The March of Technology

Tam introduces an article about her latest acquisition with this thought:

The decades around the turn of the 20th Century were a time of technological change that is hard to appreciate even when reading about it on the screen of a smartphone. In a relative eyeblink, the world went from whale-oil lanterns and horsedrawn carriages to electric light and automobiles. Telephones, automobiles, radio, powered flight: A seemingly endless stream of inventions were changing the landscape of the world, and among those dazzling gadgets were self-loading firearms. Maxim guns were starring in the tales of colonial wars and, with the development of early self-loading pistols, anybody could have this kind of H.G. Wells technology right in their pocket!

When I got started in the computer business 30 years ago I made an effort to learn all I could about the hardware I was using: what all the pins on all the connectors were for, how to set all the jumpers, and how to program all the chips. I suppose that worked out okay for me but I soon got tired of it because I discovered that as soon as I had mastered something it was no longer useful for me to know anything about it. Either it had become obsolete, or the company had changed direction, or I had changed companies. After a while it got to the point where I only bothered to look up what I absolutely needed to know in order to get the job done.

From reading Patrick O'Brian's stories about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars (round about 1800) I got the impression that technological progress up till then had been rather slow. Everything was staid, conservative "we've been doing it this way for a thousand years and we ain't gonna change on account of the whim of some whippersnapper".

Then I came across this little bit in Neal Stephenson's The System of the World:

This is in 1714, so the idea that this is a new phenomena is just my conceit. But wait, there's more: The System of the World begins with a meeting in Southwest England to form a company known as the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire, aka the first successful steam engine developed by Thomas Newcomen:

This was a very large and curious device. Note the man standing to the left of the brick pillar. There is no wheel and no crank, it just has a piston in a cylinder hanging on on one end of the beam and the pump hanging on the other. And it is not steam power that does the work of lifting the water. The atmosphere does the work. The steam serves only to raise the piston in the cylinder, and so lower the pump rod to take on a new load of water. When the piston has been raised (that is the position shown in the drawing), cold water is sprayed into the cylinder which causes the steam to condense, which forms a partial vacuum and the air pressure from the atmosphere pushes down on the piston, and so raises the pump rod and its' load of water. It must have been horribly inefficient, yet it still worked well enough that it got the job done. The water was pumped out of the mines, and the miners were able to extract ore. Even with the low pressures they must have been using, they still had trouble building boilers that would not explode. I suspect the problem was simply that the boilers were large. Since pressure is measured in force per unit area, it follows that a larger boiler with a larger surface area is going to be subject to larger overall forces.

Steam power is only 300 years old. That is not a very long time given what we know of the history of civilization.

Inside Skinny on the Drug Trade

In Sight - Organized Crime in the Americas, web site devoted to crime in Mexico, Central and South America. Just in case you needed some more bad news. Via Burro Hall.

Stupid Thermostat

After a year and a half of stalling I finally got the gas fireplace in the basement repaired. I hope to relate that excruciating tale sometime soon. Meanwhile the fireplace is working and I have heat in the basement and I can dispense with the tiny electric heater I have employed in my office.

Well, it worked for a day, and then it quit. Works if you turn it on using the switch in the base though, so there must be something wrong with the thermostat. But what could go wrong with the thermostat? I mean there's not much there, just a bi-metallic strip and a mercury switch. Maybe the wire broke, not because anything happened, but maybe during construction it got hit and it's just been hanging on by a thread. No, that's not it, put the meter on the wires and they're fine. It's got to be the thermostat, so I take it down and take it apart and check all the various contacts for connection and find nothing wrong. Put it back together and put it back on the wall and now it works. Grrr! Stupid thermostat.

I think the problem is the same one I had upstairs: very light corrosion, tarnish really, on contact points. In this case I think it was the screw connections for the wire. I suspect simply loosening them and then retightening them would have been enough to fix it.

This used to happen with old Multibus I computers when I worked at Intel. Okay, it happened once. Computer that had been running fine for a long time just up and quit. Took the boards out, polished the gold plated board edge contacts with a pencil eraser and put them back in and that fixed it.

I suppose the reason I haven't had any similar trouble with my PC is that there aren't any additional cards in use, except for the memory sticks, and those get swapped out every couple of years or so. Or maybe they have some kind of new anti-corrosion technology.

A Darkening Stain by Robert Wilson

A Darkening Stain by Robert Wilson

I thought this was going to be a nice, little murder mystery, with the added bonus of being placed in an exotic location. It turned out to be a lot tougher than that. We start out with the usual: a white male PI (Private Investigator) with a girlfriend. He has a friend on the police force. He drinks too much and the text is full of tough guy lingo. He gets drafted into a criminal conspiracy where he is way out of his depth and he has to find a way out. That's all the usual, but the setting and the way the tale is told make it altogether a much grimmer kind of story. Instead of being set in one of the usual haunts like New York, London, or LA, this one is set in Cotonou, Benin (West Africa). I had heard of Benin, and I may even have known approximately where is was, but I had never heard of Cotonou. It's a sizable city, almost a million people, and just across the border from the center of the Nigerian 429 scam empire, Lagos. The entire coast along this section of Africa appears to be low lying land, swamps and lakes. This book was kind of hard to read, not because the sentence structure was weird or the vocabulary was unfamiliar, more because of the story. I would read a chapter or so and I would have to stop and let my mind recover from  what I had just read.

This satellite photo of Cotonou, Benin, shows an area about five miles wide.

View Larger Map 
Update August 2018 replaced missing picture.

Clooney Arrested!

I like George. I've seen a bunch of his movies. I think what I like is that he doesn't always play the macho tough  guy. Sometimes he plays the other guy, the one who isn't quite as tough, or smart, or clever, or nice. In case you haven't heard he and his father and a dozen or so other people got arrested when they were protesting outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington.

Okay, we've got another celebrity making a fuss about some third world country. That's hardly news, seems like some celebrity is getting their face in the paper everyday for some kind of foolishness. I wonder if he is going to be able to get enough momentum to force any kind of change.

Some people might want the US to send our military over there and straighten those ragheads out. I admit that's  my initial reaction, but given the disaster in Afghanistan, I'm not so sure that's a good idea. (I don't know whether our involvement in Iraq was worthwhile or not.) The problem with Sudan is that they are supplying China with a considerable amount of oil, and anything that threatens to disrupt that oil supply is going to get China's attention, and I don't think we want a war with China. Other than a whole lot of people getting killed, it might disrupt our Walmart stores. Hell, can you imagine if trade with China got cut off? That would be a disaster for them as well as us.

Quote of the Day

"If corporations were truly people, most of them would be diagnosed as being sociopaths and they'd be in locked wards." - Earth Bound Misfit

Yes, Billy, corporations are people too. We know this because the supreme court said so. So why aren't these sociopaths locked up? Maybe because they're too big to jail? Ha, ha,  I made a funny. Except it's not so funny, is it?

Can We Reform The Criminal Justice System?

Everyone loves to complain about the way things are, me included. We complain about the government and the economy, politics and politicians, those people (whoever they are) of screwing things up for the rest of us. But has anyone come up with an idea that would actually change things? There was Prohibition and it's repeal. There was the Civil Rights movement. I think that changed some things. The EPA and the Clean Air Act have made a difference. I'm not sure how that happened. Did the hippies do that? The NRA is fighting an ongoing battle to restore our 2nd amendment rights and they seem to be making some progress.

I just read about a new idea. I don't know if it has a chance in hell of succeeding, but I think it is surely worth a shot. The idea is to crash the criminal justice system by getting everyone who gets arrested to refuse to make any plea agreement and to insist on going to trial. Read Go to Trial - Crash the Justice Sytem  in The New York Times.

While there certainly are violent criminals who should be locked up, I suspect more damage is done to non-violent offenders than can reasonably be justified.

Via Earth Bound Misfit.