Steampunk/dieselpunk challenge; how does Babbage's ballet interrelate with the three new British national institutions created immediately after the first world war, all of which insisted on mastering all the technologies and career paths involved as vertically integrated complexes?
That'll be Lord Reith's BBC, Lord Trenchard's RAF, and Dame Ninette de Valois' Royal Ballet. At one point the BBC actually administered colonial territory - a couple of islands where key radio transmitters stood - as well as having all its trades in house and doing very serious radio engineering R&D. John Causebrook, who essentially founded GSM radio planning at Vodafone in the 90s, started out as a propagation engineer with BBC Research.
Trenchard insisted from the word go that the RAF would have not only its own Staff College to create its own doctrine and its own corps of general staff officers, but its own Technical College to create its own craftsmen and engineers. This was a key difference between the RAF and the Luftwaffe in 1940; Hitler insisted on spending every penny on moar aircraft. We spent a lot on institution building - not just the radar project, but the maintenance shops and flying schools and warehouses full of parachutes and many, many telephone lines to tie it all up.
De Valois wanted, and got, an institution that would provide a regular income for dancers, but also a career path for lighting technicians, musicians, choreographers, costume tailors, etc, etc.
Lesson; it's fun to tear down the dead wood, but you'll end up putting it all back and more.
Also: Tin House #41 should be hitting your mailboxes or newsstand any day now. The dual theme is Hope/Dread
Isn't that the dual theme of all science fiction?
@91; I fully agree. This goes double for breakfast cereals, etc. Fashionable throwaway brand references get on my nerves; what the fuck are Triscuits, Mr. Coupland, and more to the point WHY SHOULD I CARE?
(The inverse of this was the period when BBC TV presenters were under orders not to mention any brand name whatsoever for fear of committing advertising.)
Mind you, thanks to blogging I have emotional reactions to a wide range of American journalists, going the whole way from hatred to hatred via sarcasm, contempt, half-amused cynicism etc. I could probably parody several of them. But sportsmen, general purpose TV personalities, etc - these actually work as a distancing device, rather than a familiarising one.
Like using the bizarre sex organs of the Wqlzhk slime mould colonies of the planet MK3458 to render the familiar human drama playing out aboard the starship thrillingly strange.
The thing about tactics and strategy is that good strategy beats good tactics, but however good your strategy is, it's not going to help if you get run over and crushed within the first five minutes of the fight.
The professor recommended we check out any of Keegan's earlier titles, but warned us that his later books descended more and more into pop-history and were much less academically rigorous.
I think that would hit it. A History of Warfare is good but it's already showing Toryish sweeping statements about hordes of stalwart riders etc in places.
He wrote an instant book about Iraq in 2003 that basically sucked up to the US Department of Defense quite embarrassingly. If it hadn't, it couldn't have been written at the time without the access. I remember reading bits of it and thinking "Oh God, there goes Keegan".
About the rivers thing, this is not necessarily stupid. There's a levels of analysis issue here.
In the context of the Civil War, where you're beginning to see the combination of pretty good operational and strategic level transport - railways and steamships - and nothing but shanks' pony at the tactical level that dominated the First World War, a river is a barrier at the tactical level but a highway at the operational and, at least for the Mississippi, at the strategic level.
If you're standing on one side of the river wondering how you'll get across to get at Johnny Reb, or wondering how long it'll keep the feds on the other side, it's a barrier; if you're wondering how to supply the advance into Virginia, or wherever, it's an opportunity.
Last nite she said
Oh Baby I feel so down
The way I've got this cough
and I'm so worn out
So I, I turned around
Oh baby, I know the score
It's swine flu for sure
I'm walking out that door
Well, I've been asleep for, oh, fifteen minutes this week
Oh baby, I could drown
in my own snot
I keep spreading the virus
See people, they don't understand.
No girlfriends, they can't understand.
Your grandsons, they won't understand.
On top of this, I ain't ever gonna understand.
He didn't call up a demon; he called up reality, which is harder to deal with.
It was an extremely brief job because, during the second day of a three-day seminar, afdter watching all the people who *really, really, REALLY needed to use the restroom, but were forbidden to do so by the organizers (if you left during a session you were not allowed back in, and your fee was not refunded).
That's interesting; this has been used as a form of interrogation under borderline torture. Keep giving the guy more coffee, whilst being all nice cop, then turn on the nasty cop act while he squirms.
It seems that a lot of people have strange baseline views about water intake; interestingly, this has gone from the sporting world. Racing cyclists (!) used to refuse water on the road because they thought it slowed them down; these days, it's practically a status symbol in any field of sport to hook down as much electrolyte as possible (it shows you're working hard). The military has gone the same way; once they used to demand water discipline, now they spend startling amounts of money out of their own pockets on Camelbaks.
I don't know what the origin of this killer meme is, but it does seem that it dies out among people who regularly exercise themselves thirsty, probably because of the banging your head on a wall principle (it feels so much better when you stop).
Also, I heard the phrase "spiritual warfare" in the context of Bush-era right-wing Christianism as well.
I think the Nobel committee is trolling right-wing blogs.
And why should they spend some undetermined number of IT hours to massage their internal data into the formats that Google or some other party requires?
No, just say *what* format it is and point it into /public_html/.
In the UK, we get a lot of this shit. Among other things, the complete list of postcodes and the locations they map to is secret - or rather, copyrighted and extremely expensive. (Somebody posted it to wikileaks the other day.) And the OpenStreetMap guys discovered that the administrative boundaries are copyright, as well; so they've got a project going to walk around London ground-truthing the borough boundaries by observing the signage etc.
They didn't dance with women, because they thought that was a bit gay.
Yes, I think there's a certain level of upfuckedness where nothing can be gayer than appearing to enjoy the company of women.
This could save Microsoft; imagine if they reused the WIndows codebase. Heeerrrres' Clippy!
"Hey! It looks like you're attempting to induce orgasm in your partner(s)!"
Followed by:
Microsoft Windows Management Console
This action might change your mood, relationships, parental status, or sexual orientation. You may wish to consult your human resources representative.
Yes No?
Followed by:
General Protection Fault
0xgh8x4hf
DEADCHICKEN
(Oh, the computer came too soon. Again.)
Some other issues - what about collision detection, and the possibility of a broadcast storm*? Isn't this just going back to the days of hubs?
* in context, perhaps a sudden climatic surge of many-to-many communication would be desirable...
excellent physical health
Compare the Soviet leaders at the same time; physically decrepit and held together by the best doctors available in the Soviet Union and indeed the best doctors anywhere money could buy*, but I think looking back it's never been suggested that any of them were Alzheimer's cases in office.
I mean, suggested with the degree of seriousness and plausibility that it has been for Reagan, and excluding the nationalist woofing on both sides.
* A relative of my partner, a highly respected French professor of surgery, was summoned to Moscow in the 70s to operate on Leonid Brezhnev, thus extending detente by x years where x>0. Thanks!
The best bits of the Dunning-Kruger experiment are that:
1) When told their actual results, competent subjects' estimation of their own abilities improved.
2) When told their actual results, incompetent subjects' estimation of their own abilities got WORSE - i.e. they assumed that however stupid they might be, everyone else must be worse.
*I think that bit's really important*
3) Practice improved everyone's competence on the tests AND their self-assessment.
*That's quite important too*
Caller-ID has never been good enough for critical applications. This doesn't stop people relying on it and others exploiting their reliance.
Welcome to social democracy, Dave!
But ZOMG if those evil Obama people get their way someone would take the legally-binding document I signed seriously, as if I'd meant it.
Krauthammer, and a lot of people like him, are heavily invested in the notion that their statements should not be taken to reflect their mental state, which implies legal responsibility.
I'm really tempted to write (at least a blog post) in which a French LPD (perhaps Mistral; a really handsome ship) pulls into Long Beach to offer a free clinic on the tankdeck as part of a political/military influence operation, rather like what the US Marines do in West Africa. (They already delivered a load of schoolbooks for La Nouvelle-Orléans that way.)
Or would the shock/sensawunda delta be higher if it was the redcoats, or rather, Jack Tar and one of the Bays or Bulwark?
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