Илья
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Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Илья" journal:[<< Previous 10 entries]
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08:47 pm
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Синематографическое
Сцена из прошлогоднего болливудского фильма про письма Мохандаса Ганди Адольфу Гитлеру. Гитлера играет истинный ариец!
Хинди с примесью инглиша мне кажется таким родным после стольких лет в Амазоне!
Tags: film
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08:09 pm
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Reading log
Robert Service, Comrades! (2007). A few weeks ago I re-read "This Godless Communism", a very cheesy Cold War-era American anti-Communist comic book. This caused me to want to read a scholarly book on Commmunism, and this is such a book, written by a well-known British historian of Russia. It does not have much that I didn't already know, but it organizes this common knowledge.
Communism, which is to say destroying the existing social order and replacing it with a new one based on human equality, is a very old idea, though the modern word only appeared in the 1840s. The founders of modern Communism were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A physicist will say that although Newton was a genius, he made mistakes; a Christian will not admit that Jesus made mistakes, and will find the question itself offensive. For a Communist, Marx is more like Jesus for a Christian than like Newton for a physicist. Marx wrote an analysis of capitalist political economy, Das Kapital. Eugen Böhm von Bawerk found flaws in it, and later so did Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes and many other economists. Historians and sociologists also found flaws with Marx's and Engels's analysis of society. As Service puts it, "Practically every sector of intellectual thought involved discomfort for Marxism." The Communist response has been to pretend that these critiques do not exist, and treat the writings of Marx, Engels and later Lenin and Stalin as sacred scriptures amenable to exegesis. People saw poverty and oppression around them and turned to a quasi-religion that encouraged them to turn off their critical facilities.
There were several Communist revolutions all over Europe in the aftermath of World War I, a horrible bloodbath that the leftists of the time thought was a product of capitalism and imperialism. The most famous one took place in Russia in 1917, headed by Vladimir Lenin, but there was also one in Hungary, headed by Béla Kun, and a bunch in smaller places. Russia is a big country with a large population and many natural resources, so the 1918-1920 foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War failed, and the Russian Revolution won, but all the others were suppressed. Afterwards, Communism was built in Russia, renamed the Soviet Union in 1923; here Service tells a familiar story; there is nothing in his book that is not also in a thousand other books. After the Soviet Union won World War II, the same model of society was forcibly imposed upon most of Eastern Europe. In 1949 a Communist revolution won in China, the world's most populous country. In the 1950s through the 1970s there were Communist revolutions in a bunch of Third World countries, from Cuba to Angola to Afghanistan. At the peak, a third of the Earth was ruled by governments that claimed to be Communist.
All these governments had something in common. They were single-party dictatorships (though in a few places like East Germany there were token non-Communist parties). The ruling party did not stand for elections any more than the Roman Catholic Church does in Vatican. It suppressed civil rights and due process. It suppressed independent media that could criticize its rule. Now, Service says, "Multi-party elections and civil rights do not produce rule by the people. There is overwhelming evidence that they benefit the rich and the powerful more than the poor and the weak." The Communists knew this much; what they failed to understand is that despite this, democracy and freedom offer a correction mechanism for abuses of power. Communist countries mobilized their populations for campaigns. Sometimes the results were unquestionably good. In China, land was redistributed and agriculture was collectivized more humanely than in the Soviet Union, which Service says is why hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants still revere Mao. Yet with the party not accountable to anybody, it could launch a campaign that ended up a disaster, and no one would stop it. A 1958 Chinese campaign to kill sparrows disrupted the ecology of rural China; a plague of insects ate up the harvest, exacerbating the 1958-1961 famine, causing tens of millions of deaths.
Service is an anti-Communist, but he wants to be fair to the movement he opposes. He says, "It cannot be stressed too heavily that not every inhuman action in the twentieth century was perpetrated by communists." Yet knowing that history is on your side gives one a certain impunity, like knowing that God is on your side. After the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the Chinese transition to capitalism, Communism has fallen out of popularity. Yet the forces that brought it about, political, economic and social oppression, are still there, though they now provoke a different reaction. The late Osama bin Laden would have been surprised to be compared to Lenin, but they both reacted to oppression with violence, hoping to bring about a perfect society, and were callous to the innocent people who might die in the process.
Tags: books, history
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03:38 pm
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Reading log
Looked through this book without reading it too carefully. Charles J. Bashe, Lyle R. Johnson, John H. Palmer and Emerson W. Pugh, IBM's Early Computers (1986). The technical history of IBM computers from Herman Hollerith's 19th century census tabulators up to but not including the System/360 project. It can be considered the background of Fred Brooks's books on the System/360. IBM was a 1924 rebranding of a company formed in a 1911 merger of three companies: a manufacturer of scales and meat and cheese slicers, a manufacturer of industrial time recording equipment, and a manufacturer of punched cards and tabulators. The tabulator company made machines to count the number of punched cards with holes in specific locations; it was used in the 1890 United States census, and censuses in Austria, Canada, Norway and Russia. Gradually the company improved the tabulator machines and made a sorting machine that used the Radix Sort algorithm. To subtract instead of adding, some machines used ten's complement arithmetic, and some a special hole with the sign bit. In 1944, IBM made a fully automatic electromechanical calculator for Harvard University, which called it the Mark I, with relays and pinwheels; its type of computer architecture is still called the Harvard architecture in its honor. Later there were machines using both relays and the much faster switching vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes were used in radioelectronics as amplifiers in the linear response range, and in digital computers they were either completely cut off, or saturated; this caused them to degrade over time until the cause of the degradation was found and new tubes were designed. One thing that surprised me was how many of IBM's early computers were used for Cold War military calculations: trajectories of guided missiles, intercepting potential Soviet bombers, cryptanalysis for the NSA; I wonder, what percentage of IBM's revenue came from these customers, as opposed to insurance companies and accounting departments. Later chapters talk in great detail about ferrite core memories (there was a special machine to thread them; it wasn't just laid-off seamstresses), magnetic tape, magnetic disks, and the switch from vacuum tubes to solid state electronics: diodes and transistors. The automatic transistor assembly line did not yet need a clean room!
Software did not play as large a role in early computers as in later ones, but there is a chapter on it, too. FORTRAN was developed at IBM, and so was COMTRAN, an early version of COBOL. A sample statement from a COMTRAN program is given:
IF AGE IS MORE THAN 21 AND (SINGLE OR MARRIED AND NO DEPENDENTS) THEN SET DRAFT STATUS EQUAL TO 1.
There was also a great deal of basic applied and research done at IBM. Nikita Khrushchev's May 1960 speech to the Supreme Soviet about the downed U-2 flight was translated into English by a machine translation system developed by IBM and Georgetown University; the result was given to the Congressional Committee on Science and Technology. Arthur Samuel the pioneer of artificial intelligence wrote his checkers-playing program at IBM.
Great things came out of IBM later, too: relational databases, RISC processors, the chess computer that defeated the world champion. Still: what a company; what a time!
Tags: books, computer science
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03:26 pm
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Reading log
Col. James G. Burton, The Pentagon Wars (1993). There was an HBO black comedy with the same title based on this book, but I wanted to read the original. In the 1980s, US Air Force Colonel Burton was one of a group of officers charged with reforming the way the United States Armed Forces acquires weapons. In particular, he wanted to subject the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, a cross between a tank and a troop transporter, to realistic tests. Should a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact have broken out, American and allied infantrymen would be riding in this vehicle and receiving Soviet fire. Burton wanted to make sure that this would result in as few casualties as possible. In the M1 Abrams tank, ammunition is stored in a special compartment with a blowout panel, so if the ammunition explodes, the force of the explosion will be directed away from the crew. In the Bradley it is stored inside; Burton could never understand, why the Abrams solution was impossible. Burton visited a factory that made the M113 armored personnel carrier; it manufactured two variants: one with the fuel tanks on the inside for the US Army, and one with the fuel tanks on the outside for the Israeli Army; perhaps the Israelis knew something the Americans didn't. Burton did a great deal of arm-wrestling with the Army to make sure that antitank weapons are fired at the Bradley, the M113 and a Soviet armored personnel carrier, and the results are recorded. The Army tried to transfer Burton to Alaska, but at the last moment found that he had influential patrons. The Army claimed that on the battlefield, most hits will come near the center of mass of the vehicle, so moving the water cans there and ammunition away would make the vehicle safer; of course this assumption was false. The Army tried to fire smaller Romanian rounds instead of bigger Soviet ones; this cheating was exposed. If the warhead from a TOW missile is put on a table and exploded next to a plate of armor, it makes a neat little hole; if the missile is actually fired at the plate, the hole is much bigger. Burton and his patrons forced the Army to conduct realistic tests and to make modifications to the vehicle to make it safer; this undoubtedly saved many American soldiers' lives during the Gulf War. Burton testified before the US Congress, which passed a law to subject all new weapon systems to testing under simulated combat conditions. Despite the happy ending, I was amazed at how many people's careers were staked on the expectation that no independent agency ever tests the results of their work. When this happens in the private sector, at least usually nobody dies.
Tags: books
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12:27 pm
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Лингвистическое
Понравилась реклама курсов эстонского языка:
(via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) riidekast via posol_ingrii)
Я был в Эстонии, когда мне было 14 лет, и купил учебник языка, но потом его открывал, наверное, всего однажды. Из слов рыбки узнал лишь kolm (три).
Tags: language
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04:50 pm
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Приматологическое
1. Будут ли два голодных шимпанзе тянуть тяжелый ящик с едой, который одной обезьяне не потянуть?
2. Что случится, если одно шимпанзе сытое?
(via pargentum via ...)
Tags: economics, science
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04:29 pm
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Литературное
Цитата из новой книжки профессора МГИМО про Смутное время:
"Везде супостатов преследовать будем. На дороге - так на дороге. А ежели в сральнике поймаем, так и в сральнике загубим".
(via texnews @ allin777)
Tags: politics, psychoceramics
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12:33 am
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Reading log
Adrienne Mayor, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs (2003). Warfare in the ancient world involved a panoply of weapons. There were flamethrowers using bellows for air pressure; ceramic bombs packed with burning substances (petroleum, pitch); unmanned burning wooden ships filled with combustible materials used as missiles against other wooden ships or moles. There were spears and arrows dipped in poisons of both animal and vegetable nature, including snake venom, as well as in bacteria-rich feces, or topped with stingray spines. Dropping beehives on the enemy was practiced both in antiquity, and as late as the 1935-1936 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, in response to the Italians' use of mustard gas. Armies retreated, leaving behind poisoned food and drink for their enemies. Both during the March of the Ten Thousand and during a war between Pompey and Mitridates, soldiers were poisoned by eating neurotoxin-rich rhododendron honey. The sight and sound of an elephant made horses panic; elephants in their turn could be frightened by squealing pigs; a pig smeared with burning pitch would squeal at the top of its lungs.
Mayor is a folklorist, and she devotes a lot of space to mythology: Heracles's slaying of the Lernaean Hydra and using its venom on his arrows; accidentally slaying centaur Chiron and deliberately centaur Nessus, whose blood on a tunic in turn killed Heracles himself. After the death of Heracles, the ownership of the arrows went to Philoctetes, and they were used in the Trojan War. Mayor wonders, what background could have produced stories like that. There are several ancient stories of boxes containing a plague; in Greek mythology it is a box opened by Pandora; in the Hebrew Bible it is the Ark of the Covenant captured by the Philistines; Mayor wonders whether such boxes could contain infected clothes worn by plague victims. I found it strange to read about the Ten Plagues of Egypt in a book that does not mention that the Documentary Hypothesis thinks that this part of the Hebrew Bible is a compilation of several sources.
Tags: books
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05:10 pm
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Reading log
Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars (2011). Unlike World War II and the Cold War, World War I was not about any principles an individual could support or reject. Closer to our time, if the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 or the Able Archer crisis of 1983 had degenerated into a full-scale nuclear war, it also would not have been about anything. That war would have been over in a matter of hours, slaughtered hundreds of millions, and transformed a large portion of the Earth's surface into a radioactive wasteland. In contrast, World War I took over 4 years, slaughtered millions, and only transformed a narrow strip of Northern France and Belgium into a wasteland that is, thankfully, not radioactive but so filled with unexploded ordnance that French engineers still remove hundreds of tons of it each year. Unlike an exchange of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, it could be stopped. This book is about the individuals in Hochschild's own country, Great Britain, who spoke and acted against the war. Doing it meant going against both the public opinion and the government of the nation during the period in modern history when it came closest to fascism, but they did it anyway.
The anti-war activists were certainly a diverse bunch. At one end of the spectrum was the Fifth Marquess of Lansdowne, who circulated a paper in November 1916 arguing that the war would destroy civilization and calling to a return to the status quo ante bellum. In November 1917 he published his ideas in a letter to The Daily Telegraph saying that the war "will spell ruin for the civilised world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it," and calling for peace negotiations with Germany. At the other end was Keir Hardie, the Scottish socialist who became a miner at age 10, and later a union organizer and one of the founders of the Labour Party; he tried to stop the war by organizing a general strike in the belligerent countries. When another trade unionist saw the poster "Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?", he said that he would reply, "I tried to stop the bloody thing, my child." Field Marshal John French, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force between August 1914 and December 1916, had a sister named Charlotte Despard née French, a social worker, Suffragist, vegetarian and pacifist who co-founded something called Women's Peace Crusade. One prolific intellectual who argued against the war was Bertrand Russell; he was imprisoned for his antiwar activism for half a year, though because he was an earl, his prison conditions were far better than ordinary. Another imprisoned antiwar activist was journalist E. D. Morel, hero of Hochschild's book about the Belgian Congo, who, in Russell's words, "collapsed completely, physically and mentally, largely as the result of insufficient food" during his imprisonment.
I must say that I have a great deal more sympathy for the peace activists profiled in this book who tried to stop World War I than for those mentioned in Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, who tried to stop World War II, because World War II was a struggle of the imperfect good against the perfect evil, and in World War I none of the major belligerents were significantly more evil than the others - certainly not to a large enough degree to justify the bloodbath.
Tags: books, history, military history
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12:39 am
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Reading log
Jeffrey T. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb (2006). This is really two books in one. The first is the story of the nuclear programs of nations other than the United States and Great Britain: those of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, France, India, Israel, South Africa, Taiwan, Pakistan, Libya, North Korea and Iran. In the 1940s, the Bomb was a miracle of technology; it was beyond the reach of even such a technological leader as Germany; nowadays, even a country not known for its technological prowess like Libya can start building one. The second is the story of the United States' intelligence and reaction. In 1944, an American baseball player who was also an OSS spy went to a lecture Werner Heisenberg gave in Zurich; he was under the instructions to find out whether the Germans were close to building an atomic bomb, and if they were, shoot Heisenberg; he found out that they weren't, so he didn't. President Herbert Hoover's main occupation was a mining engineer; he has worked in the Kyshtym area in the Urals, where four decades later the Soviets built a plutonium production plant; the CIA made use of his papers, which had a map of the area. American nuclear intelligence gathering relied on technology a great deal: seismographs, underwater acoustic sensors, aircraft fitted with filters to capture nuclear fallout, overflights first by the Lockheed U-2 (which was even launched from an aircraft carrier twice to observe a nuclear test range in the French Polynesia) and later by satellites. The big question was and still is, how to interpret this data. On September 22, 1979 a satellite monitoring nuclear tests showed a double flash characteristic of a nuclear explosion somewhere over either the South Atlantic or the Indian Ocean; we do not know to this day, whether this was a nuclear test by South Africa, Israel, both, a bug in the satellite, or a meteoriod striking its sensors. In 2001, Iraq ordered 60,000 aluminum tubes from China; which the CIA intercepted; were the tubes to be used in uranium enrichment centrifuges, or as rocket artillery shells? A debate between different U.S. government agencies raged in 2002; on February 5, 2003 the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the tubes in a speech before the United Nations Security Council as proof of Iraq trying to develop nuclear weapons; we now know that Powell was wrong: the tubes were to be used in rocket artillery. On December 12, 2002 George Tenet, the Director of the CIA, said that the case of Iraq pursuing weapons of mass destruction was "slam dunk"; in fact, it was anything but. Whatever the United States may do, the genie is out of the bottle, and it is hard if not outright impossible to shove it back it.
Tags: books
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