Those of you who went to the Southern Nevada Supplemental Airport Site to check out the Draft Alternatives Working Paper for the Environmental Impact Report for the proposed Ivanpah Airport, a few miles from my temporary digs here in Nipton, were likely surprised and discouraged by the nearly eighty associated PDF they expect the public to download.

Perhaps the most important of those many PDFs, the one mapping “terrain conflicts” with the Ivanpah Airport, weighed in at 233 megabytes, which represents approximately five hours and twenty minutes worth of downloading on a typical dialup connection. About 500 megs’ worth of documents in toto hardly amounts to public accessibility, especially when spread over 80 docs.

So I’ve taken most of the PDFs — the ones that contain figures for Chapters two and three of the Working Paper including the behemoth one — compressed them into some semblance of a reasonably downloadable size, and concatenated them into two documents. Chapter two is here, and Chapter three is here.

Nerdery: That behemoth one, when I optimized it in Acrobat by way of experiment, shrunk down to a reasonable 1.5 megs. I opened the original and did a space audit, which tells you how much of a document’s size is due to images, text, fonts, etc., and it turns out that “document overhead” accounted for the remaining 231.5 megs of PDF. Whether the document was deliberately inflated to discourage public participation or just prepared by careless contractors doesn’t really matter. The end result is the same: we are discouraged from making our voices heard.