Quotulatiousness

April 9, 2011

Someone deserves a medal here

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:57

If this Guardian report is true, I hope that Royston Smith is on the next honours list:

Southampton city council leader, Royston Smith, was visiting the submarine with other dignitaries while it was berthed at the Eastern Docks on a five-day visit to the city.

He described how he “wrestled” the gunman to the ground in the submarine’s control room as he tried to stop him.

“Two shots were fired, straight after he entered the control room again and began shooting again,” Smith told the BBC.

“I ran towards him, I pushed him against the wall, we wrestled to take the gun from him. He fired again, I wrestled again to get the weapon from him. I pushed him to another wall, I wrestled him to the ground and managed to take the weapon away from him then others came to help to restrain him.”

He said a group of schoolchildren had left the submarine shortly before the attack.

That’s a civilian, charging a gunman armed with a battle rifle, and disarming him before the trained military personnel could intervene. There are very few people who could have reacted so quickly — and correctly — in that situation. That’s heroism.

Rare WW2 German bomber discovered off British coast

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:32

What may be the only intact example of the German Dornier 17 bomber has been discovered in the Goodwin Sands off the coast of Kent:

The plane came to rest upside-down in 50 feet of water and has become partially visible from time to time as the sands retreated before being buried again.


Image from Reuters

Now a high-tech sonar survey undertaken by the Port of London Authority (PLA) has revealed the aircraft to be in a startling state of preservation.

[. . .]

Known as “the flying pencil,” the Dornier 17 was designed as a passenger plane in 1934 and was later converted for military use as a fast bomber, difficult to hit and theoretically able to outpace enemy fighter aircraft.

In all, some 1,700 were produced but they struggled in the war with a limited range and bomb load capability and many were scrapped afterwards.

Striking high-resolution images appear to show that the Goodwin Sands plane suffered only minor damage, to its forward cockpit and observation windows, on impact.

“The bomb bay doors were open, suggesting the crew jettisoned their cargo,” said PLA spokesman Martin Garside.

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

Latest poll: Liberals up, NDP down

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:22

The Liberals appear to the party primarily benefitting from a slackening in NDP support:

QotD: “In terms of outcomes — the greatest individual Liberty for the greatest number — Canada is a FAR more Libertarian country than the United States”

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:07

As a conscious, de jure Libertarian; and antiauthoritarian to the very core of my being — I have more than once observed that in terms of outcomes — the greatest individual Liberty for the greatest number — Canada is a FAR more Libertarian country than the United States.

You see — and you will find this point made in core libertarian writings — liberty requires social infrastructure in order to ensure basic, common wants; otherwise those wants and needs can be and WILL be used by the minority against the majority to reduce them to a state of permanent serfdom.

Unless you can afford to say “take this job and shove it,” you are not free. Arguably, it should not be a trivial step, without consequence, but it absolutely MUST be possible — or you are not living in a free society.

Likewise, there must be robust regulations and vigilant guardians watching over the markets and the commons, so that — well, so that what is happening in economic terms in the US and Europe, does not happen. And in Canada, that is the case. Canada has not abandoned regulatory oversight of critical industries in order to pander to would be Madoffs and Enrons and the result is more — not less — economic opportunity and practical liberty for more people.

But US Libertarians are of the opinion that Liberty is the same as License. It is a movement of the self-indulgent, those who cry that “I have mine, and you are a luser who deserves nothing from me.”

Bob King, “Basement Bunker Libertarians”, Graphictruth, 2009-04-30

This week in Guild Wars 2 news

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:05

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 slow week, compared to the last few weeks.

Part 1: Discussion of previous news

Part 2: Guild Wars news

  • Game update: “Removed all things that can’t be processed with a normal brain:
    – Non-tiger creatures with tiger blood
    – Red Rock Candy from Mars
    – Warlocks”

Part 3: Guild Wars 2 news

  • A glowing review of the Thief profession. “Yes, she just dragged him over here like Scorpion. Yes, he just teleported to where he shot his arrow. Yes, her dagger just hit three enemies at once, and YES he just went invis, stole a branch off a treant and then used it to beat down an ogre. Show me another MMO with a class that looks and plays like this, and I’ll give you a cookie. Not some healthy little Snackwells cookie either, one of those big soft mushy ones like you get in a combo meal at Subway. If Guild Wars 2 wasn’t on your MMO radar before (I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be) it had better be now. And for all you WoW Rogues out there who are tired of herp derping around throwing fans of knives, I think you’ve found your true calling.”
  • Part 2 of the interview with Daniel Dociu. “It is satisfying to see one of your concept materialize, but it is even more satisfying to see your concept elaborated on and improved upon. And that’s what’s very important to me and something I keep repeating, especially to the young artists who join us. A good modeler is capable of delivering ‘spot on’ and staying very true to a concept — a great modeler, though, is capable of building upon it. Taking a concept as a starting point and bringing their own contribution. Looking at it with a critical eye; dissect it, analyze it, understand it, form an opinion or attitude towards it and then add that layer of your own to the concept. It is extremely satisfying to me when I see a concept of mine brought to a level I wasn’t capable of seeing or anticipating.”
  • Part 3 of the Daniel Dociu interview. “Some people may have the artistic inclination and the creativity but lack the drive or ability of hard work and sustained intensity over four years of school. At the end of four years education, there is only a fraction of students who present themselves as a complete package with a convincing body of work (both quality and quantity wise) who would indeed stand a good chance in the very competitive job market. Everyone else may struggle a great deal, and it’s heart breaking for me as a parent to see all these kids misled into believing it’ll be a walk in the park.”
  • Horia Dociu talks about putting the Commando April Fool content together. “One day, while working on some of the previous Guild Wars 2 skill videos, I thought about how I’d love to see a SWAT team taking out charr with assault rifles and how much fun it would be to make that video. Then it clicked: April Fools’ Day would be my only opportunity to do that, so I had to make it happen!”
  • Video interview with Colin Johanson, part 1. “We caught up with Guild Wars 2 lead content designer Colin Johanson to discuss the upcoming MMORPG. In this the first part of the interview we discuss World of Warcraft, the event system and story.”
  • Part 2 of the Colin Johanson interview. “Our interview with Arenanet’s Colin Johanson continues and this time we talk about such diverse matters as the new Silvari race and the keg brawl mini”
  • Those sneaky, sneaky Skritt. “Skritt are small, rat-like creatures in Guild Wars 2 who come from deep beneath the surface of Tyria. At first glance, these skittering fur balls may seem barely capable of rational speech, but they wield weapons and wear clothing and armor like more advanced races. Also, as the asura will tell you (or as any careful observer might note), the skritt actually gain intelligence when many of them congregate. Speaking in chirps and squeaks so fast that it sounds like buzzing to human ears, they share information, parse knowledge, and determine actions between themselves. The more skritt there are to do so, the more rational, intelligent, and cunning their activities become. One skritt alone is a simple-minded individual, capable of performing basic tasks and keeping himself alive, but an entire colony of hundreds? Clever enough to challenge even the brainpower of the asura.”

Upheaval in Finnish politics?

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Ilkka is enjoying the spectacle of the “right-thinking” (i.e., left-thinking) folks in Finland who are horrified at the rise of a new party:

Canada will have yet another federal election that will bring yet another minority government, and back in the old country, the parliamentary elections have begun with the first early voting days, and the right-wing protest party True Finns is predicted to grab a significant chunk of the parliamentary seats. The impotent tantrum of the SWPL greens and leftists, along with the media that they still mostly control, reacting to the cognitive dissonance of the working class abandoning them has certainly been a laugh riot. Besides, this whole surge illustrates how just one voice of just the right pitch can smash a sufficiently ossified, smug and complacent echo chamber to little shards of glass by its mere existence. One can only imagine what the Finland of the 1970’s would have been like, had the Internet existed back then to give these voices a voice, as all leftism and progressivism can keep the reality at bay only if they get to have a totalitarian control of all media to constrain the parameters of debate.

April 8, 2011

QotD: the international double standard

Filed under: Europe, Humour, Italy, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:39

A long time ago we had a president who was doing a chubby intern.

And some Americans got uptight about it.

And we were told by Europeans everywhere ‘Relax, it’s just sex. He’s the leader of the country, they have mistresses, it happens get over it you uptight prudes.’

So now with Silvio Berlusconi having sex with underage prostitutes and orgies and I don’t know what-all I guess that makes Europe — and Italy in particular — about eighteen times more sophisticated [1] than us hicks in the United States and so-on and so-forth.

Y’all must be so proud.

[1] Sarcasm.

Brian Dunbar, “Sophisticated Europe”, Space for Commerce, by Brian Dunbar, 2011-04-07

Monty’s daily dose of DOOM!

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:12

People suffering from over-cheerful attitudes about the future of the European Union could just read Monty’s chock-full-of-DOOM postings at Ace of Spades HQ for a quick depressant:

Let’s begin abroad by explaining why Spain is boned. Spain suffers from the same disease as the rest of the continent generally — socialism, postmodernism, an ossified job market, an unsustainable welfare state — but in more concentrated form. Spain is so boned that their main export these days is young ‘uns (h/t Andy).

If you look at the countries currently in the midst of insolvency in Europe — Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and (shortly) Spain — it’s obvious that they are different entities altogether from their more prosperous European peers. For one, most of them are recent entrants onto the first-world stage. Spain languished under Franco until the mid 1970’s; Ireland only emerged from decades of civil strife (both amongst themselves and against England) in the early 1990’s; and Portugal was (and still is) a third-world nation glued to the continenet almost as an afterthought. Portugal is more properly thought of as a North African developing country than a first-world European country, whatever the maps say (h/t rdbrewer).

The Euro project hid those problems…for a while. Cheap credit allowed the dysfunctional European countries to borrow enough money to pretend to a first-world standard of living for more than a decade. There was real growth in the various economies — particularly in Ireland — but much of the “growth” was mainly borrowed money with little attendant economic or social reform.

The Great Downturn of 2008 did not cause the problem; it simply exposed what a sham the whole thing had been all along.

England is watching the drama play out on the Continent, and thanking $DEITY that they never signed on to the Euro. England still has serious problems, but they also have options that the other European nations do not have because they control their own currency.

As usual, the original post has lots of links to follow to increase the dosage of DOOM. Adjust intake to adequately suppress your optimism.

British study finds wind power even less economical than hoped

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:56

The assumption was that wind farms would produce 30% of their theoretical maximum over time (the wind doesn’t blow all the time, so no wind farm will ever produce 100% for more than a short period of time). This number now appears to be too optimistic:

A new analysis of wind energy supplied to the UK National Grid in recent years has shown that wind farms produce significantly less electricity than had been thought, and that they cause more problems for the Grid than had been believed.

The report [. . .] was commissioned by conservation charity the John Muir Trust and carried out by consulting engineer Stuart Young. It measured electricity actually metered as being delivered to the National Grid.

[. . .]

In general, then, one should assume that a wind farm will generate no more than 25 per cent of maximum capacity over time (and indeed this seems set to get worse as new super-large turbines come into service). Even over a year this will be up or down by a few per cent, making planning more difficult.

It gets worse, too, as wind power frequently drops to almost nothing. It tends to do this quite often just when demand is at its early-evening peak:

At each of the four highest peak demands of 2010 wind output was low being respectively 4.72%, 5.51%, 2.59% and 2.51% of capacity at peak demand.

And unfortunately the average capacity over time is pulled up significantly by brief windy periods. Wind output is actually below 20 per cent of maximum most of the time; it is below 10 per cent fully one-third of the time. Wind power needs a lot of thermal backup running most of the time to keep the lights on, but it also needs that backup to go away rapidly whenever the wind blows hard, or it won’t deliver even 25 per cent of capacity.

The economics of Falcon Heavy

Filed under: Economics, Space — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

Charles Stross runs the numbers on the new SpaceX Falcon Heavy:

SpaceX announce Falcon Heavy. It’s been expected for some time — it’s been on their road map for a few years — but it’s worth repeating: man-rated and with a payload of 53 tons to Low Earth Orbit, Falcon Heavy has the largest payload of any space launcher since Energiya and the Saturn V, and it’s dirty-cheap by EELV standards at $80M-120M per launch. Moreover, it can’t easily be dismissed as vapourware because it’s an evolutionary development of a real, flying launch vehicle (Falcon 9) — a Falcon 9 core with two extra first stages strapped to the sides as boosters (and some fancy cross-stage plumbing to run the central core motors off fuel bled from the strap-ons, so that at BECO the central stage still carries a full fuel load). With the giant Iridium NEXT contract SpaceX have landed (the largest commercial launch contract in history), not to mention the ISS resupply contract, SpaceX looks likely to have the cash flow to build and fly this thing.

[. . .]

Note that these days the budget for a big Hollywood blockbuster — Avatar, for instance — can push over the $0.3Bn mark. It’s hard to say what the media rights to the second! ever! manned Moon program! would be, but it’s hard to see them going for much less than a major blockbuster movie. I think it unlikely that the expedition could be run entirely on the media rights, but they should certainly make a double-digit percentage contribution to the budget. Add the opportunity to tout for the science budget of some major agencies (by carrying lunar orbiter packages as payload, perhaps?) and it might be possible to raise $250-500M towards the costs of a $600-1000M expedition.

Is Elon Musk planning on being the 13th man on the moon?

More on Falcon Heavy at The Register.

Swearing in soccer? Gasp! Shock! Horror!

Filed under: Britain, Media, Soccer — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:52

Duleep Allirajah wonders how the Football Association has managed to avoid hearing what soccer players say on the pitch until now:

Rooney swore? So f***ing what

Those fretting over the footballer’s anglo-saxon turn of phrase have clearly never been to a match before.

Wayne Rooney’s angry outburst was curious. What did it mean? Who was he addressing? In appearing to pick a fight with a TV camera, it immediately struck me as an homage to Robert De Niro’s famous ‘You talking to me?’ scene in Taxi Driver. But maybe I’m reading too much into it.

In a statement issued by his club, the player said: ‘Emotions were running high, and on reflection my heat-of-the-moment reaction was inappropriate. It was not aimed at anyone in particular.’ Maybe he was railing against his inner demons. Maybe there is no deeper meaning. Maybe it was a release of pent-up frustration after months of domestic strife and poor goal-scoring form.

But enough of my speculative interpretation, it’s the Football Association’s response that we should really be bothered about. The FA has banned Rooney for two matches for using ‘offensive, insulting and/or abusive language’. You don’t need to be a lipreader to work out that footballers swear quite a lot; every Saturday you’ll find them effing and blinding like proverbial troopers. But while disciplinary action for abusing match officials is nothing new, a ban for swearing per se is quite unprecedented.

Graphic illustrating why I don’t expect my MP to change

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Whitby-Oshawa 2008 votingWhitby-Oshawa 2008 legendHere’s the riding of Whitby-Oshawa in the 2008 election. Notice all that deep blue colour? As the legend says, the opacity of colour indicates the strength of the party in that area. Up in the Brooklin area, you can barely see the underlying road pattern for all the blueness.

You can find how blue (or red, or whatever) your riding is by using the cyberpresse.ca Interactive map (this is now available in English: the original was in French). It’s another illustration of how to use Google Maps to display geographical data in interesting ways.

This time around, I’ll at least have a Libertarian candidate to vote for: Josh Insang is running for the Libertarian Party. Check the LPC Candidate page to see if you have a Libertarian running in your riding.

April 7, 2011

Briefly noted – The Crimean War by Orlando Figes

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Middle East, Russia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:24

I just picked this up last night at the “World’s Biggest Bookstore” in Toronto. I’m quite enjoying it, as it discusses much more than just the war itself: about 50 pages in, I think I’ve learned far more about middle eastern history and Russia’s geostrategic problems.

The various books and articles I’ve read on this conflict have pretty uniformly concentrated on the purely military aspects, and generally just on the battles involving British and French troops. One reason for the relative obscurity of such a major conflict is that the background is essential to understand just why Britain and France were fighting Russia on the Black Sea coast. Without that background, the war appears totally senseless and this is heightened by the well-worn tales of military incompetence (the Charge of the Light Brigade), brief moments of heroism (the “Thin Red Line”), and criminally awful medical and sanitary situation (Florence Nightingale).

If the remaining 450 pages are as good as the first 50, this will be one of my candidates for book of the year.

Australian Defence Force in the news . . . not in a good way

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Australia’s military have a reputation for brashness, but competence in combat. The bureaucratic side of the ADF has problems:

The Australian Defence Force found itself in the headlines for the wrong reasons when a young female member of the ADF Academy went public after having sex with a fellow cadet, only to find out later that he used a webcam and Skype to broadcast the assignation to his mates.

Okay, slimy action on the part of the other cadet. Action by the military braintrust should be some form of discipline against the cadet who violated trust, yes? No:

The ADF first tried to equivocate, saying that there was nothing it could use to charge the unconscionable bastard who thought the broadcast was a good idea, only to backpedal when Defence Minister Stephen Smith (who is an impressive sight when in full flight and fury) hit the roof.

Next, the ADF brasshats, in an outbreak of unbelievably insular stupidity, decided to go ahead with a separate charge against the traumatised female, to do with AWOL and drinking. Moreover, these same defence bosses also asked the woman to apologise for going public with her story.

Adding military insult to personal injury, check. The Defence Minister was even more displeased, of course. Richard Chirgwin points out that these actions are merely symptoms of a deeper institutional problem:

Now, I could write a serious and reasoned column about the chronic social problems of the ADF, which has, for as long as I can remember, acted as if it has institutional autism.

Or I could observe that the ADF seems entirely unable to instill even the remotest hint of good sense in how its members behave in the presence of computers. It’s less than a fortnight since we found out that Australian soldiers were posting racist messages about Afghanistan nationals on Facebook.

But I have a different question to ask: why the hell was the ADF permitting unrestricted use of Skype in the Academy?

Unmanned sub hunter

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

Lewis Page looks at the Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV):

No doubt regular readers will recall the US military’s cunning plan to develop unmanned submarine-hunting robotic frigates — warships which would prowl the oceans like automated Mary Celestes, remorselessly tracking enemy submarines regardless of how their pale, sweaty, malodorous captains might twist and turn.

The Anti-submarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) project is intended to produce “an X-ship founded on the assumption that no person steps aboard at any point in its operating cycle”. The uncrewed frigate would have enough range and endurance for “global, months long deployments with no underway human maintenance”, being able to cross oceans and fight its battles largely without any human input — communications back to base would be “intermittent”, according to DARPA.

As you might imagine, there are lots of potential issues to sending an armed, unmanned ship out into the ocean, including how to handle interactions with other users of the sea lanes. It’d be worse than embarassing to the US Navy to have one of their fancy new ACTUV vessels get tangled up in a fishing net or get caught in the middle of a regatta.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it has been decided that the best way to hammer out a set of tactics for ACTUVs is to develop a game-style simulation pitting ACTUV against submarine and get people to play it — so crowdsourcing the methods and tactical principles that will then be coded into the robo-frigates’ AIs.

The new game — from which these visuals are drawn — is called ACTUV Tactics. The game engine is used in various military sims and in the Dangerous Waters commercial release of 2005. [. . .]. In it, a player tries to find and track an enemy submarine while avoiding collisions with commercial vessels and the like. Various different proposed models of ACTUV robo-frigate are available: Gator, Remora, Seahorse, Shark and Triton.

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