Quotulatiousness

July 25, 2011

Electronic weapons to destroy other electronics

Filed under: China, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:05

Strategy Page looks at some interesting developments in the electronic weapons area:

A U.S. government report (from the National Ground Intelligence Center) indicates that China has developed useful weapons for disabling the electronics on American aircraft and warships. This is done using high-powered microwave (HPM) devices to create something like the EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) put out by nuclear weapons, which damaged or destroys microelectronics.

[. . .]

Then there’s the EMP bomb, a legendary weapon that is much talked about, but has never actually been seen. Throughout the 1990s, information came out of Russia that a weapon had been developed that could generate a short range EMP (electromagnetic pulse) similar to that created by nuclear explosions. All computers within the range of the EMP bomb would be ruined. This is a truly devastating capability. Microprocessors are found everywhere these days; in automobiles, appliances, industrial equipment, medical devices and many other devices. Military microprocessors are often shielded to protect them against EMP, but the shielding is not thoroughly tested and even some military equipment will probably be disabled by an EMP attack.

A decade ago, a British military research team announced that they had duplicated the rumored Russian device and produced an EMP bomb that can fit in a 155mm artillery shell, small rockets or bombs. Such a device was supposed to be inexpensive and could be used to destroy civilian electronics that might be useful to nearby enemy troops. What is particularly worrisome about this new development is that, in the hands of terrorists, it could do a new kind of damage. While not killing people directly, the destruction of all electronics within an urban area could cause casualties and much economic loss. But none of these EMP bombs has ever actually reached the stage where they were actually ready to use. There was always some kind of flaw discovered in testing. Naturally, China is thought to have developed an EMP bomb.

Reaction to the attacks in Norway

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

Brendan O’Neill looks at the media reaction to the Oslo and Utoya terror attacks:

When it was reported on Friday that there had been an explosion and an horrific mass shooting in Norway, many observers assumed that al-Qaeda or some other radical Islamist group had struck at the heart of peaceful Scandinavia. ‘Norway’s 9/11’, said the front page of the Sun on Saturday, with the subheading: ‘“Al-Qaeda” massacre.’ Yet when it was revealed that the alleged bomber and shooter is a Norway-born, blonde-haired, farm-owning Aryan, observers quickly bought into the idea that we were faced with something very different from an al-Qaeda attack. This wasn’t ‘Norway’s 9/11’ after all, but something more akin to Columbine-on-steroids, a right-wing madman letting off steam in a most barbaric fashion. As one Norwegian police official put it: this was ‘probably more Norway’s Oklahoma than its World Trade Centre’.

Yet this simplistic categorisation of contemporary terror assaults — where violent outbursts get slotted into files marked ‘Radical Islamist Fury’ or ‘Right-Wing Anger’ — makes too fine a distinction between acts that are actually very similar. Just because something like 7/7 in London was executed by men with dark hair and brown skin who claimed to be fighting on behalf of the Muslim ummah, while the bombing of Oslo and massacre on Utoya were carried out by a white guy who claimed to be protecting European Christian culture, that doesn’t mean these are diametrically different actions. What they have in common is far more important than what separates them. And, stripped of their pseudo-political garb, what unites today’s various terror tantrums, what makes these kind of people possible in the first place, is a very powerful culture of estrangement in modern society.

In much of the media, particularly amongst the respectable broadsheet press, there was a palpable sense of relief when it was revealed that the alleged killer is white with far-right tendencies. This means he is the kind of person we can unambiguously hate. Where Islamist terror attacks, from 9/11 to 7/7, induce in some liberal observers torn and tortured feelings, where they want to condemn the violence but also feel the need to explain it as a natural reaction to evil Western foreign policy, Anders Behring Breivik is someone they can despise in an uncomplicated way. This means that while the attacks may not be ‘Norway’s 9/11’, they could well be the cultural elite’s 9/11 — in the sense that this is an act which the influential liberal classes may seek to politicise in an opportunistic fashion, to make moral mileage out of, in the same way that the right did after 11 September 2001.

Unique view of the shuttle cockpit

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:05


Click to embiggen

Link provided by Chris Greaves.

Update: There’s a big comment on this shuttle post from Chris Taylor, discussing what the shuttle was originally intended to be, and why it ended up being significantly larger and more expensive than the first proposal.

July 24, 2011

QotD: School isn’t for everyone

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Quotations, Randomness — Nicholas @ 14:12

If the communists hadn’t nationalized the old Lutheran Gymnasium of Budapest, my father might have put his foot down. As it was, he resigned himself to my not going back to school in the fall of 1952. “Can’t say that I blame you,” he said. “The comrades are crashing bores. I doubt if you’d learn anything from them, but why take a chance. You’d just have to spend years unlearning it, especially if it started with an ‘e’ like economics or ethics.”

[. . .]

I’m not sure if anybody was. In those days, there was no such illness as Attention Deficit Disorder, and in any event I didn’t suffer from it. I could be tirelessly attentive, even obsessive, about things I liked. I could, and did, read voraciously. Futzing with details was a delight; I just needed to explore things that interested me in settings that didn’t rub me the wrong way.

School did. The sound of chalk on blackboards did. What I suffered from wasn’t ADD but SADD: School Attention Deficit Disorder. The sight of a classroom made me sleepy and hyperactive at the same time. Years after I dropped out, I had one recurring nightmare: I dreamt I was sitting in my bench in class, trying to explain to everyone it was a mistake because I had no business being there.

Some soar in a school setting; I could barely drift. I loved books, but hated the way teachers expected me to deal with what I’ve read. I wanted to think, absorb, fantasize and dream about characters and stories; they wanted me to parse and précis. I was puzzled and frustrated by their fussy, fusty, pedantic, and pedestrian ways. They’d show me Mona Lisa’s smile, and ask me to count her teeth.

George Jonas, “Everything I know, I learned from not going to school”, National Post, 2011-07-24

Amartya Sen’s “no universal justice” notion

Filed under: Books, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:11

Eric Falkenstein is reading Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice and pulls out this example from the book:

Take three kids and a flute. Anne says the flute should be given to her because she is the only one who knows how to play it. Bob says the flute should be handed to him as he is so poor he has no toys to play with. Carla says the flute is hers because she made it.

Sen argues that who gets the flute depends on your philosophy of justice. Bob, the poorest, will have the support of the economic egalitarian. The libertarian would opt for Carla. The utilitarian will argue for Anne because she will get the maximum pleasure, as she can actually play the instrument. Sen states there are no institutional arrangements that can help us resolve this dispute in a universally accepted just manner.

This supposedly shows that there is no single theory of justice, rather one should look at enhancing the redistribution of life-saving goods and removing ‘injustice’.

I haven’t read Sen’s book (and have no immediate intention to do so), so perhaps I’m getting the wrong notion from the example here, but let me rephrase it a tiny bit to clarify why the example didn’t work for me:

Clara makes a flute, which is then taken from her because it might be “awarded” to someone who knows how to play it, or to someone who has no toys. Clara might, under some notions of “justice” be given back the flute she made.

I don’t see this as an example of “justice” so much as a form of theft.

Farewell Space Shuttle . . . you massive boondoggle

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

I’ve been ambivalent about the space shuttle program for decades — not because I’m anti-space, but because I think the shuttle was government methadone to replace a real space program. At that, I hadn’t connected all the dots the way Scott Locklin has here:

The Space Shuttle, an object lesson in the Sunk Cost Fallacy, has been with us since my early youth. This preposterous boondoggle was originally supposed to make manned space flight cheaper: to the point where getting a pound of matter into space would be as cheap as sending it to Australia. That was the only purpose for building the damn thing in the first place. The idea was, if your spaceship was reusable, it would be cheaper to send people and heavy things into space. If using the same thing multiple times isn’t cheaper, well, what’s the point? Conspicuous consumption, perhaps?

In one of its original incarnations, the Shuttle was supposed to launch like an ordinary aircraft. A jet + rocket powered “first stage” heavy lifter would propel the craft into the upper atmosphere, and the rocket propelled second stage would send the thing into space. Seems like a good idea to me. Jets are pretty easy to fly and maintain cheaply. Jets also don’t have to carry vast quantities of oxidizer. Plus; you get to reuse the whole mess.

Unfortunately, the politicians decided that building the first stage heavy lifter would cost “too much.” Instead they changed the design, and strapped a couple of solid rockets to a beefed up “orbiter” and giant non-reusable fuel tank. That wasn’t the worst of it: those pieces should have still in principle provided for a cheap launch vehicle. In practice, the silica tiles and engines turned out to have very high maintenance costs involving substantial labor, and turn around times were 1/6 of what they should have been, making the thing 6 (though more like 10) times as expensive as it was designed to be.

The goal of the space shuttle program was to have safe, re-usable spacecraft that could lift heavy loads to low earth orbit at a cost of about $50 per pound. What they ended up with was a dangerous fleet of hangar queens that took loads to orbit at an estimated cost of $50,000 per pound. That’s quite a missed set of goals.

No, that’s not suspicious at all . . .

Filed under: China, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:39

. . . when you use backhoes to bury the wreckage before determining the cause of the high speed rail crash:

The wreck on Saturday night killed 35 and injured 210 after a high-speed train lost power for more than 20 minutes and then was rear-ended by another train, according to the Xinhua news agency. Six cars derailed and two fell off a viaduct near the city of Wenzhou.

[. . .]

Photos on the popular Weibo microblogging service showed backhoes burying the wrecked train near the site. Critics said the wreckage needed to be carefully examined for causes of the malfunction, but the railway ministry said that the trains contain valuable national technology and could not be left in the open in case it fell into the wrong hands.

Foreign companies maintain that some crucial technology was stolen from their imported trains. But more importantly to domestic audiences is the perception of a coverup. Initial reports of how the accident occurred are already being partly contradicted by reports in the official media.

Bank of Ireland “suffered a restructuring credit event”

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:46

I’m not fluent in banker . . . does this Reuters report really say that the Bank of Ireland is in default?

The ISDA said a restructuring credit event occurred after Bank of Ireland closed an offer to buy back about 2.6 billion euros of Tier 1 and Tier 2 subordinated debt at a discount of up to 90 percent earlier this month.

A credit event is financial industry jargon for default on payment, breach of bond covenants or other event that casts doubt on an issuer’s ability to service its debt.

If it does mean the bank is in default, how come it hasn’t received much attention in the media? (Aside from the focus being on Norway right now for other reasons, of course.)

H/T to Karl Denninger for the link.

July 23, 2011

Virginia’s state surplus less than meets the eye

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Doug Mataconis takes a jaundiced eye to the Virginia “surplus”:

So, in other words, what we’ve got here are accounting gimmicks. In one case, the State legally permitted itself to defer a contribution to public pensions that were twice as big as the reported budget surplus. In the other, they legally permitted themselves to collect thirteen months of sales taxes for a twelve month fiscal year. The impact of both of these should be rather obvious. Reduce obligations while you are increasing revenues and, wow what do you know, we’ve got a surplus.

This isn’t at all new. As Virginia political bloggers Norm Leahy and Adam Bitley noted last August, the legislature used virtually the same accounting tricks to create the $220 million surplus that was reported last year.

It’s also not unique to Virginia. The same techniques are used in states across the country, and in the Federal Budget. Call it “off book budgeting.” Call it “creative accounting.” Call it whatever you like really, but it’s a pretty stark demonstration of the just how hard it really is to believe any government when they say their budget is balanced. More likely than not, they’ve used one or more of these gimmicks, plus a few others, to defer budget items and artificially increase revenue to make it appear that the budget is in balance when it really isn’t.

Today’s drive-by smear courtesy of the Globe & Mail

Filed under: Asia, Cancon — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

The Globe‘s Steve Rennie must think he’s blown the lid off a dark, sordid conspiracy, the way he reports on the booze tab of the Canadian embassy in Kabul:

Canada’s diplomatic corps in Kabul did not go thirsty.

Hospitality forms show embassy staff and dignitaries drank plenty of booze while posted to Afghanistan, an Islamic country where imbibing is not just taboo, it’s against the law.

But aren’t the grounds of an official embassy are considered to be part of the country whose embassy it is? If so, then the embassy grounds are under Canadian jurisdiction, where alcohol is quite legal.

The embassy consumed close to 3,000 bottles of alcoholic beverages from mid-2007 to last November. The tab for the beer, wine and hard liquor was at least $20,000.

Unfortunately, no numbers of people are provided — we’re invited to imagine all this booze being consumed by a few red-nosed diplomats with livers the size of Etobicoke. No, later in the article, he mentions that it was more than just a couple of soused embassy officials keeping the bar open:

There were sendoffs for departing staffers and shindigs to welcome new ones. The embassy entertained visiting generals, diplomats, journalists and politicians.

At about this point, after sneering at the diplomat’s choices of beer, Rennie realizes perhaps he needs to heighten the contrast, by showing that the soldiers and civilians operating in Kandahar had it tougher:

It was not the same for Canadians serving in the country’s restive south. Booze was banned at Kandahar Airfield and at Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar City. Soldiers, diplomats and civilians stationed there had to wait until holidays or special events for a cold one. And there was little danger of getting tipsy with a strict two-beer limit.

But as Rennie had already pointed out, the Kandahar installations were in the middle of an Islamic country that formally prohibits booze. Even if it’s a Canadian Armed Forces base, it has to observe the laws of the country in which it’s situation — it’s not Canadian soil in the way the embassy is. Not to mention that Kandahar was a fricking war zone: armies that drink booze while on active operations against an enemy are less effective armies.

Oh, but then we’re back to those awful alcoholics in the diplomatic corps, who were drinking in “an Islamic country where imbibing is not just taboo, it’s against the law”. Rennie must have forgotten writing that in the first few paragraphs, as it doesn’t mesh well with this later assertion:

Beyond the fortified walls of the embassy, there is no shortage of watering holes around Kabul for the many diplomats, aid workers and journalists who call the city home.

At one time, some popular hang outs included the Tex-Mex restaurant La Cantina and the Gandamak Lodge, a guest house with a British pub in the basement set up by a BBC journalist a decade ago after the Taliban regime fell.

Under Afghan law, anyone caught drinking alcohol can be fined, jailed or whipped. But these punishments are rarely handed down.

Didn’t you just trump your own ace there?

H/T to Chris Myrick for posting the link to this article on Google+, saying “I don’t blame them at all. I imagine Kabul would be intolerable otherwise.”

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. Another relatively quiet week in news about Guild Wars 2.

I got a few comments from non-gaming folks that these posts can get too long to scroll past, so it’s now in the extended post below.

(more…)

July 22, 2011

“When they opened up the container they said it was like a murder scene, But it smelled phenomenal”

Filed under: Australia, Randomness, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:54

Wine disaster caused by a forklift:

More than A$1m ($1.07m; £664,000) of wine has been destroyed in a forklift accident in Australia.

The 2010 Mollydooker Velvet Glove shiraz sells for A$185 a bottle ($199; £122), the AFP news agency said.

Winemaker Sparky Marquis told reporters he was “gut-wrenched” that 462 cases of wine had been smashed while being loaded for export to the United States.

“When they opened up the container they said it was like a murder scene,” he said. “But it smelled phenomenal.”

The wine industry’s nemesis, Phylloxera vastatrix

Filed under: Environment, Europe, France, History, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:49

The Economist reviews a new book about the devastation to Europe’s wine makers caused by a tiny American invader:

These varieties are a reminder of the battle against phylloxera, a small, root-munching aphid that did incalculable damage to the wine business in the last 35 years of the 19th century. What George Gale, a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, calls “the worst of all known invasive species disasters” swept across the viticultural landscape like a biblical plague. It destroyed vineyards from Rioja to Rheingau, Stellenbosch to Sicily. With good reason, Jules-Emile Planchon, the French botanist who helped to subdue the insect, dubbed it Phylloxera vastatrix.

[. . .]

In Europe, Gale’s research is no less assiduous. His coverage of the war between the largely Parisian scientific establishment, which believed that phylloxera was the effect, rather than the cause, of the devastation, and the so-called Américainistes of Montpellier and Bordeaux, who believed the opposite, is commendably detailed. The squabbling between the two sides stretched on into the 1880s, delaying the search for a solution.

Various remedies were proposed: flooding, planting on sandy soils and the use of carbon disulphide (a flammable, toxic chemical that was costly as well as tricky to apply). Growers then tried planting lower-quality American grapes, including Clinton and Noah, before switching, finally, to grafted vines combining phylloxera-resistant American rootstocks with European scions. This is still the practice in most of the world’s vineyards today.

Has Twitter entered the political sphere?

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

There has to be more to the story, but Erick Erickson is quite concerned:

Today, Twitter not only shut down the Empower Texans twitter feed, but it also shut down the twitter feeds of every individual who works for Empower Texans.

Twitter is a private organization. It can do what it wants. But I am very troubled that it did so without explanation and without anyone for Empower Texans to contact.

If this was an orchestrated effort on the part of others to flag Empower Texans as a spam account such that Twitter’s computer system would automatically can it, Twitter has a serious security problem.

It was a man made decision, Twitter has even bigger problems.

Mark Lynas goes from green activist to “denier”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Ben Pile reviews Mark Lynas’s new book:

Since becoming an advocate of genetic modification (GM) and nuclear power, Mark Lynas has drawn increasingly hostile criticism from his erstwhile comrades in the green movement. In turn, he has sharpened his criticism of environmentalists for their hostility to technological and economic development. In his new book, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, he attempts to reformulate environmentalism to overcome the excesses that have so far prevented it from saving the planet. This book will no doubt provoke debate, but what is this transformation really about, and is it really based on new ideas or merely the revision of old ones?

[. . .]

As a result, there is much to agree with in The God Species. Most importantly, Lynas makes a clean break from deep ecology — the idea that ‘nature’ has intrinsic moral value and a ‘right’ to be protected from our ambitions. He rebukes the environmentalism that imagines a return to a pristine nature, and that shows contempt for development as an attempt to ‘play god’ over nature. We should ‘play god’, he says, for the planet’s sake as well as our own comfort. There is a convincing criticism of green demands for austerity and environmentalists’ unrealistic expectations that people should make do with ‘happiness’ rather than material progress. These are the conceits of well-off, middle-class and self-indulgent whingers, Lynas explains. Some of us have been making similar arguments for a very long time.

In spite of some of his accurate criticisms, Lynas fails to get to the substance of environmentalism. We do not find out what takes environmentalists to their bleak view of the world and their low view of humanity. This is a shame, because Lynas is in a unique position to reflect on it, having once thrust a custard pie into Bjorn Lomborg’s face, with the words: ‘That’s for everything you say about the environment which is complete bullshit. That’s for lying about climate change. That’s what you deserve for being smug about everything to do with the environment.’

A decade on, Lynas now emphasises science and pragmatism rather than… erm… pies. It’s worth remembering that Lomborg started out on mission similar to Lynas’s: as an environmentalist, keen to establish the sensible limits of our interaction with the natural world. Before writing The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg aimed to debunk the works of the economist, Julian Simon, but ended up sympathetic to many of his arguments. Lynas, too, now finds himself sympathetic to many of the ideas from the economic right (he calls for the privatisation of all publicly owned water companies, for instance). And like Lynas, Lomborg never ended up ‘denying’ climate change, but instead sought to bring a sense of proportion to the problem, and to put it into context with other problems in the world. That is all it takes to find oneself called a ‘denier’: merely seeking a sense of proportion about environmental problems will put you in the lowest moral category, as Lynas, the ‘Chernobyl death denier’, has now discovered.

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