Quotulatiousness

March 9, 2012

Rob Lyons on the lessons of Fukushima

Filed under: Environment, Japan, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

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

Filed under: Economics, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

“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

Filed under: History, Railways, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:21

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 Archives

(more…)

Woolley: We need power tools (and cars) for girls

Filed under: Economics, Randomness, Technology, Tools — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:59

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?

Sweatshops and Apple

Filed under: China, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:15

Sam Bowman points out the economic factors which many western critics miss when they slag Apple for working conditions in the factories where iPhones and iPads are assembled:

Like sweatshop workers in China and elsewhere, Foxconn employees endure long hours, low pay and dangerous working environments, but do so because there is no better alternative. In fact, jobs in sweatshops (and Foxconn factories) tend to be massively in demand, because the alternative is worse. It’s not uncommon for a new employee’s first action being to sign up their relatives to the waiting list for new job openings.

It’s easy to recoil from seen evils, while ignoring unseen alternatives that are even worse. No one in the West will ever have to put up with such bad conditions.

If wages and conditions in Apple’s hometown of Cupertino, CA, were as bad, nobody would work there. That people do so in China is because they have no better alternative. China’s economy is growing quickly, but much of it is still grindingly poor, and difficult to do business in. It’s poverty that makes China’s factories such unpleasant places to work in.

[. . .]

It’s no surprise that China is still very poor compared to neighbouring countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Forty years of brutal socialism under Mao’s Communist state halted China’s development, and decimated institutions crucial for wealth creation, like strong civil society and the rule of law.

The exception, of course, is Hong Kong, where conditions and wages are much better than on mainland China — not because of a bigger government, but because of greater wealth caused by freer markets.

Cool little crossbow you wear on your wrist

Filed under: Randomness, Technology, Weapons — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:16

Tom Kelley sent me a link to this article on a neat little device that I suspect violates weapons laws in most jurisdictions:

Last October, after hurting his knee playing hockey, Patrick Priebe was holed up in his apartment near Cologne, Germany, with nothing to do. He was sitting at his computer, staring at his keyboard, when the “Y” key caught his eye. Priebe didn’t see a letter. To him, it looked like a crossbow. Immediately he knew what his next project would be.

[. . .]

To fire, he pulls back the wire, hooks it around a brass block, and places an arrow in the groove. When he flicks the thumb trigger, the brass block drops, the wire pops forward, and the arrow flies.

Army training simulators have come a long way from blanks and oversized firecrackers

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:04

Back in my day, we trained with blanks and “arty simulators” which were just oversized firecrackers with an attached whistle (simulating the fall of shot before it exploded). Today, the market for combat simulation is huge and growing fast:

Towards the end of the Gulf war in 1991, an American armoured scout unit in Iraq’s southern desert stumbled upon a much larger elite force of dug-in Iraqi armour. Rather than retreating, the nine American tanks and 12 Bradley fighting vehicles attacked. When the battle ended about 25 minutes later, the Americans had destroyed, by one tally, 28 Iraqi tanks, 16 armoured vehicles and 39 trucks without suffering a single loss. The Battle of 73 Easting, named after a map co-ordinate, is now considered a masterpiece of American tactical manoeuvring. It prompted America’s Department of Defence to build a digital model of the battle for training.

Neale Cosby, the retired army colonel who led the project at the Institute for Defence Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia, says it let commanders watch the action on panoramic screens, select alternate points of view and identify potential improvements in weaponry and tactics. The software was then upgraded so that it could be played like a video game in which “what if” circumstances — foggy night-time fighting against upgraded vehicle armour, say — could be tested. Widely demoed in Washington, DC, during the 1990s, the model kick-started “heavy-duty funding” for combat simulators, says Timothy Lenoir of Duke University, and began a technological revolution that has transformed training and changed the way war is waged.

[. . .]

Motion Reality, a firm based in Marietta, Georgia, that provided some of the technology used to animate “Avatar”, “King Kong” and the “Lord of the Rings” films, has built a mixed-reality “fight simulator”, called VIRTSIM, in conjunction with Raytheon, an American defence contractor. America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation began using the system in January at its academy in Quantico, Virginia, and it has also been sold to a Middle Eastern country. Training in an area the size of a basketball court, 12 commandos wear goggles that display high-resolution 3D images delivered wirelessly […]. Real objects in the training area commingle with computer-generated ones such as buildings and enemies. A virtual insurgent can be realistically displayed in the goggles of trainees who look in his direction — even if everybody is running. Trainees wear electrodes that deliver a painful shock when they are struck by a virtual bullet or bomb blast.

March 7, 2012

Wind turbines are “a technology that isn’t ready for prime time”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:20

Andrew Orlowski on the bad economic and technological decision by the British government to put so much reliance on wind power:

Two studies published this week calculate the astounding cost of Britain’s go-it-alone obsession with using wind turbines to generate so much of the electricity the nation needs.

Both studies make remarkably generous concessions that favour wind technology; the true cost, critics could argue, will be higher in each set of calculations. One study reckons that the UK can still meet its carbon dioxide emissions targets and save £140bn — but only if it dumps today’s inefficient hippie technology. The other puts the potential saving at £120bn — pointing out that the same amount of electricity could be generated using open cycle gas plants at one-tenth the cost of using wind turbines.

“There is nothing inherently good or bad about investing in renewable energy and green technology,” writes economist Professor Gordon Hughes — formerly of the World Bank and now at the University of Edinburgh. “The problem is that the government has decided to back a technology that isn’t ready for prime time, thus distorting the market.”

Hughes’ study — Why is Wind power so expensive? An economic analysis — is published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation today, and simply looks at the costs. The other study, by technical consulting group AF-Mercados, specifically looks at how to reduce CO2 in the cheapest manner — by incurring the least collateral economic damage. It’s called Powerful Targets: Exploring the relative cost of meeting decarbonisation and renewables targets in the British power sector. KPMG originally commissioned the study, but then got cold feet. Both come to similar conclusions: wind is astronomically expensive compared to other sources of energy — and consumers and businesses must pay a high price for the privilege of subsidising such an inefficient technology.

Update, 10 March: A lovely little cartoon from Watts Up With That on this topic:

Robot barf

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

An amusing article at the Guardian about those hard-to-avoid QR codes:

The idea behind a Quick Response (QR) code is pretty simple, even useful, when applied correctly. You snap a picture of a code and your mobile phone whisks you off to a web page — no typing necessary. The problem is that the vast majority of people have no idea what the codes are, or that they are supposed to interact with them.

Most people look at a QR code and see “robot barf”, but marketers seem to think they are a must-have technology for their advertising campaigns. In their minds, eager consumers wander around with their smartphones, scanning square codes wherever they appear. As a result, the codes appear just about everywhere, and often in some really absurd places.

Being strangely fascinated by their misuse, we decided to collaborate on a Tumblr, wtfqrcodes, to document this ridiculous trend. We started the blog with about a dozen of our own pictures and invited visitors to submit their pictures as well. That’s where we’ve gotten some of our best stuff – we’ve been amazed at some of the places QR codes show up. It’s obvious that most companies just don’t understand the technology … and that’s a recipe for some very funny posts.

Used as they were originally intended, you encounter a bit of robot barf like this one:

You take a picture of it and it opens a URL or provides other encoded information. If it’s in a printed ad or on a billboard, you probably have an idea where it’ll take you. Encountering them outside their “natural habitat”: just the bare QR code with no other information, you don’t know where it’ll take you or what kind of content it’ll provide.

March 5, 2012

US Army to retire the M-2 Bradley IFV

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

The M-2 was the primary infantry fighting vehicle for the US Army intended to replace the Vietnam-era M-113 armoured personnel carrier. It was designed to protect infantry in a high-intensity battlefield from bullets and shrapnel. It wasn’t designed to protect them against mines and improvised explosive devices:

One of the little-known casualties of the Iraq war was the American M-2 Bradley IFV (Infantry Fighting Vehicle). Five years ago, the U.S. Army stopped using the M-2 in combat. By then it was clear that the enemy was intent on using mines and roadside bombs in a big way, and the M-1 tank, Stryker and MRAP vehicles were much better able to handle these blast weapons than the M-2.

This was a hard decision to make, because up until then it was believed that the M-2 could be made competitive with upgrades. For example, the BUSK (Bradley Urban Survival Kit) has been applied to about 600 M-2s. [. . .]

All this added about three tons to the weight of the vehicle. Because of his, a major upgrade of the M-2 was planned, to include a more powerful (800 versus 600 horsepower) engine, a more powerful gun (30 or 40mm) and lighter armor (or protection systems that shoot down anti-tank missiles and RPGs). Improved sensors were planned, plus vidcams to give people inside the vehicle a 360 degree view of what’s outside.) More electronics, including one that would allow variable power, and fuel consumption, from the engine were in the works. More safety features were planned as well, including an improved fire extinguisher system. The new version was not expected to show up until 2012. It did not happen, mainly because there was no way of getting around the M-2’s vulnerability to roadside bombs. The M-1 was too heavy (60 tons) to be hurt by bombs or mines, and Stryker and MRAPs were designed to cope with the close range explosions.

The failure of wind power

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Matt Ridley on the inability of wind power advocates to distort reality:

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.

If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron’s government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. The biggest investors in offshore wind — Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Siemens — are starting to worry that the government’s heart is not in wind energy any more. Vestas, which has plans for a factory in Kent, wants reassurance from the Prime Minister that there is the political will to put up turbines before it builds its factory.

It’s a lesson we still need the Ontario government to learn: our electricity prices are scheduled to go up substantially to finance the massive wind farm investment the McGuinty government has signed up for. Much more of our landscape will look like this in future:

Even in a boom, wind farms would have been unaffordable — with their economic and ecological rationale blown away. In an era of austerity, the policy is doomed, though so many contracts have been signed that the expansion of wind farms may continue, for a while. But the scam has ended. And as we survey the economic and environmental damage, the obvious question is how the delusion was maintained for so long. There has been no mystery about wind’s futility as a source of affordable and abundant electricity — so how did the wind-farm scam fool so many policymakers?

One answer is money. There were too many people with snouts in the trough. Not just the manufacturers, operators and landlords of the wind farms, but financiers: wind-farm venture capital trusts were all the rage a few years ago — guaranteed income streams are what capitalists like best; they even get paid to switch the monsters off on very windy days so as not to overload the grid. Even the military took the money. Wind companies are paying for a new £20 million military radar at Brizlee Wood in Northumberland so as to enable the Ministry of Defence to lift its objection to the 48-turbine Fallago Rig wind farm in Berwickshire.

March 4, 2012

Tilt-shift and time lapse turns Rio’s Carnaval into a complex animated model

Filed under: Americas, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

Tilt shift of the Carnaval party in Rio de Janeiro 2011
Made by Jarbas Agnelli and Keith Loutit
Both Jarbas Agnelli & Keith Loutit were finalists at YouTube play, a Biennial of Creative Video at the Guggenheim.

March 2, 2012

The ugly twins: censorship and surveillance

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

Cory Doctorow in the Guardian:

There was a time when you could censor without spying. When Britain banned the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the 1920s and 1930s, the ban took the form on a prohibition on the sale of copies of the books. Theoretically, this entailed opening some imported parcels, and it certainly imposed a constraint on publishers and booksellers. It was undoubtedly awful. But we’ve got it worse today.

Jump forward 80 years. Imagine that you want to ban www.jamesjoycesulysses.com due to a copyright claim from the Joyce estate. Thanks to the Digital Economy Act and the provision it makes for a national British copyright firewall, we’re headed for a system where entertainment companies can specify URLs that have “infringing” websites, and a national censorwall will block everyone in the country from visiting those sites.

In order to stop you from visiting www.jamesjoycesulysses.com, the national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the banned website. That’s the difference between the old days of censorship and our new digital censorship world. Today, censorship is inseparable from surveillance.

Britain’s railway engineering heritage

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Sarah Bakewell at the Guardian on the wonderful products of the railway building era in Britain:

Once I saw merely bridges, tunnels and stations, and mostly I didn’t even notice these, so busy was I rushing to get over or through them. Now, I see a delicate ecosystem of rivets, cleats, plates, gussets, joggles, spans, arches, ribs of attenuated iron and steel.

Scholars can already study railway archives in repositories all over the country, but Network Rail has just put part of its beautiful archive of Victorian and Edwardian infrastructure diagrams on the web. This amounts to an invitation to anyone, anywhere, to contemplate such images out of sheer curiosity and love of beauty. They give us plans of the high-level bridge at Newcastle upon Tyne, with its columns trailing down the screen like tall sepia waterfalls, and Bristol’s neo-gothic Temple Meads station, in ethereal ink outline. The Forth bridge of 1890 appears side on, elongated and webby as if someone had pulled a string cat’s cradle as far as it would go. Its vertical columns climb visibly week by week; target dates are marked at each level, like the tracking of a child’s growth against a wall.

Maidenhead bridge, designed in brick by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1839, has two middle arches spanning the river in great cheetah leaps. They were lower and broader than anything previously constructed in brick, and the Great Western Railway’s directors feared the bridge would collapse: they insisted on the bridge’s temporary timber supports remaining even after it opened. Annoyed, Brunel secretly lowered the supports a bit so they did not actually support anything.

(All links in the original article.)

February 29, 2012

“Taken together, the [Canadian] music industry demands make SOPA look like some minor tinkering with the law”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:51

Michael Geist on the representatives of the Canadian music industry and their breathtaking demands for modifications to Bill C-11:

The steady procession of Canadian music industry representatives to the Bill C-11 committee continues today with the Canadian Independent Music Association (CIMA) ready to add to an already long list of industry demands to completely overhaul the bill. The music industry demands keep growing, but CIMA’s list is the most radical to date as it would create liability risk for social networking sites, search engines, blogging platforms, video sites, aggregators, and many other websites featuring third party contributions. If that were not enough, the industry is also calling for a new iPod tax, an extension in the term of copyright, a removal of protections for user generated content, parody, and satire, as well as an increase in statutory damage awards. Taken together, the music industry demands make SOPA look like some minor tinkering with the law.

Note that industry had already called for SOPA-style reforms such as website blocking and expanded liability that could extend to sites such as YouTube before the hearings began. This week has seen an industry lawyer inaccurately portray global approaches to digital lock rules and a musician association demand full statutory damages of up to $20,000 per infringement for non-commercial infringements by individuals.

Those demands are nothing compared to what CIMA has in mind, however. Topping the list is a massive expansion of the enabler provision. The music industry wants to remove a requirement that the so-called pirate sites be “designed primarily” to enable copyright infringement.

[. . .]

There is virtually no limit to prima facie liability under this provision as most sites can be said to enable some infringement, particularly if they allow for users to post or interact with the site. This includes sites like Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Youtube. All of these sites — indeed virtually any blogging platform, social network, search engine, or website that offers third party contributions — would face the risk of a prima facie claim under the music industry’s vision of the enabler provision.

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