Quotulatiousness

September 9, 2009

Operation Nanook

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:13

I was surprised that they chose this particular name for the exercise, as I’d have assumed it would provoke mild symptoms of offensensitivity. Apparently not:

Ostensibly, we’re here to witness Canada asserting its control of the Arctic, which is attracting increased military and commercial interest due to the melting polar ice cap. But a political motive lurks behind the PR: Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister of a minority government, may well be facing an election in the autumn. He has made the Arctic one of his signature issues, and will drop by for grips and grins.

We are told to be at Apex Beach, a five-minute drive from central Iqaluit, at 5:30am to witness the first part of the exercise. Around 140 soldiers and their guides, known as Canadian Rangers, will land from the frigate HMCS Toronto and icebreaker CCGS Pierre Radisson. Midway through the two-month arctic summer, the waters of Frobisher Bay are glass-smooth and ice-free.

Although the sun has already been up for an hour, the weather is cool, more like a crisp autumn day than a midsummer morning. The military has thoughtfully provided a tent stocked with coffee and muffins for the journalists. Those who forgot their hats and gloves shelter there as the first of the Zodiac boats zip across the calm waters to the beach. Aside from the Sea King helicopter circling overhead, there is little drama in the landing. The soldiers, clad in green camouflage, calmly disembark and march off in groups of four to assemble at the top of a rocky hill.

The Canadian Rangers may be the least well-known of Canada’s military:

Rangers reflect the communities they are drawn from, says Mr Buzzell. In the western Arctic, where he is from, they are a mix of white, Indian, Métis and Inuit. In Nunavut, where Inuit make up 85% of the territory’s population, they are mainly Inuit. In any exercise on land, the regular forces would be lost without the Rangers’ survival skills, as would the numerous expeditions from all over the world that set out each year for the North Pole.

The Inuit are usually too polite to make a point of this. But a video I picked up in Iqaluit called “Quallunat: Why white people are funny” provides a rare glimpse of how Inuit view hapless southerners. The scene in which an Inuit on a snowmobile rescues two so-called explorers, equipped with the latest gear but little sense, makes for funny, if uncomfortable viewing.

QotD: The Democratic Party’s problem with criticism

Filed under: Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:12

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year’s tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy — I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

Camille Paglia, “Too late for Obama to turn it around?”, Salon, 2009-09-09

A plethora of Billy Bishop airports

Filed under: Cancon, History, WW1 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:53

Publius reports on an attempt by Toronto to steal away the name of Owen Sound’s most famous warrior:

The small regional airport was originally named after George VI. Publius’ humble suggestion would be to change it back to its original name. Modern Canadians can’t tell the difference between George VI and George III, so that’s probably a no go. The choice of Billy Bishop, one of the leading Allied fighter pilots of World War One, as a namesake is an inspired one.

So inspired I was shocked by it. Billy Bishop is very Old Canada, pre-1960s. Bishop didn’t engage in peacekeeping and we’re fairly certain he was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. He was never discriminated against, except when British officers made fun of him for being Canadian. The British used to do that a lot back then. We just returned the favour by making fun of them. Perhaps Bishop could have filed a human rights complaint, had such things existed back then.

Billy Bishop was something modern Canada has half forgotten. An ordinary man with extraordinary skill and courage from small town Canada. He was one of the very best in the world at doing a very dangerous, very new and very important job. Here was a Canadian who was, in the current phrasing, completely world class.

They switched to calling it “Climate Change” for a reason

Filed under: Environment, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:06

After all the vitriol over anthropomorphic (man-made) “Global Warming”, it was a significant change when the organizations which had been most prominent in trying to bring it to public attention switched terminology to Climate Change instead:

Last week a UK tribunal ruled that belief in manmade global warming had the same status as a religious conviction, such as transubstantiation. True believers in the hypothesis will need mountains of faith in the years ahead.

The New Scientist has given weight to the prediction that the planet is in for a cool 20 years — defying the computer models and contemporary climate theory. It’s “bad timing”, admits the magazine’s environmental correspondent, Fred Pearce.

Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, quoted by the magazine, attributes much of the recent warming to naturally occurring ocean cycles. Scientific study of the periodic ocean climate variability is in its infancy; for example the PDO or Pacific Decadal Oscillation, was only described in the late 1990s. It’s the Leibniz team which predicted a forthcoming cooling earlier this year — causing a bullying outbreak at the BBC.

Much of the resistance to the “orthodoxy” of global warming was caused by the strong suspicion that this was merely an excuse for greater government control over business and further restrictions on individuals for a nebulous goal. It certainly didn’t help that any extreme or unusual weather was automatically “caused by global warming” according to the vast majority of media reports.

If global warming/climate change was actually being caused (or increased) by human activity, the proposals to “fix” the problem almost always seemed to impose far greater costs than the problem itself. Activists saying that the west pretty much had to give up most of their modern comforts (and their industrial base) in order to “save the planet” did their cause more harm than good.

Some data seemed to support the global warming theory, while other data seemed to contradict it. Rather than following traditional scientific methodology, too many scientists forgot their basic training and tried conducting media science (where peer review and providing raw data to support your findings are not required or expected). By saying that the problem was “too urgent” to be slowed down by following normal procedure, they undermined their own cause. By exaggerating the likely results if global warming was actually happening, they stopped being scientists at all and instead became political activists.

The confidence that higher atmospheric CO2 levels will result in significant long-term increases in temperature is founded on knock-on effects, or positive feedbacks, amplifying the CO2 effect. Large positive feedbacks imply “runaway” global warming — aka Thermageddon.

But even the basics are fiercely contested. Does a warmer climate mean more or fewer clouds, and do these trap even more heat, or act as a sunshade, cooling it back down again? Clouds are so poorly understood, you can take your pick. So if the climate isn’t getting warmer, the theory requires the view that the energy must be “hiding” somewhere, mostly likely in oceanic heat sinks.

But neither the feedbacks, nor the oceans, are currently being kind to contemporary climate theory.

September 8, 2009

Follow-up on the Fire Chief who was shot in court . . . by the police

Filed under: Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:21

The situation isn’t any less surreal than the original report. Kevin Drum provides an update:

He’s OK, but the police department, which was already in deep trouble for its habit of ticketing everything on wheels that rolled through Jericho, has been disbanded and all outstanding tickets have been voided. The town’s part-time judge has quit too. And nobody knows what’s happened to all the ticket revenue.

What’s in a name?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Education — Nicholas @ 09:17

For most people, certain names pick up associations that have to do with the first person you encountered who bore that name. You may view all “Garys” with mild apprehension, while you’re automatically well-disposed to “Michaels”. “Kathy” or “Chelsea” may remind you of an unpleasant classmate from grade school, while “Tina” or “Pauline” may be viewed in advance as good people, all based on your early experiences.

Teachers in Britain have their little list of names, too:

As teachers eye the register on the first day back at school this September, they’ll be nervously keeping a sharp look-out for certain names which “strike fear into the nation’s tutors”.

The list of those likely to make mischief includes young ‘uns dubbed Aliesha, Brooke, Brooklyn, Casey, Chelsea, Connor, Crystal, Demi, Jack, Jake, Jessica, Kyle, and (pay attention at the back there El Reg’s Executive Vice President, Global Sales), Liam.

This roster of foreboding comes courtesy of Bounty.com, which polled 3,000 blackboard botherers to determine just which names spell trouble. Doubtless there are those among you who have a lad called Jake who’s an absolute angel, but that makes no difference to tremulous teachers, because they’ve already got him marked down as a wrong ‘un as soon as they clock his ID.

John Snow and the start of modern epidemiology

Filed under: Britain, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:52

Another “on this date” entry for you: in 1854, John Snow persuaded the local authorities in a London borough to remove the handle from a water pump at the centre of a cholera outbreak. The move was successful, and the death rate dropped immediately. Randy Alfred has the story:

BroadSt_cholera_map

Physician John Snow convinces a London local council to remove the handle from a pump in Soho. A deadly cholera epidemic in the neighborhood comes to an end immediately, though perhaps serendipitously. Snow maps the outbreak to prove his point . . . and launches modern epidemiology.

The Soho neighborhood was not then filled with galleries, clubs, restaurants and other fine urban diversions. Some of it was an unsanitary slum where centuries-old cesspits sat chockablock with the wells that provided drinking water to a crowded populace.

Asiatic cholera had stricken Britain in successive waves since 1831. Snow, an obstetrician who pioneered the use of anesthesia in Britain, published On the Mode of Communication of Cholera in 1849. His hypothesis (and supporting data) held that the scourge was caused by sewage pollution in drinking water and “always commences with disturbances of the functions of the alimentary canal.”

September 7, 2009

Toronto air show photos

Filed under: Cancon — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 21:40

No, no, not mine . . . while I was caught in traffic along Lakeshore Boulevard on Saturday afternoon during the Snowbirds portion of the show, I took no photos. Aside from the occasional glimpse of one or more Snowbird aircraft, I managed to get a brief look at HMCS Ville de Quebec and a Canadian Coast Guard vessel.

Chris Taylor (proprietor and chief pilot of Taylor Empire Airways), however, is an air buff, and can be depended upon to be there with camera (and charged batteries), and to take photos.

Another record attempt?

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:18

Along with all the other records Brett Favre currently holds, he apparently has a chance to break another long-standing record currently held by “Ironman” Jim Marshall:

Brett Favre will play his first regular-season game as a member of the Vikings on Sunday in Cleveland already holding just about every significant NFL career passing record.

Most touchdown passes? Favre’s got that one with 464. Yards? That belongs to Favre, too. Completions, attempts and yards? Check, check and check. Heck, Favre even has thrown the most interceptions.

But there is at least one record Favre stands to break this season — and the guy he would surpass couldn’t be happier about it. Favre will enter Sunday having played in 271 consecutive regular-season games, putting him 12 games from Jim Marshall’s longstanding record for a non-kicker or punter. (Punter Jeff Feagles has appeared in 336 consecutive games.)

PSA: Back up your data

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:57

I’ve been having frequent enough issues with my various computers that backing up regularly (which I’ve done for years) isn’t as simple as it used to be. Now that I’m running both a desktop and a laptop machine (at least, when the desktop gets back from the repair shop), plus everyone else in the household’s machines, my old backup strategy fell flat.

My old strategy was each machine on the network using the same backup software (Cobian Backup 9) to create differential backup files — only saving the files that changed since the last complete backup was taken — and storing them on a secondary hard drive on my desktop machine.

As you can tell, there’s an easily defined point of failure there: if my machine isn’t online or there’s an issue with the secondary hard drive, the backups will fail to run. So we’ve been over a week now without the usual backups being taken.

My short-term strategy is just to worry, but my longer-term strategy is to buy something like this, a 2Tb network drive with RAID 1 (disk mirroring). That still leaves a point of failure in the process, but with RAID, I can hope that unless both drives in the unit fail at the same time, there’s only a small chance of serious data loss.

Update: That just figures . . . it’s now marked as unavailable, but the 1Tb NAS is still in stock.

Update, the second: Here’s an up-to-date article on backup strategies.

QotD: Environmentalism as religion-replacement

Filed under: Environment, Quotations, Religion — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:17

It never ceases to amaze me that people who say we can “save the planet” by wearing a jumper or growing our own veg are treated with the utmost seriousness, while those who argue that tackling climate change might require some larger-scale projects — such as geo-engineering the Earth — are treated as sci-fi freaks who should stick to reading Philip K Dick novels and stop polluting public debate with their insane ideas.

When it comes to climate change, the only acceptable debate, it seems, is how we can encourage ordinary people to do less, consume less and fly less. Bigger and more far-reaching ideas about how we might offset the impact of climate change are elbowed off the agenda.

This reveals something profound about environmentalism: it is not really a campaign to find solutions to the practical problem of climate change, but rather has become a semi-religious, almost medieval demonisation of human behaviour as dirty and destructive. This is really a priestly, ideological effort to lower people’s horizons and expectations, rather than a focused attempt to create a less polluted planet.

Brendan O’Neill, “Wearing thermals won’t save the planet: Why is the 10:10 campaign, with its pledges to turn off lights and grow more veg, taken more seriously than geo-engineering?”, The Guardian, 2009-09-02

September 6, 2009

QotD: Politics in the 21st century will not be about . . .

Filed under: Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

. . . privacy and intellectual property. Or rather, it’s going to be about privacy and intellectual property the way that the 20th century was about steam locomotives and iron foundries. These were vital 19th century technologies that provided a platform for 20th century industries to evolve on top of, but triple-condensing steam engines tell us nothing about semiconductor fab lines: they lie too far down the stack of incremental technologies. By the time we reach 2050, the microprocessor and software industries will be about as innovative and interesting as steam locomotives were in 1950; and the big questions about privacy and IP will have been answered (hint: ubiquitous polycentric surveillance, some sort of abstraction layer to encapsulate and insulate the public against the crisis of copyright, and a generation for whom the concept of “blackmail” makes less sense than bleeding with leeches as a cure for a surfeit of billious humours).

Thirdly, it’s not going to be about biotechnology any more than the 20th century was about powered heavier-than-air flight. Yes, flight was and is important, but not in the way the Italian modernists of the first three decades imagined, with their manifestos about “air-mindedness” and Douhet’s insane, apocalyptic visions of air power — that led to such atrocities as the British Empire’s policing with bombers (dropping poison gas!) in the 1920s, and strategic bombing raids against civilian populations during subsequent wars. For the most part, military aviation falls into two categories (better artillery, and better logistics); it doesn’t really change warfare, it just makes the whole barbaric affair more efficient (which is to say, more destructive). Biotechnology is going to be an efficiency enabler for a whole lot of things, and have immense second-order effects (just like cheap air travel), but it’s not going to fundamentally change us (unless some lunatic repeats the mousepox/interleukin-4 experiment with weaponized smallpox, in which case we are probably all dead).

Charles Stross, “Chrome Plated Jackboots”, Charlie’s Diary, 2009-09-04

Some good advice from the WordPress developers

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

WordPress blogs (like this one) have been recently under attack by a worm tailored to a weakness that existed in older versions of the blogging software. Here’s the scoop.

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

The tactics are new, but the strategy is not. Where this particular worm messes up is in the “clean up” phase: it doesn’t hide itself well and the blogger notices that all his links are broken, which causes him to dig deeper and notice the extent of the damage. Where worms of old would do childish things like defacing your site, the new ones are silent and invisible, so you only notice them when they screw up (as this one did) or your site gets removed from Google for having spam and malware on it.

In short, if you haven’t already upgraded your WordPress blog to the current version, you’re inviting trouble.

September 5, 2009

Vikings choose to keep only 3 Quarterbacks on the roster

Filed under: Football — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 21:21

. . . but to my surprise, and possibly to the dejection of sportscasters nationwide who will now not have the opportunity to announce that “Coach Childress just made a Booty call” . . . the team chose to keep Tarvaris Jackson and released John David Booty, to get down to their 53-man final roster:

DB Colt Anderson, QB John David Booty, FB Nehemiah Broughton, DE Martail Burnett, OL Chris Clark, OL Brian Daniels, OL Juan Garcia, DE Otis Grigsby, S De’von Hall, LB David Herron, DT Antoine Holmes, RB Ian Johnson, DT Tremaine Johnson, OL Andy Kemp, CB Marcus McCauley, TE Garrett Mills, WR Nick Moore, TE Jake Nordin, WR Vinny Perretta, OL Drew Radovich, DB Marcus Walker and WR Bobby Williams.

The Vikings could still try to re-sign Booty to a practice squad spot next week, if he’s not picked up by another team. You’d have to assume that his performance in Friday’s game was a determining factor in this decision.

Update, 7 September: Yep, Booty was indeed signed to the Vikings practice squad, along with “safety Colt Anderson, offensive tackles Chris Clark and Drew Radovich, running back Ian Johnson, defensive tackle Tremaine Johnson, tight end Garrett Mills and wide receiver Nick Moore”. Unfortunately, free agent Jon Cooper who’d made the 53-man roster was cut to make room for Kory Lichtensteiger who was cut by Denver.

Chicken chicken chicken

Filed under: Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 18:23

H/T to Susan Fox for the link.

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