An interesting TED talk by the novellist Chimamanda Adichie on the power of stories, and how a multitude of stories are required in order to fully understand other people.
I have always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person, without engaging with all the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the Single Story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasises how we are different, rather than how we are similar.
The website TopTenz.net lists 10 Lost Technologies such as Damascus Steel and the Antikythera Mechanism (via Kottke). Incredibly, the technology used to bake the Apollo programme lacks any meaningful record of its construction:
The Apollo and Gemini programs aren’t truly lost. There are still one or two Saturn V rockets lying around, and there are plenty of parts from the spacecraft capsules still available. But just because modern scientists have the parts doesn’t mean they have the knowledge to understand how or why they worked the way they did. In fact, very few schematics or records from the original programs are still around. This lack of record keeping is a byproduct of the frenetic pace at which the American space program progressed. Because NASA was in a space race with the USSR, the planning, design, and building process of the Apollo and Gemini programs was always rushed. Not only that, but in most cases private contractors were brought in to work on every individual part of the spacecraft. Once the programs ended, these engineers—along with all their records—moved on. None of this would be a problem, but now that NASA is planning a return trip to the moon, a lot of the information about how the engineers of the 1960s made the voyages work is invaluable. Amazingly, the records remain so disorganized and incomplete that NASA has resorted to reverse engineering existing spacecraft parts that they have lying around in junkyards as a way of understanding just how the Gemini and Apollo programs managed to work so well.
I find this offensive. Lore has it that the Apollo programmeran off less computing power than your average mobile phone, and I repeat my generous offer to donate my iPhone – completely gratis, I might add – to any future moonshot. Coupled with a Trident submarine turned on its end, I always assumed that this would catalyse our return to extra-terrestrial bodies. And so its crushing to hear that most of the work would have to be done again from scratch. What were you thinking, NASA? Meanwhile, NASA joins the Flickr Commons, providing historical andiconic photography from the NASA space programmes. The image below is the Launch of Friendship 7, the first American manned oribtal flight, in 1962.
Launch of Friendship 7, the first American manned orbital space flight. Astronaut John Glenn aboard, the Mercury-Atlas rocket is launched from Pad 14.
Now then. Dave Osler has an interesting post about benefit fraud over at Liberal Conspiracy. Apparently, only 1% of benefits paid by the state are wrongly claimed. That still amounts to a billion pounds, but is obviously less than the billions spent on bank bailouts. Crucially, it is also much less than the amount of benefits people are legally entitled to, but never actually claim (approximately £10.5 billion, points out woodscolt in the comments). Double crucially, it is a fraction of the money lost to tax evasion (£30 billion). Yet in our political discourse, it is benefit cheats who are blamed for the horrible amounts of money the government wastes. Could this be because diddling benefits is a poor person’s game, while tax evasion is a middle- and upper-class pursuit? During the election campaign, I recall more than one political debate I had with friends and passers-by, on this problem. Like immigration, the issue is incredibly muddled. People often equate benefit-fraud with the separate issue of the state giving people too much in benefits. A story about a woman who steals £60,000 from the state in a benefit fraud is equated with the story of a man who claims housing benefit of £2.1m a year to live in Kensington are seenn as somehow part of the same problem. However, they are problems of a completely different order – The first is a case of someone breaking the law, who should be (indeed, was) caught and punished. The second is someone acting perfectly legally and in their own interests, within the system operated by the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. We solve the first case by investigating criminality. We solve the second problem by forcing the borough into building more and better social housing (if indeed you consider humanely housing a group of refugees to be a ‘problem’). Housing policy, and the level of benefits paid to those not in work, seems to me to be an ideological argument, where Labour and the Tories have very different views. Meanwhile, everyone agrees that benefit fraud is wrong and must be stopped. Public discussion on benefit fraud doesn’t always make this clear… and the Left loses the argument as a result.
Eagle-eyed commuters will have spotted a quote from yrstruly in the Metro this morning, on the all important topic of Libel Tourism. Barack Obama has just signed into law some measures that will protect Americans from British libel judgements. The protection will kick-in if the libel judgement is at odds with the First Ammendment.
Yesterday, campaigners said Mr Obama’s move was a clear indication that our libel laws were way behind the times in protecting freedom of expression. Robert Sharp, of charity English PEN, said: ‘It’s a national disgrace and just shows how skewed and unbalanced our laws are.’
Over in New York, an argument is blazing over the Cordoba Initiative, an Islamic cultural and community centre planned for downtown New York. Shrill critics have labelled it the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ and called for the project to be cancelled, due to it offending the sensibilities of the families of 9/11 victims. However, a calmer look at the proposed centre reveals although it is in the vicinity of the World Trade Centre site, its hardly on top of it. Other mosques exist in the downtown area, and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the leader of the project, has been praised for his interfaith work. This controversy has clearly been manufactured by those who seek to polarise American political debate. It is depressing and astonishing that the arguments against the centre have gained any traction at all. One might expect this in Europe, with its muddled and inconsistent relationship with secular ideals. Or in theocracies like Saudi Arabia and Iran, with their blanket intolerance of other faiths. But for a country which explicitly enshrines human rights such as free expression and freedom of religion in its constitution, it is bizarre that the debate has advanced so far. Most ironic is that the Anti-Defamation League, an organisation set-up specifically to combat religious prejudice and anti-semitism, has led the calls for the plans to be scrapped. Their statement prioritises public outrage and ‘offence’ over freedom of expression, assembly, and religion – A dubious position indeed. Thankfully, the principles of tolerance appear to be waxing. Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently gave a fantastic speech where he reaffirmed the principles upon which the United States was founded. As a Jewish New Yorker, his words have a certain ‘rhetorical authority’ (as David Foster Wallace would call it). Let’s hope this argument becomes another ‘teaching moment’, a step away from the global war that Osama Bin Laden sought to provoke when he planned the September 11 attacks.
“The attack was an act of war, and our first responders defended not only our city, but our country and our constitution. We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.
