AFAIK Espresso machines were invented in the early 20th century when Italian train crews used to make coffee with water from their steam engines.
Story too good to check.
I suppose might be half true in a mundaner sort of way in that, come the Great Depression, companies tooled up to make steam engines might have been looking for something to diversify into and asked themselves "What can we make out of high-pressure brass pipework that consumers all over the world donl;t yet know that they want?"
Me@16: "Wilhelm Friedenfabrikant Dachdecker"
Lawrence@18: "Machfrieden, surely, not Friedenfabrikant?"
P J Evans@31: "'Friedenmacher', nicht wahr?"
I did say that I didn't know German!
Ach, Walter Schott! One of the great early historical novelists. Worthy to be remembered alongside Horaz Wahlpohl, Anton Schlamp, Wilhelm Friedenfabrikant Dachdecker, and Frau Elise Gaschell.
I don't know German, but the Fontane sounds a better poem than the McGonagall even if you only know English!
Wow!
Thanks for posting that.
And I only knew of Macgonagall before.
Its a pity I don't read German. Well, I get about three-quarters of it I think - but some of that is on the "if only it were English" principle, and some of it on the "if only it were Wagner". Which makes:
"Und der Brückner jetzt"
sound very strange :-)
You rotters! You reminded me of the Awful Warnings in Folk Songs thread! Wasted at least an hour when I should have been doing something to some computer or other.
Paul, were the smart kids the teachers favourites at your school? You were lucky. At my school good at sport counted for more. And both obedience to authority and also general niceness rated higher than academic ability (and you could make arguments that they should)
David Dyer-Bennet@87: "Any scheme for hidden communication among a significant group of students is likely to be compromised; it just takes one mole, or possibly compromise of other communications channels."
I think school students have been managing to communicate secretly for centuries! Without using encryption, electronics, or any tradecraft beyond the that which is common to most children.
Whispers in the corridor, secret notes passed between desks, quiet chats at the far end of the playing fields, all still work. Against teachers anyway.
Not that the teachers are always trying to find out. When my daughter was ten years old I took her to some secondary school open days. At the school she eventually went to, it took me five minutes to work out two places that the kids went to have a secret and illegal smoke. I even came across a small group of girls smoking. If I could work it out that fast I am sure the teachers could. But perhaps it wasn't in their interests to stamp it out.
But then, on a larger scale, I know places in our neighbourhood where cocaine is sometimes bought and sold, where bars serve underage customers or stay open out of hours, where pubs still allow smoking even though it is supposedly banned, and (possibly) where prostitution goes on. Unless I really am a natural-born world-class detective, I assume that the police know all those things as well. But they have better things to do than suppress a few late-night drinking dens.
Annalee Flower Horne@27: "Bullying doesn't happen because well-meaning teachers and administrators are trying their best and failing to foster a safe, supportive, and civil learning environment. Bullying happens because schools send a very loud and clear message that they care more about defending bullies than protecting their victims."
Yes. What schools - and other hierarchical institutions - don't like to admit is that bullying is socially stabilising. It reinforces existing power structures.
Basically its a way of recruiting the relatively weak onto the side of the relatively powerful by getting them to gang up on the even weaker. (Which on a large scale is what happens when political movements pick on marginalised groups to despise - Fascism really *is* organised bullying)
And it can happen spontaneously. If there is no obvious candidate for being bullied someone often gets picked on at random. There is a positive feedback loop. Once someone is seen to be the victim of bullying those who are insecure in their own position in the social structure have a strong incentive to gang up on them. In effect to join the winning side. (Which is why it REALLY ISN'T YOUR FAULT if you get bullied - and it often really isn't just because you are black, white, gay, fat, thin, black, gay, bad at sport, shy, intellectual, whatever because someone gets picked on whatever happens - people hurt themselves by assuming that they get picked on for a reason. But often they don't)
This makes life easier for the actual bosses (who in a school situation include both teachers and the most socially successful students) because the people beneath them in the hierarchy direct their opposition downwards. (Which is why the old cliche that weak leaders are bullies is true - strong leaders don't need to bully, they get others to do it for them) So bullying is actually functional, it reinforces the social system in a school (or in the army, in prison, or in some kinds of workplace)
So to root it out you have to be radical and take risks. Platitudes won't do. And why teachers (or other people in positions of power) can only oppose bullying by ALWAYS siding with the victim. If you treat it as if it was a fight with two sides to it, or if you are seen to reward the bully in any way, or even to overlook their actions, then you reinforce the bullying - the only way to stop bullying is by humiliating or demoting or degrading the bullies, which removes the point of bullying in the first place. But that doesn't happen because well-meaning teachers (or bosses, or officers) find it hard to accept that they might be benefiting by others bullying.
Of course the best way to avoid bullying is to replace authoritarian, hierarchical social structures with liberal, egalitarian ones. I suspect that that isn't going to happen any time soon in schools :(
Would they ask for the students online bank account shared secrets? PIN? Their house door keys? Access to their bedrooms?
I work in computer systems support in adult education and I sometimes think I (& other staff) have too much access to details of our students. The student record system contains full name, birth date, marital status, home address and phone number of all students. And photos. And external email addresses. As one of the system administrators I can access it if I want even though my job involves little direct contact with students. So there is nothing physically stopping me listing, say, all single or divorced women students aged between 30 and 45 who live in the same part of London as me & looking at their photos and seeing who I might fancy. And then work from email and name to find facebook or blogs etc. It would be tacky & immoral & almost certainly against my contract of employment but its very possible to do.
The same sort of behaviour from teachers rather than support staff would be much more serious because of the power relationship. (& would I think be illegal in this country). And with under-18 students it gets even worse.
Teachers of young students probably ought to be deliberatly *avoiding* information about their students online social networking. If onl for their own protection.
Connie H#19: "IIRC, the study found there's a correllation in self-reporting - those in the top third of whatever skill or ability is being tested tend to underestimate how good they are."
That boils down to everyone, clever or stupid, thinking that other people are more like them than they (we) really are. So if true we all think we are normaller than we are.
Which implies that if I am really normal than I am less normal than I think I am. And I am less good at the things I am bad at that I realise but better at the things I am good at. But the only way I can tell them apart is if someone else tells me I am good at something, based on a statistical comparison with large numbers of others. Suddenly I am in favour of exams. Thank you London University, I now know I am really really good at genetics and ecology and bioinformatics.
Where can I go to take a sense-of-humour exam?
Actually I'm a little dubious about the paper linked here.
The grammar test was based on a very small sample. Also us devotees of Language Log know that American Standard Written English is full of Bad Things that Good Writers Don't Do. (Their latest riff on it is that following the rules of Strunk and White rots your brain - literally. Well, maybe, they only speculate on causality. There is a claim that people - Nuns - who used more complex sentences with more qualifiers in their 20s were less likely to get Alzheimers later in life. So I'm alright, I thought. And then remembered Terry Pratchett who I suppose is the exception that proves)
And quantifying sense of humour sounds like hard thng to do. They say they used the correlation between the test subject's assessment of jokes and some professional comedians. But that isn't measuring how "good" your sense of humour is, its measuring how much it is like everyone else's (assuming that pros know what works)
Amazed to find that the page at the Investor's Business Daily is still up, the one with the gaff about Stephen Hawking inserted into a heap of nonsense about the British NHS.
I was half thinking they would have taken it down in shame. Is it that they really don't understand how stupid they look? Or is it the Big Lie? Do they know perfectly well that what they are saying is in fact evidence against their side of the argument, but assume that if they say it loudly enough and often enough, and if they assert against the facts that the evidence is on their side, people will be conned into believing them?
"People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."
One wonders what sort of healthcare Hawking would have got in the USA when his illness first become obvious. He was a 21-year-old student at the time, not as far as I know in any kind of employment. His disease is one with a typical prognosis of gradual decline into complete immobility and then death in about ten years. Would he have got any insurance in the USA? Would Cambridge University even have been allowed to offer him a job?
[Fixed link to Investor's Business Daily. Please, everyone, look at the Preview when you're posting. If a link is greyed out, the post won't appear but rather be held for moderation, which is not instantaneous.--JDM]
Adrian Smith@46: "One claim I came across on a libertarian site was that the admittedly-high US spending on health was actually funding some vast percentage of medical research [...] Anyone got a potted refutation to hand?"
Can't refute it because it its true. About half of all the really good biological science funding in the world is US. And you make most of it freely available online to anyone with a web-browser. Check out the wonderful NCBI website.
Its true but its an argument on the side of truth, freedom, and universal healthcare for all. Its the US taxpayer who pays for most of the real science, not the drug companies. Their stuff is vastly expensive, mostly directed towards extending the patent life of old drugs by minor variations, and they keep it secret. Secret science is by definition a dead end. It is unproductive. It leads nowhere. The future of biological science - and the future of medicine - is in what is being done in universities and public laboratories. And they are largely taxpayer-funded. With a big dose from charity - though the largest charitable funders for basic medical research have traditionally been British, not American - about a quarter of the Human Genome Project was paid for by British private funding, about half by the US government - in this field we are the capitalists and you the socialists. And US big business sponges off free science provided by US taxpayers. Its the socialised, public, part of the system that works best.
What surprises me in this argument is that so many Americans - even ones who support public health - don't seem to realise how much money they are paying out of their taxes for healthcare already. Medicare, Medicaid, VA, the CDC, public hospitals and so on together cost each of you more than most people in other countries pay for public health service because the broken private insurance system with all its inflated bureaucracy, unnecessary procedures, and bloated legal bills has forced up the price of medical care and of medicines And then you pay all your private insurance on top of that! It is as if your left hand and your right hand were bidding against each other in an auction, boosting the prices that you will have to pay one way or another.
You pay more tax than the Brits do for healthcare, both as an absolute figure and as a proportion of income. But the outcomes, objectively measured by life expectancy, are not significantly different from British ones. In fact on average we live a little longer than you do. Even though we are on average less well off, and we smoke and drink more. So you all are paying twice over for inferior quality of service. You are being ripped off. (In some Scandinavian countries and in France they do pay more tax than you do or we do towards healthcare - but they get even better service for it. Again. as objectively measured by death rates.)
You spend more than any other country in the world on healthcare but your life expectancy is fiftieth in the world! (According to your own CIA) UK is 36th, Netherlands 30th. You guys are slightly behind Bosnia, Cyprus, Ireland, and Portugal; slightly ahead of Albania, Costa Rica, Cuba and Libya. And you are dropping in the rankings - three years you were 48th. In what other field of human enterprise is the USA almost certain to be overtaken soon by Albania, Costa Rica, Cuba and Libya?
You are paying Swedish or French luxury prices for Albanian or Cuban quality of service.
The American people are being ripped off. They are being conned. They are being taken, advantage of, for a ride, in, and to the cleaners. They are being bilked, bunked, cheated, chicaned, chiselled, clipped, cozened, deceived, defrauded, deluded, diddled, done, double-crossd, duped, fiddled, fleeced, flim-flammed, fooled, gouged, gulled, gypped, hoaxed, hoodwinked, hornswoggled, hustled, jived, misled, mulcted, overcharged, pick-pocketed, put-on, rooked, run-around, scagged, scammed, screwed, shafted, shaken down, shammed, shortchanged, shorted, snow-jobbed, sold a bridge, spoofed, strung a line, stung, suckered, swindled, swizzed, tricked, trimmed, two-timed, whitewashed, and just plain robbed.
I don't think supposedly epilepsy-inducing images are the nastiest things that have been posted on 4chan by a long way. I don;t actually want to describe what I think are the nastiest things I've seen there.
But I still look at it now and again.
And I look at it through one of a number of mirrors, as far as I know unconnected with moot or the 4chan site, which you can find without much difficulty with a bit of poking about through Google/Reddit/slashdot and other obvious routes.
So one or two big SPs blocking 4chan is not going to stop people seeing /b/
I don't want an e-book.
I don't even really want a mobile phone or a PDA (though I've owned more than one of each)
I want a computer that can do everything my Macbook can do plus some, that can fit in a trouser pocket without making visible bulges, and that has some kind of foldaway rollup digital paper screen so I can read stuff any size I want. Then I decide what to read, watch, or listen to on it, not the suppliers. And whther or not I keep a file will depend on me and the physics of the storage, not on someone else's business model, however well-meaning that someone is.
Unfortunately it would also need some sort of magical foldaway keyboard that I can't quite imagine. That is the Fundamental Problem of PDAs, palmtops, & notebook computers - the largest keyboard that fits in a pocket is too small to type on with ten fingers, the smallest keyboard you can type with is too large to carry around by default the way you would carry a mobile phone or a wallet or a wristwatch, whether you intended to use it or not. There's only about a centimetre in it, but its a bloody important centimetre. Anyone who used both a Psion 3 and a Psion 5 will know exactly what I mean. Unless they have unnaturally small fingers for an adult.
But, like most here, I like books.
Also I read in the bath.
Moment of realisation from reading Pamela Sargent's article.
My grandmother, my mother's mother, was old enough to have read a nwespaper account of the Wright Brother's flight. She almost certainly did. (Her future husband, my grandafatehr who I never met, was already adult, had left Scotland, worked in India and Africa for some years, and returned home)
But Gran lived long enough for travelling to the moon to have become history. Something that many of us knew we weren't about to do again any day soon.
That's weird. And I don't think my generation has seen anything like the kind of technical advance that actually changed the way people live that my grandparents did. (And maybe their grandparents even more so - they went from the invention of the railway to flight)
Or maybe the advances that will be remembered in future are the one we harly notice because we are part of them.
"Where's my rocket pack?"
rea#29: wrote "Defeated legionaires from Crassus' army at Carrhae are sold into slavery by the Persians to msyterious strangers."
That story is in Pliny!
"Next comes the district of Margiane,5 so remarkable for its sunny climate. It is the only spot in all these regions that produces the vine, being shut in on every side by verdant and refreshing hills. This district is fifteen hundred stadia in circumference, but is rendered remarkably difficult of access by sandy deserts, which extend a distance of one hundred and twenty miles: it lies opposite to the country of Parthia, and in it Alexander founded the city of Alexandria. This place having been destroyed by the barbarians, Antiochus, the son of Seleucus, rebuilt it on the same site as a Syrian city. For, seeing that it was watered by the Margus, which passes through it, and is afterwards divided into a number of streams for the irrigation of the district of Zothale, he restored it, but preferred giving it the name of Antiochia. The circumference of this city is seventy stadia: it was to this place that Orodes conducted such of the Romans as had survived the defeat of Crassus."
Chrissl#43: "I wonder how sites like this are faring under the current Uighur/Chinese political situation. As I understand it, the Chinese are bent on confirming that the Uighur province(s) have "always" been part of China, while the Uighurs themselves clearly have some non-Chinese historical background going on"
Seeing as Uighur is in effect a dialect of Turkish - I believe it it is rather different from Anatolian Turkish and Azeri, but mutually intelligible with Kazkh, Uzbek and Turkmen. I doubt if even the Chinese could wipe out all that history very quickly.
Marilee#58 wrote: "If it's a Roman fort, Mary Gentle wrote the book."
Or will have already written the book :-)
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive..."
We're perhaps coming to the end of the generation whose experience of the world and history in the making is mainly mediated through television. But it was my generation. And there are things we all remember seeing live on, or first hearing about from, TV that we will never forget. Lots of them are terrible things, there's not much point in going through them. But some of them were wonderful.
I'll never forget (I hope) seeing those pink rocks on Mars, and not quite understanding why almost no-one else in the crowded Student Union bar I was in was thrilled by it. Or Nelson Mandela walking out of prison.
But the most memorable of them all was Apollo 11, when I was 12 years old. And being allowed to stay up all night (almost) to see them leave the LEM and walk on the Moon. And still being awake in the morning when someone went out to get a copy of the paper, which was about little else, in my eyes anyway (was it the Observer? Was the landing on a Saturday?)
As someone said on John Scalzi's blog the Grauniadn article isn't really chest-beating at Americans, its trying to grab the attention of the people (they still exist) who think that fiction cannot be Literature unless it is about a very bored middle-aged Oxbridge-educated man in Hampstead or Islington who is upset because nobody understands him and who has lots of bored middle-aged Oxbridge-educated accquantainces who strangely resemble mildly famous middle-aged Oxbridge-educated people we recognise from politics/TV/academia [choose one]
He should have mentioned Alan Moore though :-)
Dutch clouds sound like Suffolk clouds. Or perhaps East of England clouds in general. Must be the North Sea.
Further west in Britain we have Atlantic clouds which come over in big flat layers for half the time and puffy little fluffinesses the other half.
A few months ago I noticed the number of cars with foreign numberplates parked in the streets round where I live. (South-East London) So, in an act of true geekishness, I have been keeping an occasional notebook with counts of vehicles with foreign plates. So far France is winning, hardly surprisingly, but the Netherlands are not far behind.
But I think there are proportionatly more buses from France and more lorries (trucks) from NL. I don't think I've seen any caravans/mobile homes yet. Proper analysis with Chi squared on my blog when & if I can be bothered :)
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