nsure about those alert tones
This afternoon, I found myself wondering how far it was to the largest city in our area. I decided to look beyong the provincial map, and went for a regional version. There it was. A true city, with two bridges and a long history. My first calculation of the distance, using thumb prints on the screen, did not scale well, so I asked my friend, Google. About two hundred kilometers, give or take a knuckle.
Known distance. How about travel time? Monty Python had a babble about swallows, and I didn’t care about them. If we decided to drive, the old argumebt about bridge vs ferry would be invoked (it alwas is). So I lapsed into theoetical calculations. If the wind is blowing from the south, at twenty clicks, smoke from a fire in an industrial park would require more than ten hours. That ignores the rats escaping the fire, but again, I don’t care.
Here’ the thing. This afternoon, we had some of those alert signals on the mobile phone network. Just letting us know about a fire (unseen, unsmelled) in an industrial park. I really want to know why. Is their system so poorly conceived that they can’t send warning to places where it matters? And why did we receive severaal warning, at erratic intervals (oh, right, diffeent networks). I’m not sure the alert tones were helpful, here. And the daily newspaper won’t be published for hours, so I might smell the emergency before I have a chance to read about it. Clearly, not a system meant for real time. Why, when they had a huge explosion in that city, more than a century ago, the sound got here faster than that.
