Sopwith F-1 Camel in Flight. World War I allied fighter plane. The Sopwith was introduced on the Western front during 1917. While it was difficult to learn to fly because of maneuverability issues, once a pilot got the hang of it, the Sopwith proved to be a very effective fighter plane. They were used by both the U.S. and Great Britain.
This is interesting reading. It runs counter to the way most economists teach economy and the way much of the media portrays the connection between capitalism and democracy. Whether one agrees with every word is not as important as understanding the tension that exists between those who see freedom almost solely in terms of pursuing money and those who see freedom as a more complex combination of pursuits, Democracy versus capitalism: take two
At this point two directions appeared open: continuation of a restricted freedom and limited representative governance of society; or a Marx inspired march towards socialism. The middle way of democracy was a hard fought for compromise. It was resisted by conservatives as a precursor to socialism. The tyranny of the masses, don’t forget, is what stopped democracy from being America’s early form of government, and the series of social upheavals rocking Europe from the 1780’s through to 1848 simply strengthened conservative opposition to any broadening of the right to vote and thus to anything remotely like modern democracy.
But the excesses of capitalism came to be too much. The hardship and exploitation embodied in early industrialization led to both the Trade Union movement and to other social changes. The right to vote became pivotal in the fight against those excesses.
In other words: the creation of modern democracy was a reaction to, and very much in opposition to, capitalism. It was, from the outset, designed to mitigate the excesses. It was not at all to foster freedom, but to limit it. This limitation coming in the paradoxical form of extending participation in government even to those without property. The very definition of freedom was thus amended. Freedom was now the right to vote regardless of property ownership, which was still protected, but which was now abridged.
I picked up the piece about half way through. The introduction, with a brief history and the conclusion put this part in perspective.
“A one-man 100 lb helicopter, powered by rockets in the tips of two small rotor blades, would be tested soon by the navy, it was announced to-day.
It is the nearest approach that has been made to [strapping] a pair of rockets upon the back of a man and shooting him into space “comic strip fashion,” said the designer (Mr. Gilbert Magill).
The liquid fuel rockets, he said, were controlled by a throttle. The rotors were fixed to a [steel] tube which supported fuel tanks and an open air pilot’s seat.”
Cairn’s Post, Wednesday 24 October 1951. There was also a feature article in Popular Science of January 1952. Other than that Magill and his rocket helicopter have been largely forgotten.
Back from her trip from Mars, all she got was these pine cones. She plans to plant them, so that one day earth will have Martian pine trees. They’re said to produce hydrogen as a by-product of their respiration cycle. So in the future we’ll be able to fill up our flying cars from trees.
One of the greatest challenges of the past half century for aerodynamics engineers has been how to increase the top speeds of aircraft that take off and land vertically without compromising the aircraft’s lift to power in hover or its efficiency during long-range flight.
The versatility of helicopters and other vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft make them ideal for a host of military operations. Currently, only helicopters can maneuver in tight areas, land in unprepared areas, move in all directions, and hover in midair while holding a position. This versatility often makes rotary-wing and other VTOL aircraft the right aerial platform for transporting troops, surveillance operations, special operations and search-and-rescue missions.
There is a picture of some of the concepts they envision for this vertical take-off craft, at the link. One of them looks like the craft the corporate army used in Avatar.
When the Obama administration is killing alleged terrorists with deadly flying robots, Republicans complain that too many of them are being killed rather than captured. When the Obama administration captures alleged terrorists, Republicans complain that they’re being given inappropriate trials instead of being locked away for life.
On Thursday, Suleiman Abu Gaith, identified by US officials as Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and a spokesperson for Al Qaeda, was indicted in federal court in New York City on charges of conspiracy after reportedly being handed over to the US by Jordanian authorities. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) promptly went ballistic, saying military detention was imperative. “By processing terrorists like Sulaiman Abu Ghayth through civilian courts, the Administration risks missing important opportunities to gather intelligence to prevent future attacks and save lives.” They added that Obama’s “lack of a war-time detention policy for foreign members of Al Qaeda, as well as its refusal to detain and interrogate these individuals at Guantanamo, makes our nation less safe.”
But Graham and Ayotte have their history wrong. During the Bush administration, hundreds of people were convicted in civilian courts on terrorism charges, many affiliated with Al Qaeda, without complaint from Republicans. There’s nothing about military detention that magically compels terror suspects to open up—for example, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, one of two people apprehended in the US who spent several years in military detention during the Bush administration, did not begin talking until he was put back into the criminal justice system.
This is not about politics, it is about middle-school. Barack is one of the cool kids. Conservatives recent the hell out of that, so they are against whatever it is Barack is for. If Barack likes cupcakes, they’re against them. If he doesn’t like cauliflower, conservatives suddenly crave cauliflower. These brats make $179k per year, plus gov’mint health care benefits and a retirement plan.
Design drawings for a man-powered flying machine with manually controlled wings entitled, “Vélocipède aérien,” proposed by Jean Jacques Bourcart, Paris, August, 1866. There is remarkably very little information about Bourcart and his machine. Though it would probably help if I could read French. The drawing seems very modern, like you might get the flying machine inside a box of cereal and these were the assembly instructions printed on the back.
In what is sure to be only the beginning of human vs. robot confrontations, a surveillance robot belonging to the police was recently shot after a six-hour standoff with a 62-year-old heavily inebriated man.
….First, a camera-equipped robot entered the home to locate the man and the guns. A second larger bot was then sent in, but when the owner spotted it, he opened fire with a small caliber pistol damaging it. Shortly afterward, police finally entered the home and used an electronic stun device to subdue him. After being issued a search warrant, authorities found a number of firearms within the residence, including two AK47 rifles and a 75-round ammunition drum, which is illegal in Ohio.
Police did charge him for shooting the robot. You can’t go around shooting robots paid for with tax dollars.
Technical illustration shows elevation and horizontal section of a man-powered flying machine constructed and tested unsuccessfully by Swiss watchmaker Jakob Degen living in Vienna in the early 1800s. I’m not sure exactly the contortions one would have to perform to make it work, but the flight depended on the pilot using their arms and legs in proper sequence. I really like this drawing. It should be the company logo for a company that creates apps for the iPad or something. The flying machine was called an ornithopter. According to one site, Degen tethered his machine to a hot air balloon and went through the motions of operating the wings, but the craft never flew on its own.
I pretty much cannot stand The Economist. They are generally overrated and their unbiased centrism largely a myth kept alive by two somewhat centrist editorials a year. Though they did not screw this report up completely, Interesting study of ‘tipping points’, how societies change their collective minds
“FOUNDATION”, a novel by Isaac Asimov from the golden age of science fiction, imagines a science called psychohistory which enables its practitioners to predict precisely the behaviour of large groups of people. The inventor of psychohistory, Hari Seldon, uses his discovery to save humanity from an historical dark age.
A fantasy, of course. But the rise of mobile phones and social networks means budding psychohistorians do now have an enormous amount of data that they can search for information which might yield more modest patterns of predictability. And, as several of them told the AAAS meeting, they are doing just that.
They also acknowledge that a small sudden change can throw off data as it starts to mushroom. Though they might eventually be able to factor in calculations for this ‘chaos’ eventually.
Vue d’optique shows the balloon launched by the Montgolfier brothers ascending from the Palace of Versailles, France, before the royal family, September 19, 1783. They apparently did not have much confidence in the safety of said ballon as the passengers were a sheep, a duck and a rooster. Hand-colored etching.
Book illustration shows five early balloon ascensions in France. The figures show two Montgolfier balloons (Fauxbourg St. Antoine and St. Germain); a 1784 balloon of Jean-Pierre Blanchard; and a Charles and Robert balloon being inflated at Champs-de-Mar and ascending at Versailles on September 19, 1783. The illustration is a combination etching and engraving.
Panoramic view of the front section of the Shenandoah dirigible. The Shenandoah disaster, Sharon, Ohio, September 3, 1925. The Shenandoah was a Navy dirigible. It was launchdd from New Jersey, on September 2, 1925, with the intention of flying both to St. Louis and Detroit. There was a crew of 36. When they reached Ohio when they flew into a severe electrical storm at around 4:00 A.M. They tried several times to maneuver out of the storm with changes in altitudes between 1,800 and 7,000 feet. It is thought the combination of air pressure and frame twisting that the ship started to come apart. There was a crew cabin attached to the underside, that detached and fell to the ground, leaving 14 casualties. including the Captain, Lieutenant Commander Zachery Lansdowne. A report on events leading up to the crash concluded they could probably had avoided the weather that caused the crash with better meteorological information. A morbid factlet: many bystanders rushed to the scene of the crash and stole pieces as souvenirs, including the ship’s logbook. There is a very good related post here, Dreaming in Dirigibles: The Airship Postcard Albums of Lord Ventry.
3. And he’ll ban pizza
TIME recently asked former Republican presidential candidate and ex-Godfather’s Pizza boss Herman Cain if it’s “worse to imagine a world without pizza or one in which Obama gets a second term.” A second Obama term would be worse, Cain replied, “because with Obama in a second term, there will be no pizza. For anyone.” Okay, “you heard it here first,” says Max Read at Gawker: “Obama will ban pizza in his second term.”
So to this very good list of things students and everyone else should not do – 12 Things Students Should Never Do on Social Media, I would add, never wear your tin-foil hat too tight and never fly your black helicopter too close to power lines.
Dean Baker has exactly the right metaphor for journalists asking the really dumb “are you better off” question:
Suppose your house is on fire and the firefighters race to the scene. They set up their hoses and start spraying water on the blaze as quickly as possible. After the fire is put out, the courageous news reporter on the scene asks the chief firefighter, “is the house in better shape than when you got here?”
Yes, that would be a really ridiculous question.
…
A serious reporter asks the fire chief if he had brought a large enough crew, if they enough hoses, if the water pressure was sufficient. That might require some minimal knowledge of how to put out fires.
Obama came to office in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. The question should be how well he dealt with that crisis — and in particular whether the man seeking to replace him would have done better.
Maybe a better question that journalists should be asking, or at least as good as the better off question, is name the ways that conservatives at the federal level blocked the recovery (5 Ways Republicans Have Sabotaged Job Growth) and how they were aided by conservative governors and legislators. A follow up question might include something about those who would describe themselves as patriots thinking their highest priority should be maliciously stalling the recovery in order to increase their chances in the election.
She will ignore you, by the way, and you’ll decide to wait till evening, thinking it makes more sense, and it’s true: there will be red slashes and parrots whose cries will wake you in the morning, and when you go back into the square, damp clouds will be hung in the jacaranda trees, and you will find the yellow shawl of Frida Kahlo, negligently thrown over the wooden chair.
Pictures depicting crazies and their flying apparatuses and machines are al over the net. Lilienthal(May 23, 1848 – August 10, 1896) who has been described as “The Father of Flight” might thus be categorized as such just judging from the photo. Yet starting in 1891 he made many successful glider flights, holding the record for number of successful glides at one point. The Wright brothers would make their first powered flight in 1903. Lilienthal was an influence on the Wright brothers and their designs. Just as Lilienthal has problems with stability and the Wright brothers saw that as a major flaw in emulating his designs for sustained flight. There has been some disagreement as to whether the Wright brothers were actually first in powered flight which I’m not going to get into. One aspect of the Wright brother’s innovations was the fight with Glenn Curtiss over who invented those help the patent for the all important aileron. If you have ever made a paper plane and put little flaps in the wings that could be folded up or down, you made ailerons. because of the years of patent struggles the U.S. approach WW I with less than state of the art aviation or manufacturing capabilities. So much so that we purchased aircraft from France. With World War I underway in 1917, the U.S. government pressured the new aircraft industry to form a cross-licensing organization, to be called the Manufacturers Aircraft Association. Oddly or not, the MAA acted as a kind of collective, or cooperative if one prefers, in which member companies paid a blanket fee for the use of aviation patents which included the original and subsequent Wright patents. This is in the ball park of how the music industry and its licensing fees to radio work. Even by 1917 the achievements which made the frontier of modern flight possible rested on almost simultaneous developments. Those people who we view today as the famous names in aviation were often times simply faster to the patent office. While Otto Lilienthal and his brother deserve a lot of credit for creating a gliding mechanism that worked, a basic issue of maned flight for centuries, the picture above looks not too dissimilar from the flight machines design by Leonardo da Vinci.
In rereading some history of early aviation for this some of what occurred in the Wright brothers patent fights rubbed up against a prejudice I accumulated in childhood. I’ve een to the Wright brothers museum and stand on the spot where they had their first successful glider flights. They were like childhood heroes. So when I read that some guy named Curtiss says he was first I can fell a little resentment creep up on my view of events. Though if I put on my judges robes and try to judge who deserves credit for the ailerons it is a tough call. I would probably say Curtiss or call it a tie, with some credit also going to someone rarely mentioned in popular accounts of those years – French born American engineer Octave Chanute. He wrote Progress in Flying Machine in 1894, and gave technical and financial support to the Wright brothers. History, innovation, patents, credit – all get messy very fast. I believe in proper credit having experienced other people taking credit for my work and my innovation, abet at a much less revolutionary level than the pioneers of aviation. Its weird to see people steal credit. Should I speak up. Will I appear petty – especially in work places that empathize a “team” culture. I would not have had any financial windfall, though such things are considered at many companies during yearly salary reviews. Though all I wanted was simple credit. Though to be clear what I deserved credit for was not something derived out of the ether and was never purely the result of my own invention. I could not have had those ideas without my third grade teacher who made me want to increase my vocabulary and be aware of spelling. Or my middle-school teacher who came up to my desk after asking a question that no one in the class wanted to answer and plead, really you have no ideas, no opinions what so ever about what Poe was trying to say. There were other teachers, professors, co-workers, fiction and non-fiction writers, and the writers and works they referenced in their writing. There was all the people I’ve known and learned from – some in a positive way, some as a kind of example about how not to be. I didn’t grow up in a glass dome sealed off from the world, escaped one day and had ideas that made their first appearance on earth when I took pencil to mini-legal pad. So I always felt that being too obsessive about my ideas was as out of place as someone stealing them. In an age where obnoxious arrogant twits like Donald Trump and Mitt Romney brag out of all proportion to anything that have accomplished and any ideas they’ve had, modest people, people with just the average amount of humility are out of style.
Factlet: On October 7, 1908, Edith Berg, the wife of the brothers’ European business agent, became the first American woman passenger when she flew with Wilbur.
A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.”
It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.
“Gordon Crovitz is a media and information industry advisor and executive, including former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, executive vice president of Dow Jones and president of its Consumer Media Group.” Just his name and the word hack would be an honest summation for Gordon’s resume. The Government created the internet – using the word “launched” seems strange, perhaps to give himself some plausible deniability later. He is putting words and new meanings into what Obama said. All of the ingredients – the technology and history, and every individual that touched that creation would fill a book or two, and has. One of the reason the net was created was the military’s fear of loss of communication should the Cold War become hot (The birth of ARPAnet). That is a relatively simple fact. He provides no documentation for this bizarre historical revisionism.
1961 First packet-switching papers
1966 Merit Network founded
1966 ARPANET planning starts
1969 ARPANET carries its first packets
1970 Mark I network at NPL (UK)
1970 Network Information Center (NIC)
1971 Merit Network’s packet-switched network operational
1971 Tymnet packet-switched network
1972 Internet Assigned Numbers
The net or ARPAnet would not have been possible without computers and computing, which has its own complex history. One in which governments played at large role. Gordon also writes,
But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks.
The Ethernet is an important piece of technology in computer networking. That is great, and good for Xerox for building on technology originally called ALOHAnet. ALOHAnet was developed at the University of Hawaii – one of those publicly funded thingys that gov’mint does. Has Gordon ever heard the saying, popular in science circle, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. Why do we have an Ethernet today where someone’s old Windows 98 PC can talk with someone’s brand new MacBook? Because the bad old gov’mint in partnership with private business, created standards. Standards, the concept of standards are an interesting issue involving private enterprise and government cooperation in themselves. I’d suggest Gordon check out a couple of books on the subject but it would just be a waste of reading light. It is not just my take on history here, but the very same source that Gordon’ cites as his authority, WSJ’s Crovitz: “Creating The Internet” And Getting Everything Wrong
To back this up, Crovitz cited Michael Hiltzik’s book Dealers Of Lightning. Hiltzik responded to Crovitz’s column this morning and said that Crovitz got everything completely wrong:
And while I’m gratified in a sense that he cites my book about Xerox PARC, “Dealers of Lightning,” to support his case, it’s my duty to point out that he’s wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project. So let’s look at where Crovitz goes awry.
First, he quotes Robert Taylor, who funded the ARPANet as a top official at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, as stating, “The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.” (Taylor eventually moved to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where he oversaw the invention of the personal computer, and continued promoting research into networking.)
But Crovitz confuses AN internet with THE Internet. Taylor was citing a technical definition of “internet” in his statement. But I know Bob Taylor, Bob Taylor is a friend of mine, and I think I can say without fear of contradiction that he fully endorses the idea as a point of personal pride that the government-funded ARPANet was very much the precursor of the Internet as we know it today.
There is a legitimate question as to when “the internet” as we come to know it today first appeared on the scene. But, again, that’s not what Obama was talking about. He said that government research led to the internet’s creation. The government-created Arpanet, while not “the internet,” was what made the internet possible in that it was the basis from which all the tech legends lionized by Crovitz did their innovating.
Indeed, Robert Taylor — who, in Crovitz’s retelling gets “full credit” for creating the internet — said as much. Crovitz quoted a 2004 email in which Taylor wrote: “The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.” Here’s the part of that email Crovitz left out: “The ARPAnet was not an internet. An internet is a connection between two or more computer networks. The ARPAnet, with help from thousands of people, slowly evolved into the Internet. Without the ARPAnet, the Internet would have been a much longer time in coming.”
So that’s pretty dishonest of Crovitz.
The general issue of who deserves credit for what in western society, the U.S. urgently so is getting a lot of attention. Gordon’s side wants to make the ridiculous case that only private enterprise creates anything. Even with the commercial internet we all use, the technological backbone came out of publicly funded research. Individuals deserve credit. Some institutions – public labs and universities deserve credit. Finally private enterprise deserves some credit for yes, making it another engine of commerce. Why not this crazy philosophy, Gordon and like-minded zealots may have heard this in passing, credit where due. That means everywhere it is due. Some of us grew up hearing about concepts like modesty, merit, fairness. Who knows what happened, what trauma occurred to the lone inventor believers, the John Galt worshipers that they have become so desperate to create new mythologies.
inkbluesky 