This is a set of Hulett ore unloaders in Cleveland in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s shortly before they were finally retired. You can readily see how the Victorian imagination could lend itself to monstrous walking engines, given the huge mechanical marvels to be seen working along the dockside.
H/T to Robert Netzlof for the link.
So far, the opposition hasn’t been able to make much headway against that strong Conservative lead:
Here’s a summary from Kathryn Blaze Carlson:
The first poll since Saturday’s election call shows Tory support largely unchanged, bringing into question the opposition’s early emphasis on ethics.
Despite a weekend of being hammered for their alleged contempt of Parliament, the Conservatives boast the support of 41% of decided voters — 17 points ahead of the Liberals, who are at 24%. The NDP is at 19%, and the Bloc 10%.
The Forum Research poll also breaks it down by seat count, suggesting that if the election were held today, the Tories would surge from 143 seats to 162 seats, the Liberals would drop 17 seats to 61, the Bloc would rise from 44 to 51 and the NDP would be whittled from 36 seats to 34. The poll, conducted over the weekend via telephone with a random sample of 2,095 voters, is within the range of approximately plus or minus 10 seats for each party.
The seat projections reflect the regional strength of the BQ, who only run candidates in Quebec, and the natural disproportion of first-past-the-post voting.
Update: Publius points out the real root of Canada’s election issues:
Unfortunately neither you, nor any of the party leaders, have the temerity to admit what is actually wrong with Ottawa. Let me give you a hint. It’s not Stephen Harper’s pragmatism. It isn’t Lord Iggy’s incompetence. Not even Jack Layton’s spend till you’re broke ideology. The problem with Ottawa is Quebec. Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc Quebecois are merely the symptoms. Our national democracy is broken because part of the electorate refuses to participate.
In the 2006 and 2008 federal elections there were 308 seats up for grabs. That’s 75 in Quebec and 233 in the Rest of Canada (ROC). The 2006 election saw the Conservatives win 114 seats in ROC and 10 in Quebec. The Conservatives did better in the ROC in 2008 winning 133 seats and holding on to their seats in Quebec. If we were to remove Quebec’s 75 seats from Parliament a majority government could be formed with 117 seats. On that basis, including only their ROC seats, the Harper Tories would have won a strong minority government in 2006 and a clear majority in 2008. To say, as the opposition parties and the MSM have, that Harper has failed to seal the deal with Canadians is only partially correct.
For all his faults, chronicled in some detail on this blog over the years, Stephen Harper has in fact convinced a critical mass of the interested Canadian electorate of his fitness to lead us. Those who vote for the Bloc Quebecois have declared their disinterest in Canada as a working proposition.
The Bloc Quebecois are not political party in any meaningful sense but merely a pressure group that has won election to parliament. It is because of this we find ourselves in a series of weak hung parliaments. The BQ offers no vision for Canada, only its potential destruction. It’s bargaining position with the other parties in recent parliaments has been of routine blackmail. Vote what is in the best interests of Quebec, or else.
A report from Kyodo News shows that Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) is still not fully co-operating or providing all the information needed to clean up the Fukushima reactor sites:
While efforts at containing troubled reactors have not been making rapid progress at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, signs were emerging that Tokyo Electric Power Co., in the absence of a top officer, is losing its grip on accurately informing the public about risks from radiation.
On Sunday, the utility, known as TEPCO, announced in the morning that the concentration of radioactive materials of water found inside a turbine building adjacent to a rector housing was ”around 10 million times (that of) water in a normal reactor core” but later corrected the information, saying it ”made a wrong estimation.”
[. . .]
On March 20, TEPCO said, ”There were no increases in radiation levels in adjacent areas.” But increases were logged in various parts of adjacent areas, prompting skeptical reporters to raise a series of questions at a news conference but TEPCO officials remained mum.
TEPCO has been giving a series of news conferences since Fukushima Daiichi got into trouble after the March 11 quake. Attending officials have not been able to provide satisfactory answers to a majority of questions raised, only repeating words of apology and, ”We will check it.” It has left the impression they are unable to reply to questions because they are not given enough information.
[. . .]
But on Saturday, it was disclosed that the company had not informed workers who suffered high levels of radiation at the No. 3 reactor unit about radiation levels of the place where they would be working. The government was also found to have not been informed.
Top government spokesman Yukio Edano expressed his displeasure, telling a news conference, ”We cannot give appropriate instructions unless accurate information is provided swiftly.”
TEPCO is allowed to monopolize the power utility market in Tokyo and surrounding regions by law. As the nation’s biggest utility, it has also been the key promoter of the nuclear power policy and one of the main employers of retiring bureaucrats.
Critics say the company lacks cost consciousness and apparently has no idea about what competition is. It is more like a bureaucracy rather than a business being run, they said.
Fraternization between soldiers and civilian women in the weeks following libertion was intense, and inhibitions in the traditionally prudish Dutch society fell away. The fighting was over, but a new battlefront now loomed. By the summer of 1945, a medical officer in General Hoffmeister’s Fifth Division was confirming a sharp rise in VD rates among the troops. This was despite an efficient campaign to hand out contraceptives and warn the troops about the dangers of unprotected sex. “Perhaps,” noted the officer, “it was because the Dutch and Canadians get along well together.” There were no reports of rape in the area.
However, as the summer passed, popular resentment about the behavior of Canadian soldiers and Dutch girls began to rise, and the sight of their women arm in arm with their occupiers started to grate. “Dutch men were beaten militarily in 1940, sexually in 1945,” observed one Dutch journalist. Popular songs and doggerel reflected a new mood about the Canadians.
[. . .]
A joke hinting at the number of girls who were “getting into trouble” also began to circulate. “In twenty years, when another world war breaks out, it will not be necessary to send a Canadian expeditionary force to the Netherlands. A few ships loaded with uniforms will be enough.”
David Stafford, Endgame, 1945: The missing final chapter of World War II, Little, Brown 2007. pp 451-452.
A link from wormme leads to this interesting article providing some basic information on radiation:
There is an interesting way of comparing different amounts of radiation, and we’ve now built up all the pieces to understand it. Nuclear physicists and safety engineers sometimes use a unit called the “banana equivalent dose.” This is basically how it’s calculated.
First you take a banana.
Like pretty well everything in nature, bananas are slightly radioactive. Because bananas concentrate potassium, they are more radioactive than a lot of other foods — natural potassium includes some part that is the radioactive isotope potassium-40. That means eating a banana, and thereby ingesting the potassium, adds a measurable radiation dose from the radioactive potassium-40.
Now, before you change to kumquats or something, it’s not much, and bananas aren’t the only source. Potatoes are another food that concentrates potassium. But it does mean we can usefully compare the total dose we get from a banana with other small amounts of radiation. The somewhat-joking term for this is the “banana equivalent dose,” or BED.
Okay, that’s the amusing part, but read the whole thing: it’s informative and non-sensationalized.
Part of the reason I’m posting links to articles like this is that there is a lot of misinformation on all things nuclear and the mainstream media is doing a flat-out terrible job of reporting.
I’ve lived within 10-20 km of nuclear power stations for more than a decade, and I’m not particularly worried day-to-day about the risks due to that proximity. I used to joke with visitors that we didn’t pay for electricity — the walls glowed after dark from the radioactivity. I stopped doing that when I realized people were taking me a bit more seriously than I expected.
This one sounds positively science-fictiony:
Boffins in America say they’re on the track of a backpack electro-beam forcefield device capable of snuffing out raging fires without any need for water, hoses or other traditional firefighting apparatus. Apart from portable applications, they raise the possibility that the new technology might replace building sprinkler systems with ceiling mounted conflagration-squelching zapper terminals.
“Controlling fires is an enormously difficult challenge,” says Dr Ludovico Cademartiri. “Our research has shown that by applying large electric fields we can suppress flames very rapidly. We’re very excited about the results.”
Cademartiri and his fellow boffins at Harvard uni have tested their flame-zapping gizmo in the lab, using a 600-watt amplifier hooked up to a “wand-like probe”. This setup was apparently able to snuff out test flames “more than a foot high”. The team think that it should be possible to get similar effects with a less power-hungry system using 60W or less, raising the possibility of portable equipment.
So, not quite ready to snuff out the soaring flames of a major fire, yet.
In what isn’t really a surprise, Justin Olivetti reports on how Canadian WoW players have been suffering from deliberate throttling:
If you play World of Warcraft in Canada and were wondering why your connection seemed a bit slow, it turns out there may be a good explanation: Rogers Communications has been deliberately throttling the game across the country.
[. . .]
Rogers said that it was Blizzard’s use of BitTorrent to deliver updates that triggered the throttling, and said that customers who disabled this setting — as well as any other peer-to-peer applications — would not see a slowdown in speed. “Rogers will engage our customers to ensure they are aware of these recommendations, while continuing to work on a longer term solution,” a spokesperson said.
Lewis Page is less than impressed with the media’s ongoing coverage of the Fukushima reactor clean-up:
The situation at the quake- and tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant in Japan was brought under control days ago. It remains the case as this is written that there have been no measurable radiological health consequences among workers at the plant or anybody else, and all indications are that this will remain the case. And yet media outlets around the world continue with desperate, increasingly hysterical and unscrupulous attempts to frame the situation as a crisis.
[. . .]
Nonetheless, in the hyper-cautious nuclear industry, any dose over 100 millisievert is likely to cause bosses to pull people out at least temporarily. Furthermore, the three workers had sustained slight burns to their legs as a result of standing in the radioactive water – much as one will burn one’s skin by exposing it to the rays of the sun (a tremendously powerful nuclear furnace). They didn’t even notice these burns until after completing their work. Just to be sure, however, the three were sent for medical checks.
So — basically nothing happened. Three people sustained injuries equivalent to a mild case of sunburn. But this was reported around the globe as front-page news under headlines such as “Japanese Workers Hospitalized for Excessive Radiation Exposure”. Just to reiterate: it was not excessive.
Reporters clamoured to know more — in particular how could the water in the basement of the reactor building have become so radioactive — no less than “10,000 times normal”. One might note that in general radiation levels 10,000 times normal mean that you could achieve a tiny fraction of an extra percentage point of cancer risk by being exposed for a fortnight or so.
[. . .]
Then there’s the matter of the tapwater in Tokyo. Two days ago, levels of radioactive iodine-131 were found in the city’s water which were above the safety limit for baby milk calculated on the basis of a year’s consumption: in other words, if babies drank such water for a year constantly they would have a tiny, minuscule extra risk of thyroid cancer.
[. . .]
There was never any chance whatsoever that levels of iodine-131 in the tapwater would remain noticeable for a year, which is what would be necessary for any effects at all on the city’s babies. It was really quite irresponsible of the authorities to recommend that infants shouldn’t drink it. (One can’t help noticing that the first such recommendation reportedly came from the city authorities, belatedly followed by the national government. The Tokyo city governor is from the national opposition party and is facing a tough re-election battle. He had previously sought to use the Fukushima situation to cast his political rivals in a bad light over the deployment of Tokyo’s elite Hyper Rescue firefighters.)
I’d also recommend that you keep an eye on the World’s Only Rational Man for his professional take on what the media is currently panicking over at any given moment:
If modern “journalism” wasn’t the single most incompetent industry in human history we wouldn’t be pulling our hair out over this. Where’s the followup to the reports of Cl-38?
How freakin’ incompetent is the entirety of Big Media?!
You’ve had two weeks to learn a minimum about this subject you obsessively “cover”.
“But…but math is hard!” you whine? Then find some dad-gum folks who do this crap for a living rather than cultivate ivory tower media-hounds.
Sorry. Forgive the venting. Tired and P.O.ed.
Apparently going beddy-bye to the thought of runaway nuclear excursions isn’t warm milk and happy stories. Monsters Inc. could have stayed in the scaring business if they’d taken lessons from The Media.
This blogging day began with concern about neutrons. And so it ends.
I wish we still had reporters.
Because I hate journalism.
Once again, wormme is a radiological control technician, so he actually knows what the hell he’s talking about, unlike just about everyone “covering” the news.
Chris Mellor looks at the Bayeux Tapestry from a data storage perspective:
The Bayeux Tapestry, the victor’s view of the events, was finished in 1077, ten years after it was begun, making it 934 years old. At 224.3ft long and 1.6ft wide the total surface area is 358.88sq ft.
Our understanding is that the Tapestry features 45 to 48 threads per inch which gives us a resolution approximating 47dpi with a colour depth of 8, ignoring later repairs. Thus, in information terms, the tapestry contains 2.429MB of information, assuming 1-bit per colour, 47dpi, and a 51,678.72 square inch surface area.
From the writing point of view it took ten years for English (Saxon) seamsters, seamstresses or embroiderers to write this 2.429MB of data, which must be some kind of record. Assuming an eight-hour, 350-day working period for these ten years, that implies a write bandwidth of 10.84 bytes/hour; a spectacularly slow data rate in information transfer terms.
What makes it worse is that there were multiple parallel write heads — seamsters or seamstresses — and we could envisage a team of five on average, meaning each write head in this theoretical Bayeux Tapestry archiving model wrote at a rate of 2.168 bytes/per hour (17.344 bits/min). A truly amazingly poor information write bandwidth from our IT viewpoint, but a blur of flickering needles and fingers seen from the embroiderers’ seat.
Because right now, we’ve got so-called Conservatives wearing Liberal clothing (and Liberals pawing through the NDP’s cast-off pile). There’s no major federal party in Canada that actually pursues fiscally responsible government policies, no matter how much they may talk about the virtues of smaller government.
Shortly after his government’s defeat, Prime Minister Stephen Harper attempted to deflect focus back to Tuesday’s budget. The economy, he said, is the number one priority of Canadians and the budget was the key to the country’s economic future. Then he said: “There was nothing in the budget that the opposition could not or should not have supported.” True enough — but what does that say to Canada’s conservatives? Based on the budget, they are now called on to support a Conservative party that has presided over an extravagant full-scale national revival of big government by fiscal expansion.
Only a few days ago, it seems, Canadian politics was abuzz with the possibility of a new ideological era that favoured smaller government and lower taxes, with less waste, more discipline and a determination to cut taxes. There were signs of revolt in British Columbia, a shake-up in Calgary and reform in Toronto, where Mayor Rob Ford captured a staggering 47% of the vote in a town where The Globe and Mail is considered a right-wing propaganda sheet. Ford Nation, they called it.
There is no Harper Nation. After five-plus years in office, the Harper Conservatives have singularly failed to change the Canadian ideological landscape. Instead, Canadian politics changed the Conservatives. In power, they transformed themselves into another basely partisan party that willingly and even eagerly pandered to whatever the political three-ring circus put on display. This week’s budget, in which $2-billion in loose cash was promptly distributed to a score of special interests and political agendas, left in place a $40-billion deficit for 2010 and solidified a $100-billion increase in the national debt over five years.
There’s no threat on the right to force the Conservatives to actually live up to their talk, so they’re free to drift as far into Liberal territory as they like — and they seem to like it a lot — because small-C conservative voters have nowhere else to go.
This is the 20th anniversary of the founding of Blizzard, one of the most important gaming companies in the industry.
Twenty years is a long time, and to illustrate how long (and make you feel old in the process), let’s do a little retrospective. In 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev led the Soviet Union, James Cameron’s Terminator 2 and Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood ruled the box office, and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was flying off toy store shelves everywhere following its August release.
Also in 1991, a software company known as Silicon & Synapse started its life by working on ports for other gaming companies before re-branding itself as Blizzard Entertainment three years later.
Unless you were paying close attention in your history classes, you probably wouldn’t recognize the name:
It was one of the biggest and probably the bloodiest battle ever fought on British soil. Such was its ferocity almost 1 per cent of the English population was wiped out in a single day. Yet mention the Battle of Towton to most people and you would probably get a blank stare.
Next week marks the 550th anniversary of the engagement that changed the course of the Wars of the Roses. It is estimated that between 50,000 and 80,000 soldiers took part in the battle in 1461 between the Houses of York and Lancaster for control of the English throne. An estimated 28,000 men are said to have lost their lives.
But this bloody conflict is unlikely to remain forgotten for much longer. Archaeologists believe they will unearth what is likely to be Britain’s largest mass grave this summer.
Work is to begin in June, at a site 12 miles south of York between the villages of Saxton and Towton where the battle took place in snowy March weather. The locations of the graves were discovered by archaeologists using geophysical imagery and now, with funding in place, they are able to begin excavating.
And why is such a major battle so little-known? Perhaps because the “wrong” side won:
Very few records of the battle survive, which is one reason that so little is known about it. Historians believe this could be due to an early propaganda campaign by the Tudors.
Author and historian George Goodwin, who this month publishes a new book: Fatal Colours: Towton, 1461 — England’s Most Brutal Battle, said: “The Tudors did a tremendously good propaganda job in making Bosworth the key battle because that was the battle which ended the Wars of the Roses. They were the winners and they got to write the history books. Because Towton was a Yorkist victory that wasn’t really very useful to them.”
I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.
A very quiet week compared with the last couple of information-dense weeks.
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