Roger Henry sent me this link earlier this year, but it seems even more appropriate now:
I wonder how many budding documentarians will try to replicate the 1963 effort?
H/T to Ghost of a Flea for the reminder.
December 5, 2010
Worst Autumn snowfall in Britain since 1963
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Vikings and Bills “proved they didn’t deserve to be among the league’s elite”
John Holler looks at today’s matchup with a jaundiced eye:
The national interest in the Vikings-Bills game likely isn’t going to draw flies. Nor should it. A non-conference matchup between a 4-7 and 2-9 team isn’t the kind of thing that garners a lot of attention. But perhaps there are no teams in the league more snake-bit than the Vikings and Bills.
They have both faced schedules that, while both were considered gauntlets from the outset, have turned in a Murderer’s Row. Neither team has done anything to take control of their own destiny from the start, but the teams that have beat them have been among the league’s elite.
The records of the teams that have beaten both teams is both troubling and impressive. The Vikings’ seven losses have come to New Orleans (8-3), Miami (6-5), the New York Jets (9-2), Green Bay (7-4), New England (9-2), Chicago (8-3) and Green Bay (7-4).
Buffalo’s nine losses have include defeats against Miami (6-5), Green Bay (7-4), New England (9-2), the Jets (9-2), Jacksonville (6-5), Baltimore (8-3), Kansas City (6-5), Chicago (8-3) and Pittsburgh (8-3).
Perhaps the moral of the seasons for both teams is that they have faced the league’s elite teams throughout the season and, on regular basis, proved they didn’t deserve to be among the league’s elite teams
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“People talk about how knives are dangerous, and then they go in the kitchen and they have 50 of them”
Marc Lacey looks at the non-firearm right-to-carry movement:
Arizona used to be a knife carrier’s nightmare, with a patchwork of local laws that forced those inclined to strap Buck knives or other sharp objects to their belts to tread carefully as they moved from Phoenix (no knives except pocketknives) to Tempe (no knives at all) to Tucson (no knives on library grounds).
But that changed earlier this year when Arizona made its Legislature the sole arbiter of knife regulations. And because of loose restrictions on weapons here, Arizona is now considered a knife carrier’s dream, a place where everything from a samurai sword to a switchblade can be carried without a quibble.
Arizona’s transformation, and the recent lifting of a ban on switchblades, stilettos, dirks and daggers in New Hampshire, has given new life to the knife rights lobby, the little-known cousin of the more politically potent gun rights movement. Its vision is a knife-friendly America, where blades are viewed not as ominous but as tools — the equivalent of sharp-edged screw drivers or hammers — that serve useful purposes and can save lives as well as take them.
[. . .]
“People talk about how knives are dangerous, and then they go in the kitchen and they have 50 of them,” said D’Alton Holder, a veteran knife maker who lives in Wickenberg, Ariz. “It’s ridiculous to talk about the size of the knife as if that makes a difference. If you carry a machete that’s three feet long, it’s no more dangerous than any knife. You can do just as much damage with an inch-long blade, even a box cutter.”
[. . .]
“We had certain knives that were illegal, but I could walk down the street with a kitchen knife that I used to carve a turkey and that would be legal,” Ms. Coffey said. “I’d be more scared of a kitchen knife than a switchblade.”
She said switchblade bans were passed in the 1950s because of the menacing use of the knives in movies like “West Side Story” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”
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December 4, 2010
Looking for the remains of Zheng He’s treasure fleet
Virginia Postrel looks at the latest archaeological expedition in the Indian Ocean:
A team of Chinese archeologists arrived in Kenya last week, headed for waters surrounding the Lamu archipelago on the country’s northern coast. They hadn’t made the trip to study local history. They came to recover a lost Chinese past.
In the early 1400s, nearly a century before Vasco da Gama reached eastern Africa, Chinese records say that the great admiral Zheng He took his vast fleet of treasure ships as far as Kenya’s northern Swahili coast. Zheng visited the Sultan of Malindi, the most powerful local ruler, and brought back exotic gifts, including a giraffe. “Africa was China’s El Dorado — the land of rare and precious things, mysterious and unfathomable,” writes Louise Levathes in her 1994 history of Zheng’s voyages, “When China Ruled the Seas.”
Now the Chinese government is funding a three-year, $3 million project, in cooperation with the National Museums of Kenya, to find and analyze evidence of Zheng’s visits. The underwater search for shipwrecks follows a dig last summer in the village of Mambrui that unearthed a rare coin carried only by emissaries of the Chinese emperor, as well as a large fragment of a green-glazed porcelain bowl whose fine workmanship befits an imperial envoy. Although Ming-era porcelains are nothing new in Mambrui — Chinese porcelains fill the local museum and decorate a centuries-old tomb — the latest finds suggest that the wares came not through Arab merchants but directly from China.
China’s brief dabbling in overseas exploration ended fairly suddenly, but there was no technical reason that they could not have continued. It would be a very different world indeed if the Emperor hadn’t decided to ignore everything outside the Middle Kingdom.
The real problem with contemporary China’s version of the Zheng He story is that it omits the ending. In the century after Zheng’s death in 1433, emperors cut back on shipbuilding and exploration. When private merchants replaced the old tribute trade, the central authorities banned those ships as well. Building a ship with more than two masts became a crime punishable by death. Going to sea in a multimasted ship, even to trade, was also forbidden. Zheng’s logs were hidden or destroyed, lest they encourage future expeditions. To the Confucians who controlled the court, writes Ms. Levathes, “a desire for contact with the outside world meant that China itself needed something from abroad and was therefore not strong and self-sufficient.”
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Insults in other languages that don’t translate well
A fascinating thread on AskReddit asks “What are your favourite culturally untranslatable phrases?”
Language warning, so I’ve put it below the fold.
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QotD: “Every futuristic vision that starts with a clean slate has a genocide or an apocalypse lurking in it”
Here’s a clip of HG Wells in 1943 predicting the demise of the newspaper, as people abandon print journalism in favor of using their telephones for up-to-the-minute news.
In one way, it’s very prescient — “using the telephone to get the news” isn’t so far off from what we do on the web today. But in another way, it’s exactly wrong (after all, it’s been nearly 70 years and there are still newspapers), And it’s wrong in a way that futurists are often wrong: it assumes a clean break with history and the positive extinction of the past. It predicts an information landscape that is reminiscent of the Radiant Garden Cities that Jane Jacobs railed against: a “modern” city that could only be built by bulldozing the entire city that stood before it and building something new on the clean field that remained. Every futuristic vision that starts with a clean slate has a genocide or an apocalypse lurking in it. Real new cities are build through, within, around, and alongside of the old cities. They evolve.
As Bruce Sterling says, “The future composts the past.” What happened to newspapers is what happened to the stage when films were invented: all the stuff that formerly had to be on the stage but was better suited to the new screen gradually migrated off-stage and onto the screen (and when TV was invented, all the “little-screen” stories that had been shoehorned onto the big screen moved to the boob-tube; the same thing is happening with YouTube and TV today). Just as Twitter is siphoning off all the stuff we used to put on blogs that really wanted to be a tweet.
Cory Doctorow, “Newspapers are dead as mutton – HG Wells, 1943 (No, they’re not)”, BoingBoing, 2010-12-03
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California gambles on risky High Speed Rail ploy
The board of the California High Speed Rail Authority voted to build the first segment of the planned HSR trackage from nowhere to nowhere, and will carry no passengers:
Citing a need for jobs and fast approaching federal deadlines for funding, the California High Speed Rail Authority board Thursday unanimously approved construction of the first leg of the state’s proposed bullet train — a 65-mile section in the Central Valley that would not carry passengers until more of the system is built.
Costing at least $4.15 billion, the segment would run from the tiny town of Borden to Corcoran, an area hit so hard by the recession and agriculture declines that it has been dubbed the New Appalachia. Stations would be built in Fresno and Hanford.
Included in the plan are tracks, station platforms, bridges and viaducts, which would elevate the line through urban areas. The initial section, however, would not be equipped with maintenance facilities, locomotives, passenger cars or an electrical system necessary to power high-speed trains.
The board clearly believes that the state and the federal government will be forced to build the connecting segments in order to “save” the $4+ billion in sunk costs for this initial project (costs almost always balloon on major projects like this . . . final figure may well be double the headline number). In other words, they’re deliberately planning to blackmail the money out of future governments.
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December 3, 2010
Tattoos and Parenting, by Dara O Briain
I’ve said for years I should have invested my retirement savings in tattoo removal businesses . . .
H/T to William Penman for the link.
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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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December 2, 2010
Test post
Just updated the WordPress software. Testing to ensure it’s still working as expected.
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