When analyzing system-wide patterns, they're not characterized by consistency or non-contradiction. Or rather, they are, if you combine the discipline in several fields. If you don't know all those fields, the result may appear inconsistent or contradictory.
"There's no need for it to be a clear-cut case, I'm not saying there wasn't other reason."
Agreed
"Comparing today's situation in Greece with situation of US 90 years ago would probably earn you a couple of sidelong glances in any historical debate, but nothing more."
I'm not at a debating society, and I'm not trying to write a research paper. In other words, there's only so much time I'm willing to devote to this topic.
Beyond a certain level of development in a society, the effects of a depression are as I described them. The US back then was far more developed than the USSR, and I would argue that it was developed enough that famine was not a realistic hardship. Furthermore, it was developed enough that the effects I mentioned could be considered hardship. In other words, it resembled a meidum-to-high income developing country (my guess, HDI 0.64 - 0.70). I'm using the vague memory of an article in 2006 claiming that China's poverty back then resembled the US in the 1920s, and substracting 0.002 for different medical technology. It's not exact, but unless I can find real HDI calculations of this time period, it's the best I got.
Otherwise, I don't have time to try and find statistics backing this point up.
"surplus deaths". If the rate of deaths was 0.2% of the population annually in the 1920s, and rose to 0.25% in the 1930s, then the extra 0.05% would be considered surplus deaths. In this case, they probably excluded the deaths due to old-age diseases in the years before and after, and used that to calculate any changes in the rate.
My comment was that no one died from famine. The storm itself killed around 7000. Probably most were asthmatics, newborns, and a few suicides. I don't see how 7000 deaths could be attributed to famine here?
"All of them are true. Britain has lost it's economical, political and, in general, institutional power in India (this includes scientific, historical, cultural issies) and therefore they are free to research their history and demand the truth in the face of the UN, whit nobody above them to suppress their will. Well, for the most part, that is."
And yet they used the same method you view as fraudulent, despite the fact that they had the ability to use a different method. It should tell you how reliably the method is viewed.
]]>It might help to remind us all that Australia is not England and does not do English seasons."When do we have summer" is one of those questions like "when do we crown a new queen" or "when do we celebrate Thanksgiving" that kinda make sense but really don't.
We have our own seasons, ranging from the wet tropics that have "dry" and "wet" seasons (guess what they're like 🙂) through to the central desert countries that have variable calendars with variable seasons within them. The most dramatic is when a normal dry winter has floodwaters flowing down from the north, so instead of cool and dry there's a veritable explosion of life all over everything. Saying "oh but it's still winter" doesn't really describe what's happening in a useful way.
Sydney gets about six seasons although note that we're not in Burran right now, we're in "hot and wet" (like Parra'dowee). Sadly I can't find the Wiradjuri calendar online which has different names and more flexibility (it's entirely possible that the BOM have elided that in the interest of keeping that page short and simple). There's a longer description on the ABC
In a dry summer my lawn would be brown and the garden more or less on hold, but right now I am mowing 5cm or more off the lawn at least once a week and the garden is not cooperating. Normally I mulch with 10cm or more of woodchips to keep enough moisture in the soil that not everything dies, but in a wet summer that just provides extra nutrients for more growth. That's partly boasting (I have a great garden!), but also trying to give you all some idea of what it's like when the weather is hot and wet here. Fertile soil just explodes with life.
The cherry tomato plants growing on the chicken fence are about 2m tall along about 4m of fence but the extra branches have started falling down so there's also a pile about half a metre deep of ground-based tomato vine/bush. It's all covered in fruit. The tomato seedlings that were 5cm high on Sunday are about 10cm high today and desperately need to be transplanted. It sounds sarcastic when I say I mow things, but it's the pragmatic solution do dealing with this kind of plant riot. If I don't mow those tomatoes they grow across the driveway and would probably try to take over the garage.
]]>If not, I guess I'll wait for the crib sheet thread later this year.
]]>The real question you should ask yourself is whether anybody is still paying attention to it, because after a few days of nearly total inactivity it seems that the crowd has more or less migrated to the next thread. So the risk you're running is that nobody will read your comment anymore.
]]>Beyond a certain level of development in a society, the effects of a depression are as I described them. The US back then was far more developed than the USSR, and I would argue that it was developed enough that famine was not a realistic hardship. And we can safely agree that conditions for such levels of development weren't developed enough pre-war, it is only after the war was over and new status-quo was pretty much established, we could say something definite about comparing states and epochs within same period. Not to talk about post-Cold War globalization, that allowed things like HDI to be calculated on common basis, and etc.
My comment was that no one died from famine. The storm itself killed around 7000. Probably most were asthmatics, newborns, and a few suicides. I don't see how 7000 deaths could be attributed to famine here? These numbers, anyway, don't match the demographic slump in the developed countries of that time, which are visible with naked eye - which is what I pointed out several times already.
And yet they used the same method you view as fraudulent, despite the fact that they had the ability to use a different method. It should tell you how reliably the method is viewed. My problem is not the method itself, but rather how it is applied. In case of USSR, it is universally accepted by apologetics of "genocide" that all surplus death happened because of famine and terror (and by a long stretch, a daemonic power of "communism"), and when it comes to other parts of the world, suddenly you are not allowed to use the same method and are met with flat denial and unintelligible excuses (often contradicting each other).
Which shouldn't really surprise me at all. http://www.sundaytimes.lk/article/1064682/britains-foreign-office-admits-to-destroying-hundreds-of-files-regarding-start-of-ltte-uprising-in-sri-lanka It is one thing to review your history and allowing to have different opinion on it. The other thing is to destroy it and erase it from memory, leading to the same mistakes made again and again.
]]>If multiple people with, as already demonstrated, different educations in the same subjects, do not understand your argument, it is the height of arrogance on your part to continually repeat "everyone is wrong except me".
]]>The real question you should ask yourself is whether anybody is still paying attention to it, because after a few days of nearly total inactivity it seems that the crowd has more or less migrated to the next thread. So the risk you're running is that nobody will read your comment anymore.
I keep checking back until the post is officially closed to new comments.
]]>While we have to be careful in applying modern HDI to older times, the alternative isn't to assume that all European countries were equally developed. That's why I await historian's attempts to calculate historical HDI the same way that they've calculated historical GDP.
"These numbers, anyway, don't match the demographic slump in the developed countries of that time, which are visible with naked eye - which is what I pointed out several times already."
You haven't shown it at all. The only developed country you've looked at is the US, and have yet to refute my assertion that this slump was seen in any other European developed country. By the standards of the time, neither Poland or the USSR would have been considered developed (they were considered economic and technological backwaters, the same way the US views Mexico today). The developed countries were: the Southern Cone, Brazil, the US, Canada, Australia (maybe), the UK, France, Germany, Benelux, and parts of Scandinavia.
"Which shouldn't really surprise me at all." Thank god historians don't trust empire data.
]]>In an effort to cheer you up -- and since I no longer have a sensible outlet for a bit of fan-fic...
... here are some insider facts and rumours about the "Manchester College", that may be of use if you decide to go with a "side-quest" for a quick Laundry novel. Just remember everything is possible in a Wheeler-Everett Multi-verse, and that causality is not necessarily what it appears to be.
FactsThe Manchester Baby really did start the use of software. Though Kilburn and Williams (both dead) were really just testing their cathode ray tube storage technology, and the CPU was just a way to build in the self test.
The idea of using software was discussed at an international symposium (piss up) in the USA in 1946, so the race was on.
Williams spent the war developing IFF at Malvern. Kilburn was at Bletchley.
RumourOne of Williams underlings at Manchester was the radar expert assigned to Operation Bruneval. He met one of the commandos on that raid in the street in Manchester in 1946 or 47.
"You were the soldier assigned as my bodyguard weren't you? I noticed you stayed very close to me."
"You could say that. I was actually tasked with shooting you in the head if it looked like we were going to be captured."
RumourKilburn discovered a design for a flip-flop memory (static RAM to you and me) on Turing's desk at Bletchley, and recognised that it needed capacitor decoupling to work. Turing: not the most practical of engineering talents. The rest of them at Bletchley used to hide his soldering iron (big thing heated up on a stove) because he was destroying too many valuable components.
FactThe River Cornbrook lies directly under the Kilburn building (The big square blob opposite Tuer Street on Oxford Road) http://hidden-manchester.org.uk/#/waterways/corn-brook . Images of the tunnel are also shown. Don't think Ramona is on the staff at the moment.
FactIt used to be about 20% of the degree qualified UK IT people coming through the department; not surprising as we set up UG teaching in 1965 (first in UK).
FactMary Almond recruited to do programming in 1947. Was UG director for many years -- probably still alive. Some other staff only realised where she acquired her programming skills when they saw a TV documentary covering a Bletchley reunion.
FactAtlas 1 commissioned in 1961. Last UK supercomputer; had world's first floating point unit. Why? (Urban redesign of Wolverhampton?)
FactLast mainframe developed here was MU5 (prototype ICL 1900/2900). Had Virtual Memory.
RumourSuccessfully extracted damages from IBM for VM patent infringement. Paid for new building ("The IT building", see below).
FactSteve Furber (ARM designer, still alive, still here) authorised expenditure to refurbish the "clean room" in the IT building, paving the way for the Graphene discovery (in IT Building).
FactSteve and I have built a neural simulator (SpiNNaker). We both also work in the IT building.
SuggestionCan it be used to mimic brains to distract feeders?
FactConnects directly to Tobi Delbrucks silicon retinas (or even a pair of them! Brains wasn't the first with stoner weapons.) Ryad Benosman has an infra red silicon retina. Was reportedly stolen by DSGE when he displayed it a Paris Tech Fair. Stealth Medusa, anyone?
FactManchester never bothered with "High level languages" in the 1950s since "Atlas Autocode Assembler" was arguably easier to use than FORTRAN.
Really Interesting Fact/RumourTuring's last published paper was the morphogenesis one (How the Zebra got its strips). Has recently (2000's?) been validated.
But the biggie is what he was working on right at the end: what is it about physics that leads inevitably to computation? Alternatively: is computing built into the universe itself? My source is Martin Hyland (still alive, ex head of Maths, Cambridge whom I often do PhD vivas with) Martin was one of Robin Landy's students, and Robin was Turing's only PhD student.
So Turing's last Theorem would have been: why computing works.
Other odd FactLast Head of Department (Jim Miles, still alive) discovered one of Turing's notes down the back of a filing cabinet when he was clearing out.
Feel free to use any of this if you're in a creative desert at the moment.
]]>What or who started software is moot. Without denying what you say: weaving cards and knitting patterns are programs, and the latter are amazingly powerful; Ada Lovelace first described modern software for a general-purpose computer; and David Wheeler (of Cambridge) is usually credited with inventing subroutines and libraries.
No, the Atlas 1 was NOT the first computer with a floating-point unit. The English Electric Mercury II was first commissioned in 1958, had one, and even it was probably not the first.
]]>Software -- quite agree, though I'd heard the one in which Tony Hoare invented the use of stacks for subroutines.
Nevertheless, I find the Laundry series is best (for me) when the weirdness is "close" to the real world; it doesn't take much in the way of tweaks to get interesting stories.
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