The value of balls

Back in 2008 I wrote about a feather-filled golf ball that was to be auctioned, and was expected to fetch about $50,000.  It seems there's quite a market for golfing antiquities.  The BBC reports:

Divers have begun a search in Donegal for what they believe could be some of the world's rarest golf balls.

The gutta percha balls once belonged to golfing legend Old Tom Morris, who won the Open four times in the 1860s.

It is believed the balls have been lying at the bottom of one of the county's deepest lakes for 120 years.

"It really is like looking for a needle in a haystack but if we find the golf balls it'll be well worth the effort," said dive leader Gus O'Driscoll.

. . .

"We've carried out some research and spoke to local people whose parents were around when Tom Morris was here and they told us how he stood up on the hill overlooking Lough Salt and drove the balls into the lake," said Gus.

"It soon became a tradition after that for golfers on their way home from the Rosapenna to stop off and drive balls into the lake.

"That checks out because we've seen thousands of balls on the bottom of the lake and we have recovered some which date back to the 1940s and 50s."

But the golf balls Gus and his team are searching for are no ordinary balls.

Known as gutta percha, they were designed in the 1840s and used by Old Tom Morris at the time when he won his Open titles.

"They are a very distinctive ball and should stand out amongst the others.

"Some of them have come up for auction before and sold for thousands of pounds."

There's more at the link.

Another report suggests that one of Old Tom Morris' balls might fetch as much as £20,000 (more than US $32,000).  I don't know whether one could have survived for well over a century beneath the freezing waters of Lough Salt, but I wish the best of luck to the searchers.

Peter

The best prank I've seen in a long time!

The video speaks for itself.

Peter

Guinness Food Record #1

I've come across some interesting details of food recognized by Guinness World Records as the biggest, highest, lowest, etc. in its category.  I'll be putting up some of them over the next few days.

Let's start with the world's biggest commercially-available hot dog.  It weighs about seven pounds, and is sixteen inches long by four inches in diameter.  It's said to provide no less than 40 servings!  Price, according to its Web site, is $95.95 at the time of writing.

I think I'm getting indigestion just looking at it . . .





Peter

Now that's a "high" crime, all right!

It seems Sweden is an ongoing target for international smugglers of . . . wait for it . . . of all things . . . garlic!  The Local reports:

Sweden has issued an arrest warrant for two Britons suspected of smuggling millions of dollars' worth of garlic into Sweden from Norway.

The two men are believed to be behind a massive garlic smuggling operation whereby huge quantities of the popular seasoning were shipped from China to Norway and then brought over the Swedish border illicitly in order to avoid European Union import duties.

Prosecutors estimate the pair smuggled around €10 million ($13.1 million) worth of garlic into Sweden for distribution throughout the EU.

. . .

While garlic can be imported to Norway from China duty-free, the EU slaps a 9.6 percent duty on garlic imports.

According to the warrant, the Britons are suspected of using a company set up in Norway to profit from the import duty discrepancy, smuggling more than 100 tonnes of garlic across the Swedish border since 2009.

There's more at the link.  Apparently this isn't the first example of such crimes;  a 2010 report also described them as a major problem.

According to a British report, the men are accused of smuggling a total of over 1,300 US tons of garlic.  I wonder what that would smell like, all in one pile?  Talk about 'high' crimes and misdemeanors . . . !





Peter

Geopolitics and economics

Bloomberg has a very interesting article on how much the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Senkaku Islands is costing both nations.  Here's a brief excerpt.

The islands offer the prospect of rich fishing grounds, potential oil reserves and a strategic military outpost in the sea between China, Japan and Taiwan. That’s overshadowed economic ties that Jesper Koll, head of equity research at JPMorgan in Tokyo, called “a match made in heaven.”

“Japan has intellectual property, brands and capital, while China has people, markets and purchasing power,” said Koll, in an interview.

. . .

“As Japan’s politics turn decisively to the right, more and frequent spats between Japan and China are expected,” said Liu Li-Gang, chief economist for Greater China at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. who used to work for the World Bank. “Both economies will lose in the end. Japan will lose a big market, and China will not be able to leverage on Japan’s technology and investment for growth.”

. . .

Underlying the border dispute is a history of strained diplomatic ties between the two countries dating back to the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and atrocities carried out in the country by some Japanese troops.

With political capital to be gained by both sides from courting nationalist fervor ... lawmakers may manipulate the row to fit their agendas despite the economic costs, said Ding Xueliang, a professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, who teaches contemporary Chinese politics.

“Japan is always a convenient target for the Chinese government to use to divert domestic anger,” Ding said. “Compared to the political values, the trade values with Japan are secondary.”

There's more at the link.

The human race really hasn't progressed very far since the Dark Ages, has it?  Saber-rattling, militant displays and vociferous threats of retaliation - be that economic, political or even military - should belong to the past.  Perhaps we're not so civilized after all . . .


*Sigh*


Peter

Steampunk, feminism, space travel and dinosaurs!

Here's a marvelous computer-generated graphic video in the steampunk genre, with plenty of other bits and pieces thrown in.  I recommend watching it in full-screen mode.

Great work by the Media Design School of New Zealand.

Peter

When a dictionary was a bone of contention

Through an e-mail forwarded to me yesterday, I was led to an article about the publication of the first edition of the well-known 'American Dictionary of the English Language' by Noah Webster.  It seems it was highly controversial at the time.  I had to laugh at comments like this:

In the Monthly Anthology, James Savage attacked Webster without mercy, sparing not his 'suspicions of the definitions of Johnson,' his 'ridiculous violations of grammar,' nor his 'hurtful innovations in orthography.' 'But the fault of most alarming enormity in this work,' Savage concluded, 'is the approbation given to the vulgarisms' like congressional, presidential, departmental, crock, spry, tote, whop, and, of course, the inevitable lengthy.

There's more at the link.  Amusing, and both historically and linguistically entertaining!

Peter

A wonderful rant!

Readers are doubtless familiar with suggestions being bruited about in Washington that the Administration can simply mint a few platinum coins, assign them a face value of $1 trillion each, and use them as 'money' to increase the national debt - thereby bypassing Congress and the debt limit.  (We spoke about this in passing last night.)

Megan McArdle, writing at the Daily Beast, skewers this absurd notion beautifully.  I've seldom read a better rant in the mainstream media.  Here are a few excerpts.

The trillion dollar platinum [coin] is an absurdity wrapped in a legislative incongruity inside a farce.  It is the logical extension of an utterly illogical legislative process that only becomes more irrational with each passing day.   Each partisan battle has become stupider than the last.  Silly loopholes are exploited for bargaining power, and the resulting stalemates are generally solved with a temporary patch that solves the immediate problem by creating a bigger one down the road.  When the bigger problem arrives, naturally the other side seeks an even sillier loophole, resulting in an even more temporary patch.

. . .

The Great Platinum Coin Caper is everything that is wrong with Washington: a stupid partisan maneuver that erodes the institutions of our government for no gain other than an immediate political win. The only good thing that can be said about it is that the President seems to be too sensible to actually consider doing it.  Nonetheless, the fact that intelligent people like Professor Krugman are even discussing this debacle, much less endorsing it, is a depressing reminder of just how nasty and short-sighted our nation’s capital has become.

When I was reporting on Wall Street, I used to be told with some regularity that government was needed to counteract the short-term thinking of the business sector, who never thought much beyond the next quarterly earnings report.  This now seems as quaintly adorable as picture hats and daily milk deliveries.  An ADHD day trader with a cocaine habit and six months to live has considerably more long-term planning skills than our current congress.

. . .

Legislators are no longer thinking ahead even as far as the next election; all their focus is on the next Pyrrhic victory.     The very worst thing about this stupid platinum coin idea is that it's the most practical, results-oriented solution that has so far been suggested for our current problems.

There's more at the link.  Go read, and enjoy!





Peter

A suggestion for the NRA . . .

. . . and for Gun Owners of America, and the Second Amendment Foundation, and Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, and the Pink Pistols, and any and all other pro-Second-Amendment and pro-gun-rights groups.

It appears certain that the Administration is going to take action to restrict or take away some or all of our Second Amendment rights and freedoms.  Vice-President Biden made that clear today.  As I pointed out on Monday:

I believe there is enough enmity stored up in Washington against the NRA, gun-owners in general, and those whom President Obama once accused of 'clinging to guns and religion', that those now in power are acting out of a sense of vengefulness.  They appear to actively want to provoke a conflict with gun-owners and their political representatives, because they believe that the Newtown massacre has given them sufficient political capital and popular momentum to force such measures down the throats of the American people - even if they're blatantly un-Constitutional.

Very well.  The Administration is going to fight on our turf . . . so why don't we, the firearm owners and Second Amendment supporters of America, fight on theirs?  If they want a fight, let's give them one!

My proposal is this.  Last month I noted that certain states with Republican-controlled legislatures and/or governors were considering changes to how they appointed their representatives to the Electoral College every four years, to elect the President.  Instead of giving all their electors to the presidential candidate who gained the majority of votes in their State, they're thinking of allocating them on the basis of each congressional district.  The candidate who gets the most votes in each congressional district would get that district's electoral vote.  The two electors per state who represent its Senate seats could go to either the presidential candidate winning the popular vote in that state, or the candidate winning the majority of its congressional districts.

The National Journal observed:

Any changes to the allocation of Electoral College votes would have a major impact on each party's path to the White House. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have given Democrats their collective 246 electoral votes in each of the last six elections. That virtually forces Republicans to run the swing-state table.

But rewriting the rules would dramatically shrink or eliminate the Democratic advantage, because of the way House districts are drawn. The decennial redistricting process has dumped huge percentages of Democratic voters into some urban districts, while Republican voters are spread over a wider number of districts, giving the party an advantage. This year, Democratic House candidates won more than 1 million more votes than Republican candidates, but Republicans won 33 more seats.

And if Republicans go ahead with their plan, Democrats don't have the option of pushing back. After the 2010 wave, Democrats control all levers of government in only one state -- West Virginia -- that Romney won this year. Some consistently blue presidential states have Republican legislatures; the reverse is not true.

There's more at the link.  If this plan had been in force last year, Hot Air produced this graphical representation of Congressional districts to illustrate how it would have affected the 2012 Presidential race:

If that plan had been in effect across the country last year, we would now be preparing for the inauguration of President Romney.

I propose that the NRA, GOA, SAF, JPFO, PP and every other pro-gun organization out there put all their political clout, influence, fund-raising abilities, and grass-roots support behind persuading the legislatures of as many states as possible to adopt this change.  According to Wikipedia, the Republican Party currently controls 27 out of the 50 states, and shares control of a number more.  I'm sure there are conservative, Second-Amendment-supporting Democrats in some of the latter states who could be persuaded to support such a measure.

If we all work together, and work hard, I see no reason why, by the next Presidential election in 2016, more than 30 states could not have adopted this approach.  I think this would so drastically reduce the collective strength of the 'blue vote' that it would dramatically alter the US political landscape . . . and suitably punish President Obama and the Democratic Party for their current slash-and-burn drive to demonize Second Amendment supporters, and limit or minimize their constitutional rights.

I, for one, am not prepared to tolerate such action on the part of the Administration;  and if they want to play rough, I think the firearms owners of America are numerous enough, and angry enough, to take the fight to them.  This is one way we can do so which is entirely legal, doesn't involve any violence or criminal action at all, but can nevertheless deal a stunning, perhaps crippling blow to our enemies' political aspirations.

How about it?

I'd like to ask all my blogger friends who read this to please publicize the idea, and my readers who are supporters of the Second Amendment to get hold of their political representatives and gun rights organizations to which they belong, and ask them to support it.  Let's see what we can do.

Peter

EDITED TO ADD:  I'm not a Republican Party supporter.  I've said many times in these pages that I distrust both the Republican and the Democratic parties.  Each appears to be entirely self-serving and myopically partisan in its own way, putting its own interests ahead of those of the nation.  The Republicans have just cravenly surrendered over the 'fiscal cliff' issue, which gives me neither grounds for optimism, nor any reason to trust them, over gun control.

Let me be clear.  The purpose of this proposal is not to support a particular political party:  it's to retaliate against those who are attacking our Second Amendment rights.  If they attack that which we hold dear, we need to respond by attacking that which they hold dear - namely, political power.  If we can make it much more difficult for them to retain power, or easier for their opponents to regain it, we hold a weapon they'll be forced to take into account.

If they leave us alone, I see no reason why we shouldn't leave them alone.  If they want a fight . . . well, two can play at that game.  This is one way to do that.  There may be others that will be more productive.  If you can think of any, please share them with us in Comments, or on your own blog.

Speed, style and strength

Gymnast and Olympic gold medalist Epke Zonderland recently put together no less than 24 sequential high-bar release combinations.  What astonishes me is the speed at which he moves, the fact that he sustains that speed for so long without appearing to get tired, and the sheer strength it must require in his hands and arms to carry and control his weight - particularly with the added g-forces of his rotation - through so many repetitions.

Congratulations to Mr. Zonderland on an amazing performance.





Peter

Another reason to be armed

Last night I wrote about the gun-control measures threatened by the Obama administration and its allies.  It appears likely that attempts will be made to regulate, if not ban, high-capacity magazines and so-called 'assault rifles' (which aren't true assault rifles at all - it's a description designed to elicit a knee-jerk emotional reaction, but which isn't factual or accurate).

Consider such attempts in the light of news reports like this one.

Dodging open manholes where thieves had swiped cast-iron covers, Stephen Wigginton drives the crumbling streets of his hometown, East St. Louis, Illinois, pointing out new landmarks in America’s most violent city.

There’s the shopping mall where a police officer was shot in the face, a youth center that saw a triple homicide in September, and scattered about the city of 27,000 are brightly lit gas stations that serve as magnets for carjackers, hit-and- run robbers and killers.

“It’s the Wild West,” said Wigginton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Illinois. With a murder rate 17 times the U.S. average, the nation’s highest according to the FBI, East St. Louis offers a glimpse at the future for budget- strapped cities like Detroit and Camden, New Jersey, that have made deep cuts to their police forces.

. . .

The city reduced its police force by 33 percent from 2008 to 2011, the 12th-largest reduction among cities with more than 25,000 people, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation data. Among the 20 biggest U.S. police jurisdictions during that period, the number of officers fell 2.7 percent to 99,312.

. . .

East St. Louis remains plagued by “vendettas and beefs,” Parks said, describing the reasoning of criminals.

“If I think your family is in a house and it hurts you to get your family, I’m going to shoot up the house,” he said.

. . .

Cities reducing the size of their police departments should learn from East St. Louis’s travails, John Firman, director of research at the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said, adding that they ought to consider the threshold below which officers can no longer do their jobs.

“These cuts could backfire,” Firman said.

There's more at the link.

There's a neighborhood like that within an hour's drive of my home.  What makes you think I'll go anywhere near it without more than one high-capacity magazine for my handgun?  If possible, I wouldn't go there at all without a rifle and several magazines of ammunition for it.  I value my life, and the scumbags there don't.  It's as simple as that.

Local police budgets are stagnant, and likely to drop as federal funding dries up (and if you think federal funding won't dry up as economic reality bites - see below - you're politically and economically myopic!).  If they won't be able to protect me, I'd better be able to do so myself, hadn't I?  And if anyone wants to take away the tools I'll need to do that, whilst simultaneously cutting funding to the only other people who might be able to help me . . . where does that leave me?

(Don't answer that . . . it's a rhetorical question.  I know where it leaves me!)





Peter

Doofus Of The Day #670

Today's award goes to an Australian company.  It's succeeded in putting its corporate foot firmly in its telephonic mouthpiece.

THE company that operates [Australia's] Do Not Call Register has been penalised for making nuisance phone calls to thousands of Melburnians.

Service Stream Solutions was fined $110,000 for illegally contacting 6300 households and offering to install low-energy light bulbs, standby power controllers and low-flow showerheads.

The calls were made by the firm's telemarketing division, which is separate to the arm that manages the Do Not Call Register.

There's more at the link.  A tip o' the hat to reader Snoggeramus for bringing it to my attention.

That's a particularly inept piece of doofidity, isn't it?  You run the nation's Do Not Call registry with one hand, and ignore it with the other!  What price corporate communication?

Peter

This man gets it!

Now and again I come across an article or newsletter that's so to the point, so accurate, that there's nothing to do but bow quasi-reverently in the direction of its author, and tell others about his wisdom so that they can share it.  That's what I want to do tonight with Grant Williams' latest 'Things That Make You Go Hmmm...' newsletter.  You'll find the latest edition here , where you can download the full Adobe Acrobat version (and subscribe to future editions if you wish, which I highly recommend).

Mr. Williams summarizes our current political, economic and fiscal mess in about 15 pages.  I'm going to reproduce only a very few extracts here, in terms of the 'fair use' provisions of US copyright law, and direct you to his article to read the rest.  It's well worth your time.

The problem is that both parties [i.e. Republican and Democratic] are addicted to spending money that they don't have, as can be readily seen from the chart below, which shows the US federal debt increase by president.

. . .

It seems as though the only thing there is no bubble in right now is leadership. Where are the leaders? Where are the statesmen and -women? It's not just the USA; Europe and the UK are suffering from a similar vacuum, whilst China is riddled with graft as a few powerful individuals attempt to squirrel away as much money as they can without upsetting the apple cart.

. . .

As far back as 2009, JP Morgan's Michael Cembalest published an article on Forbes.com entitled 'Obama's Business Blind Spot'. In it he took issue with the low level of private-sector experience amongst the President's cabinet ... This lack of private-sector experience is totally in keeping with the behaviour of governments that fundamentally believe they are the solution to every problem. In actual fact, the truth is far closer to Ronald Reagan's famous remark:

[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

. . .

How utterly ridiculous have things become? Well, this week we find ourselves in the truly bizarre situation of actually spending more time discussing the '$1 trillion coin'. A google search for the phrase '$1 trillion coin' already yields close to 2 million results, and that number is climbing faster than the signatories to the 'Deport Piers Morgan' petition.

But what the hell is this all about? Are we seriously talking about producing a magical coin that will solve the debt problem?

. . .

I despair.

It may be technically legal, but why do these people insist on opening their mouths and letting the words escape before engaging their brains?

You cannot simply mint a 1-oz platinum coin, stamp '$1 Trillion' on it, and assume it is worth $1 trillion dollars.

This is simply a cute way for politicians to technically stay within the law and have free reign over spending again. Jeez.

. . .

When will this end? When will the world wake up to the fact that large parts of it are hopelessly broke? When will the public become sufficiently engaged in the world around them to demonstrate the requisite level of outrage? At what point does the cavalier attitude of 'the 1%' come face to face with any kind of justice? Will anyone ever go to jail? Mozilo? Fuld? Corzine? ANYBODY?

. . .

There is an insidious pattern of ineptitude, corruption, and outright dishonesty amongst public servants at the highest levels today—made possible by a public too lazy to try to understand the ramifications of the lies to which they are being subjected.

With each successful escape from detection and prosecution, the audacity of those perpetrating the crimes (yes, crimes) increases. Where will it end? I don't know, but if history is any guide, it won't end either well or peacefully.

. . .

History does have a habit of repeating itself, and people really do need to stop taking what they read and hear about at face value and take a good look around them.

Does anybody in America really think that inflation is running at just 1.8%? Has anybody's cost of living increased just 1.8% over the past 12 months?

What about Europe? Does 50% youth unemployment in Greece and Spain really sound like their problems are fixed and about to go away any time soon?

Is there a Frenchman alive who, having seen what has happened since Hollande's 75% tax rate was imposed, still believes that the measure will raise the money they said it would?

How about Japan? Anybody care to explain to me how Abe-san can generate 3% inflation AND keep Japanese government bonds from collapsing? The two are mutually exclusive—or they used to be.

'The first duty of a man is to think for himself', said José Marti, a Cuban philosopher and political theorist who died in 1885 at the tender age of 32; but today so very few people heed that sage advice that it is enough to make me weep.

What is going on around us, right now, here, in 2013, is going to shape the world for a generation; and the 'solutions' being put in place—and then spun by those lurching from one crisis to another, desperate to staunch the flow of blood—are the solutions of dire necessity and of political survival. Nothing more.

The debt is not being addressed. The spending is not being addressed. Magic coins are being tossed in the air as potential solutions.

It's simple: Too much has been borrowed. Too much has been promised. Too much has been spent.

The time has come to take the pain, and for that to happen the world needs not politicians but leaders.

I fear the places from whence they may spring.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
- Carl Sagan

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”
- Aldous Huxley

There's more at the link.  Do please read the whole thing . . . and ponder . . . and prepare, because I believe the tidal wave of economic collapse is now almost inescapable.

Peter

More to come

My lengthy article (below this one) on the threat of draconian gun-control measures took a while to research and write, given all the links I included.  Consequently, I haven't had much time to prepare my usual 'spread' of articles tonight.  I'll put up a couple more tomorrow morning.

To keep you amused until then, here's a video report on some of the more interesting (and spectacular) rally crashes of 2012.  Since so many allegedly responsible politicians in Washington appear to be 'crashing and burning' at the moment, perhaps it's appropriate!

Peter

A call to action for gun owners

In the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut school shootings, it appears more and more likely that Washington will try to impose several draconian restrictions on firearms, magazines, ammunition, and anything else the powers that be think they can get their hands on.  To summarize just a few developments since that tragedy:

• The White House appears to be weighing a broad anti-gun agenda, informed only by those opposed to firearm ownership - not including any of those who value it.
• The possibility of requiring gun-owners to take out liability insurance against the misuse of their weapons has been discussed.  This would, of course, prove very expensive - so much so that many gun-owners might not be able to afford it, and might therefore be pressured into giving up their guns as a result.
• Rumors (as yet unconfirmed) are circulating that President Obama may seek to add all semi-automatic weapons to the registry of Title II weapons established under the National Firearms Act of 1934, as amended by the Gun Control Act of 1968, to regulate possession of fully-automatic weapons, short-barreled rifles, silencers, etc.
• Other reports speculate that the President may seek to restrict online ammunition sales. There have also been calls to impose additional taxes on ammunition sales.  Very high figures for such taxes have been mentioned.
• Commentators are asking seriously questions such as, 'If They Come for Your Guns, Do You Have a Responsibility to Fight?'  Others have stated bluntly that they will disobey any new legal requirements to register and/or surrender their firearms and/or standard-capacity magazines.  There have been calls for massive civil disobedience against such measures.  Some are even warning of potential civil war.
• The mass media appear to have launched a barrage of anti-gun propaganda.  It's almost completely false, of course, but this hasn't stopped them.

My fears are as follows:

1. I believe that President Obama has no respect whatsoever for the Constitution of the United States.  All that matters to him is the furtherance of his agenda, and that of the unseen, faceless puppet-masters who control him.  (What's that?  You thought he was his own man?  Oh, come off it!  I've never seen a more blatant political figurehead in my life!)
2. The same applies to many of those calling for gun control, including Senator Dianne Feinstein, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and many others.  To paraphrase the well-known words of Rahm Emanuel (currently Mayor of Chicago), they 'aren't letting a serious crisis go to waste'.  They're trying to use, manipulate and exploit it for all they're worth to advance their agenda, which is uniformly statist, anti-individual rights and anti-freedom.
3. I fear that the Republican majority in Congress is unlikely to stand up for the rights of gun-owners.  They're nominally against further gun control measures, but given the immense political pressure that the President can apply (and has applied, most recently resulting in a craven Republican surrender over the so-called 'fiscal cliff'), I don't trust them not to cave in and give him what he wants.  Even if most Republicans maintain their traditional position, there are enough waverers among them to pass an anti-gun measure if all Democrats vote for it.
4. I believe there is enough enmity stored up in Washington against the NRA, gun-owners in general, and those whom President Obama once accused of 'clinging to guns and religion', that those now in power are acting out of a sense of vengefulness.  They appear to actively want to provoke a conflict with gun-owners and their political representatives, because they believe that the Newtown massacre has given them sufficient political capital and popular momentum to force such measures down the throats of the American people - even if they're blatantly un-Constitutional.

I regard the present situation as very serious indeed.  I can only urge each and every gun-owner to contact his or her Congressional representative and Senator, and make very clear his or her opposition to any more gun control measures, whether they be in the form of laws, regulations or Presidential executive orders.  We need to do this now, before the momentum on the other side becomes unstoppable.  This is no ordinary 'crisis';  it's being deliberately fomented, exaggerated and manipulated by those opposed to the Second Amendment and the rights of gun-owners.  If we don't fight it, and them, they may win this fight.

Please, dear readers, take this seriously.  Do your part.  Call your elected representatives as soon as possible, write to them, and keep on reminding them that they will be held accountable if they do anything to support the erosion of your rights.  Point them to Marko's excellent essay 'Why The Gun Is Civilization'.  He speaks the truth - as we need to do.  If we don't, the truth will be steamrollered by those who don't care about truth at all - only political expediency.

Peter

Are fully reusable space rockets drawing nearer?

Early science-fiction books almost universally portrayed rockets departing from a planet and landing on another (or back where they started from).  There was no thought of abandoning almost all the equipment launched off a pad, leaving it to splash down uselessly into the oceans or be burned up on re-entry into the atmosphere.  The harsh realities of early space flight made that necessary, of course, but it's always been a very wasteful business.

Elon Musk wants to change that.  Flight Global reports:

One of the most ambitious development projects in spaceflight took a giant leap last month when SpaceX achieved a 29s flight to a height of 40m - and safely back to the launch pad - with its Grasshopper rocket, a bid to develop a fully reusable vertical take-off and vertical landing launch vehicle.

. . .

SpaceX chief Elon Musk says Grasshopper is only the first in a series of projects that he hopes will result in 100% reusability for SpaceX vehicles. Speaking at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London in November ... Musk said he hoped to be bringing back the first stage from SpaceX flights "in the next year or two", and promised "soon" to unveil a new version of his Dragon cargo or crew capsule capable of landing vertically, on legs.

. . .

Musk added that his full-reusability timetable was "five to six years", though he confessed that "could be famous last words". Moreover, he said to the RAeS gathering, he expected that as Grasshopper testing continues "there will be a few craters along the way".

. . .

Musk's dream of total reusability promises much when it comes to transforming the economics of ordinary Earth orbit spaceflight. As Musk told the RAeS, the cost of a rocket today is only about 0.3% propellant, with the rest thrown away; in the case of a $60 million Falcon 9 launch, that's less than $200,000 for gas and a lot of money ending up in the sea.

There's more at the link.  Recommended reading.

Here's a video clip of SpaceX's latest, 29-second-long test flight of the Grasshopper.  It rose 131 feet into the air, hovered, and successfully touched down again on the pad it had just left.  A small step, to be sure, but one that had never before been accomplished . . . and, one hopes, a stepping-stone to much greater achievements in future.

Go SpaceX, and thank you, Elon Musk!  If you get this right, we'll all owe you an incalculable debt.

Peter

Wikipedia's 'Most Viewed' by nation

Johann Gunnarsson has compiled a very interesting series of lists of the most-searched terms and articles on Wikipedia's various versions for 2012.  Here, for example, is his Top 10 list for English Wikipedia:

By clicking a link on his page, you can see the top 100 searches on English Wikipedia.  He has the same information for all the various language editions, including Catalan, Japanese and Persian Wikipedias.  Clicking any of the article names in his lists will take you to its Wikipedia entry.

Interesting stuff for the geeks among us (including yours truly).

Peter

It feels a bit like giving birth . . .

. . . although not in the physical sense - more of a mental and intellectual one.  I sent out the penultimate edition of my first military science-fiction manuscript to several beta readers this evening.  I hope they'll provide feedback by the end of the month, at which time I'll send out the second manuscript (which is almost ready to go) while I go through their comments and make final adjustments to the first one.  I hope to have both available on Amazon and, possibly, Kobo within a few months, first as e-books and then, if the demand is there, as paperbacks.

It's a funny feeling.  I've been trying to learn the craft of fiction writing for almost eight years now, since well before I began this blog ago in January 2008.  My first efforts were dire, but I kept on plugging away at it.  I must have written the best part of two million words since I started, in an effort to master the art of fiction writing . . . and I still don't know whether I've succeeded.  I guess I won't know until I try to sell my work, and then the market will deliver its own verdict!

I've been published in book and article form in several non-fiction fields, and of course here on this blog, so I know I can do non-fiction writing reasonably well.  Whether or not I've got what it takes to be a fiction author as well remains to be seen.  I guess my beta readers will be the penultimate judge of that!  If they all hate it, it's not too late to scrap the whole idea and go back to writing non-fiction exclusively.  If they do like it . . . who knows?

Peter

A hypersonic burrito tunnel???

On Thursday I put up a post about a 'burrito bomber' that attracted a fair number of comments.  Among them was one from Dave H., who pointed us to an article from 2007 titled 'The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel'.  I read it, and it's magnificent!  It's a wonderful spoof on technology and history.  Here's a very brief excerpt.

The launch tube for the burritos lies just under the tunnel mouth and looks like what it is: an enormous gun. Every four seconds a ‘slug’ of ten burritos, white with frost, ratchets into the breech. A moment later it flies into the tunnel with a loud hiss of compressed gas, and the lights dim briefly as banks of powerful electromagnets accelerate the burritos to over two hundred miles an hour. By the time they pass Stockton three minutes later the burritos will be traveling faster than the Concorde, floating on an invisible magnetic cushion as they plunge into the lithosphere.

There's much more at the link.  Very funny, and highly recommended reading.  Thanks, Dave!



Peter

Around the blogs

Here goes with the first Around The Blogs collection for 2013.  Some of the entries date back to 2012, because our last collection that year focused on the Newtown tragedy in Connecticut.

# # #

Ace Of Spades examines our individual 'share' of the US national debt.  He gets to the point.

Our debt is 105.6% of our GDP. If everything we earned for 1 year and 19 days went directly to paying off debt, we would be in the clear. In the meantime, you would be kicked out of your house for not paying property taxes, in legal trouble from not paying state of federal income taxes, and looking kind of thin from subsisting on moss soup and acorns. Clearly, this will not be fixed in a year. Or two, or five.

More at the link.

# # #

Rev. Donald Sensing brings us 'The (Mostly) German Philosophers' Love Song'.

(Gigglesnort!)

# # #

Weird And Pissed Off appeared to have stopped blogging after the November elections.  However, while his old blog remains dormant, he's opened a new one at Cats, Cooking and Chaos.  Welcome back to the blogosphere, brother!

# # #

Old NFO informs us about DARPA's ACTUV project for anti-submarine warfare.  He includes a video clip describing it, and a link to an article with more details.  You can also find more information here.  Interesting stuff.

A little earlier, he'd put up a very amusing list of pilot attributes.  A short selection:

In the Alaskan bush I'd rather have a two-hour bladder and three hours of gas than vice versa.

It's not that all airplane pilots are good-looking. It's just that good-looking people seem more capable of flying airplanes.

An old pilot is one who can remember when flying was dangerous and sex was safe.

More at the link.

# # #

Early last month I mentioned what I called 'A screaming deal on a powerful flashlight'.  Brigid's just reviewed the same flashlight, complete with photographs.  It's interesting reading for those of us interested in emergency preparations.

# # #

Warren Meyer brings us his tax proposals, which would greatly simplify and streamline our present incomprehensibly intricate tax code.  He also illustrates how the latest Washington shenanigans complicate things further.  I think he makes a good case.

# # #

Ambulance Driver brings us a tale of a special kind of stupid.  LANGUAGE ALERT:  He's not backward in expressing his (profane) opinion of the gentleman (?) concerned.

# # #

Diogenes' Middle Finger alerts us to a left-wing academic's call to ignore the Constitution in resolving the problems facing our nation.  Needless to say, I saw red on the spot!  The Constitution is the foundation and framework of our Republic.  Do away with it, or ignore it, and chaos results.

Karl Denninger makes a similar point, illustrating how unconstitutional measures have illegally bypassed strict scrutiny and been allowed to become law.  I agree with him that this can't be allowed to continue.  Here's an excerpt.

When do we, the people, stop sitting for expedience and demand things be right instead?

There is a lawful means to change the clear language of The Second Amendment.  There is a lawful means to ensconce a right to health care in the Constitution.  There is a lawful means to make illegal the use of recreational drugs (we once understood this with alcohol and then ignored it -- for expedience.)  There is a lawful means to constrain the 4th Amendment and make being groped by the TSA legal.  There is a lawful means to constrain your right to travel using the common means of the day and require driver licenses.

That lawful means is to amend The Constitution.

There is no other lawful means; all other methods are in fact law-breaking and, when proposed by or passed by Congress, openly seditious in their character.

. . .

The Declaration was not of rights to be given by government but of unalienable rights that no government has the authority to regulate, delegate or control as it never possessed them in the first instance.

The Constitution was not a declaration of rights held by the people, it was the opposite.  It was a declaration of a very few things that the government had the ability to control and regulate, delegated by the people, reserving everything else.

And the entirety of the Bill of Rights was the absolute requirement of the founders to sign off and accept The Constitution.  Without each and every one of them the Constitution would not have been adopted, and as such they are inherently part and parcel of the original document and can only be lawfully modified in one way -- through the Amendment process in Article V.

There's more at the link.  I agree with Mr. Denninger.  It's long gone time we restored the Constitution to the legislative, legal and juridical precedence that is its (and our) birthright.

# # #

Marko, the Munchkin Wrangler, brings us a tale of lustful stupidity so mind-boggling it should really be a Doofus Of The Day post in its own right.  However, he found it first, so I'll simply steer you in his direction to read more about it.  One can only hope that the idiot in question won't procreate . . . and if he continues to treat decent women in that fashion, he's unlikely to get the chance!

# # #

Joel brings us the tale of a cat named Cocaine.  I think I've met one or two of his cousins over the years . . .

While I cannot deny that most cats are completely without practical value, I don’t agree at all that cats are uncool. Cats, in fact, are far cooler than dogs. Because cats don’t care. A dog (generally speaking, and with exceptions) wants you to love it. It’s practically obsessed with the desire to be petted, cared for, validated. Dogs are high-maintenance items.

Cats don’t give a damn what you think about them. In any relationship between one cat and one human, there is absolutely no doubt anywhere in that cat’s mind as to who’s in charge – and it’s not the human.

# # #

David McElroy asks, 'Had enough yet? Ready to quit pretending politics changes things?'  He makes a powerful case.  Here's an excerpt.

At some point, the government will lose the ability to pay its debts, because productive people will be unable to pay what’s demanded of them. There just aren’t enough of them, and more and more of them are going to walk away rather than be robbed blind in order to allow money to keep flowing to military adventurism, corporate welfare and the quasi-socialist medical system. (If you think we’ve had a free market in medicine, you’re not paying attention.) When the government loses its ability to pay the debts, draconian taxes will be imposed. Borrowing will stop. Rebellion will increase. Collapse is inevitable.

. . .

When the system collapses, nobody is going to care who you voted for or where you marched. The only thing that’s going to matter is whether you have a plan to take care of yourself and your family.

Quit thinking that swapping one politician for another is going to change anything. It’s not. The entire system has to go. The Titanic is going down. Quit paying attention to the two groups fighting over who gets to claim authority over the bridge of the sinking ship.

There's more at the link.  I hate to say it, but I fear he's right.

# # #

Dr. Whitecoat brings us another WTF??? moment in the emergency room.  It certainly sheds new light on the mathematical odds of survival!

# # #

Last but not least, Grouchy Old Cripple brings us a magnificent Monday Pun.  I think it's more of a feghoot than a pure pun, but it had me groaning loudly!  Well done, sir!

# # #

That's all from the blogosphere for this week.  More soon.

Peter

How not to demonstrate electrostatic discharge

Uh . . . yeah.  Right.

Peter

Another reason why I love my wife

She has a brain, and she's not afraid to use it.

Go read, and enjoy.







Peter

Burrito bombers - or something more?

Doug Hornig muses on whether the development of the 'burrito bomber' may portend something more sinister in the not too distant future.

Many civil libertarians have been raising the roof about domestic surveillance drones (and, really, it's only a matter of time before they become armed), so there's no need to go into any further detail here. If you want to join the fight against them, a modest Internet search will yield plenty of opportunities to do so. But what I would like to do is expose another, sinister side to this technology that has received virtually no media attention as yet. And it dawned on me because of… a burrito.

A few weeks ago, a friend forwarded me a whimsical video about some guys who decided to build a drone to serve as a Méxican food delivery system. Though these folks clearly have too much free time on their hands, it's cute enough. I enjoyed it.

But it wasn't long before I was hit over the head by the deeper meaning: the age of personal drones is dawning. Think about that.

For example, right now you can go online and buy a Zephyr – proclaimed to have a "stealthy" electric propulsion system, 60-minute flight time, and 30-mile control range – for $9,500, a surprisingly small sum. Or if you'd rather acquire your UAV more anonymously, you can go DIY. Along with their video, the burrito bomber's creators helpfully supply links that will guide you through the construction of one of your very own, from readily available parts.

Flight restrictions? None to speak of at low altitudes. And even if they existed, they would be quite difficult to enforce if we reach a point where there are thousands upon thousands of these things in the skies.

You can see where I'm going with this. Not to mince words: what if someone of more malicious intent than the burrito brothers decided to deliver not a tasty food, but a bomb? To some place he happened not to like, such as City Hall, the police station, or the IRS office. Or to a romantic rival across town. Or to a target chosen completely at random.

Suddenly the video wasn't so humorous anymore. Maybe I am among the more paranoid, but to me it seems that kind of sick usage of DIY drones is inevitable, given the number of people out there with an ax to grind.

As a weapon, UAVs are inching ever closer to perfect: easy and increasingly cheap to build; hard to detect; difficult to intercept; tough to trace, thanks to off-the-shelf parts; and the malefactor can be far from the scene of the crime. No line of sight needed with a small camera. No need to look victims in the eye or figure out escape routes. Someone could wreak an awful lot of havoc before getting caught, just with today's technology.

But consider also the implications as drones get smaller, quieter, and harder to spot, even as their electronics get ever more sophisticated. Go to the Toys & Games department on Amazon.com, and you may be surprised to find that you can buy a $300 quadricopter drone that'll give you 15-20 minutes of flight time, can be controlled by your iPhone, and offers "extreme precision control and automatic stabilization." Its range is severely limited at the moment, but you can rest assured that's a limitation that will soon be overcome.

In the military, it likely already has been. Sparrow-sized and even bumblebee-sized drones – tiny, deadly killing machines – are on the drawing board, if not yet realized.

. . .

The implications? Try this scenario on for size: You're a disgruntled citizen, hating the "powers that be" for ruining your life. You have no coherent political agenda, just a desire to – in one brief moment of glory – strike back at your perceived tormentors. Maybe like 52-year-old Marvin Heemeyer, who converted his bulldozer into a homebrew tank with some metal and a blowtorch. You focus on the newly elected president. Doesn't matter what party he represents. He's the enemy. So you set your sights on something like inauguration day, where you know his exact coordinates in time and space, and that he'll be standing absolutely still as he delivers his big speech. You beg, borrow, or steal enough money to construct a DIY drone the size of a small bird, and set up a wireless video guidance system for those crucial final yards. You extract a lethal dose of ricin from some castor beans, the recipe for which you got off the 'Net after a little inspiration from Breaking Bad reruns, load a trigger-on-contact syringe from the local CVS diabetes-supply aisle, and duct tape it to your drone with the needle leading the way. At the appointed hour, you launch the bird from a backyard in Maryland or Virginia. You toast it on its way with a can of beer, then sit back in your chair, facing the computer screen, joystick in hand and a big smile on your face…

There's more at the link.  Interesting - and worrying - reading.

Peter

"Europe in 2013: A Year of Decision"

That's the title of a very interesting article from Stratfor, providing an in-depth look at the challenges confronting the world's largest economy (Europe as a whole) this year.  What happens there will inevitably have a profound impact on the USA and the rest of the world.  Here's an excerpt.

It may well be that the European Union is in the process of dealing with its banking problems and might avoid other sovereign debt issues, but the price it has paid is both a recession and, much more serious, unemployment at a higher rate than in the United States overall, and enormously higher in some countries.

. . .

In Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece, more than a third of the workforce under 25 is reportedly unemployed. It will take a generation to bring the rate down to an acceptable level in Spain and Greece. Even for countries that remain at about 10 percent for an extended period of time, the length of time will be substantial, and Europe is still in a recession.

Consider someone unemployed in his 20s, perhaps with a university degree. The numbers mean that there is an excellent chance that he will never have the opportunity to pursue his chosen career and quite possibly will never get a job at the social level he anticipated. In Spain and Greece, the young -- and the old as well -- are facing personal catastrophe. In the others, the percentage facing personal catastrophe is lower, but still very real. Also remember that unemployment does not affect just one person. It affects the immediate family, parents and possibly other relatives. The effect is not only financial but also psychological. It creates a pall, a sense of failure and dread.

It also creates unrooted young people full of energy and anger. Unemployment is a root of anti-state movements on the left and the right. The extended and hopelessly unemployed have little to lose and think they have something to gain by destabilizing the state. It is hard to quantify what level of unemployment breeds that sort of unrest, but there is no doubt that Spain and Greece are in that zone and that others might be.

. . .

The European Union has been so focused on the financial crisis that it is not clear to me that the unemployment reality has reached Europe's officials and bureaucrats, partly because of a growing split in the worldview of the European elites and those whose experience of Europe has turned bitter. Partly, it has been caused by the fact of geography. The countries with low unemployment tend to be in Northern Europe, which is the heart of the European Union, while those with catastrophically high unemployment are on the periphery. It is easy to ignore things far away.

But 2013 is the year in which the definition of the European problem must move beyond the financial crisis to the social consequences of that crisis. Progress, if not a solution, must become visible. It is difficult to see how continued stagnation and unemployment at these levels can last another year without starting to generate significant political opposition that will create governments, or force existing governments, to tear at the fabric of Europe.

This excerpt from 'Europe in 2013: A Year of Decision' is republished with permission of Stratfor.  I recommend reading the entire article.  It contains a great deal of food for thought, particularly in the light of the rise of Greece's neo-Nazi 'Golden Dawn' movement.  Is this the precursor of more extremism on that continent - extremism that might drive the European Union into disunion?

Peter

Ever heard of the 'Tercentenarian Club'?

I hadn't, until the Telegraph published this report.

There are a number of candidates for the most exclusive club in Britain. The Victoria and George Cross Association, every member a hero, can stake its claim. So, too, the Leander Rowing Club, which counts more Olympians in its ranks than any other sports group.

But none has a longer waiting list, nor a greater shared history, than the Tercentenarian Club.

If you have never heard of it, that is not a surprise. It has barely a dozen members, no annual fee, and it meets just once a year. The members are a rag-tag collection of businessmen, including a wine merchant, a butcher, a hat maker, a ribbon manufacturer, a builder and boatyard owner. There’s even a candlestick seller.

To enter the club you need to run a business that has survived for more than 300 years and is still owned by the same family that started it.

The member companies must, by definition, have unparalleled staying power. They have survived at least 47 recessions, a clutch of banking crises, stock market crashes, the start of the Industrial Revolution and the end of horsepower, two world wars, the defeat of Napoleon, and the rise of the internet.

What is the secret?

“If I knew how we’d survived, we’d bottle it and sell it,” says Alan Hughes, the owner of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which has been going since 1570.

He is fairly gloomy about the state of the economy and the ability of his company and his fellow members to survive another 300 years. “The Chancellor of the Exchequer doesn’t know what’s going to happen in the next three months; how do I know how things will pan out?”

But then he brightens: “The demand for bells has been in terminal decline since 1870. But our biggest client is the Church, which has been in business for 2,000 years, so we are talking about a very, very slow decline.”

. . .

Most Tercentenarians specialise in something ancient and unmechanised. But looks can be deceptive.

It is true that if you step inside Berry Bros & Rudd, the wine merchant, it looks pretty much the same as it did when Lord Byron or William Pitt the Younger popped in to buy their port – the shop has dusty shelves and ancient weighing scales. But the company was one of the first retailers to embrace the internet.

There's more at the link.

Makes every American business look like a callow youth, doesn't it?





Peter

A treasure trove for folk music fans

There's great news for those who love folk music.  The Telegraph reports:

Topic Records, who will celebrate their 75th anniversary in April 2014, and who are Europe's oldest independent label, will undertake one of the biggest digitisation projects by a small record label ever seen.

This month, the label will launch 'The Great Big Digital Archive Project', with 84 folk albums available to download complete with digital booklets, artwork, documentation and sleeve-notes. The first tranche of releases will include rare albums by Dominic Behan, Davy Graham, Ewan MacColl, Tom Paley, Willie Clancy and Rambling Jack Elliott.

Thereafter, a programme of six to ten additional titles (from vinyl LPs originally released in the 1950s, 60s and 70s) will be released every month throughout the year. The digital booklets for each album will be available from the Topic website as well as iTunes. Many of the records have been out of print for decades.

There's more at the link.

A list of albums and artists currently available for download is available at Topic's Web site.  As a folk music aficionado of long standing, I have to admit that I'm sorely tempted to buy the lot!  However, I'll be good . . . for now . . .

The company released this video clip about its program.

I'm really looking forward to this!

Peter

'Big Data' may be so big it helps protect our privacy

The Register suggests that the sheer quantity and volume of data being collected about us may serve to protect our privacy, because we simply can't analyze it all.

We can't seem to get enough of Big Data. In its Digital Universe in 2020 report (PDF), IDC forecasts Big Data-related IT spending to rise 40 per cent each year between 2012 and 2020, as the digital universe, now at 2.8 zettabytes (ZB), or 2.8 trillion GB, explodes to 40 ZB.

That's very, very Big Data. It's a pity, therefore, that we currently analyse a mere 0.5 per cent of it all.

Not that all of these data are useful. IDC expects that by 2020, just 33 per cent of the world's data will be useful if analysed. But the delta between today's 0.5 per cent of actually analysed data and 33 per cent that could be useful if analysed is unlikely to get dramatically better. We like to think of ourselves as hyper-analytical, what with our quantified selves and "measure everything" approaches to business.

But, as I've argued before, we're actually quite inept at analysing data, be the data big or small.

Not only are we bad at regulating our intake of information, to paraphrase Nick Carr, but we're also really bad at separating signal from noise. In hindsight, we think we see clearly, but even then we tend to miss the point.

There's more at the link.

So we're only analyzing about half of one per cent of all data collected?  That makes me feel a lot more comfortable about privacy . . . even though I wish the data weren't being collected at all!

Peter

That's one way to put out a boat fire!

A New Zealand powerboat pilot came up with an ingenious way to extinguish another boat that was burning near the shore.

Good thing there were no rocks in the way . . .

Peter

An unwise Christmas present?

I reckon a British family are having second thoughts about the Christmas present they bought their 7-year-old son.

A seven-year-old boy sparked a major security scare after discovering a buried WWII bomb – with a metal detector he got for Christmas.

Sonny Cater was exploring fields near his house when the National Geographic metal detector, worth £30, led him to a mud-caked metal capsule.

He took it home but his father Jem, 37, became suspicious as he washed it under a tap and contacted a relative who is a former RAF armourer.

The family were told to immediately call the police and a bomb disposal squad was dispatched to their home in Kings Lynn, Norfolk.

. . .

Yesterday his mother Tracey said that, despite the drama, the incident proved that Sonny's Christmas present worked.

She said: "We are dumbfounded that he discovered this on his first go.

"We are going to go out again to see if he can find something Roman. It has made our Christmas."

. . .

"We feel a bit silly now we know it could have potentially been dangerous but its not often we go exploring and end up with a bomb in a bucket of water at the end of the garden.

"I should imagine there was a few curtains twitching on our road on Boxing day.

"There was the police and bomb disposal outside our house the neighbours must have thought we were mad."

There's more at the link.

Talk about making the holidays go with a bang!





Peter

Weird headline of the week

From the Telegraph:

Police seeking two oompa-loompas over Norwich assault

Two men dressed as Oompa-Loompas - characters from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory - are being sought by police in Norwich after an attack in the heart of the city.

The victim, a 28-year-old man, was left with cuts, bruises and two black eyes, after being set upon outside a kebab house in the early hours of Thursday morning.

. . .

This was not the first time that oompa-loompas have had a brush with the law.

In 2009 violence flared at a Welcome Family holiday park when a brawl erupted during a fancy dress evening.

These miscreants included not only an oompa-loompa, but Spiderman and even Tinky Winky - the largest of the Teletubbies - best known for his size and red handbag.

. . .

Other fancy address attackers include two men dressed as Elvis Presley and Ozzy Osbourne who were convicted last year, of assaulting a police officer in a Wyatt Earp costume.

There's more at the link.

What's next?  A drive-by shooting by the Pillsbury Doughboy riding in the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile?





Peter

Happy 30th birthday, Internet!

30 years ago today, the modern Internet was born.  Vint Cerf writes about it at Google's Blog.

Each network had its own communications protocol using different conventions and formatting standards to send and receive packets, so there was no way to transmit anything between networks.

In an attempt to solve this, Robert Kahn and I developed a new computer communication protocol designed specifically to support connection among different packet-switched networks. We called it TCP, short for “Transmission Control Protocol,” and in 1974 we published a paper about it in IEEE Transactions on Communications: “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.” Later, to better handle the transmission of real-time data, including voice, we split TCP into two parts, one of which we called “Internet Protocol,” or IP for short. The two protocols combined were nicknamed TCP/IP.

TCP/IP was tested across the three types of networks developed by DARPA, and eventually was anointed as their new standard. In 1981, Jon Postel published a transition plan to migrate the 400 hosts of the ARPANET from the older NCP protocol to TCP/IP, including a deadline of January 1, 1983, after which point all hosts not switched would be cut off.

When the day came, it’s fair to say the main emotion was relief, especially amongst those system administrators racing against the clock. There were no grand celebrations—I can’t even find a photograph. The only visible mementos were the “I survived the TCP/IP switchover” pins proudly worn by those who went through the ordeal!

Yet, with hindsight, it’s obvious it was a momentous occasion. On that day, the operational Internet was born. TCP/IP went on to be embraced as an international standard, and now underpins the entire Internet.

There's more at the link.

I was an occasional user of ARPANET at the time of the switchover.  I wonder how many of us back then - if any - foresaw just how ubiquitous the Internet would become?  I certainly didn't!

Peter