A firebreak 2,258 kilometers long, 100 meters wide at its narrowest, kept the fires coming from Mongolia on the other side of the border.
On satellite images, the colors on either side of that line are wildly different. The left side is scorched black. The right is still autumn grass.
The fire started on October 8 in the Numrug Protected Area in Mongolia’s Dornod Province, just north of the Greater Khingan Mountains.
More than 3,400 people on the Chinese side were deployed. They held the line for seven days and six nights, containing 330 kilometers of fire front. Not a single lick of open flame crossed over.
A lot of people think that firebreak is a wall. Actually, it’s plowed into the ground—a pretty basic solution. Tractors and excavators turn up the grass roots along the border, exposing a strip of bare soil. That breaks the chain of fuel. When the fire reaches it, there’s nothing left to burn, so it dies down on its own.
But the figures from the National Forestry and Grassland Administration are even more worth a look. Over the past decade, this strip has stopped fires coming from across the border more than 560 times, keeping over 98 percent of them out of the country. The way they do it is to plow the entire line over again with tractors, sleds, and excavators every year before winter.
That leaves the less than two percent that got through—fires that actually crossed the border and burned in. There have been ten such cases in the past decade: four on the China-Mongolia border, six on the China-Russia border. That’s all.
When gale-force winds of level nine or ten kick up, burning clumps of grass can be swept over a 100-meter-wide firebreak and land at the forest’s edge. At that point, no matter how wide the firebreak is, it won’t help. People have to go in and fight the fire through the heat. And sometimes there’s nothing they can do.
So, when you get down to it, what this firebreak does is reduce the odds to an acceptable level. It can’t make fire impossible. How wide is wide enough? A hundred meters or three hundred depends on how strong the winds are that year, how much the forest is worth, and how big the budget is. It’s just a matter of calculation.
On the blockchain, the same calculation is called waiting for confirmations. In Section 11 of the white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto included a table: if an attacker controls ten percent of the computing power, then after five confirmations, the chance they’ll catch up is nine in ten thousand. After ten confirmations, it’s one in a million. He never said it was impossible to tamper with. He said the odds could be made small enough.
Different exchanges require different numbers of confirmations. Some credit a deposit after two. Some require six. Some are willing to wait for thirty. The difference isn’t really about technology. It’s about how much money the exchange has on the line, who it’s dealing with, and whether it could afford to cover the losses if something went wrong.
You sleep soundly on this side because someone plowed a firebreak over there. You feel reassured when you see your coins arrive in the app because a company chose that number for you behind the scenes. Either way, you never signed off on it.
I’ve been thinking this through. Firebreaks and confirmation counts are the same thing. A sense of security can’t be verified; it can only be priced. Whoever sets the price is on the hook for that two percent.
There’s still no reliable figure for the area burned. In late September, Mongolia’s National Emergency Management Agency reported a year-to-date total of 41 forest fires and 115 grassland fires, covering about 1.2 million hectares combined.
Another set of figures says that by mid-October there had been 172 fires, burning 1.0169 million hectares. The two sets of numbers really don’t line up. No one can say which is right, and I haven’t been able to find the original data tables.
That firebreak has to be plowed all over again every year before winter.
$BTC $ETH $LINK
#蒙古国草原火 #防火隔离带 #比特币 #Blockchain
On satellite images, the colors on either side of that line are wildly different. The left side is scorched black. The right is still autumn grass.
The fire started on October 8 in the Numrug Protected Area in Mongolia’s Dornod Province, just north of the Greater Khingan Mountains.
More than 3,400 people on the Chinese side were deployed. They held the line for seven days and six nights, containing 330 kilometers of fire front. Not a single lick of open flame crossed over.
A lot of people think that firebreak is a wall. Actually, it’s plowed into the ground—a pretty basic solution. Tractors and excavators turn up the grass roots along the border, exposing a strip of bare soil. That breaks the chain of fuel. When the fire reaches it, there’s nothing left to burn, so it dies down on its own.
But the figures from the National Forestry and Grassland Administration are even more worth a look. Over the past decade, this strip has stopped fires coming from across the border more than 560 times, keeping over 98 percent of them out of the country. The way they do it is to plow the entire line over again with tractors, sleds, and excavators every year before winter.
That leaves the less than two percent that got through—fires that actually crossed the border and burned in. There have been ten such cases in the past decade: four on the China-Mongolia border, six on the China-Russia border. That’s all.
When gale-force winds of level nine or ten kick up, burning clumps of grass can be swept over a 100-meter-wide firebreak and land at the forest’s edge. At that point, no matter how wide the firebreak is, it won’t help. People have to go in and fight the fire through the heat. And sometimes there’s nothing they can do.
So, when you get down to it, what this firebreak does is reduce the odds to an acceptable level. It can’t make fire impossible. How wide is wide enough? A hundred meters or three hundred depends on how strong the winds are that year, how much the forest is worth, and how big the budget is. It’s just a matter of calculation.
On the blockchain, the same calculation is called waiting for confirmations. In Section 11 of the white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto included a table: if an attacker controls ten percent of the computing power, then after five confirmations, the chance they’ll catch up is nine in ten thousand. After ten confirmations, it’s one in a million. He never said it was impossible to tamper with. He said the odds could be made small enough.
Different exchanges require different numbers of confirmations. Some credit a deposit after two. Some require six. Some are willing to wait for thirty. The difference isn’t really about technology. It’s about how much money the exchange has on the line, who it’s dealing with, and whether it could afford to cover the losses if something went wrong.
You sleep soundly on this side because someone plowed a firebreak over there. You feel reassured when you see your coins arrive in the app because a company chose that number for you behind the scenes. Either way, you never signed off on it.
I’ve been thinking this through. Firebreaks and confirmation counts are the same thing. A sense of security can’t be verified; it can only be priced. Whoever sets the price is on the hook for that two percent.
There’s still no reliable figure for the area burned. In late September, Mongolia’s National Emergency Management Agency reported a year-to-date total of 41 forest fires and 115 grassland fires, covering about 1.2 million hectares combined.
Another set of figures says that by mid-October there had been 172 fires, burning 1.0169 million hectares. The two sets of numbers really don’t line up. No one can say which is right, and I haven’t been able to find the original data tables.
That firebreak has to be plowed all over again every year before winter.
$BTC $ETH $LINK
#蒙古国草原火 #防火隔离带 #比特币 #Blockchain