I’ve said for years I should have invested my retirement savings in tattoo removal businesses . . .
H/T to William Penman for the link.
December 3, 2010
HMS Ark Royal arrives in Portsmouth to be decommissioned
Steven Morris was there as HMS Ark Royal arrived back at her home port for the final time:
The music was corny: a Royal Marines band was belting out a version of the Rod Stewart hit Sailing as HMS Ark Royal emerged from the freezing fog to tie up at her home port for the final time.
But the emotion was genuine enough. From the quarter deck to the frozen quayside, tough sailors gulped back tears at the end of a chapter in Britain’s proud naval history.
After a quarter of a century of service around the globe, the aircraft carrier is being decommissioned as part of the defence review. The former flagship’s future remains unclear. There has been talk that she could be turned into a museum, but that may be too expensive. It is more likely that she will be sold off or simply scrapped for parts.
“It’s very emotional,” said Leading Seaman Paul Stockell, one of those who had tears in his eyes — and not just because of the biting wind — as he helped bring the ship alongside in Portsmouth today.
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Sniper detection systems continue to improve
Strategy Page looks at the continuing evolution of sniper detection devices:
The U.S. Army has ordered another 13,500 SWATS (Soldier Worn Acoustic Targeting Systems) sniper detectors. These 183 g (6.4 ounce) devices come in two pieces. One is the sensor, that is worn on the shoulder, while the controller, with small LCD display, is worn in front, where it can be quickly glanced at. SWATS calculates (from the of the sound weapon fired) direction of fire in a tenth of a second. SWATS has been very popular with troops, and costs about $5,000 each. SWATS can also be mounted on vehicles, and work when the vehicle is moving at speeds of 80 kilometers an hour or more.
Acoustic gunfire (sniper) detectors, which have been in the field for a decade, have had increasing success. Over 50,000 sniper detectors have been shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan, where they have been increasingly useful. Sniper detection systems provide directional information about where the snipers are. Several generations of these systems have showed up over the last decade. The usefulness of these anti-sniper systems has increased as the manufacturers have decreased the number of false alarms, and improved the user interface. There are other reasons for all this progress, including major advances in computing power, sensor quality and software development. One of the latest, and most useful, improvements is providing nearly instant, and easy to comprehend, location info on the sniper.
Pay no attention to the statisticians behind the curtain
James Delingpole has a handy guide to assure you that man made global warming is still happening:
“It’s all actually a sign that man made global warming is very much a live issue and that there’s more of it happening than ever,” says a top scientist, who holds the British record for securing grant-funding for global warming research projects so he must know what he’s talking about.
“Look at the Met office,” the scientist goes on. “They’ve just told us that 2010 is the hottest year since records began in 1850 and even though the stupid Central England Temperature record tells us something quite different and even though the year hasn’t actually finished yet they must know what they’re talking about and they definitely can’t have fiddled the data because the Met office is part of the government and they wouldn’t lie or get things wrong which is why that barbecue summer was such a scorcher.”
The big problem is, the scientist said, is that the public are really stupid. They think just because Dr David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit said in the Independent in 2000 that soon there’d be no snow because of global warming, when what he actually meant was that soon there’d be lots of snow and that this would be “proof” of global warming. The interviewer just missed out the word “proof” that’s all because journalists are lazy that way.
Yes, yes, confusing mere “weather” with climate again, I’m sure.
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Reactions to the Irish financial crisis
Kevin O’Rourke sees it as almost a kind of bereavement:
It is one thing to know that someone you love is terminally ill; their death still comes as a shock.
I certainly don’t want to compare the arrival of the EU-IMF team in Dublin last week to a bereavement. But I was surprised at how upsetting I found it, given that it came as no surprise. It had been clear for a long time that the blanket guarantee given to the liabilities of Ireland’s rotten banks, in September 2008, had saddled the State with a debt that was too big for it to handle. Ten successive quarters of declining real GNP, and one attempt too many to draw a line under the losses of our banks, made our exclusion from international capital markets inevitable. But to know something is one thing; to see it actually happen is something entirely different.
I am not alone in feeling this way, it seems. The economics editor of the Irish Times, Dan O’Brien, wrote that
“nothing quite symbolised this State’s loss of sovereignty than the press conference at which the ECB man spoke along with two IMF men and a European Commission official. It was held in the Government press centre beneath the Taoiseach’s office. I am a xenophile and cosmopolitan by nature, but to see foreign technocrats take over the very heart of the apparatus of this State to tell the media how the State will be run into the foreseeable future caused a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach.
This is not to say that we would be happy to have our country’s affairs managed by the current, disgraced, government. I yield to no-one in my loathing of the men and women who have done this to my country. What has been the intellectual low-point of the last couple of years? Was it the cash-for-clunkers stimulus package (Ireland does not produce any cars)? Or the statement by our Finance Minister that Ireland need not fear a bank run, since Ireland is an island? Or the biggest Irish joke of them all, which underpinned the bank guarantee in the first place: that if we wanted investors to retain confidence in the creditworthiness of the Irish State, we needed to make sure that nobody who invested in our (private sector) banks ever lost a penny?”
H/T to Tim Harford for the link.
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Happy holiday travels!
H/T to Economicrot. Many many more at the link.
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