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Brian just posted one of my favorite shots of the Scaled Composites spaceship and wondered how large the windmills in the background windfarm are.
The answer is: big. Here are two of my non-telephoto photos of roughly the same area as seen from within the confines of the Mojave Civilian Test Flight Facility (a couple hours travel north and east of Los Angeles, California):
Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
Yes, those are the same mountains you see in the photo on Brian’s blog. The windfarm was actually just barely visible in the top image before I cut it down to blog-size. I am far less certain of the direction of the bottom photo, but I think it shows the mountains in the opposite direction as I can see the control tower in it. (There is also an F4 Phantom. Can you find it?)
Things tend to be very big and very far away in that part of the world!
I bought the paper version of the December 2003 issue of Prospect yesterday, and was all set to quote from the two pieces I’ve already been reading with particular interest, while apologising for not supplying any links. Well, I can, but in the case of the longer article only to an introductory excerpt. How long even these links will last, I cannot say.
From Michael Lind’s review of D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little, which won the Booker Prize.
At one point Pierre’s cartoon Texas sheriff says: “How many offices does a girl have that you can get more’n one finger into?” The comic malapropisms of pompous black characters were a staple of racist minstrel-show humour of the Amos ‘n’ Andy kind. If Pierre, purporting to unveil the reality of black America, had depicted a leering, sex-obsessed African-American police officer unable to distinguish the words “office” and “orifice,” would jury members like AC Grayling – a distinguished philosopher whose work I have long admired – have voted to award such bigoted trash the Booker prize?
But I don’t want to be too hard on the Booker jury. They’ve democratised literature by proving that a book doesn’t have to be any good to win a prize, so long as it exploits socially acceptable national and ethnic stereotypes. …
Assuming Lind is right about the crassness of this book, and although I’ve not read it I have no particular reason to doubt him, the next question is: why? What gives? Why this animus against Americans, and especially against those most American of Americans, the Texans. → Continue reading: Market-dominant minorities of the world unite!
Meanwhile, Armadillo Aerospace has solved their H202 supply problems, has run a test engine at better than 1000lbf and good ISP and is working on vehicle modifications to deal with the new engine design.
You can watch them testing the modified landing shock absorbers of their VTVL spaceship.
Scaled Composites flew their sixth drop test on November 19th, less than a week after the previous flight on the fourteenth. Tests prior to this have been at roughly one month intervals so I assume they are entering a new phase of testing.
Objectives: The sixth glide flight of SpaceShipOne. Test pilot Mike Melvill’s first flight with the enlarged tails. Emergency aft CG handling qualities eval and simulated landing exercise with the new tail configuration. Airspeed and G envelop expansion and dynamic feather evaluation.
Results: Launch conditions were 48,300 feet and 115 knots. Satisfactory vehicle handling characteristics at the emergency CG limit. Melvill reported improved stability, improved control powers and improved stick forces throughout the flight profile. The feather was extended after a 3G pull-up to the vertical at 30,000 feet. The vehicle recovered to a stable attitude and descent after a few mild oscillations. The landing pattern was flown at a higher airspeed than previous flights which allowed for a more controlled flare and landing at the nominal touchdown point.
The odds for an in-flight engine ignition on December 17th are getting better again. It may now be a matter of how satisfactory the ground tests of the SpaceDev hybrid engine have been.
Wired reports that Congress delayed the planned takeoff of a controversial new airline passenger-profiling system until an independent study of its privacy implications and effectiveness at stopping terrorism can be completed.
A congressional conference committee, which was reconciling the Senate and House versions of the Department of Homeland Security’s budget for next year, opted to keep the Senate’s stronger language that prohibits deployment of the Transportation Security Administration’s CAPPS II program until the General Accounting Office certifies to Congress that the system will not finger too many innocent passengers.
The study will also check whether the system will effectively pinpoint terrorists, and whether an appeals system is in place for those delayed or prohibited from flying. CAPPS II is intended as a high-tech replacement for the current system, which simply checks passenger names against a list of suspected terrorists.
The new system will require passengers to provide airlines with additional information, which the agency will check against commercial databases and a watch list of suspected terrorists and people wanted for violent crimes. The system will then color-code each passenger, according to decisions made by the system’s pattern-matching algorithms.
An ideologically diverse coalition of civil-liberty advocates oppose the project, saying the system would be Big Brotheresque and ineffective.
This is far from won but at least it is a step in the right direction. Most likely the GAO study will be done, the boxes ticked and the next terrorist attack will result in yet another series of knee-jerk reactions from governments. But I would like to be proven wrong.
Guardian’s crime correspondent reports that scam-baiting – replying to the emails and stringing the con artists along with a view to humiliating them as much as possible – is becoming increasingly popular with more than 150 websites chronicling the often hilarious results.
Mike, a 41-year-old computer engineer from Manchester, runs the scam-baiting site 419eater.com, which started two months ago.
Almost always the scammer will think you are a real victim and try their best to extract money. It started because I used to get a few emails, and although I knew it was a scam I never knew how it worked. I did some research, found out about scam baiting and decided to have a go. It’s now almost a full-time hobby for me.
His site specialises in collecting pictures of the scammers in order to make it more difficult to find new victims. Using the pretext that in order to believe they are real people they need to take a photograph holding up signs with the name of Mike’s character, he has succeeded in getting one fraudster to pose with a piece of paper stating: MI Semen Stains. Other sites feature similar pictures with signs reading ‘Iama Dildo’, ‘Mr Bukakke’ and ‘Ben Dover’.
According to Guardian the oldest anti-scammer site is Scamorama, which aims to educate the public about the latest trends as well as waste as much of the fraudsters’ time as possible. The original emails often claim the author has suffered a personal tragedy, usually the loss of a parent. A typical Scamorama reply claimed the recipient has also lost a parent in shocking circumstances, having witnessed their own father being shot. The email was signed ‘Alfredo Corleone’.
I had a go at some of the stories on the 419 Eater website and I recommend you have a look too. Marvellous stuff. What a way to brighten up a dull morning.
When I read The Wealth of Nations for the first time, I liked Adam Smith’s idea that lecturers would respond better to their students if the students directly paid their lecturers. But I wasn’t sure if it could work in the world of modern higher education. Well, it turns out that when Madsen Pirie was a lecturer at Hillsdale College in Michigan, he was indeed – in part – paid according to how well the students thought he did his job. And, as he explains on the ASI Blog, it seemed to work very well.
Of course, the less-radical introduction of tuition fees in Britain is doing wonders. Lecturers who I’ve spoken to say that students are starting to expect more as it is their money that is being wasted. And universities know that American students – who pay much higher fees – will sue if they don’t get what they are paying for. Anyone who cares about the quality of university education should write a thank you note to Tony Blair.
Many weeks ago I wrote a posting here about how (a) England just might win the forthcoming Rugby World Cup, and that (b) this might work to the advantage of the Conservative Party. Well, England did win the Rugby World Cup, so how might this help the Conservatives?
I certainly didn’t have in mind that England’s front rooms will now be echoing with the claim that “now we’ll all vote Conservative then”. No. This is more the sort of thing I had in mind, from Adam Parsons in yesterday’s Scotland on Sunday.
It is easy in such times for the rest of us to fall prey to hyperbole, so let’s tread carefully here. But I think it is true to say this is an achievement of great importance, something that everybody can cherish. Not just because a British team has won the cup, nor that it is at last crossing from the bottom of the world and going to the top. It is something to do with the people who won it, and what they stand for.
England’s squad are a decent bunch of people. The likes of Josh Lewsey, Ben Cohen, Jason Leonard, Iain Balshaw – these are genuinely engaging characters, blokes you’d have a drink with.
In other words, they feel so very different from the image most footballers have come to represent over the past few years. On the one hand, we have people who have become the best in the world by training relentlessly, yet retain the level-headedness to acknowledge their supporters as their emotional crux; on the other, players who increasingly come to represent a streak of overpaid self-importance.
It is naive, I suppose, to hope that rugby could, even for a short time, replace football in the national affections, but I hope this victory will at least reverberate.
British soccer (as opposed to merely the English version) took two further knocks last week, when, in among all the England rugby fervour, both Wales (agonisingly) and Scotland (humiliatingly) failed to qualify for the European soccer championships next year.
This relative rise of rugby in the affections (England) and respect (elsewhere in Britain), and the relative decline in the esteem felt towards football, has, I feel, something of an end-of-era feel to it. It all adds to the sense of that New Labour/Princess Di/Things Can Only Get Better bubble bursting back into nothing whence it came. To put it rudely, that brief moment when the English told themselves (or were told by their newspaper columnists) that they preferred emotional incontinence to the old manly virtues of stoicism, calmness under stress, and grace and dignity whether one is victorious or defeated, to the uncontrolled emotional display of weeping copiously and in public when someone utterly unconnected with you dies, or running about like an escaped mental patient when you’ve scored a goal. → Continue reading: England’s Rugby World Cup win and the retreat from emotional incontinence
Sunday Herald reports that UK wants similar powers to controversial US Patriot Act.
Sweeping new emergency legal powers to deal with the aftermath of a large terrorist attack in Britain are being considered by the government.
The measures could potentially outlaw participation in a protest march, such as last week’s demonstrations during President Bush’s state visit, making it, in effect, a criminal offence to criticise government policy.
In an attempt to give the UK government similar powers to those rushed through in the US after the 9/11 attack on New York in 2001, it is understood that a beefed-up version of current civil contingencies law is being considered. It will allow the government to bypass or suspend key parts of the UK’s human rights laws without the authority of parliament.
…
Aware of the current level of scare-mongering following the Istanbul bombing and the threats made by al-Qaeda-linked groups that further suicide attacks were being planned on targets both in the UK and abroad, a source close to the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, last night denied his department were seeking a massive and immediate injection of cash from the Treasury. This would be needed to foot the bill if Britain’s streets were to be flooded with armed police in an almost constant level of red alert.
Despite Blunkett saying he was “sick and tired” of people pretending there was not a threat from terrorists and insisting only “very, very good intelligence would save us”, the Home Office seems to have no plan to boost security spending this or next year.
If “Fortress Britain” were to be achieved, with countrywide security checks, increased police surveillance and widespread detention of any suspect group or individual, the Home Office’s annual budget would rocket.
Hm.
From an unlikely source comes this analysis of the US Patriot Act in the editorial column:
Explaining the reasons why the USA Patriot Act runs counter to the traditional American concept of liberty is a daunting task. Most people – including the members of Congress who voted for it – haven’t even read the Act in its entirety, if at all. Those are the uninformed. Then there are the misguided – those who are somewhat familiar with the legislation, but who accept it under the notion that some loss of freedom is inevitable if we’re to protect ourselves from the scourge of terrorists.
The article ends with a famous quote attributed to Rev. Martin Neimoller:
First, they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
Read the whole thing. Simple and effective.
Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Gear program is, without any shadow of a doubt, the finest piece of current broadcasting on British television; I will brook no argument here. It is also the only place on the BBC where, except for the Hutton affair and the related war against Iraq, fierce dissent against the centralising thrust of New Labour’s Euro-loving socialism is both tolerated and welcomed.
I would love to see Jezzer’s contract, the one he signed a couple of years back, to revive the moribund Top Gear franchise. ‘I want a race track,’ he will have said. ‘I want a large garage-cum-showroom for a studio, and I want to make as many closet libertarian and anti-Tony Blair statements as I damn well please.’
The BBC won’t have liked it, but with one of their biggest money-spinners, the Top Gear Magazine, in a probable sales decline, without its matching TV series, and programs like the cunningly titled Fifth Gear picking up multi-million sized audiences on rival terrestrial channels, there was only one option for even the BBC, that car-hating, carrot munching, First Class train riding, pampered elite of Old West London town. Even with the compulsory tithe of the BBC license fee, even they, the chosen ones, have to sometimes make programs which Jonny Englander, at home with his shotguns and his bulldogs, might actually want to watch, to stop them turning off the BBC altogether in favour of such exotic delights as Men and Motors. → Continue reading: Jeremy Clarkson: Surely God in disguise
I don’t know why I yesterday took a random dip into Stephen R. Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but I did, and I came across the following striking passage about the psychologist Victor Frankl. I think it was just coincidence that Frankl got a mention in one of the comments on this, although having chanced upon this passage, maybe that made me really notice it.
Anyway, here it is:
Frankl was a determinist raised in the tradition of Freudian psychology, which postulates that whatever happens to you as a child shapes your character and personality and basically governs your whole life. The limits and parameters of your life are set, and, basically, you can’t do much about it.
Frankl was also a psychiatrist and a Jew. He was imprisoned in the death camps of Nazi Germany, where he experienced things that were so repugnant to our sense of decency that we shudder to even repeat them.
His parents, his brother, and his wife died in the camps or were sent to the gas ovens. Except for his sister, his entire family perished. Frankl himself suffered torture and innumerable indignities, never knowing from one moment to the next if his path would lead to the ovens or if he would be among the “saved” who would remove the bodies or shovel out the ashes of those so fated.
One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called “the last of the human freedoms” – the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Victor Frankl himself was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.
In the midst of his experiences, Frankl would project himself into different circumstances, such as lecturing to his students after his release from the death camps. He would describe himself in the classroom, in his mind’s eye, and give his students the lessons he was learning during his very torture.
Through a series of such disciplines – mental, emotional, and moral, principally using memory and imagination – he exercised his small, embryonic freedom until it grew larger and larger, until he had more freedom than his Nazi captors. They had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options. He became an inspiration to those around him, even to some of the guards. He helped others find meaning in their suffering and dignity in their prison existence.
In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Franki used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.
My emboldenings are Covey’s italics.
I’m sure I don’t need to explain why I consider those paragraphs to be worthy of the attention of Samizdata readers.
But I have a question, relating to one particular matter raised by Covey, which is the very definite way he uses the words ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’. ‘Liberty’ he uses to denote external circumstances, while ‘freedom’ is more like an inner mental experience. Liberty is political and perhaps also economic. Freedom is psychological, even existential. So, are these regular usages that I have been unaware of all these years? (I confess – for I’m not proud of this and have always meant to sort it out in my mind some day – that I have tended to use these two words interchangeably.) Or is Covey unusual in knowing when to say freedom and when liberty? Or are others equally definite about the different meanings of these words, but in different ways to Covey?
As often with me here, comments are not merely welcome; they are positively invited, not to say solicited.
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