Quotulatiousness

December 11, 2012

This’ll take you back

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

The Verge on a 1960s interpretation of Google search:

Google didn’t exist during the 1960s, but if it did, it may have looked a lot like Google60. Described as “an art project to explore distances and heroism in user interfaces,” Google60 is the latest creation from designer and developer Norbert Landsteiner, who earlier this year released Google BBS — a project that allowed users to conduct Google searches from within a 1980s bulletin board-style interface. The idea behind Google60 is largely similar, except here, Landsteiner replaces the Google front end with a virtual IBM 360-like interface, replete with punch cards and a “Mad Men style,” 1960s aesthetic.

November 5, 2012

Commemorating the “Great War”

Filed under: Britain, Education, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:16

“Sir Humphrey” is on what he terms as his “very late Summer Holidays”, but left a thoughtful-as-always post on the British government’s recently announced World War 1 commemoration program:

It was announced that over £50 million of public funding will be provided to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War in 2014. This high profile event will include commemoration, remembrance, and a chance for every school in the country to send students to the battlefields of the Western Front in order to see first-hand ‘Flanders Fields’.

Rarely do wars have such a dramatic impact on a national psyche, but the First world War continues to occupy a place in the heart of the British consciousness which will take generations to reduce. It is sobering to contemplate that across the whole of the UK, there were fewer than 50 ‘Thankful villages’ (locations where everyone who served came back alive). Even today, as a nation we have only just seen the last veterans of the conflict pass on, and there are still plenty of people alive who were born in this time. In Government, it is often forgotten that Lord Astor, who acts as the spokesman for Defence in the House of Lords, is the grandchild of Field Marshal Haig. Even now, almost a century on, our current links to the war remain tangible.

Humphrey has long been a ‘revisionist’ when it comes to WW1, and believes that what should be remembered as not only a violent and bloody war, also represented many of the finest feats of arms in British history. While the conventional view of the 1960s and beyond was of a war that comprised senseless slaughter, where legions of troops were thrown into battle by an uncaring General Staff, the reality is far different. Arguably WW1 represented a supreme accomplishment by the General Staff, who had to take a tiny professional army, expend it and buy time using the TA to mould a new citizen based force, which within five years became the world’s most accomplished fighting force. They did this in a backdrop of expanding the military far beyond what any would have thought possible, while adapting to technological changes at a vast rate. By the start of the One Hundred Days campaign in 1918, there is no doubt that the British Army was probably the best trained equipped and operationally effective army in the world.

This is not to diminish the slaughter or the losses felt, but it often feels that the emphasis is too greatly placed on the hellish experiences of the trenches, and not that of understanding the war, nor decision making as a whole. It is perhaps telling that the most popular public memory of WW1 comes not from primary sources, but from the comedy ‘Blackadder Goes Fourth’, clips of which to this day brighten up innumerable MOD presentations.

The Canadian memories of WW1 are a bit different from those of Britain, although shaped by the same forces: before the war started, Canada was still psychologically a colony of the Mother Country. At the end of the war, Canada stood as a recognized independent entity from Britain (though still recognizing the importance of Britain and the Empire and a proud member of the Empire), with a very hard-earned military reputation. The legalities of full independence still lay in the future (the Statute of Westminster, 1931), but the Canada of 1918 was not the same place it had been in 1914. It saw itself as a nation, not a colony.

September 10, 2012

Guaranteed headline in Canadian papers: mention the Avro Arrow

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:29

Today it’s the National Post (actually, it’s just a Canadian Press wire piece) chumming the waters with a report on an “Avro Arrow redesign pitched as alternative to controversial F-35”:

A Canadian company is seeking to go back in time to help fly Canada’s air force into the future.

Documents obtained by the Global News program “The West Block” indicate an update to the storied CF-105 Avro Arrow was put forward as an alternative to the purchase of F-35 stealth fighter jets.

And among the project’s champions is one of Canada’s top soldiers, retired Maj.Gen. Lewis MacKenzie.

The Arrow was an advanced, all-weather supersonic interceptor jet that was developed in the 1950s. Several prototypes were built and flight tests were conducted, but the project was abruptly shut down in 1959 and the aircraft never went into production.

Even people who care less than nothing about aircraft or military technology seem to have opinions about the Avro Arrow (usually allowing them to take free shots at former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker for the decision to scrap the plane). It’s far enough in the past that the facts are more than obscured by the myths of the cottage conspiracy theory industry (artisanal Canadian myth-making, hand-woven, fair-trade, and 100% organic).

The Avro Arrow is the story that never dies in Canadian papers.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/statuses/245128243458478080
https://twitter.com/InklessPW/statuses/245128551479791616
https://twitter.com/InklessPW/statuses/245130995072897024

August 31, 2012

The Northlander “was like northern Ontario on wheels”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Chris Selley remembers Ontario Northland’s The Northlander, which the Ontario government will be phasing out next month:

Long-distance rail travel for real folks, as opposed to wealthy tourists, took another sad hit recently with the announced cancellation of the Northlander — the Ontario Northland Railway’s leisurely 11-hour putter from Toronto’s Union Station to Cochrane, Ont., whence the more legendary Polar Bear Express will still take you to Moosonee, on James Bay.

It’s not sad in any commercial sense: The provincial government claims each ticket sold was subsidized to the tune of $400 (though other mathematical interpretations are available). And it’s not sad because senior citizens will now be crammed on to buses to go to their far-flung medical appointments. That’s unfortunate, no question: Trains are fundamentally more civilized than buses. But many communities the size of those served by the Northlander don’t even have buses anymore. This is the age we live in.

I find it sad, firstly, because I have fond childhood memories of that trip. There used to be a train that ran past Cochrane, all the way to Kapuskasing, where we had family friends, and it used to run overnight. There was something wonderfully odd about getting ready for bed while trundling up the Don Valley. In the winter, the train was like a strange, slow teleportation to a different planet: You went to sleep in Toronto’s grey-brown approximation of the season and awoke, after a night of groggily perceived stopping and starting, horn blasts and various crashes and bangs, to a blinding white, empty snowscape. Stumbling to the dining car — well, the box-of-cereal-and-milk car — you would find the spaces between the cars encased in snow and ice, like the inside of an old freezer.

It wasn’t fast, or slick. It was a bit ramshackle. But it was folksy. It was like northern Ontario on wheels.

The earlier post on the cancellation.

August 23, 2012

Al Stewart live: “A Child’s View of the Eisenhower Years”

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:34

August 22, 2012

Kicking the Baby Boomers while they’re down

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

P.J. O’Rourke laments the America that was, before the Baby Boomers came along and ruined everything:

The United States has set itself on a course of willful self-diminishment. Seventy-four years ago the perfect American was Superman, who happened to have been, like many of our forefathers, an undocumented alien. If Superman arrived today — assuming he could get past the INS and Homeland Security — he would be faster than the postal service, more powerful than a New York Times blogger, and able to ascend tall buildings in a single elevator.

[. . .]

America has had plenty of reasons to abdicate the crown of accomplishment and marry the Wallis Simpson of homely domestic concerns. Received wisdom tells us that, in the matter of great works and vast mechanisms, all is vanity. The Nurek Dam probably endangers some species of Nurek newt and will one day come crashing down in a manner that will make the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima tsunami look like an overwatered lawn. And we have better things to spend our country’s money on, like putting a Starbucks on every city block. But I suspect there’s a sadder reason for America’s post-eminence in things tremendous, overwhelming, and awesome.

My sad generation of baby boomers can be blamed. We were born into an America where material needs were fulfilled to a degree unprecedented in history. We were a demographic benison, cherished and taught to be self-cherishing. We were cosseted by a lush economy and spoiled by a society grown permissive in its fatigue with the strictures of depression and war. The child being father to the man, and necessity being the mother of invention, we wound up as the orphans of effort and ingenuity. And pleased to be so. Sixty-six years of us would be enough to take the starch out of any nation.

The baby boom was skeptical about America’s inventive triumphalism. We took a lot of it for granted: light bulb, telephone, television, telegraph, phonograph, photographic film, skyscraper, airplane, air conditioning, movies. Many of our country’s creations seemed boring and square: cotton gin, combine harvester, cash register, electric stove, dishwasher, can opener, clothes hanger, paper bag, toilet paper roll, ear muffs, mass-produced automobiles. Some we regarded as sinister: revolver, repeating rifle, machine gun, atomic bomb, electric chair, assembly line. And, ouch, those Salk vaccine polio shots hurt.

The Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik caused a blip in chauvinistic tech enthusiasm among those of us who were in grade school at the time. But then we learned that the math and science excellence being urged upon us meant more long division and multiplying fractions.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

“The good old days” were actually pretty crappy for most

Filed under: Books, Economics, Environment, Food, Health, History, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:22

An excerpt from The Locavore’s Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu in the National Post:

To a locavore, food in the future should be created pretty much like it was in the not-so-distant past: produce and animals raised lovingly in urban backyards, turning domestic waste into hearty dishes. Farmers’ markets in every small town and city neighbourhood, where people rediscover the joys of real food and get reacquainted with one another. The rebuilding of small-scale slaughterhouses and canning factories to serve area producers and foster the preservation of local food items for consumption in the off-season.

Ideally, this local system would also be built on seeds saved from the previous harvest rather than purchased from giant corporate seed producers; ancient “heirloom” cultivars developed before synthetic fertilizers and pesticides became available and that, as a result, are better able to seek nutrients in the soil, don’t require any chemicals and are naturally resilient to drought and pests (“If it’s old seed, it’s good seed!”); and “heritage” animal breeds better able to withstand diseases and harsh environments and grow fat and happy on pastureland alone. Pest control would be achieved through traditional “natural” products based on plants and minerals; manual labour, such as crushing or picking bugs and larvae off foliage or removing weeds by hands; and biological control methods, such as introducing exotic animals, insects and bacteria that feed on invasive pests. Finally, factory-made fertilizers would be replaced by animal manure and rotating fodder crops, such as clover and alfalfa.

[. . .]

Isn’t it possible that crushing bugs and removing weeds by hands were neither very effective nor the most productive use of one’s time? That seeds purchased from commercial suppliers offered access to superior genetic material, were not mixed up with unwanted material and were readily available when needed? That “natural” manure has always been dirty, smelly, chock-full of pathogens and requires several months of composting? That the “slow release” of nutrients from green manures and organic compost could never be as adequately controlled to match crop demands with nutrient supply as is now possible with synthetic fertilizers? Further, that old mineral (including arsenic) and plant-based pesticides were less harmful to plant pests (and thereby more likely to promote insect resistance) and more problematic to human health than more recent offerings? That introducing nonnative insects, mammals and bacteria in a new ecosystem often had unintended, broader and longer-lasting negative consequences for nontargeted species? And that, unlike chemical pesticides that typically do not persist in an ecosystem once application has ceased, exotic insects who have successfully adapted to a new environment are practically impossible to eradicate and do not remain confined to one geographical location? In the end, why are modern agricultural producers willing to purchase costly synthetic inputs, hormonal growth promoters, antibiotics and genetically modified seeds when the methods agri-intellectuals prefer are either completely free (such as giving up on the use of these inputs and on equipment such as poultry housing) or seemingly much cheaper (such as feeding cattle entirely on pastureland and saving one’s seeds instead of relying on those marketed by specialized producers)?

Ontario’s ban on a large number of pesticides and herbicides for domestic use is re-acquainting many home owners with the joys of hand-weeding their lawns. It’s getting to the point that Ontario’s provincial flower might as well be the dandelion, as they’re everywhere. There’s a reason your ancestors couldn’t wait to get off the farm…

August 19, 2012

Dave Weigel’s “Who’s Who” of prog rock

Filed under: History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 20:04

Should you be interested enough to try delving deeper into that place on the music map marked as “Prog rock: Here be demons”, you could do worse than this list from Slate,

August 18, 2012

Prog rock today: looking back on the future

Filed under: History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

The final installment of Dave Weigel’s history of prog rock at Slate:

This is what fascinates me about prog. The music is relentlessly futurist, with no nostalgia for anything in rock. Was there excess? I think we’ve answered that — there was horrible excess, and some of it involved the lead singer from the Who singing atop a giant rubber penis. In the U.K., the music press turned on prog, and turned viciously. Same thing in the States. “If you can’t have real quality,” wrote Lester Bangs of ELP, “why not go for quantity on a Byzantine scale, why not be pompous if you’re successful at it?” Bangs, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, made it into Cameron Crowe’s ‘70s nostalgia film Almost Famous. ELP did not.

[. . .]

Pop’s move away from prog didn’t happen that quickly. It was slow and tortured and involved a ton of moving parts breaking around the same time. In the United States, where most of this music ended up being sold, progressive rock radio slowly, slowly was assimilated into the Borg of commercial networking. “The reason free-form, underground progressive ended up becoming unpopular is it was the ultimate ‘active’ format,” says Donna Halper. “It was aimed at music freaks who adored everything about the newest groups and didn’t ever wanna hear a hit. OK, fine, that makes up about 6 percent of your audience. But the mass audience wanted a middle ground.” A&R men stopped looking for “progressive” acts. Sire stopped promoting Renaissance and started schlepping the Ramones. “You’d put an album out, but they were expecting to sell so many thousand,” says Davy O’List. “I don’t think it hurt the live concert attendances, but it hurt overall.”

Culturally and lyrically, prog began as anti-“establishment” music. But compositionally, it rewarded long listens and worship of virtuosity. Punk deconstructed that. [. . .]

Prog, went the thinking, was an affront against sincerity. If you gussied a song up with strings, surely you were covering for a lack of feeling. That point was made countless times, usually in the same terms with which Bangs dismissed ELP. The originators of prog were trying to make simple pop songs irrelevant. The music that replaced prog copied that reaction — what had gone before was corrupt, and had to be destroyed.

That sensibility lasted longer than most medieval land wars. The occasional mainstream defender of prog always, always started in defense mode. In June, this year, Ted Leo published a confessional in Spin all about his love for Rush. It was packaged as a “confessional” because Rush were proggy, and you couldn’t endorse prog qua prog.

[. . .]

Rush, who came late to the prog wave (1974), have trimmed back the pretention while flaunting the virtuosity. As a reward, they can still play stadiums, in basically any country. They just happen to be the most sellable artists in a niche genre. Virtuoso metal and math rock, bands like Mastodon and Protest the Hero, have nestled into the same place. That’s one fractal of modern-day prog.

January 27, 2012

Megan McArdle finds the right word to describe Obama’s vision: Nostalgianomics

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:41

In her column in The Atlantic, Megan McArdle points out the extremely ahistorical nostalgia that seems to infuse President Obama’s vision:

Surely Obama’s economic advisors have not told him that they know how to replicate the growth of the 1950s — and if they did, surely the last three years have given the lie to this belief.

I think the speech made it even clearer that other speeches have that the president’s vision of the world is a lightly updated 1950s technocracy without the social conservatism, and with solar panels instead of rocket ships. Government and labor and business working in tightly controlled concert, with nice people like Obama at the reins — all the inventions coming out of massive government or corporate labs, and all the resulting products built by a heavily unionized workforce that knows no worry about the future.

There are obviously a lot of problems with this vision. The first is that this is not what the fifties and sixties were actually like — the government and corporate labs sat on a lot of inventions until upstart companies developed them, and the union goodies that we now think of as typical were actually won pretty late in the game (the contracts that eventually killed GM were written in the early 1970s).

And to the extent that the fifties and sixties were actually like this, we should remember, as Max Boot points out, that this was not actually the day of the little guy. Big institutions actually had a great deal more power than they do now; it was just distributed somewhat differently — you had to worry less about big developers slapping a high-rise next to your single-family neighborhood, and a whole lot more about Robert Moses deciding he wanted to run a freeway through the spot where your house happened to be.

The military model of society — employed by both Obama, and a whole lot of 1950s good government types — was actually a kind of creepy way to live. As Boot says, “America today is far more individualistic and far more meritocratic with far less tolerance for rank prejudice and far less willingness to blindly follow the orders of rigid bureaucracies.” If you want the 1950s except without the rigid conformity and the McCarthyism, then you fundamentally misunderstand what made the 1950s tick.

January 24, 2012

Scottish Americans: nostalgia compounded of Braveheart, whisky tours, and castles

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

The BBC looks at the views of Scotland held by Scottish Americans:

It’s the time of year when Americans everywhere get in touch with their Scottish roots, however tangled and distant they might be, as they celebrate Burns Night.

The concept of Scottish identity has recently been invigorated as plans for a referendum on independence take shape in Holyrood. So what do Americans with Caledonian ancestry make of the debate?

[. . .]

Their vision of Scotland is mostly taken from movies like Braveheart, Mel Gibson’s 1995 tale of Scottish rebel William Wallace, who leads an uprising against an English tyrant, says Mr Forbes.

Few have any idea what modern Scotland is like, he adds, and if they do it will have been picked up from dark and twisted tales like Trainspotting or Shallow Grave.

“There are elements of truth in what people believe the whole of Scotland to be but it is not the whole truth. If you look at the marketing of Scotland, you see these broad mountainous vistas, these sparkling lakes, these old castles.

“They don’t talk about the Silicon Glen, they don’t talk about the industry around the northern oil fields.”

[. . .]

Members of a Gaelic speaking society are, apparently, still smarting after their inquiries about promoting the language in Scotland were batted away by Scottish government officials, who told them that more people speak Farsi than Gaelic in modern Scotland.

John King Bellassai, former president of the DC St Andrews Society, says Scottish Americans tend to let romance cloud their judgement when it comes to an independent Scotland

October 17, 2011

Nostalgia for the monoculture that never was

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Steven Hyden points out that waxing nostalgic for a mythical time when “we” had a monoculture is farcical:

Like Touré, I get nostalgic for the monoculture. It certainly seems like an alluring idea. The monoculture reinforces the belief that what we as critics spend so much time thinking about really is a central part of the way our society lives and breathes. Otherwise it might be hard to believe in the primacy of pop music when millions of people are out of work and our government is crippled by deep systemic dysfunction. But the best thing (or the worst thing, if you’re writing a think piece) about the monoculture is that it exists safely in the past, where it can live on in our imaginations as a mythical place where, as Touré recently wrote in Salon, “an album becomes so ubiquitous it seems to blast through the windows, to chase you down until it’s impossible to ignore it” — an all-powerful communal unity that comments on the shortcomings of the present.

[. . .]

I’ll remember going back to my junior high school that afternoon and talking about the video with all of my classmates. We knew instantly that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” signaled the dawn of a new era in pop music; it expressed our joys and fears, and pointed the way to a new future. We pledged to commit all the details of this moment (sorry, Moment) to memory, so that when our children asked us what it was like When The World Changed Forever, we would be able to pass down the tale.

Oh, wait a second: It didn’t happen that way at all.

Yes, I saw “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video over lunch, but nobody seemed to know who Nirvana was when I got back to school. It wasn’t like my friends could just punch up the video on their iPhones after I told them about it; the clip was in heavy rotation on MTV, but you still had to watch the channel for an hour or two (and at certain times of the day) to see it. Once my classmates did see it, a number of them purchased “Nevermind,” as I did. But many of them didn’t. Some preferred Pearl Jam. Some liked N.W.A.’s “Niggaz4life.” Some didn’t care about music at all; they’d rather play Tecmo Bowl. Then there were the millions and millions of Americans who bought Garth Brooks’ “Ropin’ the Wind,” the best-selling album of 1991. If anything, that was the album that we as a culture were united behind — it sold 14 million copies, though I never heard it once blasting through people’s windows.

October 9, 2011

Top Gear: Jeremy Clarkson’s tribute to the E-type Jaguar

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

January 28, 2011

QotD: If those were the “good old days” then to hell with them

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

One of the difficulties progressives face is trying to make centralized planning sound like a good idea. Even the president, with all his rhetorical genius and majestic vagueness, can struggle with the task. So, from time to time, it’s important to mold history a bit to, you know, make a point.

Early on in his State of the Union, for instance, President Barack Obama reminisced of an age when “good jobs” meant “showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown.” A time when you “didn’t always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors,” and, if you “worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck and good benefits and the occasional promotion. Maybe you’d even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company.”

Way to dream big! Really, was this country ever about being proud that your children ended up in the same plant you slaved in for 30 years? Even with a promise of a union pension and — if you’re lucky — an “occasional” promotion, it sounds like a soul-crushing grind you’d want your offspring to escape, tout de suite.

Luckily, in the real world, history tells of a story filled with dynamic movements of people, class climbing, churning innovation, booms and busts and widespread embrace of risk-taking.

Now, as the president explained, “painful” changes have crashed down on his revisionism and Americans have been forced to compete, find India on a map, move from town to town and study.

David Harsanyi, “Who are we in ‘Sputnik moment’?”, Denver Post, 2011-02-28

July 8, 2010

Monty sneers at your so-called “service industry” economy

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:10

In today’s daily Financial Briefing, Monty takes a bit of time to pine for the good old days when a job meant lots of physical work:

I’ve always felt that the “service-based” economy idea was kind of a mirage. Yes, IT has turned into a huge industry in the United States; and yes, IT has transformed the world job market. I’m just not sure the transformation is an entirely positive one. If you’re smart and willing to sit in a cubicle all day staring at a computer screen, you can do quite well. If your skills are more mechanical or manual in nature, or you like to work outdoors or on a shop-floor . . . not so much. It’s not just a question of being smart enough or not. Are we going to say that people below some arbitrary level of IQ are not essential any more, or are not able to be productive or successful? It’s almost like a mirror-image of Harrison Bergeron. Efficiency isn’t everything, in markets or anything else. An economy must produce stuff, not just electrons in different patterns that fly back and forth. Less-bright people may have skills that the smarties lack. Many is the theoretical physicist or mathematician or computer whiz who must call a plumber when the toilet backs up.

Speaking as someone who started with a few manual labour jobs, I’m absolutely delighted that I didn’t have to stay in that segment of the economy: I was terrible at ’em. He does make a good point that no matter how digitized our economy becomes, there will always be need for people who are more skilled at moving atomic-based matter as well as those who play with electrons.

It’s not exactly news that Obama is as anti-business as they come, even for a Democrat, but it’s nice to see that more people are realizing it. It’s useful to recognize the beast that’s killing you.

This is a good overview of why Obama (or any politician, really) can’t “create jobs” by hiring in the public sector. Public-sector workers do not add to GDP; they are net consumers of GDP because their paychecks are funded ultimately through taxes and fees. (They are also overpaid by about 12% compared to the private sector, mainly because their jobs are not subject to market pressures.) Public workers are paid via transfer-payments from the private sector. Government workers of any level are overhead. They are part of the cost-center, not the profit-center. You don’t hear private sector businessmen crying, “Let’s increase our overhead by 100%, boys! It’s the only way to save the firm!” There’s a reason why they don’t say that: it’s self-evidently stupid. There is also the fact that economies do not exist to give people jobs — economies exist to mediate the flow of goods between producers and consumers. Jobs are a side-effect, not the purpose, of an economy.

Several embedded links in the original post that are worth following.

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