That was a hell of a landing!

Some amazing video footage has emerged of a very hard landing by an All Nippon Airways Boeing 767 in Japan yesterday.  It bounced so hard that it wrinkled the fuselage, as close-up shots reveal.

I don't know what it felt like to be a passenger on that flight, but I bet the bang when it touched down was enough to loosen more than just the airframe!  I suspect repairs are going to take a long time, too.  They may have to remove the skin and straighten the entire front fuselage, which will take months and cost millions!  It may even be cheaper to scrap the aircraft.





Peter

When the State dictates to religions - and spouses

As readers are no doubt aware, the Danish government has just decided that it can issue orders to the Evangelical Lutheran Church - namely, that the church must permit same-sex couples to marry in its buildings, with clergy officiating.  Individual clergy may decline to participate, but in that case a bishop must arrange a replacement.

In England, the government has also moved towards passing legislation that would have a similar effect.  The Telegraph reports:

The Church's formal response to the Coalition's same-sex marriage plans dismisses them as “divisive”, “legally flawed” and “essentially ideological”.

The Church of England has suggested that priests could be forced to marry homosexual couples in churches by the European Court of Human Rights despite assurances that they will be exempt.

The warnings came as the Church released its own legal analysis as part of its formal response to the consultation on Coalition’s plans to redefine marriage.

Dr Sharon James, a spokesperson from the Coalition for Marriage, said that they were "concerned that if same-sex marriage is introduced then courts could use equalities legislation to force religious premises and ministers to conduct same-sex marriages."

There's more at the link.

That's what happens when you allow a government to regulate who may marry whom.  That's also what happens when you have State-approved and/or -supported churches (as are both the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark and the Church of England in that country).  State support for anything ultimately boils down to State control of that thing, be it what you eat, what you drive, what you wear, who you marry, or what you believe.

As I've said before, I think the answer is to for the state to get out of the marriage business altogether (and out of the religion business too!).  Let people decide for themselves what they want to believe, and who they want to marry, and how they want to do both.  Who needs politicians and bureaucrats making those decisions for us, anyway?

Peter

Is President Obama an accessory to the crime of murder?

Readers will be familiar with 'Operation Fast And Furious', the gunrunning scandal which we've covered in these pages on several previous occasions.  The evidence thus far made available suggests that the ATF and possibly other Federal law enforcement agencies (certainly including senior figures in the Department of Justice, up to and including Attorney General Eric Holder) were fully familiar with this scheme.

I was therefore astonished when President Obama yesterday asserted executive privilege to help Mr. Holder avoid having to provide a number of potentially incriminating documents to Congressional investigators looking into the scandal.  This is explosive stuff, because we're talking about an operation that has demonstrably and provably contributed to the deaths of two US Federal law enforcement officers and several hundred Mexican nationals.  This isn't just burglary, or cheating, or corruption:  it's wholesale murder!

Executive privilege has historically only been asserted for documents and information directly relating to presidential briefings and decision-making.  Therefore, if President Obama is asserting it in this case, it can only be legal if he was briefed about and/or made executive decisions concerning Operation Fast And Furious and/or related issues.  If that is the case, it would directly implicate the office of the President - and President Obama himself - in the murders that resulted from this scandal.  On the other hand, if it's not the case and President Obama was neither briefed about nor made decisions concerning this operation, then he can't assert executive privilege over the documents concerned.  It's as clear-cut as that.

I can't understand why the mainstream media are so silent about a scandal that might make Watergate look like a Sunday school picnic by comparison!  (Larry Correia describes its implications very well on his blog.  Go read.)  Any and all right-thinking Americans, of any and all political persuasions, should be profoundly concerned about this.  It's not about Republicans or Democrats, but about the rule of law and the murder of US law enforcement officers.  Surely that should rise above political disagreement?  Those who are trying to portray it as mere political dissent are showing themselves to be contemptuous of both the law and their own oaths of office (not to mention the [lack of] intelligence with which they credit the electorate).

I can only hope that the truth will come out, and swiftly.  If this scandal reaches into the Oval Office (which is not yet proven), we need to know in good time before the November elections.  We daren't elect someone who could so casually approve an operation that would kill so many innocent people.

Peter

Porcine coitus interruptus!

This is why, despite the existence of so-called 'battery operated boyfriends', electricity is seldom considered a sex aid in and of itself . . .

(WARNING: Probably not safe for work!)

Peter

Chicago again

A few days ago I asked 'Has Chicago become too dangerous to visit?'  It looks as if others have been picking up on developments there too.  I don't normally read WND (formerly known as World Net Daily) as its articles are sometimes polemic rather than informative in orientation, and aren't always supported by independently verifiable facts.  However, an article titled 'Chicago's Unreported Race War' appears to be based on the same sources of information I used to prepare my own article.  Here's an excerpt.

City officials and the media might be the only two places left where people still deny Chicago is under assault from more than 50 episodes of black mobs attacking, beating, robbing and vandalizing over the last three years in and around downtown. Many of them are on display at YouTube.

Some call it the “Chicago Intifada.”

Over just the last two weeks, black mobs are under investigation in at least five new violent incidents in downtown Chicago.

And according to the award-winning police blog Second City Cop, there may be 25 more incidents of mob violence and lawlessness in that weekend alone that were never reported.

“As someone who worked in downtown Chicago for many years, I am horrified that residents are not only not being protected by the police, but that the city and media are actively denying the public the facts they need to fulfill the most basic of human rights; protecting themselves,” said Michelle Jacobsen. “The police and media have three basic purposes; serve, protect, inform. Their purposely miserable failure is putting lives in danger.”

There's more at the link.

I'm not in the least racist, as regular readers of this blog will have been able to figure out for themselves.  Nevertheless, I have to endorse the article's complaint that few (if any) mainstream sources (particularly official sources) are willing to discuss race as an element of this crime problem.  I can't imagine why - it's a factual reality, after all - but that's the way it is.  Certainly, efforts at crime prevention aimed at any other race group are unlikely to solve the problem!

I suggest that readers do some more research on this subject for themselves, and learn which cities - and which areas within cities - should be avoided at all costs.

Peter

The history of the fork

Slate has a very interesting article on this most basic of eatin' irons - or, at least, what I had thought was the most basic of them.  Turns out it was actually the last to be developed, after the knife and spoon, so it's not so basic after all!  Here's an excerpt.

Perhaps the fork is potent and intriguing because it is surprisingly modern. Humans got along just fine without forks for thousands of years. Which means we are, in a sense, still learning to use this small instrument. And our changing fork habits can reveal our attitudes about big subjects, including religion, masculinity, and foreignness.

The fork is a latecomer to the table. Knives are the descendants of sharpened hand axes—the oldest human tools. It is likely that the first spoons derived from whichever local objects were used to scoop up liquid: The word for spoon in both Latin and Greek derives from a snail shell while the Anglo-Saxon spon means chip. The shape of the fork has been around a lot longer than the eating utensil. In ancient Greece, Poseidon brandished a trident while mortals had large forked tools to pull food out of boiling pots. But the fork didn’t have a place at the Greek table, where people used spoons, knife points, and their hands.

. . .

In the Middle Ages, most people ate off rounds of stale bread called trenchers, which could hold cooked meat and vegetables and which could be brought directly to the mouth; knives and spoons could handle anything else that a hand couldn't. Forks, having journeyed to Italy from Byzantium, arrived in France along with Catherine de Medici, who traveled in 1533 from Italy to France to marry Henry II. The political culture of 16th-century France was riven by sectarian violence, and Catherine, in her role as mother to two child-kings, used massive public festivals to demonstrate the power of the monarchy. Food was part of this strategy of spectacle. Catherine's eating methods, as well as foods as diverse as the artichoke and ice cream, went on display as she toured the country for more than a year in the 1560s, drumming up support from the populace and devising etiquette that forced members of rival factions to eat together at her table.

Steel French forks dating from late 1500's to early 1600's

At this time, most forks were two-pronged, and either hefty enough to hold down a cut of meat (similar to what we would think of today as a carving fork) or so dainty they were used primarily to eat sweets at the end of meals. Forks were used occasionally, but not every day. Montaigne, writing in the 1570s in a passage about the force of habit, mentions forks but says he rarely uses them. And they were still associated with sinister behavior. In an essay in Feeding Desire on the sexual politics of cutlery, Carolin Young notes that in 1605, an anonymous allegorical novel about the courtiers of Henry III portrayed a mysterious island peopled by hermaphrodites, whose behavior is characterized by theatricality, artifice, and falsehood. Sure enough, the hermaphrodites eat with forks, spilling more food than they manage to consume in their pursuit of the new and the unnecessary. Young traces the “unsettlingly effeminate aura” of the fork all the way through 1897, when British sailors are still eating without forks, considering them to be unmanly.

There's more at the link.  Quirkily entertaining!  (And, for those interested, the 'trencher' referred to in the extract above is the root of the term 'trencherman', referring to someone who enjoys his food in abundance.)

Peter

"Why Amazon Can't Make A Kindle In the USA"

That's the title of an article at Forbes by Steve Denning, the first in a series examining the state of the US manufacturing economy.  It was published last year, but I've only just come across it.  Here's an excerpt.

Amazon’s Kindle 2 couldn’t be made in the U.S., even if Amazon wanted to:

• The flex circuit connectors are made in China because the US supplier base migrated to Asia.
• The electrophoretic display is made in Taiwan because the expertise developed from producting flat-panel LCDs migrated to Asia with semiconductor manufacturing.
• The highly polished injection-molded case is made in China because the U.S. supplier base eroded as the manufacture of toys, consumer electronics and computers migrated to China.
• The wireless card is made in South Korea because that country became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets.
• The controller board is made in China because U.S. companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia.
• The Lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook computers.

An exception is Apple, which “has been able to preserve a first-rate design capability in the States so far by remaining deeply involved in the selection of components, in industrial design, in software development, and in the articulation of the concept of its products and how they address users’ needs.”

. . .

The lithium battery for GM’s Chevy Volt is being manufactured in South Korea. Making it in the U.S. wasn’t feasible: rechargeable battery manufacturing left the US long ago.

Some efforts are being made to resurrect rechargeable battery manufacture in the U.S., such as the GE-backed A123Systems, but it’s difficult to go it alone when much of the expertise is now in Asia.

In the same way that cost accounting and short-term corporate profits don’t reflect the true health of corporations, the economists’ reckoning of the impact of outsourcing production overseas misses the point. Americans are left with shipping the goods, selling the goods, marketing the goods. But the country is no longer to compete in the key task of actually making the goods.

Pisano and Shih have a frighteningly long list of industries of industries that are “already lost” to the USA:

• “Fabless chips”;
• compact fluorescent lighting; LCDs for monitors, TVs and handheld devices like mobile phones;
• electrophoretic displays;
• lithium ion, lithium polymer and NiMH batteries;
• advanced rechargeable batteries for hybrid vehicles;
• crystalline and polycrystalline silicon solar cells, inverters and power semiconductors for solar panels;
• desktop, notebook and netbook PCs;
• low-end servers;
• hard-disk drives;
• consumer networking gear such as routers, access points, and home set-top boxes;
• advanced composite used in sporting goods and other consumer gear;
• advanced ceramics and integrated circuit packaging.

There's more at the link, including links to the rest of the articles in the series (scroll down at the linked article to find them).  Highly recommended reading.

Peter

Blogging and writing

Many thanks to everyone who's commented at my post last night about 'Re-evaluating this blog'.  I appreciate all the input, and I'm going through it and assessing the blog in the light of what you've had to say.

While I'm doing that, a number of you made enthusiastic noises about wanting to read my fiction.  Well, OK then!  I've gone back to my 'Books Under Construction' blog (which had been dormant since posting the last writing effort there more than a year ago) and cleaned it out.  You'll now find there an update on my writing, plus the first chapter of the first of two military science fiction novels I'm working on right now.  I'll post fresh chapters every week or two, to give you a foretaste of what's coming up soon.  Please leave comments there about whether or not you like it, anything that you think could be improved, and so on.  I'm still learning!

Thanks again for all the feedback.  Watch this space for more developments soon!

Peter

I wanna play!

I think that's what this dog is indicating, anyway!

Peter

What produced that grin?

If you want to know what plastered this grin all over this face:

click over to Miss D.'s place and let her tell you about it.  Talk about aviation overload!



Peter

Re-evaluating this blog

I enjoy blogging, but lately I've been thinking about what I'm doing here.  I'd like to ask for your help, dear readers, in re-evaluating this blog and finding a better way forward.

My initial idea back in 2008 was to share ideas, articles and items that I found interesting, intriguing or funny, in the hope that others would enjoy them as well.  Clearly that's worked pretty well, as several thousand page views each day illustrate;  but page views alone aren't everything.  For example, I used to produce a lot more in-depth articles on subjects that interested me (see my Weekend Wings and Weekend Warships series listed in the sidebar, and my articles on firearms and self-defense).  As other activities have grown (including writing in other forms), those have become much less frequent - and that's less fun for me.  Furthermore, I'd like to share some of my other writing with you, both in fiction and in non-fiction.  As I get closer to publishing a few books, I'd like to share them with my readers here and ask for your feedback.  In due course, as the books come out, I'll ask you to help me publicize them to other potential readers.

As an initial step, I'm thinking of cutting back on the number of blog articles that merely reference other news sources.  I won't eliminate them altogether - I enjoy the Doofus of the Day series, for example, and I think many of you do too.  However, it's clear that some topics of abiding interest to me, such as economics, aren't necessarily what many readers enjoy.

Here's what I have in mind.  I'll cut back to two blog articles each day, perhaps three.  One might reference another news article or source;  one might discuss something I'm doing, or that those important to me are doing;  and one might look at an issue or topic in more-than-passing depth, or embed a video clip just for the fun of it.  In addition, I'll try to work on a longer article for half an hour to an hour each day as well.  That will allow me to produce one or two of them each month, which I hope will be more interesting for all of us.  I'll also scale back on subjects that have demonstrably led to less reader interaction, such as economics, because it seems many people simply don't want to read a constant diet of bad news in that area (or any other, for that matter).  Finally, I'll work towards producing more articles about writing and publishing (both my own work, and in general), with a view to helping readers interested in those areas.  If I can emulate John Scalzi and parlay an existing Web presence into publishing success, I'll be a very happy man!  (All I have to do now is match the quality of his work, which is far more easily said than done . . . )

What say you, friends?  Any thoughts from your side on how this blog can be further improved?  I'd love to hear your reactions and suggestions in Comments, please - the more, the merrier!  (If you want to write at greater length, my e-mail address is in my blog profile - click the link in the sidebar.)  Tell me what you think about this blog in its present form, and about my proposals above.  I haven't finalized my ideas yet, and I won't until I've heard from as many of you as possible and taken your views into account.  (After all, in one sense this blog is as much yours as mine!  It wouldn't exist without its readers.)

Thanks in advance for your input.

Peter

BASE jumping off Baffin Island

We've looked at BASE jumping and wingsuit flying on several previous occasions.  Here's an older video clip that I've only just discovered, showing two adventurous types jumping off the cliffs of Baffin Island in northern Canada, above the Arctic Circle.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:  you couldn't pay me enough to get me to do that, let alone do it voluntarily!





Peter

"We should thank God that such men lived"

The title of this post is taken from a well-known quotation by General George S. Patton.  It expresses my sentiments when I read about an upcoming auction sale of the medals of Group Captain Mike Stephens of World War II fame.  The Telegraph reports:

Squadron Leader Mike Stephens was climbing out of his burning Hurricane high above the Western Desert. He had been injured in both feet and much of his fighter’s engine and half the cockpit had been shot away by an enemy aircraft.

But when the Luftwaffe pilot who had attacked him flew past, Stephens climbed back into his plane and shot the enemy Messerschmitt down.

It was only then that he jumped to safety, and by that stage he was on fire himself. He beat the flames out as he parachuted to the ground, landing just 300 yards from the German front line. He hobbled towards friendly lines in the Western Desert before being picked up by Polish troops.

Stephens was awarded a Distinguished Service Order for his heroics. He was just 22 years old.

The action, in December 1941, over Acroma, Libya, was one of many acts of bravery carried out by the “ace” who shot down an estimated 22 enemy aircraft during the war.

As well as the DSO, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross with two bars.

His medals, as well as other mementoes including his log book, photographs and a flying helmet with oxygen mask are being sold by his son, and are expected to sell for £50,000 at the Dix Noonan Webb saleroom in Mayfair, London, on June 27-28.

Stephens, who went on to become a group captain, holds a special place in wartime aviation because he was admitted to three informal “clubs” for RAF pilots.

They were the Caterpillar Club, for those who bailed out with a parachute; the Goldfish Club, for those who bailed out into water; and the Flying Boot Club, for those who came down in the desert and had to walk to friendly lines.

David Erskine-Hill, of Dix Noonan Webb, said: “The remarkable wartime career of Mike Stephens epitomises the sustained gallantry displayed by the young pilots of Fighter Command.

It was a career encompassing several hundred combat sorties and the award of four decorations for gallantry – only 15 airmen received the combination of a DSO and DFC with 2 Bars in the 1939-45 war.”

There's more at the link, including a photograph of his impressive collection of medals (his British awards for valor in action are equivalent to the US awards of one Air Force Cross and three Silver Stars).  More details of Group Captain Stephens' life may be found in his obituary.

He was a man of remarkable courage.  I think General Patton's words make a fitting epitaph for such as he.

Peter

More about derivatives

I mentioned the danger posed by derivatives to the world financial system in an article a couple of weeks ago.  I've since had a few e-mails from people asking how the problem affects the USA specifically, and the extent of our banks' exposure to this problem.  The answer is, they're at grave risk from it - perhaps so grave that no recovery is possible, absent a miracle.

The nine largest banks' exposure totals almost $229 trillion.  Here's a graphic representation of the size of the problem, courtesy of Demonocracy.  Each of the towers at either side of the image represents a stack of $100 bills totaling $1 trillion.

Note the little man standing in front of the white house. The little worm next to the last football field is a truck with $2 billion dollars. There is no government in the world that has this kind of money. This is roughly 3 times the entire world economy.

There's much more at the link.  I highly recommend scrolling through Demonocracy's graphic portrayal of the derivative crisis.  Further information may be found in two articles at the Economic Collapse Blog, which are also worth careful study.

Peter

Doofus Of The Day #609

Today's award goes to a group of animal rights activists in Beijing, China.

Thousands of snakes released into the wild by animal rights campaigners in the Chinese capital Beijing have been slaughtered by terrified villagers who were invaded by the serpents.

The reptiles had been rescued from food markets in the city where they would have been skinned, chopped and put in cooking pots.

But instead of a long life in the wild, most of the beasts were beaten to death by terrified villagers around the city suburbs after being released from their cages.

"They were everywhere. Instead of releasing one or two at a time, the fools let them go all in one place," said one villager.

Not the most successful release operation, was it?





Peter

The end of a military-industrial era

From England comes the news of the closure of the final factory in the former Armstrong Whitworth manufacturing and munitions empire, established in the mid-19th century.  It had several links to very important international events, including the American Civil War.  The Telegraph reports:

For more than 100 years the factories perched on a narrow strip of land between Scotswood Road and the river at Elswick helped arm the world, made Tyneside a powerful engineering workshop and gave William Armstrong (1810-1900) a unique place among the generation of industrialists and philanthropists who made Britain the workshop of the world.

The first Lord Armstrong developed a business that was arguably the world’s first global defence company. He left the law to build cranes, branched into bridge building then moved into armaments.

The Armstrong half that became Vickers Armstrong produced the world’s first breech-loading gun for the war in Crimea, armed both sides in the US civil war, gave Japan the cruisers that defeated the Russian navy in 1905 and made huge contributions to the British effort in both World Wars.

Armstrong 12-pounder breech-loading cannon of 1859 (image courtesy of Wikipedia)

The Armstrong business era stretched from 1847 until his death in 1900 but the Elswick and Scotswood factories continued to produce weapons of war until 1982 and what was “Armstrong’s works”, celebrated in Blaydon Races, the Geordies’ national anthem, was left as the country’s biggest and last remaining maker of armoured vehicles.

. . .

As a man, Armstrong typified the Victorian entrepreneur with a mixture of commitment, endeavour and enterprise. However, there was nothing charismatic about the young Armstrong, son of a corn merchant who became mayor of Newcastle and wanted his offspring to be content with a legal career. Instead there was an engineer and scientific curiosity hidden behind the reserved facade of a man who was refused insurance as a child because he was regarded as too frail.

Watching a waterwheel led him to design a water-powered rotary engine and then a piston version when his initial technology failed to excite.

Then it was on to the hydraulic crane, the end of his legal career and buying 5.5 acres of land at Elswick to start W.G. Armstrong & Company and build an average of 100 cranes a year until his death. Armaments were added to the portfolio in 1854 after the inquisitive Armstrong, hearing about the plight of British soldiers dragging heavy field guns around the Crimea, invented the breech-loading gun.

The design set him on his way to become the “great gun-maker” in George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. He surrendered the patent to the Government in return for a knighthood, added naval guns and warships to the portfolio and had royalty beating a path to his door. Visitors to his Cragside estate included the Shah of Persia, the King of Siam, the Prince and Princess of Wales and the prime minister of China.

Turrets and 12-inch Mark IX cannon for the battleship HMS Cornwallis
under construction in the gun shop at Armstrong's works, 1902-03
(image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Armstrong was never a dominating personality but a shrewd judge of people. He assembled a team of skilled engineers from the boardroom to the shop floor. Andrew Noble and George Rendel, the designer of the cruiser, were among the best in a workforce who benefited from Armstrong’s largesse in providing schools and leisure facilities but harboured resentment when he led the opposition to cutting engineers’ working week.

He faced criticism for supplying both sides in the American civil war but had Ulysses S Grant, wartime leader and president, visit during a world tour.

There's more at the link.

The name of Lord Armstrong was one to conjure with in the 19th and early 20th centuries, along with those of Krupp, Maxim, Nobel and other magnates of munitions.  The closing of the last factory associated with him will doubtless be of interest to many military historians.

Peter

Oh noes! Crusader tomatoes!

A tip o' the hat to reader D. M. for forwarding the link to this article.  The 'NOW Lebanon' blog reports:

A Salafist group called the Popular Egyptian Islamic Association has come under fire after sending out a warning on Facebook urging its followers not to eat tomatoes because the vegetable (or fruit) is a Christian food.

The group posted a photo on its page of a tomato - which appears to reveal the shape of a cross after being cut in half – along with the message: “Eating tomatoes is forbidden because they are Christian. [The tomato] praises the cross instead of Allah and says that Allah is three (a reference to the Trinity).

[God help us]. I implore you to spread this photo because there is a sister from Palestine who saw the prophet of Allah [Mohammad] in a vision and he was crying, warning his nation against eating them [tomatoes]. If you don’t spread this [message], know that it is the devil who stopped you.”

There's more at the link.

Next up:  warnings from Hindu fundamentalists that Hindus should not eat beefsteak tomatoes for fear of offending sacred cows!





Peter

I guess that's one way to do it!

I always thought that falling off one's motorcycle in the middle of a race meant that one's race was over.  Apparently I was wrong.

Er . . . OK, I guess!



Peter

A new vision for higher education?

We've spoken before about the growing 'democratization' of education, particularly with the advent of Internet-based courses.  In a wide-ranging interview with Google Fellow and Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun, the Wall Street Journal examines (amongst other things) his perspective on the future of education.

Frustrated that his (and fellow Googler Peter Norvig's) Stanford artificial intelligence class only reached 200 students, they put up a website offering an online version. They got few takers. Then he mentioned the online course at a conference with 80 attendees and 80 people signed up. On a Friday, he sent an offer to the mailing list of a top AI association. On Saturday morning he had 3,000 sign-ups—by Monday morning, 14,000.

In the midst of this, there was a slight hitch, Mr. Thrun says. "I had forgotten to tell Stanford about it. There was my authority problem. Stanford said 'If you give the same exams and the same certificate of completion [as Stanford does], then you are really messing with what certificates really are. People are going to go out with the certificates and ask for admission [at the university] and how do we even know who they really are?' And I said: I. Don't. Care."

In the end, there were 160,000 people signed up, from every country in the world, he says, except North Korea. Rather than tape boring lectures, the professors asked students to solve problems and then the next course video would discuss solutions. Mr. Thrun broke the rules again. Twenty-three thousand people finished the course. Of his 200 Stanford students, 30 attended lectures and the other 170 took it online. The top 410 performers on exams were online students. The first Stanford student was No. 411.

Mr. Thrun's cost was basically $1 per student per class. That's on the order of 1,000 times less per pupil than for a K-12 or a college education—way more than the rule of thumb in Silicon Valley that you need a 10 times cost advantage to drive change.

So Mr. Thrun set up a company, Udacity, that joins many other companies attacking the problem of how to deliver the optimal online education. "What I see is democratizing education will change everything," he says. "I have an unbelievable passion about this. We will reach students that have never been reached. I can give my love of learning to other people. I've stumbled into the most amazing Wonderland. I've taken the red pill and seen how deep Wonderland is."

"But Wonderland is also crazy!" I interrupt.

"So?"

Ah, another Thrun project that can radically disrupt the old way of doing things. "But isn't that exactly what we should be doing? I'm going part-time at Google to pursue this. I really care. Isn't this the American history? Can't you pinpoint almost everything that happened back to some technological breakthrough?" Indeed, this is going to disrupt public schools and teachers unions and universities and tenured professors and so on, Mr. Thrun effectively interjects: "The dialogue always focuses on what's going to happen to the institutions. I'm totally siding with the students."

There's more at the link.  Very interesting and highly recommended reading.

I wish Prof. Thrun every success with his project, as I do all those who are experimenting in the same field.  (You'll find an excellent article with more information on the subject over at Al Fin, if you're interested.)

Peter

Banking: the old is new again - and popular!

I was surprised - and amused - to see that an old-fashioned method of banking is making a comeback in England.  The Telegraph reports:

Yorkshire Building Society's 'back to the future' passbook account has become it's most popular savings offering since its launch twelve months ago, despite offering no internet access and requiring people to bank in their local branches.

Almost three times as many people are opening these accounts, which pay 2.25pc, than any other Yorkshire Account, the mutual said, proving that the old-fashioned passbook is still popular in today's world.

Research by Yorkshire Building Society found more than three in five customers preferred the traditional branch network as their main method of managing their savings, most frequently citing customer service and convenience as the reasons for this choice.

More than half the Yorkshire's customers preferred to use a passbook to keep track of transactions on their account and almost 70pc of those surveyed favoured a branch-based account with a competitive variable rate.

. . .

The passbook has a long and noble history. They appeared in the 18th century, putting financial information into the customers' hands for the first time. Before that, all banking transactions were recorded only by the bank itself, so that customers had no history of their own deposits and withdrawals.

UK Post Office savings account passbook (image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Previously, customers' transactions were only kept in huge leather-bound ledgers at the bank, where they would occasionally be allowed to see what was recorded under their name and would be required to sign it. The passbook, which was around the size of a passport, ensured that customers had control over their own information, and was called a "passbook" because it regularly passed between the bank and the account holder for updating.

There's more at the link.

I began banking with a passbook (or simply a 'bank book', as we called them in South Africa) several decades ago, and continued to use one well into the 1980's.  It's something of a shock to realize that those born after about 1980 have probably never used one - in fact, they may never even have seen one!  It amuses me to see them making a comeback.

(Of course, a passbook account has one very significant security advantage - one can't make withdrawals or transfers electronically.  That means no-one can gain access to an Internet banking facility and empty your account illegally.  In today's world, that's no mean advantage!)

Peter