No pix, sorry, but here’s one from last July.

Say, aren’t BMWs supposed to have perfect 50/50 weight distribution? Oh well…

I hope Delft Hydraulics wrote themselves a nice get-out-of-future-disputes letter when the fingers start getting pointed in earnest. These are not the letters you are looking for.

So the Minister for the Environment has determined that the flood incident at Orchard Rd was “caused by an intense storm”. Let’s dive below the surface (groan) of this statement and see where a bit of arithmetic might lead us to. This could be a PSLE maths question some day.

Boon or bane? We report, you decide.
(photo credit: Green Future / Flickr)

The PUB’s webpage on Marina Barrage (http://www.pub.gov.sg/marina/Pages/default.aspx) is most informative. From there, we learn that the barrage has a catchment area of 10,000 hectares, and that during high tide, “giant pumps which are capable of pumping an Olympics-size swimming pool per minute will drain excess storm water into the sea”.

The Minister also acknowledged in Parliament (9 Feb 2009) that any litter thrown into canals in areas as far upstream as Ang Mo Kio will end up in the Marina Reservoir.

Let’s do some sums to see how this works out when it rains. On 16 June, 100mm of rain reportedly fell in 2 hours. So that’s 50mm per hour. If it fell uniformly over the catchment area, that would be 5 million cubic metres per hour.

Of course, not all of the water goes straight into the drainage system: some gets absorbed by the soil in between or under the built-up areas (we’ll come back later to the impact of that). If 75 per cent of the water gets into the drains, then 3.75 million cubic metres per hour flows into the reservoir. 75 per cent is probably too low since that level corresponds to the estimated “runoff coefficient” in Malaysia for a residential area with 8-12 houses per acre [footnote 1]. Now an acre is 43,560 square feet, therefore that density means houses with plot areas from 3630 to 5445 sq ft with a fair amount of garden in between. But let’s assume that 75 per cent is correct.

Since it was high tide, the giant pumps would have to be activated to drain all that water out of the reservoir. If we take it that each pump can move an Olympic-sized swimming pool per minute (50 x 25 x 2m = 2500 cubic metres), then all seven pumps working at that rate will drain 1.05 million cubic metres per hour. That’s 420 swimming pools.

But the  3.75 million cubic metres coming into the reservoir is 1500 swimming pools, or 1080 swimming pools more than can be pumped per hour. Oh dear.

Based on some fancy map analysis, the estimated area of the Marina Reservoir is about 2 sq km depending on how far you follow the Singapore and Kallang Rivers upstream. That’s 2 million square metres.

So, 3.75 million extra cubic metres flowing into the reservoir every hour will increase the water level in the reservoir by 1.875 metres. IF all the pumps are switched on, and working at their full rated capacity even though they need to push against the column of high tide seawater outside the barrage. Any less flow rate, and the reservoir level will increase faster than that. I seem to recall reading that one of the pumps was not turned on…

Putting it another way, the maximum rainfall that can hit the catchment area at high tide without causing the reservoir level to rise is 14mm per hour. Which is only two-thirds of the highest ever 24-hour rainfall recorded in Singapore, which was 512mm in 1978 (that’s an average of 21.3 mm per hour).

This table shows all that with fewer words:

You’re most welcome to pick holes in the assumptions. The obvious one that is not reflected is the so-called “hydrologic response” or the delay between the rain falling and the water runoff flowing into the drain system: but then, for highly urbanized environments we would expect this delay to be quite short… because there is not much soil at the surface to soak up the rainwater.

And yes, I said I would come back to the effect of soil absorption. If the normal drainage route (drains > canals > Kallang basin > sea) is walled off, the soil could be retaining more water than before. Which could make it less stable around the old, heavy trees beside the roads. Which could allow said trees to topple over when overloaded with rainwater and strong winds. As tragically happened to a motorist near the junction of Upper Thomson and Yio Chu Kang Roads, and others who were more fortunate to have walked away.

A few questions:

- What assumption for maximum rainfall (mm per hour) was used when designing the Marina Barrage?
- If less than the highest recorded rainfall, why? (bearing in mind that global warming since 1978 is expected to have led to more intense rain storms due to higher evaporation from the sea)
- If the designed maximum rainfall is lower than the highest recorded,
- could the designers have foreseen that rainfall above this level would back-flood the catchment area?
- if they could have foreseen this, which law firm is going to start the suits by flood victims?
- What is the change in soil moisture content in the catchment area since the barrage has been completed?

- If the soil moisture content has increased enough to affect tree stability due to lack of runoff into the sea, which law firm is going to start the suits by tree-fall victims (and their estates)?

*Say it in Cantonese.
Footnote 1: http://eprints.usm.my/8314/1/STUDY_ON_MALAYSIA_URBAN_RAIN_FALL_-_RUNOFF_CHARACTERISTICS.pdf, page 2

The following sign was spotted today at the inlet stack of a swimming pool complex. What does it mean?

Hmm… maybe it means that right now, there is a piece of personal protective equipment, which is conducting chemical charging in a cautious manner. Well done, equipment! Give that hard-working equipment a pat on the back for being cautious. It’s real small, too. Couldn’t see any sign of it around the, er, sign.

Then again, if the equipment is so smart, we wouldn’t need it to be protecting a person. It could be a chemical charging-bot or something instead, right?

For some more clues, let’s look at the sign which appears just above:

That makes slightly more sense. “Before you do chemicals charging here, go find some cautious personal protective equipment and put it on first.” But since we already know it can do the charging all by itself, it might treat you as… superfluous and make an… exception to its personal protective capabilities.

Matulos, stop being so literally-bloody-minded, you say! Obviously, that word Cautious is meant to be Caution. Duh!

Sorry, can’t help myself.

And now back to your regular programming.

What is ACTA? It’s the worst thing to happen to the internet since C14Li5 ads. Actually, even worse than that – you can delete spam, but if ACTA is implemented, it’ll be like a rootkit for all your legal systems. Good luck deleting it at that point.

Stop the madness

ACTA – the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement – is a multilateral (many nations) treaty being secretly negotiated now between 38 or so countries including the US, various EU states, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and… Singapore. You might guess from the title that it’s all about stopping fake designer handbags from being sold as the real thang (TM), or melamine milk powder (think of the children!).

You would guess wrong, because those laudable objectives are cover for the real and far more nefarious purpose: pushing US copyright law across the whole world through the backdoor (Bahasa Melayu: “main belakang”), brought to you by the content distribution industries.

The proposed terms include:

• enhanced border searches for infringing materials – make sure you are carrying all the receipts or CDs for those tracks on your iPod or phone or computer
• mandatory criminal sanctions for copyright infringement
• forcing ISPs to monitor users for copyright infringment and hand over their details to copyright holders
• three-strikes internet disconnection for suspected – NOT convicted – copyright infringers.

Allow me to explain how this is equal to legislating through the backdoor.

Normally, for those of you with parliamentary lawmaking factories, laws are introduced by the party in power, debated, amended and then voted on in public. Of course, the parliamentary drafting has lately been outsourced to interested industry groups, but that is just an instance of garbage in, garbage out.

BUT – if said industry group can finagle a treaty among countries to implement certain laws to its liking – why then, that international treaty overrides local laws. And each government can go home to its peasants, er constituents, and claim “but we must implement this as the law of the land because we are obliged to honour our treaty obligations under international law! Think of the childrenz!!!111″. And so the treaty takes effect in all countries which signed up (38, remember).

But don’t just take it from me. Here’s the expert opinion:

Michael Geist, including a disappointing yet not unentirely unexpected reference to Singapore’s desire for opacity. What, you may wonder, could be the quid pro quo from the US in return for this client state advocacy of the head office’s preferred position?

Geist’s ACTA timeline (warning: slightly painful colour scheme)

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Free Software Foundation

New York Times

Washington Post

Der Speigel (Googlefied auf Englisch)

This is a distributed denial of service attack done in the shadows, like so many scurrying roaches.

What can you do to stop it?

- Complain to your elected representatives (if any, haha) or your nominated executive body involved in the negotiations. In Singapore, the whole deal is all so sooper sekrit, it’s hard to tell whether that should be Trade and Industry, Foreign Affairs, IPOS, or what? Just get hold of them all.

- Spread the word

- (long shot) Write to your favourite content-distribution company and tell them that if they manage to get ACTA passed, you will stop buying their products. I’m putting this in the long shot category because an industry that sues its customers in an attempt to maintain its obsoleted business model is hardly going to be interested in said customers’ feedback, but your mileage may vary.

Get to it!

UPDATE 2010/06/20: The Free Software Foundation has published a firm, simple declaration on ACTA which you can sign. Of course this link is to the explanation of why the declaration is needed, after which you can jump to the declaration itself. What, you don’t expect to sign stuff on the Internet blindly, do you?

Recap: The car floodgates were thrown open in 2004 when the “forecast” deregistrations were kicked into, um, overdrive and the COE presses went pedal to the metal. Upton Sinclair strikes again (see top right of this here blog): all that yummy excise tax and licences and permits from the extra cars would have been so hard to pass up, don’t you think.

Result:

Another lovely day on the roads
(Credit: lynac – http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynac/4211864434/)

Now, getting public transport right is HARD. When you set it up as a profit making oligopoly (with publicly-listed players who are duty bound to maximise shareholder profits), you can only have two of {cheap, profitable, frequent enough to not be overloaded} in your model system. We’ll take the first two, thanks, and spend a nanoscopic portion of the profits on entertainingly disingenuous PR people to answer overcrowding complaints.

It’s so much easier to throw one’s hands up in the air, declare victory, start a car free-for-all and grab the cash falling from the sky. (Hands still up, right?) After all it only takes 20 minutes to get from anywhere to anywhere… for certain values of anywhere, and as long as you have the right number of outriders. For the rest, there’s Branded Paracetamol Extra Strength.

So, the Minister says that the vehicle population went up because they “persistently over-projected“. This error pattern isn’t normally tolerated in the private sector, let alone for five successive years, but whatever.

Now, the solution is to change the formula to use actual deregistrations. Aha! If deregistrations were over-projected, and they will now be measured at the actual level to input into the COE numbers, then the quota should go down. If the quota goes down, Econ 101 says price will go up. And… homo economicus comes to the party, sending COEs up 14K.

But wait: the Second Minster says “the spike in COE premiums and car prices this week was not caused by changes to a formula”. After all, there are so many other variables to point to, plus the new quota reduction hadn’t even kicked in yet, so how could the price move now because the supply will go down in future? [Hint: some people project more accurately than others. And homo economicus bats 1.00 - another neat standard feature. Batteries sold separately.]

They say that doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. But what do you call doing different things and pretending that nothing has changed?

[Update: The following month's open category rose another 7K. Hurrah!]

I can’t see any problems here…
Photo credits: Turkinator, Photos8.com

To see why, click on.

A little review of US legal history is in order:

In the beginning, there was a nice continent populated by natives living sustainably on the land. Then the Europeans came over and… oh wait, this is not a movie review site.

Well anyway, they Ctrl-Alt-Deleted the natives and set up the US constitution, which guaranteed equal rights, including voting rights* to all citizens of the rebel republic. This was a stark contrast to the English motherland, which only allowed voting by certain moneyed types (what we might now call “high net worth individuals with real estate”).

* means equal voting rights for all white males, of course. Slaves were valued at three-fifths of a man for the purpose of dividing electoral boundaries while women got no vote. It took about, oh, 180+ years to fix those bugs. Still, they were fixed in time to recently elect a President from among a black guy, a woman, some white guy and a Stepford fembot.

You have to hand it to those early Americans for being far-sighted when they drew up their social contract. For instance, here’s Thomas Jefferson in 1816:

England exhibits the most remarkable phenomenon in the universe in the contrast between the profligacy of its government and the probity of its citizens. And accordingly it is now exhibiting an example of the truth of the maxim that virtue & interest are inseparable… I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. (emphasis added)

Despite all of the elaborate checks and balances in the founding design of the US, Jefferson’s hope eventually crumbled with the rise of the early mega-corps, the trans-continental railroad companies. Here’s Collis P Huntington, one of the big 4 chaps in railways back then:

If you have to pay money to have the right thing done, it is only just and fair to do it. … If a man has the power to do great evil and won’t do right unless he is bribed to do it, I think the time spent will be gained when it is a man’s duty, to go up and bribe the judge. (emphasis added)

Okaaay, for certain values of “do right” I guess. Huntington’s contemporaries were those ethical paragons Andrew Carnegie and Leland Stanford, who, having made their ill-gotten fortunes managed to rehabilitate their Facebook rankings public images by donating chunks of it to “noble” foundations and universities. And now Bill Gates follows those time-honoured footsteps.

Anyway, back to the storyline. Episode 3: in 1886, the Supreme Court declared that corporations are people. Or maybe they didn’t, since the court reporter was an ex-railway company guy (see quotation on the top right of this blog). But if they did, it was an amazing piece of legal reasoning to go from “the 14th amendment to the constitution guarantees equal rights for blacks” to “the 14th amendment to the constitution guarantees equal rights to corporations”. Corporations, last I checked, were colourless or maybe arbitrarily coloured.

Now if corporations == people, and people have guaranteed freedom of speech, then corporations have guaranteed freedom of speech. Obvious logical conclusion.  So no law can be passed to abridge this corporate freedom.  And that’s what the Supreme Court has held – in particular, that corporations are free to spend as much of their own money on political ads as they want.

So now, since it costs money to speak (think advertising costs, which are the bulk of US politicians’ total campaign spending), the more money you have, the more freedom of speech you have. Can you see where this is leading? In fact the US did recognise the problems that such inequality of outcomes can produce, so they tried to restrict the level of political speech supported by corporations to make up for the original bad decision to treat corporations as persons in the first place. But these have now been swept aside.

The implications are as vast as the corporations’ cash holdings. As the commentariat has said, all they need to do next is allow Wal-Mart to run for President. Meanwhile, politicians need to be even more careful of upsetting their sponsors – they already spend more time on fund raising than constituency work it seems. If any elected representatives dare to bite the hands that already fed them by, for instance, supporting a law which is inconvenient for said benefactor, why then, all that’s needed is a little $100 million ad campaign to render him or her unelectable. [Like the way defamation suits are used in other parts of the world, ahem, but with more zeroes attached.]

The only way to fix this unholy mess is to limit political donations to a fixed amount per “person”, so a corp can have the same donation limit, through whatever channels, as an actual human: and maybe force the TV networks to run campaign ads for free as a condition of their license to exploit public communication infrastructure for oligopoly profit.

But hold on: any changes need to be passed by Congress, which as we’ve just established is bought and paid for by those who demand a return on their investment. Houston, we have a problem. The last hope then is to convince the (flesh and blood) voters that they need to demand action, march on Congress, flood the switchboard with angry complaints, and not stop until those reforms are passed. Probability: unfortunately low even though Obama has added his displeasure at the Court ruling to the chorus of others.

So why would you care about all this if you are not among the lucky 300 million or so US residents? Well, if you haven’t already noticed, the tentacles of the US politico-legal system are far more international than the typical American’s deliberately circumscribed circle of concern. Legal innovations start in the US and get propagated around the world through creative use of free trade agreement negotiations and other, shall we say, less-than-democratic tactics. Driven by those with the most dollars, er, votes, of course.

So thanks for getting to the end of this post: be sure to look out for the wonderful impacts of this absolutely logical, completely wrong decision coming soon to a jurisdiction near you.

Now, that is indeed a noble objective and one that will never be fully achieved, since people’s needs, and even the number of people, keep changing. Therefore, lifetime employment. Genius! Cyril N. Parkinson would have approved.

And sometimes this vision is manifested in the way things are done. Such as publicity for improvement works. Take the signboard for the Woodsville interchange. (Well don’t actually take it – that would be stealing). Rows of them are nailed up at the junction where the PIE meets Serangoon, Upper Serangoon, Bendemeer and Macpherson roads:

See, a good example is being set with the spiffy hybrid car and a multi-seater coach. Efficient, green, shiny, happy, etc. Fully on board with the people-centricity requirement.

What’s not to like? Yes, those standard Prius wheels are naff central, but that is hardly the LTA’s fault… What’s that you say? Where are the people? Why, right there in the green vehicles, of course. Look closer:

Hey, wait a minute. Where did you guys go? Maybe they considerately double parked in front of the bus and jumped out to go buy solar-fried char kuay teow. So the bus occupants must be jumping up and down screaming bloody murder, right? Let’s see:

Holy neutron bomb, Batman! There’s not a soul in sight.

Remind me of the vision statement again… “a people-centred land transport system”… ah, yes. So the thinking must have been, let’s put up signs showing the vision statement and vehicles with no people in, around or under them, just to reinforce the anthropocentricity of said vision. Nice one.

Here’s the irony: the actual construction of the interchange is being handled quite well from a disruption-reduction standpoint thanks to, IIRC, a switched-on project manager who was profiled in the State Times at one stage. But the graphic designers had a problem translating the vision into… reality? Whatapity.

Ken Caldeira, the climate scientist they interviewed for the book

RealClimate, the blog by actual climate scientists from NASA and other places

Paul Krugman, last year’s Nobel economics prize winner

and about 43,700 others.

I reckon they need to do the decent thing and edit all the unsold copies plus put up a prominent health warning on their website saying that the first edition is wrong. To paraphrase Depeche Mode, “I was suckered by the wrong side / with the wrong lies / talking up the wrong uncertainties”. Anything less would be intellectually dishonest… and we can’t have that from upright members of academia and the fourth estate, can we.

How ’bout it, Steves???

LTA statistics say that from 2003 to 2008, the number of buses and road length in lane-kilometres both grew by 5% but the car population jumped 36%.

not the final solution (props:http://blog.dyvine.com/?p=9)

So… despite mushrooming ERP gantries, motorists face obscene jams plus chronic parking shortages. A bachelor of rocket science isn’t needed to see that 36 into 5 doesn’t go.

How about taking public transport? Well, public transport operators, being at heart public listed companies are duty-bound to maximise profits, but face desultory fines for bus service lapses. If the fine for failing to meet standards is $100 and the profit from short-changing service is much more, it doesn’t take Warren Buffett-level acumen to decide what to do. You got it: operators rationally choose not to expand capacity to meet peak demand – leaving bus commuters with overcrowded, infrequent services.

For similar rational economic reasons, taxis seem scarce until call bookings come through (can you say call booking fee?).

These are not the outcomes which beleaguered commuters are looking for. Externalities as far as the eye can see… nein danke.

Yes Virginia, there seem to be some road widening works going on right now. But if you think these will magically transform peak hour traffic speeds into “too fast too furious”, you are in for a disappointment. It’s gonna be more like “too little too late”: the number of lane-kilometres added is still as far behind car growth as a Chery QQ in a drag race with a GTR.

Adding more bus lanes and give-way rules won’t reduce congestion when there are too few buses and too many cars. Not to mention that all those cars stuck in jams do sweet fanny adams for the poor environment.

In fact, slowing the car population increase is not enough: the car fleet must actually shrink, which means that genuinely attractive alternatives to driving must be offered to tempt motorists out of their cars.

Perverse incentives for transport providers to reduce service – like the taxi booking surcharge, and the imbalance between profits from curtailing bus frequencies vs. fines for failing service standards – must be removed.

System bottlenecks like outdated train signalling networks, narrow expressways and mis-timed traffic lights are major barriers to today’s brittle, easily-disrupted commuter flows. By brittle I mean even bigger jams arise from unforeseen circumstances, like accidents, Great Patriotic Sales, or… rain.

These bottlenecks must be removed: time wasted on commuting delays affects the country’s competitiveness and productivity in a wonky world economy. [New LTA slogan: "four lanes good, three lanes bad". OINK!]