Sunday, June 24, 2012

I Wonder if anyone will be fired or fined for this ineptness?

Today's Wyoming Tribune had the following headline: Coroner: New Morgue Plagued with Problems.


Now - no funniness because the building in question is a morgue.  This is much more serious than any CSI jokes.


In reading the article, I could not help but shake my head. Sounds like the whole thing was done ineptly from beginning to end. This is something that you would think would happen in Mexico, or some third world country, not in the USA in the heart of the midwest.


But such ineptness is nothing new. Boston's Big Dig was apparently a fiasco. In Hampton Roads, Wyoming, a section was added onto Highway 35. (I think it was 35, some major highway, anyway) and the camber of the whole thing was wrong, so it all had to be torn out and done again. Under this same contract, the Construction Crew putting out orange cones were paid individually for doing so, instead of having that included in the contract price, which up until that point had been normal. So they made out like bandits on that...



Here's the problems:


1. Computer equipment stored in a biohazard room
2. Ventilation system "could" have problems. [What is this "could"?]
3. Inadequate pedestrian access
4. No road into the back of the facility
5. The bay where bodies are dropped and picked up "could be larger."
6. The floor on one area of the building is cracked.
7. Sinks were improperly built


According to the paper, "Commissioner Chairwoman Gay Woodhouse said the problems should have been addressed in the buildings orginial design - in other words, why didn't the coroner, who is doin the complaining - do his complaining before the buildinh was built???


The cutting side of the sinks should be reversed with the faucet side.


The morgue is currently at the Cheyenne REgional Medical Center, which apparently had a $700,000 remodel a few years ago. (So why build a whole new building just a few years later...and one that is ineptly built?)


The coroner said "there was no reason to move out of a facility that works into one that doesn't."

Saturday, June 23, 2012

June 23 was Superday

This was, I think, the 16th annual Superday here in Cheyenne. I couldn't go to any of the events because I had to get some work done...but hopefully next year.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Bells in Wyo. sensitive in US-Philippine relations

From Federal News Radio: Bells in Wyo. sensitive in US-Philippine relations

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - Military veterans are stirred up and speaking out against the possibility that the U.S. might return three church bells seized as spoils of war from the Philippines more than a century ago.
Such a simple gesture would go a long way toward demonstrating goodwill to an old and steadfast U.S. ally in the west Pacific.

The U.S. veterans' opinion on returning the bells? Don't even think about it.

"We oppose the return of the bells, period," said John Stovall, director of national security and foreign relations for the national American Legion.

Two of the three Bells of Balangiga are displayed at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne. They're part of a memorial to 46 U.S. troops killed by Filipino insurgents in 1901. A third bell is with a U.S. Army regiment in South Korea.

Last week, the U.S. Defense Department sent U.S. Marines Brig. Gen. Richard Simcock to Wyoming to talk with veterans about the bells. The visit was the strongest indication in years, if ever, that U.S. officials are giving serious consideration to returning the bells.

Recent discussion about repatriating the bells has prompted Wyoming's governor and congressional representatives to tell the Obama administration to keep the bells where they are.

"I strongly oppose any efforts to deconstruct our war memorials that honor our fallen soldiers," Gov. Matt Mead wrote Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on May 3.

Last month, the American Legion passed a resolution referring to the bells and calling on Congress to pass laws to protect military monuments from foreign governments seeking their removal.

Filipinos revere the bells as symbols of their long struggle for independence. The bells gave the signal for insurgents to attack American soldiers who were occupying Balangiga after the U.S. took possession of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War.

The issue could come up at the highest levels as Philippines President Benigno Aquino III visits the U.S. this week and meets with President Barack Obama and others.

Veterans worry the bells have become something of a bargaining chip in U.S.-Philippine relations, said Stovall with the American Legion.

"We think that one, that the bells represent a memorial to these fallen comrades in the Philippines. And two, were we to return the bells, it sets a dangerous precedent for other war memorials around the United States," he said.

Messages left with the Philippines Embassy in Washington, D.C., weren't returned, but a senior White House official said the bells are an important and emotional issue in both countries.

"We will only have an announcement when we have good news, and we will only have good news when we have completed the process that is under way," the official said Thursday on condition of anonymity.
The modest brick memorial housing the bells at F.E. Warren _ a base inaccessible to civilians without advance arrangements _ is the only place where the U.S. troops killed at Balangiga have been memorialized as a group, veterans point out.

"That is what represents their death," said Todd White, an American Legion member from Worland in north-central Wyoming.

Some 400 machete-wielding rebels attacked the 75 or so U.S. troops in Balangiga. Another company torched Balangiga the next day and took the bells as revenge. The reoccupying soldiers took the bells home to Fort D.A. Russell, which eventually became F.E. Warren.

An old English cannon taken from Balangiga also is displayed at Trophy Park in F.E. Warren, a base that oversees dozens of nuclear missiles in underground silos scattered across the prairie. The base doesn't have any runways but is home to a herd of relatively tame antelope.

Talk about returning the bells has been a perennial issue in U.S.-Philippine relations. Whether the idea moves beyond mere talk this time remains to be seen: The White House official said he didn't know if the Bells of Balangiga would be discussed during Aquino's visit.

More than 10 years ago, around the centennial of the massacre, former Philippines President Fidel Ramos suggested to an AP reporter a Solomonic solution.

Send one bell from the base to the Philippines and keep the other one in Wyoming. Cut each bell in half and send half of each bell to the other country. Weld the bells' halves together.

"And then we end up with two pairs that are almost identical to the original," Ramos said.

 

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

New Wyoming supercomputer expected to boost atmospheric science

From the Los Angeles Times: New Wyoming supercomputer expected to boost atmospheric science

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Here in the shortgrass prairie, where being stuck in the ways of the Old West is a point of civic pride, scientists are building a machine that will, in effect, look into the future.

This month, on a barren Wyoming landscape dotted with gopher holes and hay bales, the federal government is assembling a supercomputer 10 years in the making, one of the fastest computers ever built and the largest ever devoted to the study of atmospheric science.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research's supercomputer has been dubbed Yellowstone, after the nearby national park, but it could have been named Nerdvana. The machine will have 100 racks of servers and 72,000 core processors, so many parts that they must be delivered in the back of a 747. Yellowstone will be capable of performing 1.5 quadrillion calculations — a quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros — every second.
That's nearly a quarter of a million calculations, each second, for every person on Earth. In a little more than an hour, Yellowstone can do as many calculations as there are grains of sand on every beach in the world.
The study of climate and weather patterns has always been hamstrung by volatility — by elements of chaos in the seas and the air. That challenge is most famously summed up by the "butterfly effect," the idea that the flapping of a butterfly's wings on the coast of Africa can determine whether a hurricane will strike New Orleans.

The sheer speed of Yellowstone is designed to burst through the limits of chaos theory — the difference, allegorically, between predicting the odds of blackjack after playing five hands versus playing a million. The machine is expected to give scientists a clearer image of the state of the planet, and its future, revolutionizing the study of climate change, extreme weather events, wildfires, air pollution and more.

"These are chaotic systems, but it's just math," said Richard Loft, director of technology development at NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory. "We play statistics in the climate game. We feed in the basic laws of science, and out comes something that looks like the Earth's climate. It's an instrument. This is a mathematical telescope."

NCAR is in the business of research, not forecasting, but the tools and advances produced from its research could have a profound effect on forecasting. Armed with a high-fidelity portrait of Earth systems, scientists around the United States can begin to pinpoint the regional impact of changes in the weather and atmosphere.

Rather than warning of a tornado risk in the central U.S. between noon and 9 p.m., scientists might one day warn of a tornado risk in Woodson County, Kan., between 1 and 3 p.m. Rather than warning of a hurricane striking the coast of Texas, they hope to be able to warn of a hurricane striking the town of Freeport, with a top wind speed of 90 mph and a tidal surge of 4 1/2 feet.

That regional accuracy is particularly critical in the study of climate change. "The disaster of climate change happens on a regional scale," Loft said. "Everything is connected."

For example, once scientists use Yellowstone to help predict the melting of ice at the North Pole, which means significant change in nearby waters, they can better predict the patterns of storms that form in the Gulf of Alaska. Then Yellowstone can help predict how those storms will deposit snow atop the Sierra Nevada, down to precise changes in elevation on individual faces of mountains.

That snow will melt, and the water will run downhill — which means Yellowstone can help predict how much water California will have to drink, even the most efficient locations to build the state's reservoirs.
"It's taking the macro information and applying it to the things that matter," said Richard Neale, an NCAR project scientist.

The computer will be housed in a futuristic, $70-million compound west of Cheyenne. The National Science Foundation, which funds NCAR, is paying $50 million of the tab. The state of Wyoming will pay for the rest. In exchange, the state will occupy a dedicated chunk of the computer's power and memory. University of Wyoming scientists hope to use Yellowstone to advance "carbon sequestration," a promising method of storing harmful gases underground to combat climate change and open new avenues in industry.
Yellowstone will replace NCAR's Bluefire system, a supercomputer in its own right, though this one will have roughly 30 times the throughput of the old system.

Yellowstone will hold 600 sets of atmospheric data in its vast memory bank — temperatures, humidity, wind motion, rainfall. Information gleaned from the world's data-collection systems — buoys in the ocean, wind monitors fastened to the top of telephone poles — will be added to the archive.

The Wyoming compound is one of the most energy-efficient sites of its kind. Heat generated by the computer will be recycled to warm workers' offices, and pipes carrying the coolant water will have few 90-degree angles; pumping water through pipes that bend at gentle angles requires less energy.

The bulk of the machine will arrive at the 24-acre compound this month. Once the racks are lashed together, scientists will spend weeks "basically trying to break the system," said Anke Kamrath, director of operations and services at NCAR's systems lab. If they can't, they'll open it to researchers from across the nation, probably in August. Scientists will make proposals to book an "allocation" on the computer, similar to using minutes on a cellphone plan. Most will access the computer remotely.

Many are champing at the bit. Some hope to predict migration patterns of animals, others the success and failure of certain farm crops, others specific hillsides that would be the most efficient spots for wind turbines.
NCAR scientist Michael Wiltberger studies solar flares, superheated gas that emanates from the sun, with the potential to be enormously disruptive on Earth.

"Right now, we don't know why a particular configuration of the magnetic field of the sun is going to erupt," Wiltberger said. "We need to know — and now we can run millions times more models to provide meaningful predictions."

Armed with better predictions of what will happen when solar flares reach Earth — and where, precisely, they will occur — scientists could warn energy companies to protect against power surges. Global positioning systems could be disrupted, so farmers that use GPS to map crops could be warned to suspend planting operations.

NCAR senior scientist Morris Weisman specializes in a tricky corner of science: severe, high-impact weather events, which are by definition so rare that they are difficult to predict. "Scientifically non-satisfying" is how Weisman puts it — but with such a leap in computer modeling, he said, scientists could theoretically predict an extreme weather event "within an hour, within a few kilometers."

"We can conceive of that now," he said. "It's really exciting."

Loft marveled that such a dizzying array of experiments will be done using time-tested and sometimes rudimentary math — 19th century laws of thermal dynamics, rules of mechanics devised by Isaac Newton after an apple supposedly bonked him on the head and got him thinking about gravity. Yellowstone will use the same, just a whole lot of it at once.

"Newton was thinking about apples, and the moon. He never would have imagined that the same principles would have dictated the behavior of hurricanes," Loft said. "This science stuff works."

The scientists behind Yellowstone shrug at a bitter reality: cutting edge doesn't last long in their world. The Wyoming facility was built with enough space to accommodate the next generation of computer, which is already being contemplated, before this one is put together.

"We won't be cool for long," Loft said. "This business is ephemeral. There's not much room for nostalgia."



 

Wednesday, June 6, 2012