lt, for example, said the British and Americans are “akin…in feeling and principle.”
Pushed by those shared principles, the U.S. bankrolled the British in World War I. The U.S. and Britain
began exchanging intelligence about Japan in 1937. And as Britain fought alone against Hitler,
FDR opened the “great arsenal of democracy” so that Churchill might keep his island nation alive.
Churchill knew America paid a price for focusing on the Atlantic. “If the United States have been
found at a disadvantage at various points in the Pacific Ocean,” he said after Pearl Harbor,
“we know well that it is to no small extent because of the aid you have been giving us.”
As if to consecrate the U.S.-U.K. bond, FDR’s personal envoy to Britain, Harry Hopkins, rose
during a dinner with Churchill and quoted from the Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest I will go,
and whither thou lodgest I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God,”
he declared, dramatically adding, “even to the end.” Churchill wept openly.
During the war, Churchill set up a Joint Staff Mission in Washington, D.C., as a liaison to
the U.S. military. FDR’s military liaison to Churchill was the Supreme Allied Commander,
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. Indeed, the pairings of presidents and prime ministers underscore
the common bonds and common history: Churchill and FDR, Churchill and Truman,
Churchill and Ike, Reagan and Thatcher, Clinton and Blair, Blair and Bush. Together, Britain and
America shaped the postwar world—rescuing West Berlin from Stalin, building NATO, defending
Korea. By the mid-1950s, they agreed, in the words of a Pentagon memo, to “coordinate the atomic
strike plans of the United States Air Force with the Royal Air Force” and share “atomic bombs in
the event of general war.”
Thanks to Anglo-American resolve, the Cold War was won without those bombs ever falling.
As Britain and America braced for another kind of war, in Kosovo, Prime Minister Tony Blair
recalled Hopkins’ toast during a summit with President Bill Clinton. This time, it was the
American leader who wept.
…
erjoyed when, in 1981, Sony released the much smaller PCM-F1 processor. The PCM-F1 was a small unit, roughly the size of a hardcover dictionary volume. When mated with a VCR (as the recording device), it enabled engineers to build a digital recording system for less than $2,500 - in the era when the alternatives cost more than 10 times as much.
A few years later technology advanced even further, enabling the VCR and digital processor to be reduced considerably in size and to be integrated. The conception of the DAT recorder signaled the end of the Sony F1 era, but we must not forget that its parents were the PCM-F1 and the VCR.
Although this is a Retro Review, I continue to use this vintage product almost daily. Thank you, Sony for pioneering low-cost digital recording, for providing an upgrade path for improving its sound and, most importantly, for building a digital recording system in the '80s that is still running reliably in late 1999.
Dr. Fred Bashour holds a Yale Ph.D. in Music Theory, and is a contributor to Pro Audio Review.
I owned one of these devices myself and was involved in persuading colleagues at London University, to consider the use of the product to download and store, the massive amounts of digital data that the new satellite communications systems, of the day, were generating at the time. This was the first piece of technology on earth, which provided EVERY musician with the capability of storing their music in digital form, for its distribution to ALL that would hear it, without the "permission of the 'LORDS and MASTERS' of the Music Industry"; and the opportunity to cut their musical creation to a compact disc [CD] for distribution to whomever they were pleased to do so. THE TITLE • TV Screen Shot above, was grabbed from a recent episode of Deutschland 83, revolver and all, which I deemed suitable to illustrate the potentiality of the positive use oftechnology, in the face of ALL conflict in space, time and culture. This photograph of my son Jamie was taken at the Old School House in Tackley. The Panasonic Professional Videotape machine was the first of its kind in Tackley and all of our children's friends used to come around to watch in awe, the videotapes of the likes of ET and Starwars; and the SONY kit sits between it and our Artemide "HELMET" Lamp.
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Added by Michael Grove at 13:25 on February 14, 2016
g preoccupation into the realistic prospect of
a spontaneously coordinate planetary society." Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking
Buckminster Fuller
Synergetics is a product of Fuller's passionate concern with models. Concerned that society's ignorance of science is seriously destructive, he devoted years of thought to ways of alleviating this ignorance. In the 20th century, we suddenly find ourselves confronted with an "invisible" atomic reality in which the average person understands very little about how things work. Although confronted daily with "incredible technology", which to Fuller includes the natural phenomena of Universe as well as the ever-expanding inventory of human invention, the vast majority assume such phenomena to be out of their reach. Fuller attributes this widespread discomfort to both the "invisibility" of science and the devastatingly complicated mathematics without which, scientists claim, their findings cannot be described. The dangerous chasm between scientists and lay people, with the truth guarded by an elite few and the rest resigned to ignorance, thus seems inevitable.
The origin of this troubled state of affairs? An incorrect mathematical system! Long ago human beings surveyed this environment and, seeing a never-ending flat Earth, decided upon cubes and orthogonal planes as the appropriate measuring system. Today, says Fuller, we're still stuck with that uninformed early guess, and as a result, nature's behavior has seemed irrational, perverse, and difficult to describe because we're using the wrong kind of yardstick. With accurate models, he claims, this gap can be closed. The purpose of synergetics is to make the invisible events and transformations of Universe visible, through tangible models that elucidate the principles behind our energy-event Universe. Human beings will thereby be able to "coordinate their senses" with a new understanding of reality.
Synergetics is full of tantalizing models; the difficulty comes in assigning them to aspects of physical reality. However, a number of notable examples, in which a newly discovered scientific phenomenon is described by one of Fuller's previously developed models, suggest that there may be many more such successes to come. The immediate goal therefore is to unravel and study the geometric system [IT]self.
Edmondson, Amy C.. A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Back-in-Action books) (pp. 17-18). EmergentWorld LLC. Kindle Edition.
…
which mitigate the establishment of that transition. No better perspective of these 'self-serving forces', has been created in his mind, than that proffered by Ralph Steadman in his Art Work; and most particularly his own very particular ...
'take on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights'. As most of you are already aware Leonardo da Vinci provided an early influence, in regard to my study of Art at Grammar School, which has subsequently been very much enforced by Steadman's own life long appreciation of Leonardo da Vinci.
The recurring theme of humanity in his work also shows up in his passion for other socially relevant causes. In 1994, he illustrated the front and back covers of Amnesty International's Drawing Blood, and in 1998 he did a series of drawings for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, celebrating its 50th anniversary of passing. They even had him write the introduction, wherein he stated:"'I have the right to hold an opinion, express it, celebrate it, broadcast it, live by it, and travel with it anywhere I so desire and what's more convince others, by peaceful means, that they should hold that opinion too.'"That in essence is Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and entombed within it is the right of any artist of any faith, impulse or inclination to express him/herself with unbridled passion and conviction sufficient to bestow upon the world a Pandora's Box of riches or curses we could probably live without."He continues, "Article 19 is obviously a dangerous one amongst twenty nine other equally important human agreements, but it is probably the one article which keeps well hidden within its carefully unbiased structure the undeniable fact that its content releases the power of the individual to be both artist and maniac. The 1948 United Nations Assembly had unwittingly created a monster, an embarrassing loophole, a well-meaning but desperate humanitarian gesture. In their earnest intention to neutralize any future tyranny in the shadow of the recent Holocaust freedom of communication was paramount."
…
, Korea, Germany and Australia use the same computer, while Japan relies on the Fujitsu PrimeHPC FX100 and China on IBM’s Flex System P46.
The XC40 has allowed the UK to become “pretty good” at weather forecasting, says Kirkman. “There’s a real community of science that sits around this." Each decade, the Met can predict an entire day further into the future. While the new computer may not speed up forecasts, it will improve their accuracy.In the meantime a "human brain" supercomputer with 1 million processors has been switched on by British scientists for the first time, as a result of its creators at Manchester University's hope that it will be able to "unlock some of the secrets of how the human brain works".
"I think we can expect the quality of forecasting to improve a lot," says Mark Parsons, director of Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Weather is modelled by cutting the globe up into little blocks,” he explains. At one point the block size was 50 miles and whenever they buy a new computer they can reduce the size of the block, making predictions much more accurate.”
Currently, a model of the Earth is split up into squares that are 10km across. In the UK, forecasts by the Met are more accurate with squares at 1,500m across.Eventually, the new supercomputer could work at a resolution of just 100 million across, allowing forecasters to predict, for instance, if a particular road is at risk of flooding. Prof Mark Wilkinson at the University of Leicester says that the upgrade to the Met Office is “absolutely essential”.
“You can’t make the types of models that they’re developing without a supercomputer. You gather lots of data from satellites and ground stations but the data themselves don’t tell you what’s going to happen, you need a computer capable of modelling long into the future.” he says.
.…
Added by Michael Grove at 14:23 on February 18, 2020
which mitigate the establishment of that transition. No better perspective of these 'self-serving forces', has been created in his mind, than that proffered by Ralph Steadman in his Art Work; and most particularly his own very particular take on the ...
'Universal Declaration of Human Rights'. As most of you are already aware Leonardo da Vinci provided an early influence, with regard to my study of Art at Grammar School, which has subsequently been very much enforced by Steadman's... own life long appreciation of Leonardo da Vinci.
The recurring theme of humanity in his work also shows up in his passion for other socially relevant causes. In 1994, he illustrated the front and back covers of Amnesty International's Drawing Blood, and in 1998 he did a series of drawings for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, celebrating its 50th anniversary of passing. They even had him write the introduction, wherein he stated:"'I have the right to hold an opinion, express it, celebrate it, broadcast it, live by it, and travel with it anywhere I so desire and what's more convince others, by peaceful means, that they should hold that opinion too.'"That in essence is Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and entombed within it is the right of any artist of any faith, impulse or inclination to express him/herself with unbridled passion and conviction sufficient to bestow upon the world a Pandora's Box of riches or curses we could probably live without."He continues, "Article 19 is obviously a dangerous one amongst twenty nine other equally important human agreements, but it is probably the one article which keeps well hidden within its carefully unbiased structure the undeniable fact that its content releases the power of the individual to be both artist and maniac. The 1948 United Nations Assembly had unwittingly created a monster, an embarrassing loophole, a well-meaning but desperate humanitarian gesture. In their earnest intention to neutralize any future tyranny in the shadow of the recent Holocaust freedom of communication was paramount."…
Added by Michael Grove at 17:44 on September 5, 2011