Quotulatiousness

May 21, 2011

President of TEPCO falls on his sword a few months late

Filed under: Environment, Health, Japan, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:04

The president of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has resigned:

In a business practice that recalled the ritual seppuku suicides of samurai warriors, the president of Japan’s largest power company resigned Friday to assume responsibility for the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

At a nationally televised news conference, Masataka Shimizu bowed deeply in an exhibition of remorse and declared, “I am resigning for having shattered public trust about nuclear power and for having caused so many problems and fears for the people.

“I want to take managerial responsibility and bring a symbolic close.”

Whether it’s a hearkening-back to Samurai ethos or not, he should have resigned long ago, as soon as it became clear that the company he headed was doing everything it could to conceal the extent of the actual damage both from the media and from the government.

There is a widespread feeling the government and TEPCO officials did not disclose all they knew during the early days of the crisis and have been less than forthcoming since.

In the first weeks after the earthquake, TEPCO officials received 40,000 complaints a day about the lack of information. Police had to be assigned to guard the company’s offices from anti-nuclear protesters.

This week, TEPCO released documents showing it was dealing with three simultaneous nuclear meltdowns, while reassuring people the fuel rods were safely intact in all the reactors.

“Why did it take two months to get to this point?” demanded a Wednesday editorial in the Nikkei business newspaper.

“Even a rough calculation of conditions inside the reactors would have helped in choosing the best response.”

Public confidence was shaken further when it emerged engineers at Fukushima were so unprepared for the disaster, they had to scavenge flashlights from nearby homes and used car batteries to try to reactivate damaged reactor gauges.

Nobody with an ounce of sense is criticizing the workers at the plant for their reaction to an earthquake that was far in excess of the design for the reactors, or a tsunami that was much higher than anything the designers had foreseen. Shit happens, and it was the daily double of fantastically unlikely natural disasters that struck the plant.

The company, however, deserves more than just a light dusting of shame for the way they appear to have been actively preventing the real state of the plant becoming known to the international nuclear community and the national government. A nuclear disaster is everyone’s business, and there were resources available to TEPCO that they signally failed to draw upon. Saving face is not an acceptable reaction to this kind of catastrophe.

End of the world playlist suggestions

Filed under: Humour, Media, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:31

Because whether you ascend in the Rapture or are one of the ones left behind, you’ll want to have an appropriate playlist on your iPod:

  • You’d have to have “The End” by the Doors, of course. And “Welcome to the End” by Bif Naked. Oh, and of course “Rapture” by Blondie.
  • @Crystal11: I’m going with “Until the End of the World” & “Last Night On Earth” (both U2)
  • @Metz77: “The End” (The Beatles)
  • @grahamlavery: “At least (It’s not the end of the world)” Super Furry Animals
  • @nightfallcub: Morrissey “There Is A Place In Hell (For Me And My Friends)”
  • @neilhimself: (Oh that’s clever) @Gem_Clair: “Easy Like Sunday Morning” – Lionel Richie
  • @TrumanAragorn: “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” by Death Cab For Cutie
  • @Valya: “The Sky’s Gone Out” (Bauhaus)
  • @hmmarcus: “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” – The Inkspots
  • @MitchBenn: The Byrds: “You Ain’t Going Nowhere”
  • @alandhisguitar: got to include “We will all go together when we go” by Tom Lehrer.
  • There are just too many appropriate songs by Yngwie Malmsteen to list . . . “My Resurrection”, “Alone in Paradise”, “Like an Angel”, “Seventh Sign”, “Arpeggios from Hell”, “Heaven Tonight”, and so on.

Idea stolen from Neil Gaiman’s @neilhimself Twitter feed.

This week in Guild Wars 2 news

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:07

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.

Part 1: Discussion of previous news

  • This week’s anniversary sale item at the Guild Wars in-game store is the Extreme Makeover Pack.
  • If you listen to podcasts, you might want to subscribe to the Guildcast weekly podcast — https://guildcast.wordpress.com/

Part 2: Guild Wars news

  • Reminder: If you’d like to keep track of the upcoming Winds of Change and other Guild Wars Beyond material, keep this page bookmarked — http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_Beyond.
  • Ascalon Royal Family Masquerade Ball 2011 on May 21st. “The Ascalon Royal Family Masquerade Ball is a long forgotten formal event, engraved into history years before the searing. The Kingdom of Ascalon was once prosperous, led by King Adelbern and the Royal Family. During such times the ball was the yearly celebration to celebrate the wealth and beauty that was Ascalon.”

Part 3: Guild Wars 2 news

  • Inc. Gamers Guild Wars 2 Interview, Part 1. “One big difference is crafting in the original Guild Wars was you salvage stuff and you brought it to an NPC and he crafted it for you. In Guild Wars 2 we have a number of different ways to get materials. One is from drops, another from salvaging and also from gather nodes in the world. For crafting your character chooses crafting professions and you are going to be doing the crafting and you find a crafting table where you take your raw material. You then craft the items. What this does for us, it creates a more social experience, it’s a little more traditional but it gives the chance for players to interact a lot more with each other.”
  • Inc. Gamers Guild Wars 2 Interview, Part 2. [On PvP dynamics:] “Absolutely, a small group can defeat a larger group when fighting each other. We have a few players that are quite good at the game right now, generally now my reaction when I see them is to turn and run, even with an ally or two with me. There’s definitely a lot of is skill involved in the game. We introduced some new players to our PvP environment recently and when they first started playing, not their very first game, a couple of games in when they had a grasp of the basics, we had a player who was beating people, he would kill like nine players in a row. Eventually as time progressed a lot of the players who were getting beaten by him are now as good as him, maybe even better. There’s definitely that sort of skill and learning how to play the game. Everyone thought the profession he was playing was completely broken and then he switched to another one and they were saying that one was now broken.”
  • PC Gamer’s Guild Wars 2 Preview. “If nothing else, Guild Wars 2 will be a beautiful fantasy MMORPG. Better than that, having played it, I can say that I think it’s a step forward for MMO games. Guild Wars 2 is advancing the very fundamentals of the genre. It is bravely ditching the fetch, carry, kill and collect style of questing that has kept us entertained/sedated for years. It is pinning its second-by-second interactions on a combat style that is fast, frantic and unpredictable. Oh: and there’s no subscription fee to pay. Once you’ve bought Guild Wars 2, you’ll be able to play it forever. Ruh roh. Guild Wars 2 is taking huge risks. With those risks come potentially huge pratfalls.”
  • Guild Wars 2 developers on alert of security breaches. “The pair stated it’s still too early to talk about its specific security measures, however they “understand having operated GW and seeing all the account theft that has happened. Obviously we’re hoping to shoot for accounts never being stolen, but there’s only so much you can do. At the moment though we’re not quite ready to talk about exactly what we’re doing.””
  • Flameseeker Chronicles: Lion’s Arch unveiled. “Every square inch of Lion’s Arch speaks to that, and I love it. Look at the buildings created from broken ships, the bridges and walkways constructed out of salvaged wood (wood planks, I assume), and even the windows framed with parts of much smaller vessels. The stone towers appear to be built from the same stone you can see in the structures in present-day Lion’s Arch, and the idea that those responsible for the rebuilding effort salvaged them from the ruins of the old buildings fits with the feel of the city overall. The Lion’s Arch we see in the video might be relatively new, but it’s got a strong sense of history and familiarity.”
  • Gamebreaker.tv Episode 47. Discussion of Guild Wars 2 (including the Lion’s Arch video) begins at the 37:40 mark.
  • Interview with Martin Kerstein at Hunter’s Insight. “Okay lets start off with the obvious. Martin said at a meet and greet in Germany that a new profession will be revealed this month. It was reported in this thread at Guild Wars 2 Guru, commencing about 14 pages of a thread I wish I had never read. In any case it has been confirmed in an interview and on those forums. Will it be the mesmer, or the 8th unknown profession? Who can say. I suspect it will be whichever is done, though from a marketing perspective I’m sure the 8th unknown profession would have to be the last.”
  • A not very serious entry in the Guild Wars 2 Ambassador video contest.
  • GameReactor.tv Guild Wars 2 preview video. “Petter Mårtensson, our resident MMO expert, has not tried Guild Wars 2. Instead it was the complete MMO n00b Bengt Lemne who took a plane to Seattle to try a bit of Arenanet’s new game and meet the developers.”
  • Further confirmation that there will be a Guild Wars 2 beta in 2011. “The Guild Wars 2 beta will begin in the second half of 2011, NCsoft has announced. During a conference call, chief financial officer Jaeho Lee also heavily hinted at a 2012 release for the game. “Starting from year 2012, we believe substantial growth will be driven by new blockbuster titles like [Blade & Soul] and Guild Wars 2,” announced Lee to investors.”
  • An interview with Martin Kerstein at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. “Well, what we try to do with Guild Wars 2 anyway is to break a lot of the existing conventions, like by getting rid of quests and basically totally focusing on dynamic events. So you just run through the world and happen on stuff, and that stuff has an impact on the world. It’s not just there’s this one guy standing with an exclamation mark and you go there, he says ‘hey, those evil bandits over there have been threatening me for the last 15 years, like I told the other thousand people before you…’ Then you go there and they’re not actually doing anything. So you kill them then come back, so the guy says ‘thanks, everything is fine now’ but you turn around and the bandits are back… Our dynamic events will actually have an impact on the world, so if you defend a village it’s safe. It’s more like a living, breathing world.”
  • Introducing the 7th profession: The Engineer. “Masters of mechanical mayhem, engineers tinker with explosives, gadgets, elixirs, and all manner of deployable devices. They can take control of an area by placing turrets, support their allies with alchemic weaponry, or lay waste to foes with a wide array of mines, bombs, and grenades. Like elementalists, engineers use a single weapon set at a time, but they complement this weapon set by equipping special utility and healing kits. These kits provide the engineer with special weapons and backpacks loaded with a full set of skills to replace their current weapon skills.”
  • Rubi Bayer reviews the new information on the Engineer class. “Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 fans, did you love the Commando class? Were you disappointed that it was all an elaborate joke? Did you love the idea of detonating bombs, flinging grenades, and setting mines in Guild Wars 2? Well, this is going to be a good day for you, because ArenaNet has announced the seventh profession: the Engineer. While it’s not the Commando class per se, the Engineer is described as “a master of mechanical mayhem” and looks to be the class that will fulfill all of your most explosive gameplay wishes.”
  • Wartower.de interview with Eric Flannum and Jon Peters. “Engineer technology really developed with the Charr first and foremost. And its one of the specialties developed by the Charr Iron Legion. When we talk about the Engineer he is very much a Combat-Engineer and good in inventing things that are useful in a combat situation. The Iron Legion is the start of all of this, and the Engineer profession has spread to the other races from there. The People of Tyria have seen it in combat over the past few years and have seen the effectiveness of an engineer. And so you are going to see Engineers of all races although it is a little bit more common to see a Charr Engineer than anybody else. So it all started with the Charr and their technological development.”
  • Kotaku.com looks at the new Engineer. “In some fantasy role-playing games, engineering bombs, guns, and useful gadgets is nothing more than a novel crafting skill. In Guild Wars 2, it’s a way of life. Let’s meet the game’s newly-revealed Engineer. While other classes rely on their magic or physical prowess to survive the harsh environs of Tyria some 250 years after the events of the original Guild Wars, the Engineer relies on his or her mechanical know-how to fill the many roles asked of a character in Guild Wars 2. How does a mechanical genius survive on the battlefield? I suppose the bombs help.”
  • Strategy Informer’s interview with Eric Flannum & Jon Peters. “Our engineers are very much combat engineers so they have a lot of ways to do damage. Like all of our professions, and I think this is especially true of the engineer, we try to make different play styles available to them and allow players to switch between each of them rather quickly. In one moment an engineer might be utilising the health kit, dispensing med-packs and healing team mates and then the next switching to the mine kit where you can throw out mines to secure and area before detonating them. In another minute you could switch to your rifle and dual pistols and be able to do more damage dealing. If monsters are right up in your face you can switch to the bomb kits which, unlike grenades which have to been throw out, can place a variety bombs at your feet. This can turn the engineer, if you want to think of it in a traditional MMO sense, into a point blank area of effect character. “
  • Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s fans’ Q&A with Martin Kerstein. “Q: What’s the endgame looking like, what kind of raids and dungeons are we looking at? Martin Kerstein: Eric said it and I reiterated it over the weekend, but our end game begins at level 1. What other MMOs do is basically get you to level 80 or 90 or whatever the max is, and then you have to abandon the game that you have played, because what’s the traditional endgame is a completely separate game. So you play the whole time, level your character up to a certain point, and then a new game begins. So we don’t want to force people to play something that they might not even enjoy because it’s not what they were doing before. So if you like our dynamic events, they will be there all the time, and they will still be there when you reach max level, with really challenging stuff. If you like the dungeons, great! We have challenging dungeons at the end. If you like PvP, we have world vs world PvP where you can even level the whole way up to 80 without even touching PvE. So we want to provide people endgame content that is actually catering to the style they like to play, and that’s why we say our endgame begins at level 1.”
  • GuildMag: Technological Advancement in the Engineer. “The Engineer was both the best- and worst-kept secret of the Guild Wars 2 profession lineup. It was the best because, unlike the other professions, we didn’t know what it was going to be until a leak a few hours before the official release, as ArenaNet had been canny about giving practically no hints that could confirm it — even if some are of the ‘obvious in hindsight’ nature (for instance, I think we can say we now know Kranxx’s profession in Ghosts of Ascalon). However, it was also the worst because despite this, pretty much all of the engineer’s features had been predicted before release. While there was still some reasonable doubt (and, it has to be said, a lot of unreasonable doubt) that it was actually in, wading through the profession speculation threads will reveal turrets, a variety of explosives, advanced weapon kits (although apparently we’ve missed out on the charrzooka), medical concoctions and exotic ammunition loads for firearms. All in all, it seems a success for the community’s speculation engine.”

May 20, 2011

Britain’s Type 45 destroyers finally get main armament

Filed under: Britain, Military, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:29

Back in October, I linked to an article which told the sad story of the Royal Navy’s most expensive class of unarmed warships, the Type 45 destroyers. In November, I linked to another sad story about the £1.1bn+ lead ship of this class breaking down in mid-Atlantic and having to make an emergency stop in Halifax for repairs.

In the first bit of good news about the Type 45’s, they’re now finally getting their primary missile systems into service:

HMS Daring, first of the £1.1bn+ Type 45 destroyers now coming into service with the Royal Navy, has finally fired her primary (and only significant) armament, the Sea Viper missile system.

The glad news comes five years after the ship was launched, three years after she was accepted into the Royal Navy and well into the tenure of her third commanding officer.

It’s not all good news, however, as the Sea Viper may not be the wonder weapon it’s been implied to be:

Stripping away the hype, Sea Viper has never been tested against a supersonic target and there are no plans to do so — meaning that it would be a brave decision indeed to rely on it against supersonic threats in combat. (The system’s first four trials even against subsonics saw two failures.)

Sea Viper’s French-made Aster missiles can probably reach out to 75 miles, but the inescapable curvature of the Earth means that the Sampson masthead fire control radar can’t lock on to a low-flying target until it is within 20 miles or so. Various modern and indeed not-so-modern anti-shipping missiles (eg the “Klub”, “Sunburn” and “Brahmos”) are both low-flying and supersonic.

Then there are some serious gaps in the Sea Viper’s (and thus the Type 45s’) capabilities. The system cannot attack surface targets, meaning that the Royal Navy’s new and cripplingly expensive destroyers will be almost powerless against properly-equipped warships or even quite minor gunboats and the like.

Bank of Canada is not there to “guide” the markets

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:22

Stephen Gordon points out that there appear to be some dangerous assumptions out in the market about whether and when the Bank of Canada will change interest rates:

The Bank of Canada is scheduled to make its next interest rate announcement on May 31, and my understanding is that the consensus of opinion among private sector analysts is that interest rates will remain unchanged, because there was no explicit warning of an increase in its April 12 decision.

This consensus of opinion may turn out to be well-founded — but not for that reason. Recent reports confirm what Bank officials have said several times: the Bank of Canada believes that it under no obligation to provide guidance about short-term interest rates. Governor Mark Carney has already noted that one of the contributing factors of the financial crisis was the private sector’s overconfidence in its ability to predict central banks’ behaviour.

This doesn’t automatically mean the Bank will raise interest rates at their next meeting, but it does mean that it could happen (despite the “lack of warning” in April).

Only one high speed rail line in the world is profitable

Filed under: Economics, Government, Japan, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Babbage looks at the economics of the various high speed railway lines both in service and planned:

Of all the high-speed train services around the world, only one really makes economic sense — the 550km (350-mile) Shinkansen route that connects the 30m people in greater Tokyo to the 20m residents of the Kansai cluster of cities comprising Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto and Nara. At peak times, up to 16 bullet trains an hour travel each way along the densely populated coastal plain that is home to over half of Japan’s 128m people.

Having worked for many years in Tokyo, with family in Osaka, your correspondent has made the two-and-a-half hour journey on the Tokaido bullet-train many times. It is clean, fast and highly civilised, though far from cheap. It beats flying, which is unbearably cramped by comparison, just as pricey, and dumps you an hour from downtown at either end.

The sole reason why Shinkansen plying the Tokaido route make money is the sheer density — and affluence — of the customers they serve. All the other Shinkansen routes in Japan lose cart-loads of cash, as high-speed trains do elsewhere in the world. Only indirect subsidies, creative accounting, political patronage and national chest-thumping keep them rolling.

California’s planned 800-mile high speed rail route cannot possibly earn a profit, for many reasons (not least of which is that the first segment of the network won’t even run high speed trains until the entire system is built). It’s going to cost an eye-watering amount of money even to build that first section:

Between them, the federal government, municipals along the proposed route and an assortment of private investors are being asked to chip in $30 billion. A further $10 billion is to be raised by a bond issue that Californian voters approved in 2008. Anything left unfunded will have to be met by taxpayers. They could be dunned for a lot. A study carried out in 2008 by the Reason Foundation and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association put the final cost of the complete 800-mile network at $81 billion.That is probably not far off the mark. Last week, the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office came out with a damning indictment of the project’s unrealistic cost estimates and poor management. The bill this legislative watchdog put on the first phase of the high-speed rail project alone is $67 billion — and higher still if the project runs into trouble gaining route approval in urban areas.

If the latter number is correct, then the first phase of the system is clocking in at nearly $1 billion per mile. And this is the “cheap” section running through mostly thinly populated farming areas. If, somehow, the more expensive sections of the planned network don’t cost much more, the total construction bill will top $800 billion. The original plan had the entire system costing $43 billion.

Cost overruns are an expected part of major government construction projects, but that’s insane.

Salesmen get rewarded for whoring their wares

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

At least, according to this story, the best salesmen at Munich Re were rewarded with whores:

However, this being a German-run orgy, it was not an unseemly free-for-all, but an efficient affair in which the prostitutes “had worn colour-coded arm-bands designating their availability, and the women had their arms stamped after each service rendered”.

Handelsblatt‘s informant told the paper: “After each such encounter the women were stamped on the lower arm in order to keep track of how often each woman was frequented.”

He elaborated: “The women wore red and yellow wrist bands. One lot were hostesses, the others would fulfill your every wish. There were also women with white wrist bands. They were reserved for board members and the very best sales reps.”

This was back in 2007, according to Handelsblatt, a German business publication. I’ve worked at companies where the sales force seemed to be extravagantly over-rewarded with various goodies, but this seems to be a few steps further.

Next on the primary school curriculum: Minecraft

Filed under: Education, Gaming, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:46

<voice style=”curmudgeon”>Back in my day, we didn’t have computers in the classroom. We had books. And we liked ’em. Kids these days are just spoiled, I tell you.</voice>

At the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, first and second grade computer teacher Joel Levin developed an experimental Minecraft teaching unit that was designed to let kids explore, build, and collaborate within the game. He wasn’t sure how it’d go over. Much to his surprise, the students took to Minecraft like they do to sniffing scented markers.

Levin allows his students to play in a modified Minecraft world that doesn’t include monsters. His classes aren’t so much focused on teaching kids to play Minecraft as they are on using Minecraft as a canvas for them to be creative with. In one situation, Levin had to take animals out of the game because students were just killing them all over the place, which wasn’t in the spirit of his lessons.

H/T to Victor for sending the link. Video at the linked site.

May 19, 2011

“Brave stuff indeed, mocking a man of God who is clearly a few clowns short of a circus”

Filed under: Environment, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:37

Brendan O’Neill wonders why we are all happy to pour scorn on Christian predictions of the end of the world, yet treat similarly apocalyptic Green claims seriously:

The eccentric Californian preacher Harold Camping, who claims that Jesus will return this Saturday and bring the world as we know it to an end, has been the subject of much Twitter-teasing and ridicule. “The Rapture? If it comes near me this Saturday I’ll kick its arse through its neck”, says Charlie Brooker. “I expect everyone who thinks so-called Judgement Day is on May 21st to support science and reason from the 22nd onwards”, says Professor Brian Cox. Brave stuff indeed, mocking a man of God who is clearly a few clowns short of a circus. But what I want to know is this: why don’t these Camping critics, these alleged challengers of bunkum and defenders of reason, also stand up to the far more mainstream yet equally batty predictions of End Times emanating from the environmentalist lobby?

Perhaps Camping’s real crime is that he has got the date of the Rapture wrong. After all, according to the green writer Andrew Simms’ countdown to doom, which is published monthly in Brooker’s own newspaper the Guardian, we have 67 months left to save the world. Camping you idiot! The world’s not going to end this Saturday – it’s going to end in December 2016!

Of course Simms, who runs the ominous One Hundred Months project, is not so crude as to talk about Apocalypse or Judgement Day or Rapture. No, he simply says: “We have 70 months to save our climate. When the clock stops ticking, we could be beyond our climate’s tipping point, the point of no return.” Which of course is just a more PC, more sciencey, less instantly insane-sounding way of saying exactly what Camping has said: that there is an endpoint to the world, it is arriving soon, and it will involve some judgement of mankind for his sins against God/overuse of carbon. Where Camping says our sinful behaviour has precipitated Saturday’s rapturous showdown, Simms says it is the “global suicide pact” of human greed and nature-wrecking that gives us only another 70 months. Both of them sound mental.

Happy 60th day!

Filed under: Africa, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

Jim Geraghty notes a special day arriving:

Happy 60-Day anniversary, War Kinetic Military Action in Libya! You’re now… pretty much illegal, but almost all of Washington will avert their eyes and pretend you’re legal. It’s kind of like how all the big people there treat their nannies.

Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway are professors of law and political science at Yale, took to the pages of the Washington Post to point out that for a president who was elected by angry lefties chanting about an illegal war, it’s pretty ironic that we’re now fighting what is, pretty much, an illegal war: “This week, the War Powers Act confronts its moment of truth. Friday will mark the 60th day since President Obama told Congress of his Libyan campaign. According to the act, that declaration started a 60-day clock: If Obama fails to obtain congressional support for his decision within this time limit, he has only one option — end American involvement within the following 30 days.”

Making light: are LED flashlights now “tacticool”?

Filed under: Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:51

Chris Dumm has a bit of fun reviewing an LED flashlight:

Remember back when Mag-lite was the last word in aircraft-grade aluminum illumination? Those old incandescent Mag-Lites weren’t any brighter than ordinary flashlights, but their indestructible machined-aluminum bodies made them the choice of police, private security, Elvis and burglars. They were “tacticool” before people had a chance to learn to hate that word. The longer D-cell Mag-lites resembled aluminum billy clubs; they delivered a more devastating blow than any Monadnock PR-24 police baton ever could. Despite their size and weight, however, they still weren’t all that bright.

Then new technology arrived in the form of noble gas (Xenon bulbs) and heavy metal (Lithium batteries). SureFire and Streamlight built flashlights bright enough to temporarily blind and disorient a target without having to bash his brains in with five D-cell batteries wrapped in an aluminum Little League bat. And they were tough enough to drown, drop and attach to the hardest-kicking riot shotguns in the SWAT unit’s arsenal without fizzling out at the worst possible moment.

The new flashlights were rugged, dazzlingly bright and incredibly compact. Their only drawbacks: astronomical prices (for lights, bulbs, and batteries) and battery run-times of one hour or less. They quickly became the law enforcement standard, until LED technology took the lead and never looked back.

Nathalie Rothschild: Britain’s debate on rape “is demeaning to women”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

There is much sound and fury in Britain this week over some remarks by a Tory cabinet minister in a BBC interview. The leader of the opposition has demanded that he be dismissed from the government for suggesting that there are ‘other categories of rape’. Nathalie Rothschild wrote this article in response to a 2010 review of the rape law.

In 2007, Camilla Cavendish of The Times (London) found that rape allegations had jumped by 40 per cent between 2002 and 2005. While this can partly be put down to improved support for women, which facilitates the process of reporting rape, Cavendish argued that a widening official definition of rape also played a big role. Since the Sexual Offences Act 2003 came into force, the definition of rape has been expanded to include oral sex. But there has also been a profound attitude shift with roots in the second-wave feminist idea that heterosexual sex is an inherently violent and degrading act that women subject themselves to against their better judgement.

More than four out of five rape allegations are made against friends or acquaintances. As alcohol and/or drugs were involved in over half those cases, Cavendish puts this down to ‘the culture of binge drinking’. But this avoids the more complex picture. Today, various rape-awareness activists and state feminists are themselves helping to blur the boundaries between sex and rape, encouraging women to regard themselves as violated, abused and traumatised for having gone to bed with a man without thinking it through in minute detail.

The Sexual Offences Act 2003 declared that consent must be ‘active, not passive’; in rape cases, consent is now taken to mean agreement rather than the absence of a refusal. So if a woman goes along with sex, but doesn’t make it explicitly clear that she is actively consenting to it, it can be deemed to be rape. The government has even moved towards ensuring that no agreement can be taken as consent if it is given under the influence of alcohol. As Cavendish pointed out: ‘In our zeal to protect women, are we going to legislate so that a drunken man is accountable for his deeds, but a drunken woman is not? Why do we encourage women to see themselves as victims?’ Absolving women who engage in sexual liaisons — whether drunk or sober — of responsibility for their actions is not liberating; it’s demeaning.

There is no doubt that forcing someone to have sex is a heinous, violent and degrading act and victims of rape should indeed be treated with dignity and respect. But in the name of protecting women, the government is insisting that rape cases be treated differently from all other crimes, while interfering with the course of justice in a way that undermines defendants’ rights and undercuts the power of juries.

May 18, 2011

If you take typography seriously, you will surely go mad

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:51

Frequent commenter Lickmuffin sent in this link with the subject line “This is amusing AND SPOT ON!”.

This is freaking me out today. You see, I hardly look at my calendar date on the iPhone. But today I did. I looked at that pixel-perfect, beautiful Retina screen and this problem got instantly into my eye, like a white hot scalpel pinching through my retina until it reached the back of my skull.

See what I mean? Can you see IT? The 1 is off center. Instead of being optically centered, it’s geometrically centered. So it just looks wrong. Really, what happened there, Steve? Where did all that love for typography and attention to detail go? Out the fucking window of your silver Merc, that’s where.

Perhaps this is some kind of cruel April Fools joke from Cupertino. Maybe they are all at the office, hahahing at their clever joke. OK. I don’t find it fucking funny, but I understand your desire to torture your users.

But rather than leaving it there, whimpering, Lickmuffin was suddenly seized with a typographical fit:

Well, the “all phones have it wrong” answer might be correct. [Name] sent me the Gizmodo link through Skype, and I went on and on about why the 1 is off:

[2:10:58 PM] Lickmuffin: The 1 is off centre because they are centering on the width of the entire character — that serif off to the left with no serif on the right of the 1 makes the whole character appear off-center.

[2:13:46 PM] Lickmuffin: The “wrong” version 1 has about 44 pixels on either side of it, measured on the left from the edge of the white box to the serif, and on the right from the edge of the white box to the body of the 1. I say “about” because how you measure depends on whether or not you include the aliasing in the character.

[2:14:26 PM] Lickmuffin: In the “wrong” illustration, the 1 is off-center — it measures 41 pixels from the white box border on the left, and 49 pixels from the white box border on the right.

[2:15:56 PM] Lickmuffin: What the author is complaining about is common — graphical apps tend to base centering on overall character width. For example, when I create callouts in an illustration that have a number in a circle, simply centering the number in the circle will not always look right: the 1 is usually off, especially with sans-serif fonts. The graphics apps center on the width of the 1 as an object, not on the “visual center” of the character that would make it look right.

[2:18:49 PM] Lickmuffin: There are ways to fix this — fonts can carry information called “metrics” that help align fonts when they are placed together. Most often, metrics are used to adjust side-by-side spacing of characters by nudging characters closer together when they fit together. For example: WA Here the app (or the font) would nudge the W and A together. In the case of the 1, metrics could tell apps to center the character on an imaginary centre line, rather than on the actual centre line determined by the character’s width.

[2:19:01 PM] Lickmuffin: Fonts are F A S C I N A T I N G !

Yes, I know that the dongle on the “1” is not a serif — it’s actually part of the “stroke” of the letter. But you know what I mean.

Humph.

After his collapse, I understand that Lickmuffin is now lying down quietly in a darkened room with no visible letters or numbers. Perhaps he will recover, in time.

New iPhone app for Prince Edward County wineries

Filed under: Cancon, Technology, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

There’s a new iPhone application devoted to the up-and-coming wineries in Ontario’s Prince Edward County. WineTour is in the Apple app store now (although I’m at a client site today, so I won’t be able to download it until tonight).

Touring the wineries of Prince Edward County? Plan your trip with WineTour, and find your way around the area with ease. We’ve collected all of the details you need to get the most out of your visit — so you’ll know what’s on, where the nearest wineries are, and what hours they’re open.

Most of the information in WineTour is available without the need for an internet connection, so iPod Touch owners, or those with an iPhone or iPad who don’t have a data plan will find it a valuable companion while travelling.

WineTour features continuously updated open / closed status information to help you see which wineries are open now, which are closing soon, and which are “by appointment”. It also includes the contact info for each winery so you can easily call, email or visit their website for more information.

China facing recession?

Filed under: China, Economics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:03

At risk of setting my hobby horse to full gallop, reports like this one are starting to sound a few mild alarms about the real state of China’s economy. But accepting official Chinese government statistics like this isn’t going to help:

The Chinese central bank has responded to overheating in its economy by raising interest rates four times since October 2010. Inflation has subsequently cooled, slowing to 5.3 percent in April, but the economy is still roaring with a 9.7 percent increase in gross domestic product for the first quarter.

The rate moves have raised questions about whether the government is going too far to slow things down, and whether the country can accomplish its desired transition from an export-driven economy to growth based more on internal consumption.

As I’ve said several times before, you can’t trust these kinds of numbers because they’re not independently generated from reliable data. They’re numbers that range from kinda-sorta in the same ballpark as reality all the way out to the lower stratosphere. The people providing the numbers are subject to rather more risk than just losing their jobs if they displease the government. Honesty is not a virtue when your life may depend on providing the “right” answer.

As Monty puts it:

I’ll keep hammering this point as long as I’m able: The Chinese “economic miracle” is mostly a sham. The Chinese are awash in cheap Western money, essentially, and when that money dries up (which it is doing right now), the Chinese don’t have much of a domestic market to fall back on. Plus, in case anyone forgot, they’re still run by Communists who don’t really believe in that whole “capitalism” thing.

I’ve ridden this hobby horse many times before. I don’t doubt that I’ll be riding it many times again in the future.

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