Remember me?

Y2K…anyone? Planes falling from the sky, computers unable to tell time, nano-level Keystone Kops type stuff bringing everything to a complete stop. I forget exactly what the fear was (we’d wake up on the LOST island?).

This First Friday Briefing (pictured) from the Georgia Department of Defense recounts the “sigh of relief” as all heck did not break loose upon the arrival of the year 2000.

You can rewind an interesting piece of recent history using the Georgia Government Publications portal in the DLG.  You can read the executive order from Governor Roy Barnes that established Georgia’s Y2K Interagency Task Force. Review the growing concern in a 1998 article from the State Personnel News titled, “Are state computers going to crash January 1, 2000?” :

Part of the problem is that over 50% of the software programs used by state government are over 11 years old and are obsolete. There aren’t even programmers around who know them. (pg.5)

Or peruse this memorandum from the Public Service Commission in which the “first electronic crisis of an automated society” leads to the conclusion of “four plausible scenarios: (I) “Crisis Avoided,” (II) “Much Ado About Nothing,” (III) “the Tempest in a Teapot,” and (IV) “Crisis.”

(You could also search the vast internet outside of the DLG for “Leonard Nimoy” and Y2K…but you didn’t hear it from me…but do it anyways.)

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The state of Georgia’s environment 2009

In 1948, a visitor to the southern Appalachian mountains in north Georgia could see an average of 93 miles. By 1990, due to air pollution, that distance had dropped to an average of 22 miles.”

Visibility levels at Cohutta, GA.

The above quote comes from page seventy-four of a report titled The State of Georgia’s Environment 2009. It is accompanied on that same page by the image you see here. The left half of this image represents a baseline visibility from the combined years of 2000 to 2004. The right half of this image represents the projected visibility in 2016 of the same scene (presuming the beneficial effects of state and federal efforts to reduce pollution). These images were created by a computer simulation of air pollution levels and included in the report of the Environmental Protection Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

The Georgia Government Publications (GGP) site provides users access to a staggering amount of current information about the Peach State, information that will be findable long after it has disappeared from a government web page. I was actually searching the GGP for documents related to “oil” when I came across this series of environmental reports. It felt serendipitous, and a bit startling as the images reminded me that there are people literally “looking out” for us.

Even a quick scan of the report left me feeling smarter about the state in which I live. Think what an hour with this information could do for you?

Visibility level at Cohutta, GA.

I’ll leave you with a final image: the same scene as projected in 2064 (distant, but hopeful).

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