Happy Birthday to FotB Libertyman

Libertyman is perhaps the most prolific commenter here, rarely missing a Dad Joke (or much else, in fact).

The Queen Of The World says "Happy Birthday, Sir Libertyman".  I say "Check your email".

Oh, and many happy returns of the day. 

Ella Langley - Choosin' Texas

If you listen to music on the radio you've heard this song.  In a way its a throwback to the 1970s when radio stations would play all sorts of genres - Johnny Cash, Rolling Stones, Engelbert Humperdink.

This is clearly a country song, but it has been all over pop radio - It set the record for the longest running single on the Billboard Hot 100 in history.  A song that tells a story that everyone has experienced gives it broad appeal.

And it's quite a good song.  The Queen Of The World really likes it, as do I.  People who like old school country will like it, since it really channels the Old School.  People who don't like country probably will like it (that Billboard Hot 100 thing).

The Queen and I shall watch young miss Langley's career with great interest.

Choosin' Texas (songwriters: Ella Langley, Miranda Lambert, Luke Dick, Joybeth Taylor):

Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee
I shoulda known better than to take him back to Abilene
I put him right back into her arms
I wasn't a match for that kind of spark

She's from Texas, I can tell by the way
He's two-steppin' 'round the room
And judgin' by the smile that's written on his face
There's nothin' I can do
It doesn't take a crystal ball to see
A cowboy always finds a way to leave
Drinkin' Jack all by myself
He's choosin' Texas, I can tell

Well, I guess he forgot about the Smoky Mountain rain
Them old Hank tunes, the Memphis blues we used to sing
He always loved "Amarillo by Morning"
I should've taken that as a warnin'

She's from Texas, I can tell by the way
He's two-steppin' 'round the room
And judgin' by the smile that's written on his face
There's nothin' I can do
It doesn't take a crystal ball to see
A cowboy always finds a way to leave
Drinkin' Jack all by myself
He's choosin' Texas, I can tell

When I'm eastbound and down, and I can't help but cry
'Cause I-40 gets lonelier with every mile
I'll know that his mind wasn't ever gonna change
'Cause his heart still belongs to the Lone Star State

She's from Texas, I can tell by the way
He's two-steppin' 'round the room
And judgin' by the smile that's written on his face
There's nothin' I can do, naw, yeah
It doesn't take a crystal ball to see
A cowboy always finds a way to leave
Drinkin' Jack all by myself
He's choosin' Texas, I can tell, no
Drinkin' Jack all by myself
He's choosin' Texas, I can tell

Come on, baby
Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee

 

Duke Ellington - Autumn Leaves

This has perhaps the greatest jazz violin of all time, by (sometimes trumpeter) Ray Nance.  Ozzie Bailey does a spectacular job on vocals in both French (written by poet Jacques Prévert) and English (by Johnny Mercer).  The music was composed by Joseph Kosma.

Fun fact: this was Yves Montand's signature song.  Just about everyone recorded this (Sinatra, Doris Day, Andy Williams, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, and Nat King Cole who recorded it in Japanese), but I love this version.
 

That is one righteous password

Ahem:

A person claiming responsibility for the breach of Denmark's Central Register of Persons (CPR) says they gained access through an IT company's account protected by the password "123456." 

[blink] [blink]

I mean, don't these people go to movies? 

So let me bottomline this for the Tech Nerds.  Hollywood has known since 1987 that this is a bad password.

Hollywood.

1987.

So since the script was probably written in 1986, this has been the subject of silver screen mockery for forty years. 

Sorry to the good folks of Denmark.  It could be worse, though - Sweden has had people laughing at it for a good decade longer. 

Why Columbus discovered the New World and not the other way around

In the year 1000 A.D. an unbiased world observer would never have picked Europe as the region that would dominate the globe.  Probably they would pick China with its massive population or fabulously wealthy India.  The Islamic Caliphate would have looked past its sell-by date but would have beaten Europe by a mile.

In 1500 A.D. it would have been a closer match, but Columbus' small flotilla and the individual exploration ships sent by Prince Henry the Navigator to feel their way down the African coast compared very poorly with the huge Chinese treasure fleets that sailed all the way to Mogidishu.  Our unbiased observer would still have thought that Europe was the underdog.

Two centuries later and the sun never set on the British Empire.  How on earth did something this unlikely happen?

This is one of the biggest questions in the field of history.  The event is called the Great Divergence and in history it's a real thing.  Why did the Industrial Revolution happen first in Europe, and in Britain before anywhere in Europe?  It seems so unlikely as to be incredible.

In this day and age - and particularly on Columbus Day - it is frowned upon to ask these questions.  The Powers That Be tell us that Europe got rich by stealing indigenous people's wealth, conveniently ignoring the many other non-European powers that were much more brutal at doing that than the Europeans were.  The Mongol Empire in 1300 would have had poll position for World Domination, as would the earlier Abbasid caliphate.  If all it takes for World Domination is to steal other people's stuff, what was it about Europe that was different?

After all, China invented gunpowder.  Why did Europe perfect it?  Why did little England perfect the sailing Ship-of-the-Line?  Why did the Divergence start and why there?

Today I offer two books for interested readers that explain this.  One of these could never be published today, and the author would never get tenure today.  Fortunately (if that's the right word) David Landes is safely dead and doesn't have to worry about The Usual Suspects getting him denied tenure.

Landes was a big deal in Economic History, authoring the section on the Industrial Revolution in the Cambridge Economic History.  Late in his career, perhaps 30 years ago, he wrote The Wealth And Poverty of Nations, an economic history whose title was unashamedly stolen from Adam Smith.  Landes insisted that social systems were key, and that some societies allowed progress towards a Great Divergence while other societies stifled attempts towards that progress.

In other words, if your society doesn't support the right efforts it doesn't matter how much of other people's wealth you steal; you're going nowhere.  We see this in the history of Spain which became fabulously wealthy by stealing New World wealth but squandered it, ending up at the bottom of European power rankings.  You could say exactly the same thing about the Mongol empire, or the Caliphate.

Landes' arguments in the book are considered double-plus ungood by the woke crowd, so you might want to pick up a used copy from Amazon.  The chapter on Argentina is particularly interesting in this age of President Milei.  Interestingly, Milei was an Economist, and may have read Landes' book.

A second recommendation is less controversal with the woke crowd but is joined at the hip with the Great Divergence.  The political cycle world wide has been the emergence of an empire, the collapse of the empire, and the rise of a successor empire.  We see this in China, in India, in Mesoamerica.  

But not in Europe.  Europe only had one great empire, Rome.  When it fell, it was not replaced.  Walter Scheidel wrote a book exploring why this unusual circumstance happened, Escape From Rome.  Using Landes' analytical framework, the Roman Empire did not encourage the types of behaviors that could have led to an Industrial Revolution, because those behaviors were seen by the Authorities as subversive to the state.  But when Rome fell, there were unusual circumstances in Europe that prevented a new empire from rising in its place.  Then competition between the poor emerging states set Europe on a very different path from the rest of the world.  Basically, Europe escaped from Empire while the rest of the world didn't.

Both of these books are relevant on this Columbus Day.  We are offered a litany of European sins (which quite frankly are mostly true but are hardly unique to Europe).  All politics is local, so the Woke brigade must needs tear down Western Civilization by means fair or foul.

But facts are stubborn things, and the Great Divergence is a fact.  Another fact is that the sun really did not set on the British Empire.  Understanding "why" is always more important than knowing "what" - but that understanding starts with the "what" and Landes' and Scheidel's books are your entry point to this.

Because it's a fact that Columbus did discover the New World.  It's a fact that the New World did not discover the old.  It's a fact that the great Chinese treasure fleets were suddenly gone like they had never been, and that Vasco da Gama opened India to Europe, and not India sailing trading ships up the river Thames.

Facts are stubborn things.  Things happen for a reason.  History will tell us, if we listen. 

Cancer update

So they sent me for a PET scan, to see if the cancer had spread.  It hadn't.  Nice.

A PET scan is kind of like an MRI, but first they inject a die that gets absorbed by cancer tumors.  A radioactive die. It came encased in a big lead shield.  I thought they're going to inject that into me?  Yup.

I also got the first of the hormone injections.  It wasn't bad, and the only real side effects have been fatigue.  The Lupron starts at the end of the month; that's where I expect side effects.

They're scheduling a spacer, which is a gel injected next to the prostate.  It will let them be more accurate with the Death Ray beam, keeping it focused on the lesions and not zapping parts of me I want to keep.  Radiation will be every day starting in 2 or 3 weeks and will go probably until the end of the year.

All in all, not as fun as a barrel of monkeys but not so bad so far. 

The man who made the Internet possible

Divemedic has been geeking out about home network stuff which has been a bit of a walk down memory lane - I once had a supervisor who turned down my request for a 2400 baud modem "because you can't read that fast".  You see, at 1200 baud, a text file comes down at around one line per second, and a fast reader can read that fast.  Sorry, Borepatch, no speed for you.

And quite frankly, nobody in the late 1980s got much speed.  We had big VAX computers and the standard wisdom was that "You'll never get more than a megabit per second out of TCP/IP".  And it was standard wisdom because nobody did.

Enter a fellow named Van Jacobson.  He looked at the source code for popular TCP stacks and decided that it could be improved.  WAY improved.  TCP wasn't implemented in the operating system, as an OS service; rather, it was implemented in a user application.  The problem with this, thought Jacobson, was that every time you wanted to send a packet the OS had to do a context switch to let the (user-land) data structure containing the packet go to the OS kernel.

Jacobson thought this was stupid, and that networking should be the job of the OS.  He hacked IP into the Unix kernel and all of a sudden not only were you getting more than a megabit from TCP, a single Sun Workstation could saturate a 10 Mbps Ethernet.

IBM basically said that this was because Ethernet was stupid and primitive, and IBM's Token Ring network enforced bandwidth sharing.

Enter Jacobson again.  He defined a mechanism called "Slow Start" which he added to his hacked TCP code. Basically, whenever you started to send data, you would start slowly and increase the speed gradually until you hit congestion.  What he found was that not only would his Sun workstation saturate a 10 Mbps Ethernet, but 5 or 6 Sun workstations would saturate that same network while gracefully sharing the network between them.

So why do I say that he made the Internet possible?  Imagine a bandwidth-constrained Internet - constrained either because Internet Protocol was too slow or because more powerful computers hogged all the bandwidth.  There would be no Tik-Tok, no Youtube, no Netflix, no Zoom.

And it instantly made Sun Microsystems into the Ferrari of computers.  As Networking took off, Digital Equipment Corporation couldn't compete with lower cost workstations that were much, much faster.  That was it for VAXen, and for IBM's Token Ring, and for ISO's Open Systems Interconnect protocols, and for Asynchronous Transfer Mode.  The problems that these technologies were designed to solve were suddenly obsolete.

All because of Van Jacobson.

Not many people remember this time of massive upheaval, but we all owe Jacobson a huge thank you. 

You guys are a bunch of nerds

The comments to yesterday's post were simply hilarious.  I clearly am not the only nerrd around here.

Oh, and Rick T - sometime I will have to tell you about watching a guy install a vampire tap but forgetting to use the spacer while drilling into the cable.  Drilled right through the center wire ...

Happy Birthday, Ethernet

Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and Xerox released the Ethernet spec on this day in 1980.  This is why old timers sometimes refer to it as "DIX Ethernet".

And yes, I am one of those old timers.