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Using R44 And A PowerBook To Bust Illegal Seawalls
Sylvestre writes "Ken Adelman, founder of TGV and Network Alchemy, is using a digital camera, helicopter, and a Power Book to take a high resolution photograph every 500 feet down the California coast. The goal? Busting people putting up illegal sea walls. The catch so far? One golf course covered the beach with boulders. Also of note: the website has 44 gigs of photos so far, runs on solar power, and is Microsoft Free. Best use of technology I've seen all month!"
Sea walls are illegal if it can obstruct the natural sea life from living its life. Example: frogs cannot get from the water to the land to multiply and be fruitful.
TGV was really goddamned cool. They were purchased by Cisco a few years ago and it all went to hell. They used to have catered lunches every Friday (I attended several of them) and every time I went it was from somewhere else that was good.
Anyway I didn't know the place myself well enough to actually know who was responsible for any of the cool shit, but TGV used to make network software for VAXen. I logged into a pub ftp that used their ftpd once, it was a joy because it made it look like Unix.
In any case TGV made the fastest TCP stack for Windows 3.1. It didn't make much of a difference when it came to doing PPP or SLIP over a modem because modems were max 28.8k in those days and they were real modems with buffered FIFOs and whatnot. But if you were using 10mbps ethernet or better then the TGV stack was dramatically faster than trumpet's. They also made a fast TCP stack for Windows 95 etc, but Cisco didn't do anything with it and by the time they were ready to do anything with TGV they had crushed the place's spirit, failed to open reqs for needed personnel, etc. Some of the engineers went to Cisco, and some of them went elsewhere. I'm not sure if the Santa Cruz office is still there or not. The person who was the director of the site at the time I quit from that office (As a Cisco employee) was a plant from Cisco, and not technical at all at that point. (She supposedly wrote some code at some point, IIRC.)
TGV is the birthplace of the Mainframe Mouse. It was made of ~0.75" acrylic, and contained a normal-scale mouse attached to a bowling ball. You sat on it and gripped the handlebars... well you get the idea.
TGV used to be the groovy kind of place that needed a soldering iron even though they were a software developer. Hold your hat over your heart when you remember the last time you saw a shop like that last.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because beaches are public property. Erecting a wall in the middle of the freeway might improve your property too (cut down on that damn traffic noise!) but that's also illegal.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Frogs do not live in saltwater. No frog larvae (tadpoles) are able to survive in salt water. A very small minority of frogs are able to tolerate brackish water as adults (Bufo marinus, the infamous caine toad, is one such animal), but no adult frogs live in seawater either.
I'm sure you're right about why sea walls are illegal, but if the legislation is limited to points along the coast, then your specific example is incorrect. Destruction of the habitat of shorebirds or the nesting sties of seaturtles would be a better example.
The angel in the oatmeal.
I guess it's easier if you are the department of ecology.
http://apps.ecy.wa.gov/shorephotos/index.html
Lots of other folks have posted the explanation - beaches in CA are PUBLIC property. Nobody owns them except CA citizens. Someone builds a rock wall in a public park, it's vandalism. They do something that accelerates erosion or otherwise degrades the environment, IN A PUBLIC PARK, they should get their heads handed to them.
They should have used an effective and inexpensive method, like building a tunnel for the frogs...
(I have GOT to get back to California to get a picture of an advertisement billboard they've got out there, before they wake up and take it down. In keeping with the "frog" theme, they have a giant fluorescent frog posing on a series of billboards with the text of the advertisement. One of them says Davis is "Green and Safe and Nuclear Free"....with a GIANT GLOWING FROG standing next to the words. Too funny...)
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for folks to live on?
Better habitat for wildlife, more places for people to live, less erosion of the actual coast, etc.
Of course, it won't be so good for the surfers and the folks who paid lots of money to live right on the edge, but for the rest of us (animals & plants included) it would be very nice to have lots of places to live on the coastal shelf.
It's not just my crazy idea: Dutch planners eye a new frontier: the raging North Sea
"A square yard of land reclaimed from the North Sea costs about 260 guilders, or about $130. The same size patch of mainland can cost more than triple that."
I wonder if there isn't some other motive here, requiring high-res images.
Bingo. An NTSC mini-DV camera gives you 720x480 resolution. Not only that, but you'd be amazed at how hard it is to make out detail in a still image from a video signal. And a 29.97 frames/sec video feed doesn't give you much of a benefit - maybe if you were flying overhead in a SR-71. In a helicopter, 1 frame/sec would be overkill. You'd be much better at 1 frame/sec with 30x the resolution.
You say never build that close to a beach. The thing is, cliffs and foreshores move over time. It may happen gradually, or there may be a huge slip that moves the coast inwards by many yards overnight. So when you say "don't build that close to a beach", how not close is not close enough ? Where I live the same discussion is going on. The council discourages building seawalls. Trouble is, theres only one line of houses, then the public road. What happens when the houses are gone and the road comes under threat ? In some parts of the UK the land is disappearing at the rate of up to 5 metres per year.
Sure, developers who want to create huge unnatural structures that play havoc with the natural wave and current patterns should get a hard time. But its a bit too simplistic to just say "never build near the sea".
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Good on this guy. If the government won't pull their finger out it is the obligation of the citizens.
Seen a lot of comments here about why seawalls are bad and the only explanations given are legals ones. Not suprising given most people here are americans.
The reason is one of basic physics, the legal arguments have to take second place.Unless you think you can legislate against nature. Please ignore this if you think you have a right to destroy other people property and public property and the general environment to protect your own interests.
If there is a rock, a wall, a washed up spare tyre, anything that is a hard object on the beach, then when the water hits it during normal wave action, the wave will retreat back to sea at a higher speed because it's energy hasn't been absorbed. Normal beaches (with sand) absorb the wave impact. If the water is going faster, it removes sand as it returns to the ocean and thus erodes the beach, much faster than natural movements. Even a small hard object on a beach can show this, one season I saw the tire I mentioned above, a tractor tyre, chop a gully about 0.5m deep and about 6-7m wide, just from wave action on this one small object. A wall will destroy the beach.
Remember beaches ARE NOT FIXED in the earth, they rise, fall and move around on a seasonal basis. Beach nourishment is not to replace sand that is lost, but to re-build the natural shoke absorbing action of an already eroded one.
Sydney residents please visit http://www.realsurf.com/nowall/ and please think about supporting this cause, we know what private interests have f**ked up in the states through ignorance and greed, lets not let it happen at home.
phil
Actually, a bigger problem here are landslides. What you call a "cliff" is actually a mountain, and in wet (el nino) years the mountains tend to "erode" a little faster. In the picture (easier seen in the big picture) you can see a landslide that took out a bunch of houses here a few years ago. Notice how a chunk of the hill has slid into town. I hope it wasn't where the poster lived!