Quotulatiousness

July 23, 2010

Define, or be defined

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 22:28

Jesse Walker looks at efforts to take the notion of “capitalism” and wrap it up in the more user-friendly term “free enterprise”:

[T]here’s an effort afoot to rebrand “capitalism” as “free enterprise.” On the face of it, I like the idea. Capital is going to be a central part of any modern economic system, whether or not there’s a lot of government intervention. By contrast, the phrase “free enterprise” implies economic liberty.

Unfortunately, MSNBC identifies the chief force behind the idea as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a group whose commitment to economic liberty is so strong that it came out for TARP, the Detroit bailout, and the 2009 stimulus. If the Chamber were more honest about its outlook, it would reject “free enterprise” for a more frank label, like “corporate welfare.” But I suspect that wouldn’t be good branding.

In the same way we had to give up the historical meaning of the word “liberal” to folks who used it to imply almost the opposite, we should probably abandon the word “capitalism”. For a start, the word was popularized by that great pamphlet writer Karl Marx, and it has a pejorative connotation to most people who hear it used. “Capitalists” are folks in top hats who ride in chauffeured limousines and have no sympathy or respect for “the working man”. Try subbing in “Plutocracy” or “Rich F*cking Bastards” and you’ll get close to the popular image of the current term.

In any argument where you try using terms that have been appropriated by your opponents, you’re already ceding the high ground. “Capitalism” is a word that comes pre-loaded with all the negativity your opponents delight in — don’t play their game by their rules!

Nick Gillespie predicts next season’s key moments in Mad Men

Filed under: History, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 22:14

I’m not qualified to judge, as I’ve never watched the show (in spite of the enticement of casting Christina Hendricks in a vital role). How do Nick’s predictions match your expectations for the new season of the show?

My recollections of the era aren’t relevant: I was four years old, and living in another country at the time.

The fully networked infantry comes a step closer

Filed under: Britain, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Strategy Page reports on the US Army’s Rifleman Radio project:

The U.S. Army recently conducted a successful field test of their new Rifleman Radio (RR), a 1.1 kg/2.5 pound voice/data radio for individual infantrymen. By itself, the two watt RR has a range of up to five kilometers. But it can also automatically form a mesh network, where all RRs within range of each other can pass on voice or data information. During the field tests, this was done to a range of up to 50 kilometers. The RR can also make use of an aerostat, UAV or aircraft overhead carrying a RR to act as a communications booster (to other RRs or other networks.) The mesh network enables troops to sometimes eliminate carrying a longer range (and heavier) platoon radio for the platoon leader.

The RR has just gone into production, for use as basic communications for individual troops. But in the next 5-10 years, the mesh and data (pictures, maps, at about ten times the speed of dial up Internet) capability will be phased in. During the recent field test, company commanders were able to take a video feed from a UAV, extract a single frame (basically showing where the enemy was), and transmitting this to troops using RRs.

Somewhat surprisingly, the British were pioneering this kind of kit for the troops in Afghanistan in 2002:

Six years ago, the marines bought a thousand Personal Role Radios (PRR) used by British troops since early 2002. These first saw combat use in Afghanistan later that year. The $670 radio set allows infantry to communicate with each other up to 500 meters (or three floors inside a building). The earpiece and microphone are built to fit comfortably into the combat helmet. The radio set itself, about the size and weight of a portable cassette player, hangs off the webbing gear on the chest. Two AA batteries power the radio for 24 hours. The users have 16 channels to choose from and a form of frequency hopping is used to make it very difficult to listen in on transmissions. A small, wireless, “talk” button is affixed to the soldiers weapon so that operation of the radio is hands free. The British have since adopted an improved, and more expensive, version.

Being able to communicate directly with fellow troops in combat is a huge advantage, but the weight and relative delicate nature of earlier radios meant that only platoon leaders and above were routinely provided with radios in the field (usually carried by someone else, not the commander himself).

Stalkers enjoy cool new tools to pursue their prey

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

Leo Hickman finds that Foursquare is a very handy tool to track down your cyberobsession in the real world:

Louise has straight, auburn hair and, judging by the only photograph I have of her, she’s in her 30s. She works in recruitment. I also know which train station she uses regularly, what supermarket she shopped at last night and where she met her friends for a meal in her home town last week. At this moment, she is somewhere inside the pub in front of me meeting with colleagues after work.

Louise is a complete stranger. Until 10 minutes ago when I discovered she was located within a mile of me, I didn’t even know of her existence. But equipped only with a smartphone and an increasingly popular social networking application called Foursquare, I have located her to within just a few square metres, accessed her Twitter account and conducted multiple cross-referenced Google searches using the personal details I have already managed to accrue about her from her online presence. In the short time it has taken me to walk to this pub in central London, I probably know more about her than if I’d spent an hour talking to her face-to-face. She doesn’t know it yet, but Louise is about to meet her new digital stalker.

Privacy and expectations thereof are becoming less and less realistic, but even knowing that, the merging of social media and geo-location services gives me the creeps.

I was an early user of Facebook (once it was opened to non-students) and LinkedIn and have been getting great use out of Twitter lately, but it seems like every day there’s a new social media platform being touted as the best ever. Social media is like any other form of networking: the value increases as the number of nodes goes up. The next boom in convergence will probably be cross-network liaison tools.

Update: Shea Sylvia finds the attention of a cyberstalker very unwelcome.

July 22, 2010

Theme music retrospective

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:40

I spent too much of my childhood TV watching time hiding behind the couch whenever this program was on. I was too scared to watch, but wouldn’t let my mother turn off the TV:

Listening to all of them now, it’s only the first one that really sets the hair on the back of my neck quivering . . .

H/T to Rob Beschizza for the link.

Cultivating a taste for parody

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:36

The Economist reviews The Oxford Book of Parodies by John Gross:

Writing a parody is hard. In the 1940s, a competition in the New Statesman invited readers to parody Graham Greene. Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and only came second. Get it right, though, and you have a withering form of criticism and an immortal entertainment rolled into one. John Gross’s new anthology of parodies in English (with a few foreign titbits) has samples both high and low of this diverse genre.

[. . .]

Any well-known poem or character is fair game. A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin is revisited as an ailing pensioner who has retired to Spain (“He peers through a pair of bifocals;/He talks quite a lot to a bear that he’s got/Who is known as El Pu to the locals.”) Ezra Pound wrote a wintry variation on “Sumer is icumen in” (“…skiddeth bus and sloppeth us…”) But why limit oneself to a single writer? Portmanteau parodies let writers do two voices at once, thus “Chaucer” rewrites Sir John Betjeman (“A Mayde ther was, y-clept Joan Hunter Dunn…”) and “Dylan Thomas” redoes “Pride and Prejudice” (“It is night in the smug snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug household of Mr and Mrs Dai Bennet and their simpering daughters — five breast-bobbing man-hungry titivators, innocent as ice-cream, panting for balls and matrimony.”)

[. . .]

Documents, philosophies and schools of thought can be good fodder, too. H.L. Mencken did a “Declaration of Independence in American” (“When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody . . .”)

Swordplay is hard work

Filed under: History, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:21

Peter Saltsman visits Toronto’s Academy of European Medieval Martial Arts (AEMMA) and finds that there’s not much “play” when you’re just starting to learn how to wield a sword:

I was hoping this courageous group of historians and hobbyists could teach me to fight like they do in movies such as Robin Hood, Macbeth or the new Pillars of the Earth series. In the movies, it looks so easy. The sword fights I know are the perfect harmony of choreographed bravado, hyperbolic grunting and dramatic pauses for someone to say “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

To the disappointment of my eight-year-old self, real medieval combat is nothing like that.

“They’re not really trying to hit each other,” says Cal Rekuta, a Senior Free Scholar at AEMMA, of cinematic battles. “Stage fighting is the art of looking dangerous. We’re actually studying how it was dangerous.”

I was in over my head. When a man dressed in a full suit of chain-mail armour — armour he weaved himself — talks about danger, he probably means it.

I visited AEMMA once, several years ago. It was quite an enjoyable experience, but I’m more interested in later-period swordwork than most of their membership at that time.

Gay characters on British TV: still (mostly) negatively stereotyped

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:00

British TV, bastion of high-brow entertainment (at least to foreign audiences, who only see the “good stuff”), still has trouble coming to terms with how gay people are portrayed:

Gay people were portrayed positively and realistically for just 46 minutes in 126 hours of TV programmes, a study by Stonewall has found. They were shown as predatory, promiscuous or comical stereotypes half the time they appeared.

Soaps and reality shows such as Hollyoaks, I’m a Celebrity . . ., How to Look Good Naked and Emmerdale gave most screen time to gay, lesbian and bisexual characters or issues, but they were almost invisible in talent shows and dramas.

Researchers watched the 20 programmes most popular with young viewers for 16 weeks between last September and January 2010. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people were portrayed for five hours and 43 minutes in total — but 36% of that was negative, according to the report Unseen on Screen, and 31% was realistic but showed them as upset or distressed.

Stonewall monitored shows on BBC1, ITV1, Channel 4 and Five including The Bill, The X Factor, EastEnders, Blue Peter, The One Show and Strictly Come Dancing. It found that BBC1 portrayed lesbians for just 29 seconds out of nearly 40 screen hours.

The empirical side of engineering

Filed under: Education, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:50

As anyone who’s been paying attention knows, most engineering work is unexceptional and we depend on it working without fuss or bother. Engineers learn what is and isn’t possible with the materials and techniques available, but one of the most important teachers is failure:

The sinking of the Titanic, the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor in 1986, the collapse of the World Trade Center — all forced engineers to address what came to be seen as deadly flaws.

“Any engineering failure has a lot of lessons,” said Gary Halada, a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who teaches a course called “Learning from Disaster.”

Design engineers say that, too frequently, the nature of their profession is to fly blind.

Eric H. Brown, a British engineer who developed aircraft during World War II and afterward taught at Imperial College London, candidly described the predicament. In a 1967 book, he called structural engineering “the art of molding materials we do not really understand into shapes we cannot really analyze, so as to withstand forces we cannot really assess, in such a way that the public does not really suspect.”

First results from new study around Stonehenge

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:27

A new study of Stonehenge by the University of Birmingham and Vienna’s Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology has made its first major discovery:

Archaeologists have discovered a second henge at Stonehenge, described as the most exciting find there in 50 years.

The circular ditch surrounding a smaller circle of deep pits about a metre (3ft) wide has been unearthed at the world-famous site in Wiltshire.

Archaeologists conducting a multi-million pound study believe timber posts were in the pits.

Project leader Professor Vince Gaffney, from the University of Birmingham, said the discovery was “exceptional”.

The new “henge” — which means a circular monument dating to Neolithic and Bronze Ages — is situated about 900m (2,950ft) from the giant stones on Salisbury Plain.

I imagine, given how many times Stonehenge has been mucked about with by earlier enthusiasts, there must be much misleading data has to be sifted and re-sifted before any definite discoveries can be announced. Stonehenge has been fascinating people for centuries and there are probably lots of amateur investigations that may well have made the situation more confusing (think of a sixteenth century equivalent of Indiana Jones or Lara Croft with a nose for treasure).

Temporary aircraft security procedures

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:14

Apparently, asking the wrong question of aircraft personnel can get you booted off the plane — but not the next flight:

United Airlines ejected a loyal first class passenger from a recent plane flight because he asked if he would be getting dinner. At least, that’s his story. He may have been ejected because he’s the sort of security threat who claims he’s talking about food when he’s really talking about the police.

United takes such threats very seriously. At least for a few minutes.

The threat to the plane and its crew was so severe that United summoned the police and escorted him from the plane. Okay, if they thought he was a clear and present danger, they arrest him and charge him, yes?

No. He’s such a potentially dangerous character that they have an elite customer service agent met him coming off the flight to book him on the very next flight.

July 21, 2010

Return of the autogyro

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

An interesting piece at The Register about that odd flying object, the autogyro:

Former British Army pilots, drawing on military experience carrying out covert surveillance with secret special-forces units, have decided to revive the autogyro — a long-lost aircraft design of the 1930s, probably most famous for its use in the James Bond movies.

British startup firm Gyrojet is exhibiting its planned designs at the Farnborough airshow this week, and the Reg whirlycraft and spook surveillance desk got the chance to chat with company executives.

Gyrojet’s marketing material makes use of several key phrases which ring bells for those familiar with the history of the secret British Army unit formerly known as “14 Intelligence Company”, aka “the Det(s)” during its time carrying out clandestine surveillance in the hard areas of Northern Ireland during the long troubles there.

The operators of 14 Int were selected from across the armed forces in much the same way as the SAS recruits, but far less well known even today. Unlike the SAS and SBS, 14 Int recruited women — for the simple and practical reason that it’s difficult for an all-male covert ops team not to attract notice among a normal local population.

The autogyro has interesting abilities that neither fixed-wing aircraft nor true helicopters can duplicate — abilities of great interest to those needing to conduct surveillance operations.

July 20, 2010

Cooling the (Navy’s) jets

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:57

The carrier variant of the F-35 fighter and the V-22 tilt-rotor helicopter both present an unexpected problem to carrier crews: the risk of melting the deck. The heat of the exhaust on both of these aircraft can cause damage to the carrier’s deck if they are left running for more than a short period of time. Strategy Page reports:

The navy sought a solution that would not require extensive modification of current carrier decks. This includes a lot of decks, both the eleven large carriers, and the ten smaller LHAs and LHDs. This began looking like another multi-billion dollar “oops” moment, as the melting deck problem was never brought up during the long development of either aircraft. Previously, the Harrier was the only aircraft to put serious amounts of heat on the carrier deck, but not enough to do damage. But when you compare the Harrier engine with those on the V-22 and F-35B, you can easily see that there is a lot more heat coming out of the two more recent aircraft. Someone should have done the math before it became a real problem.

The solution to the V-22 heat issue is pretty straightforward: put heat-resistant pads under the exhausts, but the F-35 requires a (hopefully minor) redesign of the exhaust nozzles to diffuse the heat.

Paywall experiment not going to plan

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:37

A drop in use was probably expected when the Times put up a paywall on their website, but I doubt they expected the drop to be on the order of 90%:

The Times has lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June, calculations by the Guardian show.

Unregistered users of thetimes.co.uk are now “bounced” to a Times+ membership page where they have to register if they want to view Times content. Data from the web metrics company Experian Hitwise shows that only 25.6% of such users sign up and proceed to a Times web page; based on custom categories (created at the Guardian) that have been used to track the performance of major UK press titles online, visits to the Times site have fallen to 4.16% of UK quality press online traffic, compared with 15% before it made registration compulsory on 15 June.

These figures can then be used to model how this may impact on the number of users hitting the new Times site. Based on the last available ABCe data for Times Online readership (from February 2010), which showed that it had 1.2 million daily unique users, and Hitwise’s figures showing it had 15% of UK online newspaper traffic, that means a total of 332,800 daily users trying to visit the Times site.

If none of the people visiting the site have already registered, the one-on-four dropout rate means that traffic actually going from the registration site to the Times site is just 84,800, or 1.06% of total UK newspaper traffic – a 93% fall compared with May.

I have to admit that the paywall meant I just didn’t bother going to the Times at all, and no longer link to anything there (because most of my readers wouldn’t be able to open the link anyway). The Times might as well have gone out of business, from the online perspective.

The Guild S4 Ep.2

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:24

<br /><a href="http://www.bing.com/videos/browse/originals/the-guild?videoId=d0fa6983-84d4-4ab0-9bbd-933e400be67b&#038;fg=sharenoembed" target="_new"title="Episode 2: Strange Allies">Video: Episode 2: Strange Allies</a>

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress