Quotulatiousness

January 9, 2012

DARPA appoints former astronaut to lead 100-year starship project

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

Brid-Aine Parnell works the Star Trek angle on the appointment of former NASA astronaut Dr Mae Jemison as the head of the 100-year Starship project:

The agency had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication, and has not yet announced the appointment publicly.

Dr Jemison, who has a degree in chemical engineering and a doctorate in medicine, was the science mission specialist on the STS-47 Spacelab-J in 1992 and logged over 190 hours in space.

As well as being a bona fide boffin, Jemison also spent time in the IT trenches, working in computer programming, among other things, before joining NASA.

She’s also no stranger to the ideas behind a starship, since, as a long-time Star Trek fan, she had a bit part in one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The episode, entitled Second Chances, must surely go down as evidence of her remarkable patience and forbearance, since it featured the two most irritating TNG characters, Commander Riker and Deanna Troi, rather prominently.

In praise of the Carl Gustav

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Strategy Page discusses the recent decision by the US Army to adopt the Carl Gustav antitank weapon (which unlike most other “new” weapons is actually quite old):

The Carl Gustav is the first multiple-shot rocket launcher army infantry have used since the smooth bore 3.5 inch (88mm) bazooka was phased out in the 1960s. The Carl Gustav is basically a lightweight 8.5 kg (19 pound) recoilless rifle. It is 1.1 meters (3.6 feet) long. The barrel is rifled and good for about a hundred rounds.

The army also got rid of its recoilless rifles in the 1970s, replacing them with anti-tank guided missiles. What made the Carl Gustav unique was that it had the long range of a recoilless rifle (which used rifled barrels) but had a short barrel and was much more portable. The most popular American recoilless rifle was the 52 kg (114.5 pound) 75mm M20. With its long barrel (2.1 meters/6.9 feet), the M20 had a range of 6,400 meters. That was fine for use against tanks, but the army brass never appreciated the fact that the recoilless rifle was most frequently used against infantry in bunkers or buildings. The Carl Gustav took all this into account, and has been very popular with the infantry because of its portability and long range.

The 84mm projectiles weigh about 2 kg (4.4 pounds) each and come in several different types (anti-armor, combined anti-armor/high explosive, illumination and smoke.) The anti-armor round is very useful in urban areas and against bunkers. Range is 500-700 meters (depending on type of round fired), but an experienced gunner can hit a large target at up to 1,000 meters.

I trained on the Carl Gustav back in the 1970s … it was a good weapon then and still clearly has a role on the modern battlefield. The joy of hitting a tank right on the turret ring with an 84mm greeting card really cannot be adequately described.

Wrapping “the maple syrup of truth in the waffle of propaganda”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

The Economist casts a jaundiced eye at Canada’s plans to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812:

Canada and the United States started the new year by firing cannons at each other across the Niagara river, which separates the province of Ontario from the state of New York, leaving a whiff of gunpowder and politicking in the air. The guns at Fort George on the Canadian side and Old Fort Niagara on the American shore were replicas of those from the 1812 war between the two countries, and were loaded with blanks.

They fired the first salvo in what Canada’s government plans as a noisy 200th anniversary celebration of a largely forgotten war in which British redcoats, colonial militia and Indian allies stopped an American invasion (which Thomas Jefferson mistakenly predicted was “a mere matter of marching”) of what was then a sparsely populated string of colonies. “The heroic efforts of those who fought for our country in the War of 1812 tell the story of the Canada we know today: an independent and free country with a constitutional monarchy and its own distinct parliamentary system,” says James Moore, the minister of Canadian Heritage.

That wraps the maple syrup of truth in the waffle of propaganda. Although Canada did not become a self-governing country until 1867, the 1812 war did help to forge a common identity among disparate colonists, many of whom were Americans who had come north out of loyalty to the Crown or in search of cheap land. But the Indians did more to foil the American invasion than the Canadian militia, and the British reneged on a promise to reward them with land, according to Alan Taylor, a historian of the war. The Canadian side won mainly because the Americans were poorly led, supplied and organised. Both sides plundered and murdered civilians.

January 8, 2012

George F. Will on big government

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:54

Even fans of bigger government should recognize the accuracy of this short summary:

Liberals have a rendezvous with regret. Their largest achievement is today’s redistributionist government. But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.

Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage.

The left’s centuries-old mission is to increase social harmony by decreasing antagonisms arising from disparities of wealth — to decrease inequality by increasing government’s redistributive activities. Such government constantly expands under the unending, indeed intensifying, pressures to correct what it disapproves of — the distribution of wealth produced by consensual market activities. But as government presumes to dictate the correct distribution of social rewards, the maelstrom of contemporary politics demonstrates that social strife, not solidarity, is generated by government transfer payments to preferred groups.

[. . .]

The tax code, government’s favorite instrument for distributing wealth to favored factions, has been tweaked about 4,500 times in 10 years. Generally, the beneficiaries of these changes are interests sufficiently strong and sophisticated to practice rent-seeking.

Not only does redistributionist government direct wealth upward; in asserting a right to do so it siphons power into itself. A puzzling aspect of our politically contentious era is how little contention there is about the ethics of coercive redistribution by progressive taxation and other government “corrections” of social outcomes it considers unethical or unaesthetic.

The Joyce Estate provides useful ammunition to those opposed to longer copyright terms

Filed under: Books, Economics, Law, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:42

The works of James Joyce have finally (re-)entered the public domain:

On the last day of 2011, the 70th anniversary year of his death, James Joyce’s work finally passed out of copyright. It was the dawn of a new age for Joyce scholars, publishers and biographers who are now free to quote or publish him without the permission of the ferociously prohibitive Joyce estate.

Over the past 20 years the right to quote from or publish Joyce’s work has been a matter of increasingly heated debate. The estate’s most vocal trustee, Stephen Joyce, the author’s grandson, earned himself the reputation as the most intractable defender of any copyright in modern times. His truculence (often verbal and colourful) towards those wishing to quote or publish his grandfather’s words dated from the mid-1970s, when biographer Richard Ellmann published some of Joyce’s “pornographic” letters to his wife Nora and some suggestive ones to a clandestine lover in Zurich. On becoming a trustee, Stephen was determined to prevent any further such revelations.

He outraged a meeting of Joyce scholars in Venice in 1988 by announcing that he had destroyed around a thousand letters to Joyce from his troubled daughter Lucia, as well as some to her from Samuel Beckett, the love of her young life. The following year he forced Brenda Maddox to delete a postscript concerning Lucia from her biography Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom. However, in 1991, the 50th anniversary of his death, Joyce’s copyright lapsed and for a time he could be quoted freely without permission. But in 1995 copyright in Europe was extended to 70 years, so the rights reverted to the estate.

[. . .]

The intention of the literary guardian is often not just to protect the reputation and prestige of an individual or family but also to safeguard the integrity of a work against experimentation, revision or trivialisation. Samuel Beckett, for example, refused to allow women to take the leading roles in Waiting for Godot, an indignant Orwell stopped his publisher publicising Nineteen Eighty-Four as a romantic thriller and the Joyce estate refused Kate Bush permission to include the final, seductive words of Molly Bloom from Ulysses in a song.

But there is also a certain power and prestige in being the literary executor of a famous writer. People pay heed to one’s words, come cap-in-hand to one’s door with requests, and the trustee of manuscripts is free to grant or deny favours with a lordly nod or dismissive gesture. It is a power jealously guarded and sometimes remorselessly implemented.

The complete knowledge fallacy

Filed under: Books, Education, History, Media, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:29

Another thumb-sucker about how we’re been overwhelmed with data and it’s all Google’s fault (well, not really):

Today, any young reader of JK Rowling’s The Philosopher’s Stone would be bound to ask, turning the pages with bated-breath expectation as Harry Potter comes close to being discovered in the out-of-bounds section of the library: “Why didn’t he just Google it?”

As so often, however, our sense of living in an age which is particularly vulnerable to being overwhelmed by too much information turns out to be misplaced.

Even before the invention of the printing press — when the distribution of information depended upon teams of scribes working with pen and ink in monastery libraries — the fear of too much to know, too much material too widely and swiftly disseminated, was already threatening to overwhelm our orderly sense of understanding.

Once books proliferated in printed form from the 16th Century onwards — “too many books, too little time” was the complaint of scholars like Erasmus and Descartes. Knowledge-gatherers scrambled to develop ever more-complicated ways of assembling, organising and distributing knowledge drawn from as wide as possible a range of erudite and unfamiliar sources for easy retrieval.

[. . .]

Of course I am labouring the point here to remind us that there has never been a time when mastering the sum of human knowledge has not been felt to be an impossible task. And historically there was the additional fear that the precious store of knowledge accumulating as the world grew in wisdom might be lost by natural or man-made disaster. Early modern compilers of information feared that without care for its safekeeping, information might run through their fingers like sand, lost forever.

A strong theme in the surprisingly large early modern literature bewailing the effect of too many books is not just worry at not being able to keep hold of everything a person is required to know, but this fear of loss. To 15th and 16th Century scholars, the period following antiquity — the so-called “dark ages” — had almost succeeded in obliterating classical learning forever. In the 17th Century, Europe-wide wars, civil wars and unrest had resulted in the destruction of entire archives of precious administrative documents.

Hence the potent theme of knowledge rescued from near-oblivion, which runs through early modern discussions of how to store and retrieve information reliably.

January 7, 2012

QotD: Is Disappearing

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:33

To be or not to be? That remaining the question, the answer increasingly clear. The verb “to be” dying out, and the culprit? None other than TV news channels. Taking the place of such cherished words as “is,” “are,” “am,” even “were” and “was”: a new verb form that you might call the one-size-fits-all past, present, and future participle. Or you might call it the one-size-fits-all past, present, and future gerund. One of these right and one of them wrong, but which which? Nobody really knowing the difference between a participle and a gerund. Anyone claiming to understand the distinction probably bluffing. So calling it what you wish: Either label doing.

Michael Kinsley, “Is Disappearing: What TV news doing to our precious verbs”, Slate, 2001-11-01

Booth babes = company with shitty products or zero new ideas

Filed under: Humour, Media, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

A useful rant about the companies who depend on “booth babes” to draw attention at trade shows:

CES, like many industry conventions, will be thick with “booth babes” — women paid to stand around in revealing clothing in order to draw men to the booths and see terrible products. That’s regrettable. Not only because it is sexist, but also because it just makes your company look like a bunch of undersexed nimrods.

If the only way you can get people interested in your product is to have a scantily clad woman appear next to it for no apparent reason, your products are probably awful. And besides, it’s boring. It’s just boring. It’s been done so many times, for so many years, that my only reaction to seeing a booth bunny is to think, “Here is a company that is completely out of ideas.”

Look, technology industry CEOs, if you want to stick a butt in my face, I’d be way more impressed if you made it your own fat ass. Butter up that big white rump of yours and squeeze it into a little red thong. Strap those mantits into a cheetah bra that lets your pale hairy cleavage see the light of day. Do that, and I promise you that I’ll listen to your pitch. (Even if it’s a little awkward for both of us!) Better yet, get the whole pasty, overpaid, C-level crew into some sexy swimwear. People will talk. You’ll be the buzz.

Full disclosure: I’ve worked (on the technology side) at companies who spent nearly as much time and effort hiring and “costuming” their booth babes as they did on the actual marketing campaign for their products. I don’t currently work with firms who do this, thank goodness.

Conrad Black: Current events vindicate Margaret Thatcher

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

The current situation in Europe proves that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was right all along:

Though it is probably happening too late to be overly gratifying to her, events are piling on to vindicate Margaret Thatcher completely in her reservations about British integration in Europe. Her response to the proposal to reduce Britain to a local government in a federal Europe was, memorably: “No, no, no, and never.” And her reward for her refusal to get on board what was then the thundering bandwagon of Eurofederalism, was to be sent packing by her own ungrateful party, though she was the only British political leader who had won three consecutive, full-term election majorities since before the First Reform Act expanded the electorate in 1832.

She was immensely popular with millions of Britons as a patriotic and courageous leader who took Britain off financial life support, saved it from strangulation by over-mighty, almost anarchistic unions, built a prosperous, home-owning democracy, threw the Argentinians out of the little corner of the British Empire they had wrongfully seized (the Falkland Islands), and played a starring role in winning the Cold War.

[. . .]

And as she liberalized the economy; imposed a free, secret ballot for labour strikes; lowered all taxes; privatized industry, housing, airports, almost everything except the National Health Service and the BBC; jolting economic growth resulted. Unfortunately, its most conspicuous exemplars included many successful entrepreneurs and financier types who offended British sensibilities by their garish and spivvy ostentation. The basis of Margaret Thatcher’s support was the Daily Telegraph-reading, gin and tonic-drinking, cricket-loving middle class, the backbone of the nation. But her enemies identified her with an infelicitous combination of Colonel Blimp fuddy-duddies and sticky-fingered, vulgar parvenus.

She had a somewhat hectoring manner in debates, and was notoriously impatient with what she considered pusillanimity from senior colleagues, sometimes calling cabinet members “blanc-manges,” or “suet puddings,” or even “spineless, boneless, men” (not necessarily inaccurately). Naturally less known was her exquisite courtesy and unaffected and egalitarian kindness to subordinates and strangers. It annoyed feminists that she was such a traditionalist, and weak men that she was a strong woman. But she triumphed by perseverance and courage; to the end, though a stirring speaker, she was nervous before a speech. She was a strong woman, but not at all a mannish one.

Veteran U-2 aircraft still flying

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

The regular flights over Iraq may have ended, but the U-2 will continue to fly for a few years yet:

With a range of over 11,000 kilometers, the 18 ton U-2s typically fly missions 12 hours long. All U-2s have been upgraded to the Block 20 standard, so they can be kept in service until the end of this decade. Or at least until the 13 ton Global Hawk is completely debugged and available in sufficient quantity to replace it. The U-2 has been in service since 1955 and only 103 were built, of which 26 remain in service (plus five two-seat trainers). The current U-2S aircraft were built as TR-1s in the 1980s, and later refurbished and renamed U-2S. Fewer than 900 pilots have qualified to fly the U-2 in that time.

[. . .]

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Six years ago the U.S. Air Force wanted to retire its U-2s and replace them with UAVs like Global Hawk. But Congress refused to allow it, partly for political reasons (jobs would be lost, which is always a live political issue) and because some in Congress (and the air force) did not believe that Global Hawk was ready to completely replace the U-2. This turned out to be correct. New Global Hawks continue to appear but there is so much demand for the kinds of recon work the two aircraft can do that both pilots and robots will coexist for a while. But eventually the old reliable U-2 will be retired.

Vikings fire only defensive coach whose unit did well this year

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Okay, I admit I’m stumped: the Minnesota Vikings had a putrid 2011 season. They lost games they should have won and they barely managed to win the games they should have dominated. I get it that the defence was clearly a problem and that changes were going to have to be made. What I don’t understand is that the only coach on the defence whose unit played well is the very first coach to be fired:

“This is what they wanted,” Dunbar said in a phone interview with the Star Tribune. “Coach Frazier told me the ownership wanted to go in a different direction. And for me, that’s fine. As football coaches, we know we’re all migrant workers and we go where the jobs are. Now, my job in Minnesota is over.”

Dunbar joined the Vikings in 2006 when Brad Childress became coach and helped the defensive line establish a reputation as a sturdy, run-stopping unit. Pat Williams, Kevin Williams and Jared Allen all earned Pro Bowl invitations while playing under Dunbar. And this season, despite the well-documented struggles of the entire defense, the d-line may have had the most solid season of any Vikings’ position group, ranking 11th in the NFL against the run. The Vikings also tallied 50 sacks as a team with defensive end setting a new single-season team record with 22.

Still, after a 3-13 finish, Frazier has vowed to shake things up and make significant changes to his coaching staff. Dunbar’s exit is likely just the start of the revolving door at Winter Park.

Dunbar said he wasn’t able to diagnose the root cause of the Vikings’ 3-13 freefall.

“I’m a position coach,” he said. “I’m not a coordinator. I’m not a head coach. When I look at what I did with the Minnesota Vikings, my piece of the puzzle was to make the defensive line play as well as they could. We played well against the run. I think we finished No. 11 against the run. And we finished No. 1 in sacks. And the guy I coached led the league in sacks with 22 on a team that really didn’t have a lead the last eight games of the year. So I thought that was my piece of the puzzle. I can’t worry about running backs, defensive backs, receivers, linebackers. When you do it, you focus on your job, put your piece of the puzzle in and go from there.”

If your defence was putrid — and it was, between injuries and legal issues — someone has to be seen to pay, but why is the only guy whose players more than earned their salaries the first one to go? I just don’t get it.

January 6, 2012

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:59

My lastest column (in my nom-de-gaming guise as Raphia Naon) on news from the Guild Wars 2 world is now up at GuildMag.com.

Weird local story gets a bit weirder

Filed under: Cancon, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:33

In Pickering, about 20 kilometres west of here, the regional police found that an abandoned home had been modified to add a “confinement room”. It’s in a fairly secluded area, so there were no immediate leads to who had made the modifications or who (if anyone) had been confined in it. Today, the National Post reported that the “dungeon house” has burned to the ground:

An abandoned Pickering farmhouse that was found to have padlocked dungeon in its basement burned to the ground early Friday morning, adding an unexpected twist to an already bizarre police investigation.

A fire broke out at 140 Concession Rd. 7 outside of Pickering shortly after midnight and soon consumed the desolate building where police had been carrying out an investigation.

[. . .]

Before the blaze, police were trying to determine who built the “confinement-style” room with padlocks affixed to the very thick door, discovered in late November when crews went in to assess the building that had been scheduled for demolition.

Police said the house was last occupied in 2006, but the room was new — believed to have been built within the last year or two.

“I can’t get into what was in the room, but the way it was constructed — the time and effort put into it and the materials used — clearly indicated it was a room designed to hold somebody in,” Durham Regional Police Detective Darren Short said last month.

Michael Geist: help save Canada’s liberal public domain rules

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:56

Canada’s standards for when works enter the public domain are more liberal than those in the US and Europe (that is, we provide shorter — but still generous — periods of copyright protection). Michael Geist says that these standards may be at risk soon:

Canada celebrated New Year’s Day this year by welcoming the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Carl Jung into the public domain just as European countries were celebrating the arrival of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, 20 years after both entered the Canadian public domain. Canada’s term of copyright meets the international standard of life of the author plus 50 years, which has now become a competitive advantage when compared to the United States, Australia, and Europe, which have copyright terms that extend an additional 20 years (without any evidence of additional public benefits).

In an interesting coincidence, the Canadian government filed notice of a public consultation on December 31, 2011 on the possible Canadian entry into the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations, trade talks that could result in an extension in the term of copyright that would mean nothing new would enter the Canadian public domain until 2032 or beyond. The TPP covers a wide range of issues, but its intellectual property rules as contemplated by leaked U.S. drafts would extend the term of copyright, require even stricter digital lock rules, restrict trade in parallel imports, and increase various infringement penalties. As I noted last month, if Canada were to ratify the TPP, it would require another copyright bill to undo much of what the government is about to enact with Bill C-11.

Paul Wells: Harper has big plans for 2012 … maybe

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:13

Yes, it’s the constantly threatening hidden agenda!

What does Stephen Harper want to do with his parliamentary majority? “I want to make sure that we use it,” he told CTV’s Lisa LaFlamme in a year-end interview. “You know, I’ve seen too many majority governments, the bureaucracy talks them into going to sleep for three years, and then they all of a sudden realize they’re close to an election.”

[. . .]

You don’t have to like this list. I’m not saying Harper’s predecessors were heroes. I am saying they were not sleeping. If the Prime Minister’s comments have any meaning, he must have something up his sleeve at least as big as those accomplishments. If he doesn’t, he won’t be the first politician to congratulate himself for his achievements before he fails to achieve them.

His interviews suggest Harper plans something big. Four times during his CTV interview, and once with the Chinese-language Fairchild network, he used the adjective “major” to describe his plans for 2012.

[. . .]

It’s striking how rarely Harper sounds bold when any discussion descends from slogans to details. Take foreign policy. On Syria, he pleads the lack of a Security Council resolution. On Egypt: “We’ll try and do what we can do to encourage stability and encourage the forces of democracy, but we don’t go into these things blind. There are some very real risks.”

A policy of bold action only where success is assured is a policy of offering help where none is needed. It is a bold decision to join others’ victory parades. There is nothing major about it.

Incidentally, the bureaucrats I talk to aren’t plotting to put Harper to sleep. On the contrary. Many wonder whether this government will wake up. One of Ottawa’s most experienced civil servants tells me the widespread belief is that Harper’s government is so obsessed with each morning’s headlines that it cannot plan. This official predicts a year of high-level early retirements from the civil service if Harper does not start using his majority.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress