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Post by Baz Faz on Apr 30, 2016 20:13:28 GMT 2
I regret to say that Ken has turned a deaf ear to your entreaty. He has just said that he speaks the truth and has nothing to apologise for.
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Post by slowcoach on Apr 30, 2016 20:35:36 GMT 2
I regret to say that Ken has turned a deaf ear to your entreaty. He has just said that he speaks the truth and has nothing to apologise for. To misquote Johnson "History is the last refuge of a scoundrel." In this case, the intent trumps mundane truth. The sources do exist, and both Ben & Ken can claim that they know their history. But history like statistics is an elastic friend. |
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Post by Baz Faz on Apr 30, 2016 23:01:02 GMT 2
I regret to say that Ken has turned a deaf ear to your entreaty. He has just said that he speaks the truth and has nothing to apologise for. To misquote Johnson "History is the last refuge of a scoundrel." In this case, the intent trumps mundane truth. The sources do exist, and both Ben & Ken can claim that they know their history. But history like statistics is an elastic friend. I await his citing of Hitler as an argument for vegetarianism. |
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Post by slowcoach on Jun 4, 2016 20:56:30 GMT 2
Muhammad Ali has died, as a much loved man.
Fifty years ago he was a divisive figure much despised by many.
One hundred years ago last month another American named Jesse Washington, a teenage African-American farmhand, was tortured to death in Waco Texas by a lynch mob. Thousands watched, photographs taken so postcards could be sold, profits made.
Progress is good, but remembrance essential.
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Post by Netsuke on Jun 5, 2016 3:49:23 GMT 2
Never heard of Jesse Washington, so did a search. He was found guilt and should have hung, but what that lynch mob did was horrible. It was sickening.
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Post by slowcoach on Jul 2, 2016 15:15:15 GMT 2
I spent part of this morning by the garden gate reducing a tangled pile of redundant fencing wire to a small bundle of short sections that are more easily disposed of. I have pulled out quite a lot of rusty wire over the last year.
In doing so I contemplated whether to write this here.
Those in the UK will have noticed that that the Battle of the Somme is being remembered. It commenced with the Battle of Albert, one hundred years ago yesterday. Graveyards testify to the many that lost their lives as does the Thiepval Memorial whose pillars carry the names of those that have no graves.
I have a relatively common name and yet more common surname and initial and it occurs more once on the memorial. I am named for my grandfather who in all probability walked out of history one hundred years and a day ago today. Viewed back from this time it does not seem possible to be more certain than that he ceased to exist during that battle.
His name is not recorded, or not recorded accurately, in the records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, there is neither a known grave nor a mention at Thiepval. He seems to have no memorial. All I know is what my aunt told me many years ago.
She was one of four children who never saw their father return, with a heavily pregnant mother that lost a husband and her unborn that could not lose a father it never had and never spoke of.
By her account, he had been a serial volunteer, rejected on the grounds of a minor disability. How he eventually was able to be passed fit I cannot tell. He was from London, a working man born in the early 1880s, and not of the poorest of the poor but not prosperous. She told me that they were informed that he was assumed dead on that first day.
My aunt and her siblings are long gone. There is no material relic of his existence, the family home, was destroyed by the Luftwaffe during WWII, by that time it was his mother´s house, his wife being already deceased. My grandmother was dug out from the family air raid shelter onto which the building collapsed. She survived, but neither correspondence nor photographs did. Most of the WWI British Army Service Records met a similar fate.
It was, by my aunts account, mostly grandmother that brought the family up, the mother was never the same. The unborn was a boy who grew up just in time for the Great Depression and being of a suitable age, to volunteer when Germany invaded Poland. The survivor of many famous and one infamous campaign he ended his war guarding trains from the North Sea ports into the Eastern Sector. Much later he succumbed to the liver damage caused by the Yellow Fever he contracted in Sierra Leone, during training to fight in Burma. As luck would have it, they were sent to North Africa instead.
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Post by sophie on Jul 2, 2016 16:32:30 GMT 2
History is a sum total of the countless stories of many people swept up in all of the events. Your story is a perfect example of that, as well as a cause/effect of events. I love these kind of family stories; too often they go untold. Thanks for sharing.
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Post by Baz Faz on Jul 2, 2016 18:47:27 GMT 2
Daniel Finkelstein wrote in the paper today about both his grandfathers who fought at the Somme and numerous other battles and both survived to the end of the war. He gives a certain amount of detail and then ends: My grandfathers were both German.
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Post by Scrubb on Jul 2, 2016 19:25:08 GMT 2
My father is much younger than any of his cousins - his father was the youngest in his family, and he didn't marry till he was 50.
When I was a child my father found an old trunk of things that had been packed away when his father died (in the '50s). In that trunk there was a framed photograph of one of his cousins - his only aunt's son, Hector - in his Highlander Regiment WWI uniform. We know he died in the war, though I haven't ever heard where or when exactly.
Also in the trunk was a folding picture frame/folio from a studio with a photo of a beautiful girl. It was signed "To Hector, With Love, Nelly. 1916".
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Post by slowcoach on Jul 17, 2016 13:31:20 GMT 2
Eighty years ago today a coup d'état was staged in Spain. It was partially defeated, splitting Spain in two.
Within days, forces supporting the government were mobilised starting a civil war (government/rebels) , at the same time foreign military intervention commenced a proxy war (fascist countries/Soviet Union with support from Mexico and initially France). The International Brigades, socialists, anarchists, communists followed, fighting against fascism, they included a significant number of Jews. And behind the lines the White and Red Terrors commenced.
It ended officially in 1939 but fighters from the defeated government side went on to fight fascism in France as part of the Maquis, Spain fell to a brand of quasi-fascist authoritarianism until after Franco died in 1975. Coups d'état were attempted in 1981 and again in 1982 but were of little long term consequence.
Echoes of the conflict and especially the Terrors still rumble on.
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Post by OnlyMark on Jul 17, 2016 16:08:17 GMT 2
Also what rumbles on is controversy over this classic photo of the era -  ".......was acclaimed as one of the greatest ever taken" There is evidence that is was staged, and strangely enough, staged not far from me. The photographer, Robert Cappa went on to be quite famous but since 1975 there have been doubts about the authenticity of the photo due to the location being said to be one place and the skyline being proved to be another. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Soldier Around my area there is still evidence of the civil war in the form of numerous pill boxes and machine gun nests in fields and at the side of roads. Not surprising really when you consider there are still chains of watch towers from the era of the Moors and the reconquest (plus tons of castles). |
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Post by tzarine on Sept 10, 2016 23:16:40 GMT 2
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Post by auntieannie on Sept 11, 2016 12:53:13 GMT 2
ah yes, I just don't know what they're thinking. Is it that the programme that recognises the pictures thought it was pornography as it detected nudity? but they are really slow to correct things. It is turning into a right mess. We're not going to allow more dumbing down. we're not going to allow more hiding of the horrors of war. We need to stop the horrors of the current wars.
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Post by shrjeff on Sept 11, 2016 13:40:55 GMT 2
fb reversed itself and is permitting the picture to be up...
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Post by auntieannie on Sept 11, 2016 13:58:23 GMT 2
took long enough!
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Post by tzarine on Sept 11, 2016 18:36:42 GMT 2
wow zuckerberg
bc you cant show breastfeeding
that was kiddy porn? is fb serious?
youre slow, alright
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Post by slowcoach on Oct 2, 2016 3:32:48 GMT 2
I have very mixed feelings about this facebook affair. I simply wished it be not that picture. I will see if I can explain. The Picture is "The Terror of War" and the girl is known as "The Girl in the Picture"
The hits at time of writing at Google are
"The Girl in the Picture" "Mark Zuckerberg" 25,300 "The Girl in the Picture" Kim Phuc 22,600
"The Girl in the Picture" facebook 4,000,000 "The Girl in the Picture" "Trang Bang" 4,000
"The Terror of War" "Mark Zuckerberg" 17,900 "The Terror of War" Kim Phuc 7,330 "The Terror of War" facebook 129,000 "The Terror of War" "Trang Bang" 3,300
So is the girl in the picture associated with Mark Zuckerberg or Phan Thi Kim Phuc?
Did the event take place at facebook or Trang Bang?
Could it be that all the fuss, all the jumping up and down, has done real historical harm. There is only so much power in an image, if you reproduce it often enough in other contexts you risk bleeding it until it is just another part of the spectacle. |
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Post by slowcoach on Jun 25, 2017 0:26:23 GMT 2
Here is a clip from a BBC documentary made over thirty years ago, in the main it deals with the odd way the construction industry managed to knowingly erect seriously defective high rise accommodation in the UK during the later 1960s and early 1970s. The clip below is the one specific comment regarding remedial attempts to fix some of the more minor problems using exterior cladding systems. Much of this has been either forgotten or people are simply to young to remember, but some do remember, I did, and perhaps it is worthwhile mentioning all this now that it seems that such problems are finally getting the full media treatment.
If you watch the programme from the start you may be perplexed by the open and matter of fact way in which people were prepared to talk about their knowingly producing defective homes; I know I was.
Inquiry. The Great British Housing Disaster (Adam Curtis, 1984)
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Post by Voy on Jun 25, 2017 0:52:59 GMT 2
I seem to remember, c 1984ish, a play in London about a conflicted young architect having to build a tower block? maybe by Frayn?
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Post by slowcoach on Jun 25, 2017 2:10:46 GMT 2
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Post by tiltedflipcurves on Jun 25, 2017 13:27:33 GMT 2
"Atlas Grabbed," by Nya Dnar. About an architect who, untrammeled by government regulation, is free to design buildings for maximum profit, leading to structural collapses and fires. (The decades-long market feedback loop for architects and construction is too slow to prevent bad architecture from driving out the good, as experience shows.)
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Post by Voy on Jun 25, 2017 15:52:18 GMT 2
thanks, Slow, that's the one. It was really harrowing to watch..
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Post by slowcoach on Sept 8, 2017 14:34:20 GMT 2
Next month it will have been 90 years since the fifth Solvay Conference, remembered as the showdown between Einstein and the Copenhagen group, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in which Einstein lost, and the Copenhagen Interpretation won the day and has been the accepted interpretation of Quantum Mechanics ever since.
The Copenhagen group were backed by a very thorough propaganda campaign that has resulted in some, particularly TV documentarists, portraying Einstein as somehow not believing in Quantum Mechanics (QM) or just being at bit dense and fuddy-duddy when it comes to QM.
Similarly it seems to be a common fallacy that Einstein was awarded a Nobel prize for his theory of General Relativity, or perhaps it was Special Relativity. It was largely for his foundational work in Quantum Theory:
The citation reads:
He also predicted the laser effect from first principles ("stimulated emission", a quantum effect) when developing the Einstein coefficients.
Somehow, perhaps due the sway Bohr and Heisenberg held after Solvay, Einstein has been written out of the popular story of QM.
The icon of the Copenhagen interpretation, and the one thing that popular science insists we believe, if not understand, about QM is the fates of Schrödinger's cat.
Now in my understanding, Schrödinger's cat, was put forward as a criticism and perhaps harsh satire of the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM, it is patently an absurdity and hence lies more in the realm of faith than science. It is now central in baffling us about all things QM.
O, and by the way it is bollox, the duration of the superimposition of states (dead/alive) for an object the size of a cat would be measured in minute fractions of a minute fraction of a second, this something with which the Copenhagen's would agree.
More than that, different interpretations of QM live on, and seem to be multiplying, here is an amusing (for physicists at least) illustration from Sabine Hossenfelder's website:
QBism is Quantum Bayesianism
She seems to have missed out her own position as one of the very few superdeterminists; a viewpoint I tend to share. It cuts the floor away from QM in a big way as it can be read as denying that we have any choice over which measurements, or observations we make. Free will plays an important role when interpreting QM.
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Post by OnlyMark on Sept 8, 2017 15:03:45 GMT 2
No matter how much I look into quantum mechanics I can never find the answer to one of the most important questions of what kind of cat was it?
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Post by tiltedflipcurves on Sept 11, 2017 4:20:02 GMT 2
Cheshire, surely.
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Post by slowcoach on Sept 19, 2017 15:35:03 GMT 2
Forty years ago, "Walter's Whistle", the Citibank Building in New York opened for business. Thirty nine years ago, almost to the day, a student writing a dissertation called the design engineer to discuss aspects of its novel construction whereby the major columns that take the load down into the foundations are located in the centres of the exterior walls not the corners.
This set in motion a round of discussions inside the architecture and engineering contractors that soon revealed that the building was structurally unsound.
It was much more susceptible to winds than had been realized, that the diagonal trusses that focused the weight from the corners to the centre were in effect sloping columns rather than bracing elements and should have been given a higher safety margin, and that they had passed an application from the construction company to bolt the sections of diagonal trusses together rather than the stronger welded construction originally specified.
The verdict was that the building would fail, given certain plausible circumstances, in wind speeds expected to occur at the site once every 15 years. Failure would be a toppling of the building, not a collapse, and the resulting "domino effect" should it toppled over its northwest corner towards Central Park, would topple a narrow fan of buildings a process that would only stop once it reached the park.
Hasty repairs were put into operation and the fault was rectified in around six weeks from its discovery. The repairs were done overnight and at weekends, and in secret. The public were not notified of the danger even though it was still hurricane season. This silence was sustained with the unwitting assistance of New York newspapers who went on an extended strike till after the problem was fixed.
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Post by Voy on Sept 19, 2017 16:13:20 GMT 2
Slow - that is fascinating! I used to get the subway in the bottom of it with great regularity . And there was quite a good bakery with croissants in the open area at the bottom where we often went for Sunday coffee/croissants/papers --
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Post by slowcoach on Sept 19, 2017 16:48:14 GMT 2
Slow - that is fascinating! I used to get the subway in the bottom of it with great regularity . And there was quite a good bakery with croissants in the open area at the bottom where we often went for Sunday coffee/croissants/papers --
We, here at slow News, aim to please.  Just glad it brought back fond, or at least foodie, memories.
A little further checking reveals that the secret was kept until 1995 (New Yorker Magazine), and that the student, Diane Hartley, didn't learn of the crucial role she played until 1996/7 when she watch the same BBC documentary as I had.
Much of the above comes from the documentary, and is different to other reports.
The use of the epithet "Walter's Whistle" seems to have sunk almost without trace. It was used here (NYT OCT. 29, 1977).
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Post by slowcoach on Sept 19, 2017 16:58:39 GMT 2
Walter (Wriston), the CEO at that time and author of "The Twilight of Sovereignty" didn't live long enough to witness the toppling of the financial system and the rescue of all things Citigroup.
So he was never beholden to the biggest peacetime display of Sovereign might brought to bear to rescue the world from the aftermath of just the sort of thinking he helped popularize.
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Post by auntieannie on Sept 19, 2017 17:15:48 GMT 2
ah, I looked that reference up and couldn't find anything. thanks for clarifying.
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Just glad it brought back fond, or at least foodie, memories.