My regular Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. With Wintersday coming to a close, ArenaNet brought down the banhammer on players using a crafting exploit with one of the new seasonal items. There’s also lots of discussion about the next few months’ announced content additions, plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
January 4, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
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North Korea adopts maskirovka to conceal rocket preparations
Strategy Page on the most recent North Korean hoodwinking of western intelligence agencies:
Western intelligence agencies are a bit embarrassed that they were not able to predict the exact day that North Korea recently launched a long-range rocket. Even though North Korean announced the two week period during which the launch would take place last December, and several nations had photo satellites flying over the launch site regularly, the actual launch came as a surprise. The North Koreans apparently took advantage of the regular schedules of these spy satellites to move equipment around the launch site at the right time to conceal just how close the rocket was to takeoff. Many intel analysts had not seen this sort of thing at all (if they were young) and the older ones had not seen it done to this degree since the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was still around and using their maskirovka (“masking”) agency to carry out large scale deceptions of photo satellites. The Russians taught the North Koreans many things, and maskirovka was apparently part of the curriculum.
In addition to concealing weapons, their performance and movements, the Soviets also used satellite deception to mislead the west on how their troops would operate in the field. Several times a year, the Soviets would hold large scale maneuvers. Each of these exercises would involve many divisions, plus hundreds of aircraft and helicopters. Satellite photos of these maneuvers were thought to reveal tactics the Soviets were going to use in future wars. But the Soviets knew when American satellites were coming over and sometimes arranged displays of tactics they had no intention of using. Naturally, this made it more difficult for the Western intelligence analysts to figure out exactly what the Soviets were planning. This, of course, was the sort of confusion the Soviets wanted to create with these little deceptions.
HMCS Athabaskan damaged while under tow
One of the Royal Canadian Navy’s destroyers was supposed to have finished a refitting back in November, but due to delays in the work had to be towed back to Halifax. On the way, further problems arose:
A navy destroyer moored in Cape Breton has been damaged and was set adrift while under tow after problems arose with repair work carried out at an Ontario dockyard, the military said Thursday.
HMCS Athabaskan drifted for several hours off Scatarie Island on Friday after the tow line broke, said Capt. Doug Kierstead of the Royal Canadian Navy in Halifax.
Kierstead said there is damage to the hull behind the ship’s identifying numbers, though he declined to say what the damage was and how it came about.
“At this point all I can say is that we are aware that there is damage visible,” Kierstead said in an interview.
He said the vessel was supposed to have undergone a routine refit by the end of November last year and was expected to be capable of sailing after that work was completed at Seaway Marine and Industrial Inc. in Welland, Ont.
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January 3, 2013
Better late than never, the annual stats post
Despite seeing lots of folks posting their annual traffic counts over the last few days, I forgot to even look at the Quotulatiousness stats page until just now. On the numbers, I think it’s safe to say that the blog continues to grow (but don’t ask me why):
Those are the internal WordPress numbers, starting from 10 July, 2009 when I switched over from the original site. Notional nationality breakdown, courtesy of Flag Counter:
Generally speaking, every other visitor to the blog is American, one in five is Canadian, one in 20 is British, and the rest of the world combines for the remaining quarter. No wonder I have so many stories with American angles…
The old site still gets some traffic, but you’ll notice that the total traffic there (including from sometime in the late summer of 2004 down to today) doesn’t add up to a particularly large number:
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Rhode Island’s 38 Studios the new poster child for crony capitalism
The 2012 bankruptcy of Rhode Island-based video-game developer 38 Studios isn’t just a sad tale of a start-up tech company falling victim to the vagaries of a rough economy. It is a completely predictable story of crony capitalism, featuring star-struck legislators and the hubris of a larger-than-life athlete completely unprepared to compete in business.
Former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, an iconic figure in New England after anchoring a historic playoff comeback which ended a legendary 86-year title drought, founded 38 Studios near the end of his baseball career in the hopes of becoming a big shot in the intensely competitive multi-player gaming world.
Since 2006, Schilling invested millions of his own fortune into 38 Studios, and with the self-assured bravado he exhibited as a major league baseball player, set out to find investors to infuse his company with the roughly $50 million needed to complete 38 Studios’ first game. Although Schilling is the kind of local legend who could get a meeting with every venture capitalist in New England, Massachussets VCs passed on 38 Studios. WPRI-TV’s Ted Nesi reported that one such potential investor said “it would have taken a lot of babysitting to do a deal with Schilling because he was inexperienced and the management was inexperienced.”
Enter Gov. Donald Carcieri (R-R.I.), term-limited and searching for a legacy after presiding over one of the worst state economies in the U.S., featuring long spells of double-digit employment and frequent last-place finishes in rankings of business friendliness. In a classic spasm of “do something, anything” government desperation, Carcieri made it his mission to lure 38 Studios from its headquarters in Maynard, Massachusetts to Rhode Island.
Using his bully pulpit as both governor and chairman of the Rhode Island Economic Devlopment Corporation (RIEDC), a quasi-public agency whose mission is to promote business in the state, Carcieri pushed hard for 38 Studios to receive a $75 million taxpayer-guaranteed loan.
Each loan guarantee must be approved by the Rhode Island legislature, and when the votes were cast in 2010, only one lawmaker voted against it. Rep. Bob Watson (R-Greenwich) noted “a lot of red flags” in a “very risky” deal that was “too fast, too loose, and frankly, a scandal waiting to happen.” Watson added “more often than not, politicians are very poor when it comes to making business decisions.”
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Comitology and the EU
Alexandra Swann notes that the great C. Northcote Parkinson predicted the EU’s decision-making mechanics with great accuracy:
If we listen to Daniel Guéguen, Professor of European Political and Administrative studies at the College of Europe, the Europhile madrassa, the equation spells the downfall of the European Union.
Guéguen has worked as a Brussels lobbyist for 35 years; he is a full time federast and one of the remaining true believers in the EU. Given his commitment to the EU project, when he deems its system of governance, comitology, “an infernal system” perhaps it’s time to listen.
The concept of Comitology was invented by the incomparable Professor C Northcote-Parkinson in his seminal work Parkinson’s law of 1958. It was meant as a satire but, like many of the best jokes, they either get elected or, in this case, embedded in the bureaucracy. Here is the Professor explaining the comitology and his equation:
x=(mo(a-d))/(y+p b1/2)
Where m = the average number of members actually present; o = the number of members influenced by outside pressure groups; a = the average age of the members; d = the distance in centimetres between the two members who are seated farthest from each other; y = the number of years since the cabinet or committee was first formed; p = the patience of the chairman, as measured on the Peabody scale; b = the average blood pressure of the three oldest members, taken shortly before the time of meeting. Then x = the number of members effectively present at the moment when the efficient working of the cabinet or other committee has become manifestly impossible. This is the coefficient of inefficiency and it is found to lie between 19.9 and 22.4. (The decimals represent partial attendance; those absent for a part of the meeting.)
This beautifully encapsulates the terrifying silliness of what is going on in the tubular steel and stripped Swedish pine chairs of Brussels, and for anyone with an interest in transparency or good governance, it is a serious concern. After all, under various estimates upwards of 75 per cent of our laws, the laws that govern the minutiae of our lives are made in the sterile Committee rooms of the Breydel, Berlyamont, Justis Lupsius and other buildings in the EU quarter of Brussels. That this cosmic joke now governs our lives is just a factor of the brobdingnagian reality of our membership of the EU.
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Comic book capers of expatriate Americans
Wendy McElroy on Superman’s renunciation of American citizenship:
How do you know when the content of a nation’s character is bankrupt? One way is to examine the dynamic symbols that embody its character and which shift in reaction to circumstance. These symbols are often found within literature and other cultural expressions.
In last year’s Action Comic #900, Superman declared an intention to renounce his US citizenship. The Man of Steel explained, “I’m tired of having my actions construed as instruments of US policy. ‘Truth, justice, and the American Way’ – it’s not enough any more.” Many readers were outraged because, despite being an illegal alien in the most literal sense, Superman epitomized the American Way.
[. . .]
As it happened, Action Comic #900 was issued only days before the killing of Osama bin Laden. Afterward, there was a surge of general patriotism and of sharp criticism directed at Superman. The comic book publishers retreated faster than a speeding bullet. The mainstream media and elites were once again able to settle comfortably into the notion that only villains, cynics, and the irredeemably selfish would abandon US citizenship for a global identity.
And, yet, people on the street then and now sensed that something else was going on. When Forbes ran an expat article, an obviously knowledgeable commentator wrote that leaving America was not […] fundamentally about taxes for most people. “[T]he larger issue is the complete betrayal by one’s country in an attempt to gouge for money to make up for the horrific [US] debt…It is high time…Americans learn that the country they grew up in, no longer exists. The ‘American exceptionalism’ that we were taught to believe in, needs to be seen for what it has become, an excuse for the government to do whatever it wants with no concern for the consequences. ALL Americans lose in this process.” The United States has become what it used to denounce – a fascist police state. To love America (the ideal), you must now leave America (the reality) — either physically or spiritually.
It is wise to do so quietly because the very hint of ‘going expat’ can drive some people into fury. In his article “Citizenship is a problem to be solved,” Phil Hodgen addressed the ‘furious’. He admonished them, “Put down your pitchforks. The point of…an article like this is not to answer with ‘You’re right!’ or ‘You’re wrong!’ The point of the article…is to explore the ideas. There are some important concepts here that transcend taxation…
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The Avro Arrow model hunt
Updating an old story (original posting at the old blog from 2004) on the search for the scale models used to develop the Avro Arrow:
Andrew Hibbert knows they’re down there somewhere. At the bottom of Lake Ontario, with more than 50 years’ worth of zebra mussels clinging to their hulls, sit nine models of the Avro Arrow.
The models were part of a program to test the hull design of the legendary Canadian plane, cancelled before it could truly soar. Strapped to high-powered booster rockets, the 10-foot models weighed nearly 500 pounds and flew over Lake Ontario at supersonic speeds. Their onboard sensors — revolutionary for the 1950s — relayed information back to the launch site at Point Petre, in Prince Edward County.
The models represent a key part of the development of the scrapped plane project.
The Avro Arrow made its first flight in 1958. The interceptor was widely regarded as ahead of its time in terms of aerospace technology. Its Malton plant employed nearly 15,000 people.
But development was cancelled abruptly in 1959, after five Arrows had flown. All were ordered destroyed, along with any documentation and related equipment.
The models, however, were safe from the scrubbing, protected by 30 metres of water.
Eleven models were tested in total: nine at Point Petre and two in Virginia. None has been recovered yet, but that hasn’t stopped so-called “Arrowheads” from hunting for them, often at great cost of both treasure and time.
The Arrow story has shown up a few times on the blog before.
Update: Colby Cosh is always good for summarizing:
I’m friendly with a local insane man who’s fixated on the Avro Arrow. There must be hundreds of these guys. It’s our Napoleon-hat.
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) January 3, 2013
I put it in a more wordy form in an earlier posting:
Even people who care less than nothing about aircraft or military technology seem to have opinions about the Avro Arrow (usually allowing them to take free shots at former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker for the decision to scrap the plane). It’s far enough in the past that the facts are more than obscured by the myths of the cottage conspiracy theory industry (artisanal Canadian myth-making, hand-woven, fair-trade, and 100% organic).
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Irish newspapers want to be paid when you link to them
Ireland is an odd place, if this little brainstorm from their newspaper industry is any indication:
This is not a joke.
I have started with that clarification, because as you read this you will find yourself asking “Is this some kind of a joke?” I thought I would be helpful and put the answer right up at the start, so you can refer back to it as often as you require.
This year the Irish newspaper industry asserted, first tentatively and then without any equivocation, that links -just bare links like this one- belonged to them. They said that they had the right to be paid to be linked to. They said they had the right to set the rates for those links, as they had set rates in the past for other forms of licensing of their intellectual property. And then they started a campaign to lobby for unauthorised linking to be outlawed.
These assertions were not merely academic positions. The Newspaper Industry (all these newspapers) had its agent write out demanding money. They wrote to Women’s Aid, (amongst others) who became our clients when they received letters, emails and phone calls asserting that they needed to buy a licence because they had linked to articles in newspapers carrying positive stories about their fundraising efforts.
These are the prices for linking they were supplied with:
1 – 5 €300.00
6 – 10 €500.00
11 – 15 €700.00
16 – 25 €950.00
26 – 50 €1,350.00
50 + NegotiableThey were quite clear in their demands. They told Women’s Aid “a licence is required to link directly to an online article even without uploading any of the content directly onto your own website.”
The rational response here is to honour their request … by pretending they’ve dropped off the internet altogether and never linking to any of the Irish newspaper websites.
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January 2, 2013
Don’t let your BMI scare you (too much)
A quick reminder that the Body Mass Index (BMI) is more a convenient mathematical trick than an actual healthy weight guideline:
In a finding that could undermine many New Year’s resolutions, a new government study shows that people who are overweight are less likely to die in any given period than people of normal weight. Even those who are moderately obese don’t have a higher-than-normal risk of dying.
Being substantially obese, based on measure called body mass index, or BMI, of 35 and higher, does raise the risk of death by 29%, researchers found.
But people with a BMI of 25 to 30 — who are considered overweight and make up more than 30% of the U.S. population — have a 6% lower risk of death than people whose BMI is in the normal range of 18.5 to 25, according to the study, being published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
People who had a BMI of 30 to 35 — considered the first stage of obesity — had a 5% lower risk of dying, but those figures weren’t considered statistically significant.
In other words, a few extra pounds are not going to threaten your life (a lot of extra pounds might). In the western world, few of us have the kind of jobs that require much in the way of physical exertion and we also have both relatively low food prices and much greater access to calorie-dense food. Our parents tended to have jobs that required more physical effort and their access to food was not as great as ours (they were less wealthy overall, and didn’t eat at restaurants or fast food joints as often as we do). Two otherwise positive trends that combine to produce a less-positive result on the scales.
Earlier discussion of the limitations of BMI as a guideline here, here, here, and here.
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Potential hotspots for 2013
Strategy Page has the advance listing of places around the world where peacekeeping or peace-making may be required this year:
Planning for peacekeeping works a lot better if you have a good idea of where the next crises will occur. For 2013 there are several potential hotspots where diplomats can’t handle the mess and armed peacekeepers may be needed. In some cases, there might also be a call for more peacekeepers in an existing hotspot. That might happen in the eastern Congo, where the largest force of UN peacekeepers has been trying to calm things down for nearly a decade, but the violence just keeps going. There’s increasing hostility between Sudan and newly created South Sudan. There are some peacekeepers there, but, like Darfur (western Sudan) the violence never seems to stop.
There’s always been the possibility of large scale fighting between Afghanistan and Pakistan. There’s been more and more small scale violence on the border and growing threats from both countries. There is still a lot of tension between Pakistan and India, over Pakistani support for Islamic terrorists making attacks in India. Pakistan denies any responsibility, despite a growing mountain of evidence. Neither country would be very hospitable to peacekeepers.
And then there the developing mess in the Western Pacific off China, where Chinese claims to a lot of uninhabited rocks and reefs is causing a growing outrage from the neighbors. China keeps pushing and with all those armed ships and aircraft facing off, an accidently, or deliberate, shot is possible. China will also be a major player if North Korea finally does its political collapse. The North Korean economy has already tanked as has morale and living standards. If the government loses control China and South Korea have both made claims on responsibility for taking over and dealing with the mess.
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Oh, this is ironic…
Several years ago, I got the only takedown notice I’ve ever received. The person objecting to me posting a short quotation of hers (with full attribution and link to the original) is now in the news herself:
An Ottawa wine writer used reviews from other writers on her website without properly crediting them. And as if that’s not ripe enough, a U.S. online wine magazine says she requires some wineries to buy a subscription to her website before she’ll review their wines.
Call it a tempest in a wine bottle. Writer Natalie MacLean has uncorked a debate about journalism etiquette and ethics online and touched off an oenophilic flap that’s produced underlying acidity and a bitter aftertaste in the usually genteel subculture.
“It’s all very tawdry,” says wine writer Tony Aspler. “The wine writers’ community is very close and collegial. To have someone behave this way, to take reviews and not attribute properly, it’s not done.”
MacLean, who writes at nataliemaclean.com, says she was surprised when Michael Pinkus, president of the Wine Writers Circle of Canada, objected to her use of others’ reviews. She got legal advice, she says, and has now gone back through past postings to fully attribute the reviews. She denies that wineries must pay to subscribe to her site to get reviewed.
“It’s been extremely painful,” says MacLean, named the World’s Best Drink Journalist in 2003 at the World Food Media Awards. “I’m more than happy to discuss the issues, to focus on the facts, but this has gone well beyond that. There’s been a lot of personal attacks. You can look for yourself on the blogs.”
So the person who objected to me quoting her was actually engaged in ripping off her fellow wine writers without attribution? That made my day.
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January 1, 2013
Vikings year in review
After Sunday’s victory over Green Bay to clinch a playoff berth, it’s easy to forget just how far the team has had to climb to get this far. At the Daily Norseman, Christopher Gates reminds us of how deep the trough was (Part 1, Part 2):
It was one year ago today, January 1, 2012, that the Minnesota Vikings were leaving the turf at the Metrodome after suffering their latest loss, a 17-13 defeat at the hands of the Chicago Bears. The loss was the team’s 13th of the season, tying the low-water mark for this proud franchise, a mark not seen since the Les Steckel debacle of 1984 when the team outright quit about halfway through the season.
Two days prior to that, running back Adrian Peterson had surgery to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament and a torn medial collateral ligament in his left knee, an injury he had suffered on Christmas Eve at FedEx Field against the Washington Redskins. The face of the franchise was laid up in a hospital bed, and questions about his future with the team ran rampant.
Quarterback Christian Ponder, drafted seven months previous to be the guy that would lead the Vikings in the long-term, finished an up-and-down rookie campaign after starting ten games following the benching of the ineffective Donovan McNabb. He had also gotten injured badly enough to get knocked out of three of the final four regular season contests for the Vikings, and people questioned whether the young Texan (by way of Florida State) was a reach. . .or, quite possibly, even a “bust.”
The Minnesota defense, despite the presence of a defensive front that led the National Football League in sacks, finished 31st in the NFL in points allowed and allowed the second-worst passer rating in NFL history. An injury to Antoine Winfield and the off-field transgressions of Chris Cook, among other things, forced the Vikings to play a lot of young players in the secondary, and even to bring guys in (essentially) off the street to fill the roster.
The Vikings’ 3-13 mark was a mere 12 games behind the Green Bay Packers for the NFC North division crown, a division that also sent the Detroit Lions to the playoffs at 10-6 and had the aforementioned Bears at 7-9 following an injury to quarterback Jay Cutler. Yes, things were looking quite dark for the Minnesota Vikings as the 2012 off-season loomed. Oh, and there was that minor little detail about the Vikings’ lease with the Metrodome expiring after that final game, essentially leaving the team without a home and speculation about a potential move running rampant.
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Happy New Year
Yeah, I slept in this morning after attending Brendan’s New Year’s Eve party in Toronto. It was a nice party, although we had our traditional problems with the wine (Bren has terrible luck in the particular bottles of wine he opens when I visit). As I was driving, I only sampled the wine anyway…
Driving through downtown Toronto at two in the morning is rarely as entertaining as it is on New Year’s: between the staggering celebrants on the sidewalk stumbling into traffic and the overly-cautious-drivers trying to get past them safely, it can be frustratingly slow. Last night’s worst drivers were the cabbies — but not for the usual excessive speed/random lane change reasons. Last night, it seemed like half the cabbies were drunk or stoned … and were driving too slowly and weaving in the lane even as they were going too slowly. That, combined with their seemingly random stops to pick up and drop off customers, made the taxis even more of a hazard than they usually are.
Even more remarkable was that we saw only a single marked police car over the entire drive (no RIDE checkpoints, either). I’m sure they were out at full strength, but aside from one SUV that pulled a fast U-turn at Yonge & Carleton, they were clearly patrolling different routes than the one we took.
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