Apologies for being a day late! I was working on how the New York Times acted as a bullhorn for those election interfering Russian hackers.
We left off in Data Science and Protests During the Age of Trump [How To Brick A School Bus…] with:
- How best to represent these no free speech and/or no free assembly zones on a map?
- What data sets do you need to make protesters effective under these restrictions?
- What questions would you ask of those data sets?
- How to decide between viral/spontaneous action versus publicly known but lawful conduct, up until the point it becomes unlawful?
I started this series of posts because the Women’s March on Washington wasn’t able to obtain a protest permit from the National Park Service due to a preemptive reservation by the Presidential Inauguration Committee.
Since then, the Women’s March on Washington has secured a protest permit (sic) from the Metropolitan Police Department.
If you are interested in protests organized for the convenience of government:
“People from across the nation will gather” at the intersection of Independence Avenue and Third Street SW, near the U.S. Capitol, at 10:00am” on Jan. 21, march organizers said in a statement on Friday.
Each to their own.
Bricking A School Bus
We are all familiar with the typical school bus:
By Die4kids (Own work) [GFDL or CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
The saying, “no one size fits all,” applies to the load capacity of school buses. For example, the North Carolina School Bus Safety Web posted this spreadsheet detailing the empty (column I) and maximum weight (column R) of a variety of school bus sizes. For best results, get the GVWR (Gross Vehicle Weight Rating, maximum load) for your bus and then weight it on reliable scales.
Once you determine the maximum weight capacity of your bus, divide that weight by 4,000 pounds, the weight of one cubic yard of concrete. That results is the amount of concrete that you can have poured into your bus as part of the bricking process.
I use the phrase “your bus” deliberately because pouring concrete into a school bus that doesn’t belong to you would be destruction of private property and thus a crime. Don’t commit crimes. Use your own bus.
Once the concrete has hardened (for stability), drive to a suitable location. It’s a portable barricade, at least for a while.
At a suitable location, puncture the tires on one side and tip the bus over. Remove/burn the tires.
Consulting line 37 of the spreadsheet, with that bus, you have a barricade of almost 30,000 pounds, with no wheels.
Congratulations!
I’m still working on the data science aspects of where to park. More on that in How To Brick A School Bus, Data Science Helps Park It (Part 2), which I will post tomorrow.