PECULIARLY PETE

Good (insert time of reading) dear reader. There are some issues with my blog that I felt merited your attention (all in good time of course). In no particular order, these are:

The site identity has been changed, on the day I am writing this, just a bit. I was quite fond of the old one, but I gather it was rather inconvenient since if you wanted to read an older article you had to scroll down a very long way. This new one should be a little easier, but if you have any particular objection to it, don’t hesitate to let me know by whatever means is most convenient.

I have never really had a regular schedule, but these days the schedule of sorts may become even less regular, due to an unusually busy period. The last post was on September 30th, which at the time of writing was just over a week ago. This is rather inconvenient if you enjoy (though even if you like suffering through them the point stands) my writings but do please be patient; if  I have a good idea for a post, I shall attempt to write it up.

If you came here from my personal Facebook, then you might have noticed that every single one of my posts has been linked to there. While this is a useful way of getting the word (or should that be words) out, it may be getting rather annoying. If so (or, on the contrary, if not), if you could let me know, that would be greatly appreciated. I suggest if you (by some miracle) enjoy my content, and I decide to cease Facebook services, you follow this blog via email. Don’t worry, it will not spam you with emails, but you will receive an email every time I post something, notifying you of this fact.

Regular programming will resume… as soon as is reasonably practicable.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you may have noticed I leave a lot of notes such as “I may write on this in future” or “more on this in future”. However, if you are an observant reader, you may also have noticed that at no point have I actually written up any of the things I  promised to. Today I hope to remedy the situation.

The first item on the list comes from the second article I wrote, concerning what I believe to be the Golden Era of British Railways. I promised to write of the great hopes of investment the various railways had before WW2, which were dashed by that terrible clash.

One big campaign during the late 1930s was for a “fair deal” for the railways. You see, during this period, they were considered Common Carriers – that is, they had to carry anything they were asked to, by law. This meant that all kinds of awkward loads, however expensive or difficult to transport, would have to be transported, as long as they could somehow be fitted into the loading gauge. Suffice to say, road hauliers were under no such obligations, and the war meant that the military needed to transport all kinds of things anyways.

So if freight was unlikely to make more money, what of passengers? Well, the main hope was new technology. All four of the big railways at the time used steam engines almost exclusively, despite new diesel and electric technology being available. Steam engines were (and are) expensive, labour intensive and dirty. Various railways had various ideas for how to solve this problem.

The London & North Eastern saw the future in electric traction (and indeed after the war one main line was done) and their Chief Mechanical Engineer (one Sir Nigel Gresley) designed electric locomotives before he died. The London, Midland & Scottish went another way and experimented extensively with diesels, particularly diesel electrics (where a diesel generator generates electricity to power motors which drive the wheels). The Southern already had an established programme of third-rail electrification, and this system still survives across wide areas of the south of England, as well as experimenting with diesel electrification. The Great Western decided (inevitably) to be different and ordered gas turbine locomotives from Switzerland, which, to cut a long story short, turned out to be rubbish when they arrived after the war.

The very next article, about 1950s British aviation (and its incredibly ambitious nature), I mentioned that flying below the radar might be a good way of combatting Soviet surface-to-air missiles and that it was indeed tried. Ultimately, this aircraft (unlike many designs of the era) did actually fly, and it was billed not just as a V Bomber replacement but also as a replacement for another bomber, the English Electric Canberra, a much earlier jet bomber. It was called the Tactical Strike & Reconnaissance 2, or TSR 2 for short. This was also the only aircraft to be recommended for development after the 1957 Defence White Paper.

This aircraft had a troubled development history, as it was designed by the fledgling British Aircraft Corporation, or BAC (they did love their acronyms). BAC was formed by the merging of several smaller aircraft firms, the idea being to make the British aviation industry more efficient. Unfortunately this meant that rather than having a small team of expert designers there were now huge unmanageable committees who all thought they were important. English Electric’s aircraft division, the only British company to have yet built a supersonic aircraft (the famous Lightning), had their former staff given senior positions, much to everyone else’s annoyance.

Despite the difficulty, the resulting aircraft was a world beater. First flying in 1964, it had an on board computer, autopilot, a head-up display and terrain following radar. Attention to detail was obsessive; the canopy glass was coated in gold alloy to reflect the light from a nuclear blast. It would have been easily capable of Mach 2, had it ever been tested up to that speed, but sadly the project was cancelled in April 1965 by a Labour government keen to reduce costs. It was thought that Britain could purchase American F-111s instead, but these failed to materialise.

In my defence of Dr. Beeching, I mentioned, but failed to elaborate on, the modernisation plan of 1955. To cut a very long story short, the plan was to replace steam completely on Britain’s railways with diesel and electric traction. It was incredibly expensive, and, while there were some notable successes (including electrifying a good chunk of the West Coast Main Line and introducing the mighty 3000 hp Deltics on the East Coast) large parts of the plan were mismanaged, and many lines, even with cheaper diesels, were never going to make money anyways.

I did mention the Fairey Delta 2 in an article about Concorde. Alas, this one will have to be further postponed until I do some more research. The basic facts of the matter were already in the article and I see no real need to repeat them here, but you might be interested to know that it utilised a Rolls Royce Avon engine, which the English Electric Lightning also used (although the Lightning had 2).

In an article concerning new bi-mode trains, I did mention the nationalisation debate. This too will have to be postponed for a better thought out and researched post, but suffice to say that I:

a) Think the debate has been framed poorly, due to the various actors in the railways at the moment and

b) Am not in favour

An article on Luftwaffe logistics brought up the Messerschmitt Me262 and Me 163. We’ll start with the 163, the rocket-propelled one. As previously mentioned, the fuel was hypergolic, but, as not previously mentioned, the fuels reacted extremely quickly. So quickly, in fact, that the engine only lasted about 6 minutes in service, perhaps 8 on a good day. The fastest fighter of World War 2 would then have to glide very slowly back to base where it was very vulnerable to attack by Allied fighters (insert curb your meme music here). Not that the speed helped. Only 9 aircraft fell victim of the Me 163 Komet, in its war career of nearly a year.

The Me 262 was an incredibly advanced aircraft for the time. It had swept wings (though not really swept enough to make a practical difference), axial flow jet engines (the kind we still use today, not the centrifugal flow ones the British used at the time). Messerschmitt’s finest also came with a pair of leading edge slats, that would automatically deploy (this was just clever aerodynamics, there were no computers here) below a certain speed, to make landing easier. While this was very clever, it was also a huge disadvantage when the Allies got wind of the slow speeds when coming into land. They sent piston engine fighters after them (notably the new British Hawker Tempest) which could tear the German jets to shreds, which in turn meant the Germans ringed their airfields with a quite ludicrous number of anti-aircraft guns. German piston-engine fighters were also brought in to deal with this new threat. I think you can probably tell that all this was an enormous waste of resources and further worsened the war situation for the Nazis, despite the revolutionary new technology (another possible curb your meme).

All this brings me, and consequently you, up to date. I can only assume that if you’re reading this you are either looking for an insomnia cure, or you’ve been on the edge of your seat waiting for all these posts I’ve promised, and are now disappointed that it’s all come out as a kind of horrid, tasteless mismatch. Ah well, you’ve read it now, you’re never getting those minutes back.

Some of you, who perhaps know me better, will know of my stubborn refusal to own or even to contemplate owning a smartphone. Why is this? Well, dear reader, let me explain my reasons, starting with:

1. People lived for millennia without the use of them, and many seemed to get on just fine.

There seems to be an insistence that the smartphone is an essential of modern life, as if, at the drop of a hat, if one did not own one, that one would simply expire. This is quite obviously not true. To survive, you need water, food, and shelter, things which our modern civilisation provides in abundance.

Ah yes, you may say, but I need to get around. To this I would respond that while Google Maps and the like are extremely useful for navigation, it is still possible to get around without them. For now, public transport does not require the use of a smartphone, tickets still come in card form, and despite much innovation in car navigation, road signs remain a fixture.

True, smartphones may have made the dissemination of information much easier. News travels around the world far faster than ever. But is this a good thing? The pressure on journalists now is not to get the story as truthful as possible, but to get it out before everyone else, thus ensuring more clicks and more advertising revenue. I suggest you make up your own mind.

2. I would really rather you just talked to me

Call me old fashioned, but to me, the easiest way to get something across is to actually speak to someone. Texts, calls and so on fall rather short, at least in my view. It strikes me as particularly odd that even within the same house, people will text each other rather than just walking over and talking. Maybe this is bad for society. Not being a sociologist, I have no idea.

3. It’s something else to charge

One unfortunate accident of the smartphone revolution is the far shorter battery life, compared to what we had previously. Smartphones, at least those that actually get used, need to be plugged in at least every night, if not more often.

Leaving aside my laziness for the moment, this isn’t great for the environment, as the energy use is far greater, and it has to come from somewhere. True, much of our electricity now comes from renewable or low carbon sources, and it’s heartening to see coal power stations being decommissioned, but the fact remains that for most people more energy use = more carbon emissions.

4. Cost

Perhaps I’m a cheapskate, but really, do I want to be paying for data, and all the rest of it? Not to mention the cost of the actual device, which, although coming down all the time (thanks capitalism!) are still not negligible. I’m cheap, at least when buying for myself, and if I don’t need to spend money, I generally don’t.

But there is another element to cost. The cost, not to me, or to the network, but to the environment as a whole. I’ve already gone over the energy costs for the use of the thing, but I’ve so far not mentioned the energy you need to construct these things, or the labour involved. I can assure you I am not about to launch into a plea for the workers of the third world, despite the problems there, because that problem is already well known and well documented.

No, instead I want to talk about materials. You see, in order to make a complicated electronic device like a smartphone, one needs a huge number of different materials, from almost all categories, including ceramics, polymers and metals. While polymers and ceramics (the plastic case and the glass screen) are fairly easy to come by, the difficulty comes in the metals department. Metals such as Cobalt, are considered critical materials, that is, they are only found in certain countries, and are difficult to come by. One of the countries that Cobalt is found in is the (not at all) Democratic Republic of the Congo, where miners face very demanding conditions.

But before this post turns into a sob story, let us instead focus on the transport aspects. All these materials, coming from many countries around the world, have to be transported, again incurring an energy cost, and more carbon emissions. They then have to be assembled, and the finished product shipped again to where it’s sold.

I suppose, however, this point is more of an argument against consumerism than smartphones in general, so I shall stop things there.

5. I actually think the world is quite interesting

By looking down at their phones, I do fear smartphone people are missing out somewhat. We live in a beautiful world, full of curious things. Even in cities, where there are few natural wonders, one can notice the care with which things are designed, the thought and the effort of thousands to make the built environment happen. Cars driving past reveal the talents of mechanical engineers, aerodynamicists, and of countless skilled hands. Railways go on, with all the certainty and regularity that the permanent way demands.

Further out, there are great hills, valleys and rivers. The landscape of England, and of the UK at large, is beautiful. We are lucky to be in Blake’s green and pleasant land. Many would downplay this, pointing to extravagant spots in faraway places, but few these days take the time to appreciate what we already have.

That said, I’m sure Angry Birds has its charm.

6. Fragility

I will admit, not owning one, I cannot say this with much conviction, but, judging by the number of cracked screens I have seen, smartphones seem rather fragile. One could counter this by pointing out that if handled with care, one will not have a problem. In turn, I would counter that by saying that anything you carry about your person regularly that needs to be treated with care all of the time is rather a drag. You don’t see people drop their keys and the key immediately shatter and become difficult to use, or their wallet; tickets do not suddenly cease to function when they fall out of your pocket.

I may also argue that the smartphone revolution is making people more fragile. Some, upon discovering that their beloved device has been left by accident at home, seem to be completely lost. The attitude of “there’s an app for that” has unfortunately created people who don’t seem to be able to cope on their own in the real world. Alas, I am probably getting ahead of myself here.

That brings me to the end of my reasoning, though I of course will remember something else I should have written instead at some point in the next week. If you, perchance, enjoyed this, you could share it with someone else, and, as if to rub in the irony, even do it on a smartphone. I use a laptop personally, but it is up to you.