Potential History
Published on 11 Mar 2018A brief history of the VK 45.01 (P), or the Porsche Tiger, and the disaster it later became.
April 30, 2018
The Ferdinand: What Not To Do When Building a Tank
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April 29, 2018
Tank Crew Training – More German Tank Prototypes I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 28 Apr 2018Chair of Wisdom Time!
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Pipe Dreams: What Happened To Hovertrains?
Mustard
Published on 8 Apr 2018In 1974, a French train sets a speed record, exceeding 250 miles per hour. But this train is unlike any other before it. Instead of rolling on wheels, it hovers on a cushion of air. In the 1970’s hovertrains were seriously being considered the solution to slow, antiquated railways, which increasingly had to compete with new superhighways and even intercity air travel.
Without the rolling resistance of train wheels, hovertrains promised greater efficiency and much higher speeds. By feeding high pressure air through lifting pads, hovertrains float on a cushion of air much like a hovercraft.
One of the most widely known hovertrain prototypes was called the Aerotrain. Lead engineer Jean Bertin and his team in France, designed several versions, including one that could carry 80 passengers. The i80HV was powered by a turbofan sourced from an airliner, producing over twelve thousand pounds of thrust. At the front, a 400 horse power gas-turbine supplied high-pressure air to hover the twenty loaded train a quarter of an inch off its guideway. The British and Americans also experimented with hovertrain technology, incorporating the linear induction motor for improved efficiency. British research led to the development of the RTV-31 Tracked Hovercraft, and the American’s developed several prototypes, culminating in the development of the Urban Tracked Air Cushion Vehicle (UTACV).
But like their counterpart the Maglev, Hovertrains failed to revolutionize rail. Hovertrains, Maglevs, or any other innovative alternative to rail has to compete with nearly a million miles of rail line already in existence. With stations and infrastructure built-out in nearly every city in the world. The limitations of conventional railways were overcome not a single innovative leap forward, but by incremental improvements. Existing rail networks were modernized with sections of track that could handle higher speeds. New signaling technologies were developed along with more advanced wheelsets.
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April 28, 2018
Lab-Grown Meat Is Coming to Your Supermarket. Ranchers Are Fighting Back.
ReasonTV
Published on 26 Apr 2018The U.S. Cattlemen’s Association petitioned the USDA to declare that “meat” and “beef” exclude products not “slaughtered in the traditional manner.”
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How A Man Shall Be Armed: 14th Century
Royal Armouries
Published on 20 Feb 2017Discover how the introduction of plate armour changed the way knights of the 14th Century armed themselves for battle.
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April 27, 2018
The rise of the “sexbot”
In Jacobite, Diana Fleischman discusses the appeal of sexbots to young (and not-so-young) men:
Sexbots are usually woman-shaped gynoid machines. At the present time, sex robots are simple: they’re silicone sex dolls that have some capacity for movement and response. Manufacturers are rolling out new models and new promises: sex robots that respond to touch and penetration, sex robots with interchangeable faces and bodies and sex robots with different personalities. Future robots will have all the allure of the cues of fertility in a flesh-and-blood woman combined with the artificial intelligence that creates compulsive reward directed behavior.
Sex robots are overwhelmingly gynoid because heterosexual men drive the market for sexual products like prostitution and pornography. Across cultures, men desire more sexual partners, need to know someone for less time before they want to have sex with them, and have lower standards for a sexual liaison than women. Looking at gay men is instructive here. Their sexual interactions are not limited by women’s sexual choosiness and they, on average, have many more sexual partners than straight men or lesbians.
It isn’t hard to see the reason for this. Men don’t get pregnant and don’t lactate, and they have smaller, easier-to-produce sex cells than women. For a man, the cost of producing offspring is cheap. Getting one’s genes into the next generation is the engine of evolution. The low opportunity costs make men motivated to take every opportunity, even if it comes in the form of a robot. Ever think a dog is dumb for growling at his reflection in the mirror? Human men can become aroused looking at flat images of nude women in black and white, our evolved psychology can respond in maladaptive ways towards novel stimuli.
[…]
My view is that the uncanny valley is something analogous to Capgras delusion, a psychological disorder that causes sufferers to believe that someone they know has been taken over by an imposter, often inhuman. According to VS Ramachandran, there are two aspects to recognizing faces: the identification of the external familiar representation and the “internal” validation – the warm emotion that goes along with it. In the uncanny valley, you recognize a robot as humanlike, but it’s missing the facial movement or some other characteristic that gives you a warm feeling of recognition. Many men won’t experience the uncanny valley, especially with regards to sex robots. These men are going to be the early adopters. Men are worse at identifying faces than women and are far more likely to have prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces.
Sex is weird. Sex is gross and awkward. Natural selection addressed this issue by causing arousal to attenuate the human disgust response. It’s worth noting that men have a much lower baseline sexual disgust than women, and that sexual excitement further reduces disgust sensitivity in men. In a classic paper by Dan Ariely, aroused men had much more positive attitudes about all kinds of unusual sexual acts. Sexually aroused men were more likely to say that it would be fun to watch a woman urinating or that they could imagine getting sexually excited by contact with an animal). 3-D pornography of video game or cartoon characters that might be creepy in a nonsexual context are popular genres. The most direct evidence that men won’t be put off by uncanny vulvas is from a paper that laments the “unabashed sexualization of female-gendered robots” in comments on YouTube videos of robots. Bawdy comments on gynoids – “you’ll have to replace it monthly due to semen corrosion,” for example – were more frequent than comments expressing unease.
Perhaps we should encourage some men to use sex robots. Men who get environmental cues that they’re evolutionary dead-ends disproportionately menace society. In the 1980s, evolutionary psychologist couple Wilson and Daly found that perpetrators of violence and homicide had something in common: they were young, single and didn’t have access to the kinds of resources with which to win mates. Polygynous societies in which wealthier men have access to multiple women are more violent and less stable because they have a class of young men without the prospect of getting a mate. Monogamy, rather than being the state of nature, may have been an important cultural technology for reducing violence.
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April 25, 2018
Tank vs. Tank: Villers-Bretonneux, April 1918 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 20 Apr 2018100 years ago, during the First World War, tank fought tank for the first time in history, at Villers-Bretonneux on 24 April 1918.
It was an engagement that foreshadowed one hundred years of tanks fighting tanks on the battlefield, stories told by The Tank Museum.
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QotD: The “white magic” of the market process
Leonard Read explained what he called the “white magic” of the market process in his justly praised article “I, Pencil.” No one knows how to make an ordinary pencil; no one can ever know how to make a pencil. And yet pencils are produced in such huge quantities that they are virtually free for the taking. We have pencils not because some one person planned from the beginning the cutting of cedar trees, the mining of graphite, alumina, and bauxite, the extraction of petroleum and clay, or the organization of transportation to get supplies to pencil factories and pencils to retailers. When you contemplate the enormousness of all the tasks that are required to make a single pencil, you understand that no one can know how to do more than a tiny fraction of these tasks.
We have pencils (along with indoor plumbing, electric lighting, microprocessors, disposable diapers, camcorders, concert halls, …) only because for each of the countless tasks required for the production and distribution of each good there are a few people who specialize in knowing how to perform these tasks. But no one knows — or can know — how to perform all of the tasks required to produce even the most commonplace of goods. The free market works as well as it does because, when property rights are respected and fully transferrable, the resulting prices tell each of the producers at the innumerable different production “sites” just what (and how much) to produce and with what particular combination of resources.
For example, if the supply of crude oil falls, the resulting higher price will prompt manufacturers of paint to produce less petroleum-based paints and more linseed-oil or water-based paint. The resulting higher price of petroleum-based paints will prompt pencil manufacturers to paint fewer of their pencils with petroleum-based paints and more of their pencils with paints made of substances other than petroleum. As F. A. Hayek taught, the pencil manufacturer need never know why the price of petroleum-based paint rose; all that is required for this manufacturer to act appropriately is for him to conserve on his use of petroleum-based paint. The higher price of such paint achieves this goal.
Don Boudreaux, “A Pitch for Humility”, Café Hayek, 2016-08-05.
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April 23, 2018
Tank Chats #28 Char B-1 Bis | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 3 Nov 2016A French heavy tank from 1940.
In its day the Char B was regarded as one of the most powerful tanks in the world, yet still had many features which harked back to the First World War. The Char B was issued to tank battalions in armoured divisions and saw extensive combat in the summer of 1940.
Of the 365 Char B-1 bis built, large numbers were captured intact by the Germans in France in 1940. Those tanks that survived were later incorporated into the German Army and modified in various ways.
http://www.tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1951-40
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QotD: The knife
A simple edged tool is likely to be the human ur-tool, especially as tool-using hominids moved farther away from sources of flint or obsidian. IMO, any adult human — and most children past a certain degree of maturity — ought to carry a knife. Otherwise you’re just a chimp with a haircut.
Roberta X. “My Kershaw! My Kershaw!”, The Adventures of Roberta X, 2016-08-17.
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April 22, 2018
Planes, Guns and Automobiles I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1919 Part 1 of 4
TimeGhost History
Published on 21 Apr 2018The year 1919 was the year when the world took the first step into the age of mass communication. Wartime developments now create the aviation industry, mass produced cars, broadcast media and … more guns.
Join the TimeGhost Army at https://timeghost.tv
Or on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Indy Neidell
Directed by Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus OlssonA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
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April 19, 2018
The mis-measurement of the digital economy
In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains why our current statistical model does not adequately reflect the online world’s contribution to our economy:
To give my favourite current example. WhatsApp is used by some billion people around the world for some to all of their telecoms needs. It turns up in economic statistics as a reduction in productivity.
That’s mad.
In more detail, WhatsApp is free to use and carries no advertising. That means there’s no sale associated with it. We measure consumption at market prices – a price of $0 means no consumption. Consumption is one of the three ways we measure GDP – each of the three should be the same as the other two but isn’t because lying about taxes.
The other two calculations are all incomes, or all production. Things that are sold at no price do not add to production given that we measure it at market prices.
Income, well, there’re 200 or so engineers at Facebook who work on it (I checked with Facebook itself). Say their salary is $250k a year each. Probably too low but we’ve got to use some number or other. $50 million then. That’s incomes added to GDP.
So, in our three methods of calculating GDP – they should all be the same but that doesn’t matter here – we’ve value of WhatsApp (more accurately, WhatsApp adds value of $x each year to the global economy) of $50 million. Or $0 or $0.
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April 16, 2018
Tank Chats #27 Light Tank Mark IIA | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 17 Oct 2016A British two-man light tank from the early thirties.
The first British light tank, the Mark I, evolved from the Carden-Loyd Carrier. The Mark II was produced in larger numbers and issued for service. Light tanks were regarded as an alternative to armoured cars with a better cross-country performance.
http://tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1952-27
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