Quotulatiousness

March 27, 2018

German WW1 Prototype Tanks Of 1918 I THE GREAT WAR On The Road

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

The Great War
Published on 26 Mar 2018

Get Our New Oberschlesien Tank Poster: http://bit.ly/PanzerOberschlesien

The German Tank Museum: https://www.youtube.com/DasPanzermuseum

While the German Army only fielded 20 A7V tanks during World War 1, they understood the potential of the tank and started working on different designs in the last year of the war. Some designs like the LKII almost got deployed while the Sturmpanzerwagen Oberschlesien or the Krupp-Protze never left the prototype stage.

March 26, 2018

The container revolution in shipping

Filed under: Economics, Railways, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Is there anything as ubiquitous as the humble shipping container these days? There’re used for all kinds of “second career” purposes, but it’s easy to miss just how important to the growth in international trade … and the rise in global wealth … those containers have been. Marc Scribner gives a quick shout-out to the container:

Deep-sea containers from China at Ely, Cambridgeshire
Via Wikimedia Commons.

One of the most underappreciated drivers of the modern global economy is the humble shipping container. Widely adopted internationally in the second half of the 20th century, intermodal containers largely supplanted break bulk cargo — the bags, barrels, pallets, and crates that must be individually loaded and unloaded onto ships, railcars, and trucks.

Intermodal containers are standardized in size and design, allowing them to be stacked onto large container ships, which can transport thousands of containers. In port, containers can be lifted onto railcars and flatbed trucks, enabling quick access to inland distribution centers and manufacturing facilities.

Containerization dramatically reduced costs all around. Fewer dockworkers were needed to load and unload vessels and larger ships were built thanks to stackable containers. Fewer ports were needed to transport an increasing volume of goods and freight insurance rates fell due to their durability and securability.

These transportation cost declines due to containerization have been estimated to have increased the volume of world trade far more than the proliferation of free trade agreements since the end of World War II. This means, according to recent research published in the Journal of International Economics, that while trade policy was important (and CEI is a strong supporter of trade liberalization), technological change in the shipping industry was responsible for enabling more trade among countries than improvements in government policy. It is important to note that for global commerce going forward, however, government policy is likely to be more important as containers have already been widely adopted, particularly in wealthy industrialized countries.

Kalashnikov vs Sturmgewehr!

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, Technology, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 17 Sep 2016

http://jamesdjulia.com/item/3024-394/ (MP-44)
http://jamesdjulia.com/item/3020-394/ (Type 56 AK)

The German Sturmgewehr and the Soviet Kalashnikov are widely and rightly considered the two most influential and iconic of the modern military rifles. While the German rifle certainly influenced the Soviet design, the two were designed with different intentions and goals. The Sturmgewehr was an attempt to blend the roles of rifle and light machine gun, while the Kalashnikov was intended to blend the roles of rifle and submachine gun – and yet they both reached largely the same practical reality.

Which do you think was the better system?

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

March 24, 2018

Today in bad ideas examined – Time to [nationalize | regulate | break-up] Facebook?

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Facebook is having a particularly bad moment right now. Earlier this year, it was the Republicans in the US demanding that “something must be done” about Facebook. Now, after discovering that the Trump campaign did exactly what the Obama campaign did in 2012, it’s the Democrats insisting that “something must be done”. In Britain, it’s both the Tories and the Corbynistas howling for action. Well, [nationalizing | regulating | breaking-up] Facebook is something, and here’s why we shouldn’t do it:

The latest bright idea from Paul Mason is that Facebook must be regulated or changed in some manner to make darn sure it does what Paul Mason wants Facebook to be doing.

There are lots of problems with the Corbynista columnist’s idea. They include: not understanding how the internet or corporate law works; ignoring how innovation happens; and the political problem of allowing the government to control a social network, real or digital.

That’s not to mention the broader point that the people best placed to control Facebook are the 2 billion users of Facebook, who can choose to use the service or not. But such free-market liberalism isn’t quite the fashion de nos jours, is it?

[…]

Mason, along with far too much of the British Left, is pretty relaxed about repeating Soviet mistakes, but there’s no reason why the rest of us have to go along with it. That rather covers the regulation and ownership aspects. As to breaking the company up, we find more in his thread of tweets on the subject.

He points to the UK corporate registration as proof that we can control the local bit, or break it off from the whole. Such a conclusion is hard to square with the complaint about the Facebook profits HMRC struggles to tax. The reason Facebook doesn’t pay UK corporation tax on all the money collected from the UK is that the UK company just does some engineering bits, and doesn’t actually run the service. That engineering could be done from elsewhere just as the ad sales are. And the design. And there’s absolutely no one at all who has insisted that there must be a UK company out there before signing up for the service, is there?

We then come to what is arguably Mason’s silliest claim: “Next comes the f***wittery about ‘we don’t want the state owning our data.’ Me too. Hence I proposed a public owned digital ID service.“

There might be some manner in which “public owned” and “state” are different, but I’m absolutely certain that this wouldn’t be the case in modern Britain. As even Gordon Brown ended up agreeing when he revealed that the BBC license fee was indeed just another tax all along.

James May doesn’t trust Sat Navs | Q&A extras | HeadSqueeze

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BBC Earth Lab
Published on 27 Sep 2013

Don’t trust the Sat Nav! Speaking from experience, James thinks we shouldn’t blindly trust a machine. Get a map!

March 23, 2018

The Grand Tour James May Running

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

The Grand Tour Fans
Published on 16 Mar 2018

Do you think James May never ran on TV and during the episode of The Grand Tour where Jeremy Clarkson drove the Ford GT was the first time ever?

Well you’re wrong. In the third season of James May Man Lab he ran on public TV. Check out this video and see James Running (twice !!)

Tank Chats #25 Mark VIII | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published on 12 Aug 2016

In the 25th Tank Chat David Fletcher explores the First World War Mark VIII tank. The Mark VIII tank, also known as The International was a joint project between the British and American forces, following their entry into the war. Once the designs had been refined massive orders were placed in 1918 and then swiftly cancelled with the end of the war. In the end six Mark VIII tanks were built for Britain of which The Tank Museum’s is the sole surviving example.
http://tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1949-363

March 22, 2018

The social media mistake

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Robert Tracinski explains why the move to social media was dangerous to free public discourse despite the otherwise-attractive nature of TwitFaceTube and other factions of the social media Borg:

Was social media a mistake? Two recent events crystallized my answer to this question. First, conservative comedian Steven Crowder had his Twitter account suspended for a week because he posted a video on YouTube that was critical of “gender fluidity” and used a Bad Word. The video was also pulled from YouTube, which you might not think of as a social media platform, even though it definitely is.

Then Brandon Morse noticed Twitter was preventing him from tweeting a link to an article by a controversial conservative columnist. This follows stories of Google-owned YouTube “demonetizing” videos by conservatives, unplugging them from the ability to make money from ads, and Facebook and Google targeting conservative sites for hilariously inaccurate and tendentious “fact checks.” It’s becoming clear that the big social media companies are targeting ideas and thinkers on the Right, and not just the far-out provocateurs and trolls like Milo Yianopoulos, but everyone.

What strikes me most is the contrast between this and the Internet era before social media, before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube swallowed up everything. I’m talking about the 2000s, the great era of the blogs. Do you remember what that blog era was like? It felt like liberation.

The era of blogging offered the promise of a decentralized media. Anybody could publish and comment on the news and find an audience. Guys writing in their pajamas could take down Dan Rather. We were bypassing the old media gatekeepers. And we had control over it! We posted on our own sites. We had good discussions in our own comment fields, which we moderated. I had and still have an extensive e-mail list of readers who are interested in my work, most of which I built up in that period, before everybody moved onto social media.

But then Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube came along and killed the blogs. There were three main reasons they took over.

I have various social media accounts, but in most cases I just use them to link to my blog posts. The old saw about never reading the comments applies with even greater force to most of the social media platforms. I don’t do “breaking news” on the blog, because that’s one thing social media can do better — most of my regular visitors come here once a day to see what I’ve posted since their last visit, not to check for smoking hot takes on something that happened in the last fifteen minutes. For immediacy, the social media sites will win over the blogs (and even the mainstream media, in many cases).

H/T to American Digest for the link.

March 20, 2018

Inside the German A7V WW1 Tank I THE GREAT WAR On The Road

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Technology, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 19 Mar 2018

The German Tank Museum: http://daspanzermuseum.de/

We visited the German Tank Museum (in Munster, not Münster) and talked to the director Ralf Raths about the German tanks in World War 1. The only one that saw action was the A7V and will find out how it was designed, how up to 23 men fit inside one of these and what the operational history was.

March 19, 2018

Meet “the gay Canadian vegan who [created] ‘Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindf*ck tool'”

Filed under: Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Guardian, Carole Cadwalladr talks to the young developer at Cambridge Analytica who says he’s the one who created the tools that the Trump campaign used to sway opinions their way:

The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.

By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd.

Two months later, when he arrived in London from Canada, he was all those things in the flesh. And yet the flesh was impossibly young. He was 27 then (he’s 28 now), a fact that has always seemed glaringly at odds with what he has done. He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a consequential role. At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain’s EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump’s election campaign.

Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.

In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.

The Katana

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

Lindybeige
Published on 4 Jun 2009

Revered object of sacred mystery and deadly beauty, or tool for hitting people – you decide. I’ll help.

For examples of pattern forging, see http://www.paul-binns-swords.co.uk/Pattern_welding.htm

March 18, 2018

The Truth About Wireless Charging

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Engineering
Published on 23 Feb 2018

March 17, 2018

Tank Chats #24 Vickers A1E1 Independent | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published on 5 Aug 2016

In the 24th Tank Chat, David Fletcher looks at the rather unusual Vickers A1E1 Independent. The Independent originated in 1922 with a War Office specification for a heavy tank. Ultimately it proved to be a failed project was abandoned in 1935, by which time it had cost more than £150,000, and sent to Bovington. It is the only tank of its kind in existence.

March 16, 2018

Mostly Weekly Series Finale: Creative Destruction

Filed under: Business, Economics, Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 14 Mar 2018

In the final episode of the webseries, we tackle how markets make and break stuff.

—–

In free and open markets people are able to make new technologies and business models, which displace older, established ones. That process of starting new companies and jobs destroys some professions while creating others.

It’s entirely understandable that people who lose their jobs want to keep them. But industries like manufacturing, coal mining, and mall retailers aren’t dying out because of competition from China, they’re being outmoded by automation, cheaper fuel sources, and online sales.

Despite the uncertainty that markets bring, they also create new jobs and entirely new professions. There aren’t gangs of unemployed lamplighters roaming the land; their descendants became Uber drivers, social media coordinators, and webseries producers.

In the end, it’s better for everyone to look at the world as it is and to move forward than to try and halt progress through the force of law.

Mostly Weekly is hosted by Andrew Heaton with headwriter Sarah Rose Siskind.

Script by Andrew Heaton and Sarah Rose Siskind with writing assistance from Brian Sack.
Edited by Austin Bragg and Sarah Rose Siskind.
Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Theme Song: Frozen by Surfer Blood.

March 7, 2018

Tank Chats #23 Hornsby Tractor | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published on 15 Jul 2016

In the 23rd Tank Chat, David Fletcher takes a look at the Hornsby Tractor. The Hornsby Tractor was the first tracked vehicle in service with the British Army. They were designed to tow artillery.

The Museum’s example is still running and is the oldest vehicle in the collection.
http://tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1958-15

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