Defined out of existence

More than just a degree and  the right toys

Robert Weisssberg looks at how social "scientists" in the 1960s redefined the Middle Class in a way that ignored what actually makes someone Middle Class in favour of a set of criteria based on theatrical props that made social mobility as unlikely as saying that putting a crown on a monkey will make it a king.

NASA asks future explorers to respect historic landing sites

When the last American astronauts blasted off from the Moon in 1972, it seemed as if they were leaving behind monuments that would stand for all time. On a lifeless, airless satellite there would never be any scavengers or souvenir hunters, no wind to bury or wear down the abandoned spacecraft and artifacts, and no air to corrode metal. Even the footprints would still be there millions of years from now. Or so everyone thought. Now, with more and more nations and private organizations planning manned and unmanned missions to the Moon, NASA is worried that the Apollo landing sites and others could be endangered by the next wave of lunar explorers. To prevent this, the space agency issued a set of guidelines that politely asks everybody to keep their distance... Continue Reading NASA asks future explorers to respect historic landing sites

A Day that Shook the World

Earth Day

It's Earth Day on Sunday and the worshipers of Blessed Gaia have been doing such a marvelous job of lampooning themselves while wrecking the world economy with their wind farms, refusal to drill for oil and gas, abandoning nuclear power for no good reason, regulating industry out of existence and generally carrying on as if civilisation is just the default position that will prevail no matter how much you damage it, that I've decided to give the satirical posts about patchouli oil and drum circles a rest this year.  Instead, I'd like to celebrate the man who did more to improve the environment by bringing power and wealth to the world than all the would-be Lord Summerisles  and Al Gores ever had or could: Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

You want clean air, water, green fields and lush forests for the kiddies to romp in?  Then build an industrial society with lots of technology and cheap energy cranking out loads of wealth for all.  Then you'll have the surplus you need to garden the Earth properly.

The fruits of willful ignorance

How far the BBC have fallen.  The have Jeremy Paxman do a flashy programme about Gordon of Khartoum and get every salient fact completely wrong.

I shouldn't be too hard on them.  It's not as if it's the British Broadcasting Corporation, after all.

Does it run Windows 8?

From the Register:

Boffins step closer to steam-powered Babbage computer

Only 174 years late.  I think they may have some trouble capturing market share with that sort of development cycle.

Credit where due

Charles Kettering:  Liberator of womankind.

ZX-81 memories

The BBC looks at Clive Sinclair's revolutionary brainchild: the ZX-81.  In 1981 it cost £50, I had to put it together myself, only had a kilobyte of memory, a membrane keyboard, a proprietary programming language that was a bitch to use, needed a cassette recorder to store programmes, and made the Tandy that replaced it look like Deep Thought, but God, I loved that little black wedge.  What was particularly mind-blowing was that the computer (singular) they had back at university was a monster that weighed tons and still took punch cards.  The standard computer histories may credit the Apple II with sparking the desktop revolution, but it was Sinclair's small-is-beautiful-and-who-cares-about-practicality approach that really put computers into people's hands for the first time.

It's like being able to tell your kids that you were there when they rolled out the Mark I fire.

HMS Dreadnought

I remember old Dreadnought; British engineering forward welded to an American nuclear plant aft (the British reactors weren't ready for sea yet). Admiral Rickover went ballistic when the American government signed the deal. Still, she was a fascinating and beautiful piece of work. Over the years, I've had to ride in a lot of NATO and Japanese boats and it's fascinating to see this first step toward the super-advanced hunter killers of today with their digital periscopes and reactors so efficient that they aren't even designed to be refueled.

Now if only Her Majesty's government gave these boats a higher priority than pouring money down the welfare state black hole, paying housing support to imams who would gleefully slaughter us all and the government refuse to deport, sending tribute to the European Empire, and throwing bank notes at insulting social engineering programmes that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Via Theo Spark.

Gigo

Part one.

Continuing on yesterday's post, here's a computer documentary from 1969

Part two.

Part three.

Smithsonian spacesuits

This never caught on.

The New York Times looks at the Smithsonian Institute's spacesuit collection and answers your questions about history's most expensive long johns

British Things

Queen Victoria was a dotty idiot who deserved nothing better than to have sugar poured on her head by a servant, the British Empire was a monstrosity built entirely on slavery, conquest, and pillage, and "there are no British things".

Quite a servings of lies, distortions, omissions, and half-truths here–too many to deal with at the moment.  So, what is it?  Left-over Soviet agitprop?  A university Trotskyite society screed?  A remake of an old Lord Haw Haw broadcast set to music?  A clip from some late-night "comedy" show?

Nope.  It's from "Horrible Histories"; a BBC "educational" programme aimed at British children.  That's right.  Children.  Apparently, the brief of the BBC is now to make British children ashamed of their country, their history, and their culture.

Okay, fine.  So be it.  I now await the next installment when the BBC returns the favour and gives the same gleeful muck-throwing treatment to Imperial China, the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Empire, or the career of a certain middle-eastern camel salesman turned prophet by the name of Mohammed.

I shan't, however, hold my breath in the meantime.

Update:  Not surprisingly, Captain Scott gets the same libelous treatment.

How Hitler killed a logo

Before Nazis soured the brand with that whole master race thing, the swastika was a fairly common symbol.  I once had a leather-bound set of Kipling that I displayed proudly in my home.  They were beautiful and the prominent swastikas on the spines caused some marvelously heated arguments with my more lefty friends.

Save the Vulcan

The last airworthy Avro Vulcan bomber needs £129,738 in the next day to keep flying.

Find the piggy bank, lads.

How to dial a rotary phone

When the bar was set a lot lower.

The first

Wired looks at some prototypes of modern technology.  It's small stuff, but some of it is pretty cool

The Ur shot

Fun fact from Popular Science, February 1929: The Jell-o shot was invented as a way to get around American prohibition laws which forbade alcoholic drinks, but not alcoholic solids.

It's always in the details.

Child abuse by abusing history

A straight, white man did this, so it is of no importance whatsoever.

Zombie looks at the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead school of history teaching and how it does a disservice to America, children and even reality.

As a retired archaeologist and history professor, this is a particular bête noir of mine. I've always been sickened by the tendency of academics with a leftist agenda to push who are forever demanding "correctives" to traditional history that are invariably less "corrective" than consigning unpersons to the memory hole.

I see it in my daughter's schooling. Her school is actually quite a decent one and not a hotbed of Social Marxism, but last year she came away knowing who Sacajawea was, but not Lewis and Clark and she could rattle off all sorts of things about Amelia Earnhardt, but never heard of Charles Lindbergh.

It gets even worse at the university level. I once took over a course in first year World history and was assigned a doorstop of a textbook written by some maniac who thought that world history was a mammoth exercise in "me, too-ism" with every obscure culture and event on the planet crammed in at the expense of far more important events or even any sort of coherent narrative. Worse, it was an impossible book to teach from because it would have required a five-year class that would have had as much educational value as bolting through the British Museum at flat-out speed while chased by a pack of rabid dogs.

In the end, I dumped it and told my class, "The history of ancient China is fascinating and I'd be delighted to teach it–if this was a course on the history of China. It isn't. It's World history. And if we're going to study the events that shaped our modern society, that means we start in the Fertile Crescent, head for Greece via Egypt, on to to Rome, then we hang about in Europe until the 19th Century, and then bounce back and forth between the United States and the Old World with the odd imperial side trip until we clear the 20th century. That's where our world, everyone on this planet's world, was made and that's what we study. If aficionados of Mesoamerican or Icelandic history feel left out, tough."

Past and future

Today is the 1,600th anniversary of the sack of Rome by the Visigoths.

Historic event or preview of what we have in store if we don't admit that civilisation is a good thing and start defending it?

The first digital camera

1975. It had to start somewhere.