United States – Page 3 – Me on the net

It’s History

The Sunken Road at Waterloo, painting by Stanl... — The Sunken Road at Waterloo, painting by Stanley Berkley, from A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year, Edwin Emerson, Jr., 1902. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was never any good at history. That’s probably because I couldn’t get straight in my mind who was battling who and for what reason and for how long and so on. Later I came across the concept that history is written by the victors. This makes sense to me in some ways but the losers will still have their point of view and will likely instruct their children according to that point of view.

So while one side may say that a battle was a heroic victory over huge odds, the other party may describe the heroic resistance against huge odds. One side might add that an ally came to the rescue at the last minute while the other side might mention a traitorous change of allegiance of a former ally.

English: US and Iraqi Army Soldiers guard bord... — English: US and Iraqi Army Soldiers guard borders in Iraq (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In wars before the twentieth century it might be that the average person would be unlikely to see any military action or even be directly affected by a war or battle. Of course, the authorities might increase taxes and conscript young men, but most people would not have seen any fighting.

Communication about the battles and the progress of the war would have been hit and miss. An injured person on their way home after fighting would no doubt have little idea of what was actually happening either on the small scale of the actual battle or on the wider canvas of the whole campaign.

Anyone who has taken part in any sort of war games, such as paint-ball or capture the flags type games, will know that an awful lot of running through undergrowth and an awful lot of lying in wait is involved, and an awful lot of not knowing what is happening. In older times, it could be that what is going on 100 metres away would not be known.

A lot of ancient warfare was waged based on intelligence brought in by scouts and observers. That’s why armies always try to take higher ground, as it gives you a better view of the field of battle and it also can be defended by fewer people. The disadvantage of course is that a patch of higher ground can be surrounded and isolated.

Scouts and observers can of course be mistaken. That “100 or so” men that were spotted may actually be many more, or it may even be a contingent of one’s own troops or allies which are out of position. A scout also risks his life by approaching as close to the enemy as he can.

Such intelligence as filters back to the commanders is obviously flawed and incomplete. They probably don’t know too much about the country that they are invading, whereas the locals may possibly have a better idea of the lay of the land. Maps may be incomplete or inaccurate, and may even have been built up directly from the intelligence.

The Map Room in the Churchill Museum and Cabin... — The Map Room in the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The commanders then need to deploy their troops according to their best knowledge and the intelligence. As a result they may send off troops to places where they may be easily overwhelmed or may be ineffective.

The commanders will instruct their platoon commanders on the objectives for their troops but once the platoon commanders reach their positions they are pretty much on their own. Chaos inevitably ensues, in spite of any attempts to keep order.



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Signals are used for communication, bugle calls, semaphores, runners and other methods are used to try to give the overall commanders an idea of what is happening at the front lines. Inevitably messages will go astray and orders will be misunderstood and this may well turn the tide of battle.

Perhaps this is why I was no good at history. When one is taught about the battle of Waterloo for example, one learns that Wellington deployed his troops here and here and that Napoleon attacked here and here and the Prussian army attacked here and here. While these statements may cover the actual flow of the battle, much of this will have been rationalised after the event.

On a wider scale, take Napoleon for example. He is described in Wikipedia as “one of the most celebrated and controversial political figures in Western history”. From the English point of view he is the villain of the piece but I suspect that to many on his side he was a hero. There is no doubt that he was respected even by his enemies as a brilliant politician and military leader.

On the principal of “history is written by the victors” mentioned above, if Napoleon had won, and should France have held sway over England, then no doubt he would have been painted either as a benevolent leader or as a heavy-handed dictator, depending on his acceptance or rejection by England. By “England” I mean the politicians and powerful in the country. The “man in the field” probably wouldn’t care too much, unless it affected him in some way.

History, to my mind, attributes intent much more than is justified, which renders it debatable at the least. We read that Country A pushed into a region in order to cut off Country B from some resource or other. More likely Country A had the opportunity and the resources to be able to expand into the region while Country B failed to do so because of lack of foresight, opportunity or resources.

So the expansion of Country A would have more to do with young men seeing the opportunities and travelling to the colonies to make their fortunes than any real plans by the government of Country A.

Baudrillard published some articles on the Gulf War, the last of which is entitled “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place“. He disputed the history of the events in the Gulf as presented.

Firstly he argued that, because of the superior air power of the Americans, they did not actually come into actually engage in conflict with the Iraqi army, and therefore the events could not be really considered to be a war.

Secondly he argued that the view of the war as presented by the media which was fed, not from actual events but mainly from the propaganda machine of the American military and as such it presented only one point of view, that of the Americans.

History will present the Gulf War and the American handling of it in overwhelmingly positive light. History has been written by the Americans for better or worse, as the victors in this event. I’m not arguing that history is wrong. Just that it presents a picture and that picture may ignore many important aspects of an event and we should be wary of official histories.

Fighting Terrorism



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(Second post of Terrorists – this won’t become a theme. At least I will try not to make it a theme).

A terrorist is someone who kills people, often innocent bystanders in an attempt to force his or her views on others. Sometimes the terrorist is part of a persecuted minority, but often he or she is driven by religious fervour. His or her beliefs maybe include the concept of rewards after death and he or she will likely be prepared to lay down his or her life in the furtherance of his or her objectives.

How do you recognise a terrorist? With the current spate of Islamist inspired shootings and bombings many people are looking askance at people with dark skins, beards and who tend to wear a particular style of clothing. To say that this can be misleading is obvious.

The case of a Sikh student who was questioned by police when someone suspected that he was a terrorist merely because of his appearance and the wires of his earphones protruding from his bag is a good example. The person who reported him was obviously ignorant of the fact that Sihkism is a religion which is totally different from Islam. This is sad, but not surprising.

So how do you identify a terrorist then? It’s very hard indeed. The young white spotty youth who lives down the road and has taken to calling himself “Jusef” and dressing in Middle Eastern clothing is almost certainly more of a threat than anyone in the area with dark skin and a habit of fasting for a month at certain times of the year.

William Henry Quilliam (April 10, 1856 – 1932)... — William Henry Quilliam (April 10, 1856 – 1932), who changed his name to Abdullah Quilliam, was a 19th century convert from Christianity to Islam, noted for founding England’s first mosque and Islamic centre. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The things that people have done in the name of religion have led to a call for religion to be banned. This obviously won’t work and it would drive religion underground and radicalise it. There are billions of people who do have a religion or belief which they base their life around who would not dream of using violence to further their religion.

Much of the tension between religious groups is the result of ignorance. There are probably as many texts in the Koran which promote peace and harmony as there are in the Christian Bible. There are also likely to be as many violent exhortations as to what to do to non-believers in the Bible as there are in the Koran. After the Bible and the Koran are related documents with the later Koran commenting on the earlier Biblical texts.

How can we spot terrorists before they commit their crimes? How do we determine who is a harmless and friendly family man and who is plotting to blow us up? Certainly not be looking at the colour of the skin and the possession of a copy of the Koran. Not by checking if he or she visits the Mosque every week. Even if such a person seems surly and unfriendly, he or she might just be having a bad day. And we cannot decide based on their choice of clothing.

The only real way of detecting a terrorist in our midst is unfortunately by closely watching for them. Of course, we should have our suspicions first, otherwise we would need to track everyone who “looked like a Muslim”. This is unacceptable in a free society.



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We can get better understanding of Muslims and vice versa, by education. One proposal was that religion, all religions, be taught in schools. This is a good idea but will not work unless similar is done in Islamist states and countries, and that will never happen.

One big issue is the case of the alienated white teenager. A certain few will for one reason or another completely flip and commit murder, usually of their contemporaries, and sometimes at random. Any nominal motive would be attributed to anything from white supremacy, to political reason (usually nihilistic), or to nothing significant.



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It seems that such teenagers are more and more and more being attracted to Islam and the violent side of that religion and we find that atrocities are sometimes being carried out by white boys who have converted to Islam.

I question whether the problem here lies with the religion or in the fact that these kids had easy access to guns and that their alienation was either not recognised or ignored. If they had not had the concept of Islamic jihad to adopt, would they not have found some other cause to espouse?

So how do we fight terrorism? Do we suspect our neighbours who have ties to the Middle East, or do we quarantine them, or even deport them? All these solutions are ineffective and some followers of Islam have lived here peacefully for generations. Do we force them to give up their culture and assimilate more closely into the community?

All these options have been tried in the past and historically have shown that these tactics are ineffective, not to mention brutal and demeaning. And that is without considering the case of the alienated white boy.

The Government would have us believe that the answer is for more surveillance of all citizens. This is certainly effective in some cases, but in the few cases which escape the notice of the authorities, the terrorists can cause untold damage and inflict a large number of deaths on many innocent people. And this still doesn’t really address the issue of the white teenager who typically acts alone and who quite often has no close ties to Islam.

Another option is for retaliatory military raids on the overt face of the organisation that the terrorists are connected with, but this will always happen after an atrocity and merely gives the organisation rhetorical weapons to justify their aims.

English: A payload surveillance camera made by... — English: A payload surveillance camera made by Controp and distributed to the U.S Government by ADI Technologies. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is sad but I don’t believe that things will change until Islam changes. I have high hopes that it will as the adherents of Islam move into non-Moslem countries and integrate with the non-Moslem communities there. Then perhaps the more liberal ideas will filter back to the Moslem counties together with increased prosperity.

After all, the Christian religion mounted the largely ineffective Crusades against Moslems in the Middle East, admittedly as a result of an Islamist expansion and that crusading religious fervour eventually died out in Europe.

It’s a pity that there is no real solution to the problem of terrorists. One can only hope that ultimately people will evolve to be more understanding of their neighbours and that xenophobia will diminish to almost nothing. Until then we will have to live with the inconveniences at airports and the much more significant internal spying of authorities on citizens.

Unfortunately, we will have to read in the papers of atrocities carried out by one group or other against unarmed people for some time to come. I can see no real effective solution.

(I note that I have conflated “terrorist” with the fanatical Moslem activities that we have seen recently. Terrorists however come in all shapes and sizes, all religions. This was not intentional but shows how easy it is to slip into the habit of equating the one with the other).

Why Philosophers are Never Asked to Parties



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The philosopher went to a party. He grabbed a drink and looked around. After a while he looked around again and started to frown. His host came up to him and asked him why he was looking puzzled. The philosopher replied that he wasn’t sure that he was at a party.

The host looked around and everyone was chatting, drinking and eating or dancing. Music was playing and the lights had been dimmed. The host asked him why he wasn’t sure, and the philosopher replied that, while it appeared that he was at a party, he couldn’t be sure that he was, because it could be that, in spite of appearances, he wasn’t at a party and that all the people here could be merely pretending that it was a party.

English: Saul Kripke (philosopher) on juquehy ... — English: Saul Kripke (philosopher) on juquehy beach (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, if he asked anyone, they would say that it was a party, but they would say that whether or not it really was a party. When the host asked why anyone would go to the trouble to set up a fake party, he stated that he didn’t know, but if he could determine that it was a fake party, then that would be the next question. If it proved to be a real party then he could relax and enjoy himself. At this point that the philosopher found himself alone, as his host had left him to his musings.

There’s a saying that “if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck”. This saying satisfies most people most of the time, but (philosophers aside) doesn’t satisfy everyone, all of the time.

When a top politician is replaced mid-term, the person who replaces him or her often showers praise on him or her, and states how much the party is in debt to the “retiring” politician, who may be stepping down to “spend more time with family”, most people would recognise this for what it is, a political coup. Few would believe that the top politician wanted to resign and that he or she really had a choice.

In this case the metaphorical bird is most likely a turkey, but everyone insists that it is a duck. Even though it doesn’t look like a duck and doesn’t quack like a duck, and doesn’t even walk like a duck.

It’s pretty easy for us to detect the coup for what it is and mostly the media will report it as a coup, but the sceptical philosopher has no easy way to determine if he should relax and enjoy himself or go home. He knows about the political coup and sees this happen fairly often. Something happens and it is presented in one way, and everyone knows that this “duck” is not in fact a duck. So, why could not the same be true about the party?

The basic question that underlies the philosopher’s dilemma is “How do we know what we know?”, which a branch of philosophy that philosophers call “Epistemology“. When we read in the papers that a top politician has stepped down, or we go to a party, most people are quite aware of what is going on. We base our awareness on previous knowledge of prior political coups and previous parties.

English: Cartoon expression of Frank Jackson's... — English: Cartoon expression of Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument. One of the popular thought-experiment discussed in philosophers of mind. 日本語: 心の哲学における有名な思考実験。マリーの部屋。 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We are quite happy to apply the negative (he didn’t really want to resign) and the positive (it’s a great party!) to these situations based on experience. The philosopher can’t do that, as this leads to the “problem of induction”. Maybe in the last three coups the politician didn’t want to resign, and maybe the last three gatherings were in fact parties, but this time it may be different and the philosopher has the problem of knowing one way or the other.

Well, actually the philosopher has the problem of needing to know one way or the other. A true philosopher is a sceptical about everything he sees or hears or otherwise experiences, but there is a fundamental problem with the issue of “knowing”.

English: Knowledge, mural by Robert Lewis Reid... — English: Knowledge, mural by Robert Lewis Reid. Second Floor, North Corridor. Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. Caption underneath reads: IGNORANCE IS THE CVRSE OF GOD KNOWLEDGE IS THE WING WHEREWITH WE FLY TO HEAVEN. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you tell a philosopher that the sun will rise tomorrow, he or she may ask you how you know it will. If you reply that you know it because the sun came up yesterday, and the day before and the day before that, the philosopher will question how you know that what happened in the past will happen will happen in the future. He will point out that if you toss a coin and it turns up heads three times in a row, that it doesn’t mean that it will turn up heads the next time it is tossed. It’s a 50:50 chance that that it will come up tails.

If you then appeal to science the philosopher can point out that science is built on theories and experiments to disprove them. No experiment can prove a theory as such because you can do as many experiments as you like which turn out to agree with the theory and the philosopher can suggest that one more experiment might disprove the theory, and if it does, bang goes the theory.

Actually, if a theory is any good, then it won’t be completely destroyed by an experiment that goes against the theory. No, it is more likely that the theory is patched up to take account of the errant data, and the process goes on. Also if the theory is any good any experiment which contradicts it is likely to happen at the extremes of the domain of the theory, and it can be usefully used for the vast majority of cases that don’t occur in those extremes.

What about the philosopher at the party? He can prove one way or another that the gathering is really a party, and not something else. His host has a couple of options at least. Firstly he can suggest that the philosopher takes it as a working hypothesis that it really is a party. Then he can take part, and if he enjoys himself, that doesn’t disprove the working hypothesis. Secondly the host can find another philosopher and introduce the two, who can then jointly discuss the validity of the hypothesis (that it is a real party).

Or thirdly, he can avoid asking a philosopher to any of his parties.



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A Miscellany



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I’m going to try something different in this post. I won’t try to stick to a single theme, but will try to create a miscellany of short themes and see how it goes.

Firstly, a friend of mine is a keen photographer who keeps a blog and for five years he has posted one or more photos to his blog every day. It’s a fantastic achievement, and since I have trouble posting once a week, I can only imagine the persistence, application and diligence needed to post once every day.



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I’ve mentioned before that I have started blogs at various times in the past and have been unable to keep them going. This time around, for reasons that I can’t really fathom, I have managed to keep going for coming up to 150 posts now. If Brian succeeds in reaching 5 years of posting he will have posted over 1,870 times. Which is mind-boggling!!

One of the reasons that he has given for dropping his self-imposed regime of daily posting is that he feels that the quality of his posted pictures is possibly suffering from the requirement to post something every day and that the temptation to post a merely adequate (from his point of view) picture just to keep the chain going is strong.

English: Locomotive in KiwiRail livery (not a ... — English: Locomotive in KiwiRail livery (not a particularly good photo, but perhaps adequate until a better is found) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I must say that I have not seen any deterioration in his pictures, but I don’t look at them with his eyes. So I will continue to look forward to his posts, even though he will not be posting daily pictures once he reaches the 5 year target.

Of course, this has made me think about this blog and how long I intend to keep it going. I’ve posted nearly 150 times so far which represents a bit under three years. I’d like to reach at least 5 years too, which will be around 250 posts. That’s the current target, so let’s see if I can reach it.

English: 250 West Pratt Street in Baltimore (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Next topic. If I was able to ask God a question, I would say “Quantum Physics. What were you thinking!” We like to think that the universe is logical and consistent. If it wasn’t then there would be no guarantee that the sun would not blink out 10 seconds from now. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0! OK we are fine this time.

I’m told, and I have an inkling about it from my reading and thinking, that Quantum Physics is logical and consistent. However the various popularizations of it appear counter intuitive and paradoxical. How can Schroedinger’s poor cat be both alive and dead? What exactly is a superposition of states? What (if anything) is the “collapse of the wave form”?

Omega-Point-Multiverse (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

General and Special Relativity were considered mysterious and paradoxical when Einstein first published his papers. At the time someone claimed that only three people in the world truly understood it, but it didn’t take long for it to be taught down to college and undergraduate levels. While strange and challenging, it was soon accepted as true by the majority of people who had come across it, although people still create web sites where they try to prove that Einstein was wrong.

Quantum Physics is also taught at undergraduate levels I believe but it remains (or so I get the impression) as a work in progress. The famous Copenhagen Interpretation was formulated around 90 years ago by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenburg and there is still no accessible standard interpretation that is accepted by the majority.

Niels Bohr once said “Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.” Richard Feynman said “Nobody understands quantum mechanics.” So, God, Quantum Physics. What were you thinking about?

Flags and things. There is a big debate in this country at the moment about whether or not to change the flag. People often refer to the Canadian flag as a case where a new flag was adopted after public discussion. It’s not a good case study though as the actual adoption of the winning flag involved a farcical mistake : “Through a six-week period of study with political manoeuvring, the committee took a vote on the two finalists: the Pearson Pennant (Beddoe’s design) and the current design. Believing the Liberal members would vote for the Prime Minister’s preference, the Conservatives voted for the single leaf design. The Liberals, though, all voted for the same, giving a unanimous, 14 to 0 vote for [it]”. (From Wikipedia).

The process for our new flag was decided on early. Firstly all submissions would be reviewed, and a “top 40” would be selected by a panel composed of, basically, a bunch of celebrities and other. No disrespect to them, but they were not flag experts, and if they were chosen to sort of represent the man/woman in the street that is what they achieved.

Of the top 40, four were “approved” by the ruling National cabinet. It’s not too clear how this was done, but only conspiracy theorists would contend that three out of the four contained the fern emblem that the Prime Minister favoured and that he somehow influenced the selection.

Stjórnarráðið in Reykjavik, the seat of the ex... — Stjórnarráðið in Reykjavik, the seat of the executive branch of Iceland’s government (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now we have the top four we are supposed to vote in a referendum to pick one to go up against the current flag in a second referendum. Interestingly a group has been formed to promote a fifth design (originally in the top 40) over the top four. We will see where if anywhere that this movement goes. I’d guess it will eventually fail.

One hundred words to go. Interest is high on the attempt of Jarryd Hayne, a former Australian rugby league player who has secured a spot in San Francisco 49ers NFL team. (That’s what is called “American Football” everywhere except the USA). Good luck to him, I say. I expect to see a surge of popularity for the sport in this part of the world.

He seemed to bring something new to the American game, but time will tell if opposition coaches find ways to nullify his effect or whether other players will adopt some of his style, which to my naive eye seems to be a more fluid running game. Or maybe he really is an exceptional player. Time will tell.

Well, I quite enjoyed jumping around through various topics but I don’t think that I will do it every time. I’ll just take it as it comes.

A show jumping course (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Early television and that mess of metal on the roof

In the beginning the consumer television set was a large box with a small blurry screen. To successfully receive one of the few channels being broadcast one needed an aerial to pick up the broadcasts. They came in two sorts. One was a huge “H” or “X” shape that was located on the roof and aligned with the signal from the broadcaster. The other was a small device consisting of a base made of plastic and two metal prongs, known as “rabbit’s ears“.

Of the two types you will only see the rabbit’s ears aerial still being used today. Since television has moved from the VHF (Very High Frequency) band to the UHF (Ultra High Frequency) band, television aerials have shrunk in size and the technology has now improved so that television aerials have become the compact roof top Yagi style aerials that are common today.

Nederlands: Schets Yagi antenne (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although it is obvious from the shape of the Yagi aerials that they receive a directed signal, I suspect that not many people know why they are the shape that they are. There is only one element that picks up the signal and that is one of the cross bars on the main shaft of the aerial. All others elements (including the mesh element at the back if there is one) serve to concentrate and direct the incoming signal towards the main element or dipole.

This means that the aerial can pick out weaker signals from general noise but it does mean that the aerial must be aligned fairly accurately with the transmitters signal.

There is a new type of aerial that has become common in recent years and that is the dish aerial. Dish aerials are generally used to pick up signals from stationary satellites and need to detect weak signals broadcast from space. The actual dipole is in the small plastic box in front of the dish. The dish is a passive reflector and just concentrates the small signal onto the dipole in the box, much like the Yagi aerial does for UHF frequencies. Satellite signals are of even higher frequency than the UHF ones.



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In the early days of broadcasting and with the use of VHF frequencies, ghosting was a problem. Because early aerials (and “the rabbit’s ear” type of aerials) were not particularly directional they could receive signals which had bounced off various obstacles on their way from the transmitter to the receiver. The reflection from obstacles such as hills and large buildings meant that the receiver would collect signals which had travelled by different routes and hence had taken slightly different times to reach it.

The result of this was that the images on the screen either appeared to have shadows or duplicates. This phenomenon was called “ghosting” and in a bad case it might appear that in a broadcast soccer match that the match was being contested by two teams of twenty two players using two balls.



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This phenomenon is not often seen these days as UHF signals and satellite signals are much more directional and hence do not receive signals bounced from obstacles in their line of view which has a much narrower angle.

In the early days of television technology the electronic equipment in the receivers was in its infancy. The circuits leaked signals between their parts, and components were not as stable as they are today. Valves and other components had to “warm up” to operating temperature and often the oscillators and other circuits tended to “drift” away from the nominal operating frequencies.



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In real terms this meant that those watching the program would often find that the picture would appear to roll up or down the screen. Someone would have to leap up and twiddle the controls at the back of the television to try to stop the picture rolling. Very often the twiddler would adjust the control to stop the rolling, only to find that his or her very presence had affected the circuits and the screen would start to roll as soon as he or she moved away.

Other effects would cause other issues. Unstable circuits would cause the image to shake like a jelly, or tear completely in one or more places. It was a true art form to twiddle the available knobs (of which there were many) to produce a decent and more or less stable picture.



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Screens were small. Early sets had dimensions of perhaps 9 inches (23 cms). Today screens of 50 inches or more are common. Each screen had (in the UK at least) 405 lines all of which were scanned in one or more cycles. The early television tubes were not very accurate and each line could be clearly seen, and so sometimes could the “flyback” as the circuitry returned the beam to the top of the screen for the next scan.

The end effect was a small picture blurred by circuitry instabilities, often with artifacts like the “flyback” lines polluting the picture, and plagued by instabilities, but which showed pictures of news around the world, or educational programs or discussion panels, plays or game shows. And they even broadcast cartoons for the kids. Everyone wanted one, of course!



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Obviously things improved very quickly. Television electronics became much better, and the pictures much more stable especially when transistors were introduced. The screen increased in size, and colour television was introduced. Some would argue that the quality of the television content has dropped dramatically, but that doesn’t change the fact that most people have one or more televisions in their house and it has become the central focus of many lounges and living rooms. Many people have them in bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens these days.



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It is ironic that broadcast television may well have peaked. More and more people use their television sets to show content that has not been broadcast, but which has been obtained over the Internet. It may be that this network distributed content may totally displace the broadcast television service and that people will no longer be tied to a broadcast schedule, picking up content that they want to watch from a myriad of Internet sources.

Speed



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(Posted late again! Whoops!)

Every time I write my 1,000 words it is a challenge but sometimes it is more of a challenge. As I’ve said before, sometimes I know roughly what I want to include, while other times I pick a topic and go for it. This post is one of the latter.

Speed. Anyone who has been on the Internet since the early days knows about speed. When I hear people complaining about the speed of their connection I quietly laugh as I consider the days of dial-up, and of 2400 baud modems. A megabit download could take half an hour to an hour if the connection held up that long.

A Telia SurfinBird 56k modem, made by Telia. T... — A Telia SurfinBird 56k modem, made by Telia. They often came with a Internet package from the company in the late 1990s. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As an aside, the “skreee, Kaboinga, boinga, boinga, skeeee…” of a dial up modem connecting induces nostalgia in me, though I’d not go back to those days! Today’s Internet is sometimes called the Information Superhighway. The old dial up Internet was much like a dirt road. With potholes.

When one takes a journey, say from one end of the country to the other, one sets out on local roads, which may or may not be congested, then one travels over the Motorways, or the Interstates, or the Autobahns. Then one travels on the local roads at the far end. Any of these may be congested, but the local roads are most likely to be slower to traverse.

The same is true of the Internet. Your local ISP is equivalent to the local roads at your end of the trip, and the target website or whatever you are connecting to is in their ISP’s local network.

If we delve a little further, it is evident that the copper or fibre that makes up the Internet is not really a factor in the speed of the Internet. Signals in the fibre travel at light speed. Typically this is less than light speed in empty space, but it is close to it. Signals in copper travel slower than this, but still at a significant percentage of the speed of light. (I’d put a link in here, but the subject is complex and I found no clear explanation. YMMV).

The real reasons that fibre is preferred over copper is the huge bandwidth and the much smaller attenuation in fibre cables. Bandwidth is often described in terms of how many lanes a highway has. Obviously the more lanes the more traffic a highway can handle. Attenuation is interesting. It’s as if your car starts out in New York in pristine condition, but deteriorates en route to Los Angeles, until it arrives at its destination looking like a bucket of bolts, if it makes it that far.

Whether or not the packets are transmitted by fibre or copper, the signal must somehow be loaded onto the cable, and this takes significant time. The packet of data is placed into a register on the network connector by the computer and a special chip translates that to a stream of bits on the wire, or pulses of light in the fibre.



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These pulses then whiz off onto the network. However they don’t travel all the way in one hop. Your computer connects to a modem device that sends the signal to your ISP, where the signals hit a router. This device looks and a whole packet of data, then send it off again towards its destination. It doesn’t get to its destination in one hop, and there may be a dozen or more hops before it gets there.

At the beginning and the end of each and every hop there is a device that grabs the packet of data off the wire, decides where to send it and puts it on another wire. These devices are called ‘routers’, a term which many people will have heard. As you can imagine, each hop adds a delay (or latency) to the packet of data. These delays are quite small but they add up.

English: Avaya ERS 8600. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So the Information Superhighway doesn’t look that flash after all. Sometimes I wonder how data actually gets through at all. It’s as if there was a multi-lane highway across the country (the world even), but it is studded with interchanges which take significant time to traverse, increasing the time taken for the trip – light would take nanoseconds to get from here to Sydney if we had line of sight, but over the Internet it takes milliseconds.

Satellites are even worse. To reach a geostationary communications satellite and return takes of the order of half a second, an age in computing terms. Of course most communication satellites are lower than that so the delay is not as much as half a second, but it is still significant.



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The advent of streaming services has exacerbated the problem. The basic issue is twofold. To use the motorway analogy, there are many more cars on the road and as a result the interchanges are becoming crowded resulting in congestion. In general the motorways themselves are fast and free-flowing, but the interchanges have not caught up.

An ingenious partial solution is to strategically place machines around the world which effectively distribute the stuff that people want to receive, so that the same content is available locally. It’s like taking all the copies of the pictures in a gallery in Los Angeles and storing the copies in New York, Miami, Washington and so on. Rather than having to go all the way to Los Angeles, a New York viewer sees the picture locally.

In the diagram shown, we see an "Akamaize... — In the diagram shown, we see an “Akamaized” website; this simply means that certain content within the website (usually media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, video) will not point to servers owned by the original website, in this case ACME, but to servers owned by Akamai. It is important to note that even though the domain name is the same, namely http://www.acme.com and image.acme.com, the ip address (server) that image.acme.com points to is actually owned by Akamai and not ACME. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So the sources of delay to your streaming the latest version of TV shows are many. The first possibility is your own setup. Maybe your network and modem are not up to the task. Secondly there is the telecom network. Tricky stuff happens between you and your ISP which if the province of the telcos. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but in some cases switching a couple of connection in the roadside cabinet or in the exchange helps.

Then there is your ISP. ISP will be keeping a close eye on the traffic through their part of the network, but the rapid rise of the streaming services has caught them a little bit unawares, and some are scrambling to keep up. Then there is the Internet backbone. It is unlikely that there are issues here. Finally there is the target ISP’s network and the target site’s network and the site itself. Any of these could cause issues, but they are way beyond the control of the end user and his/her ISP.



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Speeds on the Internet are phenomenal when compared to the early days. Things are much more complex these days. It is amazing what can be achieved, and those of us who have experienced the early days are less likely to whinge about speed issues as we remember that it was like!



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Cricket – bat and ball game

That’s how Wikipedia describes cricket – as a bat and ball game. Since the Cricket World Cup is currently being staged in Australia and New Zealand, I thought that I would choose cricket as the topic for the week.

The roots of cricket are in England, though it so happens that the mother country of cricket has been eliminated from the Cricket World Cup (CWC). Cricket has spread to a number of other countries as a result of colonial and other influences and 14 teams have been taking part in the 2015 CWC.

List of ICC cricket member nations. Orange mar... — List of ICC cricket member nations. Orange marked countries are test teams, yellow are associate and purple are affiliate member nations. (Note: Certain island nations may not be shown.) For those who may not be able to make out the colours: Shade used for Australia is orange Shade used for United States is yellow Shade used for Mexico is purple (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cricket playing nations are either full members of the International Cricket Council or associate or affiliate members. The CWC contestants are the 10 full members and 4 other members who are required to qualify for the tournament. The ‘minnows’ as the associates and affiliates are often referred to rarely trouble the full members in matches, but upsets are not unknown.

Of the bat and ball games, cricket is of the class where a batsman defends a target from a ball thrown (“pitched” or “bowled”) by a player from the other team. Points (referred to as runs) are scored by running from one end of the pitch to the other, or by hitting the ball out of bounds.

Cricket is similar to baseball and softball and the informal game of rounders in the sense that the members of the batting team take turns ‘at bat’. The target area is a physical target in cricket (“stumps” and “bails”) but is a virtual box in baseball and softball. There is no specific target in rounders, where the ball just has to be hittable by the batter.

Cricket has two “targets” or wickets, and I can’t think of any other bat and ball sport that has two wickets or the equivalent. The wickets are one chain apart in the old Imperial measures, and the person who delivers the ball to the batsman throws or bowls the ball from one wicket to the other. The game switches around after every 6 balls, with a second bowler bowling at the batsman at the other end of the pitch. This is termed an “over” as the supervising official, the umpire, calls “Over” when six balls have be bowled.

In informal or backyard cricket it is common to have just one wicket and a single pole (or stump) for the bowler to deliver the ball from. Other rules are ignored or modified as appropriate from the much smaller space available. In recent years, there has been a move to formalise at least some games of backyard or beach cricket and to institute competitions in the formalised code. These are still considered “fun” games though.

There are variants of cricket played in some Pacific Islands, The rules of these variants are also informal, team sizes are variable, and the bat often resembles a war weapon. Teams can contain both men and women and people of all ages. The Wikipedia article mentions that there have been attempts to formalize the rules of this variant of the sport.



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The original format of the formal game of cricket is multi-day, multi-innings. Even the Island form of the game runs to several days, but that may be related more to the social nature of island cricket than anything else. As in any formal game the equipment and the uniform is closely specified and in particular the uniform is white – known as “cricket whites”.

The multi-day format is unusual in sports and arises from the fact that each team has eleven players and each may have to have their time at bat twice in a game. Shorter forms are often played at a semi-formal or provincial level, many being completed in one innings in one day. Cricket is not a quick game in terms of time taken, as each batsman may face upwards of one hundred balls. The semi-formal “village green” cricket is a leisurely affair, in spite of the fact that the ball may be bowled at speeds of up to 150kph.

A family playing cricket on the Village Green (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A new form of cricket has developed where the number of overs or sets of six balls is restricted to 50 for each team. The uniforms are not restricted to white and some other minor changes have been made to the rules. These changes have led to a more exciting, quicker form of the game and the matches are over in one day. This is the form that is being played for the Cricket World Cup.

There is an even shorter version of the game called Twenty20, which is a fast paced version with only 20 overs per side. Both the 20 over and (slightly less so) 50 over versions of the game result in fast scoring and more excitement than the standard version of the game as teams, both fielders and batsman take a more highly charged attitude.

Turner slides to prevent a boundary during a T... — Turner slides to prevent a boundary during a Twenty20 Cup match against Gloucestershire. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The sport is professional at the top level, and the top players are treated as celebrities. Since the sport is international these days players get to play in many countries. In particular many overseas players play in the Indian Premier League, a very rich Twenty20 competition based, as the name implies, in the Indian sub-continent.

The stance of a batsman in cricket is side on, with the bat grounded before the bowler start his delivery and raised backwards in preparation for the stroke. Consequently there are left hand and right batsmen (and bowlers). Since the game has been around there are unique terms for various matters to do with the game.

Collins's batting stance — Collins’s batting stance (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For example, the field positions have traditional names which might seem whimsical. “Silly Mid On” is one of them. It certainly is “silly” as it is close to the batsman in the natural line of a stroke on the on or leg side. The position is intended for a close in catch and is obviously dangerous as the ball is hard, much like a baseball. Some Silly Mid On fielders wear protective helmets and other gear.

One field position that I had not heard of until recently is “Cow Corner”. A fielder at Cow Corner is in much the same line from the bat as Silly Mid On, but much further away, almost on the edge of the field (the “boundary”). The name seemly relates to the rustic roots of the game where the field was indeed a field or paddock that had to be cleared of livestock before a game could commence.



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Of course, the cattle would most likely have left deposits behind them which could trouble the fielders during the game.



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Lemmings

English: Traffic Jam in Delhi Français : Un em... — English: Traffic Jam in Delhi Français : Un embouteillage à Delhi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Australia there have been traffic jams up to 28 kilometres long. In New Zealand the end of the holiday period is likely to create “traffic hell“. Meanwhile, those of us who have stayed at home, have found the roads to be eerily empty.

Why do people rush away at Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere? Of course, it is our summer, and getting away from home for a few days is always attractive, but it is evident that if thousands of people try to travel the same roads at the same time there will be congestion.



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I call those who join the exodus and arrival progressions lemmings. This is of course unfair to both the furry creatures and to the humans. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide, and the humans, in many cases, don’t have a lot of choice of travel time.

In the Garfield cartoon, Garfield meets a mouse who is half lemming. Garfield asks the mouse what a lemming is. The mouse replies “A gerbil with suicidal tendencies”. (This cartoon may be online, but I’ve been unable to find it. The Garfield strip for my birthday is quite funny, though.)



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In our bigger cities, there will always be traffic problems, because of the sheer number of people that need access to the CBDs and who have to come, in the main from dormitory suburbs. If the roads were sufficient to carry all the traffic it is likely that there would be little room for the CBD itself.

The land of the automobile, the USA, has probably reached the best compromise between the needs of the car and the needs of those who live and work in the centres of cities. Special roads carry cars from the outskirts to the centres of the cities where special buildings have been built to house the cars during the day while the owners are working and shopping. Other special roads take traffic past the city centres and on to other cities. Other countries have copied or extended this model.

Nighttime view of Downtown Los Angeles and the... — Nighttime view of Downtown Los Angeles and the Hollywood Freeway, USA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Humans often don’t have much choice of when they travel, given that they have to work and working days around holidays are pretty much fixed. Some places even shut down on certain days to avoid having to staff offices when few people will be around.

In the Southern Hemisphere Christmas falls in summer, so the natural desire is to go away from home at this time of the year, on a holiday or, as they say in the USA, on a vacation. So it is unfair, really, to call them lemmings. They don’t have a lot of choice.

The lemmings are unfairly tagged with the appellation of suicidal maniacs. The story goes that periodically the lemmings migrate usually as the result of population pressures. Geographical features have changed over the millennia and consequently the lemmings fall over cliffs (which didn’t feature in the ancestral environment) or drown in rivers and fjords which have widened since their ancestors swam them.

These theories were used to “explain” why numbers of lemmings are found dead at some times and dead lemmings are rare at other times. The Wikipedia article on the animals has some interesting theories on issue, such as the spontaneous generation of the animals in mid air resulting in their demise on hitting the ground.

While we may laugh at these theories, we must remember that in 1530s science was nowhere nearly as sophisticated as today. In 500 years time, it may be that our scientific knowledge may look just as silly.



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I believe that people don’t have to all travel at the same time. Sure the dates are constrained and working requirements also constrain the dates that people can travel, but usually there is some leeway. People could travel a day earlier or a day later. Most employers are more than happy to accommodate such slight variations. If it is impossible for an employee to vary travel dates then a change of travel times would do the trick.

Frequently the call is for the roads to be widened or, as the euphemism has it, improved. This solution may well work in a country like the USA which has a large population which is concentrated in cities with little population in between, but is problematic in smaller countries. In New Zealand, not only are the main centres much smaller, but the population is a lot more dispersed than in the USA.

When these factors are considered, it may not make sense to continue to continue to build wider highways in smaller countries. A six lane highway that may be heavily used four times a year doesn’t make economic sense. A four lane highway that is heavily used much of the time does make sense.

English: View of Moscow's MKAD / highway ring ... — English: View of Moscow’s MKAD / highway ring Deutsch: Blick auf den Moskauer Autobahnring MKAD (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I frequently hear people call for “improvement” of roads that I regularly travel with few hold ups and issues. This is because I travel at times which are called “off peak”. People travel to work at the same times every day, and consequently you can travel easily in the opposite direction to the majority and wonder if they could not slightly change their schedules to avoid the hold ups, and indeed some people do do so.

Some people travel in to work very early (and leave early too, of course). Some people “work from home”. This latter can be a euphemism for goofing off of course, but most people who work from home treat this option seriously and with the state that the art of technology has reached, people can usefully contribute from home.

There is an example of the pitfalls of merely “improving” roads near where I live. When I came to this city I recall sitting in traffic on a four lane (two each way) highway into the centre of the city. Subsequently a motorway was built into the city and the four lane highway is relatively lightly used. (The road I refer to is on the left of this picture).

Obviously in this case the motorway was not considered at the time that the four lane highway was built, but it does demonstrate that often the most obvious solution can often be less than efficient over the longer term.

Electric Cars

There is a perception that electric cars are greener than petrol-driven cars. While I would not like to give the impression that I am against electric cars, as I am actually in favour of them, long term, in the short term I see some issues with them.

Firstly, consider the auto mobile. There are 250 million of them in the United States alone. That require a huge infrastructure which we don’t often consider. Firstly the crude oil is extracted from the ground using huge drills. While the technology is fairly basic, a lot of planning goes into a well before the hole is drilled, and then the drilling rig, and the workers are brought in and eventually crude oil flows.

It flows, ultimately to refineries where, apart from fuel oil, many other oil based products are extracted. The fuel is then trucked around the country or to other countries and ultimately to petrol supply stations (or gas stations as they are referred to in North America). Special equipment, the bowsers, are used to load the fuel into the cars.

The cars also require lubricating oil, which can be purchased in the petrol supply stations. More often the lubrication oil is supplied at special workshops set up to cater for the auto mobile users. These have special equipment to attend to and repair internal combustion engine. Replacement parts are manufactured and distributed to these workshops.

In contrast the fledgling electric car industry is small. There are few recharging stations, and the repair stations for electric cars are currently few and far between. Technicians who can work safely on electric cars are rare.

For electric cars to compete directly with petrol engined cars the infrastructure for electrical cars needs to match the current infrastructure for the petrol cars and that will require significant investments from someone. New electrical charging stations will need to be created or petrol supply stations will have to give up some space to electrical charging stations.

While charging stations are being created, there are less than 10,000 world-wide and a few thousand in the US. In the US there are approximately 3 charging points per station, so there are relatively few places to charge electric cars.

Charging an electric car at an outlet takes a minimum of 10 minutes and to do it this fast requires special equipment, for which special expertise is required. To provide this expertise requires special training, comparable to the expertise required to deal with petrol bowsers. Cross-training of petrol bowser experts in electrical outlets is of course possible, but the expertise is sufficiently different that a whole new pool of experts will need to be built up.

Bowser at Ariah Park, New South Wales, Australia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When an electrical car requires repair for any reason, it will need to be taken to a mechanic who knows how to deal with one. It’s likely that some repair locations will switch to electric rather than petrol, since the equipment is so different, though these days the petrol repair locations already use sophistic electronics in the diagnosis and repair of petrol engined cars.

So, in summary, electric car facilities will have to replace petrol car facilities as electrical cars become more common. This will not happen quickly and easily as the industry supporting petrol cars will no doubt resist. The electric car industry will have an expensive fight on its hands as all new equipment will have to be provided and a fledgling industry wont have a lot of financial backing.

What is needed is for the costs of the petrol car industry to climb significantly, and that will cause other significant societal problems. Then it will make sense to invest in the electrical car industry.

Another issue as regards electric cars is related to the charging of them. It takes significantly longer to charge an electric car as opposed to filling up a car’s tank with petrol. In a fast charging station, with special equipment in the charging “bowser” and special connections in the car, it could take anything from 10 minutes upwards.

Cars can be charged at home, and from standard electrical connections, but this would normally have to happen overnight when there is less other usage of electricity in the home. However, if you charge a car from a standard electrical connection, it will take a long time, up to eight hours or more. So those who charge their cars at home can expect not to use the car in the evening, and a flat battery is more of an issue than a flat battery in a petrol car.

The cables both in the house and in the supply connections needs to be robust because of the inevitable heating from the continual high current, and if you be chance draw too much current, either the car charging or the house will be temporarily cut off. If you were to have medical equipment in the house then this could be life threatening.

A CH-46E Sea Knight helicopter's downwash kick... — A CH-46E Sea Knight helicopter’s downwash kicks up a dust cloud resulting in brownout (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course there are mechanisms that can be ensured to reduce the impact of these problems, but that means that the wiring infrastructure in the house needs to be upgraded. It’s not a big problem until you multiply it by the number of houses that would need to be upgraded.

A bigger issue is that the electricity infrastructure is built for, really, quite light usage. If everyone in the street were to get an electric car, then the local infrastructure would come under stress. There are already “brown-outs” and “black-outs” of the infrastructure in the US at times of heavy demand. Add onto that the charging of numerous electric cars and one wonders if the infrastructure could be upgraded in a reasonable time or whether blackouts and flat batteries would become common.

This problem goes all the way back to generation, which currently depends mostly on fossil fuels in many parts of the world. It’s not much good if reducing fossil fuel usage at the consumer end results in increased fossil fuel usage at the generation end.

So while electric cars and fossil free generation should eventuate, at the moment there are high barriers to widespread adoption of electric cars and reduction of dependence on fossil fuels.



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Sporting Times

Sport in childhood. Association football, show... — Sport in childhood. Association football, shown above, is a team sport which also provides opportunities to nurture social interaction skills. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We as a race spend a lot of time on what is loosely called ‘sport’. From the ad hoc beach cricket and ‘touch’, through the more organised school age sports, through the grade sports all the way up through the local and national representative sports, both individual and team.

The individual and team sports pull in a huge number of supporters, officials, organisers and so on, so it is rare individual who has not been in some trivial or profound way involved in sports at one time or another.

Sport is obviously of great importance to the human race. I don’t know of any animal that indulges in activities that could be called sports. Of course, males of many species battle other males for dominance and control over females or territory, and their young do seem to practise for these battles, but there is no sense in which these battles are fought for pleasure. They are too serious for that!

The roots of sport can be found in interpersonal contests of course, like arm wrestling to see who is the strongest, or quizzes to see who has the best memory and so on, but human contests don’t usually have the serious implication of battles between animals of other species. Very often they can be cooperative contests as training exercises so that the group as a whole can perform better.

This would be very useful indeed to hunters, who as a group would be benefit from the increased accuracy with the spear or the bolos, or even the simple thrown stone.

The technology would also have benefitted from such practice contests. Each contestant would have seen how his fellow contestants had improved the technology. That’s no doubt how the woomera or atlatl came to be invented, in a contest before the hunt.

Mokare with spear and woomera, another woomera... — Mokare with spear and woomera, another woomera lies at his feet. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sport can also serve as a way of defusing or sublimating a dispute between rival groups. The tests of skill replaced an actual contest, and rules of procedure were imposed on the contest, so that, mostly, no one actually got killed.

The smallest group of humans is probably the family, which has a flexible definition. It could be as few as two people or as many as twenty. The concept of the nuclear family, mum, dad, kids is fairly new, inspired by cheap or affordable housing, and the ubiquity of affordable transport.

Anyway, whatever the size the family team ‘competes’ usually in a more or less friendly fashion with neighbours. However neighbourhood families ally themselves in competition with other neighbourhoods to form villages, suburbs, cities and so on up to countries. Only at the highest level is there no global group, though the United Nations aspires to that title.

United Nations - New York — United Nations – New York (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sports give humans the chance to compete, and they seem to enjoy it. How else can one explain the rise of sports like snooker, card games, and contests which don’t rate the name of sport, such as beauty contests? Is car racing a sport? Obviously some people are better at these marginal sports, so is the contest the key? It seems so.

When there is no one else around humans will compete against themselves or against chance. Solitaire, a card or peg game for a single person is popular and automatically installed on most computers. It is used in cartoons to characterise a lazy or disinterested employee.

Often a person may not be particularly proficient at a sport but may still enjoy it. They may enjoy it particularly at one or two removes, as spectators. Spectators may identify strongly with the sports person or team in which they are interested. If they come across supporters of some other person or team, they may interact adversely with them, even to the point of fighting with them.

Parents are notoriously partisan supporters, yelling support from the sideline to their offspring, often I suspect to the embarrassment of their children. Parents also tend to overestimate the abilities of their kids and tend to push them more than they should. Sport for kids should be fun, but pushing them too hard can spoil their enjoyment of sport, which is a shame.

Those who continue to enjoy their sport and become good at it can become heroes to a large number of fans. The All Blacks are almost revered in New Zealand and the national team who play the national sport can not only receive adulation but can also be paid a lot of money.

Of course if the national team fails that can lead to a sense of devastation for their followers. Failure can be losing to another team or simply not winning. Recently the New Zealand All Blacks drew with the Australian team and it was almost as if they had lost! Fortunately the All Blacks won well the next weekend, otherwise the country might have sunk into depression.

Sports stars in the most part realise that they are representatives, but the stresses on top sports people is tremendous. The All Blacks are a good example of this. One or two of the top echelon of the rugby players in New Zealand have not succeeded in withstanding that pressure and have had issues with alcohol and violence. In a lot of ways it is unfair to expect exemplary behaviour and expertise at the top level of the sport.

Nevertheless, a surprising number of top sports people do appear to be genuinely nice people. These days, the team captain, winner and loser, has a microphone stuffed under his or her nose and is expected to give an instant analysis of the game, and to their credit most appear to come up with something intelligent about the game, congratulating their opponents, win or lose.

English: interview (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Interestingly, after the drawn game I mentioned above, both teams were disappointed, but for slightly different reasons. The All Blacks were expected to win, and were expecting to achieve a record number of wins, and their disappointment at not winning was obvious. There was a sense of let down. The Australians, however, obviously believed that they had missed a great chance to beat the All Blacks.