Dengl 26 A Use for So-Called Space Travel: The Geostationary Parasol

Mary Wakefield has written a "boys toys" encomium about space traffic.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/5186153/the-space-age-isnt-over-it-hasnt-yet-begun.thtml

It is, for the most part, unconvincing. I am sure the views for Richard Branson's 3, 000 millionaire travellers will be amazing and their after dinner conversations on return much enhanced; but they will in no manner be "new astronauts" (astro means a star and they will not have gone significantly nearer any stars than I will have done; we should have a further contempt for the term 'cosmonaut', as nobody, even if they venture to Mars, will have been anywhere near the cosmos which begins at the nearest star - is that Alpha Centauri - four light years away ...). Many of the recently developed applications of spacecraft have been useful, though we could have managed without and quite probably spent the money better on earth.

There are at least two potentially earth-saving applications for which we do have to reach out into the solar system. One, which Wakefield does mention, though without discussing it enough, is the need for a giant device which will not just detect a possible cometary collision with earth, but actually somehow ward it off.

A second device which Wakefield also mentions, but without identifying how it might best be used, consists of panels to collect solar energy and in her version beam it back to earth. She does not say where the beam will fall, whether it may do significant damage on the way, or whether the track of the beam will be precisely controllable, and how the energy will be collected, but no doubt these difficulties can be overcome.

Surely, though, what would be useful, if we are not yet wholly convinced by the non-global-warming lobby, is a means by which to cast large shadows, in a controlled manner, upon earth; a Geostationary Parasol. The object would be to lessen the warming which we have stumbled into by reducing earth's reflective heat loss. I have no knowledge of astrophysics but my question is, whether a huge solar panel much further away from the moon (and thus closer to the sun? – but thereby casting a wider shadow), and between sun and earth like an eclipse, could be constructed to collect enough solar energy to transform into stabilising propulsion for itself, while casting a substantial cooling shadow on earth.

Who would finance and build such a device? Who would control its shade? These challenges in socio political "engineering" are perhaps as intractable as the engineering ones involved in setting forth and physically controlling such a device. I do not believe we should hope that such truly useful applications will arise serendipitously on the back of funfairs in the sky.

Dengl 25 New Circenses

I was very pleased to have had the opportunity to attend a seminar yesterday, on the Internet. (It was at the House of Commons Grand Committee Room!).
I fear I ended among a minority who, by show of hands at the end, indicated we did not see it as a democratic panacea. I thanked the organiser, saying:

I am (not hugely) hard of hearing and sport an aid in one ear; however, I sat just next to an air conditioner vent (most welcome on that boiling day, especially after I had cycled 5 miles warmly to be present) and the wretched aid magnified the whirr of the air vent's motor making it very difficult to hear some panel speakers. Quite clearly, Grant Shaps, MP (one of the speakers) needs no microphone and I heard him well. Would that all speakers (I am not commenting about content) spoke as clearly as he did. It was next to impossible to hear most of the questions from the floor. I realise that many people have acute hearing but this is not so common among the older generation and fairly soon we will be joined by a mass of recruits who will have damaged their hearing by immersion in what is now termed "music" in clubs or via ipods etc. When that blessed day comes, it will be more usual for panel events to emphasise to speakers that they MUST talk into their microphones (and that, not too closely) and not, however intimate it makes the event seem, talk aside to their neighbours (Paul Staines, famous as a "blogger" Guido Fawkes, http://order-order.com/ did this); also, it would help if the chairman or person who is asked a question repeated (also to verify that s/he had taken it on board validly) what the question was. As things are, people like me have to try and work out what the question was, by inference from the heard-part of the answers given.

It was very instructive - negatively for me, I fear - to have the screen at the front carrying the "twitters" (is this london's substitute, now that all the sparrows have gone, for a beguiling, let alone an instructive discourse - I might well prefer to have the sparrows back instead) . This could be held to be distracting from the discussion among the "speakers" . It would be instructive to see a content analysis of the twits (is that the right word?) including such categories as: memorable poetic/haiku ..sharply pointed information, sharply pointed question, sharply pointed opinion ... all the way down to ... dispensable rubbish (sometimes insulting). I fear that a substantial proportion I saw on the screen were of the last category - they constitute not just clutter but damaging distraction from the development of some meaningful and informed public discourse.

In all, I am very graeful for the chance to have been there, and not a little concerned that even among what must have been quite an elite group of informed people there is a strong tendency to conflate the ideas of demotic with democratic. I was reminded of my idea of what some gladiators must have felt, in the colosseum, on seeing a forest of downward thumbs, that these people probably do not know what they are doing ...

Dengl 25 CEBOS - those who use Facebook (and other "social" networks)

I seem to have become frivolous in my old age - last week I made more than one silly suggestion at the Atomic Energy Plant near Edinburgh (for example, that they get a candy company to create "Torness Rock" - sugar versions of nuclear reactor fuel rods, shot through with a slogan such as "uranium not carbon" - or some such -
and now, I have another suggestion: I think that it would be good to have a new word to label the new generation of acolytes in the networkian creed; following the aesthetically atrocious neologism 'blogger' (and the tongue-in-cheek derivative dengl deployed here) I suggest it would work to have the term CEBO (plural, of course cebos) to refer to those who develop much of their social identity from faCEBOok. I'm afraid I am not really a cebo. Indeed, I dont use this dengl place as some social site I have to revisit and update, trading comments with all kinds of worthy people, but as a private store where I just occasionally put something of what occurs to me.

Dengl 24 From Mau Mau to Iran and On?

Here's a (small - but quite likely important) task for African historians

I have not seen the matter discussed elsewhere, not has it been given much space where it has been touched upon, in the Spectator.
The episode I am thinking of involves what happened to President Obama's step-grandfather. Barack says his s-grandmother reported the man was tortured by the British.
This has evidently marred Obama's relations with the UK - and perhaps deterred firmer actions by western "powers" (or, should we be called "feebles"?); but it also has implications for Obama's failure to do anything (admittedly, he was only a candidate at the time, but I wrote to him and thought that if he wished to intervene in the post-"election" carnage in Kenya he could strengthen his Presidential claims) .... about the options for resolution of the un-democratic power grab there.
If the western nations condoned this - the next election could have been corrupted. No doubt it would have been, anyway, but rascal Mugabe had the "co-option" model of so-called resolution validated for him, by western democracies that accepted the Kenya debacle. Something similar happened in Madagascar.
And now, Iran.
Surely, these things are connected.


Here's the Spectator "discussion" - as far (back) as it goes. I think there is much to be said for Veronica Bellers' retrospections. However, maybe "proper" African historians could achieve a firmer clarification?

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/the-week/3702708/part_3/letters.thtml

"Obama's grandfather

Sir: Andrew Roberts is correct to doubt Mr Obama's step-grandmother's allegation that Obama Sr was tortured during the Mau Mau emergency. The President's grandfather was a member of the Luo tribe, which remained firmly loyal to the British administration. He would have faced the ire of the elders if he had tried to join the Mau Mau, members of which were drawn from the Kikuyu tribe. The Luo and Kikuyu disliked each other intensely.

My father was provincial commissioner in Nyanza - the province where the Luo reside - at the time of the emergency, until 1957. He spent his time visiting the locations in the province to offer support and he let it be known that his door was always open to anyone who had concerns. He was much liked by all races".

Veronica Bellers (née Williams)
By email


If the British DID torture Obama snr, this may put the O family in sympathy with the Mau Mau uprising and more likely to support the Kikuyu establishment case now - thus compromising a stance pro democracy.
If the British did not torture O. snr, some pressure to clarify the Kenya election - on behalf of the Luos would have been a more realistic option for US and UK combined

I dont know where the next election in a dictatorial country will be, but the case is getting firmer for entrenched dictators to present the results how it suits them, then relax in the reassurance of a supine west ...

Peter Black AM: Inappropriate comment of the day

Peter Black AM: Inappropriate comment of the day
My first ever Liberal vote was cast in the 1950s and I have felt - and shown - support in various ways even until now - not on every cause I may say - but I'd like to know why the flapping bird has three effective feathers in its RIGHT wing but only two in its Left; I suppose in flight it would go round in circles (anticlockwise - or some might say, leftwards?). Is this what all Lib Dems want the active logo to convey?
I am sending the remarks elsewhere, on facebook's refusal to recognise Welsh locations, to a group of Americans shortly to visit Wales, to educate them. I also write to cricketing authorities and journalists to correctly name the England & Wales (Test) cricket team!

Peter Black AM: Inappropriate comment of the day

Peter Black AM: Inappropriate comment of the day
Beaaring in mind what happened to the regicides who had Charles executed (even if the victim list was slimmed down to 9 from an original 40, I think) I hope there will be no eventual recriminations against today's removers of the head. As said somewhere in the website, it is the unfortunate person who, not the post itself that is being removed - precisely because parliament and the people want the post to continue and to do so effectively.

Dengl 23 Word Inflationisation: Does Complexity Cloud Colour?

There is now a disease, I think, inflecting the English language worldwide; how about making a list of aggravated words - see the pattern:

burglar burgled burgling burgle all surely concise?
but no - people prefer to write burglarise
from which they then get burglarised wait for: burglarisator

I reckon it can be carried further burglarisation
and burglarisationise
and eventually burglarisationisated

am I burgling on too much?

Very often seen nowadays is the hyper-professionalised "word" (it's longer - therefore thought to carry more clout - like those mediaeval broadswords the fighter could hardly lift); here's
incentivise (from incentive - like motive
from which we get incentivisation from incentivise - and "motivise"
no we used to be content with motivate and motivation (not motivisation)

imagine reading a job advert for a new Head of a Bank
it might include: "you will be incentivised by ..."
a massive salary quite out of proportion to the good you might do,
though auguring (augurisating? augurisationising?) the scale of harm
which you might achieve ...
Such adverts exist; I've seen them.

This cancerous growth in the word-system should surely be arrested (arrestivisated?).
First, the situation has to be comprehensively diagnosed and many examples assembled.

Do any other hyper-inflationisated words thumping around the cosmos and eventually being stored in an amazingly ungreen hypercooled cave owned by Google in Colorado (I think they are relocationisating to Alaska to save electricity costs?) occur to you?

M



BURGLARY IN FLORIDA

When southern Florida resident Nathan Radlich's house was burglarized
recently, thieves ignored his wide screen plasma TV, his VCR, and even
left his Rolex watch. What they did take, however, was 'a generic white
cardboard box filled with a grayish-white powder.' (That's the
way the police report described it.)
A spokesman for the Fort Lauderdale police said, 'that it looked similar to
high grade cocaine and they'd probably thought they'd hit
the big time.' Later, Nathan stood in front of numerous TV cameras and
pleaded with the burglars: 'Please return the cremated remains of my sister,
Gertrude. She died three years ago.'
The next morning, the bullet-riddled corpse of a local drug dealer known as
Hoochie Pevens* was found on Nathan's doorstep. The cardboard box was there
too; about half of Gertrude's ashes remained
Scotch taped to the box was this note which said: Hoochie sold us the bogus
blow, so we wasted Hoochie. Sorry we snorted your sister. No hard feelings.
Have a nice day.
And you thought California was the land of fruits and nuts!


*no novelist could have had the temerity or ingenuity to invent such a name - therefore this story must be true

Dengl 22 New York Times runs proposal for Peace between Israel and Palestinians

If not now: when?
I was sent this article. It suggests to Israeli "hardliners" that the prospect of a secure half-cake today, is better than a whole cake in the unforseeable future, with a great deal of indigestion on the way. I might be tempted, if I was in Israel as the "midliner" I reckon myeslf to be, to go for the half-and-now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/opinion/28friedman.html?emc=eta1


In the first century BCE, Babylonian born Hillel (later known as Hillel the Elder) migrated to the Land of Israel to study and worked as a woodcutter, eventually becoming the most influential force in Jewish life. Hillel is said to have lived in such great poverty that he was sometimes unable to pay the admission fee to study Torah, and because of him that fee was abolished. He was known for his kindness, gentleness, concern for humanity. One of his most famous sayings, recorded in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers, a tractate of the Mishnah), is
"If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?"
The Hillel organization, a network of Jewish college student organizations, is named for him. Hillel and his descendants established academies of learning and were the leaders of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel for several centuries. The Hillel dynasty ended with the death of Hillel II in 365 CE.