Real diversity
A North Carolina TV station does an interesting feature on local Sovereign Citizens. Caught me by surprise; after the intro I was expecting the "usual" set of white boys, but this group turns out to be all black, with El in their names. Apparently an offshoot of Elijah Muhammad's Black Muslims. Aside from that, their beliefs and actions are identical to the white version of Sovereigns.

They strike me as old-fashioned pre-1918 Americans, polite and firmly civilized, accustomed to a non-Soviet government, who suddenly find themselves transported to 2013. (Like Rip van Wink-El.) And they're doing what old-fashioned pre-Soviet Americans would do in that situation. They're trying to obstruct and hinder the tyrants.

Well now. The vicious bigoted hate group which absurdly names itself the "Southern" "Poverty" "Law" Center has been focusing ferociously on the Sovereign Citizens movement for a long time. Let's see if they've taken note of these Sovereign Citizens. The "S" "P" "L" C blog has a tag for Sovereigns. Let's scan through it ... Nope! I don't see any of those El names among the Sovereigns they hate. All the pictures are caucasians, for Some Mysterious Fucking Reason.

Hmm. Who's the racist here? Surprise surprise surprise surprise surprise! The "S" "P" "L" C hate group is the bigot, treating Sovereigns as a racial classification. The Sovereign movement is truly diverse in the best old-fashioned sense of the word.
  ¶ 3:54 AM

  "New technology"?
Science writers seem to be broadly ignorant in areas of acoustics and language. I suppose they're equally ignorant in other areas, but I happen to know something about acoustics and language. (Of course their problem in areas like "global warming" or "diversity" or "economics" is NOT mere ignorance; it's raw Satanic murderous genocidal EVIL.)

Couple of nicely parallel examples in this week's science items.

(1) "New technology" finally enables the Smithsonian to read some old wax records made by Bell in 1885.

Nothing new about the technology! Since the 1930's, movie projectors have used a focused light and a photocell to read sound tracks on film. This could have been adapted quite easily to read old wax discs without touching them. Apparently nobody thought of doing it.

Even better, Bell himself was working on a light-based technique in 1885, at the same time when he made those wax records. His Photophone directed a focused beam of light at a diaphragm moved by sound waves, and sent the varying reflected light through a tube to a distant receiver. At the receiver, the varying light modulated current flow through a selenium photocell to create a current that could drive an earphone. It's truly strange that he didn't think to use this for reading a sound record. Just replace the diaphragm with the disc.

(2) "New technology" finally enables dialect researchers to track the changes in Philly's strange dialect.

"Certain changes have continued in the same direction over 100 years and everybody's doing it," said Bill Labov, who has studied the Philadelphia accent since 1971 and recorded hundreds of native speakers born between 1888 and 1992 and living in dozens of neighborhoods. ... Technological advances have allowed Labov and his colleagues to turn their decades of field recordings into voice spectrographs — computer-generated visualizations of the human voice like an EKG — to track speech variations over time. Regional dialects are cemented by adolescence, so a recording of a 75-year-old Philadelphian made in 1982, for example, should provide a snapshot of what people sounded like around 1925.

Pleasantly surprised to hear that Labov is still working. I've been familiar with his work since the '70s, and sort of assumed he'd be retired or dead by now. But there's absolutely nothing new about sound spectrographs. Bell Labs (hmm, sounds familiar) developed the technique in the late '40s, and Kay brought it to market in 1950. It's been used intensely by speech researchers ever since. The original was a complex and smelly mechanical device, but it's been all software since 1980.

= = = = =

[On the latter item, I'm speaking from directly relevant experience... Working at Penn State in the late '80s, I operated one of those smelly old Kay spectrograph machines for researchers who were analyzing Philly dialects.]  ¶ 5:27 AM

  A sort of door
Following on this. It's clear that the British approach to housing is drastically different from the American. We don't have nearly as many deaths from cold weather, even though we have more poverty and a whole lot more cold weather. When temperatures get just below freezing, Britain falls apart. Pipes burst and houses can't be heated. Most American housing, even in older cities, can stand 10F before systems start to fail.

While perusing an 1898 Meteorological Magazine, I encountered a stark word-picture of the difference in attitude in this account of a tornado in Este's Park.



Aside from the peculiar misspelling, note the Martian-style unfamiliarity with screen doors, which were perfectly common in America. "The outer door (a sort of door with wire gauze instead of panel) was ripped off its hinges, and is a mass of splinters."

The concept of protecting a house from bugs or weather doesn't seem to be part of the British mindset.
  ¶ 3:27 AM

  Hope that's not accurate
Weather bureau is predicting a big wind event today. As I woke up, still no big wind. I checked the Wunderground map to see if I could spot it approaching. Along the Cascade crest, one of their little 'key' symbols seemed to have a LOT of flags on it, so I clicked on it.....



The NaN at the bottom probably indicates the instruments are out of whack. I hope so! 223 mph is a good brisk breeze.

Later in the day: Well, it got windy, but not as windy as they were predicting. Seems to be a pattern in the last two or three years. The weather bureau does a good job of predicting generally windy versus generally calm, but their use of the Wind Advisory is uncorrelated with the most serious wind. Days with tree-toppling wind often have no Advisory, while days with a Wind Advisory are often just breezy.
  ¶ 3:02 AM

  Good point, weird metaphor
Britain's minister for welfare is proposing a strange sort of voluntary means-testing for pension benefits:

Iain Duncan Smith says he “would encourage” elderly people who can well afford to pay for their their own heating bills, bus passes and television licences to return the money to the state.

Sounds appropriate. We don't have those benefits here, and I can't see why you'd want them in the first place. (The heating allowance has clearly created a Moral Hazard situation. It removed the pressure to insulate houses properly, and allowed the Carbon Cult to jack up energy prices without limits because the old folks were supposedly 'protected'.)

He makes another good point, but again overly kind and gentle:

In the interview, the Work and Pensions Secretary also hit out at the BBC over its coverage of his major welfare reforms, including the way the corporation has reported ministers’ moves to remove extra benefit payments for households with bedrooms which are not being used.

“We’ve had a lot of moments with the BBC,” Mr Duncan Smith says, while accusing the corporation of “misrepresenting” the reforms. “They have always tended to to look at the welfare reforms from the jar that is marked, and it’s a very leftist jar, 'less money bad, more money good’. So if you are reducing welfare you must be doing something rather nasty.”

Looking from a jar? Weird.

You don't need any metaphor to describe BBC. Objectively and precisely, BBC is Satan. That's all.
  ¶ 3:11 AM

  Small move toward sanity?
Sounds like federal wildlife officials are moving away from bizarre anti-science anti-Darwin "endangered species" shit, and moving back toward a more normal and scientific approach to managing critters.

A draft U.S. Department of Interior rule says roughly 5,000 wolves in the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes are enough to prevent the species' extinction.

It says having gray wolves elsewhere - such as the West Coast, parts of New England and the Southern Rockies - is unnecessary for their survival.

The rule would give control of wolves to state wildlife agencies, which wildlife advocates warn could effectively halt the species' expansion.

I don't know if this marks a broader change of attitude, but at least in this one case Interior has returned to the actual meaning of 'species'. Until now, the ESA defined any little population in any little location as a 'species', even when the same animal was wildly abundant elsewhere.

Until now, the feds were explicitly committed to wiping out humanity. This marks their first hesitant reversal from total genocide.
  ¶ 4:42 AM

  Ethical sharks
I was unimpressed when the Anglican Faghouse appointed Miss Justin Welby as its chief pixie. Now I'm way beyond unimpressed.

The Archbishop, a former oil industry executive and now a member of the cross-party Banking Standards Commission, said “serious consideration” should be given to forming a professional banking body, along the lines of the General Medical Council, the enforce standards.

He said: “Banks are incredibly complicated things. The idea that people can hold hugely responsible positions in them without any kind of formal training seems to a number of us quite surprising.”

....said it was time for bankers to be required to pass exams in order to raise their professional standards and help restore public trust in their work.

Good, Missy Welby. And while we're at it, let's give sharks ethical training. Then we can place the sharks in swimming pools where they will replace lifeguards.

Unfortunately this sort of spineless idiocy is a universal product of Christianity. Though JC himself had no patience with bankers, his followers have gone along with the Marxist notion that all humans are indistinguishable inorganic particles, equally capable of following "standards" if properly trained.
  ¶ 3:50 AM

  He stopped loving her today


Trite title, but simply unavoidable.

In 1977 I worked the desk at Sooner Inn, a truckers and tramps motel in OKC. The motel had a bar just off the main lobby, and the bar had a jukebox that played only George Jones. I suppose there were other records, but they never** got played. Why bother when you've got Jones?

The eponymous song hit a deep resonance because its truth countered toxic mass-culture feminist lies. Femistalinists tell us that males are faithless tomcats. Nope, backwards. Some people mate for life like swans, others are always ready to shop around when the current brand gets boring. Most males are swans, most females are shoppers.

= = = = =

** Well, I lied for the sake of a clear point. In fact exactly one non-Jones song was played constantly. Despite hearing it thousands of times, it's still my favorite country number.... Heaven's just a sin away, by the Kendalls.
  ¶ 1:21 AM

  Lectuahs and The Operaaaaah, 2
When I wrote this a few days ago, I thought I was stretching things for parody:

Futurists always see new technologies serving Serious and Uplifting and Goddamn Nosy Busybody purposes. They never foresee that most people want plain old entertainment most of the time. As radio and television and computers started to appear on the horizon, futurists couldn't see that radio would be built by Amos & Andy, television would be built by pro wrestling, and the Web would be built by porn. No, each of those technologies would only serve to Regale The Benighted Mawwsses with The Operaaaaah, The Ballettt, The Theataaaaah, and Lectuaaaahs Upon Pseudo-non-dimorphic Leitmotifs In Pintaaaahhhh And Shakespeaaaahhh. And naturally each new tech would End War By Facilitating Communication Between Conflicting Ethnies.

Nope, not a stretch. Here's David Sarnoff in 1922, writing in Electrical World:



Sarnoff's technical prophecies were really an advertisement for coming attractions, since he knew what his engineers were working on. And NBC made a genuine long-lasting effort to provide those Lectures and Operas. But the people wanted a lower type of entertainment, so ultimately even NBC gave in.

Another item from the same source verifies a point I've made often. Did Lincoln free the slaves?



Nope. FDR freed the slaves, with help from Henry Ford.
  ¶ 5:12 PM

  The dreaded "Ninth Order"
Several news items about the Wash Legislature mention that the Senate may have to resort to a "rare parliamentary tactic" known as the Ninth Order. This wasn't elucidated or explained in the news items. It sounded so medieval and threatening that I wanted to find out more. Is it like Room 101? A secret fraternal society like Opus Dei or Knights Templar? The Ninth Circle of Hell?

It's not part of Robert's Rules. All Google refs to the phrase in a parliamentary context come right back to the Wash Senate, still without explanation.

So I searched the Wash Legislature webpage and located it under Senate Resolution 8601, defining the Senate Rules:



Most of those Orders don't really happen anyway; legislative sessions are rapid-fire sequences of push-button votes, with constantly repeated mentions of phrases like first reading, second reading and third reading. The Orders are slurred-over filler verbiage like an auctioneer's WholllllgimmeTenTenTenLevenLevenLeven and DoIHearFiveFiveFive.
(Watch a typical recent example)

Even so, the Orders apparently have a meaning in the bizarre minds of the senators. And in those bizarre minds, introducing a bill during "presentation of motions" is drastic and unusual. That's as far as I can take it. Still don't know why this particular bill has to be placed into the dreaded Ninth Order.
  ¶ 3:52 AM

  Bunch of pixies!
I hadn't paid much attention to Salinger. Among that generation of writers, I read Updike, Steinbeck and Percy intensely and thoroughly, but didn't find others highly interesting.

Now I've gained a lot more respect for Salinger. UK Guardian covers a new trove of letters Salinger wrote when he was starting his career. He had just been accepted by the New Yorker.....

"God and Harold Ross alone know what that bunch of pixies on the staff are doing with my poor script."

Bunch of pixies! Perfect.

The odd thing is that everyone except Ross knew the New Yorker writers were a bunch of pixies. Ross had an antique countrified view of amorphodites as a sort of rare semi-mythical creature. He was convinced he had never encountered one, even while he employed a dozen of them.
  ¶ 11:50 AM

  Truly amazing
On the investigation of the supposed 'ricin letters', the FBI started out in default form.

= = = = =

Post-1989 FBI operating system:

All crimes are committed by Klansmen.

If a crime happens, find the nearest Klansman in pointy robe.

If you can't find a Klansman in pointy robe, find the nearest beefy pasty white Southerner.

If you can't find him, find the nearest white Christian.

= = = = =

On this event, their first suspect was bog-standard: an Elvis impersonator. Simply perfect stereotypical Southerner, As Seen On TV.

But after arresting him, they did something absolutely UNPRECEDENTED. They RELEASED HIM and stated explicitly that he is NOT THE SUSPECT.

This violates every rule in the Persecuting Attorney's Handbook, not just the FBI Handbook! No persecuting attorney ever fully releases a suspect. Never never never never never NEVER admit error! Even if all the evidence immediately points to someone else, even if the first suspect died a century before the crime was committed, the first suspect remains THE REAL CULPRIT until the end of the universe. The evidence is wrong, the jury is wrong, and the judge is wrong.

I'm glad I lived to see this day. It may be a one-off, but it's still a total departure from tyrannical norms in this miserable shit-eating excuse for a former country.
  ¶ 3:24 AM

  Die-Versity kills everything
The Wash state legislature is wasting time and money revising all the state's laws into "gender-free language." It isn't enough that Die-Versity kills people; it must kill logic and language as well.

A few snips from SB 5077:



I suppose I should be thankful that the nastiest aspects of gendperson neutrality have passed. In the early '90s when feminism was at its full menstrual flood tide, oops I mean personsstrual flood tide, oops I mean perdaughtersstrual flood tide, oops I mean perdaughtpersonsstrual flood tide, oops I mean ppdaughtppdaughtstrual flood tide, absolutely nothing was safe. Any set of lettpersons that could possibly represent anything remotely associated with m*les or m*leness had to be dispersontled.

These modern changes are less clumsy, with one exception: OMBUDS. What's the plural? Ombudses? I can't find an example in the document, though the absurd genitive form ombuds's does appear several times.

However, ombudsman doesn't have a proper plural anyway. Ombudsmen doesn't feel correct, and we didn't borrow the Swedish plural ombudsmannen.**

Replacing achievement gap by educational opportunity gap is a vastly more toxic species of Die-Versity. The Newthink-logic is clear: We will not acknowledge that blacks and whites get different scores on tests. Those differences are just accidental random artifacts. Only the opportunity differs, and we must waste an infinite amount of money re-adjusting the opportunities to bring achievement to absolute equality, even though we know it won't happen and we won't recognize its existence in the first place.

= = = = =

**Footnote: I just realized that we often borrow foreign plurals from Latin and Greek, but we never borrow plurals from any other source. Grammar freaks inconsistently insist on using the nominative plural for some Latin and Greek words, regardless of the actual case in English. For instance, they want us to say "from these data" instead of "from this data", because data is a plural form in Latin. [If you're truly serious about Latin, you should use the ablative plural "from these datibus."] But the grammaroids never borrow any inflections from other languages, even our close cousins like Swedish.
  ¶ 9:26 AM

  More periodicity
Speaking of periodic patterns.... This morning's news mentions that this spring is the "coldest on record" for wheat-growing regions, after last year's "hottest on record".

It's NCDC time! A little Excel graphing leads to this picture of March temperatures since 1895, from the wheat-growing portions of Kansas. (Mean of Kansas climate divisions 1,2,4,5,7,8, Excel here.)



Been here before, haven't we?

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 4:49 AM

  IRC RIP


Earlier Polistra mused on the consequences of a 'verb-like' economic system.

Catholic and Islamic thinkers saw labor as the key component of value. Islam goes farther, declaring that any attempt to place value on abstract numbers (i.e. paying interest) is a sort of idolatry.

I'm proposing one more step. Treat everything, animate or inanimate, carpenter or car, as activities instead of things. Treat everything as a source of labor. Why is a carpenter worth money? Because he works for you, doing things you can't or won't do. Why is a car worth money? Because it works for you, doing things you can't or won't do.

In fact a verb-like monetary unit has been around for a long time, but it quietly died in the US in January of this year. The International Reply Coupon or IRC is still around in most countries. It is pure verb within a narrow realm. One IRC is guaranteed by all participating countries to represent the base cost of sending an airmail letter to another participating country. This is not the same thing as currency exchanges. You always pay the same for an IRC regardless of which country you send it to; and each country must honor an IRC for its own airmail postage regardless of present postage rates or currency values. The action of sending one airmail is the value of the IRC.

I remember the IRC fondly from my ham radio days. If you wanted a ham in Poland to send you a QSL card verifying your contact, you'd send him a QSL of your own along with a couple of IRCs to compensate him for postage. Companies dealing across borders sometimes used IRCs as a universal currency for small amounts: you might send ten IRCs to purchase a magazine.

If we're ever going to set up a more verbish system, or even a more sane system, post offices would be a good backbone. Most POs ran savings and checking systems, often called Giro. The system disappeared here in 1966, but still works in many countries.
  ¶ 2:59 AM

  Dumber than a termite
The climate wackos have scaled new heights of stupidity. They've beaten termites, ants, and paramecia in a race for minimum intelligence.

Fueled by industrial greenhouse gas emissions, Earth's climate warmed more between 1971 and 2000 than during any other three-decade interval in the last 1,400 years...

Here's what they are saying:

Today's warmth happened before, 1400 years ago.

THEREFORE today's warmth is caused by industrial greenhouse gas emissions.



No sane human would think this way.



Try it out:

I got a paycheck for $600 this week.

I also got a paycheck for $600 last week.

THEREFORE I know that this week's paycheck comes from an entirely different source than last week's paycheck.



Or:

I ate an egg sandwich for lunch today.

I also ate an egg sandwich for lunch yesterday.

THEREFORE I know today's egg sandwich was made in an entirely different way than yesterday's egg sandwich.



Now let's run it down to the termite level.

Last year around this time, the temperature rose to 80 degrees for the first time. We swarmed.

Today the temperature rose to 80 degrees for the first time.

THEREFORE this is not the day to swarm. Instead we should make an egg sandwich.



Of course termites aren't that dumb. Only climate "scientists" are that dumb.

= = = = =

Quitting the analogy and going explicit, here's the basic point: Nature loves cycles. Nature hates straight lines.

When you see a pattern in Nature that looks like a cycle, you should assume the pattern is a cycle.

You should need a big fucking pile of proof to decide otherwise.



For a long time the scientific priesthood has skipped this basic rule. They consistently ignore the obvious and insist on using bizarre loony theories that run counter to all facts and observations.

In this case the priests look at an obviously cyclical pattern of temperature and decide, for no visible or provable reason, that the first part of the pattern is all natural and green and stuff, while the second part of the pattern is completely separate and caused by Evil KKKarbon.



The priesthood has a long record of similar ignorance.

In geology, simple observation led most people to suppose the continents had broken apart from a single land mass. After Wegener pointed this out and showed how it must have happened, the priesthood spent 50 years laughing at him before they finally caught on.

Same mistake with Mars. Schiaparelli saw canals and rivers and assumed they were canals and rivers. The priests spent 200 years laughing at Schiaparelli before they finally caught on.

Same mistake with evolution. For thousands of years people observed plants and animals and assumed that all the species were created 'in the beginning'. The scientific priesthood laughed at this, making the strange and unsupported assumption that species arose separately and gradually. This strange assumption has been running for 150 years, despite zero evidence of species actually arising. The priesthood hasn't caught on yet, but more and more evidence (of the type that priests should understand) is accumulating. Perhaps they may start to understand in another 150 years.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 11:39 AM

  Radio glitches
What's going on here? For about 5 days local radio reception has been interrupted at irregular intervals. The interruptions are probably 1/5 second, about the length of one phoneme in speech. It's not power cuts; I'd notice those in the lights.

Seems to be affecting both of the AM stations I normally use, and all of the NPR-related FM stations. So it's not just one network or one satellite link. Far as I can tell, KXLY is not interrupted when purely in-studio, but was interrupted on a 'location' program. This might point to a local microwave center that serves all the stations?
  ¶ 3:59 AM

  Coulda had a V8?
It's been about one year since I switched my diet away from processed food, back to more home-cooked. Tomatoes have been the centerpiece of this change. After decades of avoiding them, I find that I love the taste in a nearly addictive way. Clearly my body was lacking and needing the good stuff in tomatoes, and now it can't get enough of Vitamin A and C and Lycopene and whatever else is in there. The result has been amazing. Better digestion, much more regular pooping, and measurably better circulation and stamina.

Acting by analogy, I decided to try V8 juice last week. I had tried it many years ago and hated it. Made me gag.

In theory, now that I've learned to love tomatoes, I should also like V8. Right?







Wrong! Still makes me gag. Jesus, that shit is awful!!!

There must be some kind of vegy juice that tastes halfway decent. I have a vague and probably false memory of drinking something that tasted tangy and 'greenish' instead of 'reddish'. More like cucumber than tomato. But I can't find such a product among online opinions and reviews. (Lots of tasty-sounding recipes, but I ain't gonna buy a blender just to satisfy a question about a remembered taste!)

= = = = =

This hard lesson in anticipation vs reality helped me to squash a temptation. For several years I've been lusting after my little house's Pretty Twin. She was built from the same plan in the 1940s, but maintained and remodeled much better over the years. In '08 she was for sale at $120K, which was entirely out of my range. This week she's on the market again, foreclosed at $65K. In theory, I could afford that amount without a mortgage. I could then sell existing house, probably for $30K. Tempting! So I went by and took a close look at Pretty Twin. She's not so pretty up close. Jammed between other houses, needs a new roof, and there's a tall tree almost touching her west [windward] flank. I've spent plenty of money and work removing dangerous trees from existing house, and I'd have to spend more money again on top of the dead loss of $30K.

Temptation gone. As I get older and stiffer I will need to buy a different house at some point; but prettiness can't be the determining factor. What I'll need is a bigger kitchen and bathroom for ease of maintenance. And those are exactly what Pretty Twin doesn't have.

Sticking with the Plain Twin.....

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 5:41 AM

  Крокодил fails
The pseudo-satirical magazine Крокодил, serving the Soviet Establishment loyally as always, has unintentionally failed in its assigned role.

Following FBI reports this morning that the suspects implicated in Monday’s Boston Marathon bombing are of Chechen descent, efforts to thoughtlessly stereotype the alleged terrorists were impeded by the majority of Americans’ lack of basic knowledge about Chechnya or the Chechen people, a new study has confirmed. “Our research shows that, while many Americans would like nothing more than to make sweeping, insensitive generalizations about these two individuals based purely on their ethnic identity, this process is largely impeded by the fact that 9 out of 10 Americans truly know next to nothing about Chechnya, including even the very barest details of what or where Chechnya is...”

I suppose it's meant to be "funny" in the usual Bill Maher way, but this time Крокодил has revealed a truth that runs counter to official Politburo axioms.

All Party Members are required to believe several hundred axiomatic assumptions, all of which are transparently, blatantly and provably false.

The germane axiom here is "Ignorance breeds prejudice."

If the axiom were true, then American ignorance about Chechens would cause us to develop all sorts of damaging bigotry about Chechens, not prevent us from developing biases.

Needless to say, the ACTUAL FUCKING FACT is that familiarity breeds stereotypes, and stereotypes are pretty good generalizations. None of them are 100% true of all members of the group, but then no statement about humans is ever 100% true. We're complex critters, we're all different, and some of our differences are closely aligned with racial and ethnic divisions.
  ¶ 2:57 AM

  Cell phones as seen from 1910
Futurists always see new technologies serving serious and uplifting and goddamn nosy busybody purposes. They never foresee that most people want plain old entertainment most of the time. As radio and television and computers started to appear on the horizon, futurists couldn't see that radio would be built by Amos & Andy, television would be built by pro wrestling, and the Web would be built by porn. No, each of those technologies would only serve to Regale The Benighted Mawwsses with The Operaaaaah, The Ballettt, The Theataaaaah, and Lectuaaaahs Upon Pseudo-non-dimorphic Leitmotifs In Pintaaaahhhh And Shakespeaaaahhh. And naturally each new tech would End War By Facilitating Communication Between Conflicting Ethnies.

Nice example from a Univ of Minnesota engineering journal, 1910:



Note the cellphone at the end: "We might even hint at a day when we can carry around an instrument which will give us a private line to anyone else."

But also note the total absence of entertainment. The 'aerophone' would save people in emergencies and speed business correspondence. That's all.

Especially dumb because Fessenden and others were already broadcasting music and jokes in 1906.

= = = = =

Sidenote 1: We automatically think the Titanic was the first use of wireless to save a ship. Obviously it wasn't. Presumably David Sarnoff created the Titanic legend to serve his own purposes.

= = = = =

Sidenote 2: The futurists weren't wrong about everything.... Radio, TV and the Web have all helped warmakers to propagandize, organize and run wars. "Facilitating communication among conflicting ethnies" is the best of all possible ways to guarantee war. But one recent technology has actually ended one type of war. Satellites with cameras make a massive surprise invasion impossible. Any attempt to build up troops and tanks and ships and planes will be detected by one of the major powers.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age

  ¶ 6:21 AM