Quotulatiousness

April 7, 2011

Briefly noted – The Crimean War by Orlando Figes

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Middle East, Russia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:24

I just picked this up last night at the “World’s Biggest Bookstore” in Toronto. I’m quite enjoying it, as it discusses much more than just the war itself: about 50 pages in, I think I’ve learned far more about middle eastern history and Russia’s geostrategic problems.

The various books and articles I’ve read on this conflict have pretty uniformly concentrated on the purely military aspects, and generally just on the battles involving British and French troops. One reason for the relative obscurity of such a major conflict is that the background is essential to understand just why Britain and France were fighting Russia on the Black Sea coast. Without that background, the war appears totally senseless and this is heightened by the well-worn tales of military incompetence (the Charge of the Light Brigade), brief moments of heroism (the “Thin Red Line”), and criminally awful medical and sanitary situation (Florence Nightingale).

If the remaining 450 pages are as good as the first 50, this will be one of my candidates for book of the year.

Australian Defence Force in the news . . . not in a good way

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Australia’s military have a reputation for brashness, but competence in combat. The bureaucratic side of the ADF has problems:

The Australian Defence Force found itself in the headlines for the wrong reasons when a young female member of the ADF Academy went public after having sex with a fellow cadet, only to find out later that he used a webcam and Skype to broadcast the assignation to his mates.

Okay, slimy action on the part of the other cadet. Action by the military braintrust should be some form of discipline against the cadet who violated trust, yes? No:

The ADF first tried to equivocate, saying that there was nothing it could use to charge the unconscionable bastard who thought the broadcast was a good idea, only to backpedal when Defence Minister Stephen Smith (who is an impressive sight when in full flight and fury) hit the roof.

Next, the ADF brasshats, in an outbreak of unbelievably insular stupidity, decided to go ahead with a separate charge against the traumatised female, to do with AWOL and drinking. Moreover, these same defence bosses also asked the woman to apologise for going public with her story.

Adding military insult to personal injury, check. The Defence Minister was even more displeased, of course. Richard Chirgwin points out that these actions are merely symptoms of a deeper institutional problem:

Now, I could write a serious and reasoned column about the chronic social problems of the ADF, which has, for as long as I can remember, acted as if it has institutional autism.

Or I could observe that the ADF seems entirely unable to instill even the remotest hint of good sense in how its members behave in the presence of computers. It’s less than a fortnight since we found out that Australian soldiers were posting racist messages about Afghanistan nationals on Facebook.

But I have a different question to ask: why the hell was the ADF permitting unrestricted use of Skype in the Academy?

Unmanned sub hunter

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

Lewis Page looks at the Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV):

No doubt regular readers will recall the US military’s cunning plan to develop unmanned submarine-hunting robotic frigates — warships which would prowl the oceans like automated Mary Celestes, remorselessly tracking enemy submarines regardless of how their pale, sweaty, malodorous captains might twist and turn.

The Anti-submarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) project is intended to produce “an X-ship founded on the assumption that no person steps aboard at any point in its operating cycle”. The uncrewed frigate would have enough range and endurance for “global, months long deployments with no underway human maintenance”, being able to cross oceans and fight its battles largely without any human input — communications back to base would be “intermittent”, according to DARPA.

As you might imagine, there are lots of potential issues to sending an armed, unmanned ship out into the ocean, including how to handle interactions with other users of the sea lanes. It’d be worse than embarassing to the US Navy to have one of their fancy new ACTUV vessels get tangled up in a fishing net or get caught in the middle of a regatta.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it has been decided that the best way to hammer out a set of tactics for ACTUVs is to develop a game-style simulation pitting ACTUV against submarine and get people to play it — so crowdsourcing the methods and tactical principles that will then be coded into the robo-frigates’ AIs.

The new game — from which these visuals are drawn — is called ACTUV Tactics. The game engine is used in various military sims and in the Dangerous Waters commercial release of 2005. [. . .]. In it, a player tries to find and track an enemy submarine while avoiding collisions with commercial vessels and the like. Various different proposed models of ACTUV robo-frigate are available: Gator, Remora, Seahorse, Shark and Triton.

Health clubs’ real goal is “helping us to lose weight around the middle of our wallets”

Filed under: Health, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

I’ve never really been able to get into the idea of joining a health club — the few times I’ve tried, the interest hasn’t gone beyond the “free trial” period. I find exercise for the sake of exercise to be not just boring but actively repellant. What little exercise I get, outside the minimal physical efforts required of a modern technical writer are on the badminton court once or twice a week, or doing SCA rapier fencing. Those are both interesting enough to keep me coming back (in spite of my admitted lack of expertise in either).

I’m not alone in this, as Daniel Duane helps to illustrate:

Not that I haven’t wasted time at the gym like everybody else, sweating dutifully three times a week, “working my core,” throwing in the odd after-work jog. A few years ago, newly neck-deep in what Anthony Quinn describes in Zorba the Greek as “Wife, children, house…the full catastrophe,” I signed a 10-page membership contract at a corporate-franchise gym, hired my first personal trainer, and became yet another sucker for all the half-baked, largely spurious non-advice cobbled together from doctors, newspapers, magazines, infomercials, websites, government health agencies, and, especially, from the organs of our wonderful $19 billion fitness industry, whose real knack lies in helping us to lose weight around the middle of our wallets. Not that all of these people are lying, but here’s what I’ve learned: Their goals are only marginally related to real fitness — goals like reducing the statistical incidence of heart disease across the entire American population, or keeping you moving through the gym so you won’t crowd the gear, or limiting the likelihood that you’ll get hurt and sue.

We’re not innocent. Too many of us drift into health clubs with only the vaguest of notions about why we’re actually there — notions like maybe losing a little weight, somehow looking like the young Brad Pitt in Fight Club, or just heeding a doctor’s orders. Vague goals beget vague methods; the unfocused mind is the vulnerable mind, deeply susceptible to bullshit. So we sign our sorry names on the elliptical-machine waiting list — starting with a little “cardio,” like somebody said you’re supposed to — and then spend our allotted 30 minutes in front of a TV mounted a regulation seven to 10 feet away, because lawyers have told gym owners that seven to 10 feet minimizes the likelihood that we’ll crane our necks, lose our balance, and face-plant on the apparatus. After that, if we’ve got any remaining willpower, we lie flat on the floor, contract a few stomach muscles with tragic optimism, and then we “work each body part” before hitting the shower.

Even in my minimal-exercise routine, I’ve often been told to start with some stretches. Uh, no, apparently I shouldn’t do that:

How many times have you been told to start with a little stretching? Yet multiple studies of pre-workout stretching demonstrate that it actually raises your likelihood of injury and lowers your subsequent performance. Turns out muscles that aren’t warmed up don’t really stretch anyway, and tugging on them just firms up their resistance to a wider range of motion. In fact, limbering up even has a slackening effect on your muscles, reducing their stability and the amount of power and strength they’ll generate.

On the economic incentives of health club owners:

Commercial health clubs need about 10 times as many members as their facilities can handle, so designing them for athletes, or even aspiring athletes, makes no sense. Fitness fanatics work out too much, making every potential new member think, Nah, this place looks too crowded for me. The winning marketing strategy, according to Recreation Management Magazine, a health club–industry trade rag, focuses strictly on luring in the “out-of-shape public,” meaning all of those people whose doctors have told them, “About 20 minutes three times a week,” who won’t come often if ever, and who definitely won’t join unless everything looks easy, available, and safe. The entire gym, from soup to nuts, has been designed around getting suckers to sign up, and then getting them mildly, vaguely exercised every once in a long while, and then getting them out the door.

When to drink a wine

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Randomness, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:26

Michael Pinkus tries to answer the inevitable question “When should I drink this wine?”

What I find myself telling people-who-ask sounds like a huge cop-out. I end up turning it around and asking them whether they like their wines fresh and fruity or with a little age on them, edging more towards the dried fruit or foresty floor.

Truth is, most people prefer their wines to have fruit rather than floor, which explains why new world producers, especially those in Chile, Argentina and Australia, do so well, their fruit is fresh, full and mouth-filling, especially at the time when most people drink them. Studies have shown that 90% of all wine is drunk within 24 hours of purchase, and 95% within 48 hours. That means that only 5% of you are lying your wines down for any length of time. That also means that you’re missing out on the best part of wine, its never-ending change-ability.

I trust that most of you have seen the movie Sideways — I seem to stick it into the DVD player (now Blu-ray) every year, it’s like catching up with old friend (granted they seem stuck in a Groundhog Day-like cycle — but until a sequel comes along I’m stuck with them). Anyway, I’m not ruining anything (for those who haven ‘t seen it) when I quote Maya here on the allure, and never-ending change-ability, of wine:

“It’s a living thing.” She begins. “… I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks … And then it begins its steady, inevitable decline.”

It’s rare for me to open a bottle of wine within 48 hours of purchase, unless I’m travelling, but I’ve seen this stat quoted frequently. I think it’s sad that so many people are missing out on the (in my opinion) greater pleasure of tasting wines that have been given an opportunity to mature. On the other hand, 90% of the wine that is made today isn’t intended to mature: wine makers respond to economic incentives just as much as everyone else does, and if that kind of wine sells well, that’s what they’ll end up producing.

Friend of Randian cultists afraid to say what he really means

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

The victim of Objectivist intimidation is poor little P.J. O’Rourke, who has to be very careful how he reviews Atlas Shrugged:

Atlas shrugged. And so did I.

The movie version of Ayn Rand’s novel treats its source material with such formal, reverent ceremoniousness that the uninitiated will feel they’ve wandered without a guide into the midst of the elaborate and interminable rituals of some obscure exotic tribe.

Meanwhile, members of that tribe of “Atlas Shrugged” fans will be wondering why director Paul Johansson doesn’t knock it off with the incantations, sacraments and recitations of liturgy and cut to the human sacrifice.

But that’s about as far as he dares to go, risking retribution from Randian cultists. Oh, wait . . . he does go a tiny bit further towards martyrdom after all:

But I will not pan “Atlas Shrugged.” I don’t have the guts. If you associate with Randians — and I do — saying anything critical about Ayn Rand is almost as scary as saying anything critical to Ayn Rand. What’s more, given how protective Randians are of Rand, I’m not sure she’s dead.

The woman is a force. But, let us not forget, she’s a force for good. Millions of people have read “Atlas Shruggged” and been brought around to common sense, never mind that the author and her characters don’t exhibit much of it. Ayn Rand, perhaps better than anyone in the 20th century, understood that the individual self-seeking we call an evil actually stands in noble contrast to the real evil of self-seeking collectives. (A rather Randian sentence.) It’s easy to make fun of Rand for being a simplistic philosopher, bombastic writer and — I’m just saying — crazy old bat. But the 20th century was no joke. A hundred years, from Bolsheviks to Al Qaeda, were spent proving Ayn Rand right.

Wil Wheaton gets the “special” treatment from the TSA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

The TSA just got another rave review from a traveller who got the full treatment and didn’t like it:

Yesterday, I was touched — in my opinion, inappropriately — by a TSA agent at LAX.

I’m not going to talk about it in detail until I can speak with an attorney, but I’ve spent much of the last 24 hours replaying it over and over in my mind, and though some of the initial outrage has faded, I still feel sick and angry when I think about it.

What I want to say today is this: I believe that the choice we are currently given by the American government when we need to fly is morally wrong, unconstitutional, and does nothing to enhance passenger safety.

I further believe that when I choose to fly, I should not be forced to choose between submitting myself to a virtually-nude scan (and exposing myself to uncertain health risks due to radiation exposure), or enduring an aggressive, invasive patdown where a stranger puts his hands in my pants, and makes any contact at all with my genitals.

When I left the security screening yesterday, I didn’t feel safe. I felt violated, humiliated, assaulted, and angry. I felt like I never wanted to fly again. I was so furious and upset, my hands shook for quite some time after the ordeal was over. I felt sick to my stomach for hours.

This is wrong. Nobody should have to feel this way, just so we can get on an airplane. We have fundamental human and constitutional rights in America, and among those rights is a reasonable expectation of personal privacy, and freedom from unreasonable searches. I can not believe that the TSA and its supporters believe that what they are doing is reasonable and appropriate. Nobody should have to choose between a virtually-nude body scan or an aggressive, invasive patdown where a stranger puts his or her hands inside your pants and makes any contact at all with your genitals or breasts as a condition of flying.

H/T to occasional commenter “Da Wife” for the link.

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