What I wrote last month,

“I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but almost every anecdote and every little tidbit of information were new to me. Scott’s point – that we don’t know almost anything about infrastructure – was thus proven to me.”

…was reinforced when I read the book itself: I don’t know anything about infrastructure. But after reading the book I can say I know a little bit, understand how much I don’t know, and realize how much more I’d like to know. I bet it was fun watching me as I was reading it, exclaiming on average five times per page “This is so cool”, and “Hey, this is neat” and “Wow, I had no idea!” and (rarely) “w00t! Here’s a tidbit I actually heard of before” and “Hey, I know where this is!” (as I lived in Raleigh for eleven years, I know the area well).

A few years ago, Scott was just as ignorant about infrastructure as most of us are. But then his curiousity got better of him and he started researching. He would start at his house in Raleigh and trace all the wires and cables and pipes going in and out of the house to see where they led. Sometimes there would be a crew on his street digging into the asphalt and fixing something and he would approach them and ask questions. At other times he would figure out where the headquarters are and who to ask to talk to:

“What Scott realized during the two years of research for the book is that people in charge of infrastructure know what they are doing. When something doesn’t work well, or the system is not as up-to-date as it could be, it is not due to incompetence or ignorance, but because there is a lack of two essential ingredients: money and political will. These two factors, in turn, become available to the engineers to build and upgrade the systems, only if people are persuaded to act. And people are persuaded to act in two ways: if it becomes too costly, or if it becomes too painful to continue with the old way of doing things. It is also easier to build brand new systems for new services than it is to replace old systems that work ‘well enough’ with more more modern ways of providing the same service.”

In a sense, this book is a memoir of curiosity as Scott describes his own adventures with a hard-hat, a modern Jean Valjean sloshing his way through the Raleigh sewers, test-driving the public transportation, and passing multiple security checks in order to enter the nearby nuclear plant.

But it is more than just a story of personal awe at modern engineering. Scott weaves in the explanations of the engineering and the underlying science, explains the history and the politics of the Raleigh infrastructure, the historical evolution of technologies underlying modern infrasturcture, and illustrates it by comparisons to other infrastructures: how does New York City does that, how did Philadelphia did it 50 years ago, how did London 500 years ago, how about Rome 2000 years ago?

“What is really astonishing is how well the systems work, even in USA which has fallen way behind the rest of the developed world. We are taking it for granted that the systems always work, that water and electricity and phone and sewers and garbage collection and public transportation always work. We get angry on those rare occasions when a system temporarily fails. We are, for the most part, unprepared and untrained to provide some of the services ourselves in times of outages, or to continue with normal life and work when a service fails. And we are certainly not teaching our kids the necessary skills – I can chop up wood and start a wood stove, I can use an oil heater, I know how to slaughter and render a pig, how to get water out of a well, dig a ditch, and many other skills I learned as a child (and working around horses) – yet I am not teaching any of that to my own kids. They see it as irrelevant to the modern world and they have a point – chance they will ever need to employ such skills is negligible.”

And this brings me to the point where I start musing about stuff that the book leaves out. As I was reading, I was constantly hungry for more. I wanted more comparisons with other cities and countries and how they solved particular problems. I wanted more history. I wanted more science. I wanted more about political angles. But then, when I finished, I realized that a book I was hungry for would be a 10-tome encyclopic monograph and a complete flop. It is good that Scott has self-control and self-discipline as a writer to know exactly what to include and what to leave out. He provides an excellent Bibliography at the end for everyone who is interested in pursuing a particular interest further. His book’s homepage is a repository for some really cool links – just click on the infrastructure you are interested in (note that “Communications” is under construction, as it is in the real world – it is undergoing a revolution as we speak so it is hard to collect a list of ‘definitive’ resources – those are yet to be written):

What many readers will likely notice as they go through the book is that there is very little about the environmental impacts of various technologies used to ensure that cities function and citizens have all their needs met. And I think this was a good strategy. If Scott included this information, many readers and critics would focus entirely on the environmental bits (already available in so many other books, articles and blogs) and completely miss what the book is all about – the ingenuity needed to keep billions of people living in some kind of semblance of normal life and the interconnectedness that infrastructure imposes on the society, even on those who would want not to be interconnected:

“There are people who advocate for moving “off the grid” and living a self-sufficient existence. But, as Scott discovered, they are fooling themselves. Both the process of moving off the grid and the subsequent life off the grid are still heavily dependent on the grid, on various infrastructure systems that make such a move and such a life possible, at least in the developed world.”

My guess is, if there’s anyone out there who could possibly not like this book, it will be die-hard libertarians who fantasize about being self-sufficient in this over-populated, inter-connected world.

At several places in the book, Scott tries to define what infrastructure is. It is a network that provides a service to everyone. It has some kind of control center, a collection center or distribution center. It has a number of peripheral stations and nodes. And there are some kinds of channels that connect the central place to the outside stations and those stations to the final users – every household in town. There is also a lot of redundancy built into the system, e.g., if a water main breaks somewhere, you will still get your water but it will come to you via other pipes in surrounding streets, with zero interruption to your service.

Scott covers surveying of land, stormwater, freshwater, wastewater, roads, power, solid waste, communications (phone, broadcast media, internet) and transportation (e.g., public transportation, trains, airplanes). These are the kinds of things that are traditionally thought of as ‘infrastructure’. But aren’t there other such systems? I’d think security has the same center-spokes model of organization as well: police stations and sub-stations (distribution centers) that can send cops out wherever needed (distribution channels), with potential criminals brought to court (processing centers) and if found guilty placed in prison (collection center). Similarly with fire-departments. Ambulances are just the most peripheral tentacles of the health-care infrastructure. The local-county-state-federal political system is also a kind of infrastructure. So is the military. So is the postal system. So is the food industry and distribution.

Thinking about all of these other potential examples of infrastructure made me realize how many services that require complex infrastructure undergo cycles of centralization and decentralization. For transportation, everyone needed to have a horse. Later, it was centralized into ship, railroad, bus and airline infrastructures. But that was counteracted by the popularity of individually owned cars. And of course taxis were there all along. And as each decade and each country has its own slight moves towards or away from centralization, in the end a balance is struck in which both modes operate.

You raised your own chickens. Then you bought them from mega-farms. Now many, but not most citizens, are raising their own chickens again. It is not feasible – not enough square miles on the planet – for everyone to raise chickens any more. But having everyone fed factory chicken is not palatable to many, either. Thus, a new, uneasy balance.

Nowhere is this seen more obviously today as in Communications infrastructure. We are in the middle of a big decentralization movement, away from broadcast (radio, TV and yes, newspaper industry infrastructure with its printing presses, distribution centers and trucks) infrastructure that marked about half of 20th century, and forward into something more resembling the media ecosystem of the most of human history – everyone is both a sender and a reciever, except that instead of writing letters or assembling at a pub every evening, we can do this online. But internet is itself an infrastructure – a series of tubes network of cables and it is essential not to allow any centralized corporation to have any power over what passes through those cables and who gets to send and receive stuff this way.

Finally, as I was reading the book I was often wishing to see photographs of places or drawings of the engineering systems he describes. As good as Scott is at putting it in words, there were times when I really wanted to actually see how something looks like. And there were times when what I really wanted was something even more interactive, perhaps an online visualization of an infrastructure system that allows me to change parameters (e.g., amount of rainfall per minute) and see how that effects some output (e.g., rate of clearing water off the streets, or speed at which it is rushing through the pipes, or how it affects the water level of the receving river). That kind of stuff would make this really come to life to me.

Perhaps “On The Grid” will have an iPad edition in the future in which the text of the book is just a begining of the journey – links to other sources (e,g., solutions around the globe, historical sources), to images, videos, interractive visualizations and, why not, real games. After all, it is right here in Raleigh that IBM is designing a game that allows one to plan and build modern infrasctructure – CityOne. These two should talk to each other and make something magnificient like that.

The store was packed. The store sold out all the books before Scott was even done talking. The C-Span Book TV crew was there filming so the event will be on TV some day soon. Scott was also, earlier yesterday, on WUNC’s The State Of Things (the podcast will soon be online here) and the day before that he was on KERA’s Think with Krys Boyd (download MP3 podcast by clicking here).

Scott’s energy and enthusiasm are infectuos. He held the audience captive and often laughing. The questions at the end were smart and his answers perfectly on target. But most importantly, we all learned a lot last night. I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but almost every anecdote and every little tidbit of information were new to me. Scott’s point – that we don’t know almost anything about infrastructure – was thus proven to me.

What Scott realized during the two years of research for the book is that people in charge of infrastructure know what they are doing. When something doesn’t work well, or the system is not as up-to-date as it could be, it is not due to incompetence or ignorance, but because there is a lack of two essential ingredients: money and political will. These two factors, in turn, become available to the engineers to build and upgrade the systems, only if people are persuaded to act. And people are persuaded to act in two ways: if it becomes too costly, or if it becomes too painful to continue with the old way of doing things. It is also easier to build brand new systems for new services than it is to replace old systems that work ‘well enough’ with more more modern ways of providing the same service.

There are people who advocate for moving “off the grid” and living a self-sufficient existence. But, as Scott discovered, they are fooling themselves. Both the process of moving off the grid and the subsequent life off the grid are still heavily dependent on the grid, on various infrastructure systems that make such a move and such a life possible, at least in the developed world.

What is really astonishing is how well the systems work, even in USA which has fallen way behind the rest of the developed world. We are taking it for granted that the systems always work, that water and electricity and phone and sewers and garbage collection and public transportation always work. We get angry on those rare occasions when a system temporarily fails. We are, for the most part, unprepared and untrained to provide some of the services ourselves in times of outages, or to continue with normal life and work when a service fails. And we are certainly not teaching our kids the necessary skills – I can chop up wood and start a wood stove, I can use an oil heater, I know how to slaughter and render a pig, how to get water out of a well, dig a ditch, and many other skills I learned as a child (and working around horses) – yet I am not teaching any of that to my own kids. They see it as irrelevant to the modern world and they have a point – chance they will ever need to employ such skills is negligible.

I got the book last night and am about to start reading it – very eagerly so. Scott started with his house in Raleigh and traced all the wires and cables and pipes going in and out of the house to see where they led. He compared what he learned in Raleigh and its various infrastructure experts and officials, to the equivalent services in other geographical places, and traced them back in history. I can’t wait to read the synthesis of all that research. I hope you will read it, too.

Today, I asked Scott Huler to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

My scientific background is all writing; that is, I’m a writer who has always loved science and scientists, but I never practiced advanced science. I’ve been all about getting the word out from the start. All through school I took every science course I could — geology, astronomy, biology, calculus, physics, chemistry — because I loved the power of science and scientific thinking and understanding, but I never doubted I’d major, as I did, in literature. Writing was what I wanted to do.

Now I live in Raleigh, NC, surrounded by interesting science and interesting scientists and never lack for subject matter. I’ve written about — and write about — lots of things, not just science, but even that generalism is a sort of scientific philosophy. The natural philosophers of the 17th and 18th century were in many ways the first true scientists, but they didn’t think of themselves as such — they thought of themselves as people who wanted to know the whys and hows of their world, and they didn’t limit themselves to certain processes or issues. In my work, and my life, I aspire to be like them.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I’ve always wanted to write, so out of college I’ve just sort of made my way towards writing work of one sort or another. That’s let to electronic media as well, doing radio work for NPR and its affiliates and video work on websites and other places. Since I’ve done every newsroom job from copy editor to managing editor and told stories in books, on the radio, and on video, I like to think I can let the story come to me and tell me how it wants to express itself: sound? images? words on paper? When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail. I like to try to be more like a tool belt.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate with projects. I’ll list a few projects during which for at least at one moment I thought, “If this is as good as it gets, if this is the best assignment I ever have, I cannot complain.”

– in 1995 as a member of the staff of the News & Observer in Raleigh I joined with staffers of four other papers up and down the East Coast and joined with them to complete a sort of relay through hike of the Appalachian Trail. The N&O was an early adopter of the web, so there was a lot of traffic on the website for that (examples: Going The Distance On A Smokies Trail and Our adventure ends)

– in 1997-98 I spent much of my free time hanging around the garage following a top-level NASCAR race team, trying to understand how the physics lesson of making a car go fast. That too led to a book, but here’s a cool story I did for the Times about what happens when it all goes wrong.

– in 2002-3 I finished two decades of the most desultory research by spending a year on a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan getting to the bottom of the Beaufort Scale of wind force. No, I am not kidding, the Beaufort Scale of wind force. It’s a smashing, poetic, highly observational, descriptive scale of the wind. Long story, but it turned into a book, and the weeks I spent sketching the coast of Montevideo, Uruguay, from the bridge of a hydrofoil or hoisting sail on the barque “Europa” were lifetime reporting highlights.

– in 2004 I skipped out on much of the pregnancy of my first child to spend months tracing the journey of Odysseus from Troy, in Turkey, to Ithaca in Greece, decidedly by the scenic route. I hope the book was good, but I was just glad to be out there.

– in 2008-9 I spent most of my time going to water plants and sewage plants, scrabbling around in storm drains and substations, trying to make sense of all the infrastructure that serves my house and everybody’s house. It was like having my entire work life be the best sixth-grade field trip of your life, for two years. The book is just out.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Amazingly, for the first time ever, I haven’t just walked away from the topic I’ve finished a book on. There seems to be so much more to talk about in the systems I’ve spent the last years learning about that I’m not quite ready to be done. To that end I’ve spent the last month doing a video project for the city of Raleigh about its brand-new water plant opening May 12 and hoping to do more of the same. That said, I am and will remain a generalist — you never know what the next project will be.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I’m fascinated by the history of science in our daily lives, whether it’s finding out through the Beaufort Scale that the wind was oil back in the day, powering our entire commerce structure, or that Herodotus and Pliny pointed to aqueducts and sewers as the glory of Greece and Rome, not to the Parthenon Pantheon, the Agora or the Forum. Science is foundational, and I guess in days like these it’s almost thrilling to fight those who believe that when you turn a key and your car starts making noise 100 times out of a hundred or you punch in numbers and a bell rings in your friend’s house a continent away then science is good, but when the exact same process of thinking leads you to conclusions that challenge your beliefs science is bad. That in itself is fundamentally unscientific thinking, and it’s shocking to live in a time when it’s in its ascendance, but at least you don’t have to look hard to find the bad guys.

As a researcher and reporter I both love and hate the web. I love how easy it is to find people who know about something I’m trying to learn about, but I hate it too. Instead of a few local sources, or a few gatekeepers who can lead me where I need to go, I’m faced with a panoply of sources, each of whom has strategically keyworded his or her resume or home page to maximize contacts and so only might actually know about the topic I think he or she should. In some ways things like Google books can let me view, in my home, an amazing source like this one, which I ran across in my research on the Beaufort Scale, but in some ways I preferred it when getting off your butt and getting out in the world was job one of a reporter. Like all technology, you still have to manage it and master it, not the other way around.

But the scientific community makes such a great job of working to get information out by using the web that overall it’s just a treat to have that resource. Though hard to find time to do anything else once you click into it.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I think I’ve answered that above, in a way. I love the links I get from scientific friends on Twitter, but if I did nothing but check into and respond to those links that would be my entire day. And almost every link is worth following — that’s the problem. And I do need to do more responding — I need to be a more active part of that community. But then who does my work? As an independent writer I used to tell people I spent 40 percent of my time as a salesperson, 30 percent as a dunning agent, 20 percent in office management, and 10 percent in information technology — and in my spare time I did writing work. And that was before the Internet, much less social media. So it’s murderously difficult to both work and blog and Tweet and so forth. But what are the options?

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I really discovered science blogs through Anton Zuiker’s mistersugar.com. I’m in a science writers’ book club with him, and he’s opened my eyes to the nature of blogging and of scientific blogging especially. Science bloggers are such a specific case of people with the right reasons for blogging and such trustworthy sources that they really are an amazing community as well as a resource. I have loved being even such a sort of Kuiper Belt participant. I turn to them for information all the time now. I LOVE deepseanews.com and a blog around the clock, but honestly I find almost anywhere I turn in the world of science blogging I’m lost for hours finding out about stuff I had never even thought to wonder about.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I would call #scio10 the best conference I’ve ever attended. The session about the future of online communication wondered whether there was any hope for “plain old text blogging” — this at the exact moment that mainstream newspapers are still trying to work out a response to plain old blogging. That makes me feel both hopeless for newspapers and thrilled at the capacities for communication.

But above all #scio10 reminded me what wise people never lose sight of: that “meatspace” is not merely important but the point. With all the Tweeting and blogging and wireless this and Skype that, what brought all those people together was the appreciation of being together. Even with chips in our heads, we’ll remain mammals and real space, real time creatures. I love that #scio never loses track of that, and I think it’s what makes it unique.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. Good luck with the new book and see you soon!

Scott Huler at ScienceOnline2010

You can read a review in Raleigh News & Observer, as well as an article by Scott in the same paper and another one at the Science In The Triangle blog.

Scott Huler has a book reading and signing event on Wednesday, May 12th at the Regulator in Durham, then another one on May 26th at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. I’ll try to make it to one or both of these – and you should, too.

From the blurb:

“Wires, pipes, roads, and water support the lives we lead, but the average person doesn’t know where they go or even how they work. Our systems of infrastructure are not only shrouded in mystery, many are woefully out of date. In On the Grid, Scott Huler takes the time to understand the systems that sustain our way of life, starting from his own quarter of an acre in North Carolina and traveling as far as Ancient Rome.

Each chapter follows one element of infrastructure to its source — or to its outlet. Huler visits power plants, watches new asphalt pavement being laid, and traces a drop of water backward from his faucet to the Gulf of Mexico and then a drop of his wastewater out to the Atlantic. Huler reaches out to guides along the way, bot the workers who operate these systems and the people who plan them.

Mesmerizing and often hilarious, On the Grid brings infrastructure to life and details the ins and outs of our civilization wigh fascinating, back-to-basics information about the systems we all depend on.”