We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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…Good.
It is also insensitive to Catholic feelings, Nazi feelings, Buddhist feelings, Communist feelings, Capitalist feelings, Manchester United Supporter feelings, Surrealist baboon trousers, Scientologist feelings, Creationist feelings, Darwinist feelings…
“Since Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group.”
The whole point of a reference book or reference wiki, is to present information regardless of anyone’s ‘feelings’. And if some Muslims do not like that… tough shit, here is a link to the ‘Mohammed Cartoons‘ for you because to my mind it is not enough to just ignore them, intolerant Islam must be confronted and loudly defied. I could not care less whose ‘feelings’ get hurt by publishing something and thankfully to their credit neither could Wikipedia.
Samizdata is also fairly insensitive to Muslim feelings
In yesterday’s Pentagon Press Briefing, Commander, Nato International Security Assistance Force Gen. Dan McNeill had this interesting comment:
I’m also reminded of the headlines that said there was a resurgent Taliban, there was a coming spring offensive, and they were going to hold sway on the battlefield. And I think a retrospective look at calendar year ’07 says that clearly was not the case. They did very little on the battlefield. They were very successful in staying in the press, and they continue to be, but they have done little on the battlefield.
Do the Taliban have sufficient strength to pull off another Spring News Offensive or have we precluded this by sufficiently weakening the elite al allah al Press Relations over the preceding year?
What are millionaires for? Why, to pay for things like this:
Gizmodo’s Martin Lynch writes:
A UK designer is about to take the wraps off a unique floating chair/recliner called The Lounger, inspired by the Landspeeder from Star Wars.
Designed by 40-year Keith Dixon from Middleton, the futuristic looking Lounger has taken 5 years to create and allows you to float above the base thanks to the use of repelling magnetic forces in the base and the lounger itself.
We are not talking a few centimetres off the base either but up to 14ins so that you get that whole ‘floating sensation’. That of course depends on how much you weigh. If you’re close to the 266lbs [19 stone] limit then maybe you should drop that to 4ins or less.
There are restraining rods to prevent the seat from shooting off to the sides and users are warned to keep it at least 5 feet from the telly. And make sure you don’t have a pacemaker.
Apart from that, you’re good to float from March 16 when The Lounger goes on sale for a cool £5,875. That should bring some people back to Earth with a bump.
Which is why I mention the millionaires. The millionaires will decide whether they think this is a cool idea. If they decide that it is, some of them will buy it, thus paying for about an eighth of the research and development costs. If the ones that buy it like it, more millionaires will buy it, thus paying for another quarter of the R and D. Many more chairs will then be made, for sale at a rather lower price, slightly better. Pretty soon, we’ll all be able to buy them, either at Ikea or at Curry’s, for £99.99 a pop, and half a decade later for £34.99, with additional features that the early adopter millionaires never dreamed of.
Why can’t schoolznhospitalz be done more like this and less the way they are now?
I’m seriously considering pitching a detective novel, about the hunt for a serial killer. The unique selling point will be that as the detective homes in on the killer, he gradually comes to sympathize with him, and ends up questioning whether he should actually collar the murderer … because the victims are all spammers.
– Charlie Stross
Anyone worried by Natalie’s posting below should be aware that you ain’t seen nuttin’ yet. Tom Griffin of The Green Ribbon has obtained a full listing of the information it is intended to collect (and distribute among various authorities) concerning those buying tickets to move from any one of Britain, the Irish Republic, and Northern Ireland to any of the others.
There has been a common travel area since St Patrick, and this was formalised in the 20th century when the countries of Britain and Ireland came incompletely apart. Now it seems both governments are in effect conspiring to introduce internal passports and replace a common travel area with a common surveillance area.
[hat-tip: spyblog]
One of our commentariat mentioned ‘Bussard Fusion’ several times and I did not at first pay much attention. I assumed it was yet another of the long line of ideas which might work out but probably will not. Still, with the name Bussard attached to it, I thought a quick look might be worthwhile.
It was. I did not realize that not only is Dr. Bussard still around: he has been developing his ideas with ‘under the radar’ money from the Navy for fifteen years and he took it far enough to show the physics is understood and works. They blew up the demo machine but when they analyzed the data they found it had managed to do what it needed to do before it performed its self-disassembly.
Another interesting facet is the radiation free P-11B fusion path. I never paid any attention to it in my own readings because even the D-3He I am familiar with requires perhaps a hundred times the confinement constant of the D-T fusion everyone has been working on for 50 years.
It turns out there is another way to fuse an atom. It is cheaper, smaller and avoids the basic problem which makes the whole Tokamuk family of fusion reactors into eternal research cash cows.
If you want to learn more, not only about the physics behind it, but also of yet another way in which the State screws up everything it touches, set aside the next hour and a half and listen to “Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really)” presented by Dr. Bussard himself.
For those who have not spent a lifetime watching the world of Physics, Dr. Bussard is one of the elders of the field. He is no outsider and no crank. He is one hell of a serious physics dude.
I must admit to being surprised by the volume of comments that this “Samizdata quote of the day” item provoked; I am not aware that we got linked to by some pro-Clinton blogs. One thing that did strike me about the comments was the apparent ignorance of the new commenters as to the philososphical bias of this blog (pro-liberty, pro-capitalism, small, if not minimal government, robust view on defence, etc). My dislike of Hillary/Obama/McCain/Huckabee/Romney is pretty consistent all the way through. Their unifying characteristic is their belief that government can do many good things and should do these things a great deal. Not one of them has – unless I missed it – made the sort of general, shrink-the-state comments that were the trademark of Reagan in his prime (that’s not to say, of course, that the Gipper actually was as marvellous as some of his supporters might claim). Of course, there remain differences, but none so much to really make a major shift in the direction of American, or for that matter, western politics. If Clinton were elected and we got a re-run of the Clinton psychodrama of the 1990s, it would be tedious, even a dangerous distraction from serious events, but I am not convinced it would be the end for Jefferson’s Republic. On the other hand, if McCain got elected, he’d probably only want to serve out one term, as he is getting on in years.
Why does any of this matter? Well, like it or not, what happens across the Big Pond resonates here. British politicians look for suggestions that western political ideas are moving in a particular way. At the moment, Big Government, Greenery, micro-management of personal behaviours via the tax and legal system are dominant ideas, although there is some fightback. This is why, infuriating though it may be to Little Englanders, the US Presidential elections get so much attention.
I’ll just be relieved when it is over so we can go back to bashing Gloomy Gordon and Dave.
Hayek? …. Check!
Hazlett? …. Check!
Von Mises? …. Check!
Ron Paul gave an extremely cogent economics talk to Seattle Business leaders which you can watch here.
He even wants to dump Sarbanes-Oxley. What more could you ask?
The writer of this Times story: Pensioner died in attack on his home after parking space row, has, perhaps understandably, concentrated on what exactly Mark, Zoe and Steven Forbes did to the late Bernard Gilbert and whether “We’ll smash his car to bits and then his hire car and then whatever he gets after that until he dies” constituted a considered plan.
However that may be, there is an aspect of the story that deserves a story – and a trial – of its own:
Mrs Forbes was upset and called her husband Mark, who told her to note down Mr Gilbert’s numberplate. He then asked a policeman friend to check Mr Gilbert’s address on the police national computer, using the car registration number.
The innocent have nothing to fear – so long as they have not annoyed anyone who knows a copper who can be persuaded to look up an address.
The 1950s was rather more than about Elvis, Monroe and The Bomb. Slowly, as Britain recovered from the war, the rationing, and the cheerless austerity during the late 1940s, life got better. It is fashionable, for a certain type of writer, to claim that nothing much exciting happened before the 1960s (a classic Baby Boomer conceit); in fact, arguably, the 1950s were as interesting and colourful, albeit with fewer drugs. One institution that came to the fore in that decade of Ealing comedies and curvy sports cars was Manchester United FC, a once unfashionable club (it used to be called Newton Heath). Old Trafford, its ground, was reduced to rubble by the Luftwaffe; a young Scotsman demobbed after the war called Matt Busby, who used to play for Liverpool and Manchester City, took over as manager.
The story of what happened during his extroardinary career at Old Trafford will be remembered as long as football is played. The fortunes of the Red Devils waxed and waned, but inevitably, the tragedy that hit the club in the February of 1958 is indelibly marked on the history of the club. Eight players, plus other passengers, were killed when the aircraft taking the team from a European Cup match crashed in the snow-bound airport of Munich. It is widely recognised that one of the dead, Duncan Edwards, was probably the greatest British footballer of his generation.
Here is a wonderful account of the last game the team played in Britain – against Arsenal – before the European game. It is hard for any English football fan not to wonder at what might have been; at least three, if not more, of the Manchester team could have played in World Cups in 1958, 1962 and 1966. What a waste.
At least it can be said that air travel has gotten a lot safer since. In the late 1940s, the entire Torino football team from the North Italian city were killed in a crash.
May they all rest in peace.
It is a fast moving world we live in and much has happened in the week or so since I last posted on this topic.
John Carmack, head of Armadillo Aerospace, believes they have an understanding of and cure for the ‘hard starting’ problem their Pixel and Texel rocket test articles exhibited in their attempts at the Moon Lander prize at Alamogordo this last October. The hard starts damaged several of their motors and even cracked the bell in one of them. They have a new igniter they are testing which may solve the problems.
There is much news at SpaceX after a long period of silence. They have tested their Falcon 9 first stage on a test stand with two engines. They will soon test three engines and work their way up to the full complement of nine. This is a big rocket and requires a BFTS for testing. Elon Musk claims this stands for Big Falcon Test Stand: that is his story and he is sticking to it.
Development of the Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine has been completed. The third Falcon 1 test flight will use this engine instead of the ablatively cooled engine used on the first two test flights. An exact date for the Kwajalein launch has not been announced but it is now scheduled for somewhere in the April-June time frame.
Ground breaking has occurred at SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral site, the former SLC-40 pad , once used for Titan-IV launches.
SpaceX has passed the Critical Design Review (CDR) with NASA on their COTS (Cheap Orbital Transport Systems or Commercial Off The Shelf) contract to perform resupply to Space Station Alpha. By 2010 SpaceX is to demonstrate cargo deliveries using the combination of a Falcon 9 rocket and a Dragon capsule. The Dragon capsule will carry passengers after it has flown a few times.
I could go on. but there is just so much happening at SpaceX I can only recommend you read their update and if you have any questions about the technology, come back here and ask.
But wait! There’s more!
Bigelow Aerospace, which already has two inflatable space station test articles in orbit, is making its move:
Industry sources said Bigelow Aerospace is ready to place an order that includes six launches starting in 2011 to begin assembly and early operation of the new station.
“Those [first] six launches will be comprised of two missions to deploy hardware such as Sundancer itself and our node/bus combination and four missions to dedicated to transporting crew and cargo,” Robert Bigelow, president and founder of Bigelow Aerospace said in a written statement.
“Subsequently our launch rate will double, and we will require a dozen launches, all for crew and cargo transportation missions over the next 12-month period. Our third year of active operations will again require another dozen crew and cargo mission launches and, in our fourth year of operations, we anticipate needing 18 such launches.”
Things are moving so quickly it is just astounding to an old spacer like myself.
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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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