Quotulatiousness

January 30, 2020

Upgrading NORAD’s capabilities with AN/SPY-7(V)1 radar (aka “Aegis Ashore”)

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell on the need to upgrade NORAD radar installations as part of a general refurbishment of the alliance’s capabilities:

Lockheed Martin’s Solid State Radar has been designated as AN/SPY-7(V)1 by the US government.
Image from Lockheed Martin/PRNewsfoto.

One of the elements which might be considered in modernizing and enhancing the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) surveillance, warning and control system is a new radar and some people have suggested that the AN/SPY-7(V)1 radar, sometimes called Aegis Ashore, might be a useful (and proven, it is in use, on land, in Japan, and will be fitted on Canada’s new Type 26 (destroyer-frigate) combat ships) solution. This radar is eminently suitable to be part of an enhanced (conventional) NORAD and of a CANUS continental ballistic missile defence system.

There are many technical (and logistical) advantages to using that radar on both our, Canadian, warships and in a land-based role, too.

The AN/SPY-7(V)1 radar produces a lot more information than do the current AN/FPS-117 and AN/FPS-124 radars which are used in the NORAD role, today, and were built in the 1980s using 1960s and ’70s technology.

(Please don’t worry about the AN/*** designations. They are part of a very sensible American system which was designed to make it simpler to identify both Army and Navy systems (hence the AN/ at the beginning). The three letters following the AN/ describe the system:

  • The first letter describes the installation. F means Fixed, on the ground (land) and S means on a ship;
  • The second letter means the type of equipment, and P means radar; and
  • The third letter means purpose. S means search (detection and locating) and Y surveillance and control.

Thus the SPY-7 is a shipborne surveillance radar and the FPS-117 is fixed (land-based) search radar. The numbers just differentiate one system from another.)

If Canada chooses an advanced radar, like the SPY-7, two engineering problems will need to be addressed:

  • First, these things use a lot more power than do the existing radars; and
  • Second, they produce much, much more information which needs to be “transported” instantly, to control centres in places like Canadian Forces Base North Bay, where all the data from all the radars is analyzed and used to effect NORAD’s mission. If the radar sites are located below (about) 72°N, as would be the case for coastal radars in BC, NS and NL, this is not a huge problem because the station is within the “footprint” of the big, high bandwidth satellites in geostationary orbit. But if the radar site is too far North then a terrestrial (possibly microwave, maybe tropospheric scatter) network (in which each station needs electrical power, too) will have to be installed to move the data to a satellite ground station. (Or a non-geostationary, high bandwidth, satellite system will have to be deployed.)

January 25, 2020

QotD: The post-oil-crisis evolution of modern cars

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

Man I remember back in 1982, we all thought we’d be driving nothing but 3-cylinder diesels by the turn of the millennium. If you went back and told some gearhead in my high school class that in 2017 Dodge would be selling a “street legal” 10-second Hemi Challenger, he’d think you were talking about the 0-60 time of a 4-cyl car.

The computer changed everything. Not only in engine tuning and performance, but in design and modeling.

I had an example of a classic late Dark Ages car, an ’84 Trans Am with the LG4 305c.i. Rochester Quadrabog motor. A hunnert and fifty horsepower and nearly every engine function powered by enough dry-rotting vacuum tubing to reach to the moon and back…

Only a few years later and exotic computer-designed and controlled long-runner port fuel injection systems were common on domestic performance cars and HP numbers were on the right side of 200 for the first time in a decade.

It was coming out of an awful time. Like a friend wrote: When he went into seminary you could buy a Mustang with a nearly 400bhp engine option. When he left seminary, the Mustang was a Pinto.

Being a car enthusiast in America in the latter half of the 70s/first half of the ’80s was like being a dirt farmer in Fifth Century Britain, marveling at the weed-grown roads and disused aqueducts left by a race of giants and building your pig shed with stones looted from a burned library.

Tamara Keel, “Cars of the future from the past…”, View From The Porch, 2017-12-26.

January 20, 2020

The reasons HMS Queen Elizabeth has two islands – Russia copied the twin island design

Filed under: Britain, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Military TV
Published 5 Jan 2020

Many have wondered why HMS Queen Elizabeth has two “islands”. Here we consider why she is the first aircraft carrier in the world to adopt this unique arrangement and the benefits it brings.

REDUNDANCY AND SEPARATION CAN BE GOOD
In a moment of inspiration back in 2001, an Royal Navy officer serving with the Thales CVF design team developing initial concepts for what became the Queen Elizabeth class, hit upon the idea of separate islands. There are several advantages to this design but the most compelling reason for the twin islands is to space out the funnels, allowing greater separation between the engines below. Queen Elizabeth class has duplicated main and secondary machinery in two complexes with independent uptakes and downtakes in each of the two islands. The separation provides a measure of redundancy, it increases the chances one propulsion system will remain operational in the event of action damage to the other. Gas turbine engines (situated in the sponsons directly below each island of the Queen Elizabeth class) by their nature require larger funnels and downtakes than the diesel engines (in the bottom of the ship). The twin island design helps minimise their impact on the internal layout.

In a conventional single-island carrier design, either you have to have a very long island (like the Invincible class) which reduces flight deck space or, the exhaust trunkings have to be channelled up into a smaller space. There are limits to the angles this pipework may take which can affect the space available for the hangar. The uptakes can also create vulnerabilities, the third HMS Ark Royal was lost to a single torpedo hit in 1941, partly due to progressive engine room flooding through funnel uptakes.

The twin island design has several other benefits. Wind tunnel testing has proved that the air turbulence over the flight deck caused by the wind and the ship’s movement, is reduced by having two islands instead of one large one. Turbulent air is a hindrance to flight operations and aircraft carrier designers always have to contend with this problem. Twin islands allow greater flight deck area because the combined footprint of the two small islands is less than that of a single larger one. By having two smaller islands it allowed each to be constructed as a single block and then shipped to Rosyth to be lifted onto the hull. The forward island was built in Portsmouth and the aft island built in Glasgow.

This arrangement solves another problem by providing good separation for the main radars. The Type 1046 long range air surveillance radar is mounted forward while the Type 997 Artisan 3D medium range radar is aft. Powerful radars, even operating on different frequencies, can cause mutual interference or blind spots if the aerials are mounted too close together. Apart from a slim communications mast, both the Artisan and 1046 have clear, unobstructed arcs.

January 19, 2020

Travelling SNCF in the age of the smartphone app

Filed under: Business, France, Humour, Media, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Register, Alistair Dabbs reveals some unfortunate truths about the French railway service (the Société nationale des chemins de fer français or SNCF) and its mobile app:

An SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Duplex DASYE (moteur asynchrone, nouvelle generation de duplex) train at Figueres-Vilafant station, 1May 2011.
Photo by eldelinux via Wikimedia Commons.

Actually, the hotel app is rubbish. The booking system is slow, the property information incomplete and some of the buttons don’t do anything at all. From time to time, the app flashes up a notification inviting you to install the app … er, that you’re already running. Much better to book using a proper computer. Still, flashing the screen around got me the Presidential Disability Suite. Franklin D rocked a wheelchair, remember, and I’m a fan.

This, however, pales into insignificance with the tedious and frankly silly collection of smartphone apps I had to juggle to manage my train journey to get here. Yes, it’s my own fault for trying to navigate my way across France on public transport in the midst of a general strike but surely that’s precisely the kind of thing digital communications ought to be able to help you with, don’t you agree?

Map of the French railways on which the TGV (LGV: blue; normal tracks: black) and Intercités (grey) SNCF trains run. Only lines going to and from Paris are shown here.
Wikimedia Commons.

The French train company, SNCF, has been doing its best by notifying travellers with bookings every day at 17:00 which of the following day’s trains would be running and which would be cancelled. I’m a lifelong union member myself and I fully support the workers’ rights to … oh buggeration, my TGV’s been rerouted to set off from a city 300km away. Fucking union arsewipes – sack ’em all bastard wankers.

Oh well, I thought, I’ll just have to work out another way. Fire up the SNCF booking app!

A banner at the top informs me that I should seek information about which train services are running by checking its Twitter feed. So I launch the Twitter app. SNCF on Twitter says I should check via the idiotic INOUI brand for TGV bookings. So I launch the INOUI app. This tells me I should check with SNCF or, if I want more information, click on a highlighted link. I click on it: it links to a one-sentence message that tells me there is a strike on and that train services may be affected.

Two hours of thumb-numbing smartphone tomfoolery later, I have worked out my own alternative route via multiple connecting services. This was made more challenging by the SNCF and INOUI apps providing contradictory information about the same journey. Best of all is they can’t agree on where my TGV will actually go. Will it reach its terminus as usual or will it apparently go inexplicably missing from the tracks in the countryside outside Lille? According to SNCF and INOUI, it will do both. It’s Schrodinger’s train.

Just as I go to bed, the Eurostar app sends me a notification reminding me to get to my local station on time tomorrow to catch the TGV that’s been cancelled.

As you can see, my much prolonged, zig-zag route up the country and into Blighty worked, no thanks to these ridiculous apps. It wasn’t all bad: I got to see more French farmland than I expected and experienced first-hand the extraordinarily rich cultural variety of train station beggars that France has to offer the modern rail traveller.

January 17, 2020

SdKfz 2 Kettenkrad: Germany’s Halftrack Motorcycle

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Jan 2020

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

The Sd.Kfz. 2 Kettenkraftrad (aka Kettenrad) is a deliciously German sort of vehicle, a small utility tractor made with a pair of treads and motorcycle front wheel. It was powered by a 4 cylinder Opel automotive engine generating 36 horsepower, and had a 3-speed gearbox with high and low range transfer case. Top speed was 44 mph, and it could tow about 1,000 pounds of ammunition or other supplies in a small 2-wheeled trailer, or directly tow light artillery pieces.

The vehicle was developed in 1939, and in mass production in time to see substantial use in Operation Barbarossa; the German invasion of Russia. Although complex to maintain and expensive to produce, the Kettenkrad was quite well suited to the terrain and distances of the Eastern Front. As the war progressed and supplies became scarcer and artillery became heavier it was less universally useful, but remained in service until the very end of the war, tasked with jobs as mundane as towing aircraft at airfields. After the war, they were put into civilian agricultural service (much like the Jeep in the US).

This example is in the rental fleet at DriveTanks.com, available for instruction and driving to anyone. It is one of my very favorite vehicles from World War Two, and I really appreciate DriveTanks giving me the opportunity to do some driving on it and show it to you! See all their available rentals here:

https://www.drivetanks.com

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740

January 4, 2020

The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Zero

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Technology, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Real Engineering
Published 31 Aug 2018

Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/user?u=282505…
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/brianjamesm…
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/thebrianmcmanus
Discord:
https://discord.gg/s8BhkmN

Thank you to AP Archive for providing footage: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHTK…

Get your Real Engineering shirts at: https://standard.tv/collections/real-…

References:
[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/world-war-i…
[2] http://rwebs.net/avhistory/history/ze…
[3] http://aboutjapan.japansociety.org/im…
[4] https://www.history.com/news/the-akut…
[5] https://www.japanpowered.com/history/…
[6] https://www.warbirdforum.com/sakai.htm

Credits:
Narrator/Director: Brian McManus
Co-Director: Mike Ridolfi (https://www.moboxgraphics.com/)
3D Animations: Eli Prenten (http://eliprenten.com/)
Research: Stephanie Sammann (https://www.stephanie-sammann.com/)
Sound: Graham Haerther (https://haerther.net/)

January 2, 2020

The 2010s … the best decade (so far) in human history

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Health, History, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Ridley explains why, despite all the doom and gloom in the daily headlines, the last ten years have been the best by almost any measure:

Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.

Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching it all closely. Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010, I’ve been faced with “what about …” questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.

Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that “the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking” and “we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet”. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.

This does not quite fit with what the Extinction Rebellion lot are telling us. But the next time you hear Sir David Attenborough say: “Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is either a madman or an economist”, ask him this: “But what if economic growth means using less stuff, not more?” For example, a normal drink can today contains 13 grams of aluminium, much of it recycled. In 1959, it contained 85 grams. Substituting the former for the latter is a contribution to economic growth, but it reduces the resources consumed per drink.

As for Britain, our consumption of “stuff” probably peaked around the turn of the century — an achievement that has gone almost entirely unnoticed. But the evidence is there. In 2011 Chris Goodall, an investor in electric vehicles, published research showing that the UK was now using not just relatively less “stuff” every year, but absolutely less. Events have since vindicated his thesis. The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between 2000 and 2017, from 12.5 tonnes to 8.5 tonnes. That’s a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources consumed overall.

H/T to Damian Penny for the link.

January 1, 2020

Let there be LIGHT! – December 31st – TimeGhost of Christmas Day 8

Filed under: History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 31 Dec 2019

The electrical age was ushered in by Thomas Edison’s illumination of Menlo Park 140 years ago. For the first time, electrical lighting was demonstrated to a public audience.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Tom Maeden and Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Tom Maeden
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorization by:
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “A Sleigh Ride Into Town”
Traditional – “Carol of the Bells”

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
4 hours ago
On the eighth day of Christmas Thomas Alva Edison said: let there be light. Now, as we say say in the video, we know that Edison was not the only inventor of incandescent light, perhaps not even the inventor at all. But as with so many other things he brought the world, he was the first one to make it practicable, and perhaps more importantly; make it popular.

It’s hard to fathom how monumental to humanity this day, 31st of December, 1879 is — the world literally changed forever with the flick of a switch. Our work behavior, or sleeping patterns, our leisure time, socializing, sex, media, industry, cooking, aesthetics … well more or less everything started to change on this day. In 2019 hardly anything we do is possible without it — especially not watching this video, which after all is brought to your eyes by one of many, many derivative innovations of the incandescent light bulb. In fact it’s 140 years later and we are still researching the depths of the change that incandescent light brought upon humanity.

Most of us take it for granted by now, artists celebrate it, entire industries depend on it, Luddites deplore it, environmental studies are showing that it might be harmful to other animals, neurologists are researching the effects of changed sleeping patterns on your brains, the production of energy we need to light our world has contributed to dramatic environmental changes on the entire planet, and the innovations coming from it just keep on pouring out of labs like Menlow Park every day. What do you think?

Happy New Year! May it be enlightening.

December 31, 2019

A lump of coal minus a canary – December 30th – TimeGhost of Christmas Past – Day 7

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published 30 Dec 2019

The last day of work of the year for many people is the harbinger of exciting new change. For British coal miners in 1986, it meant the redundancy of the canary in the coal mine.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Tom Maeden and Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Tom Maeden
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “A Sleigh Into Town”
Farrell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Johannes Bornlöf – “The Inspector 4”
Jo Wandrini – “Dawn of Civilization”

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 hours ago
So, the year is almost over… it’s a Monday, so many of you might be at work. How was 2019 and how do you hope that 2020 is going to be? For us at TimeGhost it has been a very exciting year indeed. WW2 grew both in scope and viewership, Between 2 Wars is almost completed and we welcomed close to 2,000 new recruits to the TimeGhost Army https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

And all of us, you guys included need to thank them for all the content we were able to bring to you in 2019. Because like nations depend on their defense forces to maintain their independence, we depend on the TimeGhost Army to keep fighting the good fight of education and entertainment. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We look forward to take all of this even further in 2020 as WW2 grows ever more complex, Between 2 Wats concludes, and we come out with new exciting series here on the TimeGhost channel.

December 20, 2019

Anton Howes on the “improving mentality” of the British industrial revolution

Filed under: Britain, Education, History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes looks at some of the “bottom-up” educational initiatives that helped create and shape the industrial revolution:

I stumbled across a speech the other day, delivered by Dr Olinthus Gregory — the mathematics teacher at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich — to the Deptford Mechanics’ Institution. The mechanics’ institutions, or institutes, were created by working men pooling their savings to pay for lectures, libraries, educational equipment, news-rooms, and book clubs. They spearheaded Britain’s bottom-up approach to adult education, with the classes held in the evenings after work. But they’re a story for another time.

Diagram of a Watt steam engine from Practical physics for secondary schools (1913).
Wikimedia Commons.

What caught my eye was Gregory’s speech. Delivered in 1826, Britain’s industrial prowess was already obvious to many. The Industrial Revolution was already in full swing. Gregory paints the picture perfectly:

    Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, navigation, the arts, and sciences, useful and ornamental, in a copious and inexhaustible variety, enhance the conveniences and embellishments of this otherwise happy spot. Cities thronged with inhabitants, warehouses filled with stores, markets and fairs with busy rustics; fields, villages, roads, seaports, all contributing to the riches and glory of our land.

But there was more to be done. After all, everything can always be improved (an attitude that I call the improving mentality):

    Recollect farther, that every natural and every artificial advantage is susceptible of gradual progression, and trace the yearly elevation to higher perfection. New societies for improvement … new machines to advance our arts and facilitate labour; waste lands enclosed, roads improved, bridges erected, canals cut, tunnels excavated, marshes drained and cultivated, docks formed, ports enlarged: these and a thousand kindred operations which present themselves spontaneously to the mind’s eye, prove that we have not yet attained our zenith, and open an exquisite prospect of future stability and greatness.

Progress had been made, but there was always room for more.

As for the causes, Gregory had some interesting observations. Important, he said, was coal: “more valuable to us than the gold mines ever were to Spain, since without these the various metals could not be worked, and half our manufactories would be at a stand.”

But coal alone was not enough. There would be less output, of course, but he did not say that progress would have been stifled altogether (which is also more or less my own position). Also important was that inventors could persuade the government of the benefits of innovation, which is something I mentioned in my last email. As Gregory put it, Britain had “a government of whom the arts and sciences never crave audience in vain.”

And most important of all was Britain’s community of inventors and scientists, from the Boultons and Watts and Smeatons and Arkwrights and Bramahs, to the Donkins, Hornblowers, Trevithicks, Maudslays and Stephensons (only a few of whom are at all heard of today) …

December 16, 2019

“The near-homogeneity of Silicon Valley political beliefs has gone from wry punchline to national crisis in the United States”

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jason Morgan reviews Michael Rectenwald’s new book Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom:

The near-homogeneity of Silicon Valley political beliefs has gone from wry punchline to national crisis in the United States. The monoculture of virtue signaling and high- and heavy-handed woke corporate leftism at places like Google, Twitter, and Facebook was once a source of chagrin for those who found themselves shut out of various internet sites for deviating from the orthodoxies of the Palo Alto elites. After the 2016 presidential election, however, it became obvious that the digitalistas were doing a lot more than just making examples of a few handpicked “extremists.” From the shadow banning of non-leftist sites and views to full-complement political propagandizing, Bay Area leftists have been so aggressive in bending the national psyche to their will that there is talk in the papers and on the cable “news” channels of “existential threats to our democracy.”

It is tempting to see this as a function of political correctness. Americans, and others around the world, who have found themselves on the “wrong side of history” (as determined by the cultural elite in an endless cycle of epistemological door closing) have long been shut out of conversations, their views deemed beyond the pale of acceptable discourse in enlightened modern societies. Google, Facebook, Twitter — are these corporations, and their uber-woke CEOs, just cranking the PC up to eleven and imposing their schoolmarmish proclivities on the billions of people who want to scrawl messages on their electronic chalkboards?

Not so, says reformed leftist — and current PC target — Michael Rectenwald. The truth of Stanford and Harvard alumni’s death grip on global discourse is much more complicated than just PC run amok. It is not that the Silicon Valley giants are agents of mass surveillance and censorship (although mass surveillance and censorship are precisely the business they’re in). It’s that the very system they have designed is, structurally, the same as the systems of oppression that blanketed and smothered free expression in so much of the world during the previous century. In his latest book, Google Archipelago, Rectenwald outlines how this system works, why leftism is synonymous with oppression, and how the Google Archipelago’s regime of “simulated reality” “must be countered, not only with real knowledge, but with a metaphysics of truth.”

Google Archipelago is divided into eight chapters and is rooted in both Rectenwald’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history of science and corporate control of culture, as well as in his own experiences. Before retiring, Rectenwald had been a professor at New York University, where he was thoroughly entrenched in the PC episteme that squelches real thought at universities across North America and beyond. Gradually, Rectenwald began to realize that PC was not a philosophy, but the enemy of open inquiry. For this reason, and because Rectenwald is an expert in the so-called digital humanities and the long history of scientific (and pseudo-scientific) thinking that feeds into it, Google Archipelago is not just a dry monograph about a social issue. By turns memoir, Kafkaesque dream sequence, trenchant rebuke of leftist censorship, and intellectual history of woke corporate political correctness, Google Archipelago is a welcoming window into a mind working happily in overdrive.

December 8, 2019

QotD: Web traffic

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Boss: “But the web’s a valuable customer interface!”

The Operator: “If you’re Amazon or Sendit, but not if you’re us. We’re a web nothing! Baby seals get more hits!”

Simon Travaglia, “BOFH tests the law of redundant supply”, The Register, 2004-10-04.

December 7, 2019

History of Space Travel – One Small Step – Extra History – #5

Filed under: History, Russia, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published 5 Dec 2019

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

The United States was losing the space race. A number of unfortunate missteps and mistakes had hindered their progress. But the United States had also structured its space program entirely differently from the USSR. Instead of being helmed by the military, the National Aeronautics & Space Administration was created by Eisenhower with an emphasis on exploration and research. And in the end, the later but more advanced satellites will collect the data required a dream firmly placed in the American consciousness by JFK. A dream to place a man on the moon.

From the comments:

Extra Credits
19 hours ago
The plaque still gives me goosebumps in the best way possible. Hopefully one day we can live up to its promise of peace. Be good to one another. ❤️

And thanks to Rebecca Ford (the voice of Lotus) for voicing space mom at the end of each of these episodes. They’ve been a blast to make and we hope that you all have enjoyed this trip to the stars.

Bryan Donkin, 19th century inventor, amateur public relations whiz and independent lobbyist

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

In the latest installment of Anton Howes’ Age of Invention newsletter, he recounts the story of Bryan Donkin and his efforts to save innovators from excessive government interference:

One of the major arguments of the book I’m writing is that inventors’ talent for public relations and lobbying was one of the main reasons that Britain — rather unexpectedly — was the place that experienced an unprecedented acceleration of innovation.

The greatest of these lobbyist-inventors has to be Bryan Donkin, a nineteenth-century mechanical engineer. As an inventor, Donkin improved threshing machines, dredging machinery, and a variety of other tools. He invented the steel pen, dabbled in chemistry, as well as phrenology, and was one of the key people responsible for mechanising the production of paper. He became best known for improving and commercialising tin cans for food. Mechanised paper-making and canned food, having both been invented in France, were perfected in Britain by Donkin. He was the archetypal tinkerer.

Bryan Donkin (1768-1855).
Photographer unknown via Wikimedia Commons.

But it’s as a lobbyist that I think Donkin was truly exceptional. His experience has important lessons for all would-be supporters of invention today.

In April 1817, Donkin read in his newspaper that there had been a disaster in Norwich: the boiler aboard the steamboat Telegraph had exploded. Of the boat’s twenty-two passengers, eight had died immediately in the blast, and another six had eventually succumbed to their wounds. It was a shocking tragedy. And for Donkin, doubly so: in addition to the human death toll, the explosion threatened to kill off one of the era’s newest and most exciting inventions.

Although some of the first trials of steamboats had taken place in the 1780s, it wasn’t until the turn of the century that they began to be practical. By 1817, the first commercially successful steamboat service in Britain, Henry Bell’s Comet, had been chugging its way up the River Clyde between Glasgow and Greenock for only five years. And Londoners like Donkin had only just seen their first steamboat, Margery, when she puffed her way into the Thames in 1815 (the following year, after becoming the first steamboat to cross the Channel, she reinvented herself in Paris as Elise). Thus, by the time of Telegraph‘s explosion, the passenger steamboat had only just been born. There was a very real risk that it would be banned.

Fortunately, however, the steamboat had Donkin in its corner. His immediate reaction upon reading about the explosion was to gather some of his engineer friends — Timothy Bramah and John Collinge — and set off for Norwich to view the explosion site for themselves. As the first expert engineers on the scene, they then took control of the narrative about the explosion. Donkin and his friends went straight to Norwich’s MP to ask him to set up a parliamentary select committee to look into the disaster. And while they waited for the politicians to be assembled for the committee, they held a series of public meetings about the disaster at the Crown & Anchor Tavern — a favourite haunt of London’s engineers. There, they had a chance to rally the rest of the profession and get their story straight about what must have caused the explosion.

December 2, 2019

China Rules the Seas – The Invention of the Junk l HISTORY OF CHINA

Filed under: China, History, Japan, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

IT’S HISTORY
Published 19 Aug 2015

Imperial China was a great seafaring nation. With the invention of the junks — massive, nearly unsinkable ships — it is safe to say that by the 14th century China had the best sea vessels in the world. The invention of the compass made navigation trustworthy as never before and Admiral Zheng He’s treasure fleet eagerly explored the Seven Seas. The first Chinese navy also depended on the mighty junk for their fighting tactics. But not all emperors were convinced of seafare and so the Chinese maritime power ended somewhat abruptly, giving the rest of the world time to catch up. Learn all about China on the water on IT’S HISTORY.

» The Complete PLAYLIST: http://bit.ly/HistoryOfChina

» SOURCES
Videos: British Pathé (https://www.youtube.com/user/britishp…)
Pictures: mainly Picture Alliance
Content:
“Hadingham, Evan (2001): Ancient Chinese Explorers: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/…
Needham, Joseph (1986): Science and Civilization in China, Volume 4, Physics and Physical Technology, Part 3, Civil Engineering and Nautics. Taipei”

» ABOUT US
IT’S HISTORY is a ride through history – Join us discovering the world’s most important eras in IN TIME, BIOGRAPHIES of the GREATEST MINDS and the most important INVENTIONS.

» CREDITS
Presented by: Guy Kiddey
Script by: Martin Haldenmair
Translated by: Guy Kiddey
Directed by: Daniel Czepelczauer
Director of Photography: Markus Kretzschmar
Music: Markus Kretzschmar
Sound Design: Bojan Novic
Editing: Markus Kretzschmar

A Mediakraft Networks original channel
Based on a concept by Florian Wittig and Daniel Czepelczauer
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard-Olsson, Spartacus Olsson
Head of Production: Michael Wendt
Producer: Daniel Czepelczauer
Social Media Manager: Laura Pagan and Florian Wittig

Contains material licensed from British Pathé
All rights reserved – © Mediakraft Networks GmbH, 2015

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