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For the last several weeks I have been watching with growing pleasure, every Monday night from 8 pm to 9 pm, two episodes at a time, one of those Channel 5 TV series that tend to pass without much comment or many claims of significance, called Massive Engines.
Last night saw the airing of the final two episodes, number 9 about massive pumps, and number 10 and finally, about the massive jet engines that enable modern airliners to ply their trade. The presenter was Chris Barrie, who is probably best know for comedy-of-embarrassment characterisations like Rimmer in Red Dwarf, or Brittas in The Brittas Empire, and in Massive Engines there are occasional Rimmer/Brittas style, self-send-up moments of leaden humour. The impression you get is that Barrie is not as sure as he would like to be that he is keeping his audience’s attention.
For myself, I absolutely do not think Barrie need have worried. Whenever, which was most of the time, he forgot about being comical and concentrated on explaining the whys and wherefores of his various massive engines, often while himself operating them and with every sign of knowing pretty much what he was doing, I was held, and fascinated.
I learned all kinds of things I never knew. For instance, in the last show, about aircraft engines, I learned that on an early aircraft engine, not only did the propeller rotate, but the cylinders also, firmly attached to the same bit of the engine as the propeller, and rotating along with the propeller. To keep them cool. Amazing. Well, you probably knew that, but I had no idea. You probably also know that whereas petrol engines work with regular explosions, diesel engines (names after a German bloke called Diesel) do not feature externally induced explosions. The pressure caused by the cylinder coming back up again is enough to set fire to the next lot of fuel. Well, I sort of vaguely did know that. But now I know it a little better.
In general, throughout the run of the show, Barrie’s quick and clear explanations of the principles behind all the mechanisms he was describing were, well, amazingly quick, and amazingly clear.
The only episode which I found a bit weak was the one about motorbikes, which featured rather too much footage of Barrie trundling about rather pointlessly on a motorbike, in between the serious explanatory stuff. The trouble with motorbikes is that frankly, they are not massive. They got as big as they will ever be many decades ago, and anyway, the point of them is speed, plain and simple, rather than speed (or anything else for that matter) achieved through massiveness.
That episode aside, all the engines on show got steadily bigger and more effective throughout their history. They are not necessarily massive any more. The pumps, for instances, that shift water hither and thither used to be a lot bigger, when they were steam engines, than they are now, now that they are diesel or electrical engines or whatever. But a good few of the engines Barrie talked about with such enthusiasm are huge right now, and getting ever huger.
The earth moving kit they now use is unbelievably huge, as was proved with a trip to a massive open cast coal mine in Germany, where there were also earth-shifting lorries with wheels the size of terrace houses. The machines used to dig tunnels are now as massive as they have ever been. As are those aircraft engines of course.
I expected the airplane episode with which the show ended to be a commercial for the Airbus A380, but actually it was a commercial for the Rolls Royce Trent Alphabetsoup engine. No Airbuses were mentioned, but a Boeing was, the two engine 777, which is apparently almost as huge as the four engine 747.
I recall no mention whatsoever of the wickedness of massive engines from the environmental point of view, which was most refreshing. On the contrary, massive engines got massive because they were used, again and again, to solve massive environmental problems, such as the environmental mess that the London sewage system had become towards the end of the nineteenth century, or the massive problem of travelling vast distances across the damn environment, most especially the sea. (There was an episode devoted to massive ships.) The entire show was a continuous hymn of praise to the God of the Technical Fix. You have a problem? Building a massive engine to solve it.
I cannot claim to remember all the technical details that were laid out before me on Massive Engines, but when they were being laid out I recall very, very clearly that they did make perfect sense, at the time. Had I written the stuff down, I am confident that only my own handwriting would have then stopped it making perfect sense now.
What I am really saying is, if I come across DVDs of this show at a suitably miserly price, I would definitely consider buying them, and watching the whole show again, repeating the quick and clear explanations and fast forwarding through the motorbike trundling.
As a potential interester of intelligent and intellectual curious children, boys especially of course, these shows would, I feel sure, prove excellent.
And Chris Barrie’s Rimmerisms might even help from that point of view. By the end, even I was enjoying the rest of it so much that I found myself smiling instead of wincing when Barrie started up yet another massive engine not with a “right let’s start this thing up”, but instead by shouting rather self-consciously: “let’s rock”. Very embarrassing dad. But when you really like the serious work that someone is doing, you can put up with mannerisms and foolishnesses that would drive you insane if it was just another pointless idiot doing them. And when they are gone, you even find you miss them.
So, an outstanding show, and particular proof of the value of having lots of different TV channels, allowing lots of different points of view besides the official one, which as far as massive engines is concerned is now that massive engines are, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst, just plain evil.
I am just back from supper with Perry, Adriana and co., and now just about, before sleep overtakes me, have time to report – and to expand upon the fact – that before I left I had another drool over Adriana’s portable computer, with its look-at-it-from-everywhere screen. This time, instructed to feel how light it is, I picked the thing up, and did so with considerable ease.
Earlier in the day, I chanced upon this item of techno-news about something called FOLEDs. FOLEDs are even better than OLEDs. OLEDs are Organic Light Emitting Diodes, and FOLEDs are Flexible Organic Light Emitting Diodes. In English, what this appears to mean is … well, put it like this. When I bought my digital camera recently there was a film of transparent plastic to protect the camera’s little screen which shows what the picture is going to look like or does look like. What all these acronyms appear to mean is that in a few years time, that thin film of plastic will be the screen.
Over the last couple of decades, mobile computing and communications have changed the way we act – and interact. Notebook PCs, PDAs and cellular phones make it easy to carry information with us whenever and wherever we go. Yet, despite enormous advances in form and functionality, today’s devices can still prove clunky and challenging to carry on planes, trains and automobiles.
However, if researchers have their way, we will soon be able to bend the rules of physics. Flexible Organic Light-Emitting Diode (FOLED) technology could pave the way for notebook computers with roll-up screens, toys that show vivid images on their surfaces, even clothing with displays woven into the fabric. “Within the next decade, flexible displays will open up all sorts of possibilities,” states Mark Thompson, a professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California. “It will change the way we access information and entertainment.”
Manufactured from transparent plastic films or other ultra-lightweight materials filled with special polymers, these devices could lead to less expensive and far more convenient consumer electronics. Already, researchers have developed prototype roll-up displays, and more basic Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) technology has been built into display screens of a handful of cameras, DVD players and mobile phones. “It is only a matter of time before OLED becomes a predominant display technology,” says Steve Van Slyke, a research fellow at Eastman Kodak Co. and one of the inventors of the technology in the early 1980s.
What makes active-matrix OLED technology so appealing is that it provides a few more vivid image than LCDs and other displays; offers a viewing angle as high as 160 degrees without backlighting; and requires far less power than today’s mainstream display technologies. The latter is particularly appealing for those using battery-powered devices, such as notebook computers. “Any incremental gain in battery life is a significant issue,” Thompson points out.
And so on. I am not sure how long this piece will stay up on the www, so I have quoted it at some length.
When all this comes to pass, Adriana’s portable computer will then seem like my very first portable computer, which was called an Osborne, and was only portable in the sense that your holiday luggage is portable (if it is), or that my mum’s ancient sewing machine is portable.
And how about clothes that change colour and pattern like a movie?
I realise that there will be more to the good life in the future than better gadgets, and that better gadgets might coincide with worse life, but better gadgets are still very, very nice, and I am impressed. Not even the fact that the EU has backed it can suppress my interest in and enthusiasm for this technology.
As regulators impose more onerous capital adequacy and reporting requirements on the Western world’s banks, investment firms and brokerages, demand surges for increasingly sophisticated computer infrastructure to keep track of all the new systems deemed necessary to make the regulations work. As a result, demand is rising, according to this Financial Times article, for graduates with science degrees, especially in the field of physics. And it does not come as much of a surprise to learn that Britain’s mostly state-run education system is not doing a very good job at churning out young physics students. I am shocked, shocked to hear this!
I would greatly prefer it if clever folk with scientific knowledge were engaged in the potentially fruitful areas of nanotechnology, biotech, aviation and civil engineering, all fields likely to see continued rapid growth, than working to make increasingly Byzantine bank regulations work better. It looks like a waste to me. We want our budding Isaac Newtons and Richard Feynmans working on spacecraft, not greasing the wheels of the latest EU banking directive.
Dale Amon is Samizdata.net’s man in the know about this stuff, but I link to it also, if only because the enemies of freedom (see the first paragraph of the first comment on this posting) seem to hate it so much, and write attacks (“Among their sacred causes are the decontrol of gun ownership and decriminalisation of all drugs…”) on Samizdata.net that could not be bettered if Samidata.net had paid for them.
Like SpaceShipOne, the homebuilt rocketship that claimed a £5.2m cash prize for twice reaching suborbital space, Rutan’s next creation will travel beyond Earth’s atmosphere as well.
SpaceShipTwo (SS2), however, will have more than a single occupant.
Rutan is toying with designs to accommodate up to eight passengers at a time, with enough upgrades to warrant a ticket in the £104,000 (£200,000) price range.
“I think anyone who had the chance to go would want to go,” said Trevor Beattie, a British advertising personality, who already has booked a flight.
Rutan, who has been averaging better than one new aircraft design every year for the past three decades, says he is finished with airplanes for a while.
The mission now for his Mojave-based company, Scaled Composites, is to create 3,000 new astronauts a year – per departure point, Rutan adds, and per ship.
“Mojave is not going to be the only place in the world where there will be a place to buy tickets and fly a spaceflight,” Rutan said.
Not everything in the world is good just now, and that would have been true even without that terrible earthquake. But some things are going very well.
The little iPod portable sound system that allows you access to thousands of your favourite tunes is likely to be flying off the shelves this Christmas. No wonder. The device is a marvel and one of those trendy “must-have” items that our modern capitalist system seems to excel in. Apple’s sales growth has gone up tremendously over the past year partly as a result of the gadget.
Interestingly, this emblem of shameless materialism is also finding uses in the field of medical science, if this story, which I came across via libertarian author Virginia Postrel, is a guide. Medical researchers use the device to help them keep records of medical data and relay it back. Clever. It shows how certain types of technology that start off in a supposedly frivolous field like portable music gadgets can accomplish something more serious, as Postrel points out. Side point: I wish she would increase the font size of her blog. It is killing my eyesight. As I pointed out a week or so ago, another product of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, the eBay auction site, has been used by buyers as unusual as the London Underground for the purposes of getting obscure spare parts.
I think what this demonstrates in general is the yawning gap between the dynamism and creativity of the private sector and the plodding performance of all too much of what goes under under the aegis of the State. It also reminds us a bit I think of the good news that continues to be out there, if we want to look for it. Let’s be honest, a lot of what we have written about lately, such as the ID card issue and free speech infringements, makes for dark reading. Let’s not lose sight of the ways in which free enterprise is still on the march.
On that cheery note, have a very merry Christmas and happy 2005, and hopefully, a prosperous and peaceful one too. Thanks to my fellow contributors for making this blog so much stimulating fun.
Yesterday President Chirac proudly opened the Millau Viaduct, to universal acclaim, not just in France, but from anyone in the world who has seen any of the photos.
It is a truly magnificent structure. Yesterday I foolishly speculated that they might have saved billions had they been been willing to build something smaller and wigglier, but since this bridge in fact only cost an amazing €394 million that is flat wrong. And what is more, the entire cost of the bridge was paid by a private company, the same one that built the Eiffel Tower.
This bridge gives the world perhaps its biggest and juiciest taste so far of just what a huge impact on road transport the era of road pricing, now getting seriously underway, is destined to have. At first, environmentalists favoured road pricing, because they thought it would discourage cars. Alas for vain hopes. Road pricing make it possible for the private sector to build more and more magnificent roads. This bridge could never have been contemplated, let alone built, had the French not long been in the habit of paying to use their fastest roads.
It also illustrates perfectly just how amazingly bridge technology has progressed in recent years. The French had long known that they needed this bridge, and that it needed to be this high and this direct. It was just that until now, bridge technology did not permit its construction. And then … it did! With truly wonderful results.
The only tiny doubt concerns the fact that the architect (whatever exactly that means of what is essentially an engineering triumph) is the same architect as presided over the construction of the (aesthetically very pleasing) Millenium footbridge, in London. That famously wobbled when it was first opened. This was quickly fixed of course, and it was only a wobble, not a catastrophe. But I bet when that happened, the clients for this new whopper felt a teeny bit of a wobble themselves. I so assume, however, that all is completely well structurally with the new bridge.
The Internet is now quite properly awash with imagery of this masterpiece, and I have linked to many such views. In addition to all the regular pictures, I particularly like this one.
I was trawling through an ancient b3ta.com newsletter, as you do, earlier in the week, and came across these profundities. But since the profundities concern cats, I saved them until today, Friday being catblogging day, or so I seem to recall reading somewhere. Anyway, this is what b3ta.com says, so profoundly:
We can’t imagine anything worse than being allergic to cats – it’d be like having an allergy to life itself. However, help is at hand for sufferers. Boffins are busy meddling with nature to create a moggy that won’t provoke an allergic reaction, and the first kittens are due in 2007. A snip at just $3500. BTW: When people claim they’re allergic to cat fur, what they mean is that they’re allergic to cat urine, cat skin or cat saliva that’s become airborne by being secreted on the fur.
And b3ta.com then supply this link to allerca. Says allerca at the top of its website:
WELCOME TO ALLERCA. ALLERCA is working to produce the world’s first hypoallergenic cats. These cats will allow some of the millions of people allergic to cats to enjoy the love and companionship of a household pet without suffering from allergy symptoms.
If you obsess only about the doings of politicians, you are liable to miss good news stories like that. Name me one politician who ever did anything as splendid as inventing a non-allergic-type cat. Actually, do not name any such politicians, because there may have been one or two. But you get my point.
Boffins meddling with nature, enough to make you purr, eh? Remind me to return to this topic in 2007, because strictly speaking it has not yet been done.
My apologies to all those readers of samizdata.net who are allergic to catblogging. Also, it seems that I am about six weeks late with this happy announcement. But, it is the kind of thing you can miss, so never mind about that.
Instapundit supplies two interesting (at first I thought that was about bloggers deep under the earth) recent links (among the usual zillion other interesting links), which in their different ways both illustrate how difficult it is being a Big Business person these days.
The first is to this Wall Street Journal piece, about how big business is now using the buzz on the Internet, blogs, etc., to find out what people really thing of their latest products.
People who rave online about their favorite new gadget – or gripe about the products they hate – are turning heads in the business world.
The growing popularity of blogs and other online forums has prompted companies to pay more attention to what is being said about them on the Internet, and has given rise to a new kind of market research aimed at finding useful information in the sea of online chatter.
For more than a year, car-maker Volkswagen AG has used a service by Techdirt, Foster City, Calif., to find out which new technologies are generating the most buzz online, with the aim of integrating some of them in new automobiles. “I think [Web sites] are very important as a source of unfiltered information, but there’s too much information out there already. Frankly, we don’t have time to keep track of all these things,” says Daniel Rosario, a senior engineer in Volkswagen’s electronics research lab in Silicon Valley.
There is no link to Techdirt in the piece, but presumably they mean these guys. → Continue reading: Buzz
I am confused (as Americans often say when they are about to be nasty in a very unconfused way – but I really am rather confused) by this BBC report about a scheme to make spammers wish that their parents had been further into birth control than they were, at about the time when they, the spammers, were actually born.
Here is the first paragraph:
A plan to bump up the bandwidth bills of spammers seems to be getting out of control.
But from what I can grasp of the rest of the article, what the BBC calls “getting out of control” is what the rest of use would describe as “working extremely well”.
Earlier this week Lycos Europe released a screensaver that bombards spam websites with data to try to increase the cost of running such sites.
But…
…which seems an odd word to use here. I would have gone with “And”…
…analysis shows that, in some cases, spam websites are being completely overwhelmed by the traffic being directed their way.
As that Sergeant Major (played by Windsor Davies) in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum used to say; “Oh dear. How tragic.”
But monitoring firm Netcraft has analysed response times for three of the sites the screensaver targets and has found that the campaign is being too successful.
What was that? Too successful?
Two of the sites being bombarded by data have been completely knocked offline. One other site has been responding to requests only intermittently as it struggles to cope with the traffic the screensaver is pointing its way.
Too successful. Too successful!!! Sounds like for once the punishment has fitted the crime perfectly.
But yes.
The campaign has come under fire from some corners of the web.
Many discussion groups have said that it set a dangerous precedent and could incite vigilantism.
“If you do manage to swamp the spammers then you set yourself up for more attacks in return,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at anti-virus firm Sophos.
Which, I suppose, would make this Cluley man a Sophist, twice over. This is like saying that if you use force against a burglar, he might get angry and burgle you even more ferociously in the future. As he might, I suppose. Best roll over and surrender. But I reckon that Cluley does not understand economics. I mean, if you were a spamster, would you make a point of picking a fight with people clever enough to have swamped your entire site?
This corner of the web (the corner that consists of me) is extremely attracted by the whole idea of what Lycos is doing here, and wonders what the downside of it is, if any. This corner of the web is in favour of what other corners of the web call “vigilantism”. To this corner of the web, this all sounds absolutely splendid.
But is this corner of the web missing something? What does this discussion group think?
The only real problem in what Lycos is doing seems, to this corner of the web, to be that the state, in all its various geographical manifestations, is minded to make it illegal. What is that thing that Perry keeps saying?
But so what? Even if this process is declared illegal, something resembling it could still proceed, could it not? If enough people wanted that? No? But at this point I really am rather confused.
Time for some good news, in the form of a classic piece of techno-ingenuity that looks like turning a classic problem into a classic solution.
You know how, when you take photos with your cheap digital camera (everyone has cheap digital cameras nowadays), and when you use flash (everyone uses flash), you get that horrible dark shadow behind and to one side (depending on exactly where the flash thingy is situated next to the camera lens). A problem, right? I think so. When I take digital photos, I am prepared to endure agonies of bad lighting and blurriness rather than resort to flash and its pictorial indignities.
But this guy has turned this problem into a solution. Solid shapes give you annoying little black lines do they? So why not, he said to himself, have four flash guns, all around the lens, not just one, and that way, get yourself black lines everywhere, wherever anything sticks out?
The multi-flash camera captures real life images and renders them in a non-photorealistic line-form. …
So what use is that? A lot, it turns out.
The multi-flash camera’s non-photorealistic images look like line drawings, but have an advantage over hand made line drawings for they are able [to] depict real-world scenes with precision and, most importanly, speed impossible for the human eye/hand. …
Think of all those instructions manuals where, in order to explain things properly, they cannot use photos, because photos are not clear enough, and must instead resort to laboriously created line drawings. Well, this gadget creates line drawings like that automatically.
Multi-flash imaging promises to facilitate and pioneer complicated rendering of mechanical objects, plants, or internal anatomical parts. Because of its ability to detect depth discontinuities, it may render shapes that would otherwise be difficult to perceive. For instance, a car engine could easily be captured in a non-photorealistic image and then superimposed over an actual photograph of the engine resulting in a superior manual illustration (see example below). Alternatively, a skeleton with complex network of white bones could be efficiently reproduced for instructional medical visualization. Additionally, an endoscopic camera enhanced with the multi-flash technology promises to enhance internal anatomical visualization for researchers and medical doctors.
I wonder if the kind of cheap digital cameras you can now buy for $200 will soon have this kind of facility. Personally, I look forward to a time when cheap digital cameras have far more, and more flexible, flash devices on them than they have now. My first digital camera had only one flash device of course, but it was such that I could take pictures from one direction and point the flash at the object of my attentions from a quite different direction. Too bad it never worked properly. You can get flash devices for a digital camera like this now, but they cost far more than I care to pay. If this new device draws attention to the good things that digital flash can do, that might change.
Which is all rather incidental. My main point here is: what a brilliant idea.
UPDATE: By the way, as a commenter reminded me by asking about this, I should have said that this camera is a whole lot better than anything Photoshop can do along these … lines! (Ha!) Follow the second link above, scroll down a bit, and you come to a set of six pictures. These show this difference very clearly, and it is all the difference.
Despite the miserable weather, a reasonable audience turned up at Conway Hall in Holborn to listen to Aubrey de Grey, at the monthly meeting of Extrobritannia. The speaker sounded as if his life was already ebbing away, given the fast bullets assigned to each argument. Powerpoint presentations are far less interesting.
Aubrey de Grey campaigns for practical approaches to anti-aging medicine, and uses the acronym SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). He is one of the few people on the planet actively attempting to help the general population live longer and healthier lives. As he argues, one without the other is pointless.
One of the strategies for promoting this goal is the Methuselah Prize, a reward designed for prestige rather than money, which will (hopefully) promote philanthropic investment in these research programmes. To those familiar with this structure, this is designed to emulate the success of the X Prize.
The talk today included the recent changes in the structure of this Prize. There are two components: an award for postponing the aging process and an award for reversal. The aim is to award those resaerchers that succeed in extending the lifespan of the laboratory mouse and, even better, reversing the aging process.
The goal of capturing the imagination of the public is best achieved by a very simple prize structure, in which money is awarded simply to the producer of the world’s oldest ever mouse. This should be restricted to the species used in virtually all laboratory work, Mus musculus , but no other restrictions should be placed on the way in which the mouse’s lifespan is extended, except for ones that fail to maintain its cognitive and/or physical well-being. This is analogous to the situation with boxing, for example: the heavyweight championship is the one that gets by far the most publicity and money.
A major shortcoming of this simple structure exists, however. Our main purpose is to find interventions which are effective when initiated at a late age; it is very likely that interventions that are applied throughout life will always be ahead of those initiated late.
Hence, we are running two prize competitions:
– a “Longevity Prize” (LP) for the oldest-ever Mus musculus ;
– a “Rejuvenation Prize” (RP) for the best-ever late-onset intervention.
Although the United States and Europe have placed cultural and regulatory obstacles in the path of longevity science, cutting edge research continues to take place in the Far East. Only yesterday did South Korean researchers claim that the injection of umbilical cord stem cells had allowed a woman paralysed from the waist down to walk again. The question on concerned minds: can this result be reproduced?
These scientific goals are no longer the dreams of writers; they are the goals of academics and the content of research programmes. This is all progress. Faster please!
Austin Meyer, author of the X-Plane flight simulator, has posted a picture showing a mockup of a home computer from 1954. I particularly like the “easy to use Fortran interface”. But then I would… I started off as a Fortran hacker.
I must admit thinking this is what the (one, only) home computer of 2004 would have looked like had it been a government operation as space flight has been.
Ooops: I got taken in, as did Austin: Snopes had it. Found out minutes after hitting the publish button. We catch things fast here on the net! But it is a cute image and my final point does still stand, faked photo or not.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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