Perhaps you have lost site of the fact that the state has always been the master. That is the nature of governments. This kind of expansion and abuse of power results from the error people make by saying "the government represents us, so it is OK to let it take over".
But... but... but... that nice Mr. Blair said:
"The people are the masters. We are the servants of the people. "We will never forget that and, if we ever do, the people will very soon show that what the electorate gives, the electorate can take away."
Tony Blair, 18th May 1997
Next you'll be saying he lied about weapons of mass destruction!
As for you having to pay 40 - that's not very much, is it? Less than a pound a week, and it's a one off cost.
No, it will be renewable every x years (either 7 or 10) just like passports. And that's assuming that the system isn't completely smashed by counterfeit cards. You can bet that when forged Blunkettcards appear it will be the people not the Dear Leader who will pay the surcharge.
Like I said originally, other European countries have the ID card, and they're not totalitarian dystopias, are they?
None of them have biometric cards designed to be plugged into a national database.
And more importantly, none of them have such a ramshackle contract between citizen and state as the UK. The whole ID card fiasco (and I think I can safely predict that) will not grant any of us any additional rights or freedoms - it will just cost us money to have a few of them taken away.
Want your personal information linked between government databases? No problems - this government thinks that's a GREAT idea (despite being illegal under the Data Protection Act). Want any council employee to pull your internet browsing record or read your emails? No worries, New Labour is trying to amend their own Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to do that. Your electoral register record? Available to marketing companies unless you checked that little tiny box hidden near the bottom of the page. How about your confidentail medical records? Well Alan Milburn has allowed the drugs companies to see those.
This is a government that cannot be trusted with confidential information. It should not be allowed to acquire any more control over your data.
Because they've not been abroad and seen how you can have peaceful, progressive countries like Denmark, where ID cards isn't an issue. They'd rather rant without thinking about it properly. With ID cards it's trivial to get rid of asylum seekers, for instance.
You answered your own question when you used the word 'progressive'. That doesn't apply to the UK's political system. For all of Tony Blair's repetition of 'New', there is very little new about his desire to control every aspect of society.
I'd imagine Denmark doesn't have draconian legislation on association in public places or the right for the authorities to intern people without trial.
I expect Denmark has less of a problem with racist police officers, an unaccountable intelligence apparatus and inflexible political system. Denmark's citizens probably have a written constitution (do they?), a right to privacy and freedom of information.
And most of all Denmark doesn't have David Blunkett.
As for asylum seekers, the question you should be asking isn't 'how easy is it to get rid of them?' but 'should we get rid of them?' Not everyone grows up in a nice stable, economically sound environment. Hiding a problem doesn't make it go away.
Britain had a whole lot of Danish economic migrants around the 11th century - it doesn't seem to have affected us too much in the long term.
8:21 - Virgin Mobile phone turned on in Kensington
9:55 - Virgin Mobile customer applies for a Virgin credit card
10:34 - Virgin Mobile customer orders a Virgin Cola near the Virgin V2 music store in Kensington
11:03 - Virgin Mobile customer goes for Virgin Vodka instead. Cola sucks.
12:45 - Virgin Mobile customer boards Virgin train, westbound
Which would then more likely go:
13:45 - Virgin Mobile customer still on Virgin train, stationary
14:45 - Virgin Mobile customer getting slightly fed up with Virgin train, stationary
15:45 - Virgin Mobile customer homicidal on Virgin train, eastbound (slowly)
16:45 - Virgin Mobile customer still on Virgin train, texting death threat to Richard Branson
The bronze horse you linked to doesn't look very interesting though. Why the WOW?
It's huge and very beautiful! The one at San Siro in Milan stands on a 1.5 metre high marble plinth, so your head is just about level with the horse's hooves, above that you have this enormous animal giving the impression that it is bearing down on you (which is just what the Sforza family would have intended it to do).
But it is also been given an extremely animate pose - the horse is trotting, twisting its head, eyes rolling, nostrils flared. Leonardo broke with centuries of tradition in doing this - horses had always been depicted with heads straight ahead and without character.
Clearly Leonardo loved horses, he sketched thousands of them, dissected them - the musculature on his horse is far more accurate than those of his contemporaries and he went on to write the first accurate book on equine medicine!
Take a look at the picture of it being assembled by crane to get some idea of its size. In some ways the modern statue is less ambitious than Leonardo's. He wanted the statue to be self-supporting without an internal skeleton (known as the armature).
To do this, Leonardo intended to create his statue in a single pouring of bronze (about 80 tonnes of molten metal). This had never been attempted before (or since) and so he had to develop a completely new casting technique, very similar to the way we now make injection moulded plastics.
Leonardo sketched the process for casting his statue and clearly worked out how to do it, but we now think that he couldn't have got a good cast. Hence the recreation used conventional bronze casting technologies.
Obligatory self promotion approaching. If you're in the UK, you can learn more about the Sforza Horse in the Open University course A178 - Perspectives on Leonardo da Vinci.
And of course, when you're in Milan, drop by the statue itself!
The best estimate is that at least 75% of Leonardo's writings have been destroyed or lost since his lifetime. Most of the surviving codices are actually rebindings of his work which have been salvaged from elsewhere.
Then there is the problem that Leonardo hardly ever finished anything - he loved procrastinating work, so its hard to know if some works attributed to his pupils are actually overpaintings of Leonardo's work. he hardly ever signed anything, so a good number of paintings (and some sculptures) are suspected of being Leonardo's work, but it can't be proven.
And he kept experimenting - most famously in the case of The Last Supper in Milan. Leonardo wanted to paint with oils for their intense colouration, but did not want to use the traditional fresco technique of applying paint to wet plaster (Leonardo rarely worked for a long period of time - so the plaster would have dried before he completed the work).
So he invented an oil-based paint that could be applied to dried plaster. And it looked magnificent - contemporaries were in awe of the work - for a few years, but Leonardo's formulation did not bind to the plaster and the paint began to crumble from the plaster. The painting was then restored a number of times - quite crudely, which made a big difference to the work.
So if you are in Milan, go and see The Last Supper - it is a work of extraordinary beauty and power (and size), but it is a faint shadow of the original.
Leonardo also lost a lot of work thanks to his choice of patrons, most notably Ludovico Sforza, tyrant of Milan between 1480 and 1499. Ludovico hired Leonardo ostensibly to create a massive 8m high statue of a horse to commemorate Frederico Sforza, the dynasty's founder.
Well Leonardo being Leonardo, he didn't work terribly quickly and got side-tracked, spending much of his time producing the majority of his known paintings, designing fortifications for Milan, a giant crossbow and starting his obsession with geology.
In 1499, the French invaded Lombardy to settle their claim for the dukedom of Milan. Sforza lost the battle and fled - Leonardo took his opportunity to leave as well.
What he didn't take was the full-sized model of his horse. The clay model was destroyed by Gascon bowmen and reduced to rubble. In recent years, an American team have created a pair of monumental bronze horses inspired by the original. One is in Michigan, the other in Milan - I saw the latter one this summer - and in a word - WOW!
And just think, this is Leonardo da Vinci we are talking about, what has been lost from less-well-known artists? What about the collected works of the Library of Alexandria, the libraries of the Caliphate of Baghdad, Rome...?
The Great Eastern, his first ship. His range as an engineer cannot be understated.
An amazing guy - he'd be so depressed if he came to Britain today, not only do we no longer have the fastest trains in the World, but our fastest trains are French and Italian! What he'd say about the West Coast Main Line rebuilding taking longer than the construction of the Great Western is anyone's guess. But he'd find the fact we'd built the fastest airliner then scrapped it for something slower incomprehensible.
One slight correction. Great Eastern was the third of Brunel's ships. The first, Great Western was the first ship to steam commercially across the Atlantic in April 1838 (she was beaten to being the first steamer fulls stop, by two days by Sirius although that ship was too small for commercial traffic).
His second was Great Britain launched in 1843 and was the first large iron ship and the first to be powered by a screw. She is now preserved in Bristol and is well worth a visit.
Great Eastern was the third and largest by far.
As you say, his range was phenomenal. To produce one revolutionary ship would have been achievement enough, but three? Had he just done ships that would have been a monumental achievement - but to build the World's fastest railway, the World's first large iron building (Paddington station), a series of monumental suspension bridges, flat-pack hospitals, stations, tunnels...
Incredible.
And his monument? If you travel across the Royal Albert Bridge between Devon and Cornwall - a bridge so revolutionary that its only recently been proven how it stands up - look up, its there in 6 foot letters.
It was so depressing that Clarkson made such a good case for Brunel in 'Great Britons'. For a while I had to reconsider my deep-rooted dislike of the man...
But then I went back to loathing him, his perm, his patronising attitude and 'Top Gear'. My vindictiveness would only be deepened if he was employed to do one of those bloody Freeview adverts!
how in the world do you get that far down to reach the section of cable that is miles below the surface? holy crap, that must be one hell of a ship. it must hold a lot of cable to hoist that bidness up and then be able to hold the weight of it all as they work on it. do they just get it up high enough to allow divers to get to it? i agree with the parent of your post, this is absolutely amazing to me.
Yes you need a big hold and run the cable over the stern. These ships tend to have grapples to latch on to cables and haul it aboard for maintenance.
The first successful TransAtlantic cable was laid by Great Eastern designed by Slashdot's patron saint - Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
She was the biggest ship in the World for almost fifty years, and SIX times larger than any ship afloat (that was Brunel's Great Britain which was itself TWICE the size of any other ship).
Bearing in mind she was launched in 1857 here are the statistics:
680ft long
120ft over the paddle wheels
gross tonnage - 18,914 tons
displacement over 27,000 tons
She had a single screw, twin paddle wheels and six masts (her steam engines which were the biggest in the World (naturally) were still novel technology), a complete double bottom and double hull which was internally compartmentalised. She could have carried 4000 people from Britain to Australia and returned without refuelling.
What happened to her? Brunel could barely launch the ship, she had to be slid sideways into the Thames, rather than float her from a dry dock. It took three months to get her into the water. When she was afloat she had cost more than three times the original budget and the Eastern Steamship Company who commissioned her was on the edge of bankruptcy.
When she was fitted out, she was put to sea on trials. Brunel was aboard, but the effort of constructing Great Eastern had almost killed him. He suffered a massive stroke and was taken ashore. Shortly afterwards, off of the South Coast, Great Eastern suffered a massive explosion in one of the water jackets surrounding a funnel. Five men died and the ship had to be put in for repair. Brunel was told the news, and almost immediately lapsed into a coma, dying a few days later.
Finally she was put into service, not on the Australia run which had proved unprofitable, but on the North Atlantic. She never carried more than a tiny fraction of her passengers and was reknowned for rolling in heavy weather. One story does stand out, she hit a reef whilst travelling at full speed on the approach to New York. Her bottom was cut open along a greater length than that of Titanic, not only did she not sink, she continued her voyage without loss of life and arrived safely in New York where she was repaired.
Eventually the cost of running Great Eastern became too great and in 1864 she was sold to the Telegraph Construction Company for the purpose of laying the TransAtlantic cable. She was the only ship in the World capable of holding the entire cable - it took more than 5 months just to load the cable into her holds. The first attempt in 1865 was almost successful, but the cable broke in Mid Atlantic in more than 6000 feet of water.
So what did they do? They went back to Britain, picked up another cable and laid the first truly successful cable in 1866. Better than that, Great Eastern found the broken cable (no I have no idea how), spliced it and got that working as well.
Great Eastern's importance to the British Empire can't be underestimated. She laid the cables that joined Britain to the African colonies, the Eastern part of the Mediterranean, India and Australia. Without them, the British Empire could not have been governed.
And the ship? Well she was replaced by a custom built cable carrier Faraday in 1874 and laid up in Milford Haven, South Wales. She hung around there for twelve years before being t
All that and it's winter out there. I wouldn't like to be the guy operating the world's most expensive arcade grab machine somewhere in the North Atlantic in November.
The alternative explanation is that British Telecom have spent the last three days digging a hole at the bottom of my road and gone and cut the wrong cable.
Because Carter was paranoid about terrorists/Russians acquiring nuclear material, right? Perhaps we should reexamine that ban.
I wouldn't bother, Britain has been reprocessing fuel continuously since the 1950s - both to extract plutonium for our nuclear weapons programme and the projected fast breeder reactors that were going to make the 1970s even more groovy than they were.
To cut a long story short, do a google for Sellafield (sometimes called Windscale). It explains why you never, ever want a reprocessing industry in the US.
The end result? Billions spent to build the colossal THORP reprocessing plant in Cumbria (which has never worked properly), billions more spent to keep British Nuclear Fuels Limited solvent, billions added to energy bills to pay for reprocessing. Thousands of tonnes of hard-to-handle liquid waste currently stored in corroding tanks, millions of litres of actinides poured into the Irish Sea and forty TONNES of plutonium that no one needs.
When you throw in the fact that MOX causes reactors to 'age' prematurely, the falsified quality assurance checks performed by BNFL on reprocessed fuel, the decline of the UK's Magnox stations and the complete collapse of British Energy plc, you find out...
REPROCESSING SUCKS!
Uranium is cheaper than it has even been, deposits are still being discovered and (in most of Europe certainly), nuclear power is uncompetitive with renewables.
And of course, since September 11th, we've come to realise that a huge sprawling plant with thin roofs is not the best place to hold some of the most hazardous materials on the face of the Earth. Terrorists wouldn't need to get their hands on Sellafield's plutonium; there are enough fission products there to make life in Britain and the rest of Western Europe considerably more unpleasant than it is now.
It's sad to say, but Britain's adoption of nuclear reprocessing probably dwarfs Concorde when it comes to technological mistakes. At least we've put Concorde to rest and can stop paying the bills.
This company seems to grab inordinate amounts of air time and publicity for no actual product. Every few months, ADS pops up and issues a press release along the lines of:
'Soon you'll be able to use an implanted chip to [FILL IN EXCITING GEE_WHIZZ TECHNOLOGY WHEN YOU GET A MOMENT]. Applied Digital Solutions will shortly announce [CAN YOU GET THE GUYS IN MARKETING TO THINK OF SOMETHING SNAPPY?], a whole new generation in personal security.'
The company sounds like its on a scam, perhaps the venture capital is running out.
Is there any chance the people at ADS can be implanted with microchips that will set off alarms in all news bureaux when they make a press release?
The Concorde program cost over $100 Billion in 2003 dollars. It barely broke even on operational costs in it's good years.
The $100 billion is a little bit of an exaggeration; the total costs to the two governments would be about $34 billion in 2003 money.
Concorde was a great money earner for British Airways, they probably made about $800 million from their fleet. What it earned them in publicity is probably incalculable.
But as for wasting money, it has to be the ISS - at least when Concorde proved to be a financial disaster with precious little point we stopped pouring more money down the drain.
Either that or the money the British government is pouring down the drain on redeveloping the West Coast Main Line. ISS might be pointless, but it has a certain cache that can't be matched by the 10.03 Silverlink County stopping service to Milton Keynes.
He first died when his Ferrari crashed into a cactus at high speed, but thanks to the wonders of modern science he was cloned from his own tongue. Whereupon he embarked on a successful career as a Soviet spy before being jailed, executed and then exchanged for Cutter John who had landed in the USSR after his wheelchair - no, this is getting too weird...
Welcome back Opus, now when do we get to see it in the UK? Come on America! You sent us your President last week (honestly, you really didn't have to), now send us the penguin!
More specifically, everything we have launched to everywhere except Mars seems to have made it
You're forgetting something - well two things actually. The missions to Venus by the Soviets and the Americans were also beset with repeated failures. The Pioneer probes very nearly didn't survive their encounters with Jupiter's radiation belt, Voyager was nearly crippled by a ring particle when it passed Saturn, Galileo had repeated failures...
But why did the big probes survive? Because they were EXPENSIVE, they were built like tanks. Thanks to budget cutting at NASA, the Mars probes of late have been small and light with no room for redundancy.
The 'smaller, faster, cheaper' strategy also put an unbearable strain on quality control.
Mars Express has to perform one VERY important maneuvre. On December 19th it must eject the Beagle 2 lander whilst still travelling at interplanetary velocity.
If Mars Express fails to shoot Beagle 2 into space, the retro-engine will not have enough thrust to brake Mars Express into Martian orbit. Both probes would then fly past the planet and into solar orbit.
Beagle 2 then travels through space for six days before hitting the Martian atmosphere at interplanetary velocity. Beagle 2's onboard transmitter will not come to life until the probe impacts the surface, so you can imagine that those six days will be pretty tense for the ESA teams.
All being well, Beagle 2 and Mars Express should arrive at their destinations safe and well in the small hours of Christmas morning. By the time we're opening our presents here in the UK, they should have received a signal from the Martian surface.
Maybe I listen to Art Bell too much, but it seems pretty strange that so many probes to Mars have failed in some fashion. Perhaps the Martians don't want us messing up their planet?
Or maybe Mars is a long way away and it's really hard to build a machine that can be expected to work for months on end whilst being baked and simultaneously frozen after being placed in a vacuum and bombarded with radiation. Then to put this complicated device on top of hundreds of tonnes of high explosive so that you can get it moving fifteen times faster than a rifle bullet with the objective of placing it somewhere near a body only slightly larger than the Moon?
I can't imagine a touchscreen tough enough to allow thousands of voters beat the hell out of it and it withstanding an election.
Here in the UK there are plenty of ticket machines at stations and airports that use touchscreens which appear to be made of toughened glass or very heavy duty plastic.
IIRC the touchscreen is covered with a material bearing an electrical charge. When a finger touches the screen, oscillators round the edge of the display measure the change in capacitance and a position is calculated.
I've never seen one broken despite being on streets in the British weather. The PoS operating system on the other hand, doesn't seem to be up to the job.
For what it's worth, you can get your piece of reactor-grade uranium at United Nuclear. The interesting part is that it's slightly LESS radioactive than the natural chunk of uranium ore I've got in my bedroom.
That's because the chunk of ore will be far from pure uranium, it will contain traces of the decay products - such as polonium, radium and radon, all of which have shorter half lives (and are hence more radioactive).
Glad to hear that you're taking basic safety precautions though.
And what Sophisticated Lady wouldn't be overjoyed at unwrapping a genuine Swarovski crystal accessory?
Howabout the one that no longer has PC PS2 connectors on their computer? (RTFA)
My girlfriend is fairly sophisticated, but if I gave her that, she'd probably question my sexuality.
I'd insist on buying a wireless version for the lady in my life.
Not because of any superior ergonomic factors, but because Bluetooth would remove the risk of my beloved wrapping the cord around my throat and tightening.
My god, they're going to have to find a new measurement for bad taste now that thing's rolled into town.
Dude I was thinking the same thing. We're screwing with our air to the point where we'll have to artificially maintain the balance vs the damage we cause. What happens when we bring back too many tons of matter to a planet which is precariously spinning round at JUST the right distance from the sun?
The misleading word there is 'precariously'. The position of the Earth's orbit around the Sun is essentially a function of the Sun's mass and the velocity of the Earth as it orbits the Sun. The Earth's mass is immaterial to the orbit. So provided the Sun does not suddenly change its mass, or the Earth undergoes some supernatural acceleration, we're safe.
As for the Earth-Moon system, it isn't static as you might think. The Moon's orbit is gradually enlarging as it strips rotational energy from the Earth. Effect on the Earth? Longer days, nothing else. At the same time, each body continues to accumulate hundreds of tonnes of asteroidal and cometary material as smaller bodies smack into their surface.
Slashdot Mirror
But... but... but... that nice Mr. Blair said:
"The people are the masters. We are the servants of the people. "We will never forget that and, if we ever do, the people will very soon show that what the electorate gives, the electorate can take away."
Tony Blair, 18th May 1997
Next you'll be saying he lied about weapons of mass destruction!
Best wishes,
Mike.
No, it will be renewable every x years (either 7 or 10) just like passports. And that's assuming that the system isn't completely smashed by counterfeit cards. You can bet that when forged Blunkettcards appear it will be the people not the Dear Leader who will pay the surcharge.
Like I said originally, other European countries have the ID card, and they're not totalitarian dystopias, are they?
None of them have biometric cards designed to be plugged into a national database.
And more importantly, none of them have such a ramshackle contract between citizen and state as the UK. The whole ID card fiasco (and I think I can safely predict that) will not grant any of us any additional rights or freedoms - it will just cost us money to have a few of them taken away.
Want your personal information linked between government databases? No problems - this government thinks that's a GREAT idea (despite being illegal under the Data Protection Act). Want any council employee to pull your internet browsing record or read your emails? No worries, New Labour is trying to amend their own Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to do that. Your electoral register record? Available to marketing companies unless you checked that little tiny box hidden near the bottom of the page. How about your confidentail medical records? Well Alan Milburn has allowed the drugs companies to see those.
This is a government that cannot be trusted with confidential information. It should not be allowed to acquire any more control over your data.
Best wishes,
Mike.
You answered your own question when you used the word 'progressive'. That doesn't apply to the UK's political system. For all of Tony Blair's repetition of 'New', there is very little new about his desire to control every aspect of society.
I'd imagine Denmark doesn't have draconian legislation on association in public places or the right for the authorities to intern people without trial.
I expect Denmark has less of a problem with racist police officers, an unaccountable intelligence apparatus and inflexible political system. Denmark's citizens probably have a written constitution (do they?), a right to privacy and freedom of information.
And most of all Denmark doesn't have David Blunkett.
As for asylum seekers, the question you should be asking isn't 'how easy is it to get rid of them?' but 'should we get rid of them?' Not everyone grows up in a nice stable, economically sound environment. Hiding a problem doesn't make it go away.
Britain had a whole lot of Danish economic migrants around the 11th century - it doesn't seem to have affected us too much in the long term.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Five Pounds a couple of weeks ago.
Which was WELL SPENT - because now there are even more chances to see that advert for Freeview starring Alan Titchmarsh.
And don't worry if you miss them on BB1, you'll be able to catch the advert again on BBC2, on BBC3 ON BBC1, BB4 ON BBC1, BBC Radio 1, 2, 3 and 4...
Best wishes,
Mike.
9:55 - Virgin Mobile customer applies for a Virgin credit card
10:34 - Virgin Mobile customer orders a Virgin Cola near the Virgin V2 music store in Kensington
11:03 - Virgin Mobile customer goes for Virgin Vodka instead. Cola sucks.
12:45 - Virgin Mobile customer boards Virgin train, westbound
Which would then more likely go:
13:45 - Virgin Mobile customer still on Virgin train, stationary
14:45 - Virgin Mobile customer getting slightly fed up with Virgin train, stationary
15:45 - Virgin Mobile customer homicidal on Virgin train, eastbound (slowly)
16:45 - Virgin Mobile customer still on Virgin train, texting death threat to Richard Branson
Best wishes,
Mike.
http://homepage.mac.com/mike_richards/PhotoAlbum4. html
The first one should give you some idea of how big the horse is - yes those are people alongside!
Best wishes,
Mike.
It's huge and very beautiful! The one at San Siro in Milan stands on a 1.5 metre high marble plinth, so your head is just about level with the horse's hooves, above that you have this enormous animal giving the impression that it is bearing down on you (which is just what the Sforza family would have intended it to do).
But it is also been given an extremely animate pose - the horse is trotting, twisting its head, eyes rolling, nostrils flared. Leonardo broke with centuries of tradition in doing this - horses had always been depicted with heads straight ahead and without character.
Clearly Leonardo loved horses, he sketched thousands of them, dissected them - the musculature on his horse is far more accurate than those of his contemporaries and he went on to write the first accurate book on equine medicine!
Take a look at the picture of it being assembled by crane to get some idea of its size. In some ways the modern statue is less ambitious than Leonardo's. He wanted the statue to be self-supporting without an internal skeleton (known as the armature).
To do this, Leonardo intended to create his statue in a single pouring of bronze (about 80 tonnes of molten metal). This had never been attempted before (or since) and so he had to develop a completely new casting technique, very similar to the way we now make injection moulded plastics.
Leonardo sketched the process for casting his statue and clearly worked out how to do it, but we now think that he couldn't have got a good cast. Hence the recreation used conventional bronze casting technologies.
Obligatory self promotion approaching. If you're in the UK, you can learn more about the Sforza Horse in the Open University course A178 - Perspectives on Leonardo da Vinci .
And of course, when you're in Milan, drop by the statue itself!
Best wishes,
Mike.
The best estimate is that at least 75% of Leonardo's writings have been destroyed or lost since his lifetime. Most of the surviving codices are actually rebindings of his work which have been salvaged from elsewhere.
Then there is the problem that Leonardo hardly ever finished anything - he loved procrastinating work, so its hard to know if some works attributed to his pupils are actually overpaintings of Leonardo's work. he hardly ever signed anything, so a good number of paintings (and some sculptures) are suspected of being Leonardo's work, but it can't be proven.
And he kept experimenting - most famously in the case of The Last Supper in Milan. Leonardo wanted to paint with oils for their intense colouration, but did not want to use the traditional fresco technique of applying paint to wet plaster (Leonardo rarely worked for a long period of time - so the plaster would have dried before he completed the work).
So he invented an oil-based paint that could be applied to dried plaster. And it looked magnificent - contemporaries were in awe of the work - for a few years, but Leonardo's formulation did not bind to the plaster and the paint began to crumble from the plaster. The painting was then restored a number of times - quite crudely, which made a big difference to the work.
So if you are in Milan, go and see The Last Supper - it is a work of extraordinary beauty and power (and size), but it is a faint shadow of the original.
Leonardo also lost a lot of work thanks to his choice of patrons, most notably Ludovico Sforza, tyrant of Milan between 1480 and 1499. Ludovico hired Leonardo ostensibly to create a massive 8m high statue of a horse to commemorate Frederico Sforza, the dynasty's founder.
Well Leonardo being Leonardo, he didn't work terribly quickly and got side-tracked, spending much of his time producing the majority of his known paintings, designing fortifications for Milan, a giant crossbow and starting his obsession with geology.
In 1499, the French invaded Lombardy to settle their claim for the dukedom of Milan. Sforza lost the battle and fled - Leonardo took his opportunity to leave as well.
What he didn't take was the full-sized model of his horse. The clay model was destroyed by Gascon bowmen and reduced to rubble. In recent years, an American team have created a pair of monumental bronze horses inspired by the original. One is in Michigan, the other in Milan - I saw the latter one this summer - and in a word - WOW!
And just think, this is Leonardo da Vinci we are talking about, what has been lost from less-well-known artists? What about the collected works of the Library of Alexandria, the libraries of the Caliphate of Baghdad, Rome...?
Best wishes,
Mike.
An amazing guy - he'd be so depressed if he came to Britain today, not only do we no longer have the fastest trains in the World, but our fastest trains are French and Italian! What he'd say about the West Coast Main Line rebuilding taking longer than the construction of the Great Western is anyone's guess. But he'd find the fact we'd built the fastest airliner then scrapped it for something slower incomprehensible.
One slight correction. Great Eastern was the third of Brunel's ships. The first, Great Western was the first ship to steam commercially across the Atlantic in April 1838 (she was beaten to being the first steamer fulls stop, by two days by Sirius although that ship was too small for commercial traffic).
His second was Great Britain launched in 1843 and was the first large iron ship and the first to be powered by a screw. She is now preserved in Bristol and is well worth a visit.
Great Eastern was the third and largest by far.
As you say, his range was phenomenal. To produce one revolutionary ship would have been achievement enough, but three? Had he just done ships that would have been a monumental achievement - but to build the World's fastest railway, the World's first large iron building (Paddington station), a series of monumental suspension bridges, flat-pack hospitals, stations, tunnels...
Incredible.
And his monument? If you travel across the Royal Albert Bridge between Devon and Cornwall - a bridge so revolutionary that its only recently been proven how it stands up - look up, its there in 6 foot letters.
I.K. BRUNEL
ENGINEER
1859
What a guy!
Best wishes,
Mike.
You go wash your mouth out!
It was so depressing that Clarkson made such a good case for Brunel in 'Great Britons'. For a while I had to reconsider my deep-rooted dislike of the man...
But then I went back to loathing him, his perm, his patronising attitude and 'Top Gear'. My vindictiveness would only be deepened if he was employed to do one of those bloody Freeview adverts!
Best wishes,
Mike.
It's by Tom Standage, and I agree - it's a brilliant book, highly recommended.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Yes you need a big hold and run the cable over the stern. These ships tend to have grapples to latch on to cables and haul it aboard for maintenance.
The first successful TransAtlantic cable was laid by Great Eastern designed by Slashdot's patron saint - Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
She was the biggest ship in the World for almost fifty years, and SIX times larger than any ship afloat (that was Brunel's Great Britain which was itself TWICE the size of any other ship).
Bearing in mind she was launched in 1857 here are the statistics:
She had a single screw, twin paddle wheels and six masts (her steam engines which were the biggest in the World (naturally) were still novel technology), a complete double bottom and double hull which was internally compartmentalised. She could have carried 4000 people from Britain to Australia and returned without refuelling.
What happened to her? Brunel could barely launch the ship, she had to be slid sideways into the Thames, rather than float her from a dry dock. It took three months to get her into the water. When she was afloat she had cost more than three times the original budget and the Eastern Steamship Company who commissioned her was on the edge of bankruptcy.
When she was fitted out, she was put to sea on trials. Brunel was aboard, but the effort of constructing Great Eastern had almost killed him. He suffered a massive stroke and was taken ashore. Shortly afterwards, off of the South Coast, Great Eastern suffered a massive explosion in one of the water jackets surrounding a funnel. Five men died and the ship had to be put in for repair. Brunel was told the news, and almost immediately lapsed into a coma, dying a few days later.
Finally she was put into service, not on the Australia run which had proved unprofitable, but on the North Atlantic. She never carried more than a tiny fraction of her passengers and was reknowned for rolling in heavy weather. One story does stand out, she hit a reef whilst travelling at full speed on the approach to New York. Her bottom was cut open along a greater length than that of Titanic, not only did she not sink, she continued her voyage without loss of life and arrived safely in New York where she was repaired.
Eventually the cost of running Great Eastern became too great and in 1864 she was sold to the Telegraph Construction Company for the purpose of laying the TransAtlantic cable. She was the only ship in the World capable of holding the entire cable - it took more than 5 months just to load the cable into her holds. The first attempt in 1865 was almost successful, but the cable broke in Mid Atlantic in more than 6000 feet of water.
So what did they do? They went back to Britain, picked up another cable and laid the first truly successful cable in 1866. Better than that, Great Eastern found the broken cable (no I have no idea how), spliced it and got that working as well.
Great Eastern's importance to the British Empire can't be underestimated. She laid the cables that joined Britain to the African colonies, the Eastern part of the Mediterranean, India and Australia. Without them, the British Empire could not have been governed.
And the ship? Well she was replaced by a custom built cable carrier Faraday in 1874 and laid up in Milford Haven, South Wales. She hung around there for twelve years before being t
The alternative explanation is that British Telecom have spent the last three days digging a hole at the bottom of my road and gone and cut the wrong cable.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I wouldn't bother, Britain has been reprocessing fuel continuously since the 1950s - both to extract plutonium for our nuclear weapons programme and the projected fast breeder reactors that were going to make the 1970s even more groovy than they were.
To cut a long story short, do a google for Sellafield (sometimes called Windscale). It explains why you never, ever want a reprocessing industry in the US.
The end result? Billions spent to build the colossal THORP reprocessing plant in Cumbria (which has never worked properly), billions more spent to keep British Nuclear Fuels Limited solvent, billions added to energy bills to pay for reprocessing. Thousands of tonnes of hard-to-handle liquid waste currently stored in corroding tanks, millions of litres of actinides poured into the Irish Sea and forty TONNES of plutonium that no one needs.
When you throw in the fact that MOX causes reactors to 'age' prematurely, the falsified quality assurance checks performed by BNFL on reprocessed fuel, the decline of the UK's Magnox stations and the complete collapse of British Energy plc, you find out...
REPROCESSING SUCKS!
Uranium is cheaper than it has even been, deposits are still being discovered and (in most of Europe certainly), nuclear power is uncompetitive with renewables.
And of course, since September 11th, we've come to realise that a huge sprawling plant with thin roofs is not the best place to hold some of the most hazardous materials on the face of the Earth. Terrorists wouldn't need to get their hands on Sellafield's plutonium; there are enough fission products there to make life in Britain and the rest of Western Europe considerably more unpleasant than it is now.
It's sad to say, but Britain's adoption of nuclear reprocessing probably dwarfs Concorde when it comes to technological mistakes. At least we've put Concorde to rest and can stop paying the bills.
Best wishes,
Mike.
'Soon you'll be able to use an implanted chip to [FILL IN EXCITING GEE_WHIZZ TECHNOLOGY WHEN YOU GET A MOMENT]. Applied Digital Solutions will shortly announce [CAN YOU GET THE GUYS IN MARKETING TO THINK OF SOMETHING SNAPPY?], a whole new generation in personal security.'
The company sounds like its on a scam, perhaps the venture capital is running out.
Is there any chance the people at ADS can be implanted with microchips that will set off alarms in all news bureaux when they make a press release?
Best wishes,
Mike.
The $100 billion is a little bit of an exaggeration; the total costs to the two governments would be about $34 billion in 2003 money.
Concorde was a great money earner for British Airways, they probably made about $800 million from their fleet. What it earned them in publicity is probably incalculable.
But as for wasting money, it has to be the ISS - at least when Concorde proved to be a financial disaster with precious little point we stopped pouring more money down the drain.
Either that or the money the British government is pouring down the drain on redeveloping the West Coast Main Line. ISS might be pointless, but it has a certain cache that can't be matched by the 10.03 Silverlink County stopping service to Milton Keynes.
Best wishes,
Mike.
He was - occasionally.
He first died when his Ferrari crashed into a cactus at high speed, but thanks to the wonders of modern science he was cloned from his own tongue. Whereupon he embarked on a successful career as a Soviet spy before being jailed, executed and then exchanged for Cutter John who had landed in the USSR after his wheelchair - no, this is getting too weird...
Welcome back Opus, now when do we get to see it in the UK? Come on America! You sent us your President last week (honestly, you really didn't have to), now send us the penguin!
Best wishes,
Mike.
You're forgetting something - well two things actually. The missions to Venus by the Soviets and the Americans were also beset with repeated failures. The Pioneer probes very nearly didn't survive their encounters with Jupiter's radiation belt, Voyager was nearly crippled by a ring particle when it passed Saturn, Galileo had repeated failures...
But why did the big probes survive? Because they were EXPENSIVE, they were built like tanks. Thanks to budget cutting at NASA, the Mars probes of late have been small and light with no room for redundancy.
The 'smaller, faster, cheaper' strategy also put an unbearable strain on quality control.
Hence the failures.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Perhaps it's like The Bible Code? Look hard enough into the moderation patterns and you can make predictions of the future.
Oooh look, Duke Nukem Forever!
Best wishes,
Mike.
If Mars Express fails to shoot Beagle 2 into space, the retro-engine will not have enough thrust to brake Mars Express into Martian orbit. Both probes would then fly past the planet and into solar orbit.
Beagle 2 then travels through space for six days before hitting the Martian atmosphere at interplanetary velocity. Beagle 2's onboard transmitter will not come to life until the probe impacts the surface, so you can imagine that those six days will be pretty tense for the ESA teams.
All being well, Beagle 2 and Mars Express should arrive at their destinations safe and well in the small hours of Christmas morning. By the time we're opening our presents here in the UK, they should have received a signal from the Martian surface.
So, here's hoping!
Best wishes,
Mike.
Or maybe Mars is a long way away and it's really hard to build a machine that can be expected to work for months on end whilst being baked and simultaneously frozen after being placed in a vacuum and bombarded with radiation. Then to put this complicated device on top of hundreds of tonnes of high explosive so that you can get it moving fifteen times faster than a rifle bullet with the objective of placing it somewhere near a body only slightly larger than the Moon?
Best wishes,
Mike.
Here in the UK there are plenty of ticket machines at stations and airports that use touchscreens which appear to be made of toughened glass or very heavy duty plastic.
IIRC the touchscreen is covered with a material bearing an electrical charge. When a finger touches the screen, oscillators round the edge of the display measure the change in capacitance and a position is calculated.
I've never seen one broken despite being on streets in the British weather. The PoS operating system on the other hand, doesn't seem to be up to the job.
Best wishes,
Mike.
That's because the chunk of ore will be far from pure uranium, it will contain traces of the decay products - such as polonium, radium and radon, all of which have shorter half lives (and are hence more radioactive).
Glad to hear that you're taking basic safety precautions though.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Howabout the one that no longer has PC PS2 connectors on their computer? (RTFA)
My girlfriend is fairly sophisticated, but if I gave her that, she'd probably question my sexuality.
I'd insist on buying a wireless version for the lady in my life.
Not because of any superior ergonomic factors, but because Bluetooth would remove the risk of my beloved wrapping the cord around my throat and tightening.
My god, they're going to have to find a new measurement for bad taste now that thing's rolled into town.
Best wishes,
Mike
The misleading word there is 'precariously'. The position of the Earth's orbit around the Sun is essentially a function of the Sun's mass and the velocity of the Earth as it orbits the Sun. The Earth's mass is immaterial to the orbit. So provided the Sun does not suddenly change its mass, or the Earth undergoes some supernatural acceleration, we're safe.
As for the Earth-Moon system, it isn't static as you might think. The Moon's orbit is gradually enlarging as it strips rotational energy from the Earth. Effect on the Earth? Longer days, nothing else. At the same time, each body continues to accumulate hundreds of tonnes of asteroidal and cometary material as smaller bodies smack into their surface.
Best wishes,
Mike.