March 18, 2012
Reason.tv: Why The Future Is Better Than You Think
The ever-expanding role for women in the military
An interesting article at Strategy Page:
The growing number of women in the military is largely driven by the need for people with scarce skills. Since most (over 80 percent) of military jobs have little, or nothing, to do with combat, if you can’t find enough qualified men, you can recruit women. This is especially true in the West, where females tend to be better educated than males. Thus women comprise about ten percent of the troops in Western armed forces. In the United States this is 15 percent for active duty troops, and 18 percent for the reserves. Civilian contractors, who are taking back some of the military jobs they performed for thousands of years, have an even higher percentage of females.
All this reflects growing female participation in the post-agricultural economy. We tend to forget that as recently as the 19th century, 90 percent of humanity were engaged in agriculture. It had been that way for thousands of years. With industrialization, women began to stay at home with the kids, and no longer work the same jobs (as they did in agriculture) with their husbands. But in the last sixty years, women have returned to their traditional place in the economy.
[. . .]
This current trend in using women and contractors are actually a return to the past, when many of the “non-combat” troops were civilians. Another problem is the shrinking proportion of troops who actually fight. A century ago, most armies comprised over 80 percent fighters and the rest “camp followers (support troops) in uniform.” Today the ratio is reversed, and therein resides a major problem. Way back in the day, the support troops were called “camp followers,” and they took care of supply, support, medical care, maintenance and “entertainment” (that’s where the term “camp follower” got a bad name). The majority of these people were men, and some of them were armed, mainly for defending the camp if the combat troops got beat real bad and needed somewhere to retreat to.
[. . .]
One of the great revolutions in military operations in this century has been in the enormous increase in support troops. This came after a sharp drop in the proportion of camp followers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Before that it was common for an army on the march to consist of 10-20 percent soldiers and the rest camp followers. There was a reason for this. Armies “in the field” were camping out and living rough could be unhealthy and arduous if you didn’t have a lot of servants along to take care of the camping equipment and help out with the chores. Generals usually had to allow a lot of camp followers in order to get the soldiers to go along with the idea of campaigning.
Only the most disciplined armies could do away with all those camp followers and get the troops to do their own housekeeping. The Romans had such an army, with less than half the “troops” being camp followers. But the Romans system was not re-invented until the 18th century, when many European armies trained their troops to do their own chores in the field, just as the Romans had. In the 19th century, steamships and railroads came along and made supplying the troops even less labor intensive, and more dependent on civilian support “troops.” The widespread introduction of conscription in the 19th century also made it possible to get your “camp followers” cheap by drafting them and putting them in uniform.
Can there ever be a “canonical” release of Abel Gance’s Napoleon?
Manohla Dargis charts the incredibly rocky history of Abel Gance’s silent masterpiece Napoleon:
SOON after Abel Gance’s “Napoleon” had its premiere in Paris in 1927, he wrote a letter to his audience, soliciting open eyes and hearts. “I have made,” he wrote, “a tangible effort toward a somewhat richer and more elevated form of cinema.” He had created a film towering in ambition, scale, cost, narrative and technical innovations, and believed that nothing less than “the future of the cinema” was at stake. His audacity had merit. The origins of the widescreen image can be traced to “Napoleon,” which also featured hand-held camerawork, eye-blink-fast editing, gorgeous tints, densely layered superimpositions and images shot from a pendulum, a sled, a bicycle and a galloping horse.
The film was an astonishment, and it was doomed. One hurdle was its length — his early versions ran from 3 hours to 6 hours 28 minutes (down from 9 hours) — while other difficulties were posed by Gance’s advances, specifically a process later called Polyvision that extended the visual plane into a panorama or three separate images and that required three screens to show it. Partly as a consequence, distributors and exhibitors took harsh liberties: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cut it down to around 70 minutes for the American release, a butchering that seemed to encourage bad reviews. Gance continued to rework the film, adding sound for a 1935 version and, decades later, new material. Yet even as he was taking it apart, others — notably the British historian Kevin Brownlow — were trying to restore “Napoleon” to its original glory.
In truth “Napoleon,” as it was initially hailed, no longer exists, which raises ticklish questions about authorship. In his book on the film, Mr. Brownlow lists 19 versions of “Napoleon” — including those created by distributors, Gance and Mr. Brownlow himself, who for decades has tried to restore the long-lost full version.
It’s almost a metaphysical question: how can you re-create the “original” when even the creator was busy re-shaping it at every stage along the way? George Lucas looks like an arch-conservator in comparison to Gance’s efforts.
March 16, 2012
Copyright MathTM
Now remember kids: always buy your movies and other entertainment items legally. You’ll get this kind of experience:
And here’s the reason you pay for a legal copy, rather than being one of those evil pirates:
Update, 21 March: The actual numbers — “by an actual Copyright Mathematician” — behind the Copyright MathTM video.
March 15, 2012
Santorum vows to eliminate online porn
As if he wasn’t already socially conservative enough, Rick Santorum is now promising a moral crusade to clean up the internet:
Internet pornography could conceivably become a thing of the past if Rick Santorum is elected president.
The unapologetic social conservative, currently in second place behind Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination, has promised to crack down on the distribution of pornography if elected.
Santorum says in a statement posted to his website, “The Obama Administration has turned a blind eye to those who wish to preserve our culture from the scourge of pornography and has refused to enforce obscenity laws.”
If elected, he promises to “vigorously” enforce laws that “prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier.”
Abusing the homeless … by giving them money to perform tasks
Chris Selley skewers the bien-pensant journalists who got so upset that some homeless people were given an opportunity to earn money:
Now, you might think homeless people, development directors at homeless shelters and anti-homelessness activists would know a thing or two about what homeless people need and want, and you would be correct. You might therefore think this was a good-news story, and you would be wrong. BBH took heavy fire from keyboard warriors who think the program was just ghastly.
Here in Canada, Maclean’s technology correspondent Jesse Brown, perhaps testing out a new hyperbole app, led the pack. He called it a “disgusting marketing ploy,” an “epic milestone in the history of bad taste,” “grotesque” and “degrading — literally.” Yes, literally.
“Yes, [the employee] keeps the money. No, that doesn’t make it okay,” he sniffed, presumably enjoying easy access to many multiples of $50 as he typed.
[. . .]
There ought to be an official term for this phenomenon, wherein well-meaning, bien-pensant carer/sharers freak out on behalf of a group of (homeless, poor, oppressed, disaster-afflicted) people, only to be told by those people to shut their goddamn pie holes. We saw it after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, when people criticized Royal Caribbean cruise lines for continuing to sail to its private beaches in the country, where it employs locals and, for a time, donated the proceeds of its visits to relief efforts. Such bad taste!
March 14, 2012
Michael Geist rounds up the changes to Bill C-11
It’s not wonderful, but as he points out, it could have been much worse:
In the days leading up to the clause-by-clause review, many focused on three key issues: no SOPA-style amendments such as website blocking or warrantless disclosure of information, maintaining the fair dealing balance found in the bill, and amending the digital lock provisions. By that standard, the changes could have been a lot worse. The government expanded the enabler provision, though not as broadly as CIMA requested. Virtually all other copyright lobby demands – website blocking, notice-and-takedown, iPod tax, copyright term extension, disclosure of subscriber information – were rejected. Moreover, the provisions supported by consumer and education groups including user generated content protection, time shifting, format shifting, backup copies, Internet provider liability, and statutory damages reform were left untouched. This represents a major victory for the many Canadians and groups such as Open Media that spoke out on these issues.
The fair dealing provision was similarly left unchanged despite a full court press from publishers and copyright collectives who sought elimination of the education category within fair dealing (didn’t happen), inclusion of the Berne three step test in the law (didn’t happen) or a new fair dealing test that overrules the Supreme Court of Canada CCH test (didn’t happen). The expanded fair dealing provision will not cause the horrors claimed by those groups and it is heartening that the government dismissed the misinformation campaign.
The only loss was the least surprising — digital locks. Despite widespread support for compromise legislation and sensible amendments from both the NDP and Liberals, the government rejected any changes. Given the government’s consistent support for digital locks, the ongoing pressure from the U.S., and Prime Minister Harper’s direct intervention on the issue in 2010, amending the digital lock rules presented a major challenge. Government MPs yesterday emphasized the possibility of future new exceptions via regulation but that will be cold comfort in the short term to those with perceptual disabilities, researchers, documentary film makers, consumers, and the many others adversely affected by the restrictive approach. In fact, one NDP MP raised the possibility of constitutional challenges to the bill.
EFF reports on most recent legal setback for former owners of Righthaven
It’s pretty much good news all the way through for bloggers and anyone else who quotes and links to material on the web:
Late Friday, the federal district court in Nevada issued a declaratory judgment that makes is harder for copyright holders to file lawsuits over excerpts of material and burden online forums and their users with nuisance lawsuits.
The judgment — part of the nuisance lawsuit avalanche started by copyright troll Righthaven — found that Democratic Underground did not infringe the copyright in a Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper article when a user of the online political forum posted a five-sentence excerpt, with a link back to the newspaper’s website.
March 13, 2012
Yet another straw in the wind on Canada’s F-35 plans
An article by Murray Brewster, published in the Winnipeg Free Press looks at more signs that Canada may not be as tightly bound to their F-35 purchase plans:
The point man on the F-35 stealth fighter purchase says the Conservative government has not ruled out abandoning the troubled project.
“We have not, as yet, discounted the possibility, of course, of backing out of any of the program,” Julian Fantino associate defence minister, told the Commons defence committee on Tuesday.
He made the comment after a series of pointed questions from both opposition parties.
Fantino said the government is still committed to buying the radar-evading jet, but no contract has been signed.
The Conservatives still believe the high-tech jet is the best choice to replace the aging CF-18s, but the minister suggested they are taking a cautious approach.
None of the other nine allied nations involved in the program has yet withdrawn and the minister said: “We are not.”
[. . .]
In months of questioning in the House of Commons, Fantino has insisted there is no need for a backup plan in case of further delays in the project as the manufacturer works out software and design glitches.
But on Tuesday, he told the committee he was waiting for defence officials to prepare alternate scenarios to the F-35 deal, the so-called Plan B that opposition parties have demanded.
March 12, 2012
The hidden dangers of driving an antique BMW Isetta
March 11, 2012
“[S]ince Vietnam, improved body armor has reduced casualties by more than half”
Strategy Page on the benefits and drawbacks of current body armour options for US troops in Afghanistan and other combat deployments:
The U.S. Army has been trying to reduce the load infantrymen carry into combat. This has proved difficult, no, make that extremely difficult. The problem began with the appearance of, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of new body armor that offered better protection. The new “protective vest” was heavier and bulkier, thus inducing fatigue and hindering mobility. This often led to battlefield situations where a less tired, and more agile, infantryman could have avoided injury. Military and political leaders usually do not appreciate this angle. But the troops do, as it is a matter of life and death for them.
[. . .]
Until the 1980s, you could strip down (for actual fighting) to your helmet, weapon (assault rifle and knife), ammo (hanging from webbing on your chest, along with grenades), canteen and first aid kit (on your belt) and your combat uniform. Total load was 13-14 kg (about 30 pounds). You could move freely, and quickly, like this, and you quickly found that speed and agility was a lifesaver in combat. But now the minimum load carried is twice as much (27 kg), and, worse yet, more restrictive.
While troops complained about the new protective vests, they valued it in combat. The current generation of vests will stop rifle bullets, a first in the history of warfare. And this was after nearly a century of trying to develop protective vests that were worth the hassle of wearing. It wasn’t until the 1980s that it was possible to make truly bullet proof vests using metallic inserts. But the inserts were heavy and so were the vests (about 11.3 kg/25 pounds). Great for SWAT teams, but not much use for the infantry. But in the 1990s, additional research produced lighter, bullet proof, ceramic materials. By 1999 the U.S. Army began distributing a 7.3 kg (16 pound) “Interceptor” vest that provided fragment and bullet protection. This, plus the 1.5 kg (3.3 pound) Kevlar helmet (available since the 1980s), gives the infantry the best combination of protection and mobility. And just in time.
[. . .] The bullet proof vest eliminates most of the damage done by the 30 percent of wounds that occur in the trunk (of which about 40 percent tend to be fatal without a vest). The Kevlar helmet is also virtually bulletproof, but it doesn’t cover all of the head (the face and part of the neck is still exposed). Even so, the reduction in deaths is significant. Some 15-20 percent of all wounds are in the head, and about 45 percent of them are fatal without a helmet. The Kevlar helmet reduces the deaths by at least half, and reduces many wounds to the status of bumps, sprains and headaches. Half the wounds occur in the arms and legs, but only 5-10 percent of these are fatal and that won’t change any time soon. Thus since Vietnam, improved body armor has reduced casualties by more than half. The protective vests used in Vietnam and late in the Korean war reduced casualties by about 25 percent since World War II, so the risk of getting killed or wounded has been cut in half since World War II because of improved body armor.
March 9, 2012
Rob Lyons on the lessons of Fukushima
It’s almost exactly a year since the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Fukushima, and Rob Lyons summarizes the lessons we’ve learned from that disaster:
Sunday marks the first anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the east coast of Japan on 11 March 2011. The quake, measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, was the biggest ever to hit Japan and one of the biggest anywhere in the world in the past century. The resulting tsunami caused roughly 20,000 deaths. Yet, shockingly, the biggest issue about the disaster remains the resulting inundation of a nuclear-power plant at Fukushima, which so far appears to have caused precisely zero deaths from leaking radioactivity.
There are many valuable lessons to be learned from this tragedy. One is the importance of development. The earthquake and tsunami that affected the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004 were only marginally larger, yet killed well over 200,000 people. Direct damage from the Japan earthquake was relatively small thanks to high building standards. Warnings allowed many people to escape the unprecedented seawater surge that followed, though video of the wall of water hitting coastal towns is still shocking. Even so, the world’s third largest economy will take a long time to recover fully from what happened. Thankfully, Japan has the resources to do that.
This, however, is not the main lesson being drawn from events a year ago. Around the world, the conclusion many commentators and politicians have drawn is that nuclear power is inherently dangerous and that we need to stop all future nuclear development. This is a perverse conclusion, absolutely flying in the face of the facts. The reaction against nuclear power post-Fukushima reveals much about the navel-gazing, risk-averse worldview that has such a paralysing effect on life in the developed world today.
The US Navy’s “east of Suez” moment
“Sir Humphrey” on the looming crisis of the United States Navy:
There has been a lot of attention paid in some quarters this week to the allegations that the UK may shift back to STOVL rather than CTOL F-35. Humphrey has no intention on commenting on these particular reports — to his mind they are part of the wider PR12 process, which has seen, and will doubtless continue to see, a plethora of leaks of selected texts designed to push one case, denigrate another and continue the endless routine of tribal warfare between the services and their capbadges. All will be revealed in late March, so there is little point in speculating much before this point.
What has been of more interest though has been the reporting on the F-35 and also the wider perception that the US Navy is about to take a very significant hit in surface fleet numbers over the next 2-3 years. According to documents released there will be the loss of roughly 20 escorts from cruisers to frigates, paid off into reserve. This represents almost 20% of the USN, and is likely to see the reduction in size to barely 80 escorts within the next 2-3 years.
This is a very significant reduction — it’s effectively the paying off of the equivalent of the entire RN surface flotilla without replacement. On current plans by 2015, then USN is going to have barely 60 Arleigh Burke class destroyers, and around 20 Ticonderoga class cruisers — both designs which date back to the late 1970s – early 1980s in concept, even if the interiors have been significantly updated in equipment since then.
[. . .]
The USN is now struggling to keep pace with the fact that its escort fleet is aging, that it has multiple carriers which require replacement at some point in the near future, and that its SSN fleet is also going to need updating soon as well. This must also be set against the reality that hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of cuts are inbound to the US defence budget, and that all three services have old and obsolescent equipment requiring replacement. It is hard to see how the US will be able to maintain its three services in their current levels of capability for much longer, and the worry is that a lot will have to give.
Humphrey is increasingly of the opinion that we are witnessing the USA’s ‘east of Suez moment’ at which the US is faced with the same strategic challenges that all empires are faced with. The legions will be recalled from Europe soon, and this is going to leave a major series of security and other challenges that need to be filled. A future blog article is planned to look at the impact of the USN cuts, and what the impact may be on the RN and other navies.
For those unfamiliar with the phrase in the title, it was in 1968 that the British government under Harold Wilson formally accepted that Britain could no longer maintain its military establishments in the furthest-flung corners of the former empire and announced the withdrawal of almost all forces from “east of Suez”. That was when the military (and economic) overstretch could no longer be maintained.
March 8, 2012
The “SteamPunkiest” railcar ever
A few pictures from RR Picture Archives by Marty Bernard, showing the most Steampunk-appropriate railway vehicle, the McKeen Motor Car. This example is painted in Virginia & Truckee markings:
Click to see full size image at RR Picture ArchivesWoolley: We need power tools (and cars) for girls
Over at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative blog, Frances Woolley marks International Women’s Day:
Goods are becoming ever more specialized. Everything from baby diapers to multivitamins is now dispensed in gender- and age-appropriate models. Yes, it makes sense to have his and hers jeans. But gender appropriate soft-drinks? Does the average guy’s masculinity really need to be bolstered by buying Coke Zero instead of Diet Coke?
The profitability of his and hers products is partly due to price discrimination. The local hair salon charges women more than men because women are prepared to pay $50 or $60 to get their hair cut. Men asked to pay that price would just walk across the road to the barber shop that charges $15 for a short back-and-sides.
[. . .]
Second, gender differentiated power tools. I have small hands. My palm sander doesn’t fit into my palm — it’s more like a two-handed sander. I’d love to get a new drill, but most have such a large grip that I can barely hold them. It’s not just a gender issue — men’s hands come in all sorts of different sizes, too. How can women be expected to share equally in home repair duties when every power tool is the wrong size for their hands?
Finally, I’d like to see more cars built with features that appeal to women. I’ve heard — but I don’t know if this is true — that as soon as a particular model of car is perceived as being “girly,” men won’t buy it. Since men still constitute the majority of car buyers, sales collapse. I’ve heard this offered as an explanation of the lack of cars like the Smart car — two person vehicles that use hardly any gas, and are easy to drive and park on city streets. Smart cars are just too cute, and cute=girly, and girly is the automotive kiss of death. But what is the cost of this pursuit of masculinity?
