Tag: technology

WWII production trivia

MR sent this fascinating explanation of one reason the Allied bombing campaign was a bust with regards to inhibiting German aircraft manufacturing:

When I was in grad school I heard of the origins of CO2/Sodium Silicate core making in Germany during WWII. The fellow said we were bombing factories and foundries.  My dad and later myself were metallurgists, both doing time in the foundry industry before branching out.

Coremaking….. cores make the hollow spaces inside castings, is heat intensive as it was done with oil bonded sands that had to be baked like cookies.  Gas, coal, coke…..and big core ovens. A cupola to melt iron can be made from oil drums and bricks and the molding sands can be mixed with a shovel and rake, but you need ovens for cores.  We couldn’t figure out how the Germans were making castings so soon after we bombed their foundries into the stone age.

After the war we found out that they had invented a core making process that did not need ovens or oil.  Simple sodium silicate and clean sand.  What the foundry men would do was take the coreboxes, the molds for the core..out in the cities and countryside.  They taught the people to mix the silicate and sand and ram up the cores, then set them out in the air.  In a few hours to a day the core would be hard as a rock…literally.  The two halves, or more pieces, would be glued together and be ready to go. They had regular drop off and pick up routes and kept the German foundry industry humming.

Necessity, as is so often the case, proved the mother of invention. Given the dearth of invention in Silicon Valley of late, perhaps we should encourage the North Koreans to bomb the Bay Area.

Uber’s driverless car crashes

That’s not confidence-inspiring:

A self-driving car operated by Uber Technologies Inc. was involved in a crash in Tempe, Arizona, the latest setback for a company reeling from multiple crises.

In a photo posted on Twitter, one of Uber’s Volvo self-driving SUVs is pictured on its side next to another car with dents and smashed windows. An Uber spokeswoman confirmed the incident, and the veracity of the photo, in an email to Bloomberg News.

The spokeswoman could not immediately confirm if there were any injuries, or whether the car was carrying passengers. Uber’s self-driving cars began picking up customers in Arizona last month.

I have to admit, I do not understand the fascination of technology-companies with self-driving cars. I suppose one has to be a bit of a fascist, or at least a monopolist, to be enamored of the concept, which would explain why Apple and Google have gotten involved.

Revisionist history fail

SteelPalm was attempting to pass off revisionist history on one of the very worst sites on the Internet to try to do that.

You know how Hitler could have definitely won the war? If he had spared his German Jewish scientists and also used the Jewish scientists in the territories he conquered.

That is completely false. There were more US-born Jewish scientists than foreign-born Jewish scientists working on the Manhattan Project. The idea that the Germans didn’t succeed in making an atomic bomb due to “persecution of Jewish scientists” was not only a self-serving idea put forth by a Dutch-born Jew whose parents died during the Holocaust, but it wasn’t even the primary reason he provided. Samual Goudsmit “concluded that the failure of the German atomic bomb project was attributable to factors such as bureaucracy, Allied bombing campaigns, the persecution of Jewish scientists, and Werner Karl Heisenberg’s failed leadership.”


Many of the foreign-born Jewish scientists were not from Germany. Hitler had already made his fatal mistake of invading Czechoslovakia and triggering the war with Britain and France by invading Poland before scientists such as Tellar, Segrè, and Szilard would have even been theoretically accessible to him, but the reality is that most of them were already working in the Allied West before 1933. Rudolf Peierls and Hans Bethe were both already at Cambridge on Rockefeller Foundation scholarships in 1930; Otto Frisch left for London when Hitler was elected in 1933.

How could Hitler have possibly spared scientists, much less used them, when they were already out of his reach before he came to power? And more importantly, Germany never had the industrial wherewithal to develop atomic technology and weaponize it; they simply didn’t have the manpower or the materials to spare while they were already engaged in fighting a war on both fronts. The USA possessed every single advantage in the various relevant aspects, yet it still barely managed to produce three testable weapons before the end of the war.

Your cloying, whining rhetoric of the “I can’t even!” variety aside, the Manhattan Project consisted of almost exclusively Jewish scientists and was headed by a Jewish scientist.

I really don’t understand what SteelPalm is attempting to do here. His repeated and counterproductive attempts to defend his people by resorting to a false historical narrative is not going to make anyone think better of them. Quite the contrary, I would think.

The Manhattan Project was not “headed by a Jewish scientist”. J. Robert Oppenheimer was the Scientific Director of the Los Alamos laboratory, he was not even one of the two head scientists of the project. Major General Leslie Groves headed the Manhattan Project, and his scientific advisors were Richard Tolman and James Conant. Los Alamos was only one of four major MP sites and it was considerably smaller than Oak Ridge.

There were 26 Jewish scientists of note involved in some way with the Manhattan Project. 13 were US-born, 13 were foreign born. Hans Bethe was also half-Jewish, but he is usually omitted because he was raised Protestant. These 26 men did not make up the near-entirety of the scientific personnel of the project; one of the “scientists” listed was not even a scientist, but an engineer still in college. Not only did these 26 “Jewish scientists” not make up the majority of the 6,000 scientists involved in the project, they didn’t even make up the majority of physicists involved.

It is true that Jewish scientists, both US- and foreign-born, made vital contributions to the Manhattan Project. It is unlikely that the atomic bomb would have been completed in 1945 without them; it probably would have taken another year or three and therefore would never have been dropped in war. But to claim that Jewish scientists were “almost exclusively” responsible for it is utterly false and a tremendous insult to literally thousands of American scientists and engineers, to say nothing of the six British and Australian members of the vital MAUD Committee, without which the Manhattan Project would probably not have been created in time to factor into the history of WWII.

Ironically, the biggest single contribution to the Manhattan Project was probably made by a man who was not an American, was not Jewish, and although a scientist who later worked on the project in a scientific capacity, his unique and utterly vital contribution was entirely bureaucratic in nature.

When there was no reaction from America to the reports of the MAUD Committee, Mark Oliphant crossed the Atlantic in an unheated bomber in August 1941. He found that Lyman Briggs had not circulated the reports to the Uranium Committee, but had kept them in a safe. Oliphant then contacted Ernest Lawrence, James Conant, Enrico Fermi and Arthur Compton and managed to increase the urgency of the American research programmes. The MAUD Reports finally made a big impression. Overnight the Americans changed their minds about the feasibility of an atomic bomb and suggested a cooperative effort with Britain. Harold C. Urey and George Braxton Pegram were sent to the UK in November 1941, to confer but Britain did not take up the offer of collaboration. 

Remember, this took place almost exactly two years after the famous Einstein–Szilárd letter was delivered to FDR. The Manhattan Project was not inspired by that letter, as many incorrectly assume, but rather, by Oliphant’s stubbornness in bringing the MAUD reports to the attention of the Uranium Committee. This should be obvious, because the budget for the project was approved by FDR in June 1942 and the Manhattan Engineer District was created two months later.

It also demonstrates there is considerable truth to the “for want of a nail” aphorism.

H1B: the real cost-benefit

Why the H1B visa program should be shut down without delay:

A close look at H1BPays.com’s data shows that, as you move past the Googles and Microsofts of the IT world, H-1B salaries tend to cluster around the $65,000 to $75,000 level.  There is a reason for this.  If outsourcing companies pay their H-1B workers at least $60,000, the company is exempted from a number of regulations designed to prevent visa abuse.

But $60,000 is far below 2016 market rates for most tech jobs.

In 2014 (the last year we have good data), Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, and Tata Consultancy used 21,695 visas, or more than 25 percent of all private-sector H-1B visas used that year. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Uber, for comparison, used only 1,763 visas, or 2 percent.

What’s the difference? Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, and Tata are all outsourcing companies. Their business model involves using H-1B visas to bring low-cost workers into the United States and then renting those workers to other companies. Their competitive advantage is price. That is, they make their money by renting their workers for less than companies would have to pay American workers.

 This is the real story of the H-1B visa. It is a tool used by companies to avoid hiring American workers, and avoid paying American wages. For every visa used by Google to hire a talented non-American for $126,000, ten Americans are replaced by outsourcing companies paying their H-1B workers $65,000.

That’s how you kill high tech in America. It’s time for the God-Emperor to shut the program down entirely. There is ABSOLUTELY zero need for it. Let Microsoft and Google move to India if they think they can get better coders there.

News is Conspiracy Theory +15

Spacebunny joked yesterday that she was old enough to remember when Echelon was conspiracy theory. It has now become readily apparent that what used to be derided as “conspiracy theory” is nothing more than the news, 15 years early. Consider a few historical references from this blog.

The Patriot Act and the IAO are constitutional abominations. The War on Terror is being used exactly in the same way that the War on Drugs has been used for decades – to provide the federal government with the ability to infringe upon the liberty of the American people. Your house can get stormed with a no-knock raid if an anonymous telephone call accuses you of the wrong sort of botany project, and soon the same thing will be the case if you happen to visit the wrong web sites or use dangerous terminology in your emails. Echelon is still out there transcribing American faxes, emails and telephone calls, after all.
– October 22, 2003

The US government sees fit to eavesdrop on everyone inside and outside the United States with its Echelon system, but unlike a parent trying to raise a child, that level of oversight is necessary. Terrorists, don’t you know. Why, without it, we wouldn’t have caught bin Laden and prevented the 9/11 attacks….
– December 10, 2004

Arrived too late, the act has been done.
The wind was against them, letters intercepted on their way.
The conspirators were nine of a party.
By Caesar the Younger shall these enterprises be undertaken.

Echelon and the Bush administration’s spying on Americans will be defended by the Supreme Court, should it ever get that far. Most likely, they’ll do so by refusing to hear a challenge against it.
– January 3, 2006

CIALeaks proves, once and for all, that Edward Snowden is one of the greatest heroes in American history. One hopes that the God-Emperor will recognize this and offer him a pardon; it is the CIA that is far more of an enemy to the President and the American people than the Russians these days.

Even better, President Trump should appoint Snowden to be the head of the NSA and charge him with turning it into a government agency that is entirely compatible with the U.S. Constitution and rule by the people. #SnowdenForNSA

Periscope test

I’m going to try one in a few hours. Since I’m locked out of my Twitter account again, I have no idea how it will be announced, or if you have to follow my Periscope account independently of my Twitter account. We’ll just press the red button and see what happens.

Anyhow, if you’re on Twitter/Periscope, please let me know here if an alert pops up and if you’re able to watch it, assuming you are so inclined.

Also, for the really old school readers, I’m going to be publishing a complete set of all my WND columns soon, in three volumes. If you were a reader of my column from 2001 to 2005 and would be interested in writing an introduction to that volume of around 1500 words, please let me know in the comments here.

I’m not looking for anything fawning, just a straightforward reader’s perspective on the historical column.

UPDATE: apparently you can follow me through periscope.tv here. Only 63,000 fewer followers than Cernovich!

UPDATE: It worked! 267 people showed up and watched – thank you all – and you can apparently watch a recording here. Quality wasn’t as nice as it usually seems to be on Mike’s but it did work. I’ll probably do another one tomorrow to discuss the inauguration and take some questions about the next four years.

Social media and the threat to the status quo

I don’t think it is a coincidence that we’re seeing a growing push against social media from the Left, as it has largely ceased to serve their social justice purposes and has now been transformed into a sword that cuts both ways:

We are learning that all of our thoughts aren’t welcome, especially by social media company investors. We are also learning that social media companies are a business. This means conversation is encouraged as long as it runs the gamut from mundane to vicious but stops at the overtly sexual or violent. Early in its life-cycle Pinterest made a big stink about actively banning porn while Instagram essentially allowed all sorts of exposition as long as it was monetizable and censored. Facebook still actively polices its photographs for even the hint of sexuality as an artist named Justyna Kiesielewicz recently discovered. She posted a staid nude and wanted to run it as an targeted advertisement. Facebook mistakenly ran the ad for a while, grabbing $50 before it banned the image. In short the latest incarnation of the expository impulse is truncated and sites like Facebook and Twitter welcome most hate groups but most draw the line at underboobs.

Further, social media is no longer protected. As careless CEOs quickly discover saying the wrong thing in a “private” chat or deleting an errant tweet does not mean someone won’t screencapture your rant. In fact social media has become an id and ego collector, a fly strip where all of our worst thoughts are captured permanently. We exhale in anger and chuff in frustration. We tell people to unfollow us if they don’t like what we’re saying and we turn neighborhood pages into political cesspools. Then, when we cross too many perceived boundaries, an army of trolls is ready to pounce and our private spaces become public very quickly.

In short social media is no longer a safe place. I don’t mean this in the politically correct sense but in the very mental and physical sense. Whereas the web was once a broadcast medium it is now a two-way or many-to-many medium. Our errant Twitter thoughts can make us targets and we often don’t know we’re being watched. Entire wars can break out online that have real-world consequences – see Pizzagate – and hoaxes flit through the memetic bloodstream like cancer, breaking down our defenses. A prominent writer and friend recently mused about what would happen if he posted some political rants. The first thing that leapt to his readers’ minds was the potential for SWATing and doxing and then an visit from the FBI. Then, as evidenced by the above CEO example, you get fired.

Social media has become a very real, very visceral, and very censorial force and it can now only worsen the human condition. It was once an experiment but that experiment is over.

That being said, this is a genie who won’t be easily put back in the bottle, because it still serves too many powerful and vested interests. What we can expect is what we are starting to see; a one-sided crackdown that will ultimately fail because it necessarily sacrifices the moral level of war, and in its hypocrisy, gives up both the moral and intellectual high grounds.

The intrinsic problem that the Left faces is that in its constant attempts to destroy every Right-wing figure who surfaces, those who survive become impervious to their methods and become examples to others. Observers then learn what approaches work, such as the open antifragility pioneered by the likes of MILO and Stefan Molyneux, and which ones don’t, such as the aggressive anonymity that is easily neutered by a simple doxxing.

The Left can’t win on an equal playing field, so they have fought dirty for nearly a century. That was effective so long as the Right was the establishment and sensitive to accusations of fairness and violating its own standards. But now the Alt-Right is rising, and has demonstrated that it is capable of winning on an equal playing field or tilting the field, as needed. This is why their attempts to discredit, disqualify, and destroy will be more furious than ever, and why antifragility and reliable allies rather than anonymity are necessary for every Alt-Right and Alt-Lite figure, however minor.

Those fine people at Facebook

These are the people who believe they are worthy to define what is real news and what is fake news.

Senior Facebook Employee Arrested For Allegedly Soliciting Unprotected Sex From Underage Girl

Dov Katz, the head of computer vision at Oculus VR, was arrested near Seattle on December 21 for allegedly soliciting sex from an underage girl. According to charging records, Katz allegedly attempted to pay $350 to have unprotected sex with someone he thought was a 15-year-old girl.

Katz, 38, has been charged with attempted commercial sexual abuse of a minor. According to the charging documents, Katz wasn’t actually texting a 15-year-old girl, but an undercover agent from the Tukwila Police Department. Katz, an Israeli citizen living in America, has since been released on $125,000 bail according to the King County jail website.

Apparently we can look forward to a lot more stories about how 15 is the new 21, lollipops are sexy, and pedophiles are people too.

The fox guarding the chicken coop

Facebook is arguably the very worst organization to lead the charge against “fake news” than any organization not called “The Onion”, as Techdirt concluded long before Mark Zuckerberg’s latest George Soros-funded crusade:

Facebook is generally seen as a key multiplier in this false force of non-news, which is probably what led the social media giant to declare war on fake news sites a year or so back. So how’d that go? Well, the results as analyzed over at Buzzfeed seems to suggest that Facebook has either lost this war it declared or is losing it badly enough that it might as well give it up.

To gauge Facebook’s progress in its fight, BuzzFeed News examined data across thousands of posts published to the fake news sites’ Facebook pages, and found decidedly mixed results. While average engagements (likes + shares + comments) per post fell from 972.7 in January 2015 to 434.78 in December 2015, they jumped to 827.8 in January 2016 and a whopping 1,304.7 in February. 


Some of the posts on the fake news sites’ pages went extremely viral many months after Facebook announced its crackdown. In August, for instance, an Empire News story reporting that Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sustained serious injuries in prison received more than 240,000 likes, 43,000 shares, and 28,000 comments on its Facebook page. The incident was pure fiction, but still spread like wildfire on the platform. An even less believable September post about a fatal gang war sparked by the “Blood” moon was shared over 22,000 times from the Facebook page of Huzlers, another fake news site.

So, how did this war go so wrong for Facebook? Well, to start, it relied heavily on user-submitted notifications that a link or site was a fake news site. Sounds great, as aggregating feedback has worked quite well in other arenas. For this, however, it was doomed from the start. The purpose of fake news sites is, after all, to fool people, and fooled people are obviously not reporting the links as fake. Even when a reader manages to determine eventually that a link was a fake news post at a later time, perhaps after sharing it and having comments proving it false, how many of those people then take steps to report the link? Not enough, clearly, as the fake news scourge marches on.


Another layer of the problem appears to be the faith and trust the general public puts into some famous people they are following, who have also been fooled with startling regularity. Take D.L. Hughley, for example. The comedian, whose page is liked by more than 1.7 million people, showed up twice in the Huzlers logs. One fictitious Huzlers story he posted, about Magic Johnson donating blood, garnered more than 10,000 shares from his page. Hughley, who did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment, also shared four National Report links in 2015. 

Radio stations also frequently post fake news. The Florida-based 93XFM was one of a number of radio stations BuzzFeed News discovered sharing Huzlers posts in 2015. Asked about one April post linking to a Huzlers story about a woman smoking PCP and chewing off her boyfriend’s penis, a 93XFM DJ named Sadie explained that fact-checking Facebook posts isn’t exactly a high priority.

So, it’s not the dark and ever-dangerous Alt-Right that is to blame for fake news, but celebrities and Facebook itself. Moreover, Facebook isn’t even reliable when it comes to reporting its own internal metrics to advertisers, as it has been caught exaggerating its own traffic numbers for the FOURTH time. Or, as Facebook would prefer you see it, accidentally making mistakes that just coincidentally happened to favor its own financial interests again for the fourth straight time.

Facebook Inc. built a colossal business based on measuring something older advertising methods cannot: the granular details about people. Two months ago, the company copped to a flaw in that measurement. Then Facebook did it again. And again.

On Friday, Facebook revealed faulty metrics with Instant Articles, its mobile publishing system, the fourth disclosure of a measurement error since September. The admission sharpened calls for more independent organizations to monitor the performance of digital advertising. And some large firms that buy a lot of ads said they will more closely scrutinize their spending on the social networking giant and could shift marketing dollars elsewhere….

In September, Facebook shared its first measurement error: inflated viewership numbers for its video ads, a relatively new product. Two months later, the company disclosed additional metric errors along with new tools for third-party measurement companies, including ComScore and Nielsen, to track its system more closely.

Problems persisted. Earlier this month, a report in Marketing Land, an industry publication, spotted a discrepancy between Facebook’s internal metrics on how articles where shared and public measurements. Facebook confirmed the error. “That shouldn’t happen,” said Brian Wieser, senior analyst, Pivotal Research Group. “If anyone was concerned that Facebook’s self-audit was not sufficient enough, they just proved it.”

I don’t know why anyone is surprised that Facebook is trafficking heavily in false information on every side. Look at who runs it. Once a con artist, always a con artist. That’s been Zuckerberg’s motif from the start.

The awfulness of Apple

The appeal of Apple is lost on Jerry Pournelle:

I wish I could return all my Apple devices for refunds. Actually, that isn’t true; I like my Apple iPhone 6, and I’ll keep it; but the iPad is far more trouble than it’s worth, and the MacBook Pro, while useful, suffers from the same security mania that makes the iPad useless. I can’t even install free apps on the iPad. I tell it to install; it asks for my Apple account password; I go find that and mistype it, but eventually I get it right; whereupon it tells ,me it has sent a security number to a trusted device. I go looking for trusted devices. Naturally they have to be Apple. Eventually I remember that the iPhone is an Apple device and I trust it, and lo! I find there is a message with a code number. I type that into the iPad. It is rejected. I try again. Still rejected.

I give up. I have an iPad with almost no apps because it takes all afternoon and another Apple device to get an app for it, and that doesn’t work because – I don’t know why. It took me a while to figure out that the trusted device was the iPhone; could the delay be it.? I suppose I will have to go to the Apple Store and see if anyone can fix this, but at this season that’s not a practical thing to do, and I’m not really all that mobile at my age anyway.

I thought the Surface Pro was a fussbudget and it is, but it’s got to be better than having to own two Apple devices before you can use one of them, and then having them send you a security number that doesn’t work, with no instruction as to what to do next. Congratulations. My iPad is now so secure I can’t use it, and I don’t know what to do next.

I like the MacBook Pro. I like the keyboard. But the security paranoia with the need for two devices to do the most trivial tasks like installing a free app is too much for me. And the message with the code seems to have vanished from the iPhone now; it’s neither in mail nor in messages. I suppose I must have dreamed it?

It is rather ironic that the company whose fortune was made by its superior user interface is now heading downhill due to the worst UI experience in technology. But that’s the way of the world; it turns out that Steve Jobs was irreplaceable after all.

Apple’s main concern is now keeping people imprisoned in its walled garden, not luring them in any longer. The “technology giants” are no longer even technology companies, but marketing-distribution systems. So, it’s no surprise that their technology and user experience is suffering as a result.

I have an iPad Mini that was required for a game on which I’m working. It’s got some nice hardware, but the UI is so horrifically awful that I simply don’t use it for anything except testing the game. Sadly, Google is going the same way, to the point that I no longer update my Android tablet, phone, or apps.

This tells me we’re heading for some serious disruption in the not-too-distant future.