Quotulatiousness

March 10, 2020

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy turns 42

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Register, Richard Speed notes a significant anniversary:

The weekend marked the 42nd anniversary of the first broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the hugely influential BBC radio show.

42 is a significant number for fans of the innovative series by Douglas Adams so (carefully) pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, wrap yourself in a towel and join The Register for a trip back to 1978, when the BBC decided to do something quite different.

Writing in the introduction to the Pan Books’ 1985 publication of the radio scripts (which differ from the books, which differ from the television series, which differ from the film …), series producer Geoffrey Perkins described his first meeting with the author. Adams was giving a speech despite being aggressively heckled by the cast members of the Cambridge Footlights show he’d just directed.

He’d also elected to stand on a rickety chair to deliver the speech.

“Here,” recalled Perkins, “was someone prepared to stick his neck out further than most people, someone who would carry on in the face of adversity, and someone who would shortly fall off a chair.

“I was right on all three counts.”

Perkins went on to join the BBC, while Adams worked with the Monty Python team as well as contributing to Doctor Who as the 1970s went on. He pitched the idea for a science-fiction comedy radio series to radio producer Simon Brett. Brett recommended Perkins to the BBC as a potential producer and the series was given the go-ahead on 31 August 1977 (after the first episode was commissioned on 1 March 1977).

“We both owe him an enormous debt,” said Perkins of Brett.

Budapest 44: The Siege of Buda (December 44 – February 45)

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Historigraph
Published 7 Mar 2020

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The Siege of Budapest and the battles that led to it have had precious little written about them (in English!), so the bulk of this video comes from one book:

Krisztián Ungváry, Battle for Budapest: 100 Days in World War 2

This is by far the most detailed account of the battle that I could find.

Music:

“Crypto”, Incompetech https://incompetech.com

“Rynos Theme”, Incompetech

“Stormfront”, Incompetech

Thought-saving inventions

Filed under: Britain, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest issue of his Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the innovations that helped provide short-cuts for thought, rather than labour:

The world on Mercator projection between 85°3’4″S and 85°3’4″N, such that image is square. 15° graticule. Imagery is a derivative of NASA’s Blue Marble summer month composite with oceans lightened to enhance legibility and contrast. Image created with the Geocart map projection software.
Image by Strebe via Wikimedia Commons.

When we think of labour-saving inventions, the kind of labour that springs to mind tends to be manual. We think of machines replacing the muscle of limbs and the dexterity of fingers, and we worry about their effects on unemployment and unrest. But there’s a subset of labour-saving inventions that rarely gets discussed. They might best be called thought-saving.

A few weeks ago I mentioned the introduction of mathematical techniques to navigation. Before the mid-sixteenth century in England, pilots very rarely even knew how to calculate their latitude, let alone their longitude. But over the course of just a few decades, England became one of the world leaders in navigational improvements. A handful of mathematicians saved pilots the trouble of calculation, by coming up with tables, instruments, diagrams, and rules of thumb. In the process, they improved navigation’s accuracy, and ushered in an age of English dominance of the high seas.

The historian Eric H. Ash gives a few great examples. In the 1590s, the explorer John Davis shared a way to calculate the time of high tide, without requiring multiplication. Likewise, William Bourne, a self-taught mathematician and gunner, in the 1560s provided an easy means of calculating the linear distance in one degree of longitude, at any given latitude. He provided a diagram — really an instrument, even if it wasn’t made of wood or brass — which with just a simple piece of string could be used to derive the answer without needing to understand cosines, or really any trigonometry.

The mathematicians did the same with maps, too (after all, aren’t all maps thought-saving?) The sixteenth-century cartographic innovations simplified the pilot’s ability to chart a route, for example by taking away all need to worry about the curvature of the earth. The famous 1560s map projection of Gerardus Mercator stretched the distance between the lines of latitude as they got closer to the poles, so that charting a course on such a map was a simple matter of drawing straight lines rather than complex trigonometry. The Mercator projection may well make Africa look smaller than Greenland — it’s actually almost fifteen times as large — but it made life significantly easier for mariners. For similar reasons, the mathematician John Dee designed a special chart — what he called the “paradoxall compass” — to aid the English explorers who in the 1550s went in search of a northeast and northwest passage to Asia. Conventional charts made navigating high latitudes confusing, as the north pole was a straight line — the map’s top border. Dee’s map made things easier by putting the pole at the centre, as a point, with the lines of latitude as concentric circles.

The Birth of a Nation | Based on a True Story

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Cynical Historian
Published 7 Oct 2016

The Birth of a Nation was the first major motion picture success, and because of its historical inaccuracy, the Ku Klux Klan was revived for another round of terror. This is the worst case of a “Based on a True Story” film. So today is a prime time to go into why it was so bad, and get some President Wilson bashing in.

Through YouTube’s cowardice, this video has been demonetized.
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references:
Blee, Kathleen M. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. https://amzn.to/2NzeHbl

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitc…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bir…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bir…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cla…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconst…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Ha…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Tur…
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Wiki:
The Birth of a Nation (originally called The Clansman) is a 1915 American silent epic drama film directed and co-produced by D. W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish. The screenplay is adapted from the novel and play The Clansman, both by Thomas Dixon Jr. Griffith co-wrote the screenplay (with Frank E. Woods), and co-produced the film (with Harry Aitken). It was released on February 8, 1915.

Three hours long, the film was originally presented in two parts separated by an intermission; it was the first 12-reel film in America. The film chronicles the relationship of two families in the American Civil War and Reconstruction era over the course of several years: the pro-Union Northern Stonemans and the pro-Confederacy Southern Camerons. The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth is dramatized.

The film was a commercial success, though it was highly controversial for its portrayal of black men (many played by white actors in blackface) as unintelligent and sexually aggressive towards white women, and the portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) (whose original founding is dramatized) as a heroic force. There were widespread African-American protests against The Birth of a Nation, such as in Boston, while thousands of white Bostonians flocked to see the film. The NAACP spearheaded an unsuccessful campaign to ban the film. Griffith’s indignation at efforts to censor or ban the film motivated him to produce Intolerance the following year.

The film’s release is also credited as being one of the events that inspired the formation of the “second era” Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in the same year. The Birth of a Nation, along with the trial and lynching of Leo Frank for the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan in Atlanta, was used as a recruiting tool for the KKK. Under President Woodrow Wilson, it was the first American motion picture to be screened at the White House.

Griffith’s innovative techniques and storytelling power have made The Birth of a Nation one of the landmarks of film history. In 1992, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.
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Hashtags: #History #BirthOfANation #KKK #Review #BasedOnATrueStory #WoodrowWilson #DWGriffith

QotD: Free trade versus protectionism

Filed under: Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is a myth that free trade is unproven in practice. Forget that countries with freer trade have both higher per-capita incomes and faster rates of economic growth. Look instead at the essentials of the case. Each and every day you trade freely with many merchants. Do you think that you and your family would be enriched if your neighbor extracted punitive payments from you whenever you buy some item that your neighbor judges to be from a seller located too distant from your neighborhood? Every day Arizonans trade freely with Texans and Rhode Islanders. Do you think that Arizonans would be enriched if the government of that state obstructed their ability to trade as they choose with people located in other states?

People trade freely countless times, each and every day. Yes, yes, I’m well aware that such trade isn’t ideally free. Occupational-licensing restrictions, for example, unjustly and harmfully obstruct domestic trade. But the fact remains that today within each country – including within the U.S. – trade is not typically obstructed based on geographic location or political boundaries. And therefore people buy and sell freely within countries. If the case for a policy of free trade were not practical – if it were only a theoretical curiosity – then it would be true that ordinary people would be even richer if the state obstructed their abilities to trade with each other domestically.

It’s a myth also that the economic case for a policy of free trade in any one country requires that other governments also practice free trade. The case for a policy of free trade is, at bottom, a case for unilateral free trade: while nearly everyone in the world would be better off if all governments adopted policies of free trade, nearly everyone in the home country would be better off if the home government adopts a policy of free trade regardless of the policies of other governments.

Protectionism is a nasty mash of logical fallacies, half-truths, hubris, economic ignorance, and cronyist apologetics.

Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2017-12-18.

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