The 10 minute warning system that Israel has been using to notify civilians in the vicinity of structures they will be bombing is fascinating. I could not find an online description of the system but the way it works is that civilian neighbors of a structure that will be attacked are given a 10 minute warning by phone to evacuate the area. It appears to be fairly precise given the counterproductive nature of giving evacuation warnings across too broad of an area.

Think for a second about what it would take to make such a system effective. First and foremost, they would have to have a map of every structure in Gaza, which is clearly something Google does on a daily basis, but then they would have to have a database of phone numbers attached to every person in each structure (remember this is predominately a mobile based telecom system).

The real challenge would then be to feed in targeting data with ETs for attacks because it’s a 10 minute system, precisely a 10 minute warning. The system would then have to make assumptions about blast radius based on ordinance and then calculate the number of buildings that could be affected. Upon determining the warning perimeter the system would then have to make potentially thousands of concurrent calls with the automated warning message.

I’m tempted to say that there are a lot of potential uses for such a system that go beyond, you know, warning me that my neighbors house is going to be bombed, but I can’t thing of many scenarios beyond emergency response. At any rate, it’s still pretty cool.