November 2006 Archive of engeniusBLOG

There is an urban legend which I can actually vouch for as actual fact. At the BBC Droitwich transmitting station in Worcestershire, England, is a 400-kW (ERP) AM transmitter with its carrier set at a very accurate 200 kHz. During WWII, the transmitter was the main source of information for embattled Europe - reaching, as it did, to the South of France and deep into Germany, and carrying coded messages for the underground. The 50+ acre site houses the two transmitter buildings (the second for a MW transmitter with separate mast), the huge multiple-conductor T-aerial, and grass -- lots of grass.

The BBC rented out the site to a local farmer.

One day this guy was talking with his mates in a local pub and a BBC employee heard him boast that he never paid for his lighting. A couple of days later he got a visit from a policeman and a senior BBC manager. It was absolutely true. With the light switches turned off, every fluorescent in his cottage glowed brightly. He was not...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

I'm writing this while half listening to a bunch of pundits guessing early results in the 2006 mid-term elections. And some of this strikes me as bizarre.

We have the lawyers already involved in getting injunctions to extend voting hours because of machine problems; voting stations running out of ballots; candidates' names disappearing or truncated on voting machines. Any real overall result this evening seems to be extremely unlikely, and any long-term decisions in states where voter fraud and machine fraud are alleged could stretch the whole process out for a week or more. There are, no doubt, a lot of lawyers sitting in VIP lounges at northeastern airports ready to be scrambled in corporate jets to fly anywhere in the country.

I don't hold any real political position in the US; heck, I don't even have a vote! But the democratic process just isn't working properly.

Take the situation where Latino voters were harassed outside a polling station by two men -- ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Just a couple of weeks ago (October 2006) we wrote in these pages: "Living in a household with a near-teenager, who has a lot of school peers who seem to be rather more spoiled than the norm, we are in a position to assure the world that portable CD players are no longer "cool." The fact that they are a more sensible and long-term medium for music storage is completely immaterial, as is the CEA forecast's emphasis on generic MP3 players -- whose prices today (and profits) far exceed the introduction prices of portable CD players 10 years ago. It is, once again, down to branding. It is all iPod, iPod, iPod, all the iTime."

Did we get slapped in the face with the Microsoft Zune coming out much better in a thoroughly professional Click Here to Read More >>

Until recently, it was easy for the average engineer or tech worker to think of environmental issues as somebody else's problem, but the British Treasury's release of the "Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change" draws a bright, shining connection between how we treat our home planet's life support systems and our pocketbooks. With a clear, carefully-documented analysis that only a flat-Earther could ignore, Sir Nicholas Stern, Head of the Government Economic Service, explains that we have a decade or two to get our butts into gear and start cutting our CO₂ emissions to near-zero or face disruptions in the global economy that will make America's Click Here to Read More >>

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