When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
Banks will often have 4 to 8 vice presidents at each location. Titles don't mean anything but customers feel more important and feel like they get special service if they are being handled by a VP, or at least that's what I was told was the reason.
No doubt... In sales it's become typical to call someone a Territory Manager, Regional Manager or Account Manager where there are no direct reports and by all accounts the person is the only salesperson in the area for that company. They functionally have no more authority in the decision making process other than to get dressed in the morning.
The other day, I was driving along a road in upstate New York when I saw a deer. This isn’t an unusual sight in itself, but this fawn, young enough to still have was still spots, was bounding, flying, across the lawns beside the road, so fast and heedless that my husband worried it would jump right into a car and die.
What was even more striking than its speed, though, was how high it seemed to get, as it left the earth and almost hovered, for a moment, in the air, over and over again. It look something like this, but even more dramatically air-borne:
So effortless, so much air. Why couldn’t I do that?
In theory, say some experts, jumping should not be just the provence of a few lucky animals. One evening in 1949, after dinner at the Royal Institution in London, a scientist named Archibald Vivian Hill delivered a speech in which he argued that, based on the basic properties of muscle and on simple dimensional reasoning, “similar animals of different size should be able to jump the same height.”
Jumping relies on basic physics: any animal that jumps is using energy to leave the ground. This is true whether they are bounding, leaping, high jumping, jumping straight up into the air, or lifting all four feet off the ground while “stotting” or “pronking.”
Jump from a running start, and you have horizontal energy to put into it. Jump from a standstill, and you only have the energy your body can create from that state of rest. No matter what, though, the aim of a jump is to lift the center of gravity from the ground, as high as possible.
You’d think that a smaller animal might get less air, since it has less muscle and shorter legs and can create less power. But it also has less mass to move. Hill noted that in the standing long jump, kangaroo rats and humans could jump about the same distance. As a rule, animals with equal proportion of the muscles used for jumping can cover about equal heights or distances.
The idea that all animals should jump the same distance had been around for centuries before Hill outlined it, but, of course, it’s not that simple. Think about it this way: small animals have shorter legs, which means that as they bend their legs and push off their ground their muscles, even if they were incredibly strong, don’t have much time to do the work of jumping. They basically can use only one of two tricks to improve their jumping prowess, explains Jim Usherwood, a senior research fellow at the Royal Veterinary College’s Structure & Motion Lab. They can extend the time in which they make the jump or increase its power.
Longer legs allow more time for muscles to gather energy before the animal leaves the ground. This is why good jumpers have disproportionately long or strong legs. And excellent jumpers, like fleas, locusts, and other insects, do not rely on the power of muscle alone. They have other tricks—their legs include catapult-like mechanisms that store energy and release it at the right moment.
Still, even accounting for these tricks, Usherwood points out that humans aren’t that bad. “I can jump higher than a locust, or frog, or flea is able to,” he says. In the end, it does matter how big you are to begin with.
The tiny fawn didn’t have noticeably long legs, so I asked Usherwood if he could explain how it go so much air. We considered this image, by Eadweard Muybridge of a similarly airborne fawn:
The front legs of these sorts of animals would have good, long tendons, Usherwood explained, which help it slow, right before the jump, and ping up its legs into the air. Then, it relies on its back, muscly legs, to kick off.
But part of this deer’s jump is just show. It’s pulled up its legs up towards its body, leaving an impressive gap of air beneath it. But the measure of a good jump isn’t actually how much air you can clear, so much as how high can you get your center of mass away from the ground. In other words, the deer wasn’t doing anything so special.
Humans are decent at this, although not great. We don’t run particularly fast, and we don’t have springy legs. But, really, there’s not much separating me from that fawn. In fact, in one of Hill’s examples, mule deer and humans were measured as jumping the same distances if they started from a run.
People are often impressed that deer can jump 8-foot fences, but humans can, too, if properly trained. The current high jump record for humans is just over 8 feet, and that’s under rules requiring jumpers to launch from one foot, a restriction that limits the height they can reach. Using two feet, and a series of energy-gathering flips, people have cleared bars even higher, of 9 or 10 feet. These are highly trained athletes, whereas among deer clearing a tall fence seems more commonplace. But the deer often have a stronger motivation for jumping fences (like access to a tasty garden). If the reaching best food required jumping 8 foot fences, we’d all probably be pretty good at it, too.
MUNCHIES in North Korea: A Visit to Pyongyang’s Newest Pizza Joint
November 2, 2016 / 12:00 pm BY JAMIE FULLERTON
When it comes to pizza, my favourite food, I’m not enormously fussy. But when I was served the pepperoni pizza I had ordered at Italy Pizza, the newest Italian restaurant in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, I had to politely ask that the staff take it back and add some cheese, as it had been served with none. That’s me: the picky Brit abroad.
Italian food has only been a “thing”—and a niche “thing” at that—in the city since 2008, when the first Italian joint in North Korea opened. So it’s easy to forgive a few pizza production basics, such as putting cheese on them, occasionally going awry. It also seems a little crass to moan about such slights in a country in which the memory of the 1990s famine that killed around 2 million people is still fresh.
With the totalitarian country kept in chronic isolation by current leader Kim Jong-un, information about food infrastructure there is hard to verify. Numerous reports, however, suggest that much of the North Korean rural classes live hand to mouth. The middle and upper classes are usually granted the chance to live in cities, the most elite being Pyongyang, where an increasingly moneyed middle class has emerged over the past decade. This has fuelled the rise of Western-style restaurants in the capital.
Pepperoni pizza at Italy Pizza. All photos by the author.
Now in Pyongyang you can find beer bars, burger restaurants and, perhaps surprisingly considering the North Korean regime’s attitude toward the country’s historic enemy of Japan, a sushi joint. Italy Pizza is the third Italian restaurant to open in the city, arriving in late 2015 as part of the opening of Mirae Scientists Street: a stretch characterised by pastel-coloured skyscrapers located next to the Taedong River that runs through the centre of the capital.
Mirae Street.
As is the case for many of the Pyongyang hotels and restaurants foreigners are allowed to visit, the décor of Italy Pizza is 1970s cruise liner-level kitsch. Gloriously odd touches abound, such as this fish tank with no fish in it. Or water.
Pizza dough is churned out in an open kitchen. Although most North Koreans are banned from travelling abroad, many Western-style restaurants in Pyongyang get permission to send their staff overseas for training.
The restaurant was not very busy on my Friday evening visit, and I was told that this is typical. Many of the approximately 5,000 Westerners who visit North Korea as tourists each year have speculated online that venues such as these exist purely as showcases for foreigners. Simon Cockerell, general manager of UK-owned North Korea tour specialists Koryo Tours, said that this was unlikely.
Cockerell explained that while all North Korean restaurants will ultimately be state-owned, businessmen and women who operate within work units that manage them have a bit of leeway with regard to the style of venues that they open. “It’s easy to say there’s no profit motive, but costs versus income is still a ‘thing,’” he said. “They might be willing to lose money for, say, three years or something, but there is such thing as a restaurant closing in Pyongyang because not enough people went there. They are businesses.”
Italy Pizza does more to attract business than just serve pizzas. After my dinner was served, perhaps due to having few other customers to deal with, a waitress serenaded the room with an impressive karaoke session.
The imagery on the karaoke screen was typical of that seen on TV in North Korea: fighter jets, guns, tanks, and the occasional nod to heavy industry.
The pizza, meanwhile, was pretty good, with a pleasantly fluffy crust. The tomato sauce won’t be challenging Domino’s for tang factor any time soon, but it’s unlikely that many people will be in a position to make a direct comparison within the next few decades.
Most pizzas were priced at the equivalent of around $6 to $10 US each, making them unaffordable to most locals but not in the elite price range of fine dining in Pyongyang. I wondered if, by being exotic and pricey compared to local staples such as noodles and kimchi, eating pizza was a bit of a status symbol in the city.
Cockerell reckoned not. “There’s still this thing in North Korea where people don’t like to be seen eating in public,” he said. “You’d think that restaurants might have good views from their windows but often they have curtains over them. It is more socially acceptable now to have more money than someone else, but that mentality probably comes from a time when eating out was seen as showing off, and showing off is seen as bad. It’s innate conservatism.”
I’ll return to Italy Pizza, should I ever find myself in Pyongyang again. And next time I’ll go for the Fruit Pizza. If any dish flies in the face of innate conservatism, it’s got to be this thing.
MUNCHIES in North Korea: Sinking Pints in Pyongyang’s Beer Bars
November 3, 2016 / 12:00 pm BY JAMIE FULLERTON
Pyongyang, the capital of hyper-isolated and totalitarian North Korea, might not sound like the obvious location for a beer-sodden knees-up with the jolly boys. Although we’re not quite at a stage where Pyongyangers are regularly getting massively pissed up and vomiting down their Mao suits, in recent years beer halls have become established, popular spots in the city, where locals can unwind after a hard day of work and repeatedly bowing to portraits of the Kim dynasty leaders.
The seven varieties of beer from the Taedonggang brewery are the tipples on offer at such places, with the rising popularity of the Pyongyang-made brews fuelling the launch of the city’s first ever beer festival last August. Production of Taedonggang began after the North Korean government bought and imported an entire brewery, Ushers of Trowbridge, in 2000. Now there are around five large Pyongyang beer halls serving it.
Last month I visited one of them, Mansugyo Beer Bar, maintaining the slim hope of lucking out and stumbling into a welcoming Pyongyang stag party until it became clear that the bar was not that kind of establishment. Sparsely decorated, lick-the-floor clean and with no music (the latter aspect perhaps being the one thing the pub had in common with J D Wetherspoon’s décor and brand concept), the venue is a touch more minimalist than your average Red Lion.
A few propaganda posters on the terrace brightened the place up, though.
As is the case at most of the beer halls in the city, customers stand at tables as they knock back pints that sell for the equivalent of about 50 cents US. The brews are named and numbered from One to Seven. The most conventional, lager-style offerings are on the lower end of the scale with more extreme tipples such as chocolate- and coffee-flavoured beers assigned the highest numbers.
Most people in the bar plumped for the conservative options. One (as in the beer named One) was an enjoyably crisp, golden, medium-strength lager-esque drink, while Two was a slightly lighter version that is also bottled and sold in many other places around the city. They were both pretty tasty.
I gave the chocolate and coffee styles a whirl, but their mildly unpleasant bitterness gave an indication of why I was the only person in the bar doing so. They’re not tongue-troublingly bad, but Six and Seven are clearly just making up the numbers.
My visit was at 5:30 PM on a Wednesday afternoon. The atmosphere was polite and subdued with the day’s first post-work drinkers, most of them male, providing a lightly bubbling soundtrack of glass clinks and murmurs. Pyongyang is where North Korea’s most privileged citizens live, and while the presence of the beer halls there is a result of the emergence of a wealthier middle class in the city, the relative low cost of the drink means that they are not refuges of the absolute elite. The liquor soju remains the most popular booze in the country, but draft beer is becoming more common and accessible.
“Beer is a bit middle-class in North Korea, but you never know who’s going to end up drinking at these places,” said Simon Cockerell, general manager of UK-owned North Korea tour company Koryo Tours, the firm I travelled to Pyongyang with. “I once went to a similar beer bar in the city and ended up talking to a table of very loud female gynecologists.”
I was told that the good-natured raising of voices is one of the few overt signs of drunkenness I was likely to encounter at a Pyongyang beer hall. The drinkers I was sharing the place with barely threatened to register even that; they seemed to be there for a couple of civilised rounds after work.
“It’s a conservative society,” said Cockerell. “These bars aren’t open late. You see people who are more ‘sleepy’ drunk rather than passed-out drunk. That tends to be in parks, when people have had a soju-heavy picnic.
“In these bars, people just get a little bit rowdy sometimes; you never see anyone getting carried out and I’ve never seen a punch-up over a spilled pint or anything like that. They’re not open all day, so there’s not, like, an old guy perched at the end of the bar who’s been there every day for 40 years.”
With most able young men in North Korea conscripted to the army, the beer halls’ clientele tends to not be particularly young. “You do see the occasional young couple on a date here, though,” said Cockerell. “They’re called ‘donju dates’ —donju means new money people, the ‘masters of money.’ It’s a North Korean word that’s now also being used in South Korea, too.”
Sadly, there were no donju dates taking place during my fleeting trip to Mansugyo Beer Bar. Still, I’d happily take a lady for a pint of Two there, should the ban on foreigners freely roaming in North Korea be lifted in my lifetime. I liked it there; the bar offers a rare chance on Pyongyang’s rigid tours for outsiders to see the city’s locals relaxing, or at least appearing to. Sort a big drop-down screen for Super Sunday and they’ll be laughing.
Is it weird that I've wanted to visit the country of "Great Leader" for a few years now?
I think it's one of those things where you have to do it just because you were told not to.
Tell a kid not to do something and they can't help but do it.
My wife wants to hurry up and go to Cuba but I don't want to bring my money to enrich their government. Looks like I'm going to Cuba. It's not that I'm whupped, but that she's a really good wife who doesn't ask for much.
I understand the allure of the forbidden exotic place, but when you've been to Puerto Rico and to Cozumel you've seen what tin-pot corrupt governance and crumbling infrastructure look like in a Caribbean climate. I don't need to see it turned up to 11. I know what old cars look like. Ours are better than theirs. I know what beautiful tropical places look like. I also know what those places look like when they are clean and well governed. I'll probably get arrested. The old people are to blame. Either they were part of the revolucion or they didn't work hard enough to stop it.
My wife wants to hurry up and go to Cuba but I don't want to bring my money to enrich their government. Looks like I'm going to Cuba. It's not that I'm whupped, but that she's a really good wife who doesn't ask for much.
I understand the allure of the forbidden exotic place, but when you've been to Puerto Rico and to Cozumel you've seen what tin-pot corrupt governance and crumbling infrastructure look like in a Caribbean climate. I don't need to see it turned up to 11. I know what old cars look like. Ours are better than theirs. I know what beautiful tropical places look like. I also know what those places look like when they are clean and well governed. I'll probably get arrested. The old people are to blame. Either they were part of the revolucion or they didn't work hard enough to stop it.
Everyone I know that's been there raves about what an amazing experience it is to visit. I am hoping to go there myself soon before American influence becomes too evident.
When emotional intelligence (EQ) first appeared to the masses, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70% of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into the broadly held assumption that IQ was the sole source of success.
Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as being the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack. The connection is so strong that 90% of top performers have high emotional intelligence.
“No doubt emotional intelligence is more rare than book smarts, but my experience says it is actually more important in the making of a leader. You just can’t ignore it.” – Jack Welch
Emotional intelligence is the “something” in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions to achieve positive results.
Despite the significance of EQ, its intangible nature makes it very difficult to know how much you have and what you can do to improve if you’re lacking. You can always take a scientifically validated test, such as the one that comes with the Emotional Intelligence 2.0 book.
Unfortunately, quality (scientifically valid) EQ tests aren’t free. So, I’ve analyzed the data from the million-plus people TalentSmart has tested in order to identify the behaviors that are the hallmarks of a low EQ. These are the behaviors that you want to eliminate from your repertoire.
You get stressed easily. When you stuff your feelings, they quickly build into the uncomfortable sensations of tension, stress, and anxiety. Unaddressed emotions strain the mind and body. Your emotional intelligence skills help make stress more manageable by enabling you to spot and tackle tough situations before things escalate.
People who fail to use their emotional intelligence skills are more likely to turn to other, less effective means of managing their mood. They are twice as likely to experience anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and even thoughts of suicide.
You have difficulty asserting yourself. People with high EQs balance good manners, empathy, and kindness with the ability to assert themselves and establish boundaries. This tactful combination is ideal for handling conflict. When most people are crossed, they default to passive or aggressive behavior. Emotionally intelligent people remain balanced and assertive by steering themselves away from unfiltered emotional reactions. This enables them to neutralize difficult and toxic people without creating enemies.
You have a limited emotional vocabulary. All people experience emotions, but it is a select few who can accurately identify them as they occur. Our research shows that only 36% of people can do this, which is problematic because unlabeled emotions often go misunderstood, which leads to irrational choices and counterproductive actions. People with high EQs master their emotions because they understand them, and they use an extensive vocabulary of feelings to do so. While many people might describe themselves as simply feeling “bad,” emotionally intelligent people can pinpoint whether they feel “irritable,” “frustrated,” “downtrodden,” or “anxious.” The more specific your word choice, the better insight you have into exactly how you are feeling, what caused it, and what you should do about it.
You make assumptions quickly and defend them vehemently. People who lack EQ form an opinion quickly and then succumb to confirmation bias, meaning they gather evidence that supports their opinion and ignore any evidence to the contrary. More often than not, they argue, ad nauseam, to support it. This is especially dangerous for leaders, as their under-thought-out ideas become the entire team’s strategy. Emotionally intelligent people let their thoughts marinate, because they know that initial reactions are driven by emotions. They give their thoughts time to develop and consider the possible consequences and counter-arguments. Then, they communicate their developed idea in the most effective way possible, taking into account the needs and opinions of their audience.
You hold grudges. The negative emotions that come with holding on to a grudge are actually a stress response. Just thinking about the event sends your body into fight-or-flight mode, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. When a threat is imminent, this reaction is essential to your survival, but when a threat is ancient history, holding on to that stress wreaks havoc on your body and can have devastating health consequences over time. In fact, researchers at Emory University have shown that holding on to stress contributes to high blood pressure and heart disease. Holding on to a grudge means you’re holding on to stress, and emotionally intelligent people know to avoid this at all costs. Letting go of a grudge not only makes you feel better now but can also improve your health.
You don’t let go of mistakes. Emotionally intelligent people distance themselves from their mistakes, but they do so without forgetting them. By keeping their mistakes at a safe distance, yet still handy enough to refer to, they are able to adapt and adjust for future success. It takes refined self-awareness to walk this tightrope between dwelling and remembering. Dwelling too long on your mistakes makes you anxious and gun shy, while forgetting about them completely makes you bound to repeat them. The key to balance lies in your ability to transform failures into nuggets of improvement. This creates the tendency to get right back up every time you fall down.
You often feel misunderstood. When you lack emotional intelligence, it’s hard to understand how you come across to others. You feel misunderstood because you don’t deliver your message in a way that people can understand. Even with practice, emotionally intelligent people know that they don’t communicate every idea perfectly. They catch on when people don’t understand what they are saying, adjust their approach, and re-communicate their idea in a way that can be understood.
You don’t know your triggers. Everyone has triggers—situations and people that push their buttons and cause them to act impulsively. Emotionally intelligent people study their triggers and use this knowledge to sidestep situations and people before they get the best of them.
You don’t get angry. Emotional intelligence is not about being nice; it’s about managing your emotions to achieve the best possible outcomes. Sometimes this means showing people that you’re upset, sad, or frustrated. Constantly masking your emotions with happiness and positivity isn’t genuine or productive. Emotionally intelligent people employ negative and positive emotions intentionally in the appropriate situations.
You blame other people for how they make you feel. Emotions come from within. It’s tempting to attribute how you feel to the actions of others, but you must take responsibility for your emotions. No one can make you feel anything that you don’t want to. Thinking otherwise only holds you back.
You’re easily offended. If you have a firm grasp of who you are, it’s difficult for someone to say or do something that gets your goat. Emotionally intelligent people are self-confident and open-minded, which create a pretty thick skin. You may even poke fun at yourself or let other people make jokes about you because you are able to mentally draw the line between humor and degradation.
Bringing It All Together
Unlike your IQ, your EQ is highly malleable. As you train your brain by repeatedly practicing new emotionally intelligent behaviors, it builds the pathways needed to make them into habits. As your brain reinforces the use of these new behaviors, the connections supporting old, destructive behaviors die off. Before long, you begin responding to your surroundings with emotional intelligence without even having to think about it.
Last edited by DNMakinson; 12-05-2016 at 08:27 AM.
Reason: Added Bolds
I suffer from a couple of those. Most principally "You don’t get angry." This is a problem when in a leadership role, and I sometimes have to actually pretend to be pissed off and rant a bit when ****'s not getting done (or done right), as it's just not in my nature to huff and puff...
MISLEADING TECH: KICKSTARTER, BOMB SIGHTS, AND MEDICAL REJUVINATORS Al Williams January 21, 2016
Every generation thinks it has unique problems and, I suppose, sometimes it is true. My great-grandfather didn’t have to pick a cell phone plan. However, a lot of things you think are modern problems go back much further than you might think. Consider Kickstarter. Sure, there have been plenty of successful products on Kickstarter. There have also been some misleading duds. I don’t mean the stupid ones like the guy who wants to make a cake or potato salad. I mean the ones that are almost certainly vaporware like the induced dream headgear or the Bluetooth tag with no batteries.
Overpromising and underdelivering is hardly a new problem. In the 30’s The McGregor Rejuvenator promised to reverse aging with magnetism, radio waves, infrared and ultraviolet light. Presumably, this didn’t work. Sometimes products do work, but they don’t live up to their marketing hype. The Segway comes to mind. Despite the hype that it would revolutionize transportation, the scooter is now a vehicle for tourists and mall cops.
One of my favorite examples of an overhyped product comes from World War II: The Norden Bomb Sight. What makes the Norden especially interesting is that even today it has a reputation for being highly accurate. However, if you look into it, the Norden–although a marvel for its day–didn’t always live up to its press.
ABOUT THE NORDEN
The Norden could adjust for air density, wind drift, the bomber’s airspeed and groundspeed while controlling the bomber’s final run on the target. Carl Norden invented this analog computer and felt like it was a moral invention since it would allow bombs to hit their targets and not hit civilians.
The military was primarily interested in being able to hit ships and other pinpoint targets from high altitudes. In fact, because of technical limitations, the Norden didn’t work for low altitude bombing.
A conventional bomb sight used a slide rule calculator and depended on the operator to make measurements. The operator didn’t have much time to make the measurements, so errors and inaccuracies were common. The Norden was a two-part device. The sighthead has a 20X telescope held vertical by a gyroscope. No matter how the plane moves, the telescope remains vertical. A mirror under the telescope rotates so that targets in front of the plane show up in the sight. The crosshairs (made of spider silk) marked the center of the scope.
A series of adjustments for airspeed, bomb type, and other factors means that once the target is in the center of the telescope and the other settings are correct the target will stay in the sight no matter how the plane moves. The other part of the device–the stabilizer–adjusts the plane’s motion to account for factors like the wind. In some versions, an indicator told the pilot what to do, but in many cases, the Norden flew the plane up to the bombing run.
The Army training video below gives an excellent explanation, but the main idea is that when correctly adjusted, the mirror under the telescope will rotate to keep the target in sight. When you are far from the target, the mirror’s motion will be slow, but the closer you get, the faster the mirror has to turn. When the rate of turn reaches a certain level, the bombsight automatically drops the ordnance, presumably hitting the target. The measurement of rate, rotating of mirrors, and the gyroscopes all required advanced analog computer techniques. TOP SECRET
The secrecy surrounding the Norden was nothing short of amazing. The bombardiers swore an oath not to reveal any details of the Norden secret. The sight itself had a specially guarded box and was brought to the plane, installed, and then removed after each mission. A pyro device ensured the device would not survive a crash, although the bombadier was responsible for ensuring the destruction of the instrument, with his pistol, if necessary.
When it wasn’t in the air, the bomb sight resided in a vault. A highly-trained and highly-secret group maintained the device. Even though security relaxed a bit towards the end of the war, the public didn’t see the Norden until 1944.
The secrecy for the Norden was probably second only to the Manhattan Project. Like that project, espionage penetrated despite the security. The Germans had their version of the Norden which–interestingly–didn’t work any better than the American ones although it was simpler to use.
PICKLE BARRELS
The Norden worked great in trials. The official line was that the Norden could hit a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet. This may have been true, but it depended on a lot of conditions being just right. Clear sight of the target was the biggest problem. The Norden could not break cloud cover, a smokescreen, or fog. Also, flying fast (as you would want to do during combat) made the device less accurate.
Turns out, with a 20X telescope, a bombardier couldn’t see a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet, much less hit it. The Norden company claimed it could hit a 15 square foot target from 30,000 feet (a pretty big pickle barrel). That’s still pretty impressive.
Unfortunately, in practice, accuracy was much less than advertised. At 15,000 feet, the accuracy was about 400 feet–not nearly good enough to hit a ship reliably. It wasn’t just environmental issues that hampered the Norden. It was difficult to operate from inside the cold plastic nose of a B17 (the bombardiers often wore silk gloves to prevent their skin sticking to the cold metal) and had lots of moving parts that could fail or go out of alignment, especially after a few hard landings. Accuracy got better as the war carried on, but at first it wasn’t really much better than other conventional sights. There were several reasons for the improvement. The Norden was difficult to manufacture (using special tools) and drawings and techniques doubtlessly got better over time. Also, operators simply got better, and even learned how far off their particular bombsight was and would compensate for that.
Don’t get me wrong: the Norden was an incredible piece of engineering. In clear weather and with other prevailing conditions, it was possible for it to be highly accurate. I say possible because so much depended on the skill of the operator. This observation led the Army to designate lead bombers with the most accurate bombardiers using the Norden and the others just dropping their bombs when the lead planes released.
Like the Segway, though, the Norden was the subject of a lot of hype. After the device became known publicly in 1942, the Norden company presented demonstrations of dropping a wooden bomb into a pickle barrel at Madison Square Garden. It was hard to evaluate how good it really was until after a lot of information became declassified, so if the company said they could hit a barrel from 30,000 feet, it was hard to refute it. The Norden, by the way, dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It missed its actual target by 800 feet, which was of no consequence, but does make for a very large barrel of pickles.
The videos below show more about how the Norden did what it did. Today, you could probably set the whole thing up with a minuscule amount of off the shelf gear. But for its time, it was an electromechanical marvel.
Molten gold was poured down his throat until his bowels burst
F R W van de Goot, R L ten Berge, R Vos
Department of Pathology, VU University Medical Centre, De Boelelaan 1117, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands; frw.goot@vumc.nl
In 1599, a Spanish governor in early colonial Ecuador suffered this fate. Native Indians of the Jivaro tribe, unscrupulously taxed in their gold trade, attacked the settlement of Logrono and executed the gold hungry governor by pouring molten gold down his throat. 1 Pouring hot liquids or metals, such as lead or gold, into the mouth of a victim was a practice used on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, by the Romans and the Spanish Inquisition among others. 2
Several sources mention the bursting of internal organs. 1–3 The question remains whether this is actually the case and, also, what the cause of death would be. To investigate this, we obtained a bovine larynx from a local slaughter house (no animal was harmed or killed specifically for this purpose). After fixing the larynx in a horizontal position to a piece of wood and closing the distal end using tissue paper, 750 g of pure lead (around 450°C) was heated until melting and then poured into the larynx. Immediately, large amounts of steam appeared at both ends of the specimen, and the clot of tissue paper was expelled with force by the steam. Within 10 seconds, the lead had congealed again, completely filling the larynx (fig 1).
After cooling, cross sections of the larynx were made, and formalin fixed, paraffin wax embedded slides of the laryngeal wall were observed under the light microscope. The laryngeal mucosa was found to be totally absent, and coagulation necrosis of the underlying chondroid and striated muscle was seen at a maximum depth of 1 cm (fig 2).
Based on these findings, we suggest that the development of steam with increasing pressure might result in both heat induced and mechanical damage to distal organs, possibly leading to over inflation and rupture of these organs. Direct thermal injury to the lungs may lead to instantaneous death, as a result of acute pulmonary dysfunction and shock, as shown by Brinkmann and Puschel. 4 Even if this is not the case, the development of a “cast” (once the metal congeals again) would completely block the airways, thus suffocating the victim.
In conclusion, we have shown that in the execution method of pouring hot liquefied metals into the throat of a victim, death is probably mediated by the development of steam and consequent thermal injury to the airways.
Figure 1
Bovine larynx after being filled by melted lead.
Figure 2
The laryngeal mucosa was totally absent and coagulation necrosis of the underlying chondroid and striated muscle can be seen.
References
Anthony HE. Indian headhunters of the interior. The National Geographic Magazine 1921, October: 328–333.
Wylie J A. History of the Jesuits. The tortures of the Inquisition (Chapter 11).
Hare JB. Hebraic literature, translations from the Talmud, midrashim and Kabbala.
Criminals and criminial punishments (http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/hl/hl50.html).
Brinkmann B, Puschel K. Heat injuries to the respiratory system. Virchows Arch A Pathol Anat Histol1978;379:299–311.
Saddam Hussein's Blood Quran A 605-page Quran penned in the blood of a dictator is locked away in a mosque.
Following an assassination attempt on the life of his son, Uday, the former dictator became a devout Muslim. Ironically though, with infinite resources it’s difficult to demonstrate your piety. In an attempted display of devotion, shortly after his 60th birthday Saddam had roughly 27 liters of his blood drawn and given to a calligrapher.
Over the course of two years the artist, Abbas Shakir Joudi al-Baghdadi, wrote some 600 pages of the Quran using the Iraqi president’s blood as ink.
Authorities don’t know what to do with the document. On the one hand, it is a significant, if gruesome, artifact of a particular era in Iraqi history. On the other hand, displaying it could cause it to be glorified by Saddam’s supporters, the Ba’ath Party. Additionally, some Sufi leaders have have called the macabre method of writing such a Quran “haraam,” or forbidden.
For now, the Blood Quran resides in a basement under strict lock and key. It was previously on display in Saddam’s “Mother of All Battles” Mosque. Now, that room is sealed by three vaulted doors, the keys to which have been distributed between a sheikh, the city police commissioner, and a secret third party. In order to even be considered for a visit to the Blood Quran, one has to submit to deliberation by a government committee. So for now, it sits in the mosque, growing more curious and grisly by the day.
Very poignant read. Both the implications of the rat's behavior for social models and the process of how such an experiment unfolded to reveal its outcome are equally fascinating.
[SIZE="6"]The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters[/SIZE]
The real unhappiness of The Fall of the Faculty is over what the "administrative university" will look like. What administrators hanker after is a university run like any other business. That leads them to view the rambunctiousness of faculty with deep suspicion: a Ford worker who bad-mouthed his boss would be sacked, so why should faculty be able to criticise their department chair's views on the curriculum, the dean of the faculty's views on hiring, or anything else? There goes academic freedom. Since academic freedom is essential for innovation in research or teaching, there goes the core mission of the university. Lip service will be paid to academic freedom, but deanlets and deanlings are everywhere drawing up codes of civility and respect so that administrators can squash any real resistance to their decisions.
The difficulty is not that resistance is futile, but that the real remedy is for universities and colleges to be self-governing communities where academics themselves do most of the administrative chores. And anyone who has had to twist his colleagues' arms to help with such things knows that our own unwillingness to take back the institutions that employ us is one of the major reasons for the deanlets' population explosion.
Opinion: The adaptation of predictive numerical models, statistical analysis, and metrics applied to govern human behavior so as to alter, minimize, or eradicate outliers in those models (brought about through freedom of choice, or in this case freedom of academic inquiry) is how corporate systems function. Personally, I despise academia equally with corporate ideologies but in this article they seem to be the sad protagonists. So, here they sit as bystanders to the infiltration of metric-minded administers indifferent to the basic freedoms required by academics because freedom cannot be predicted.
Edit: But the irony here is the same statistical modeling used in many fields of academic inquiry are the same methodologies now used to govern academia administratively. The very same principals of outlier-exclusion that form the academic canon are now reversed back upon them in a DELICIOUS turn of fate.
Last edited by Philosopher; 01-25-2017 at 07:45 PM.
Reason: Another thought
The earliest examples of cats being used in warfare dates back to the Ancient Egypt during a war against Persia. The Persians, fully aware of the reverance that Egyptians paid to their felines, rounded up as many cats as they could find and set them loose on the battlefield. When the Egyptians were faced with either harming the cats or surrendering, they chose the latter.
During World War I, cats were used in the trenches as an attempt to keep the rat population down and some cats were used as poison gas “detectors”.
The most creative way to use a cat as a weapon happened in World War II. The United States' OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA) needed a way to guide bombs to sink German ships. Somebody hit upon the inspiration that since cats have such a strong disdain of getting wet and always land on their feet that if you attached a cat to a bomb and drop it in the vicinity of a ship, the cat's instinct to avoid the water would force it to guide the bomb to the enemy's deck. It is unclear how the cat was supposed to actually guide a bomb attached to it as it fell from the sky but the plan never got past the testing stages since the cats had a bad habit of becoming unconscious mid-drop.
Not to be outdone by its predecessor, the CIA also attempted to use cats but this time as a bugging device during the Cold War. Although a disaster as a guided bomb, the CIA thought that a cat would make the perfect covert listening device in a project known as Operation Acoustic Kitty. They attempted to surgically alter the cat by placing a bugging device inside him and running an antenna through its tail. The project took five years and $15 million dollars before the first field test hit a slight snag when the bugged kitty was released near a Russian compound in Washington and was immediately hit by a car while crossing the street. The project was ended soon after.
Exploding rats: Rat carcasses filled with plastic explosives
Exploding rats were a weapon developed by the British army in World War II for use against Germany. Rat carcasses were filled with plastic explosives, with the idea that when the rats were shovelled along with coal into boilers, they would explode, causing significant damage. However, the first shipment of carcasses was intercepted by the Germans, and the plan was dropped. The Germans exhibited the rats at top military schools, and conducted searches for further exploding rats.
11-04-2016, 11:55 AM
0
