly/TRIADSmanual
TRIADS relies on the geometry of the foil pouches the MREs are contained in to flutter them to the ground, directly over the population in need. Because of the wide dispersion, the starving children and adults have as much of a chance to get some food as do the thugs running around with machetes, and it becomes impossible for those thugs to take-over and hoard entire pallets of food.
This system was used in Bosnia and Afghanistan, and can distribute over 32,000 MREs per C-17 drop (816 MREs in each of the 40 TRIAD boxes it can carry). Because a TRIAD package can be assembled, rigged, and loaded far more quickly than the parachute-based air-drops we have seen used this week, and because there is no additional ground transport required, TRIADS can deliver far more food to far more people in less time than any other method that can be deployed in Haiti over the next week.
It also is much less costly than the parachute-based air-drops, which means far more food can be delivered for each donated dollar.
Please forward this message to anyone you know who might be able to get a high-ranking disaster relief official, military official, or politician to start using this system ASAP!
For those interested in more details of this “food fluttering”, here is some additional background:
- Dr. Bill Wattenburg’s pitch for dropping food from planes:
http://www.kgoradio.com/Article.asp?id=1662660&nId=0&spid=33179 - YouTube video of Afghanistan airdrops of individual meal packets:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCxwprZekpM - Dropping food from airplanes — without parachutes?–class notes of U.C. Berkeley professor Richard Muller (author of Physics for Future Presidents)
http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/old%20physics%2010/chapters%20(old)/7-DroppingFood.html - High-Tech Cardboard Boxes Used In Afghan Food Airdrops–Describes the Tri-Wall Aerial Delivery System used in Bosnia and Afghanistan to deliver tens of thousands of MREs
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=44648 - U.S. Air Force Airdop News Page ((from the Internet Archive, because the military deleted this site)–has a ton of news items about the 2001 TRIAD air-drops that delivered 2 million packets of food in Afghanistan.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060222040836/www.usafe.af.mil/airdrop/news.htm
In the same pile of newspaper clippings as the previous post alluded to, I found a letter to the editor (likely the SF Chronicle, but clipped without the date or newspaper header), a teacher named Todd Toepfer from Modesto writes about a colleague who was denied a teaching credential because even though she had been teaching for 7 years, because the teaching university she had attended would not recommend her for one because she did not complete the student teaching prerequisite. Her teaching experience included two years at a Big 10 university, two years at a private high school, and two years at the school where she was denied a teaching credential.
With that experience and a master’s degree in two foreign languages, she was denied an official credential for a technicality, and thrown into the group that the education establishment moans about when they complain about the lack of qualified teachers each time they try to tighten the rules about what it takes to become a teacher.
P.S. If my Googling turned up the same Todd Toepfer who wrote the letter, he is a math and science teacher who received an Award of Excellence through the University of California, San Diego, Outstanding Teacher Recognition Program, and is also a member of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. So don’t think this complaint was from someone unexperienced with teaching.
In browsing through some decade-old newspaper clippings, I came across one that discussed the infamous 1997 decision by the California Academic Standards Commission to turn down an offer by a group of three scientists who had won the Nobel prize in chemistry (and one of whom the Nobel committee described as “one of the most creative research workers of our age”) to write the state’s new science curriculum for free. In trying to find references to this online, I came across an interesting online group–Mathematically Correct, which according to David Gelernter of the NY Post, “fights the Establishment on behalf of sanity and quality in math education.”
The groups details of the 1997 science curriculum war is well worth reading, but you should also read their report on the National Center on Education and the Economy, How the NCEE Redefines K-12 Math, which Mathematically Correct describes as shallow, focuses on the use of calculators, and does not include any Ᾰtasks involving large numbers, negative numbers, prime numbers, operations with fractions, or operations with decimals.Ᾱ
The saying used to be “What’s good for the General is good for the U.S.”, but the dramatic decline in General Motor’s fortunes over the past couple of years bears revisiting this phrase, and make sure that whatever has befallen GM doesn’t do the same to the entire rest of the U.S. manufacturing industry.
Those who are concerned about this should read a recent editorial by Pat Buchanan, Who killed General Motors? that was published in newspapers around the country.
A reminder of yesterday’s news: A 1998 Chronicle article pointed out that the Proposition 117 protection for mountain lions was allowing them to decimate the remains of the Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep population.
Proposition 71, passed by California voters last year, turns out to use unusual financing that will take money from promised research funds and spend it on interest payments, prevents any changes from being made to the law for 3 years, and the oversight board’s meetings can be immune from California’s open meeting laws.
For the whole scoop, read the SF Chronicle’s article from December Prop. 71’s fine print contains surprises.
Progress on the $275 million, 4,000-foot twin-bore tunnel approved by San Mateo County voters way back in 1996, and supposed to begin construction this fall, has been blocked by the California Coastal Commission over the transfer of a small parcel of land.
Approved by the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors in May, the Commission filed an appeal in late July to block the project. Caltrans’ promise to transfer the Martini Creek Devil’s Slide property to California State Parks after construction is completed is not good enough—they want the transfer written into law before giving their final blessing to the project.
More details can be found in this article from the San Mateo Times: Devil’s Slide tunnel tossed a curve ball. State Senator Bryon Sher is the author of the legislation, SB 792.
