Empires of the mind

Think Tanks

2012-01-05T14:41:00.002+02:00

Recently I've been writing about propaganda and the way vested interests use it to influence the media. Chomsky refers to, a Bought Priesthood, the technocrats, columnists, pundits, university professors, intellectuals and business lobbyists who benefit from the political status quo and use their position to defend and support it.
These, according to the Chomsky propaganda model, provide the media with large amounts of ready-to-print material to support the needs of special interest groups. So who are the people providing this material?

I've previously mentioned: Global_Climate_Coalition This now defunct lobby group took financial support from BP, Esso, Ford and General Motors. Although this group eventually folded, as the evidence for Global Warming increased, the denier propaganda that they disseminated in their heyday is still being repeated today.
One group that is still very much in business is Policy Exchange. This organisation describes itself as an " independent, non-partisan educational charity". A look at the testimonials dotted around the Policy Exchange website will give you some idea of how non-partisan they are. Even Boris Johnston recognises that they represent the interests of the centre right:

They produce, apparently 'a torrent of ... media scoops', I think Boris probably means press releases than can be reprinted by the media at no cost. The print media, worldwide, are all having huge financial problems. No one has come up with a financial model that allows them to make a profit in the face of so much free, online competition. Therefore, anything that can reduce their costs, by allowing them to fill the pages with zero effort, is hard to refuse.
The kind of article that gets sourced from the material produced by Policy Exchange is thus dailymail/Green-taxes-treble-2020-costing-taxpayers-16bn-year
This article opens with "Taxes to pay for contentious climate change policies are set to treble over the next decade, soaring to more than £16billion a year."

Another think tank is the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Today they picked up on the BBC interview with Steven Hawking, where Hawking repeated his warning that climate change, or nuclear war could mean the end of the human race. GWPF came up with an item, Scientist criticise Hawkings doomsday hype, quoting another BBC interview.

scientists-criticise-hawkings-doomsday-hype
So who are these scientists? One was Dr Benny Peiser, from Liverpool John Moores University, UK, who was, apparently, highly critical of the reported remarks. The second was Sir Arthur C. Clarke!
Now it turns out that Dr Peiser actually runs the Global Warming Policy Foundation, so no surprises there. More improbable was the snippet from Sir Arthur C Clarke who was quoted as saying, "I am surprised Professor Hawking didn't mention the danger of an asteroid impact which is inevitable sooner or later. Admittedly, this is most unlikely to wipe out the human race, but it could send us back to the Stone Age."
Well ACC was a great SF writer and asteroid impact on Earth was one of his plot devices. Quoting him on this can hardly be considered criticism of Steven Hawking, but somehow GWPF makes it seem so. BTW, Global Warming Policy Foundation have to go back to a news item from the year 2001 to find the quote from Clarke. (Unsurprisingly, as Sir Arthur died in 2008)

Policy Exchange and the Global Warming Policy Foundation are both registered charities. Last year Policy Exchange turned over £2 million yet it enjoys the tax advantages of a charity. Global Warming Policy Foundation is rather smaller, it has 3 employees and turns over a mere £500,000 a year.
The thing about charities is, they are supposed to be non-political. UK based organisations such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth can not be considered charities in the UK because of their political positions. Given this, it seems nothing short of astonishing that the likes of Policy Exchange and Global Warming Policy Foundation, which are little more than a neocon propaganda units, should have the status as a charity.

"Think Tanks. . . phoney institutes where ideologue-propagandists pose as academics ... into which money gushes like blood from opened arteries to support meaningless advertising's suffocation of genuine debate". (John Chuckman)

Engineering Consent

2011-12-24T12:15:00.003+02:00

Edward Bernays is most famous for introducing the concept of manipulating public opinion for profit. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays dreamt up a number of breathtaking techniques that have changed the way opinions are formed, and ideas sold, using the mass media.

In an essay called Engineering Consent he wrote, "entire populations, which are undisciplined or lacking in intellectual or definite moral principles, are vulnerable to unconscious influence and susceptible to want things that they do not need."

Bernay's first major triumph, in the field of advertising, was in the campaign to persuade women to smoke. At the time, the 1920's, there was a taboo against women smoking. Bernays cleverly associated women's smoking with the campaign for votes for women. Totally spuriously, he propagated the idea women campaigning for the right to vote considered the cigarette the symbol of their cause, the Torch of Freedom.

Bernay paid women to smoke in public and took photographs of them. These were always attractive women, but carefully chosen not to look like models. The newspapers were supplied with these pictures along with explanatory copy which they could use free of charge. Interestingly, this led to genuine campaigners for women's votes picking up on the cigarette campaign and eventually endorsing it.

Since 1920, when Bernay's techniques were still called propaganda, opinion manipulation has gone from strength to strength. The Nazis excelled at such matters, so well in fact that they brought the word into disrepute and Bernays had to come up with a new term, Public Relations, to replace propaganda.

In earlier times advertising had been about announcing the latest products and their features. But now the owners of the big manufacturing companies, and the banks, wanted people to buy more than merely what they needed, they must now desire things. With Bernays help, through the manipulation of irrational desire, the consumer was invented.

Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s, said, "We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. ... Man's desires must overshadow his needs." Bernay's, with his Freudian connections, linked sex to marketing and soon American car ads showed couples enjoying almost orgasmic delight over their new car purchases.

Eventually all political campaigns latched on to public relations and by 1997 Britain's Labour Party had fully embraced the marketing model to the extent that actual, fundemental policies, in particular Clause 4, were abandoned.

Because the two main parties in Britain have well entrenched support the New Labour campaign of 1997 concentrated first on identifying the 'swing' voters, those who might or might not support Labour, depending on policies.

Once typical swing voters were identified they were invited to join focus groups and what would please the focus group was then investigated. From this Labour's campaign was developed.

This focus group strategy, (tell me what you want, what you really, really want) is now used to market everything from movies to cake mix. It doesn't just identify what the voters want, or rather what the focus group wants, it also changes the product. Nowadays movies are 'test screened' so that the producers can decide which of a variety of endings is most satisfactory. So too were New Labour policies test marketed, to see what would engender the most votes.

Of course, some causes are not negotiable. Support for unpopular wars must still be 'sold' to the public. And certain agendas, pro-nuclear power, for example, are promoted by strong vested interests. The media is saturated with input from armies of special interest groups each promoting a particular cause.

Neom Chomsky, the linguistics expert and liberal has gone to lengths to identify how public opinion is manipulated, for both political and consumer marketing ends.

Chomsky refers to the Bought Priesthood, the technocrats, columnists, pundits, university professors, intellectuals and business lobbyists who benefit from the political status quo and use their position to defend and support it.

Chomsky argues that all mass media news comes ready filtered, for our consumption, via the Propaganda Model.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model#The_filters

Filter 1, Ownership.

The ownership of mainstream media is concentrated into a decreasing number of growth orientated, profit motivated clusters. The BBC cannot be excluded from this group, as in order to maintain funding they have to keep the government of the day on side. As Jon Pilger wrote, "The BBC began in 1922, just before the corporate press began in America. In the same year the British establishment was under siege. The unions had called a general strike and the Tories were terrified that a revolution was on the way. The new BBC came to their rescue. In high secrecy, Lord Reith wrote anti-union speeches for the Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and broadcast them to the nation, while refusing to allow the labor leaders to put their side until the strike was over."

Filter 2, Advertising.
Stories that conflict with a "buying mood", will tend to be excluded, along with information that presents a picture of the world that collides with advertisers' interests.

Filter 3, Sourcing.
All news media have to maintain their sources, they have to keep in good favour with government spokespeople in order to maintain the flow of news.

Filter 4 Flak.
The US-based Global Climate Coalition (GCC) - comprising fossil fuel and automobile companies such as Exxon, Texaco and Ford is a typical flak machine. The GCC was started up by Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest public relations companies, to attack the credibility of climate scientists and 'scare stories' about global warming.

Filter 5, originally, Anti-communism and fear.
This filter speaks of the selecting of bogeymen, originally communists but lately any group who might be accused of possibly having a terrorist agenda. The recent Occupy (Wall Street) etc have already started to share this demonisation. As Chomsky puts it, "the way artificial fears are created with a dual purpose... partly to get rid of people you don't like but partly to frighten the rest. Because if people are frightened, they will accept authority."

Watching a recent clip from Christopher Hitchens, he made the amusing observation that at 250 dollars a year a subscription to the Washington Post is way too much. As it's largely an organ of government propaganda it should be free to all taxpayers. (British readers can change that to the Daily Telegraph or the Guardian)

As the Czech novelist Zdener Urbanek put it. "In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know its propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West, we've learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive."

Selling the Big Lie

2011-11-29T01:34:00.016+02:00

Napoleon seems to have been amongst the first to acknowledge the power of the media. He said, "Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." By the time he was developing his news management techniques newspapers had been around a couple of hundred years but by the early 1800s advances in printing techniques had made them much cheaper. That, and increased levels of literacy had lead to the increasing influence of the press.

At the time of Hitler the first of the broadcast media was appearing. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, recognised that this would have a news-management power at least as important as the press. Goebbels commissioned the development of a cheap radio, the Volksempfänger, that was designed to be both cheap and only capable of receiving the short range German broadcasts.

These days Italy's ex PM Berlusconi has his own TV and radio stations which did not show the cheering crowds in Rome on the day he stepped down.

And, just in case we might think that news management is just something that Johnnie Foreigner gets up to, keep in mind the pro nuclear power spin that was rolled out in the early hours of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. supply-and-demand

It's no surprise that where there's money there's someone lobbying to get their story in the papers. This article, from the Guardian, discusses the Climate change denial industry. Largely funded by Exxon. ethicalliving.g2

This is what Edward Bernays, called "engineering public consent." Edward_Bernays

In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."

The Czech novelist Zdener Urbanek said. "In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know its propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West, we've learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive."

John Pilger has written much more on this subject, please read his excellent article.the-invisible-government

And why does this go on? Unsurprisingly this lobbying stuff is big business. A Washington firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and any politicians who might express sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street, and the other financial centres protests. upwithchrishayes

A free press, you must be joking. Who would call $850,000 free?

The Sound Barrier

2011-10-30T10:38:00.002+02:00

There's an old British movie called The Sound Barrier. Filmed in the 1950's it purports to tell the tale of the first attempts to fly faster than sound. At the time it was assumed that airtravel, which was starting to become cheap enough for all to afford, would mean faster and faster speeds. But first there remained the special problem of the Sound Barrier. High speed flight at supersonic speeds seemed to introduce new control problems, or at least that's how the film puts it.

At the moment we have the UK, apparently poised on the brink of something called a double dip recession. The UK, which is not a member of the Euro currency, has the option of using the old money supply controls to manage the economy. When it comes to stoking up a boom the tool that may be used is increasing the money supply. The current euphemism is QE, Quantitative Easing. This, it is claimed, will kick-start the economy by encouraging growth and this, by making it easier to pay more for property.

This seems to overlook a couple of things, the first being that the current demographic leaves a large part of the working population closing in on retirement age. The younger ones have doubts about their employment prospects and the scarcity of new jobs.

Secondly, and this is where we get into Sound Barrier territory, is the fact that the old tried and tested device for encouraging growth was last seen to work properly in 2006 and, arguably, something important has changed since then.

The change is Peak Oil, and this, for me, is where we have crossed into the supersonic region. These days growth no longer has access to an infinite fuel supply. In the old days, say the 1987 run up to the election, it was quite in order to fan the economy with cheap money, but the economies’ fuel was, and is, oil. At that time oil was cheap too, at that time, oil supply exceeded demand by a considerable margin.

This is no longer the case. Of course, officially, the jury is still out on Peak Oil, largely because the people with oil are pretty cagy about how much of it they have. Back when OPEC was being set up some members lied about how much they had because the size of the reserves represented position within OPEC. But there are reasons to believe that we have already past Peak Oil, or else are so close to it as makes no difference.

This means that any attempts to fan the market with cheap money will now be met with a new effect. As an economy tries to come out of recession and oil demand rises now the cost of oil goes up. We know that whenever this has happened before, because of war related supply restrictions, this has triggered a recession. (see previous blogs.)

This suggests that any attempt to 'kick start' the economy will be stymied, quickly, by an abrupt increase in oil price, with its customary depressing effect on the economy.

So how to deal with this? In the Sound Barrier movie one of the ace test pilots discovers that he can recover control by reversing the controls. To pull out of a dive he must push, rather than pull, the control stick back. In real life supersonic flight is a bit more complex than that, but this is movie as metaphor, not real life. ( In reality, the Sound Barrier was conquered by engineers as they gradually understood more about airflow in the supersonic region. )

Could the economy be fixed by a 'control reversal'? Instinctively, the citizens of the UK seem reluctant to buy into a new boom. They'd all sooner reduce their credit card debt and not extend their mortgages.

The civil aircraft industry didn’t persevere with supersonic flight. There just weren’t enough movie stars and millionaires to pay for it, hence no replacement for Concorde. Instead the industry chose to move people on mass, and put airtravel within reach of almost everyone. Which, along with mass car ownership and high energy cost agriculture, is why we are at Peak Oil now, and not twenty years from now.

The only fix on the table is to reduce the demand for oil, while keeping the wheels of industry going. Which means just one thing, more and more investment in renewable energy. If demand for oil can be reduced, there’s a chance of avoiding another oil price boom and shutting growth down.

Long term, this is going to be ever more difficult as oil gets harder to find. We’ll need to much burn less of it, so we can use what is available to keep our energy intensive agricultural systems going. We have to leave sufficient ‘headroom’, between the supply and demand, so that we don’t choke off all growth with high energy prices.

In the supersonic region the old rules no longer apply.

Supply and Demand

2011-09-21T18:56:00.000+03:00

A friend of mine remarked recently that she was surprised that Britain, unlike Germany and Italy, was not making more of the nuclear catastrophe in Japan. A recent item in the Guardian gives some idea why. emails-nuclear-uk-government-fukushima

Here the Guardian reproduce some 80 emails between Government officials and the British nuclear industry. These show that within 2 days of start of the Japanese disaster the government and industry had their heads together rehearsing their lines. The disaster started on March the 11th and by March the 13th, a Sunday, the British Government had prepared a,'Let's not rush to judgement' announcement. Well they certainly had. On the day the press release came out the Fukushima reactor building 3 exploded.

This was when Energy Secretary Chris Huhne mocked continental politicians, those excitable Germans, for their response to the crises. The stoic British kept to a press strategy that had been worked out the previous weekend. This warned that anti-nuclear types would probably compare the disaster to Chernobel. By the 12th April Japan itself had classified the Fukushima incident as being equivalent to Chernobel.

The recent revelations regarding News International, the Murdoch news empire, reveal a level of complicity between the press and government. As regards nuclear power the British Government had decided on its energy policy and it doesn't want to have to go changing it just because of public opinion. Murdoch promised his support to the British government, in return for support of his project to dominate British media. And, perhaps by coincidence, the government had no trouble getting its take on Fukushima into the papers.

Nuclear power is hideously expensive if the costs of incidents like Fukushima are properly considered. No insurance company will supply cover for a nuclear power station. It is assumed that the government will carry that burden should it be needed. If nuclear power companies had to buy insurance cover on the free market running costs would be much higher. Governments, of course, don't like to remind taxpayers of this important fact, and the nuclear companies certainly don't brag about it. The UK government, in particular, seems to be being led around by the nose by the nuclear industry.

Peak Oil is another issue the British government just doesn't want to think about. The issue driving price is supply and demand. Even the effect of Peak Oil could be cushioned if nations prepare for it and start developing alternatives. If demand reduces before supply starts to decline oil prices don't have to shoot through the roof. This is the lesson of the two big oil crises of the 20th century. These were generated by suppliers intentionally restricting supply and this led to some startling price spikes. When demand outstrips supply prices soar and for no additional effort profits increase, and users must belatedly struggle to find alternatives. Thus, it serves the purpose of the oil business to encourage complacency and downplay the prospect of Peak Oil.

But, while Britain chortles as Jeremy Clarkson and the Daily Mail mock developments in renewable energy Germany is forging ahead. The Fukushima incident served as a catalyst to Germany to declare that it would start to close down all its nuclear power stations. German hopes to produce 35% of all its electricity from renewables by 2020 and 80% by 2050, with a reduction of electricity usage of 50% by 2050.

Currently the anti-renewable lobby claims that all renewable proposals are lacking when it comes to dealing with the fluctuations of supply, windless day = stationary windmill, thus renewables are in trouble. And that when renewables fail to meet demand additional costs are incurred by starting up hydrocarbon powered peak-load turbines.

Even with non-renewable power, with much of the load carried by nuclear or coal/oil powered generators, peak load turbines are required. Power consumption goes through all kinds of peaks and troughs during a 24 hour cycle and when demand is very low, at night time, a conventional generator plant often has to waste power venting steam because demand is so low.

A fully developed renewable system can deal with both demand and supply fluctuations. A very mature, low risk, system is possible that stores power by pumping water into elevated resevoirs.

By pumping water to a higher level at times when demand is low or supply high, and allowing it to flow down and drive a generator when demand is high or supply low, the peaks and troughs of demand and supply can be managed.

However, one of the main issues is finding suitable areas for the two essential bodies of water. Now Germany has come up with an innovative concept, the possibility of flooding used up coal mines therefore concealing the reservoirs underground, and finding a use for those exhausted, non-renewable energy sources the coal mines.

Already some 20% of Germany's electrical power comes from renewable sources: Windpower, Biomass, Hydropower and Photovoltaic Solar power. In the UK it's about 6%. No prizes then for guessing which nation will develop the essential renewable power technologies of the future.

Further down the Hubbert curve

2011-09-04T11:39:00.000+03:00

In the last blog I spoke of modeling a fictional world - Beyond Peak Oil. Any real model of the economy, on the downslope of the Hubbert curve, must be immensely complicated, and prone to error. For writing spec. fiction we can use simpler methods. Suppose we look at some key events of the upslope of the Hubburt curve and revoke them, in the order they took place.

Looking at the last 100 years and projecting forward I can 'predict' an economy changing back from its present 2% of workforce employed in agriculture back to some 20% by 2060.

The exact timescale is in question. The steepness of the downslope of the Hubbert curve depends on demand for oil and its products. If these stay high we can expect a steep downslope which compresses the timescale. If demand reduces the rewind takes longer. Of course, if you are in the oil business the goal is to maximise profits which is best done by ensuring that demand exceeds supply as much as possible, as it has done in the oil crises of the last century.

The story is set in 2060. Describing a society that is an exact mirror of the past period is not interesting. We would, I reckon, be able to maintain some of our technology. A society with computers, the internet and television but without mass, cheap travel.

There is still oil, but it is very expensive. There is some combustion powered aviation, for the super rich. You can buy a small electric car as good as a 2010 combustion powered car but, if you are member of the 20% of the agricultural workforce you can't afford one. You either walk to work, or if you are lucky, go by bike. But you do consider yourself lucky because you are employed and with the healthcare benefits of an employed citizen.

Working people cannot afford to travel much. They see the past century, the Time of Plenty, which is accesible via TV and films, as a lost golden age of apparently universal wealth.

The middle class are much reduced as a percentage of the workforce, many formerly middle class professions are automated or have disappeared as a consequence of the increased cost of hydrocarbons. But the lifestyle of the middle class is superior to the present day.

The upper class, the super rich, are almost invisible to the naked eye. They travel the world in combustion powered aircraft. They have ownership of wilderness areas and have longer, fulfilled, healthy lives. Just occasionally they come down to earth to influence the world of men.

In some countries there is a virtually abandoned underclass with no rights, no healthcare and almost no social mobility. Such is my model of 2060.

Sliding down the Hubbert Curve

2011-08-30T18:13:00.017+03:00

There have been numerous TV shows and countless newspaper and internet articles on the subject of peak oil. As someone with an interest in writing SF the world beyond peak oil is thought provoking. (I happen to believe that SF should have some resemblance to historical analysis to the extent that we try and look at how technology/economy changes society. )

The oil experts agree that world oil production will follow a bell curve. Above is the Hubbert prediction from 1956. Beyond the peak of production, which predictions say we are now close to, although oil is still plentiful, costs start to rise.

Above is a graph of inflation adjusted oil prices (1946 - 2010). The effects of two oil crises appear as perturbations on the graph. It might be tempting to think that peak oil will be nothing more than another perturbation. And yet the price history we have seen, with a year 2008 maximum followed by a recession lead slump, is only the behaviour of prices on the upslope of the Hubbert curve. The upslope is a time of increased production where economies of scale are reducing real production and distribution costs.

The characteristics of the upslope of the Hubbert oil curve are the enabling of new technologies that depend on hydrocarbons. The upslope brought mechanised agriculture, car ownership, agrichemicals, plastics, mass airtravel. And a new, much larger middleclass. The nature of the 20th century is bound to the upslope of the Hubbert curve.

What we don't know is what the downslope will bring. Maybe the reverse?

In Britain petrol is now costing over 6 pounds per gallon. Even now, before we start our slide down the Hubbert curve, this is nearly 3 times the cost of eqivelant off-peak electricity. (1 gallon of petrol is approximately equivalent 43.7 kw/hour. 1 kw/hour cost 4.95 pence, off peak)

Modern agriculture is very energy intensive. A recent documentary stated that about 100 calories of energy in hydrocarbons is needed to produce 1 calorie of food energy. And this is not counting transportation and packaging. Modern farming is highly mechanised and artificial fertilizers and insecticides are derived from hydrocarbons. High energy agriculture has made the developed world very efficient in labour terms. (In Britain now only 1.4 % of the workforce work the land. In the USA it's 1.9%.)

So, can this kind of agriculture be sustained against rising prices for hydrocarbons?

After the fall of the Soviet Union Cuba went through an agricultural crises.
Cuban Ag crises Suddenly it found itself unable to grow food in the previous, high energy, fashion that its alliance with the Soviet Union had permitted. It had to back pedal. Currently, in Cuba, over 20% of the workforce are involved in agriculture. This amount of labour is caused by Cuba's inability to afford high energy agriculture.
The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

We might have to change the way we do agriculture and go back to labour intensive farming. Not that this is entirely a bad thing. Organic farming produces healthier, tastier food. It is less energy intensive and eliminates many agrichemicals. Moreover, fresh locally produced food is mandated when high energy transport and preservation is not possible.

What else?

In Germany it is claimed that 1 in 7 of all jobs are car industry related. This is the kind of argument that has allowed the German car industry to lever about a billion euros in tax credits out of the taxpayer towards developing alternate fuelled vehicles. (BMW have just claimed the largest profits in the company's history. Free market fundamentalists may explain, if they can, why these car makers need to be given a state hand out to enable them to develop the technology to stay in business.) Never mind, it is technically possible to develop renewable energy cars. Within ten years or so, the technology for renewable energy cars, (electric or hydrogen) and as good as petroleum powered, in terms of range, performance and general reliability will likely be developed.

A more interesting question is, will the market for mass volume cars still be around? If agriculture is restructured to be labour intensive somebody is going to have to be working the land. Agricultural work never was well paid. And we cannot easily go back to the farming of earlier times. Farms are much larger now, and ownership is not widely distributed. The efficiency gains of the last 60 years caused many small farms to consolidate into larger ones. The agricultural jobs of the future will be for employees, not owner occupiers.

What if we go to Cuba levels of agricultural employment?

Not since 1931 has 20% percent of the US labour force been employed in agriculture.

The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy

The 1930s were not a time of high car ownership. The wealthy middle classes could afford them, it helped if, say you were a doctor and you needed one for work. But for an agricultural worker car ownership was totally out of the question.

By 1930 agriculture had become somewhat mechanised, we didn't yet have the efficiency gains due to agrichemicals. As we slide further down the Hubbert curve we might expect further enlargement to the the agricultural labour force if mechanisation becomes too expensive to sustain. (In 1900 41% were employed on the land. In a sense the early mechanisation of agriculture made the huge standing armies of the First World War possible. Those people were freed from the land for the battlefield.)

So where will these additional agricultural workers come from?

The service sector includes air and road transport which are vulnerable to fuel costs. And the new labour intensive agriculture will be local sold, we don't expect to shift food huge distances any more. Airtransport and numerous supplier businesses will also suffer. Despite the fantastic efficiency of combustion engined airliners the increasing cost of fuel will limit demand. (Electric powered mass airtransport is unlikely.)

Food will cost more which means less disposable income. This will further hit service sector jobs and the car market. Expect fewer jobs in manufacturing as well. In short, there will be no shortage of formerly well paid middle class types to work the land.

But there will be some new jobs. Mass transportation systems that lend themselves to electric power will be in demand once more. Electric power, from nuclear or renewable sources will continue. Just don't expect it to get cheaper.

However, one way or the other, it seems likely that the middle classes, as a percentage of the population, are set to grow smaller. A reversal of a trend that's been under way for all of the twentieth century, in short, this could get very interesting....

Phone Hacking

2011-07-12T08:48:00.023+03:00

Amidst the welter of mainstream news regarding phone hacking and dodgy behaviour by the British press I chip with a certain reluctance. Phone hacking suggests some technology wizardry and invokes some imagery of a bored but brilliant teanager exercising huge technical skill. In fact 'caller ID spoofing,' the technique probably used here, is relatively simple and involves calling the voice mail message centre from a phone with a caller ID that appears to be the same as the number of the victims phone.

Caller ID is the feature that allows you to see who an incoming call is coming from. A number of companies exist which offer a caller ID spoofing service. To use a Caller ID spoofing service, customers pay in advance for a PIN, allowing them to make a call for a certain amount of time. Customers dial the number given to them by the company and enter their PIN. Then they enter the number they wish to call.
https://www.telespoof.com/
To access someone else's voicemail, which happened in the Dowler case, the number to call is the number of the voicemail service of the victims cellphone service provider. They must enter the number they wish to appear as the Caller ID as the number of the victims phone. When the call connects to the voicemail service the system uses the caller ID number to connect the call to the correct mailbox. Sometimes a PIN code will be also needed but these are often not used or will be 0000 or 1234 or some other easily guessed number.
Then, when the hacker is into the voicemail system 'as the victim', can he replay or even delete the victims messages.
Caller_ID_spoofing - Wiki
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2006/08/paris_hilton_ma/
The fact that this was happening became obvious to Britain's Prince William when he got onto his own voicemail and discovered messages tagged as SAVED MESSAGES that he'd not heard before. Someone else had been into his voice mail and replayed them first, while they were still NEW MESSAGES. This ought to be something of a give away for even the slowest Inspector Plod but even where Royal security was concerned the police have been reluctant to persue the matter.
In the case of the murdered school girl, Milly Dowler, her voice mail message was hacked into repeatedly and the messages of family and friends, desperate to get in contact with her, became news. The individuals involved in hacking were perhaps being paid on a message by message basis and finally when the voice mail was full and no new messages could be stored the hackers took it upon themselves to delete old messages to make room for new ones. By this stage not even Plod of the Yard could ignore the fact that unathorised people were accessing private messages and interfering with a murder investigation.
Now, it seems, this 'revelation' has brought down one of Britains oldest popular tabloids. Big deal, there's plenty more bildzeitung keen to take over from the NOTW. Rebecca Brooks, CEO of the NOTW, is still claiming to have known nothing about it. Journalist on the NOTW claim that even the office cat knew about the phone hacking. What a disaster, and what a piss poor show by the police.

Sir Harold Ridley

2011-07-02T13:22:00.004+03:00

It seems that I have a cataract. A few weeks ago I realised that the vision in my right eye was rather blurred, a visit to the optical shop showed no improvement with various lenses. A visit to the local eye doctor brought forth a, "I have good news and bad news." (I'm not sure if all German optical specialist favour Pythonesque humour but mine did.) A cataract is the condition where the normally clear natural lens of the eye becomes opaque. The modern treatment calls for the removal of the old lens and replacement with an implant.

Cataract treatment is one of the oldest surgical treatments devised and dates back to, amazingly, the 6th century BC. (Descriptions of this early treatment are not for the sqeamish.) At the time, with no possibility of vision enhancement using glasses, the utility of the treatment was dubious. Later, when eyeglasses became available, around the 1700s, the improvements in vision made the surgery more useful although the correcting spectacle lenses needed had many shortcomings.

It was work of an Englishman,Sir Harold Ridley who pioneered the use of lens implants. It was known from wartime experience that shards of Perspex, the transparent plastic used in aircraft canopies, could be buried in the body for years without being rejected. Ridley devised a Perspex lens replacement. (He worked with an optician, John Pike, of Rayners the lens makers, and a chemist, Dr John Holt, of ICI) Other colleagues devised ways of sterilising the plastic lens.

The first lens was implanted in 1949. At the time prosthetic surgery was almost unknown. Now we have a whole global industry built around eye surgery alone. It's remarkable to note that all the initial development and risk was taken on privately by Ridley and his colleagues and played down because of the revolutionary nature of the work.

This pioneering work met with considerable resistance within the establishment of British optical surgeons. Sir Stewart Duke Elder, who had appointed Harold to Moorfield's eye hospital before the war, had already fallen out with him. Harold was a highly skilled surgeon and after doing good surgical work on combat casualties during the Battle of Britain was banished, by Duke Elder, to Ghana. Harold was initially disapointed by this as Ghana was well outside the expected combat area where he thought he could be most usefully employed. But banishment to this backwater didn't stop Harold Ridley working. In Ghana he researched various causes of blindness and with colleagues made great progress on river blindness which was a huge problem in there.

After the war, and Harold's groundbreaking work on lens implant surgery, Duke Elder was still set against him. As a result ocular implant surgery gained quicker acceptance in US, and elsewhere, than in the United Kingdom.

Nevertheless, Harold continued with other developments and pioneered the use of electronic television systems to image the eye, initially in black and white and in 1950 using one of the first colour TV systems in Britain.

In spite of his pioneering work Harold was not knighted until he was over 90, long after the demise of Duke Elder. And then only thanks to former colleagues and students and the intervention of Hilary Clinton and Cherie Blair. Finally, Sir Harold was properly honoured within his own lifetime. It seems that the influence of the enemy he had made at the start of his career, Sir Stewart Duke Elder, who had also been the Queen's eye surgeon, had lasted a long time.

I'm to have my cataract operation on the 18th of July. More on this later.

Haus der Kunst

2011-06-09T20:36:00.024+03:00

Haus der Kunst (House of Art), is an art gallery in Munich which was opened in 1937. It is perched on the side of the Englischer Garten, a Munich city park that was founded in 1789 and styled after the British landscape parks of Capability Brown.

The building was inaugurated as the House of German Art with a huge display of Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung ("Great German art exhibition"). This was intended to be an antidote to what Hitler had called, entartete kunst Decadant Art. which is to say, anything abstract or modern. (One imagines Hitler as being the kind of chap who would say, "I don't know much about art but I know what I like") The German state owned art galleries were cleared of any art that fell into this category and this was brought to Munich for display and eventual disposal.

Pieces were put on display along with mocking slogans and the price paid by the previous government. The Weimar Republic is now famous for the rampant financial inflation of the time. Yet, the time of this first German democratic government had been one of huge creativity. This included not just the classic arts of painting and sculpture, but also films, architecture and interior design.

Amongst those deemed decadent were Bauhaus, the group of cutting edge building and interior designers. Bauhaus, (nothing to do with the current German DIY store, the German equivalent of Homebase) were designing furniture in the 1920s that still looks modern today.

Cubism, Surrealism and Impressionism were all deemed decadent art. The work of lesser known artists was burnt with some ceremony. But, the Nazi regime was not one to miss a chance to make money, and all the valuable pieces were sold abroad. The veto extended to popular music, especially jazz because of its ethnic roots. They had many musicians and much music banned.

The famous jazz guitarist, Django Reinhart was extraordinarily lucky to survive the war. He'd been in Paris when the Nazi's conquered it. As a gypsy, and a jazz musician, he had two strikes against him. Many gypsies ended their days in concentration camps.

The Haus of Kunst was filled with much more conventional works. Portrait painters, recognising the way the wind was blowing, produced endless portraits of the Fuerher. Included this extraordinary Knight in shining armour.

Check this link for more examples.

http://www.thirdreichruins.com/kunsthaus1.htm

The new, preferred art, was also to depict life in Germany and this one, "Der Führer Spricht" (The Führer Speaks) is intended to depict a typical German rural family listening to the radio. Yet, it might have appeared in the American Saturday Evening Post.

By 1945, the Haus of Kunst had survived the bombing. The US Army turned part of it into an Officers Club. But, a few years later, the Haus of Kunst was back in business as an art gallery. Among the first exhibits were the previously shunned work of modern artists. Picasso's Gurnecia was on display.

Gurnecia, which depicts the Spanish town that was bombed by the Luftwaffe in the Spanish civil war. It is abstract but its meaning is clear enough.

Over the years the patrons of the Haus de Kunst have, metaphorically speaking, continued to stick two fingers up at the Fuerher. The Haus de Kunst has no permanent displays, but provides a temporary home for travelling exhibitions from around the world - the most abstract, avant guard works, of the most way out style imaginable.
http://www.hausderkunst.de/

More on Hitler's art.

http://victorian.fortunecity.com/plath/392/curator/LM99054T.htm#5

The growth cycle of a technology.

2011-05-26T18:45:00.010+03:00

Where are we in the development cycle of the electric car? Can we look at other technologies and decide how mature the electric car is? A model for technology development might be:

1) Initial work by dedicated visionaries. Building and improvising many parts.

2) High cost, early models. Rich mans toy stage. Techniques and components are borrowed from existing technologies. Profits are starting to be made.

3) Volume, mass production. Huge industrial base. Ongoing development is cross fertilised from helper technologies. The technology is so significant that the base product inspires developments that enhance other technologies.

The combustion engined car and commercial passenger aviation are at stage 3. Cars are now universal and mass air travel is trivially cheap. By comparison, personal flight technology, today only available in owner flown helicopters, is still a largely impractical, expensive way for millionaires to kill themselves. This technology is still at stage 2, the rich man's toy stage.

Universal communication, cellphones etc is well into stage 3. It too had a rich mans toy stage. Back in the 1960s it was possible to have a car telephone installed, if you were rich enough. Even thought the technology was little different to a police radio, with a telephone operator to dial through your connection to a landline phone, the basic need, for continuous, on demand communications was being realised.

When an existing solution is already in use a new technology has to be very good indeed before it can replace it. In the 1930s a couple of visionaries, one in Germany and one in England, developed the gas turbine jet engine. They came up with a technological step change so great that it was eventually worth while designing brand new aircraft and much new infrastructure to best exploit it.

With the electric car, production vehicles are derived from existing combustion powered designs. The energy storage systems are still largely improvised from those designed from vastly different, much lower power applications. The Tesla high performance electric sports car, for example, is based on ancestor technology. The frame and chassis are developed from a combustion powered Lotus Elise, and the energy storage system is derived from some 6,831 cells of the battery type found in laptop computers. These characteristics, and the high cost, lodge what is possibly the best example of the electric car, the Tesla firmly in stage 2.

Battery technology has improved greatly in the last thirty years. Energy density, the amount of power that can be stored in a certain weight of storage, has increased greatly, although it is still well below that of petrol. Additionally, combustion fuels have the advantage of reducing weight as they are depleted, a discharged battery weighs as much as a charged one. But, none of the battery improvements thus far have been as part of a development for electric vehicles, they were mainly developed to improve the performance of mobile phones and portable computers.

Recent years have brought improvements in electric motors. Werner Von Siemens invented the DC, direct current, electric motor in the late 1800s. The AC, alternating current, induction motor was invented by Nicolas Tesla in 1924. An AC motor is much more efficient than a DC motor. AC motors lack the mechanical brushes that must continuously break-reverse-make the circuit within a DC motor. (the things you see sparking away inside cheap electric toys) For an AC motor some form of alternating current power supply, not just a battery, is necessary. Miniature AC induction motors were used in some of the first airborne analogue computers devised in the 1940s. The aircraft that used them had to carry around their own source of AC power.

But, by the early 1990s, the development of microprocessors meant that small battery powered systems could use brushless AC motors. Power switching and control was then localised to individual motors. This makes for much more efficiency.

But that's not the end of it. Combustion engines have their own disadvantages that we just don't notice anymore. They work best at a particular speed, around 3000 revolution per min. As a result of this combustion cars have to carry around gearboxes in order that the most efficient engine speed be matched to the road speed. Piston engined aircraft do something similar by varying the pitch of the propeller as the airspeed changes. But, the electric motor inherently generates high torque at low speed. The Tesla sports car has no gear selection box, or clutch, it has a single speed transmission, and a forward, reverse and off switch. Although the energy density of gasoline is still much higher than batteries electric drive offers some sure savings. But the development stage 2 practice of borrowing technology does not yet allow full exploitation of these advantages.

A blank sheet electric car design would have a specifically designed automotive energy storage, using the latest battery chemistry. It would have a specifically designed drive system, probably all wheel drive with one motor, direct drive per wheel. A control system would be needed to keep it all working within safe limits and to precisely control the motors. Arguably, the most difficult part of the job would be that one, developing the safety critical software to get the best out of it. The fact that it hasn't happened yet isn't because the Tesla designer are idiots, they are working pragmatically to a budget. This requires employing as much existing technology as possible,while in stage 2 of the (electric car) technology development cycle.

An all out effort in electric car design could yield a much more effective technology quite quickly but in order to do that the initiative probably has to be taken out of the hands of private industry. The early history of the jet engine relates how Whittle, the British jet pioneer, tried and failed to interest the engine companies who would, post war, make massive sales, and profits from the jet engine. Even the Royal Air Force gave Whittle more help than the British aero engine industry and, but for the wartime opportunity of near limitless, taxpayer funded development, the technology might have languished in the doldrums for years. (or been developed elsewhere)

The electric car is also disadvantaged by the highly developed state of combustion engined cars. The newest developments in energy storage and motors are, not yet, enough to dislodge the combustion car. Petrol is a great means of storing energy in a very compact form, it has a very high energy density. Even the best new batteries still fall short of this. Energy density of a lead acid battery, 0.14 Mj/kg. A Lithium Ion battery 2.5 Mj/kg. -- Gasoline, 46.4 Mj/kg.

There is, perhaps, one other factor which is inhibiting electric car development, the fact that there are competing, energy storage systems that might turn out to be be more effective than batteries. The hydrogen fuel cell, or flywheel technology might turn out to be more practical than batteries.

The primary problem is one of improving energy storage. Out of this will eventually come new technologies that will find other applications. Amongst these, perhaps, local storage of renewable energy. At the moment homes with rooftop photovoltaic cells get financial benefits by selling surplus power back to the grid. It could be more efficient if it were stored and used locally, at night time.

However, it will be ironic, after the motor car has burned up most of the hydrocarbons, if the next big technology breakthrough for renewable energy comes as a result of car development.

Morecambe

2011-04-29T21:19:00.012+03:00

In the 1950's it was the steam train that took my mother and I to Morecambe, on the Lancashire coast. The memory of the smell of steam and coal, the slam of carriage doors and the blast of the whistle. Then the departure in a whirl of steam. That's how I remember my trips to Morecambe.

Morecambe is a seaside town which has seen better days,yet somehow it has managed to hang on to a fan base who, despite everything, still hold on it in affection. Alan Bennett said, had Morecambe been in the south of France it would have been a playground for millionaires. The location, if not the weather, IS spectacular. On a clear day the mountains of the Lake District frame the bay making it remarkable.

Bennett wrote a TV play about an elderly, rather proper couple, who retire to Morecambe (Sunset across the Bay). But that was in the 1970's. Now it would be a very determined couple who choose it as a retirement home. These days, Morecambe, called by some Bradford-on-Sea, seems to be dominated by the unemployed, and the addicted. The unloved ones who's presence in Morecambe depends on DHSS benefits. The state, after selling off of so much public owned housing in the Thatcher era, must now rent from the private sector and it rents the one time holiday accomodation of Morecambe.

In its heyday, (1900-1950) Yorkshire workers took the long train journey across Lancashire to come to Morecambe. Perhaps they preferred the more temperate west coast, and it was more easily accessible by train from Bradford and Leeds than the east coast resorts. And, in the 1930s, Morecambe might actually have aspired to be a playground for millionaires, for it was then that the Midland Hotel was built.

The Midland was intended to appeal to the bright young things of the day. It was designed to the height of what was then the very latest styling fashion, Streamline. This was a sub-genre of Art Deco which took inspiration from the new metal, streamlined, aircraft that were then coming into use.

This Eric Gill mural, which shows Morecambe and the less lovely Blackpool, with its tower, decorates the interior.

But it was not to last. The 1960s brought, among other things, advances in airtravel and soon holidays abroad were in easy reach of almost everyone. Then, changes to the railways deprived Morecambe of its branch line. The thinking of the day was that branch lines were redundant, it was said that passengers would drive their cars to mainline stations. Instead they drove their cars to airports and jetted off abroad. So ended the heyday of Morecambe and numerous other British seaside resorts.

The Midland, the property of the nationalised railway company fell into disrepair. It must have come close to being pulled down, as Morecambe's piers and funfairs were. Somehow it survived and now it has been restored. And a pretty good job has been made of it, although I have to say that the mosaic floor looks as though it's already missing a few pieces, or perhaps the money ran out before they could finish the job. A pity, but the main structure of the building is intact and the hotel is open once more for guests. The main stairway is magnificent and it looks as though Bertie Wooster, and Jeeves could stroll down it at any moment. If you get anywhere near Morecambe, take a look. Morecambe could use your support. And it's worth the trip.

Internet Porn

2011-03-30T09:04:00.067+03:00

Recently Annette wrote on this subject: erotica-versus-pornography erotica-versus-pornography Erotic content in art as been around as long as art, the question is when does it become pornography? What was once constituted extreme pornography is viewed differently now..

This article: Muggeridge, Deighton from 1965, is a discussion between Malcolm Muggeridge and Len Deighton. It gives some idea how perceptions have changed in 45 years. At the time, television was being subject to criticism for some of the material that was being shown. Back then, in Britain, there were just 3 TV channels, and tightly controlled. Of course, erotic material had always been available, but at a price. What was happening in 1965 was that it was leaving 'gentlemen's club' exclusivity and becoming generally available.

Muggeridge's attitude to pornography is traditionalist, a cold showers and abstinence point of view. Muggeridge sees porn as an evil in itself and he doesn't even consider more modern notion that porn may induce some users into criminal behaviour. In fact, in one remarkable statement he suggests that actual rape might be more acceptable than porn

In the 1960s the issue was about who has access. If erotic material is kept as the preserve of the wealthy you can ignore it. Once you make it available to everyone, that becomes impossible. And so, in 1965, or so, such figures as Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse achieved much self publicity by campaigning against what they claimed was pornography on broadcast television.

Every new imaging technology has produced new opportunities to produce pornography, photography, movies, video tape etc. The internet has done that and generated vast new markets. The technology is the media and it can advertise and sell direct. The internet might have been designed for delivering porn.

From a libertarian standpoint, is pornography actually doing any harm? (If we discount the unproven assertions that porn may encourage criminal activity.) Well, see: Porn:worse than crack? Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Therapy, called porn the "most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today. The internet is a perfect drug delivery system because you are anonymous, aroused and have role models for these behaviours," Layden said. "To have a drug pumped into your house 24/7, free, and children know how to use it better than grown-ups -- it's a perfect delivery system if we want to have a whole generation of young addicts who will never have the drug out of their mind."

If Mary Layden is to be believed pornography can be an addictive. In such matters it might be best to play safe and limit access. Now society doesn't generally facilitate addictive behaviour does it? But there are types of behaviour, which can be addictive, and legal: booze, gambling, cigarettes. All of these are supported by business lobby groups who rationalise that they are protecting the freedom of the individual by making such material available.

Internet porn could be controlled, but free access is the default condition. As porn was, effectively, the material that launched the internet, this is not surprising. It is possible for local service providers to block porn as a default, denying access to minors. They could, on request, then permit use to adults. But local internet service providers are reluctant to promote such an option, they'd lose money - one can imagine hubby struggling to explain to the missus why he wanted to enable the porn switch. It would raise a few interesting questions in many households.

It's also been suggested that some governments are encouraging a perception of the internet as primarily a porn gateway. Those countries that are soft on file copying might just be trying to distract potential dissidents from exploring the potential of the internet for communications and organised dissent. Which would make porn the new opium of the masses. As Len Deighton points out, in the article I cited at the top, the Nazis utilised porn and may have been the first to 'democracise' it.

Whatever the case, there's money in porn, huge amounts of it. It is claimed to be a $10billion dollar business. Given that, don't expect to see too many restrictions on internet porn any time soon.

Wunschkonzert

2011-03-21T08:08:00.008+02:00

With my limited grasp of German at trip to the cinema or theatre, here in Germany, can be a trial. However, recently I saw a performance that I was able to follow quite as well as any of the native born Germans. This was Wunschkonzert. This is a remarkable, one woman, seventy minute stage play without dialogue. It premiered on the 18th March 2011 at the Altstadt Theatre in Ingolstadt.

Altstadt Theatre Ingolstadt

Susan Oswell plays Frau Rasch in this unique, silent, one woman performance. The story, set in her, tiny, sparsely furnished apartment, opens as she gets home from work. She has a little shopping, some flowers and a scarf. She is perhaps a business lady or, more likely, a smart personal secretary to an older executive.

She commences her chores. Sorting the mail, putting out a bill to be paid tomorrow. Putting her clothes away carefully for the next day. Nothing is hurried, nothing is dropped carelessly or half done. Frau Rasch is able to give everything she does quite as much time as it needs. In fact, it gradually emerges, Frau Rasch has very little in her life apart from her chores.

On the wall are two photographs of the younger Frau Rasch. A ballet dancer. This present woman shows little connection to music. Although she moves with the economy of a dancer all her motions have the flat, relentless inevitability that tell of endless repetition. As she chops the tomato for her supper she might be fitting the one millionth left, rear brake light on the Audi production line.

Even smoking a cigarette is a meaningless activity of no more pleasurable than wiping the cream from her face.

At last, apparently on a whim, she decides to put some music on. Some animation comes to her face and some extra motion. She even shows a little joy in her food. The one time dancer revealed by her pictures is still in there, somewhere.

But the music ends and Frau Rasch reverts to her earlier mode and her motion resumes its spare, machine like, efficiency. Even posing with her new scarf she demonstrates no more pleasure in the action than does a set of traffic light endlessly stopping and starting the cars.

By now we wait anxiously for her to restart the music. Finally she does and again she is energised. But this time it doesn't last. The music has invoked some memory, perhaps of an old lover, perhaps a memory of a life glimpsed and now more painful on account of its loss.

In this play, with its pace and lack of dialogue, the audience are all observers with time to reflect and decide what remembered tragedy the music might have invoked. What, 'road not taken' our one time dancer might be contemplating. We cannot know what is in Frau Rasch's mind but we all have such memories to feel as kin with her.

This moment of sadness has sets the narrative on its final trajectory. We realise that there is something damaged within her that she is unable to repair. She has no one to turn to. Her phone, which she has carefully placed to charge, does not ring. There are no siblings, children or parents to need her, or help her. Each prosaic domestic activity occupies her completely. She is neither stressed, nor rushed, nor weary, nor in pain. She is nothing.

The one, 'path not taken', may not be contemplated. Its loss is too painful. Instead, Frau Rasch, on this night, and for no more reason than on this night she also has a headache, on this night she chooses oblivion.

Wunschkonzert, by Franz Xaver Kroetz, is performed by Susan Oswell and directed by Ingrid Cannonier.

Tinkering on the Cutting Edge

2011-02-06T18:59:00.002+02:00

The wealthy upper classes of 18th century Britain and their patronage of science has been well documented. Indeed, for some enthusiasts, actual scientific research was the hobby. The connection between developing new technologies and their support and development by enthusiastic hobbyists, is perhaps less well known.

In recent times we have seen the introduction of new technologies such as the mobile phone. Technologies that spring, almost complete and perfect, onto the market and rapidly become essentials, world wide. This has not always been the case and a number of now perfected technologies that we also consider to be vital were once subject to protracted development essential in the hands of amateur enthusiasts. While I do not claim that amateurs invented much actual technology it was often down to amateur users, the beta testers for photography, radio and theme computer to create a market and find ways to use the various technologies that might otherwise have been short lived fads.

The first photographs date back to 1826 and the pioneers discovered various photo sensitive chemicals and developed the processes. When it first emerged photography was seen as a combination of art and technology, and the enthusiasts were the well to do middle classes with some hand skills and the scientific background to understand the technical considerations. It's hard now to imagine the thrill it must have been to create the very first photographic images. Image creation had been the preserve of skilled artists who, building on centuries of technique and painstaking craftsmanship, drew or painted. That image creation should now be possible, not just for artists, but for technical types must have been thrilling.

Eastman Kodak had a commercial system in place by 1870, where enthusiasts could send a wooden camera containing a reel of exposed film for development and printing. Nevertheless, for a long time, real mastery of photography required home laboratories - darkrooms. A photographer was someone who took the picture and developed and fixed the prints. There was, perhaps, another reason that some of the early enthusiasts liked to be in charge of developing their own pictures, and this was for the creation of the first nude studies. It seems that even from the earliest days of imagery that, that very male pre-occupation, the nude female form, has featured. This preoccupation would drive first still photography, the Polaroid camera, some of the earliest motion pictures and eventually home video.

Theodore Miller, for example, had a huge interest in photography and made many nude studies of his daughter Lee. He experimented with stereo photographs and passed his talent and interest onto Lee. By the 1930s, photograph had pushed the traditional artist away from the school of realism into surrealism. A few years later, working in the photographic darkroom, the experimental artist and photographer Man Ray, assisted by Lee Miller, devised darkroom techniques which allowed photography too, to explore surrealism.

Radio came in to being at the start of the 20th century. The thermionic valve, the first truly effective means of creating high frequency amplification and oscillation, (the two vital building blocks of radio) now became possible. The valve, or tube to Americans, is a precursor to the transistor which is now completely ubiquitous. Valves were much larger, much less reliable and given to varying in performance over their rather short lifetime. Much early electronc equipment tended to behave in a undeterministic fashion. While broadcast reception was possible with factory made receivers it was the enthusiastic amateurs building large aerials and coaxing the best out of their, often homemade receivers, who reigned supreme. Early radio was troublesome and quirky but the opportunity it gave, to tune in to London or the other big cities in Europe made it worth the effort.

By the mid 1930s the first attempts at television broadcasting were made. Just in time, as it happened, to give the new electronics industry experience in building powerful transmitters and to seed the cathode ray tube industry. Radar, which came in just before the war, benefited from both these technologies. If good radio reception had been a challenge television required extreme ingenuity on the part of camera and receiver designers. Eventually cohorts of locally based technicians accumulated tow run little radio and television specialist workshops, countrywide.

Britain, it seems, was particularly well blessed with radio enthusiasts and when the Second World War started these men were in great demand as the services recruited, first radio technicians, and then as new equipments were rushed into service, radar technicians. The skills these men had learned, prewar, tinkering with radios, paid off in wartime as good, practical knowledge.

The way different, similar technologies feed and serve each other is never more aptly illustrated than with the symbiosis of radio, television, and radar. After the war this continued and radar providing components, techniques, and skilled technicians to facilitate building and operation of the early electronic computers.

There have been occasions when it has been necessary to consult the amateurs because, really, no one else has a clue. In order to circumvent the restrictions of the First World War peace settlement (which limited the size of the conventional artillery that it could have) the German Army turned to the field of rocketry. Werner Von Braun, a talented young student with an interest in rocketry, was a member of the Spaceflight Society of the Technical University of Berlin. He was given an army grant to peruse his studies. His thesis, Construction, Theoretical, and Experimental Solution to the Problem of the Liquid Propellant Rocket (dated April 16, 1934) remained classified until 1960. Von Braun's V2s begat the Soviet ICBMs and the ensuing technology race eventually begat Project Apollo, and the moon landings. For all Von Braun's Nazi connections his original goal had been, as he told Piccard in 1930, to reach the moon.

After the Second World War came the start of computer development, and this has been well documented elsewhere. Development was in the hands of the professionals although certainly the first machines had many memory techniques, delay lines and CRT storage systems, borrowed from wartime radar. The first machines were extremely temperamental, this being the early days of discrete semiconductors, and it seems most likely many of the technicians in those early days had followed the radio amateur route and were capable of keeping these temperamental machines going.

There was a great interest in electronics in the 1960s, it was the new technology, and the amateur enthusiast could persue his interest through a variety of popular monthly magazines.

In the USA the journal Radio-Electronics carried some of the first home computer projects. Radio-Electronics had been founded in 1929 by Hugo Gernsback, the same man who gives his name to the most prestigious of the science fiction awards. Gernsback founded the magazine Amazing Stories in 1926, and with his brother Sidney started the radio station WRNY in 1925. Gernsback is said to have coined the name Television in 1909 and WRNY was the first radio station to broadcast experimental television in 1928.

Britain too had a wealth of magazines devoted to radio, television and electronics. Amongst these were the Practical series, published by Frank Camm, brother of the aircraft designer Sydney Camm. The 1960s were, for the amateur, dominated by analogue electronics and numerous do it yourself projects were published that the enthusiast could build or at least study. I can recall one which was a copy of Gray Walters Turtle, an autonomous electronic device that was supposed to emulate animal behaviour by following light. Also notable was the monthly Wireless World. This journal carried numerous construction projects and notably carried, in 1945, Arthur Clarke's famous article where he described for the Communications Satellite.

By 1970 the home computer was on its way and Radio-Electronics featured Don Lancasters TV Typewriter in 1973. (Not a computer but a how-brew video terminal which could display 16 lines of 32 character text on a standard TV.) The following year Radio-Electronics published a design for an 8 bit computer which the home enthusiast could build. But it was another USA magazine, Popular Electronics, just one year later, with its Altair 8800 really made an impact. The Altair was designed by a couple of enthusiast who had a small company making instrumentation kits for model rockets. MITS.

The Altair was based on an Intel 8080 microprocessor and as published could do very little. The computer I/O was a front panel with switches and lights. It was necessary to enter all programs, in binary, using the switches on the front panel. However, it was only a few months later when Microsoft's first product appeared,(written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen) a Basic interpreter for the Altair. With the Basic programming language the machine changed from being an engineering novelty to something that you could actually do something with. The homecomputer had arrived.

The popularity of the Altair pointed the way ahead. It did not take long for the homecomputer to lose its front panel and more neatly packaged machines such as the Apple and the Commodore Pet arrived. The core technology was the microprocessor, which in quantity was pretty cheap, but display systems and keyboards were expensive. The manufacturers went back to the hobbyist idea of using the TV as a display and borrowed from the hobbyists the cassette tape recorder as bulk storage for programs.

Throughout the 1980s sales volumes increased and prices fell. The home computer market steadily grew. Computer games, word processing and eventually the first dialup bulletin boards appeared. The bulletin boards were precursors to the Internet. All of these developments started in the hands of the hobbyist.

Having said all this, and watched as a few enthusiasts made big money out of riding the home computer wave, just what cutting edge technologies might todays hobbyists be working on? What will be the next big one? My money is on 3D printing. Today it's at just about the Altair 8800 stage of development. Kits are available and a core of enthusiasts world wide are learning how to use the technology. In common with all emerging technologies it borrows from connected, allied technologies such as the Internet, and 3D cad design. Most significantly much of the work is open source, being done altruistically by enthusiasts who are more keen on helping each other than trying to make money out of it. There are other emerging technologies, many of them, but this looks like the one that won't be dependent right from the start on big industry and big money. As such it may go places that no corporate executive could ever imagine. And that can only be a good thing.

The Social Consequences of Technological Change.

2011-02-06T10:56:00.001+02:00

A few weeks ago I was thinking about what the theme for this blog should be. Over the last couple of years I've looked at books and films I like, bits of technology that interest me, and the lives of various people I admire. A bit of a mixture.

I have an interest in science fiction and two of the novels I've written about deal with the changes imposed on people by technology. These pieces were, A Canticle for Leibwitz and Flowers for Algernon. In the first the change is brought about by a devastating nuclear war which pushes civilisation back to the middle ages. In the second we have an amazing treatment that gives a mentally retarded man genius IQ. Essentially this concerns, In the event of new technology, then what do people do? This, for me, is the essence of science fiction.

This is not generally the way history is written. While technical types may discuss the esoterics of technology, for example, how fitting drop tanks to the Luftwaffe fighter force at the time of the Battle of Britain might have effected the outcome of that conflict. Such matters do not generally feature in the history books. They will feature in this blog.

The blog will look at how changes in technology have effected society. How technology changes society and how society changes technology will be matters for this blog.

More essential music

2011-01-29T18:16:00.001+02:00

Over recent years we have been witness to a breakdown of what was once a major industrial sector. The beast is not totally dead but it is in its final throes. This sector is the recorded music industry.

As I've claimed earlier, music seems such a crucial part of our make up that we, as humans, will go to remarkable trouble to find ways of making and, now, reproducing music. The first part of the 20th Century was the time of mechanical music playing and the second part was the era of sound recording and reproduction.

In 1950 the vinyl record was introduced but it took a little while for it to really hit the big time. By the 1960s recorded music suddenly became a major industrial player and vast numbers of vinyl albums were sold to that newly empowered youth market. Music has always been a vital part of our leisure time, see elsewhere in this blog, http://terry-kidd.blogspot.com/2009/09/essential-music.html but the combination of the baby boomers reaching their teenage years, the invention of cheap vinyl LP records and cheap record players suddenly produced a big new industry. All that was needed was the right sort of product.

This new product came from America but got a British spin when bands like the Beatles created a genre with wide appeal to the new, teenage audience. Vinyl LP sales were such big business that the rock groups of the day spent, typically, a few weeks in a studio- if they were lucky, and then, when the album had been produced and was ready to hit the shops, several months on tour promoting it and generating sales.

The required infrastructure to manufacture albums, the pressing plant, packaging and distribution made companies such as EMI and Decca, previously better known for esoteric electronic systems, newly household names.

Although groups like the Beatles were popular enough to feature in a few low budget movies their main reason for being was to generate those album sales, everything else, the tours and the TV appearances were all in aid of promoting those sales. Admittance to rock concerts was relatively cheap, they were a promotional device for the albums.

But technology doesn't stand still and for the vinyl album the first big competitor was the compact cassette. Devised in the late 1960s by a company that was more interested in selling tape recorders than music, Philips. This new technology allowed copying of albums. Philips had devised a way to tame the magnetic tape deck by containing the twin spools and the loose tape ends within a plastic cassette. The quality was rather limited, on account of the narrow and slow speed tape but soon got better with improvements in tape technology and electronics. Strangely enough, the magnetic cassette soon became yet another way of selling pre-recoded music. The new cassettes were ideal for cars and the original perceived advantage, free home copying from existing media, was not hugely popular. Although there were a few enthusiasts who liked to compile tapes the loss in quality of an analogue to analogue copy and the copying time - a 45 minute album took 45 minutes to copy, all this seemed to discourage widespread copying. For home use the tapes had a disadvantage of albums, especially for short rock tracks, accessing a particular track required a lot of shuffling to find the start of a particular number.

In any event, the record manufacturing industry fought back hard and introduced a new disc technology, the Compact Disc (mid 1980s), a technology that gave a significant quality improvement over the older analogue systems and the quick access to different songs that vinyl discs had given. Eventually it would also permitted home copying, but that would have to wait for another revolution, the home computer, but by then, for music reproduction, the CD itself had been superseded by a further technology.

Bootleg CDs containing an artists' entire catalogue started appearing at what the British called 'Computer Fairs' in the early 1990s. These were meetings where you could shop for computer hardware and they existed for a brief time while the home PC was still mainly in the hands of the computer hobbyist. (The relationship between important new technology and the hobbyist is something I shall blog about on another day). Save to say that the Computer Fair provided a venue to bring together copyright thieves and their potential customers, and was largely ignored by the law. Later, of course, the internet would make these opportunists redundant but briefly they flourished.

The bootleg CDs were dependent on a new data compression system called MP3 and it was not long before it entered the legal mainstream with the introduction of the MP3 players. Falling prices for semiconductor storage and the introduction of the IPOD made the manufacture of permanent media to carry music around on obsolete. With this has come the redundancy of the manufacturing infra structure.

Of course, the music industry still wants to make sales, even though the jobs that were once a part of the album manufacturing/distribution industry are long gone. Setups such as ITUNES are there to make music buying so convenient that finding a pirate version to copy is just too much trouble. Regardless of the long term fate of copyright the linkage between a physical object and particular music is long gone.

Clearly, now, the marginal cost of reproducing the music is so tiny as to be barely measurable. In the 1960s record companies could point to their set-up and tooling costs as a means of justifying the prices charged. From a social point of view it was possible to point to the number of jobs produced by the business.

The advertisements placed by the owners of copyright, the attempts to strike a parallel between illegal file copying and shoplifting are more than a little flawed. The resources that are displaced in order to copy a digital file are trivial. Moreover, the thief, should he choose to, can point to an actual reduction in environmental impact of the reproduction of a file copy compared to the manufacture and the manufacture and distribution of a legally produced disc. This knowledge will, I feel, in the long run remove the prejudice against so called copyright theft.

Sony, who are the copyright owners of some of the greatest music of the twentieth century, are trying to hang on to their piece of the action, in the not too long run they will be joining the dinosaurs.

Changes have already come to the business model of the music industry. Rock music concerts still exist but they are no longer promotional vehicles for disc manufacturers. Nowadays concerts have to be revenue producers in their own right.

But The Man, as 1970s hipsters were inclined to call big business, has lost his monopoly. With new technology all musicians and bands can distribute their music world wide. Decca records rejected the Beatles, if EMI had done the same much of the soundtrack of the mid 20th century might not exist. These days there are numerous opportunities to record and distribute music, anyone can do it - world wide. And in the long run this can only be a good thing.

Technical Excellence

2010-10-17T17:01:00.004+03:00

In the ‘swinging sixties’ Len Deighton wrote a best selling novel called the Ipcress File. This was filmed with Michael Caine who played Deighton’s working class spy hero. I love the Deighton spy genre but his best work, and one of the most meticulously researched of all books about Second World War aviation, is Deighton’s 1970 novel, Bomber.

When it was first published Bomber was a very large book. In 1970 most novels were around 250 pages and Bomber checked in at around 500 pages. The only thing comparable,back then, was the three volume version of Lord of the Rings. Deighton used a computer to create Bomber having seen an early form of word processor in use by IBM for creating their technical documentation. His previous works, it seems, had used scissors and Copydex and had been reworked using a literal copy and paste process and retyping. The increase in productivity that composing directly on a computer gave meant he could navigate around a huge book and manage the intricate, and as far as I can tell, technically accurate plot.

Bomber is about an RAF night bombing raid that goes hideously wrong. Not that this was unusual, night time navigation in WW2 and bomb aiming was a technical problem of considerable magnitude. Deighton understands this and goes to lengths to examine it within the context of the story.
The whole plot revolves around an initial incident which causes the first target marker flares to be dropped too soon. The intended target is the German industrial city of Krefeld, but the bomber force actually attacks the small, fictional, market town of Altgarten. Altgarten has a large number of greenhouses. These show up on the radars of the bomber force as similar to the factory buildings of Krefeld. A further phenomena, creep back, draws the bulk of the bomb damage back across Altgarden.
What Deighton is doing here, I believe, is illustrating just how imprecise the British night bombing effort was. He manages to do this without diminishing the efforts, courage and skills of the British crews. By 1943 it was known by Bomber Command how imprecise the vast bulk of the night bomber force could be. But, pre-war, Britain had invested hugely in the bomber force assuming that it would be an effective deterrent. It took a while before British High Command were prepared to concede how inaccurate the early attempts at night bombing were.

Deighton describes in intricate detail the workings of the German night fighter defence. How this system operated, and how well it exploited the shortcomings of the RAF’s aircraft is described superbly, and possibly for the first time in any non-classified, English language text.

The use of Schräge Musik (obliquely mounted) guns, and the technique of attacking the bomber force is described. The German night fighters were guided into the bomber stream by operators on the ground who are using powerful and accurate ground based radars. The nighfighters themselves had quite short range radars. They are directed by voice commands into a position behind and below the bomber stream.
       In this position the fighter pilots could often see the glow of the exhausts and sometimes see the target aircraft silhoueted against the sky. The Lancaster crews, who had poor visibilty below, were unlikely to spot the nightfighters. A ball turret gunner might have seen them, and these had been fitted on some marks of Lancaster, but were removed by the time that Deighton’s story was set.
       The German obliquely mounted guns, which no one on the British side anticipated, (despite the fact that similair guns had been used by the British in the first world war against Zepplins) allowed the fighters to gain a positive ID, get into the optimum position for destruction, and destroy a bomber with one burst.

In a world where some mainstream novels dump technical information straight out of wikipedia into the text, with often little understanding on the part of the writer, Deighton’s Bomber stands supreme. The accuracy and originality of the research, the clarity of the narrative, and the central part in the plot that the technology forms, illustrates that Deighton knows, and understands, exactly what it is he’s writing about.

From time to time there are rumours of a Bomber film. It’s been suggested that ‘Memphis Belle’ might have started out as an attempt to film Bomber. Certainly some of the book’s moments, most especially the ‘Opera House’ where the German defence system data is all collated on an illuminated plotting screen, would look astonishing on film.
       The close poximity of the groups of adversaries, who could sometimes hear each other on their common radio frequencies, suggest an intimacy like nothing any other soldiers have faced.
       The brushing contact, via invisible radar beams, at a time when television was a rich mans toy. Travel from England, to Germany and back again, when at the time only the wealthy knew of foreign travel, or even cars, these give the whole battle a remarkable, surealistic quality.

At the start the story opens with Sam Lambert, an NCO Lancaster pilot who is trying to be persuaded to participate in a cricket match by his unit commander. On the weekend in question Sam has other plans.
   Sam Lambert is a decent man. He's trying to serve his country. He flies to Germany by night and encounters people who want to kill him. By day he is caught up in the mess of unit politics. In a sense he is just like one of Deighton’s espionage heros.

Template for Terror

2010-09-26T21:36:00.023+03:00

The tiny towns are pastel plaster like a modern watercolor of a medieval memory. With mastery of image Lee Miller conjures a version of the vision and the mythical truth that it is meant to depict. The line applies as much to the town of Dachau as to any other Bavarian town. Yet the word Dachau invokes many other images. The conentration camp memorial there is something that I’ve never quite had the courage to see. Recently a friend from England came to visit and together we went to the place.

Dachau was the site of the first of the concentration camps, opened in 1933 and intended for political prisoners, which is to say, those who opposed the Nazi regime. The burning of the Berlin Reichstag building in 27 February 1933 was used as an opportunity to introduce new laws which suspended civil liberties for Germans. Dachau was opened a few weeks afterwards.

The prison at Dachau was intended to be a showpiece of the Nazi regime. In the 1930's foreign dignitaries visiting Germany were brought here to visit to be impressed by its beauty and its facilities. The arrangements, from the entry gate with its Work Makes Free, dictum, to the tree lined esplanade were intended to give an impression of humanity and the promise of rehabilitation. In reality the trees lined the route to the cemetery and the only freedom to be found was after being worked to death.

Dachau was never an extermination camp. The Nazis kept those outside Germany. Yet, over 32,000 died at Dachau. Dachau was a prototypical business centre for the Nazi regime. A template for other camps and a source of income. Prisoners who were fit enough to work were employed within the camp or travelled to work in nearby factories. Companies such as BMW and Siemens all hired manpower at bargain prices in the form of those inmates who were fit enough, and suited enough, to the work.

Dachau’s ‘hospital’ was used for various experiments on prisoners. Tests on behalf of the Luftwaffe recorded the time a person, in normal flying gear, could survive in freezing water. Decompression experiments, where live prisoners were subject to abrupt pressure drops, were also carried out.

The euphemism, human resources was never applied so completely as at Dachau. The prisoners were exploited in every way imaginable. Once a prisoner had become too sick to work they were registered as ‘Invalid’ and then executed. In the doublethink logic of Dachau the ‘Invalids’ were deemed beyond rehabilitation. Everything possible was taken from them, each prisoner’s ‘medical’ record notes if they had gold fillings or crowns so that these could later be recovered from the bodies.

The brickwork of the crematorium at Dachau shows a roughness unlike typical German masonry. It was built by slave labour and quickly, and yet the design shows the usual attention to detail and efficiency.

Prisoners entered the building at one end via narrow rooms with overhead pipes where their clothes were hung. Soon, their clothes would be reused by others. Then they entered the ‘shower room’ and the door closed behind them.

This picture shows the exterior of the shower room. The chemical Zyklon B was poured into the cast iron chutes. Between the two chutes, the vertical rectangle, was an armoured glass panel where the condition of the prisoners could be monitored. Death could take up to twenty minutes. Afterwards a ventilation system cleared the room and the bodies were moved either to the ovens or to adjacent storage.

Many of us have some notion of prison life which includes a plucky group of prisoners outwitting the guards and maintaining a sense of dignity. This was not the case at Dachau. The administrators had planned for that and had a system which of all the things at Dachau strikes me has the most ingenious, and the most invidious.

The picture shows part of the Memorial of Badges, one of several artworks which are in place in the camp. These show the different markers that the prisoners wore on their uniforms. We all recognise the Star of David but there were many prisoner badges whih indicated a position within a catalogue of groups. The groups became a hierarchy of privilege and punishment.

The German hardened criminals wore green triangles. Red triangles were worn by the Communists, Social Democrats and other political prisoners, and blue by the foreign workers. Homosexuals wore pink triangles. There were Brown badges for the Gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses wore a purple triangle. A bar over the top of the triangle meant that an inmate was a second-timer, or a prisoner who had served time in the camp, been released, and had then been arrested again. The Jews always wore two triangles with a yellow triangle on top of another colour, usually red which signified a political prisoner.

The hierarchy always placed the Jews at the bottom, with the gypsies immediately above them, and then raising, through some subtle league table, the other groups up to the most privileged and powerful, the green triangles - the hardened criminals. As a result everyone knew who they were and where they were in the pecking order.

With this ‘chain of command’ the SS, who ran the camp, were able to maintain discipline with the minimum of guards. Privileges, and extra rations were handed out to the people at the top of the prisoner hierarchy. These used their power to maintain order.

In the years after the war the camp at Dachau was used for emergency accomodation and with the post war rebuilding the Bavarian government came under pressure to clear the site. This was resisted and over the years the site has been reconstructed in certain areas in accordance with the photographs and the records the SS kept.

At the end Dachau is exactly what it was first intended to be, a showpiece for a regime. A regime which generated terror on an unprecedented scale.

Lee Miller

2010-09-05T00:21:00.039+03:00

The Second World War was a time of enormous, and fearsome, technical progress. But what of the other culture? If the scientists and technicians were busy making giant strides what was the world of art doing?

There was one woman who dived right into the thick of it. Someone who’d already made a name for herself as a photographer, Lee Miller, who spent the days after D Day following the US Army as a war correspondent and photographer.

Lee Miller had many lives and the job of surrealist war correspondent was just one of them. Her articles and photographs, which first appeared in the magazine Vogue, contain some of the most memorable images and have shaped our view of the Second World War and become the guide track for a dozen war movies.

Lee’s first piece was about the 44th Evac, a canvas field hospital where emergency patch up surgery was carried out on wounded troops prior to their dispatch to England. Lee’s images of surgery in progress, captured in her photographs and text, with masked, gowned medics engaged over the bodies of soldiers set the style for M*A*S*H.

Next Lee moved on to St Malo and recorded what was, in the grand scheme of things, a rather minor military action. A German strong hold is being dug out the hard way by the 83rd Division. By accident Lee has found herself in the thick of it.
Our long-range artillery was etching arcs of sound over my head. It was a temptation to look up each time at these invisible sphere-songs with their trailing rattle. Finally they went crash into the citadel and there would be a salvo from there answering back. I hung around waiting to latch onto someone who would be going somewhere or doing something and would take me. A tank destroyer on caterpillar tracks moved down the street next to us and set up for business. It shed wiremen as it went. Telephonists squatted in the street and the gun belched at the forts. In a very few minutes the enemy counter-battery zeroed in on it with 88s. They went whistle bang whistle bang whistle bang, and broke in the trees, the roofs, the street. The boys on the gun didn’t pay any attention but since I had no business being there anyway I went back to the villa which was only a bit better than the street.

In Lee’s pictures we discover that the war was not totally populated by men. There are nurses, Russian women soldiers and the shaved heads of the women who made the wrong choice and became lovers of the Germans. There are pictures of Parisian girls flirting with the GIs, and one can hope at least some of them made good on the promise of those pretty smiles. And there is a sense of reality that was missing from the coy British accounts of soldiers and their preoccupations. Of a man being decorated for bravery, his tin helmet is embellished with a non-issue decoration, Lee comments, ‘Anyone who has found a pair of girl’s pants for his helmet is envied’. And she has an eye for technical detail, she knows that accurate artillery needs OPs, (Observation Points) and telephone communications and so the comms boys, as well as the spotters and gunners, get a credit.

Next up is Paris, which Lee knew well from her earlier life and got to meet some old friends.

Lee and Picaso

Keeping in mind that all this was for Vogue magazine, then as now about fashion and lifestyle, Lee writes about how Paris style has changed to accommodate the wartime condition. The practical turban style that I can remember my mother wearing in the 50s, a warm cover for wet hair, was devised in newly liberated Paris. There were hairdressers but no power for hairdryers.

It’s amazing, after reading about relentless total war, blitz and counter-blitz, and the horrors of the easternfront that just 12 weeks after the liberation Lee has a an actual Paris fashion show to report on. It took the British as many years to again take an interest in such things. More remarkable yet was a Bitch-a-gram from Vogue head office criticising the quality of the ‘snapshots’ that Lee was sending back, instead asking for studio posed shots featuring models of refinement.

Now Lee is as patriotic as Patton there’s still room for some left wing sensibility. (Speaking of the Nazi supporters of Hitler) The type of person who clips his share coupons or reads the ticker tape for marketing profits without asking if the mine is a swindle or the dividends drawn from capital lived there. They bought Hitler on the same terms and they are very shocked to find themselves the ‘widows and orphans’ of a bucket shop scheme. They expect sympathy from us for their having been accomplices of crooks and receivers of stolen goods.

At Ecternach, on the Luxemburg border with Germany. Lunch is brought abruptly to a halt a few times by Buzzbombs, (V1 Flying Bombs) passing over the building, grinding and changing their lousy gears. They sounded like the death rattles here already. I tried to calculate the ‘something’ divided or multiplied by ‘time’ equals ‘something else’- when you’d be getting it in London, and the little hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention while I auralized the thud and crump of that unbrained monster in Pimlico or Hampstead. In fact, by now the allied advance was such that those early cruise missiles no longer had the range for London, the war was coming to an end.

Lee moved on into Germany. She was a stunning Aryan beauty, usually seen smoking a cigarette, and wearing a hodge podge of US Army and civilian clothes. She had a jeep, a camera, a typewriter and a four gallon can into which all the booze she'd managed to ‘liberate’ was poured. Having, it seems, a whale of a time, but then came Buchenwald and Dachau.

In this case (Dachau) the camp is so close to the town that there is no question about the inhabitants knowing what went on. The railway siding into the camp runs past quite a few swell villas and the last train of dead and semi dead deportees was long enough to extend past them. The cars are still full of skeletal dead, and the path beside the trains are littered with the fleshless bodies of those who tried to get out and walk to their execution.

One of Lee’s pictures shows a couple of grim faced, middle aged German ladies. One could have been summoned from the local beer garden, and the other could be anyones mother. They’ve been brought, by orders of General Patton, to bear witness to the horrors of the labour camp at Buchenwald. The picture, with a black American GI in the foreground, is more than just a target of opportunity, but a set-up to illustrate the society of plurality, who were the victors, and the society that aspired to racial purity, the defeated.

Of Germany and Germans:
The tiny towns are pastel plaster like a modern watercolor of a medieval memory. Little girls in white dreses and garlands promenade for their first communion. The children have stilts and marbles, and tops and hoops, and they play with dolls. Mothers sew and sweep and bake, and farmers plow and harrow.

Lee finally made it to Hitler’s house in Munich. By now her hatred of all things ‘Kraut’ was relentless but here she mocks Hitler’s taste in interior design. The bookcase that jutted out into the room had as savage an angle as the swastika itself. The art work – sculpture, still wearing prize medals from exhibitions on a string – was mediocre as were the paintings on the walls. I hoped to find one of the masters own works. There was a plaster cast of Hitler’s hands, and on the desk in the next section of the room a globe of the world. The piano, a Bechstein, was out of tune but the radio was a masterpiece. In the main entrance were cupboards holding crystal and china, linen and silver, all swastika’d and initialled A.H. There was a rubber plant and a black plaster eagle with folded wings.

This was where Lee’s most famous picture was taken, soaping the back of her neck in Hitler’s bath tub. Perched on the side of the bath is a photograph of the Fuehrer, and discharging what seems to be most of the mud they’ve collected since her time at 44th Evac, Lee’s army boots on Hitler’s bathmat.

At the end Lee finds the Germans baffling,
‘he (Hitler) had been badly advised and controlled by gangsters.’ ‘He should have made peace when the Russian war went bad’...
I’m just like the soldiers here, who look at the beautiful countryside, use the super modern comforts of their buildings and wondered why the Germans wanted anything more.

After the war Lee may have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Certainly, drink became more of a problem. Lee would never again find as great a subject as the war, what peacetime assignment could possibly compare? Undoubtedly Lee was damaged by what she’d seen. However, there could have been only one thing worse than taking a job such as this, and that would have been not taking it.

A Long Chain

2010-08-28T08:34:00.009+03:00

Some things you remember all your life, like the news of some totally impossible, totally unexpected event - the death of JFK, the events of 9/11, and, on the 28th of January, 1986, the loss of the space shuttle Challenger.

At the time images of the shuttle were everywhere. Nikolodium, one of the brand new cable TV channels, a channel for children, had a Space Shuttle animation running during all its program breaks. The Space Shuttle was shorthand for all of the USA’s competencies in technology, organisational skills and wealth.

I was in one of the engineering labs at Boeing Huntsville when I heard the news. The phone rang and one of my colleagues answered. I can remember fragments of the conversation. Dick Peterson was asking, “But what happened to the shuttle?” He put the phone down and said that there’d been some kind of explosion during the launch, there was no sign of the shuttle. His wife and child had been watching it on live TV and had called to tell what they’d seen. They wanted to know immediatly how such an impossible event could have happened.

In those days, even if we had a few computers on our desks we had no internet and I imagine we immediately went in search of a radio, or went home. This disaster, unlike the Apollo 13 which had been so memorably rescued, was over with the crew apparently killed instantly.

It was assumed at the time, ‘The Shuttle blew up’, in fact it did not. Hot gases from the right hand solid fuel booster leaked past a rubber ‘o’ ring seal. Eventually they burned through the aft part of the large orange hydrogen/oxygen ‘external tank’ which the shuttle orbiter, (the delta winged spaceplane which goes to orbit and glides back to earth) is attached to. A few seconds later the right hand solid rocket booster broke away at its aft securing point, then the ‘external tank’ broke up. Abruptly, at 48,000 ft, the orbiter was tossed around and subjected to 20g forces that caused it to break up.

What happened to the crew next, during the time it took the crew compartment to come back down, is a matter of conjecture. One wing was torn from the orbiter almost immediately. The intact crew cabin broke free and continued to ascend, to 65,000 ft. After the break up the crew were in free-fall and there are indications that at least some of them were still alive. The reserve oxygen tanks show depletion of two and a half minutes of oxygen, the time from the event until the crew cabin hit the ocean with a force of 200G.

Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was drafted into the Rogers Commission on the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster. He was an unusual choice, but whoever nominated him showed good judgement. Feynman’s conclusions on system reliability and the gap between the expectations of management and engineering reality are on target and have a wide application.

Feynman was one of a number of American scientists that had been on the Manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb. In later life he would recall his time at Los Almos as a time when things were organised extraordinarily well. His views of NASA were very different. Feynman’s findings led to the three year halt in shuttle flights during which NASA went through widespread reorganisation.

The head of the Rogers Commission to investigate the Shuttle disaster described him thus, "Feynman is becoming a real pain." Yet Feynman, with no small assistance from another commision member, Air Force General Donald Kutyna, memorably revealled the cause of the disaster on live TV. Feynman also threatened to remove his name from the Rogers Commision official report unless he was allowed to add his own appendix which described a number of further risk areas which could be potential safety issues for subsequent flights.

Despite NASA’s official position, pre-Challenger, that the complete shuttle was extremely safe a large number of NASA engineers felt that the risk of a launch failure was between 1 in 50 and 1 in a 100. Challenger was the 10th shuttle flight and on the day of the launch the very cold conditions were far from ideal.

The issue, as Feynman demonstrated on TV with a cup of iced water, a clamp and some of the rubber o ring material was that in very cold conditions, as these were, the rubber became stiff and would not recover its shape fast enough to maintain a seal.

There might be a few who would see Feynman’s on-screen revelation as grandstanding. Maybe a little, yet Feynman was smart enough to fully understand the problem, he had the tenacity to dig deep to the bottom of it and he had the balls to go public with it.

Donald Kutyna, no slouch at digging to the bottom of problems for the Air Force, arguably used Feynman. He told Feynman about he'd been repairing his car and discovered that some carburettor seals were ineffective due to low temperatures on a cold morning. Feynman latched onto this and related it to the o ring seals on the shuttle. Maybe he thought Feynman’s approach would get the point across more effectivly than his own.

Kutyna, even before coming to the Roger’s Commision already knew plenty about the Shuttle, and NASA’s organisation. He’d been in charge of setting up Vandenberg Air Force’s shuttle launch facility. Vandenberg was never actually used for launching the shuttle because of the Challenger disaster. Kutyna, himself not one for mincing words, said that NASA allowing the Challenger launch, under those conditions, was akin to an airline allowing a plane to fly despite evidence that one of its wings was about to fall off.

Feynman and Kutyna made an excellent team and Feynman went on to add his appendix to the Roger’s Commision report which can be read here. http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html

Feynman’s section opens thus, It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. ... The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management...quoting NASA’s official line... "the probability of mission success is necessarily very close to 1.0." It is not very clear what this phrase means, asks Feynman, Does it mean it is close to 1 or that it ought to be close to 1? This rhetoric is how NASA management deluded themselves into overlooking the alarms and cautions that their own engineers were raising.

Feynman’s section looks at a few other aspects as well. The shuttle had, by the standards of the 1980’s, a large amount of safety critical software running on it. He says about 250,000 lines of code in its entirety. (By current aircraft standards no more than one major subsystem.)

Feynman is complimentary of the software production process. First, having described all the very labour intensive methods of classic safety critical software testing, he adds, ...there is an independent verification group, that takes an adversary attitude to the software development group, and tests and verifies the software as if it were a customer of the delivered product.... the computer software checking system and attitude is of the highest quality.

However, in a word of caution he says, (although) there appears to be no process of gradually fooling oneself while degrading standards so characteristic of the Solid Rocket Booster .... To be sure, there have been recent suggestions by management to curtail such elaborate and expensive tests as being unnecessary at this late date in Shuttle history.

Three years later, and after much redesign and reorganisation, the Shuttle flew again.

17 years on, another shuttle, Columbia was lost during a re-entry accident. This on the 113th shuttle launch. But by now no one was pretending that the shuttle was as safe as a commercial airliner. Or was pretending that after fixing one weak link in a long chain that somehow the entire chain had been strengthened. As Feynman put it, When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

2010-07-18T01:09:00.010+03:00

by Walter M. Miller.

This novel from 1959 is a classic, post nuclear holocaust view of the future.

SF writers, have course, had been on to the possibilities of nuclear weapons long before the mainstream got near them. In the book, Doomsday Men, P.D. Smith recounts how the famed ‘pulp’ magazine Astounding Science Fiction had security experts at the Los Alamos atomic bomb project in an absolute uproar over some of the science fiction that Astounding was publishing while the atomic bomb project was still underway, and top secret. Robert Heinlein’s, Solution Unsatisfactory being one of them. This story features using radioactive dust as the primary weapon rather than a nuclear bomb. But at the time it appeared the use of dispersed radioactive materials, as a weapon, was being seriously considered by the allied military powers.

Such stories were a far cry from the Utopian visions of earlier science fiction. And the view of the future got darker still and by 1946. Churchill, at times not mean clairvoyant said of nuclear weapons, “The Dark Ages may return—the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of Science.”

This, of course, is the future that Miller is writing about in Canticle. 600 years after the nuclear war that has destroyed mid 20th Century civilisation a religious order have attempted to preserve some of the old knowledge describe the war thus:

“It was said that God, in order to test mankind which had become swelled with pride as in the time of Noah, had commanded the wise men of that age, amongst them the Blessed Leibowitz, to devise great engines such as had never before been upon the Earth, weapons of such might that they contained the very fires of hell, and that God had suffered these Magi to place the weapons in the hands of princes, and to say to each prince: ‘Only because thine enemies have such a thing have we devised this for thee, in order that they may know thou hast it also, and fear to strike.”

“But the princes, putting the words of the wise men to naught, thought each to himself: ‘If I but strike quickly enough, and in secret, I shall destroy those others in their sleep, and there shall be none to fight back; the earth shall be mine.’

“Such was the folly of princes, and there followed the Flame Deluge...”

At the time, all the powers who could afford it were spending immense amounts on nuclear weapons. Once the first prince got them the other nations, now knowing what could be done, and what its destructive powers actually were, spared no expense. Even Churchill seems to have been unable to grasp just how powerful nuclear weapons would become. “Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.”

Small wonder then, that the man in the street had no real concept of what was possible. The 1950s was a time when governments, now no longer able to justify having the ultimate weapon, had to perpetrate the myth that nuclear wars would be survivable. The famous Duck and Cover public information ads were part of this propaganda.

In part one of the book, 600 years after the war, all grasp of 20th century science has been lost. Any fragments of knowledge found are preserved as Holy Relics.
Francis, a novice monk, has discovered an ancient circuit diagram of some trivial electronic sub-system. He is copying it, in fact making a beautiful, illuminated version of it, in his spare time.
He is being mocked by a colleague who asks him what the diagram depicts.
Francis, who has no clue, ventures the following,
“..perhaps it does depict an object but only in a very formal stylistic way.....there was once an Art or Science called electronics (Francis goes on to explain) and the subject matter of electronics was the electron.”
“What pray was the electron?”
“Well, there is one fragmentary source which alludes to it as a ‘Negative Twist of Nothingness.”

Later, the post nuclear holocaust vision became a sub-genre all of its own and numerous memorable stories have been written about it. Miller’s novel, after an initial frosty reception from the mainstream, eventually got the recognition it deserved.
Time finally said of it "an extraordinary novel even by literary standards, which has flourished by word of mouth for a dozen years." Other attempts by popular mainstream writers such as Nevil Shute, with ‘On the Beach’ seem pedestrian by comparison.

The SF boys, who’d been first on the scene with the news continued to be up there, telling the public how things might really pan out.
As Ray Bradbury put it, “It isn’t my goal (as a science fiction writer) to predict the future, but to prevent it.” Miller, in this wonderful novel, had the same goal in mind, and he succeeds totally.

----------------------------------------------
PS Earlier predictions from Churchill.
"May there not be methods of using explosive energy incomparably more intense than anything heretofore discovered? Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp or dockyard?

— Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill 'Shall We All Commit Suicide?'. Pall Mall (Sep 1924).

Goodbye Rooner

2010-07-13T23:39:00.001+03:00

Yesterday was the day I last did something for my cat. I went to the vet to pay the bill which included the shot that finally put her to sleep. This being Germany things didn’t go quite as expected. Over the years I’ve said goodbye to many animals. In England, USA and now here. Always, in the past, I’ve been given a little box of ashes which have eventually been spread on the ground where the departed pet spent most of its time.

Not so with Rooner. She’s been mainly confined to my apartment for most of the five years I’ve lived in Germany. When I moved here, expecting Gina to come with me, I brought her cat Pookie. Rooner came along later. She’d been living in turn with my ex, Cathy and then with my daughter Robyn. Rooner wasn’t happy with either of them. At last she had to come to Germany too.

My friend Lizzi brought her out here and Pookie and Rooner then had to try and make a go of it together. It was not a really good arrangement and I tried to have Rooner adopted by Keith and Yvonne but she never really settled with them either. Eventually Pookie went back to England, to Gina, and finally Rooner came back to me.

Rooner was a very beautiful cat, but with rather bad manners. She had a habit of waking me in the early hours of the morning, sometimes by sneezing on my face. Always very early, about the time when one of the neighbourhood cats commenced caterwauling. Often it would be 5:00am and I’d never get back to sleep. In a way it was Rooner who got me started writing. She’d wake me and I’d start to write a few bits. Perhaps, because my dreams had been curtailed by Rooner, I’d try and write them down before they melted completly away.

Rooner had a fine time when my apartment balcony was being rebuilt. For a while she’d have the luxury of climbing in and out of the apartment whenever she wanted. This was probably her best time of all in Germany.

Rooner was, we think, almost 16 years old. She’d been my daughter's cat and she had christened her Roo because of an early predisposing to kick with her back legs when play fighting. When we lived in Crawley she had easy access to the street with a cat flap. Later, in Germany, she would only occasionally venture out and sometimes end up spending all day locked out. My neighbour Jens would leave her some milk until I got home.

For a long time Rooner was a strong, healthy cat. The only thing she craved, and I fear I never gave her enough of, was attention. She would love to come and sit on my lap or my chest. She would often perch on the chair arm behind me and gently tap my head.

Last year, starting in August, I had many trips abroad. My landlady Frau Reich would pop in once a day and feed her. Sometimes I’d be away for a week or more and on one of the trips in November Jens called me to say that Roo was sick, should she go to the vet? Naturally I gave the go ahead and they gave her a full check up and really found nothing.

Later it transpired that she had worms and she seemed to do better after worming and the removal of some bad teeth. Shortly after that she developed an abscess near where the teeth had been taken. The abscess was treated but then her left eye started closing up. The eye too was damaged and had to be removed. At this point I was offered to choice of having her put to sleep. Although the eye could be removed it would be expensive. I didn’t question the cost but what I hadn’t thought about was how much pain the operation would cause her.

They kept her in two days longer than I expected and when I took her home I was appalled by how weak and helpless she seemed. I thought then that it had been a terrible mistake. I wrapped her in a towel, soon to be soaked in blood, and held her.

By morning she seemed stronger. I had to go to work but I made it home at lunch time. To my astonishment she hauled herself to her feet to greet me. In a few more days she was moving around quite well and was starting to adjust to being without an eye. She even started to jump up to her favourite perch on the radiator.

But this was not to last. One night she jumped on to me while I was asleep and I rolled over and she ended up pitched onto the floor. In the morning she had lost her steadiness and was walking very badly.

Another trip to the vet and it seemed she had had a stroke. This surely must be the end for Rooner, I thought, she seemed to be in such distress. But no, the vet advised, small animals often get over strokes and I be advised to wait. Meanwhile the wound where her eye had been removed was closing up although the site of the old abscess showed little signs of healing.

Well, it turned out the vet was right and once again she rallied and it seemed that after a week or so she was improving. She’d become a very fussy eater and I struggled with numerous different foods to try and find something that would suit her.

Back she went to the vet every week for antibiotics and at length she improved and even started putting a little weight back on. Once or twice she ventured out onto the balcony. Then we had a four day weekend and I made a trip back to England.

I checked Rooner into the vet for my trip. I thought they’d be best placed if she took sick again. But by now she’d come to hate that place with all its associations of pain and separation from me. And she scowled fiercely at me as I handed her over.

I think that last weekend was the end for her. She was very weak when I came to collect her and seemed to have lost every bit of weight again and was as light as a shadow. It seemed that she might have had a further stroke.

Yet, despite her weakness she would still haul herself up onto the couch to sit beside me and rest on my lap if she could. But every breath seemed painful and she no longer had the strength to keep herself clean.

After a long night of painful, laboured breathing I finally decided that the end must come and I took her to the vet for the very last time.

In Germany, they say, cats have seven lives. In England, of course, we think they have nine. Rooner, for sure, squeezed every drop out of her allocation. My old friend had told me that Rooner would let me know when she’d had enough of life. And for me the life an animal is too special a thing to end without considering very hard.

In truth, as well, I'd hoped I wouldn’t have to decide. That I’d come home one day and find that nature had taken its course, and that she’d have died naturaly.

But it didn’t work out that way. In the end I found the will to cause her life to be ended, at least that way I was with her when she left it.

So it was back to that hated place where she had so many associations of suffering: the surgery and so many innoculations. During all the times I held her while she’d been prodded and injected, she had never once hurt me.

That last fatal needle, it too brought forth a yelp of pain before, at last, everything was over for her. But I hope that the last thing she knew of this world was the gentle caress of someone she was devoted to.

And that was it, until that final bill arrived and I went to pay it. I'd been expecting to collect her ashes. I’d planned to sprinkle them on the field outside, as soon as the wheat was cut.

But that’s not going to happen. There were no ashes for me and now I have no nothing but pictures and memories of that cantankerous, feisty cat. No opprtunity for a last goodbye, but this.

The vet said she had the temperament of an English landlady. It’s not a flattering comparison. But she had spirit, and while she was still strong, grace and beauty. Never did a creature cling to life with such great tenacity and I wish she could have enjoyed more of it.

Goodbye Rooner

Good, it’s the co-pilot flying the plane.

2010-07-11T17:02:00.000+03:00

These days it’s the practice of most airline captains to come over the speakers at some time or other, during a flight and introduce himself, and the co-pilot. Sometimes the Captain will say if it’s him/her, or the co-pilot, who is handling the controls. For myself I’m happiest if the person handling the controls happens to be the co-pilot. Then I know conditions couldn’t get much better for avoiding stupid errors.

An authoritarian cockpit culture has been blamed for what was at one time the appalling safety record of Korean airlines. In a number of critical situations, when it was quite clear to the co-pilot that the Captain, who also happened to be handling the aircraft, was doing the wrong thing the junior pilot felt unable to intervene out of respect for the authoritarian figure in the left hand seat.

Cultural differences seem to be most significant when it comes to marking out the differences in human behaviour. The habit of being willing or unwilling to defer to authority is an interesting marker in identifying the differences in what might be termed national character. Geert Hofstede has done extensive work trying to quantify how certain measurable characteristics are found in different cultures.

Geert Hofstede

For South Korea we find that the Hofstede index shows a PDI of 60%.

PDI represents something called Power Distance Index and is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions are willing to accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. It suggests that a society's level of inequality is endorsed as much by the followers as much as by the leaders.

The higher the PDI the more likely a society is to accept, without question, authority.
PDI
World Average 55
South Korea 60
Spain 51
Italy 45
USA 40
Australia 36
British 30
Germany 30

South Korea has a PDI index of 60. 5% above the world average of 55. But it’s interesting to note that both Britain and Germany both have very low scores in PDI. Suggesting that nationally these two countries are much more likely to question authority than accept it. Which is very interesting. Britain, supposedly hidebound with it’s established class system, and Germany also playing against the national stereotype, are measurably less deferential even than the truculent Australians and a full 10% less so, than the denizens of the land of the free, the USA.

In matters of flight safety being able to question authority is crucial. If the pilot in command is about to do something bloody stupid it’s the job of the co-pilot to put him right. In the days before Korean airlines retrained there were an number of instances where the junior pilot kept quiet because he felt unable to challenge the authority of the captain although he was quite aware that the senior figure was going wrong.

The world PDI average is 55% which means that if you fly a lot you may still encounter a co-pilot who is a little inhibited when it comes to challenging the bad judgement of the captain. It makes sense then for conditions to be best if the co-pilot is handling the aircraft. It means that the experienced captain is free to observe how the co-pilot is doing. Moreover, if he does spot something going wrong he’s unlikely to feel inhibited about letting the pilot know about it.

Changing Cockpit Culture: Why We Fired Capt. Kirk

Replicating Machines

2010-04-15T02:15:00.008+03:00

In Neal Stephenson’s novel, The Diamond Age, one of the characters makes the observation, ‘There were only ever two industries, the industry of things and the industry of entertainment.’ Within The Diamond Age the industry of things has been replaced by a technology where even the very poor have access to a household device which, when supplied with power, hydrogen and a suitable design template will produce food, clothes and gadgets on demand.

The design information is turned into a real world object by a tabletop factory. The consequences of such a machine would be immense. If anything we want can be swiftly produced to a template the only meaningful property becomes intellectual property.

Diamond Age matter compilers are a little ways yet in the future but it just so happens that there are a few people who are not happy to sit around waiting while nanotech catches up with Neal Stephenson. Adrian Bowyer, a mechanical engineer at the University of Bath is pushing the envelope with his ideas for RepRap, self-replicating, rapid prototyping machines.

Rapid-prototyping has been around for a while. Objects which had previously only existed on drawings boards can be turned relatively quickly into three dimensional models. One way of doing this is by depositing molten plastic in layers using a precision servo system. This technique, which has certain similarities to inkjet printing, is usually referred to as 3D printing.

Commercial 3D printers are very expensively and at 20K Euros apiece are not the stuff of impulse buys. One way to promote the use of 3D printers is to design a printer that can print (some of) its own parts. This video 3D printer shows a budget, home made 3D printer at work.

This machine is called a Mendel. It is Adrian Bowyer’s second design. It is printing a set of parts for another Mendel. Adrian designed a 3D printer but he designed one with parts that it could make itself. This device is a so called Clanking Replicator, which is the name coined for a replicator that use conventional rather than nanotech parts.

It hardly needs to be said that this little robot, which is little more than a three axis servo system, falls well short of being capable of complete replication. Techniques for manufacturing printed circuits, where the machine can lay down low melt point metal, to serve as circuit tracks and wiring are being developed. But that leaves a lot of work to be done.

Bowyer isn’t building a replicator to make money out of it. Although there are a few kits for sale there isn’t a replicator business model as such. If the first thing you do with a new replicator is use it to build other replicators how will you make money building replicators? They don’t even try. The whole project adheres to the open source ethic. This gives builders visibility of all the design, even all the code that controls the system. This allows people to modify and debug it. And nobody owns the design.

Of course, aside from replicating itself the system can make a variety of neat items and this is where it gets interesting. A software package called Art_of_Illusion is available, also free, which can be used to model new parts and THINGIVERSE contains a huge variety of items that can be produced using a 3D printer.

So can replicators change the world? Recently we've seen the industry of record production being decimated by iTunes and the various file sharing sites. Books too are moving towards print on demand and electronic readers. We could expect a complete inversion of the rest of the economy if production on demand spread to artifacts.

In current business models, where artefacts are produced in highly efficient Asian factories, manufacture is a small part of the current commercial story. The gadget itself might as well have been grown in a plantation rather than manufactured. The main profit comes from the various parties who ‘add value’ through shipping, wholesale distribution, retail distribution, advertising and packaging. An object that sells for a hundred pounds in a Basingstoke mall might have earned the Asian manufacturer maybe ten pounds, but the job of getting the gadget from the factory into the consumer hands earns the rest of the chain ninety pounds. But with a desktop factory, we lose the need for that and the need for a whole bunch of carbon footprint caused by shipping stuff around the world.

I can’t help think that Adrian Bowyer’s RepRap is the way of the future. Bowyer won’t make any money out of it but that probably doesn’t worry him. I see he’s written an article, it’s interesting. Wealth_Without_Money

Eric Brown. The world's greatest test pilot

2010-04-07T11:53:00.006+03:00

It’s about thirty years since the writer Tom Wolfe rather breathlessly revealed that, in addition to the well known ‘celebrity’ astronauts of the American space program, there were a whole bunch of people doing important work called engineering test pilots. Their achievements were every bit as important as the Apollo astronauts yet nobody knew their names. Nobody outside of aviation that is.

It happens that not all those great test pilots were American. Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown, a Scot borne in 1919 is one of the most remarkable of them all. For a country that gives out knighthoods for reading the television news the fact that Britain has not made more of Brown’s achievements is astonishing. Still in full possession of his wits, and wit, at 91 Brown’s work has covered the most exciting years of aviation - the period from 1940 to the Apollo landings in 1969.

Eric holds the world record of having flown the largest number of different aircraft types, 487, and he was the first to land a jet aircraft on a carrier. With an MA in German he was ideally suited to fly the numerous captured German aircraft. In the closing months of the war he flew several advanced, (which is to say bloody tricky) German aircraft back to Britain. Then he was in the front line of examining and analysing German secret research.

The following interview, conducted by the former BBC science correspondent Reginald Turnhill and including astronauts Joe Engle and George Abbey gives a fascinating glimpse of the times.

Top Test Pilots Discussion

It’s very hard not to be astonished by the German wartime achievements. Brown describes how they were way ahead of the Allies in virtually every aspect of aviation engineering with the possible exception of electronics. Brown describes the remarkable Me163 rocket plane. He was the only non-German to fly it under rocket power.

Also discussed is the almost forgotten Shuttle precursor the X20 Dyna-Soar. This single seat, vertical launched craft would have landed conventionally after re-entering from Earth orbit. This was a fabulous road not taken in space exploration. With a genealogy going back to Sanger’s proposed design for a German bomber capable of attacking the USA Dyna-Soar would have made an astonishing weapons systems.

Brown speaks of Concorde, the supersonic transport, generally noted for being British/French, but with its roots in German wartime research.

I’d love to write more about Eric Brown, but I’m without my prime reference. I keep buying his biography, Wings on my Sleeve, then lending it to people and never getting it back. It’s recommended.

Wings on My Sleeve
X-20 Dyna-Soar
America Bomber

Triumph of the Geeks

2010-02-21T22:09:00.001+02:00

Up Pixar

In this movie, now out on DVD, Pixar bring together three outsiders.

The movie opens with the Carl Fredrikson, a boy of eight who meets the girl who will become the love of his life. Ellie and Carl are made for each, Carl is shy and nervous while Ellie is exuberant and extrovert. She recognises in Carl her soul mate and they marry and grow old together. And so the story begins.

Ellie dies and Carl is left a lonely, bitter widower who regrets that he and Ellie never took a trip they’d long dreamed of, to Venezuela in the footsteps of their hero Charles Muntz. Now Carl is besieged on all sides by urban development but refuses to leave the house that contains all the memories of his earlier life. After an unfortunate accident Carl decides to go, and take his memories with him. He fastens thousands of helium balloons to the house and makes a break for it just as the men from the retirement home are about to take him.

Unbeknownst to Carl, a plump, accident prone eight year old boy called Russell has stowed away on the house. Despite Carl’s wishes they both get swept away to Venezuela. Now that he’s got there it is Carl’s wish that he position the house by Paradise Falls, where Ellie had always imagined it, and he coops Russell to help him.

Along the way they meet another outsider, a talking dog called Dug. They befriend a brilliantly coloured flightless bird called Kevin, and encounter Carl’s old hero Charles Muntz. Muntz is now the premier bad guy with a dirigible and a pack of talking dogs. They are Dug’s old pack who have shunned him. Muntz is obsessed with capturing Kevin and he believes that Carl is after the bird himself and this makes him an enemy.

Now the action starts with Kevin taken on board the airship and Russell determined to free him. Carl gets the house airborne and takes off after Russell. Muntz launches a trio of biplanes (piloted by dogs) from the dirigible and they attempt to shoot the house down. Russell outsmarts the dogs and frees Kevin and in the final battle Muntz falls to his doom leaving Russell, Carl and Dug victorious.

Listening to the words of the artists at Pixar, it’s hard not to see them as one time geeks. They were the loner kids who wrote, painted, maybe even made model aeroplanes while the non-geeks played sports and ran with the pack. They were the odd balls, the ones who didn’t join in, the ones to be pitied. These are the kids who grew up to make a fabulous, memorable piece of art, on the cutting edge of computer technology yet with its roots deep in the emotional style of Capra.

Good going geeks.

Flowers for Algernon

2010-02-17T00:08:00.010+02:00

I was re-reading Flowers for Algernon the other day, and as I did, I recalled how the first reading of it affected me, and how it defined what I thought was special about science fiction. For me the tale is one of the all time greats, in addition it holds, I think, a useful tip for aspiring writers.

Since its first publication in 1958 it has been remade in movie, TV and theatrical form many times, and through these forms it has gained admittance to the mainstream, but it is still essentially a SF story. For me an SF story includes a fictional piece of science as an implicit part of the plot. In this case the premise is that a special surgical technique has greatly increased the intelligence of Charley Gorden. We learn nothing about the procedure beyond the fact that Charley's IQ is hugely increased. This doesn't matter. For me this model serves as a working definition for Science Fiction: IF [insert technological breakthrough here], THEN what will humans do?

In Flowers we go with Charley as incredible changes to his intellect occur. When the original short story was written such matters as IQ and other forms of pysch. testing were considered to be preminent, defining characteristics ofhumans. Yet one of the key points of the story is, as far as Charley is concerned, that despite the changes to his intelligence an essential part of him is maintained across the arc of the narrative.

Some people give the following definition of a story: Get a character in a situation, then throw rocks at him. This is the template for Flowers. At the start Charley is a moron who is the butt of the jokes of his co-workers. At the middle he is a lonely genius who has discovered that his brilliance will soon fade. At the end he has lost everything, his love and his intellect. The only thing he has managed to hold on to is the cloudy recollection that he was once smart. And throughout his journey, even at the heights when he was hailed a genius, he still maintains a connection with, and feels ashamed for his former self,

Finally Charley losses almost everything. All Charley has left is his kinship with Algernon the white lab mouse who has made the same journey. Charley knows he has a connection with Algernon, but he no longer understands why. We might be left wondering what the whole point was. Charley has gained no insight, he can't even recall how much he actually had and lost. Yet Keyes delivers the payoff through the minor characters. After everything, when Charley returns to his old job, we discover that his old tormentors, who can recall his travails better than he can, finally show some respect for him. It's a blink and you'd miss it moment, but for me it's crucial.

When Keyes submitted the story to Galaxy the editor said he loved it but please re-write it to allow Charley to hold on to his intelligence. Keyes left the story unchanged and went to another magazine. Later, after the short story version had found success Keyes developed it into a novel. Again various publishers asked for a rewrite so that Charley could retain his gifts. Keyes eventually found a publisher who would go with the story as we find it today. I don't think anyone could doubt that Keyes was correct. Had he changed it he might have made a quicker sale but he would have created just another SF potboiler, notable only for a little physcho babble about ink blot tests. Instead he created a classic that has never been out of print, sold over five million copies and, fifty years on been retold on stage and screen over a dozen times.

Sometimes, it seems, it just pays to stick to your guns.

An Enduring Myth

2010-01-06T01:02:00.017+02:00

There is a cherished notion, held close by UK aviation enthusiasts, that Britain, at the end of World War 2, had an aviation industry that was second to none and was only prevented from capitalising on it by the self serving attitudes of trade unions (supported by the Labour party) and the short sightedness of governments, (also Labour) who toyed with the industry and spitefully prevented it from developing numerous world beating aircraft.

See:
TSR2 Online
Wiki on TSR2
Cancelled projects
TSR2

The reality of it is rather different as the parliamentary record of the day, Hansard shows. Sir William Robson Brown (Conservative) in the parliamentary debate on the 1966 Plowden report on the British aircraft industry made the following statement:
“Production costs in the (British aircraft) industry are something which I cannot comprehend. With wage costs 40 to 50 per cent. lower than they are in the United States, our manpower production costs are 2½ times higher.”

Now it was customary in debates on British industrial productivity, in the days when industrial productivity played a significant part in the British economy, to demonise the unions, but that’s only part of the story. In order to see why British production costs were so high, compared to the USA and other countries, we have to go back to 1798 and Eli Whitney.

The concept of interchangeable parts is often credited to Whitney. Although historians are still debating who actually came up with it, this concept, the American system of manufacturing is defined as a way of using standardized, identical, interchangeable parts, manufactured to a consistent tolerance. Interchangeable parts were a turning point in industrialization. Prior to this all manufactured items had been the work of skilled craftsmen making bespoke articles and the parts and pieces were usually anything but interchangeable.

With the invention of the automobile American manufacturers quickly embraced interchangeable parts. Henry Ford was proud to proclaim that no files were used on his production line, all the parts fitted perfectly, and were interchangeable. This had the further advantage that spare parts could just bolt in, again without rework.

However, there are significant intial costs in mass production, drawings have to be very carefully prepared with all dimensions and tolernaces specified in great detail, and components made to much higher tolerances if they are to be assembled without rework. Often tooling, parts which must be manufactured in order to manufacture and form other parts, must be made. Consequently the start up costs are much higher.

In Britain cars were seen as the costly playthings of the wealthy, and the American approach did not find favour. The high unit costs made this a self fulfilling phrophecy and in Britain making cars in high volume took ages to catch on.

So, while 1930s Germany was stamping out the first Beetles priced so that workers could drive them on the new autobahns, the British car manufacturers were still proudly elitist and held on to methods which called for a level of ‘fitting’ during assembly. This approach was presented as a virtue, the low volume luxury car makers held that their cars were built by craftsmen and this was promoted as exclusivity.

The British aircraft industry of the 1930s worked in a very similar way to its car manufacturers. And, borrowing the rational, they held that skilled fitters were essential whenever airframes and aero engines had to be manufactured. When the war was imminent and the British government wanted to increase aircraft production big problems were encountered when experienced mass producers attempted to adopt the aircraft industries' drawings and processes. Even relatively straight forward sub-assemblies such as bomb racks, when sent out to be manufactured by manufacturers such as Hoover and Electrolux, created problems. The supplied drawings were not always complete and tolerances were insufficient to define parts that could be assembled without extensive hand rework. The subcontractors ended up redrawing the original blueprints produced by the aviation big boys such as Avro and Handley Page to the standards that were customary in vacuum cleaner manufacture.

Even the drawings of the famous Rolls Royce Merlin engine, which was eventually manufactured in the United States in huge quantities had to be extensively reworked before the Packard company could commence production. Packard Merlin This is not to say that the designs of the Merlin and aircraft like the Spitfire were flawed, aerodynamically they were not, but the manufacturing depended on skilled fitters who carried much of the design and production process in their heads and knew how to bend, hammer and file the components to fit. It’s pretty clear that this had a big effect on productivity. The German Messerschmidt 109 took about 4,000 man hours to manufacture compared to 14,000 man hours for a Spitfire. You’ll probably find people who’ll tell you the Spitfire was a better plane but I doubt that even the most rabid fan will claim that each Spitfire was worth three 109s, and, as Stalin put it, Quantity has a quality all of its own.

When the war ended Britain was left with a huge and experienced aircraft industry. It had priceless experience in the new field of jet propulsion and privileged access to German wartime research. Yet the manufacturing techniques hadn’t changed much. The English Electric Canberra impressed the United States Air Force to the extent that they subcontracted the American Martin aircraft company to produce them under license. The US built aircraft was called the B57 and with this design Martin found, like Packard, that all the drawings had to be reworked before they could be manufactured. For the British aircraft industry there just wasn’t an incentive to change. The industry had spent the war years on cost plus work with the government as the only customer. Profits were assured and this was an actual disincentive to spend money on tooling and up front engineering.

Huge and fragmented, Britain’s post war aircraft industry lost ground while the American industry went from strength to strength. The British Comet, the worlds first jet airliner, was hit by a series of accidents attributed to a design error in the windows of the pressurized cabin. Yet what startled Americans when they visited the Comet factory in Hatfield were the production methods. The Boeing visitors thought they would spend more on tooling for a one off prototype than the British were using on the production line.

In a bid to try and snatch back a technical lead Britain joined with France to make the supersonic airliner Concorde. Major aircraft assemblies had to be produced in Britain and France and they had to fit together precisely. Finally the British aircraft industry had to produce drawings and processes to completely define what was to be made, no longer could craftsmen sort things out on the shop floor - everything had to fit first time. As the sixties continued more multinational projects were started, the Jaguar, Tornado and the various civil Airbus types. The legacy of Concorde was to force the British aircraft industry to reach beyond cottage industry manufacturing and work at world class levels. It took a while, and in the early days of the joint Italian, German and British Tornado it was the British manufactured parts of the work share that had fitting problems. But Britain only caught up as the bar was being set still higher. All the big American aerospace companies were engaged in Apollo project, subsequently the best in the world got immensely better.

In more recent times much of what remains of the British aircraft industry has been engaged building the Nimrod MRA4. This is a rework of an earlier aircraft which itself was derived from that 1960s Comet airliner. This project has now cost the UK tax payer £3.6 Billion, for nine aircraft. For reasons that probably seemed like a very good idea at the time, only about 80% of the airframe is brand new, with sections of the airframe inherited from the 1960s build. This has caused some of the huge overspend. The legacy airframe components were difficult to integrate with the new build elements and they give an insight into just how bad the older generation aircraft were. There were differences of up to 4 inches in length between parts of the legacy fuselage components. By comparison, for the Boeing B777, which first flew 15 years ago, Boeing claim each aircraft to be within 3/100th of an inch of each other over a fuselage length of 200 feet.
Nimrod Lewis Page Boeing

Eli Whitney and the American system of manufacture really started something, at least in mechanical engineering. There are those who maintain that software engineering has yet to reach the Eli Whitney stage, some who even claim that the epithet Software Engineer is an oxymoron. Maybe. Much of the industry is still left to skilled craftsman carrying the design, if there is one, in their heads. But not, at least, in the aircraft industry. Software for use in aircraft systems IS subject to formal controls and rigorous testing. Formal engineering methods are imposed on the industry for safeties sake, and this is largely thanks to the American FAA who set the standards, effectivly world wide. Software standards, thus far, tend to be imposed by brute force testing methods more exhaustive than scientific. Perhaps it will take another major initiative like the Manhattan project or Project Apollo, before true software engineering becomes a reality but at least there are parts of the industry moving in the right direction.

Analog Computers

2009-12-20T02:19:00.010+02:00

In her excellent book, Longitude. Dava Sobel told how a clock behaving in a deterministic way is a crucial component of successful navigation. The first accurate clock which could maintain synchronisation with the time at zero degrees longitude was the beginnings of an analogue navigation computer, albeit one that needed a little manual assistance to complete its task.

What makes an analogue? An old style vinyl album records a representation of the sound waves that took place when the original piece was recorded. A frozen graph of the sound that’s been curved into a spiral from the outside to the centre of the record. The volume level of the sound is represented by the depth of the peaks and troughs of the graph, and the pitch by the interval between the peeks and troughs. Low volume sounds tend to be hard to distinguish from imperfections in the manufacture of the disk - noise. The primary characteristic of analogue systems, and their main limitations: the magnitude of all values is represented by the magnitude of a signal somewhere.

The schematic above shows the Moniac analogue computer. (currently on display in the Science Museum in London.) It was used as a teaching aid to model the national economy. Moniac used the flow of water through the system to 'model' an economy. It featured valves to create the effect of changes in taxation and other policy decisions. See Monica technical description for a complete article.

Analogue computers used in gunnery and navigation need to be built like the proverbial brick outhouse. They generally used gears and motors. Again physical values are used with, for example, the distance turned by a wheel representing values such as speed or distance.

A number of mathematical functions must be performed and over the years engineers have dreamt up different ways of performing them. A classic problem in air navigation is distance travelled over ground when all we know is airspeed and direction. Before we get very far we need to do a little Polar to Cartesian conversion. If airspeed is known, and heading, how can we get distance travelled north and south, east and west?

One answer was the ball resolver, see below. Essentially it is an infinitely variable gear. (This is actually from an early 20th century computer in the Science Museum for predicting tides but the same mechanism in somewhat miniaturised form featured in many navigation computers.)

An electric motor turns the disc at a speed that represents airspeed. The disc turns the brass ball and the ball turns the roller. If the ball is positioned at the outside of the disc the roller will turn quickly, if the ball is moved towards the middle of the disc it will turn the roller progressively slower.

The system has another motor, this driven when the aircraft heading changes. This motor moves the ball from side to side. When the plane is flying due north the ball is positioned at the outside of the disc. The roller is turning at it’s highest possible speed for the speed of the disc. If the aircraft turns to the right and flies more east, as in the diagram below, the system will move the roller towards the centre of the disc. Even with the airspeed the same the velocity north will reduce.

A second resolver is used to calculate velocity east. Identical to the north one except that the ball is set up to move differently. With this one the ball is at the outside of the disc when we are flying east and at the inside when we are flying north.

With the two revolvers we can convert the polar parameter airspeed and heading to the cartesian velocity north and velocity east. And velocity north goes negative when the aircraft is flying south and velocity east goes negative it is going west. (and, BTW those same resolvers can work the trick backwards and convert Cartesian back to Polar.)

With the velocities it’s pretty easy to calculate distance travelled. Those mechanical counters on bikes and speedometers integrate speed and get distance. It’s just a matter of gearing. If we’ve decided that 60 miles an hour is represented by 60 revolutions per minute we just have to arrange the gearing so that one mile will pop up after 60 revolutions of the velocity rollers.

We can even turn distance in miles into degrees of Latitude and Longitude. 60 nautical mile is one degree of Latitude, but Longitude is a little more tricky. Those pesky lines of Longitude get closer together as we move away from the equator so a third disc resolver needs to be added to correct the velocity East/Longitude, for changes in Latitude.

Of course, these calculations assume no wind conditions, unlikely. But supposing we have a system that can measure groundspeed and drift. Moving on a few years from the Norden bombsight etc (which needed ground observation to get drift) we had aircraft like the Vulcan with downwards looking doppler radar that could directly measure groundspeed and drift. So, instead of feeding the computer airspeed we feed it groundspeed derived from radar, Green Satin.

Green Satin also supplies the drift angle, the effect of wind on the aircrafts track across the ground. In order to complete our analogue computer we have to find a means of adding two angles together, the original heading angle and the drift angle. For such an apparently simple problem the mechanical analogue computer uses a differential. Two input values, one for heading angle, one for drift angle are (algabraically) added to produce track. Track is the angle of the aircrafts path over the ground.

All the above techniques are only a sample of what was done with electromechanical analogue computers. The mechanical systems have their shortcomings and there are numerous other analogue techniques, many of them purely electronic. Vacuum tubes amplifiers were used, and as soon as they became available, transistors. And I’ve not even mentioned a now totally obsolete lost world ‘solid state’ technology called magnetic amplifiers.

Now the analogue computer has had its day, although it arguably reached it technical best, (with integrated circuit operational amplifiers) just as it was being made obsolete by the digital computer. As Robert Heinlein observed, that tends to be the case, by the time a technique is finally perfected, it’s generally obsolete. And so it is with the analogue computer.

Bomb Sights

2009-12-15T09:57:00.026+02:00

The first bombing raids on London, by the Graf Zeppelin in 1917, democratised warfare as never before. The killing was know no longer confined to the battlefield and soldiers but now included cities and the civilian population. By the nineteen thirties the prospect of city bombing had gathered pace to the extent that Britain's RAF invested greatly in bombers. (Far more so, in fact, than in the fighters and radar that would eventually win the Battle of Britain.) These new bombers were to be a deterrent force that would make attack unthinkable. But when the war began it was soon realised that the accuracy with which the bombers could deliver their payload was quite another matter.

At the start of the Second World War, aircraft navigation, especially at night, could be extremely poor. Prague was bombed only once and that was by accident. The pilot who bombed Prague thought he was bombing Dresden, an error of over a hundred miles.

Then, assuming that the target was found, there was the issue of bomb aiming. In the early days this had been left to the pilots judgement. As aircraft altitudes and speeds increased bombing effectively became more difficult. The fundamental problem of air navigation is the difference between the aircraft's motion through the air and its motion over the ground. To bomb accurately the motion over the ground must be known, but the aircraft instruments of the 1930s and 1940s could only determine motion through the air.

The instruments of the time could measure airspeed with reasonable accuracy and heading can be found from a magnetic compass. But, because of wind, speed and direction over ground rarely corresponds with speed and direction through the air. The air is usually in motion, and any calculations regarding distance travelled, based only on speed through the air and direction pointed will be subject in error. In order to correct speed over the ground, and track (the path of the aircraft over the ground) wind speed and direction must be known.

The first generation bombsights attempted to add in a predicted wind speed based on weather forecasts. But the forecast winds were often way out and the vector sights which allowed the bomb aimer to ‘dial in’ the predicted winds were soon found to be inadequate. But aircraft motion over the ground could be determined by observing and tracking a point on the ground.

The Norden bombsight was one of several computing bombsights developed by the USA, Britain and Germany which were capable of deriving the wind speed and direction from observation of the target. The Norden bombsight was probably the most hyped weapon of the Second World War. It was an improvement on the vector sights its true accuracy was nothing like the claims made of it. And, long after its secrets were well know in Germany, crews had to carry out a post mission procedure of locking the bombsight up that was as useful as the ceremonial changing of the guard outside Buckingham Palace. Germany had long had a comparable bomb sight of its own, the Lotfe 7. And this was well known to the Allies from Lotft 7s found in shot down aircraft.

The RAF precision bombing experts, 617 squadron, used a British designed sight, the SABS (top picture), and very effectively. At their best, 617 could deliver precision weapons such as Tallboy to an accuracy of 125 yards. The Tallboy bomb, devised by Barnes Wallis, was used to bomb the Tirpitz and against the Saumur tunnel.

All these bombsights were tachymetric sights -calculating speed (windspeed) through observation.

Initially the bomb aimer set the known vertical separation (altitude over ground) between the bomber and the target into the bomb sight computer. He then had to manually align a telescope, which was part of the bombsight, on to the target. The bombsight's computer, which was getting airspeed and heading, then continuously calculated a pointing angle for the telescope as the target was approached. This pointing angle steered the telescope through a servo mechanism.

In reality this would only work in ideal, no-wind conditions, and in practice, the target drifts across the field of view of the telescope. The bomb aimer has two controls which he must use to 'null out' the drift. These controls set up a 'vector' in opposition to the actual wind vector, (which is the speed AND direction of the wind). With the drift correctly neutralised the telescope will automatically track the target. And the adjustment of the drift controls has produced values for the direction and strength of the wind. With the wind known the bomb release point can be determined with much greater accuracy.

The American and German tachymetric bombsights were designed for use with aircraft with autopilots. They produced a steering signal which was fed into the autopilot to correct the aircraft heading. An automatic bomb release signal was also produced. The British SABS bombsight drove director lights which the pilot had to follow.

In an earlier blog I mentioned how the guidance technology developed in the Second World War was developed for use in missiles and, eventually, the Apollo moon landings. The technique of tracking an object, manually on a bombsight, was, within ten years fully automated. ICBMs used automatic star tracking to achieve great accuracy. The submarine launched missile system Polaris is so named because of its ability to automatically track the Pole star.

By the time engineers and airmen had achieved great accuracy the development of nuclear weapons seem to have made accuracy obsolete. The reality has turned out a little differently, bomb accuracy continues to be improved with guidance such as GPS and laser now achieving accuracies of better than 13 metres.

Waiting for the Telegram

2009-12-12T08:17:00.010+02:00

The short story, in written form, can be spare and effective, but in the face of stiff competition from other media is no longer popular. In his collection of TV monologues, Talking Heads, Allan Bennett has devised a TV format which is very similar to the short story form in its impact, and with similair demands on the writer for economy.

In Waiting for the Telegram, Violet, is played by veteran actor Thora Hird. Violet is a lady in her nineties, if she lives long enough she’ll receive a telegram from the Queen congratulating her on her centennial. The story looks back over her long life and the priority that her failing mind has given to various events. This is a brilliantly constructed piece which unfolds most elegantly Waiting_for_the_Telegram

Violet is hospitalised with other elderly people and has trouble finding words. She's been coached to describe a thing when she can't remember the word.
Tits become, "Them two things with pink ends that men like."

Bennett uses this device to put the telegram in context. When Violet can't find the word for telegram she has the line,
"What is it now? Lad comes on a bike. Folks stood at the door weeping."

Commercial telegram operation began in 1839 and telegrams were used to mark great events in family life. News of births, marriages and deaths was delivered by telegram. In the first world war the deaths of soldiers who had died in combat were announced by telegram. Violet’s generation was promised a war to end wars in 1914 and the memory of the loss of so many men is still vivid to her. When asked,
"What war?"
She snaps back, "The proper war. When all the young lads got killed. Never again. That war."

Despite all the memories she's lost she can still remember the last time she saw her sweetheart. He and her had been left alone together on his last night before he went off to war. Somehow Violet’s sense of propriety, or her shyness, inhibited her. Her sweetheart went off to war unsatisfied. She has regretted this ever since.

This is a masterly performance from Thora Hird. Almost ninety at the time, and playing a character ten years older. As the tale unfolds she deftly switches voices to recite the words of the nurses and the other inmates. And, despite the sadness of the tale, Bennett still gives Hird a few funny, typically northern lines. She delivers these with superb timing. - Violet is recalling how Rennie, another elderly, deluded lady inmate is always saying that she’s waiting for a taxi.

"Rennie, where is this taxi going to take you?" Violet had asked her.

"To my mam and dad's in 1947." says Rennie.

"Well if he can take you there I bet he does a spanking trade."

We hear of the indignities that the elderly patients are subject to: being dressed in the wrong clothes, even given the wrong teeth. But we see the affection that Violet feels for some of the staff. And in particular one of the male nurses, Francis. We find that a lady of ninety can still look at a young mans body and admire it.

At the end, after Rennie has died.

"Well he (the taxi) came in the end."

Her nurse friend Francis dies too. By now Violet has had enough, we sense that she won't last much longer.

It was the Zimmerman telegram that brought the first world war to a close. This was an encrypted communication between the German Foreign Secretary and the German ambassador in Washington. It brought the USA into the war. It was intercepted by the British and decrypted by Room 40, Britain’s cipher decryption centre. This finally brought that conflict to an end in 1918. Yet it was only twenty two years later that the lie of a war to end wars was revealed and the second world war started.

Beyond the stone age

2009-11-24T08:25:00.120+02:00

In one of the better episodes of Star Trek Kirk and Spock have travelled through time. They’ve been transported back into the 1930’s and Spock has to improvise a repair to his Tricorder using radio tubes.

In invention two aspects are closely linked, Need and Technology. The technology of the day determines what can be done, and the need establishes the effort to be expended.

The invention of the triode valve (1905), by Lee de Forest, marks the occasion when electrical technology took a deep breath and suddenly became electronics. The triode provided a means of amplification of small electrical signals. This opened the way for audio amplification and radio, and eventually made practicable many previously unimagined applications.

The triode, shown here in schematic form, takes very small electrical signals connected to Vg, and amplifies them to makes a larger, but similair signal. on Va. The amplified signal can be used to drive, for example, a loudspeaker and make what might previously have been a tiny, inaudible signal from a microphone into something large enough to be useful.

Previously, when mechanical engineering had reigned supreme, inventors had sometimes attempted to implement devices that pushed the technology beyond what was realistically practicable. The story of Charles Babbage and his efforts to develop a programmable, mechanical computer has been told many times.

In the days before electronic amplification recorded sound using mechanical means had limited success. Television, in its first versions, used mechanical scanning which was soon superseded by electronic systems. These technologies were driven by a need which could not quite be met by the technology of the day. The principles were sound, but in practice the limitations of mechanical systems were soon evident.

The triode was a crucial turning point, it was a practical means of amplification of high frequency signals. The crucial aspect is high frequency. Mechanical systems can provide a measure of amplification. Levers and pulleys are ways of rescaling or amplifying physical movement, but inertia limits how quickly a physical system can move. All mechanical systems are doomed to relatively low speed operation.

The electronic amplifier using triodes and similair components was soon joined by a variant, the electronic oscillator. (Oscillators are a key element of radio technology.)

When the first radars started to appear, they were built using the established elements of radio: amplifiers and oscillators. A third element was added, electronic switching. The first computers, when they came along, needed the new electronic switches in huge numbers.

The numbers required started to reach the limits of the viability of valves and a replacement was needed. The transistor arrived at just the right time. Transistors could be used as amplifiers, oscillators or switches. They were smaller, used less power, and were soon much more reliable. Moreover, transistors lent themselves to implementation in bulk as integrated circuits, which led to further improvements in size, cost and reliability.

As the new technology matured, other parts of the computer were re-engineered. The first computers had been a grab bag of borrowings from other devices. The first memory systems had used delay lines, which had previously been used in ground based radars. (Many of the early computer designers had worked on radars and knew how to make such esoteric technologies work.) As soon as it was possible delay lines and other weird and wonderful memory systems were replaced by semiconductor memory. At present the spinning magnetic disc is bravely hanging on to its traditional role as a non-volatile memory back up but it can’t hold out much longer.

Computer technology is now so highly developed that a computer is not always an end in itself. It’s often a component within a bigger system. Radios and radars, which had previously contributed technology to computers now contain, as components many computers.

The development of computers has taken place while electronics emerged from the stone age and is still driving the cutting edge of technology development. For a while though, quite a number of complex computers were developed using mechanical systems and stone age electronics. These were analogue computers but that's something for another blog.

The Nine Billion Minds of Clarke

2009-11-06T08:08:00.002+02:00

Arthur Schopenhauer said “To read is to think with somebody else’s mind.” It’s a nice idea, but it takes a pretty good writer to bring it off. Arthur C Clarke, who died in March 2008, was such a writer.

With typical prescience Sir Arthur said goodbye to his fans the Christmas preceding. It’s pleasing to say that he kept his wits, sense of humour and his distinct Somerset accent intact to the end.

After his death many words were spent discussing the Clarke ego, and the fact that he was gay. So what? All that really matters are his words, and these endure.

Margaret Attwood, in the days before she grew disdainfuly of SF, said that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is fourteen. If you are going to be an SF fan, that’s when you find out. That’s the age when it changes you forever. What a delight it was for me, as a teenager, to visit the village library after school and discover a new volume of those yellow Gollanz Science Fiction books. In England, before publisher Victor Gollanz got SF between hard covers, it was not really considerd respectable reading material.

ACC, at his best, in a collection such as ‘The Other Side of the Sky’ was the master of the Science Fiction short story. He made it seem so effortless that I was dismayed to discover that a lot of other writers couldn’t come close. In his hands the SF short could be polished, memorable and beautiful.

ACC had very strong views on religion and declared that at his funeral there should be no hint of any religious rites. He’s also known for the memorable quote, "One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion."

Many of his stories touch on religion in a unique way. ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ is one of the best known. In this story Tibetan monks have been engaged for centuries in a search for the ultimate - correct name of God, the quest involves writing out all possible words that may be derived from combinations of characters in a special alphabet. After labouring with pen and parchment, technology becomes available and the monks buy a computer to hash through all the remaining word combinations.

We follow along with a couple of techies who are the site support for the machine. One of them has discovered that it is the belief of the monks that once all possible names are written down man’s purpose will be complete. Rather than risk a possibilty of confronation with an angry mob they decide to leave before the machine has made it all the way to letter combination nine billion. As they journey down a dusty mountain road, well let ACC tell it his way:

‘Look ,’ whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

The narrative has taken us from the mundane here and now, - a computer factory in Manhattan, via a monastery on the side of a Tibetan mountain, to a universe where a rather petulant god can, at will, terminate the whole of creation. Not a bad trip, for a man with a typewriter and a few sheets of A4.

Now if Schopenhauer is right, after you’ve read these words, you will have got to think, just for a moment, with the mind of ACC. That fact that he’s dead and gone matters not. A little part of his conscious just had a moment inside your head.

ACC disdained all religions and was dismissive of an afterlife. Yet some aspect of the mind of ACC lives on everytime one of his books is read. Of all the after lives that men have speculated on, I think that is one that ACC would approve of.

Golems

2009-11-01T13:45:00.003+02:00

Prague is an amazing city. After four years living in southern Germany I’ve become used to being around beautiful buildings but I must admit that Prague trumps even Bavaria. This may be in part because Prague managed to escape, almost completely, the bombing that most German cities were subjected to. As a consequence the town is a patchwork of all manner of buildings from all centuries.

Guarding the entrance to the old Jewish quarter is this guy, the Golem. Golem looks a bit like Darth Vader, I fancy the Star Wars designers had a pretty good look at all the classic monsters and drew on one of the most fearsome.

The Golem, in Jewish legend, is an artificial being who looks like a real person but is without consciousness. Legend says that very holy men could create such creatures from clay, as God created Adam, but only God could create a life that was truly conscious. The ‘quickening’ of a Golem involves the use of the true name of God, which was known only to very holy men. To activate him was necessary to put a clay tablet in his mouth.

The Golem in Prague was created to be a sentry on guard. One version of the legend tells how the creature fell in love, but it was rejected and then set about creating mayhem. Its creator then deactivated it. On its forehead was the word EMET which in Hebrew means truth, the E was erased to leave MET, which means death.

If you are anything like me you’ll probably have little trouble seeing a connection between Golems and those robots who, by long tradition, wreak havoc across classic black and white sci-fi films. Frankenstein’s monster, which according to the story was put together just down the road from Prague, in Ingolstadt, shares more than a few Golem traits.

In 1921 a play called, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) premiered in Prague. It was notable for the first introduction of the word Robot which is derived from the Czech word robota, implying the labour of serfs. These robots were biological machines, factory assembled from vat grown flesh, rather than those clanking suits of armour that were later considered to be robots.

While paying tribute to the name robot, Isaac Asimov was not impressed by the play but it was obviously a great success. It was translated and produced in London and New York, Chicago and Los Angles. In 1938 the BBC adapted it and broadcast it as thirty minute TELEVISION production, which is considered to be the first broadcast TV science fiction ever. The author, Karl Capek conceded eventually that what he had done was retell the Golem legend.

It’s hard to not be impressed by Prague, a place of Golems, Kafka and Cubism.

Now maybe it’s just me but this statue, which was actually erected to commemorate Kafka, seems to be saying as much about Golems and their ilk, as it says about Kafka. It seems to sum up the relationship between men and those who seek to control them. The rider requires from his mount only muscle and blind, mindless obedience. In the absence of the necessary magic to create Golems men who behave like Golems must be found. Mindless men, without conscious, or conscience. Unfortunatly, as history shows, such men can often be found.

Unlikely Characters

2009-10-24T23:46:00.053+03:00

From time to time I try my hand at writing fiction. It is advisable, they say, to create convincing characters, to describe real people doing plausible things. Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr, and composer George Antheil, seem to have taken that rule and stamped on it, and these two are real life characters.

Hedy Lamarr starred in the controversial 1933 Czech film, Ecstasy. This movie, which depicts a frustrated young woman married to a much older man, swept her to fame. Helped by nude scenes and depictions of her orgasm. Which, she says, was cued by being pricked in the bum by the director wielding a safety pin. This led to the film being banned in various countries and after this it became a must see.

Hedy subsequently became the trophy wife of a wealthy European arms manufacturer, Friedrich Mandl, who counted Hitler and Mussolini among his chums. Mandl wanted to control Hedy’s life, he tried to buy up all existing prints of Ecstasy and destroy them. Hedy says she hid out from Mandl in a brothel and ended up having to ‘entertain’ one of the clients in order to maintain her cover. The marriage didn't last, she met Louis B. Mayer and moved to Hollywood.

George Antheil was an American who traveled around Europe pre war living in Paris and Berlin and achieved fame as a composer of avant-garde musical works. He wrote Ballet Mécanique which was to be performed by an orchestra of some 16 player pianos, see Essential Music. In the era before electronic amplification Antheil wanted to achieve very high volume levels, rock concert levels, and using 16 player pianos was how he chose to do it.

George turned up in Hollywood in 1938, then tried his hand at novel writing, he wrote an advice column for Esquire, and eventually wrote the musical scores for a number of Hollywood movies. He also authored a number of books of male interest including one called "The Glandbook for the Questing Male" which was intended to give men an insight into identifying the sexual availability of women. Hedy contacted him when she was looking for a non-surgical means to increase her breast size.

So, in 1940 George and Hedy met and the conversation turned, somehow, to the radio control of torpedoes! Most popular accounts say that Hedy brought, from her time married to her first husband, knowledge of the potential control problems of torpedoes. George brought a knowledge of player piano technology.

At the time torpedoes were mainly free running devices and homing systems were still a little way in the future. When Hedy and George were getting their heads together radio control had been tried. They knew that a radio control system would be subject to jamming, (transmissions on the same frequency which would scrabble the control signals) They decided that in order for radio control to be viable the control system would need to hop quickly between different frequencies. The idea was that the controlling transmitter would constantly change frequency and that the receiver in the torpedo would change its frequency, to follow that of the transmitter.

The diagram, from the patent, shows the transmitter and receiver. Hedy has signed it 'Hedy Hiesler Markey', which was her married name at the time.

The system is controlling the rudder of a torpedo and a tone corresponding to 100 Hz will drive the rudder left and 50 Hz will drive it to the right. At the same time, the transmission frequency, which on a conventional broadcast transmitter is fixed, is made to change under the control of a player piano type roll. A motor is driving the piano roll, and as the piano roll perforations pass over switches different capacitors are switched into the master oscillator circuit of the transmitter.

The switched capacitors change the frequency of the transmitter, if you were listening to the transmitter on a radio you’d need to constantly re-tune, as to a different station. If you were trying to jam the system, you’d need to retune your transmitter as well. Of course, in order to maintain control, the receiver in the torpedo has to switch to the new frequency automatically. It also has a piano roll, punched identically to that in the transmitter, this would retune the receiver so that it stays in tune with the transmitter.

The transmitter and receiver need to stay synchronized in order for continuity of communications to be maintained. George had already encountered synchronization problems with his work Ballet Mécanique and those 16 player pianos. Lack of synchronization between the instruments had turned the first attempts into a cacophony and the 16 pianos had been reduced to four. The patent recognizes the synchronisation problem and although they do not illustrate a synchronization method they suggest it is prior art, and already in use in telegraphy and television.

The US Navy did not persevere with Hedy and George’s invention. Radio control of torpedoes was quite a difficult trick, and most torpedoes were straight runners, with simple autopilots to control direction and depth, or were controlled by wires. Eventually Germany introduced homing torpedoes which went for the acoustic noise of the propellers of the target.

However, the 50Hz, 100Hz modulators could easily have been replaced by a speech modulator, and this would have given secure voice communications much like the Havequick radios currently in use by the British Armed forces. In the Havequick the transmitter frequency comes from a pseudo-random algorithm which can be seeded by the current date and time. The sequence of the pseudo-random number is highly classified and knowing it would be like having a copy of one of George and Hedy’s player piano rolls. – It would permit an outside agency to know the sequence of frequencies which would still allow jamming or interception the transmission.

The mechanical system doomed the practicality of the system. The player piano roll needed a source of vacuum for the reader switches and the synchronisation system would have tricky to impliment. Although the principle described is sound, as with Babbages mechanical computer, proper electronics is much better. Hedy and George, like Charles Babbage before them, had a good idea that was just a little ahead of its time. They had to use mechanical methods, methods which were not totally impractical but would be better achieved using electronic switching techniques.

Hedy Lamarr, from nude scenes in Ecstasy to Time Domain Frequency Multiplexing. If you put her in a short story they’d laugh at you. Incredible characters, don’t you just love them?

The Long Shadow #1

2009-10-19T07:23:00.080+03:00

Neil Armstrong said, “We went to the moon on world war two technology.”

It’s tempting to assume that he meant the technology that Von Braun had developed, the V2 rocket. This had been adapted by both the USA and the USSR, and quickly developed into technology for delivering nuclear weapons.

It’s remarkable to me that only 25 years separates the first V2 fired on London and the first landing on the moon, and 40 years have passed since then. The moon landing seemed, at the time, to be of another age from what I then knew of the war. That so much had been accomplished in such a short time suggested that by 2001 we would be dancing around the outer planets.

Rocket technology, which with the V2 had been little more than an expensive way of delivering a small amount of high explosive, had suddenly become a viable means of delivering nuclear weapons. This had surprised sceptics who had assumed that 1. nuclear bombs would remain physically huge and heavy and 2. that the problems of automatic guidance over intercontinental distances would be too difficult.

Electronics, which had previously only meant radio, had now spun off into a variety of other areas. Radar, control electronics used in guidance systems and numerous types of navigation system.

Even the digital computer had its roots in wartime code breaking technology. Although this information was not common knowledge in 1969.

Strictly speaking, the transistor is absent from the wartime development list. But even this had its origins in work done at the Bell labs in support of radar. Semiconductor diodes were developed in wartime and by 1947, based on this research, the transistor was developed.

Pilots like Armstrong had flown high performance jet aircraft and were trained in the sciences.

Space medicine had grown out of wartime studies, with data gathered in shameful experiments on prisoners in Germany and Japan. Yet the data was useful, and it did contribute to the knowledge base that marked the beginnings of space medicine.

Numerous technologies: precision engineering of gyroscopes, electro-optics, magnetic tape recording, these were all wartime developments. They had all been the subjects of intense development in the guided missile race that commenced as soon as WW2 was over. These developments were relatively mature by the time Kennedy made his first announcement about a moon landing in 1961.

In order to reach the moon, ‘state of the art technology’ would be used. This expression became a euphemism for the hottest technology going. In its original form it was meant to indicate a measure of caution. State of the art meant the design of the space craft would be based on existing techniques. Nothing in Apollo would be dependent on technologies unproven and propulsion, structures, electronics, and re-entry systems had already been used in existing missile systems.

Despite the commitment to 'state of the art', there was left an enormous challenge, the need to coordinate the numerous companies that manufactured the Apollo spacecraft and systems. Many different companies would be used and all must work together to make a single, common system. This was quite unlike the typical aircraft build process back then. Airframe manufacturers were used to working in splendid isolation. As long as they could make all their bits fit together, and accommodate the engine and electronics, they could complete a structure in any way they saw fit. Aircraft manufacture was like low volume, luxury car making, expensive and very labour intensive. It was dependent, not on rigorously defined engineering processes, but on skilled craftsmen who tailoring the pieces together. All that would change for Apollo where different suppliers had to separately produce different parts of a tightly meshing system.

The Manhattan project, the wartime effort to produce the atomic bomb, had involved 130,000 people and cost, by today’s prices, an estimated 22 billion dollars. An international development, carried out in great secrecy, had successfully produced a weapon of unprecedented power. Kennedy and his contemporaries had seen what American science and industry could achieve when it set its collective mind to it.

Apollo would eventually employ over 400,000 people and numerous technology firms and academic bodies. Aside from its technical legacy it provided, at the time, a huge boost to an economy that was in recession. But this didn’t come cheap, it cost around $25 billion, or $145 billion in present day terms.

The legacy was an aircraft industry which achieved immense technical capability, working to hugely increased quality and production standards. It would subsequently decimate its European competitors and secure a technical lead that is still maintained 40 years on. European manufacturers eventually caught up in most areas, but it took much longer for them to recognise the need for the processes and standards that Apollo had demanded of the American aerospace industry way back in the sixties.

Apollo cost the US taxpayer plenty. Money up in smoke? I’m sure there were plenty who said so at the time. The tradition of public spending to jump start an economy, as used by Hitler with his public works program of the 1930s, is seen by some as backdoor socialism. The money spent on weapons, which gravitates towards a different set of rich capitalists, tends to be seen differently. With Apollo, the money trickled down and energised the economy, and consolidated a technical lead that the USA had made its first down payments on in WW2. It paid off with what Tom Hanks called, The exquisite achievement of landing a man on the moon, but it’s carried on paying back in jobs and capability ever since.

Now, at last, we have moved out of the long shadow of WW2, finally we are developing technologies which have only a tenuous connection to those started back then. The elements of our age, what Arthur C. Clarke called the Total Comm. Age, would have seemed incredible (in 1942) even to a visionary like Clarke. We haven’t made it to the outer planets, but things that are now essentials did not even have names back then, (the Internet is but one of them) and that is pretty amazing.

We have another great legacy of Apollo, the knowledge that when it gets the opportunity, science and engineering can quickly accomplish incredible things, and not just in the field of weapons of mass destruction. Yes, we needed to know that too.

The Flight of the Phoenix

2009-10-17T19:47:00.006+03:00

Flight of the Phoenix (original version) is one of the whole time great movies. I saw it when it was new in the cinema and I must have seen it fifty times on TV since, usually turning on half way in and getting drawn into it once more.

James Stewart plays a pilot who feels responsible for the deaths of several passengers after a forced landing in the desert. He and the rest of the survivors are eventually persuaded by Dorfmann (Hardy Kruger) to attempt to build an aircraft from the remains of the old one.

The movie says something special about the nature of machines, particularly aircraft. Although they may look refined, immaculate, often beautiful, in fact they are constructed of an extraordinary quantity of precisely worked components. Each part has been made to its particular shape to serve its particular purpose. None of it occured accidentally, somebody sat down and designed every last tiny part.

Dorfmann, the aircraft designer, has to figure out how to make a plane from what’s left intact of the old. He must come up with a design that’s viable. He has to work everything out, how the old plane must be torn apart, how the parts of it will be moved around, and how they will be reassembled, how the controls must be rigged. In reality this would be an almost superhuman feat. Could a real life aircraft designer do such a thing? Would a real aircraft designer have covered ever step of the production life cycle. But Dorfmann’s company makes model planes, and Dorfmann has always had to design everything on his projects. Still improbable? Maybe, but this is the movies, we don't take quite as much convincing!

Moreover, and most important of all, Dorfmann must present the case for building the Phoenix, and see it through. Dorfmann demonstrates real steel, for a time he and he alone believes in the job and recognises the importance of seeing it through. Dorfmann is commited to the point of obsession, as true genius requires.

With Dorfmann's character, the movie teters on the edge of credibility, the introspective Dorfmann is something special, not only did he design the airframe of his world class models, but also the radio control. Improbable stuff? Perhaps, but the movie is saved by great story telling. The survivors decide to go for it, rather than sit on their arses and die, they take a chance on the 'toy plane' builder.

In fact, many full size aircraft designers have been model plane builders. Charles Fairey had a job as a power station engineer before selling, for a considerable fee, a model design of his to Gamleys Toy Store. Then he moved into full-size aviation and eventually ran a 'little' company called Fairey Aviation. Sydney Camm, responsible for the Hurricane fighter, was also a modeller, and most recently Burt Rutan, who even borrowed some his construction techniques from aeromodelling (hot wiring foam etc). As Dorfmann puts it, flying models are not toys, they obey the same physical laws as the full sized ones. Moreover, they don't have a pilot to keep them straight and level. In fact, Dorfmann would have prefered it if he could have managed without the pilot, James Stewart's character, Frank Towns

Towns must surrender his authority to Dorfmann, so that the new plane can be built. Towns doesn’t believe the plan is feasible but he is persuaded that engaging in the project is better than letting them sit around waiting to die. Throughout Towns rails against Dorfmann but always Dorfmann is right and Towns wrong, yet Dorfmann knows he needs Towns’ skills to fly the plane.

After many problems the plane is ready and Towns must start it up and fly. The point where Towns climbs aboard and pulls the ladder up behind him is very sweet. This is where Towns takes the plane away from Dorfmann. Now he must use all his knowledge to get the engine started.

The engine can only be started with a Coffman cartridge starter. Dorfmann feels that Towns would intentionally not get the engine started, so he can't kill more of them in another crash. But if the engine doesn't start Towns will have failed as a pilot AND they'll all die of thirst.

Towns starts the engine and is seen to have knowledge that Dorfmann doesn't have. In one sense getting the engine going is the end of the story, Towns has made his choice, finally committed wholeheartedly to the project, and in doing so got his self respect back.

And now, with the motor going, the Phoenix has ceased to be a collection of useless parts, it’s become the difference between life and death and every one of them has made a contribution.

Paul Mantz, a veteran stunt pilot who had worked with Howard Hughes on Hell's Angels was killed flying for this movie. As a result the actual flying shots look a bit truncated. It's a great pity, but Mantz died doing the work he loved, and when you gotta go, that's not a bad way to do it. Moreover, this is a wonderful movie, Mantz could hardly have wished for a better final credit than Phoenix.

More comments on Phoenix
ouerbar-movie-review-flight-of-phoenix-1965

Doing More With Less.

2009-10-07T02:02:00.017+03:00

I was delighted to see that Burt Rutan won the Robert Heinlein Memorial award for 2008. Other recipients have been Neil Armstrong, Chuck Yeager, Carl Sagen. So who the hell is Burt Rutan?

Burt Rutan first appeared on the radar back in 1980, his CV was a lot shorter then. Then known as an innovative designer of aircraft intended for home building. He’d designed a plane called the VariEze. (pronounced very easy) This plane was developed at a time when most commercially built aircraft were made from aluminium. VariEze was made from composite, foam plastics and glass fibre. Composite aircraft were not completely unknown, but these were largely European built gliders. These were factory made machines which required expensive tooling. Glass fibre was laid up in these fixtures and components were moulded, much like the parts for a model kit.

The VariEze and its successors, featured two Rutan design characteristics, an unusual configuration and a novel construction system.

The configuration features a canard. The canard serves the same function as the horizontal tail surface. It provides stability in pitch, but without the need to produce a lift reducing down force like traditional, aft mounted tails. The Eze also has swept wings, most unusual in slow flying, piston engined aircraft. They offer no aerodynamic advantages at lower speeds and make a conventional structure more complicated, but they do offer the more subtle advantage of inherent stability in roll.

Rutan’s second major innovation, was the mouldless composite construction method. This allows a relatively simple implementation of swept wings, and much else. Borrowing ideas from surfboard and model aircraft construction, this entails cutting foam plastic cores to shape using an electrically heated wire. The foam blocks are carved and sanded to the required shape for the component, perhaps a wing or tail surface. Cardboard templates are used to devlop the shape to the required section and then the foam is covered in glass fibre and resin. The foam itself provides very little strength, most strength is in the glass fibre skin.

Other innovations are the ‘pusher’ engine and the twin, wingtip fins. Both these features offer aerodynamic advantages. With the VeriEzi Burt Rutan took the traditional aircraft configuration, as used on numerous aircraft from the Spitfire to the A380, completely changed it around and in the course of doing so, made it much better. The whole thing is a wonderful, organic creation. Balanced, logical and beautiful, a brilliant early effort from a man who has never stopped innovating.

Since the VariEze was prodced big aerospace manufacturing has adopted winglets as add ons to conventionally constructed wings. But this is just a 'bolt on' feature, in the VariEze the winglets also support the rudders and, because the rudders and other control surfaces are outside of the higher speed airflow developed by the propeller the aircraft is less directly subjected to changing its handling characteristics with different power settings. Rutan's winglets serve a dual purpose.

The image below shows SpaceShip One being carried aloft by its mothership. Tucked in close behind is the Beech Starship, another of Rutan's designs.

SS1, Space Ship One is Rutan’s greatest achievement thus far, (but he’s still only 66) and would have been sufficient to make him one of Heinlein’s people. Back in the day when Heinlein was writing his first stories, engineering was done very differently. In some respects it was all done the Burt Rutan way. Men such as Willy Messerschmitt and DeHavilland had their names on the aeroplanes they made, and their style all over them. As we moved into the 1960s aircraft design became institutionalised, immensely expensive and the work of huge teams. Aircraft were no longer designed by, or even especially associated with single individuals.

With the very high cost came conservative configurations, design refinement, not revolution. Improvements, none the less, but expensive solutions to well understood problems. Rutan always been on the cutting edge. “Any fool can find a difficult, complicated and expensive solution to a problem, but it takes somebody really smart to find a very simple solution.” For Burt Rutan. simplicate, and add lightness are mandatory.

Another Rutan hallmark is to design inherent stability into the aircraft's configuration, as with the swept wings of the VeriEze. On SS1 Rutan came up with a huge innovation for re-entry, the Shuttle is pedestrian by comparison. He came up with a revolutionary way of turning a super streamlined hypersonic rocket plane into a high drag, stable, re-entry vehicle.

This image shows SS1 at apogee, adopting ‘Feather mode’. This mode is taken up after it has achieved its maximum altitude, and is outside most of the atmosphere. Re-entry, from similair speeds that SS1 achieves, was done the conventional way in the government funded X15. It used ablative heat resistant materials and precision guidance by an automatic flight control system. By contrast, SS1, in feather mode, is inherently stable, neither the pilot, or an automatic guidance system has anything to do while the aircraft re-enters the atmosphere. It decelerates from over 2,300 miles per hour, at 367,000ft, to a few hundred miles an hour by around 50,000ft. It is then 're-moded', out of feather, back to its standard configuration then glides down for a conventional, runway landng.

At a stroke Rutan knocked billions off the development budget. Developing automatic control systems is immensely expensive. It’s hard to overstate the value of this kind of innovative thinking.

Mike Melville, one of Rutan’s long time colleagues, someone who has worked with him since the VariEze days, became, the first SS1 astronaut. In the video below a system failure led to the loss of the primary attitude indicator, and this was during the boost phase. Melville maintained the craft in the correct attitude by monitoring the real world horizon in his peripheral vision. Now that's pretty hot stuff, even by the standards of one of Heinlein’s fictional heroes, it's seems that Rutan, as well as being a great innovator, can pick his pilots pretty well too.

Mike Melville

Video illustrating one of the SS1 flights

Rotating Wings

2009-09-20T08:15:00.013+03:00

I’ve fallen in love. I went flying in a gyrocopter last Saturday, and now I want one! I’m fond of helicopters, but they are expensive and complicated. Fixed wing pilots call helicopters ‘a cloud of metal fatigue around an oil leak.’ Helicopters have become an expensive way for millionaire amateur pilots to kill themselves.

Autogyros, or gyrocopters look a bit like helicopters. They usually have one big rotor on top, and an engine at the back with a pusher propeller. But the likeness to the helicopter is superficial. The rotor is not mechanically driven, it spins like a windmill in the airflow. Borrowing an idea from nature and spinning sycamore seeds, falling gets them spinning and the spinning slows the descent by causing a little lift to be generated. In the autogyro the rotor is tilted up at the front. The engine pushes you along and forward motion keeps the rotor spinning.

If the engine should stop the impetus to go forward is reduced and the ‘gyro starts to descend, but the rotor keeps turning, it’s still being pushed around by the wind, so lift is still being generated. Engine failure on an autogyro is no big deal, the pilot still has directional control, and he can concentrate on picking out a clear spot for landing.

In a ‘gyro a near vertical landing can be achieved, unlike a glider which needs to keep moving forward in order for the wing to keep producing lift. The rotor of the gyro keeps producing lift so long as it’s turning.

The idea has been around since 1920 and for a while it seemed as though every home would have one. They fell out of favour when the helicopter proper came in. The pre-war gyro’s were as big as light planes, it was only after the war that technology changed.

Annette wrote a blog on James Bond last week and I dug out the DVD of ‘You Only Live Twice’. That’s the one where Q provides 007 with a miniature flying machine, the gyrocopter, Little Nellie, packed up in four suitcases. The script, BTW, was by Roald Dahl, who got a mention a few blogs back for adding Gremlins to the national consciousness.

The gyrocopter in the film, was flown by its inventor, ex-RAF pilot, Ken Wallis. During the war both the Germans and British had experimented with small Gyrocopters, or rather, rotary winged kites. Both of these design were looked at after the war when gyrocopter were developed for sport aviation.

The Germans had devised a compact observation platform which could be packed up and towed behind a U Boat, and the British design was intended to be towed behind a aircraft and then released. It would be used for dropping agents into enemy territory.

Nowadays both jobs could be tackled using parachute variations. Square, steerable chutes were developed for sport aviation in the 1960’s and adopted sometime afterwards by the military. Now Special Forces personnel train to perform high altitude, covert, free fall drops into enemy territory. The aerodynamic ram air chutes are manoeuvrable and quite different to what was available in the 1940s.

Q has fitted Little Nellie out with various devices, to make it an airborne version of the Aston Martin. On the DVD commentary track Ken Wallis, who had worked on aircraft missile firing trials, grumbles about the way a cluster of miniature missiles are fired simultaneously. He knew that in reality they must be fired in a stream for best accuracy.

That's the movies for you, always taking liberties with the truth, but just to show that larger than life characters are not just found in films, Ken, born in 1916, was still flying his autogyro at the age of 90!

Essential Music

2009-09-15T23:19:00.028+03:00

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of music in our lives. Since the earliest times great efforts have gone into making music, and reproducing it. For centuries the leading edge of technology has been used to reproduce music as faithfully as possible. Modern methods record and replay sound but mechanical methods of producing music go back to the 9th century.

The principle of recording the notes to be played, rather than the sound produced, has been applied in various ways. Chiming clocks and musical boxes use mechanical means to record the data. A favoured method, still in use today, utilises a drum which rotates. Pegs stick out of the drum and strike or pluck the notes.

Similar to the pegged drum are perforated metal discs which allow for easier storage of more software. Techniques borrowed from the Jacquard loom, led to the player piano with its paper roll. These were initially produced by manually punching out the notes, the music to be played had to be worked out in advance, then realised in the workshop. Then, around 1900, techniques for recording an actual performance of a keyboard player were devised.

Recording methods were gradually improved. One of these, the Duo-Art, recorded a four bit binary code, representing loudness, on to the paper roll. The Duo-Art ‘expression box’, was a mechanical servo system which decoded the binary data and converted it to 1 of 16 volume levels. A new volume level was set every 1/60th of a second.

In the picture, the musician, at the keyboard of a recording piano, is working with a recording producer who is adjusting the levels. There was an extensive post recording process where the producer could rework, and tidy up the recordings. Eventually an edited master would be signed off by the musician and the producer and mass production would begin.

With lots of 'software' available ‘Player Pianos’ became very popular. The family would congregate around the piano and someone would work the foot pedals. These drew the paper roll through its reader, and provided the energy to strike the notes. Sometimes the paper roll would have song lyrics written on it as well, and these would come into view as the roll was drawn through the machine, much like a karaoke machine.

A device known as a 'Piano Player' was made, these could turn a normal piano into a recording player. Concerts were sometimes staged where an orchestra played along with a virtual pianist recorded on paper. In 1985 Rudolph Granz made a posthumous performance using this method, playing along with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra. This puts a different spin on 'live performance'.

While few self respecting middle class homes lacked a piano, automated or otherwise, the super rich needed something better. For the very wealthy, with lots of room, orchestrions was produced. Often centered around an automated pipe organ, orchestrions added automated drums, automatically fingered violins and often animated figures. This detail show part of an orchestrion for playing a violin.

Smaller orchestrions were installed in pubs and café’s These machines were very robust and could play a variety of music with the ‘software’ often on books of fan fold card pages.

With such sophistication, small wonder that recorded music, rather than recorded sound, held sway for so long. Before the invention of electronic amplification mechanically recorded sound was scratchy, tinny and low in volume. Devices such as the orchestrion could reproduce very high levels of sound. Moreover, some music prepared for these mechanical musicians was so involved that it is too difficult for a human to play.

The precision technology of the mechanical servos was robust and versatile. Engineers found alternate applications for it. One American company, The Link Piano and Organ Factory of Binghamton, NY started out manufacturing player pianos and organs. Ed Link, son of the man who founded the piano company, adapted player piano pneumatic servo systems and used them in the Link pilot trainer. Thousands of these were built for pilot training and, in somewhat modified form, as fairground rides.

The Link trainer with its vestigial wings.

The Binghampton company, now CAE Link, is still making simulators. In the movie Apollo 13, the Link logo appears on the side of the Lunar Lander simulator. Though by the 1960's Link had abandoned pneumatics and taken to using digital computers with electronic servo systems.

By the 1950's sound recording with electronic amplification had finally started to catch up. Scratchy 78s gave way to 45s and magnetic tape. These in turn gave way to digital recording. But the old player piano technology has a modern counterpart. MIDI is a digital protocol that allows computers to exchange control information with electronic instruments and mixing equipment. MIDI can also be used to cue stage lighting, effects and animation. An entire performance, of electronic instruments, can be recorded as MIDI cues and reproduced note for note. As such it makes a good modern analogy to a player piano roll.

Music, as close to the cutting edge of technology as anything humans do. How did it ever become so important? Sounds like a topic for a future blog.

Link trainer
Player Pianos

Hunting in the dark

2009-09-11T10:59:00.014+03:00

These two hunters use echo location to find their quarry. But the bat is more sophisticated in extracting information from the returned echoes than the equipment in the aeroplane. This implies no disrespect to the engineers who designed the radar in the Junkers. In an intense, darwinian struggle of barely 5 years, through move and countermove, German, British and American engineers devised most of the techniques of what is now called Electronic Warfare, EW.

The equipment in the aircraft could determine the distance to a target with some accuracy, but the direction could only be discriminated with an accuracy of about 5 degrees. Bats, on the other hand, (and here I’ll speak of the characteristics of various species, not just the Horseshoe bat in the picture) can also extract Doppler information. Doppler is used to determine the speed of a target, by measuring how much its motion has changed the frequency of the returned echo. In 1940 the Doppler effect had been known of for a 100 years but it took the Hamburg campaign, Operation Gomorrah, before radar engineers exploited it. The raids, in July 1943, a week of intense air attacks, night and day, was the most effective strategic bombing effort that the RAF were ever to carry out.

The effectiveness of the attacks was largely due to the deployment of a new EW measure, chaff. Both Germany and Britain had known that by dropping bundles of metal foil, of the correct size, they’d be able to create havoc on radar. Both sides resisted using it, in case their opponents hadn’t already thought of it. But in 1943, Harris, commander of the RAF bomber force, was given permission to use chaff in the Hamburg attacks. Huge amounts were dropped making the actual aircraft indistinguishable to the radars of the day.

For once the bombers were able to deliver a crushing blow. Largely unhindered by radar controlled flak guns and night fighters the bomber force was able to bomb with uncommon accuracy. Very large fires were started and losses on the ground were huge. Hamburg was considered by both the allies and Germany to be a major event. But the bombers were never able to be as effective again, just 4 months after Hamburg Germany had come up with a countermeasure.

The countermeasure was doppler discrimination. Doppler is used by bats to distinguish between moving prey and stationary trees. They detect the small changes in frequency of the received echoes. The bigger the frequency change, the greater the speed of the target. The same phenomena effects radio frequency echoes. Dropped chaff falls straight down, unlike the bomber stream which had a cruising speed of around 200 mph. In response to Hamburg, German radars were modified to distinguish moving targets by detecting the doppler shift. They were able to sort out the targets, from the chaff.

But bats can do even better, the Doppler effect of the particular motion of the wings of a prey can characterise the returned echo. Some bats use this to distinguish between different species of insects. By the end of the war electronics had caught up with bats and was able to do this too, and use the modulation effect of spinning propellers to help identify types of potential target.

Biologists talk of co-evolution, where the development of a new trait in one species influences the evolution of another. Some species of moths have evolved a sensitivity to the calls of a particular bat’s echolocation. They use it to take evasive action. This too has it’s airborne counterpart with aircraft using directional receivers that ‘listen out’ on the known frequencies of enemy radars. Physics restricts what frequencies can be used and the trick is for the hunter to keep changing frequencies. It turns out that bats too, in their need to keep one step ahead of the moths have learned to frequency hop, in order to pre-empt the moths sensitivity to the usual sound.

Bats exploit frequency sweeping, changing the note of the burst of sound they emit in order to more accurately determine the range to the prey, accuracies of under a millimetre are possible. Electronic implementations of these techniques, using modern systems are very software intensive. They require a wealth of intensive, maths heavy, code. Yet the bat has evolved a nervous system that is quite capable of cracking the same problem.

Is there anything humans have come up with that hasn’t already been achieved by bats? Bats seem to be lone hunters while radar equipped nightfighters receive guidance from the ground. Nowadays we have airborne networks with fighters, dedicated radar warning aircraft and ground stations all exchanging data continuously and automatically. I’d be surprised if it turns out that bats ever figured out how to hunt in cooperation, analysing echoes when the position of the transmitter is unknown could be just too difficult for nature.

But evolution has come up with some pretty amazing things. Watch out, if it turns out that a study on bats, or any of the other creatures that use echolocation suddenly disappears from view. Maybe the men in black have confiscated all the copies! It could just be that nature came up with something that man as only just go around to understanding, and now engineers somewhere are keen to copy it and work it into a new weapon system, before the other guys do.

WW2 German airborne radar
Dyson, Disturbing the Universe
Bat echolocation

Conscious, but only of the past.

2009-09-10T16:12:00.015+03:00

Yesterday Colum took me to task, for him a bandwidth of 20 bits per second seems too slow for consciousness. These numbers are quoted in The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders, and were established nearly 60 years ago. In fact, several different figures are quoted, and for some tasks the consciousness did even worse. The task of proof reading, for example, is performed at 18 BPS (bits per second), while piano playing is done at 23 BPS. It seems possible that some jobs lend themselves to being ‘automated’, as it were, and are speeded by well practiced, unconscious skills. On the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words there are some more diagrams, and further notes here.

It is important to consider only tasks that MUST be performed consciously. Many activities, like driving and changing gear, become so practiced that the consciousness does not need to participate. Driving is quite different in the early stages, those first attempts at clutch and brake control were much harder, took longer and took up all of the resources of the conscious. Once the skill is learned most of the donkey work is delegated to the unconscious. Once you’ve learned to drive you can drive AND listen to the radio. The conscious has been freed up for other things.

It’s also worth remembering that in the case of emergency those practiced unconscious reflexes are in charge. They must be, not only is the conscious limited in capacity, or bandwidth, it’s also lagging behind the unconscious in time, and way behind reality.

Experiments described here seem to show that the conscious lags behind perception by around half a second. We might expect some delays while objects in the field of view are evaluated and decisions are made, but consciousness, whatever it is, even lags behind when everything that is going on is internal, in our heads.

What this means is that any decision we might make is not revealed to the consciousness until around half a second after we’ve decided to do it. The decision takes place, and conscious recognition of the decision takes place around 500mS later.

This doesn’t mean that we are not creatures of free will, just that our recognition of it lags behind by around half a second. But we’ve grown accustomed to it, our unconscious mind works much faster, so it’s the unconscious that drives the car, thank goodness, the conscious just can’t keep up.

What we call consciousness, just seems to be a recognition of what we have decided, it doesn’t seem to be an essential part of the process.

In my rather facetious attack on HDTV, I intentionally left out a key point. The actual experience of reality, even the reality of watching a movie, is very different to our memories. Memories, no matter how cherished, can’t equal the richness of the actual experience. The conscious, when editing and storing our memories must leave out much of the experience. What is felt during the actual deed, as it’s happening, will be more intense than anything we can possibly recall.

The richness of the actual experience are what those 20 million bits per second of HDTV are trying to reproduce.

So is the conscious involved in editing and laying down memories? I think it must be, massive amounts of information, events that happen to us are edited out and lost. Why should they be remembered? All the automatic learned skills that we use, day to day, serve no useful purpose by being recalled. What took place on the journey, road conditions, stops for petrol, etc are rarely worth memory space once you've claimed your expenses. If, on the other hand, you stop for petrol and in doing so meet the love of your life, you’ll remember it for ever. But, it is only in retrospect that the true importance of an event can be recognised. If that love turns out only to be a passing fancy, over a longer time that recollection too may fade.

This is what Daniel Dennett describes as the Orwellian model, described here, where history, in our memories, is re-written in the light of current events and priorities.

Intentionally editing memories, BTW, which can mean just removing painful ones, as in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, seems to be getting a little closer, as related here.

The Bandwidth of Conciousness

2009-09-09T20:56:00.002+03:00

Anyone contemplating buying a high definition TV might like to consider the following, one crucial part of the system will always operate at a much lower data rate than whatever device you select and carry home from the store.

The human consciousness, that part of the chain which actually experiences and recalls the movies has a data rate much, much lower than the TV. Tests have shown that the conscious experience runs at little better than 20 bits per second. Compared to HDTV which brags about data rates of 10 million bits per second.

Of course, the manufacturers of modern audio visual systems claim to deliver an experience much closer to reality than earlier models. What we call experience includes a welter of unconscious sensation. All this enriches things but what we remember of the event is what has fallen into the domain of the conscious mind. The conscious seems to be responsible for evaluating what we see and hear and what we remember.

The unconscious mind IS engaged, turning what is imaged on the back of the retina into objects and the sounds heard into speech. The conscious, takes all that, edits our experience and saves the highlights. In which case, why not cut to the chase and just live the highlights. Is there a way?

Ace SF writer Philip K Dick conceived the idea of missing out the expensive, and often largely boring parts of experience. In, We can remember it for you, wholesale. a travel agency supplied only the memories, and a few souvenirs, of pricey tourist jaunts to Mars.

Now back in the early days of TV, the supporters of radio liked to say that the pictures, on radio, were better. Listening or reading a well written narrative invokes pictures in the head.

The data rate of reading is very close to the measured data rate of consciousness. But during reading, the experience is subtly different. Watching a movie, or even real life, the unconscious mind reduces a wealth of audio visual events to a narrative that the conscious can follow. When reading, (something good) the conscious induces mental images which illustrate the narrative internally.

In reading too, part of the unconscious IS engaged, first taking the printed word and converting it to an internal voice. This seems much like the voice of conscious, that internal narrative that produces a commentary on all the richest parts of actual experience.

So the message is, don’t waste your money on HDTV. A writer sat down, and dreamed up a story, it’s been filmed, distributed and shown on your TV. Then, assuming it turns out to be memorable, your brain converts it back to a narrative, and finally to a set of memories,

Now let’s face it, you could have got there sooner and cheaper by buying the book, and the book would last longer.

The User Illusion

Friend (verb)

2009-09-09T18:23:00.003+03:00

Almost everyday I see FRIEND used as a verb. As in I’ll FRIEND you on facebook. None English speakers may find the English practice of 'verbing' nouns confusing. This kind of thing happens in English, but is strictly forbidden in German and would swiftly invoke action from the syntactic police who are authorised to use, if necessary, deadly force to ensure the use of the verb BEFRIEND.

BEFRIEND doesn't work for Facebook. BEFRIEND implies a casual encounter at the vending machine, maybe a little assistance freeing a sticking bag of crisps, or an exchange of views on the price of gummy bears. BEFRIEND is not for someone that you actually give a shit about. But FRIEND (verb) doesn’t have a past form that feels right. One might say, I ‘FRIENDED you, but it sounds infantile.

A more radical approach would be to say: I FROUEND you on Facebook. This copies the: I fight, I fought, form but is still longwinded. Another variation, as in I drink, I drank, could give: FRAEND, which looks pleasingly medieval. Better still is FRUEND, which seems rather Freudian, which immediately makes it sexy.

I don’t generally sweat the conjugation of verbs but I do have a song in the Country and Western genre waiting to be written. Some of you may have heard my previous haunting ballad: I’m selling my dentures on EBAY because I don’t need to smile anymore.

The new number, which will doubtless be in the Country charts just as soon as this thorny linguistics matter is clarified will go something on the lines of, I FRIENDED my daddy on facebook, now I chat with him in heaven everyday.

Gremlins

2009-09-08T18:06:00.054+03:00

This week Annette has been writing about gremlins. Gremlins found their origins in the wartime RAF. These are discussed in The Gremlin Question, an evocative bit of writing on the subject from the RAF Journal, 1942
Included, in full, is the following song, no doubt ‘sanitised’ for its appearance in print.
When you're seven miles up in the heavens,
(That's a hell of a lonely spot)
And it's fifty degrees below zero
Which isn't exactly hot.
When you're frozen blue like your Spitfire
And you're scared a Mosquito pink
When you're thousands of miles from nowhere
And there's nothing below but the drink
It's then you will see the Gremlins...

Gremlins were blamed for weird failures that occurred in the air, but were not reproducible on the ground. As aircraft became more complicated these problems became more common, but the squadron that produced this song seems to have been especially bothered by them. There are several clues why. They were a photo reconisance unit, and the pink Mosquitos and blue Spitfires flew as high as the technology of the day permitted. The song says seven miles but the best Mosquitos could make it up to 42000 ft. As mentioned in the song, it gets pretty cold up there.

There we have it, cold soak an aeroplane and parts start to shrink and jam. Back on the ground, at normal temperatures, a sticking part will often free up again.

Weird things can happened on the ground too, when the Supermarine company was ramping up Spitfire production, prior to the Battle of Britain. They installed new tooling. A jig for manufacturing wings was made with the framework bolted firmly to the factory floor. Yet wings made in this rock solid new fixture were found to vary in size. Some would fit snugly into the new fuselages being built alongside them, others would be too big or too small and had to be scrapped. Gremlins? No, the factory was built on the banks of a tidal river, on reclaimed land, and as the tide came and went the wing jig was distorted. High tide wings came out different to low tide wings.

No wonder that the RAF thought the gremlins were working for the opposition.

The writer Roald Dahl served in the wartime RAF. After seeing combat in Greece he was sent, in 1943, to serve with the British Air Attaché in Washington. While there he wrote about gremlins and presented Walt Disney with the idea for a movie about them. After this, gremlins became part of the fantasy vocabulary.

They still retained an attachment for aircraft though. There’s a Twilight Zone episode from 1960, starring William Shatner, who sees a gremlin on the wing of a plane creating mischief around the engine.

So, now that gremlins have been outed, are we safe from them? I doubt it. The folds and wrinkles of software systems offer massive scope for gremlins. In fact, there is probably a whole sub-species of gremlins just there to invoke problems around data arrays. These are probably the count-from-zero, count-from-one gremlins who hang around multi-platform systems just waiting to strike.

The Thames Barrier is a safety critical system which just has to work when called for. The control system, on the insistence of the designers, has been implemented completely without software.

On safety critical systems, when software MUST be used, it is tested extensively then changed as little as possible. What is arguably the greatest engineering achievement of our civilisation, the moon landings of forty years ago, were carried out with the minimum of flight rated software. What software was used, not much, was stored in such a way as to be almost impossible to change.

Even so, the gremlins still managed to strike. Defeated on the software front they went back to tampering with hardware. The famous Apollo 13 problem, caused in part by up rating the heater coil in a liquid oxygen tank from 28 volts to 110 volts, and not changing out a switching relay, could have been fatal. As we all know, some very smart guys saved the day. On that occasion the gremlins were trounced, but you can be sure they are still out there. Lurking, inside any machine more complicated than a bottle opener.

Oh no, it's not SF

2009-09-06T23:46:00.007+03:00

I was listening to Margaret Atwood discussing her new book, Year of the Flood. She is insistent that it is NOT science fiction. I was reminded of Salman Rushdie who almost broke out as an SF writer, his first published novel, Grimus, is regarded as fantasy SF. Apparently, efforts were made to stop it being nominated for an SF prize, lest Rushdie be stigmatised, poor thing, as an SF writer!

So how did SF find itself in the ghetto? Or rather, back in the ghetto. For a while SF was pretty respectable. Following it's beginnings in the pulp arena, alongside westerns, detective fiction and war stories it gradually became respectable. For a while though, literary critics took to referring to SF has the 'literature of ideas', a polite way of excusing the apparent lack of the traditional literary preoccupations with dialogue and character. Indeed, many SF classics survive quite well on a bloody good idea, not much else, and still manage to be engaging enough to keep you reading to the end.

Later, of course, the likes Ballard, Bradbury and, indeed Margaret Atwood herself brought respectability and even the praise of literary critics to SF.

But these days SF is, again, 'beyond the pale' and anything whole heartedly regarded as being SF is not going to be considered serious writing.

Why is this? And does it matter?

First things first. The SF 'genre' is now shaped by movies and TV. The growth of the SF, massive budget movie/TV market has meant that SF and fantasy movies are a huge industrial investment. And when the money comes in so does marketing, branding and risk management. These kind of corporate buzzwords don’t invoke thoughts that what is being produced in any way resembles art. It’s a business, requiring risk mitigation. It may still be entertaining, and for sure, that guarantees it’s not literature.

No matter that producing a movie is a long way from the lone author crafting his unique and solitary vision. Hollywood has hijacked the SF brand. So now Ms Atwood must talk of writing Speculative Fiction, not Science Fiction, less she ends up in the bookstore alongside all those Dr Who spin-offs.

Now in some ways it doesn’t really matter how stories are categorised. That’s a problem for bookstore inventory management. But it does matter if people forget what SF does best. Anybody who has tried writing soon discovers that the SF writer has a big challenge that the mainstream writer doesn’t, he has to portray the unique world that his story occupies, and quickly. It’s a lot of effort, so why bother?

Here’s why. SF and only SF has the licence to put you in a situation where, for example, you’ll follow a human with his IQ is doubled. What might that be like? Who else can go there but the SF writer? Not Alan Bennett, not F Scott Fitzgerald, not, well name your literary giant of choice.

Is it important? Yes, it is. It took Daniel Keynes great skill and quite a lot of tenacity to write Flowers for Algernon and maintain his vision despite the editors who wanted to Hollywoodise it, and give it a happy ending. And by golly, it is SF and only SF. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, dear Ms Atwood, and Mr Rushdie.

The real culprits are probably the teams marketing them, no matter, I can't address them, it's Atwood and Rushdie on the book cover!

Empires of the mind

2009-09-06T22:01:00.004+03:00

The full quote is from Churchill. 'The empires of the future are empires of the mind.'

To an aspiring fantasy writer creating empires of the mind is the goal. After all, isn't writing a matter of stringing words together in such a way that images, worlds even, are created in the mind of the reader?

Of course, it's one thing to aspire, another to succeed. Building the skills to achieve that goal takes time and practice.

Steven King, of whom I am not a fan, does say one thing that resonates. 'It's neccessary to write a million words of b****x first, (or approximate words to that effect,) before you can get to write the good stuff.' One reason to write a blog. Somehow or other you've got to write that one million words first, (some people say two million).

With that in mind, be advised, not all the following will be of quality.