Hitting the random article button at Wikipedia can often yield very interesting results.
A launch loop or Lofstrom loop is a design for a belt based maglev orbital launch system that would be around 2,000 km (1,240 mi) long and maintained at an altitude of up to 80 km (50 mi). A launch loop would be held up at this altitude by momentum of the belt as it circulates around the structure, in effect it transfers the weight of the structure onto magnetic bearings at each end which support it.
CBS News’ 60 Minutes interviews George Piro an FBI agent who had been assigned to interrogate Saddam Hussein upon his capture.
Piro reveals that the Iraqi dictator miscalculated the threat that the US posed to his regime.
Saddam Hussein initially didn’t think the U.S. would invade Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, so he kept the fact that he had none a secret to prevent an Iranian invasion he believed could happen. The Iraqi dictator revealed this thinking to George Piro, the FBI agent assigned to interrogate him after his capture.
I have to say that this comes as no shock to me. Saddam believed he was playing a regional game by feeding disinformation to Iran unaware that his game would backfire on the world stage with a US President needing a victory for propaganda purposes having failed to capture Osama Bin Laden.
It seems that both Saddam Hussein and the Western leaders that took us to war had failed to heed the words of Sun Tzu to “Know your enemy”.
Or as the Japanese learned following their attack on Pearl Harbour “Never underestimate the United States willingness to go to war”.
The nominees for the 80th Academy Awards have been announced.
I’m annoyed but not really surprised that Atonement has received so many (seven) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford so few (two).
And that Elizabeth: The Golden Age got any at all is astonishing, although Best Costume Design probably is a given because being a period drama about a monarch there’s bound to be lavish costumes.
In this special interview Rick Falkvinge, the founder and the leader of Swedish Pirate Party, gives his own views on the wildly heated political filesharing debate in Sweden, evaluates the political and technological prospects of P2P and talks about the dangers of citizen surveillance and Big Brother society. “Our enemy has no intellectual capital to bring to the battle”
White Dwarf is basically three games in one involving moving with your mouse a small white circle which exerts a gravitational like pull on other coloured circles which cross the gameboard.
I think the most fun play mode is Original in which you have to collect the green circles and then touch a blue circle to bank the points you’ve accumulated all whilst avoiding the red circles.
If that description makes little sense I urge you to go play it and you’ll soon pick up the knack of it.
My best score so far 15590
Best score on the Avoid mode is around 56 million!
Bruce Schneier recommends reading National Security for the Twenty-First Century by Charlie Edwards of the think tank Demos.
Or as it is more officially known The King William’s College General Knowledge Paper 2007-8.
It’s that time of year again when the obscenely difficult General Knowledge Paper is given to the students of King William’s College on the Isle of Man.
As I write this I imagine Manx families having enjoyed their Christmas dinners are now sitting around a table (or more likely Google on a PC) discussing possible answers to the questions.
I’m unsure whether or not I should post the answers here that I know or not as I may unfairly skew the competition amongst the students. But as Metafilter already has done so and they are far more likely to be near the top of the Google hits I shall do so.
1.9 During the year 1907: whose return for 1st June was 31.1 – 14 – 48 – 17? Don’t know but this is clearly a cricket question.
2.9 Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
2.10 Greyfriars. Billy Bunter.
3.1 William Henry Ireland. Forger of a play that was supposedly written by William Shakespeare.
3.3 Don’t know but the question I’m sure is about Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald and the October 1924 General Election. Edit: The Zinoviev Letter
3.4 The Hitler Diaries created by Konrad Kujau.
I’d surmise that section 3 concerns forgers.
4.1 Rorke’s Drift. Zulu is one of my all time favourite films so I couldn’t fail to answer this one.
4.3 Chaka. Zulu King.
5.2 Jim Laker in 1956. The test match England v Australia at Old Trafford.
6.2 Vyacheslav Molotov
6.3 Anton Chekhov
6.8 Dmitri Mendeleev
6.9 Yuri Gagarin (I’m guessing it’s him given the Russian theme and the name Glenn suggest John Glenn the Astronaut)
6.10 Ivan Pavlov
8.2 Captain Hook, from J M Barrie’s Peter Pan.
11.1 Hole in the heart.
11.3 Kind Hearts and Coronets. With Alec Guinness playing the parts of all eight D’Ascoynes in the film.
11.5 Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
11.9 Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland.
13.1 Sergeant Pepper
14.1 Dean Martin
17.1 Paddington. Bear and railway.
17.5 The location of Cleopatra’s Needle (that being the name of an Obelisk in London) I’m guessing.
Population is unknown in Lagos but is well above 10 million and there is roughly 6000 new arrivals every day!
Third World megalopoleis like this will likely be home to a large proportion of the world’s population in this century.
The Megacity: Decoding the chaos of Lagos by George Packer.
I’ve some notes on this essay by Stephen Fry on Americans lively dinner conversation and global warming.
Jim has deliberately chosen his position due to his own undeclared conflict of interest and his point that many scientists dispute global warming is a common fallacy by people like him. It’s far more complicated than that it really isn’t a debate where there are two sides for climatologist to put themselves, there is dispute over whether it is a natural cycle, what effect global warming will have, whether or not human influence is quantifiable, issues over the fact that warming is uneven across the globe.
Fry’s position of a kind of Pascal wager is I believe the correct one because even if global warming turns out not to be a problem the steps we need to take to tackle it are ones human civilisation needs to make at some point in any case.
Fossil fuels are going to run out (actually I believe that they won’t but that we will cease to use them at some point) and so in order for us to progress as a race we need to move into a post-fossil fuel society.
Wired has some theories about what technologies we’ll be using sooner than later in the place of fossil fuels.
We’ll probably end up moving towards using ethanol or similar produced from corn to power our transportation but this will not be a solution to global warming because of the continued Carbon Dioxide release.
Some research is being done into synthetic biology to create enzymes that can produce even better products than biobutanol to replace petrol entirely and perhaps even offer a performance improvement over gasoline.
But power generation will definitely move away from generating CO2 as sustainable power generation technologies improve they become more viable and more economical than building huge coal fired power stations. We will at some point in the mid 21st century start to see Nuclear fusion power stations come online but until then it makes sense to continue to build fission based stations and the technology has improved greatly in that area also so that the modern stations are far better and safer than those in use in the US and UK currently.