They’re all the rage these days. If you don’t have one, you can get a custom-crafted, up-to-the-microsecond strategy outlined for you at whatthefuckismytransmediastrategy.com, like this one:
As you can see, it makes at least as much sense as “real” strategies sometimes do.
H/T to Warren Ellis for the link.
The Globe and Mail reports that police constable Adam Josephs has launched a suit against YouTube in an attempt to force them to divulge the identities of posters and commenters:
A Toronto police officer whose stiff upper lip made him an inadvertent YouTube sensation and a symbol of police heavy-handedness at the G20 protests has launched a $1.2-million defamation lawsuit against the website.
Constable Adam Josephs was nicknamed “Officer Bubbles” after a video surfaced of him online admonishing a young protester during the summit for blowing bubbles.
[. . .]
The original video shows Constable Josephs and a number of other officers holding a police line near Queen Street West in front of a crowd of protesters, when a young woman begins blowing bubbles in front of them.
“If the bubble touches me, you’re going to be arrested for assault,” he tells her sternly. When she questions him about the warning, he continues to warn her.
“You want to bait the police. You get that on me or that other officer and it gets in her eyes, it’s a detergent. You’ll be going into custody.”
The video of “Officer Bubbles” intimidating the dangerous bubble-blower:
Update, 18 October: By way of the Twitter feed of Colby Cosh, here’s the link to the actual document.
Your neighbourhood bird mincers may soon be even more of an eyesore . . . they may need to be painted purple:
A study has revealed that a wind turbine’s colour affects how many insects it attracts, shedding more light on why the turbines occasionally kill bats and birds.
Scientists say that turbines, most commonly painted white or grey, draw in insects. These then lure bats and birds — as they pursue their prey — into the path of the turbine blades.
Support for the idea comes from another study showing that bats are most often killed by turbines at night and in summer, when insects are most abundant.
So, after testing, which colour works best to deter insects? Purple.
By way of Bruce Schneier an opportunity to show another xkcd comic:
So, what’s the Swedish tie-in?
As you may have heard, we’ve had a very close election here in Sweden. Today the Swedish Election Authority published the hand written votes. While scanning through them I happened to notice
R;13;Hallands län;80;Halmstad;01;Halmstads västra valkrets;0904;Söndrum 4;pwn DROP TABLE VALJ;1
The second to last field is the actual text on the ballot. Could it be that Little Bobby Tables is all grown up and has migrated to Sweden? Well, it’s probably just a joke but even so it brings questions since an SQL-injection on election data would be very serious.
Monty is still too busy with real life to do a daily Financial Briefing, but he’s dropping by a few times a week with his insightful-and-acidic thoughts at Ace of Spades HQ:
Welding jobs may be plentiful, but that’s no help to you if you’re not a welder. This is called “structural unemployment”, and it has no real short-term solution. It results from a disconnect between current worker skills and employer requirements. It’s really a form of malinvestment. Students train in subjects like Postmodernist Literary Theory and The Hermeneutics of Lesbian Cinema, but the job market is asking for engineers and plumbers. Workers in fading industries won’t or can’t retrain. The last time this problem cropped up was during the 1982 recession: the old manufacturing jobs were gone, and the hundreds of thousands of Rust Belt factory workers — many now middle-aged, with high union wages and benefits packages they didn’t want to lose — either could not or would not re-train into other fields. This led to a long cycle of stagnation in which the American upper midwest remains mired to this very day. Pull quote:
Victor Calix Cruz, 51, has been job hunting for two years after being laid off from construction work in Miami. He, his wife and their two teenage children are “surviving” on his wife’s disability and his unemployment payments, he said. While he heard of openings at hotels, he hasn’t applied because the pay and benefits aren’t as good as what he had before.
I don’t imagine that your unemployment check matches what you were making before either, Chief. It’s like the old Rolling Stones song: you can’t always get what you want.
The carrier version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter may be about to learn another trick developed for the Sea Harrier, Shipboard Rolling Vertical Landing (SRVL):
According to the US announcement, made last week and flagged up first by Flightglobal.com, Lockheed will be partnered with the UK side of BAE Systems plc for the task of ensuring that the F-35B can get down on a ship at sea using SRVL. BAE is already involved in development of the jet, and in fact the lead test pilot for the F-35B, Graham Tomlinson, is a BAE employee.
The idea of SRVL is that the F-35B will not set down vertically supported solely by thrust from its lift fan and downward-swivelled jetpipe. Rather it will come down still moving forward slowly, supplementing the vertical thrust with lift from its wings. The forward speed would still be slow enough that there would be no need for arrester wires and a tail hook.
This should allow an F-35B to set down on a carrier deck while carrying a larger amount of fuel and weapons than would normally be possible. The Royal Navy is well-known to be anxious about this issue as it led to the early departure of the late, great Sea Harrier fighter.
Strategypage reports on an indoor shooting simulator:
The U.S. Marine Corps has saved over half a billion dollars in the last four years, by using indoor electronic firing ranges. IMST (Indoor Simulated Marksmanship Trainer) has cost over $200 million, but the savings in ammo, wear on weapons, and running outdoor ranges were much larger. Nearly 200,000 marines have undergone marksmanship training using IMST. Unlike the similar U.S. Army EST system, IMST is wireless. A special magazine contains gas that provides a realistic recoil and a wireless radio device connects the weapon to the targets displayed on the screen and records how accurate the electronic rounds were fired.
Devices like IMST and EST have boosted the shooting skills of troops, while reducing costs. This gives American riflemen a big battlefield advantage. In most armies, the troops rarely fire their rifles. Ammo is too expensive (given the meager military budget). When there is combat, the troops are issued bullets, which they fire very inaccurately. Against a better trained foe, this leads to quick defeat. Happens all the time. But now cash strapped armies can train their troops to be effective marksmen without spending a lot of money, by using simulators.
Sure beats the “simulation technology” we used in my militia days: we ran around yelling “Bang!” to simulate firing the bullets the military budget couldn’t afford to provide us with. Ah, the joys of Trudeau-era military experience.
In making automobiles more safe and ecologically friendly, we’ve often lost sight of the basic cost benefit factor — I think this is probably more true in the safety than in ecology — and one of the things that is precious about the American automobile industry is that it provided a cheap and reliable means of transportation for practically everyone in society, and then when those vehicles became used vehicles, it gave cheap and mostly reliable transportation to everybody, to the point where the Oakies in the dust bowl were in Model T fords and not on foot. When we undertake to make the automobile this humming, electronic device that provides a perfect egg of safety and closure and creates no adverse externalities (as people like to say these days) we lose sight of the purpose of the damn thing in the first place. And the purpose was to allow freedom — freedom and horizontal mobility to the masses. That’s why cash for clunkers was just sinful. You’re taking a bunch of perfectly good vehicles, inexpensive vehicles that could be used by people without much in the way of material means, and crushing them. If someone took a valuable resource — something that could really be useful to people — and destroyed it, they’d be in jail if they were private citizens.
P.J. O’Rourke, “P.J. O’Rourke Likes Puppies and America, Dislikes Flip Flops at the Airport [Texas Book Festival Interview]”, Austinist.com, 2010-10-08
L. Neil Smith, in an ideal world (that is, after the Libertarian revolution), would like to do some serious gunsmithing:
I have some interest in reclaiming good technology that has been abandoned by our civilization, usually for the most stupid of reasons. Living in a free country would mean that I could return to a dream I’ve had for years, of becoming a weapons-manufacturer. For example, as a gunsmith, I don’t believe that history and humanity are quite through with the design known as the “Broomhandle Mauser”, the first commercially successful semiautomtic pistol. The Broomhandle is so different in conception and execution from the Browning-invented weapons we’re all used to, as to seem like the product of an alien mind.
If you’re not familiar with the Broomhandle Mauser, here’s a picture from http://www.g6csy.net/c96/database.html:
Some folks don’t like the Mauser’s grip, which I find perfectly comfortable, and seem to forget that we almost never shoot a revolver today with handles shaped like its frame. I love neoprene grips like the Pachmayr “Presentation” model, myself. They make shooting magnums pleasant. Others don’t like magazines situated in front of the trigger, rather than inside the handle, but they’re happy with sport-utility rifles like the AR-15 and the AK-47 built exactly the same way.
What killed the “Broomie” was the inadequate cartridge, 7.63x25mm, it was made for. By the time a more effective offerng was available — 9mm Mauser Export, which rivaled the .357 Magnum — it was too late. Browning designs and their imitators had taken the field over. But with modern steels and production techniques, in effective calibers — like .40 S&W, 10mm, or .45 ACP — there is still a place for the Mauser design. I’d even like to make a miniature that shoots .22 Long Rifle.
Make no mistake, I absolutely venerate St. John Moses Browning’s 1911, and his P35 Browning High Power is also “of the best” — or at least it would be if it could be made for a worthwhile cartridge without messing up its marvelous handling qualities, as I find the .40 caliber version does. I have some fresh ideas in this area, beginning with a 145-grain .375 bullet loaded into a modified 8mm Nambu parent case.
The Browning 9mm was first handgun I ever fired, and is still one of my favourites:
At the same time, however, I would bring the Dardick pistol back, an absolutely revolutionary design that combines the best qualities of automatics and revolvers, without any of the drawbacks of either. Critics at the time of its introduction said it looked too weird — rather like an oldtime Weller soldering gun — but how do you suppose the Broomhandle, the Luger, and the 1911 looked to generations of revolver-shooters? Aesthetics are arbitrary, and shooters would get used to the Dardick as they did to other weapons, if it served them well.
The Dardick was indeed an odd-looking weapon:
The Dardick used special plastic-cased cartridges with a roundly triangular, or trochoidal, cross-section, loaded with a .38 caliber bullet. It was pretty clearly aimed at the police market, where the standard at the time (the late 1950s) was the wildly-successful Smith & Wesson Model 10, of which it is said more than six million were produced.
There’s no reason that the Dardick concept couldn’t be mated with much better calibers than it was offered in. With its double-action works, and an astonishing magazine capacity (in 1958) of fifteen “trounds”, it might well have nudged the Model 10. But it fell victim, not to the market, but to a corporate boardroom dispute, and history lost one of the most effective devices for personal defense ever invented.
As Neil pointed out in one of his books, the Dardick was the answer to a bad crime writer’s prayers: it was literally an automatic revolver. (For those following along at home, an “automatic” has a magazine holding the bullets which are fed into the chamber to be fired by the action of the weapon: fire a bullet, the action cycles, clearing the expended cartridge and pushing a new one into place, cocking the weapon to fire again. A “revolver” holds bullets in the cylinder, rotating the cylinder when the gun is fired to put a new bullet in line with the barrel to be fired. The Dardick is the only example I know of that combines both in one gun.)
It’s probably a good thing that I live in Canada, where owning handguns is a legal marathon, otherwise I’d probably have another expensive collecting hobby . . .
Kim Willsher reports on a new device to measure the levels of antioxidants in red wine:
The matchbox-size device can measure antioxidants in a drop of wine placed on a test strip and is expected to sell to wine producers for around €2,000 (£1,720). The Swiss manufacturers Diagnogene are planning a model for wine drinkers. “I can absolutely see people choosing to buy one wine over another because they can see it is healthier for them,” said Hoda. “It will also help producers make wine with more polyphenols. We know these antioxidants come from the skin of the grapes, that red grapes are better than white, and that the levels can be determined by the length of fermentation and other factors.”
He said the Swiss pilot test had revealed pinot noir grapes to have the greatest health benefits. “Let’s be honest, it must be better to have a glass of wine than to take a pill. Within moderation, of course.”
Claims for the positive properties of wine — particularly red — on the heart and brain have long been made and not only by French bons vivants. In 2006 a study by British scientists published in Nature said: “Regular, moderate consumption of red wine is linked to a reduced risk of coronary heart disease and to lower overall mortality”.
Of course, given past experience, don’t expect regulators in Canada or the US to suddenly allow any claims of health virtue to appear on wine bottle labels. Wouldn’t want to encourage drinking, you know.
Attempts to block websites showing child pornography don’t appear to be as effective as direct action, according to a press release from the German Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship (AK Zensur):
Internet blocking is advocated as an allegedly effective measure against the proliferation of child abuse images. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark have been using this technology for years. But a practical test by the German Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship (AK Zensur) in cooperation with European civil rights advocacy groups has shown: Internet blocking does not fight abuse, in practice it only serves to conceal the failures of politics and police. Websites can remain on blocking lists for years even though they have either been deleted or could be deleted easily and quickly.
How is this possible, and what could be done against illegal sites? Answers are given by a new analysis of current blocking lists from Sweden and Denmark by the Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship. The group developed software to select, categorise and geo-locate 167 blocked Internet domains as a representative sample of websites blocked in Denmark at the time of the investigation. “The result is a smack in the face of law enforcement authorities”, says Alvar Freude of the Working Group. “Of the 167 listed sites, only three contained material that could be regarded as child pornography.” Two of these three sites had been blocked in Denmark since 2008, and these are, or least were, blocked in Sweden, Norway and Finland as well. These sites were therefore known for at least two years in several countries, and apparently law enforcement authorities did nothing to try and get this illegal content removed.
This is even more disturbing because the Working Group managed to take down the remaining sites just by sending a few emails. Two of the sites were hosted in the USA, and even during the weekend (Friday, ca. 10 p.m. EDT) they were removed by the hosters within 30 minutes. On the following Tuesday, the third website was taken down by its registry in India, three hours after notification. The content was stored on a server in the Netherlands. “The removal of this dehumanising content and the pursuit of the perpetrators must have absolute priority. Internet Blocking leads to the exact opposite”, says Alvar Freude, who sent the take-down requests.
H/T to BoingBoing for the link.
For your daily contrarian view of the wonderfulness of Google’s new Instant Search feature, we turn to SmoothSpan:
The Internet is a Mighty Echo Chamber, and with one fell swoop, Google Instant Search has added a big ole’ Marshall Stack to turn the Echo levels all the way up to 11.
Google reports that Instant Search will save 350 million hours of user time per year. What isn’t reported is how it will cut off the Long Tail where it starts by promoting banal sameness for searchers. This is great for Google. After all, keeping up with every last oddball search someone may want to do costs them more infrastructure money. At their scale, it is significant. So, corralling everyone into fewer more common searches is a good thing.
[. . .]
How does Google Instant Search contribute to the Echo Chamber? Well anyone who has bothered to look through keyword information on their website will see that people find sites through a bewildering array of queries. Some might even say much of it is accidental, but looking over these lists gives a wonderful window onto how your content is found and perceived by others. How often do we get to commit such telepathy with our followers? Rarely. Yet, Instant Search will substitute popular searches for those individually created. More people will be driven off the back roads search trails and onto the superhighways that lead to whomever controls the first few search results connected to the Instant Searches Google is recommending at the time.
Oddly enough, I was talking about Google searches the other day with DarkWaterMuse (whose blog is offline at the moment), but it was more in the context of “how often are the sponsored links actually useful to you?” We both agreed that the correct answer fell somewhere in the range of “rarely” to “never”.
Remember the “Flying Jeep” proposal? It’s still being pursued, as the initial funding for a flying gyrocopter/SUV has been awarded by DARPA:
Transformer TX, as we have previously reported, is intended to produce a vehicle able to drive on the ground with similar performance to a Humvee or other offroad vehicle. It must also be able to take off vertically with 1,000lb of passengers and payload aboard and fly about at altitudes up to 10,000 feet at speeds equivalent to normal light aircraft.
Perhaps best of all, the Transformer TX is also intended to be fully automated, capable of flying itself with only the most basic guidance from its human operator — who would not, therefore, need to be a highly trained pilot.
Admittedly, I know almost nothing about flying, but this sounds like getting something for nothing (that is, aren’t there laws of physics against this?):
The SR/C idea is basically a winged, propellor-driven light aeroplane with a set of free-spinning autogyro rotors on top. It’s not a helicopter: the engine can’t drive the rotors in flight, and a sustained hover isn’t possible. Nonetheless, though, the CarterCopter can take off vertically as required by Transformer TX rules.
It does this by having weighted rotor tips, meaning that a lot of energy can be stored in the spinning blades (rather as in a flywheel). Sitting on the ground, a small engine-driven “pre-rotator” assembly can gradually spin the rotors up to high speed. The pre-rotator, pleasingly, doesn’t have to transmit a lot of power — thus it is lightweight, cheap and simple compared to a helicopter’s transmission. Nor is the engine required to deliver the massive grunt required to keep chopper blades spinning hard enough to support the aircraft.
Once the rotors are at takeoff speed, the pre-rotator is declutched, the prop engaged and the pitch of the rotors pulled in so that they start to bite air. As they slow down, the energy stored in their whirling weighted tips blasts air down through the disc and the aircraft leaps vertically into the air in a “jump takeoff”.
Sounds amazingly like pulling yourself into the air by your own bootstraps . . .
Still, I’d like to eventually get that flying car I was promised all those years ago.
As discussed earlier, the Royal Navy has been watching the US Navy’s ongoing EMALS project carefully, as it might provide a major cost-saving for the new carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales. Recent testing shows the program appears to be back on track:
The US Navy’s plan to fit its next aircraft carrier with electromagnetic mass-driver catapults instead of steam launchers is reportedly on track, with shore trials using test weights a success. The progress of the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), the first of its kind, is of interest to the Royal Navy as it could offer a way to massively cut the money spent on the Service’s two new carriers — or, more accurately, to cut the money spent on their aeroplanes.
A statement issued last week by the US Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) says that the EMALS test installation at Lakehurst, New Jersey is going through its planned programme without difficulty.
[. . .]
CVN 78, aka USS Gerald R Ford, is the next US Navy supercarrier, now under construction. It’s very important to the USN that EMALS works, as it is acknowledged that it’s now too late to change the Ford’s design and fit her with steam catapults like all other US (and French) carriers. If for some reason EMALS isn’t a success, the US will have bought the biggest and most expensive helicopter carrier ever.
Though the steam catapult is actually a British invention, Blighty’s present pocket-size carriers don’t have any catapults at all. Thus they can only launch helicopters and short-takeoff Harrier jumpjets.
The problem for Britain’s decision makers is that the current carrier design limits them to the ultra-expensive F-35B, which will be roughly twice the price of the ships themselves to provide sufficient aircraft to make the carriers fully operational. Being able to swap out the deluxe F-35B for cheap-as-dirt F-18E’s may be enough to save both carriers from the ongoing cost-slashing by the ministry.
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