Quotulatiousness

August 26, 2017

Inside A British Mark IV WW1 Tank I THE GREAT WAR Special

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Uploaded on 25 Aug 2017

Check out The Tank Museum on YouTube: http://youtube.com/thetankmuseum

Indy and Tank Museum curator David Willey take a look at the British Mark IV tank. Over 1000 of these tanks were built and they are an iconic symbol of early tank warfare during World War 1. We discuss crew conditions and other important details in this episode.

Hot takes are easy, if you’re Andy Benoit

Filed under: Football, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At the Daily Norseman, taking shots at “pro” sports personalities comes as second nature. Ted Glover and Eric Thompson have developed a particular joy in sharing the … gems … from Andy Benoit’s Twitter feed, and have taken it one step further:

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#happy #hashtag #anniversary

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Brittany Hunter informs us that the #hashtagrevolution is now ten years old:

This week the hashtag turned ten years old. As a writer, I am always looking for interesting and current topics to tackle. But this particular topic seemed completely insignificant to me. The symbol itself has existed for years. Why should I care about the anniversary of its repurposed use?

But upon further investigation, it became apparent to me that the advent of the hashtag should not simply be brushed off and dismissed as a silly pop culture trend. In fact, it actually answered many questions posed in F.A. Hayek’s essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society”.

The Hashtag is Born

Social media’s presence in our daily lives has reshaped the way our society exchanges information. But the fact that social media posts themselves are now able to be organized by a single “#” is quite remarkable. Now, all this decentralized knowledge is searchable on almost any social media platform.

Ten years ago, entrepreneur Chris Messina tweeted “#barcamp” from the then-obscure South by Southwest conference. By the end of 2007, it had been used on Twitter over 9,000 times. Today, over 125 million hashtags are used every day just on Twitter. With other social media platforms now utilizing this symbol, the total numbers are even grander.

But at its very core, the hashtag provides the means of connecting humanity with essential knowledge for better managing our lives – no matter where it comes from or where it ends up. The hashtag serves as a symbolic reminder of the remarkable information utopia that is emerging via technology in our time, and its existence portends vast increases in human well being the future.

When is an archaeological artifact merely “recyclable”?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Sweden, apparently, it’s actually becoming a common practice to discard “excess” metal artifacts for literal recycling:

One of the amulet rings from the Iron Age that archaeologists are recycling. Previously, this type of object was saved, says archaeologist Johan Runer.
(Photo from Svenska Dagbladet, caption from Never Yet Melted)

Rough translation from Swedish language article in Svenska Dagbladet:

    While the debate about burning books is raging in the media, Swedish archaeologists throw away amulet rings and other ancient discoveries. It feels wrong and sad to destroy thousands of years of ritual arts and crafts, and I’m not alone in feeling so.

    “What you do is destroy our history! Says Johan Runer, archaeologist at Stockholm County Museum.

    Amulet rings from the Iron Age, like Viking weights and coins, belong to a category of objects that, as far as Runer knows, were previously always saved.

    He tried to raise the alarm in an article in the journal Popular Archeology (No. 4/2016), describing how arbitrary thinning occurs. Especially in archeological studies before construction and road projects, the focus is on quickly and cheaply removing the heritage so that the machine tools can proceed.

    He works himself in these kinds of excavations. Nobody working in field archeology wants to get a reputation as an uncooperative “find-fanatic” but now he cannot be quiet any longer.

    “It’s quite crazy, but this field operates in the marketplace. We are doing business,” says Runer.

    Often, especially in the case of minor excavations, there is a standing order from the county administrative boards that as few discoveries as possible should be taken.

    If you think it seems unlikely, I recommend reading the National Archives Office’s open archive, such as report 2016: 38. An archaeological preamble of settlement of bronze and iron age before reconstruction by Flädie on the E6 outside Lund.

    In the finds catalog, coins, knives, a tin ornament, a ring and a weight from the Viking Age or early Middle Ages have been placed in the column “Weeded Out”.

Building a French Cleat System for Power Tools

Filed under: Technology, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 26 Jul 2015

For a written tutorial check out my blog at http://wilkerdos.com/2015/07/power-tool-french-cleat-system/

Follow me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/wilkerdos

Visit Triton’s homepage: http://www.tritontools.com

This week I build individual holders for each one of my power tools so that I can store them on a French cleat system.

QotD: The American Constitution

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

All things considered, this New Republic piece on Randy Barnett and the libertarian constitutional movement is really pretty good. But I thought this part was revealing:

    Barnett believes the Constitution exists to secure inalienable property and contract rights for individuals. This may sound like a bland and inconsequential opinion, but if widely adopted by our courts and political systems it would prohibit or call into question basic governmental protections — minimum wages, food-safety regulations, child-labor laws — that most of us take for granted. For nearly a century now, a legal counterculture has insisted that the whole New Deal project was a big, unconstitutional error, and Barnett is a big part of that movement today.

If your entire program is called into question by the notion that individuals have property and contract rights, maybe the problem is with your program.

And to the extent that, as believed by many, the Supreme Court’s eventual accommodation to the New Deal was the product of duress in the form of FDR’s court-packing scheme, then isn’t that accommodation, in fact, illegitimate?

Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, 2015-08-31.

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