Interesting Links for 07-01-2019

[andrewducker]

Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand?

(tags: physics knowledge viaFanf )

Lasers vs. Microwaves: A Billion-Dollar Bet on the Future of Magnetic Storage

(tags: lasers harddrive storage microwave Technology )

Four foreign elections should should pay attention to in 2019, and none are American

(tags: viaDanielDWilliam politics Germany Europe india australia )

How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

(tags: psychology happiness work usa burnout )

The concrete sound mirrors that once protected Britain

(tags: history sound uk airplanes )

The Hand Licking Incident (or how to work with your children to solve their problems)

(tags: children advice )

Comments

[dewline]

And if Americans still hope to have somewhere to flee to, they might want to pay attention to Canada, too.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-rules-out-snap-election-1.4948404

[andrewducker]

I'm glad that Canada hasn't turned as awful as the USA.

(No matter how grumpy I am with Trudeau for not following through on PR)

[alithea]

I might be end of Gen X rather than a millennial but that burnout article was a scarily accurate description of my life for the past few years.

[mountainkiss]

I think it applies to almost everyone I know in some shape or form.

[alithea]

I wonder if it's less a Millennial thing and more a generations where women are expected to work fulltime regardless of whether they have kids thing...

[mountainkiss]

Quite possibly but it also applies to more of my mid-fifties white male clients than not. "Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young." I think that she lays out one incredibly powerful, clear and painful path to burnout but I think there are others too.

[alithea]

Yeah, I agree. I said women specifically because I was thinking of the emotional labour and being the household project manager aspect - most of the mixed sex couples I know involve the female partner having to ask the man to do stuff, my own marriage included (Kev will cook, wash up and food shop but anything else doesn't occur to him unless he doesn't have any clean clothes to wear or whatever!).

[mountainkiss]

I think that's right but my clients have a massive mental load at work that follows them home. (So do I.)

[alithea]

I had that in my previous job too and now you've put it in my mind, I think my boss was seriously burnt out, which really didn't help the team. He's internalized the must be working all the time thing so much that he thinks it's the only thing in his life with value - academia is incredibly unhealthy that way and he's American too.

[mountainkiss]

A huge number of organisational cultures across all sectors have institutionalised this, I think.

[rhythmaning]

I read that "hand licking" post wondering why the child licked their hands, and why neither parents not teacher had bothered to ask the child in the first place.

An example of "something must be done... Let's do something!", I'd say.

[nancylebov]

His mother did ask, but only after a period of trying to make him stop.

He may have been too young to explain at that point, or (his mother's theory) didn't trust her with an answer because of the pressure he was under.

[danieldwilliam]

For reasons which are entirely superfluous to this comment I once read a treatise on the legality of aerial bombing writen in about 1912 and then a short history of the organisation of Fighter Command's control system - which both involved a consideration of the question whether the bomber would always get through. Fighter Command's problem being that for the first 20 or so years of military aircraft fighters struggled to intercept bombers. They were usually slower and operating at lower service ceilings and by the time you could see the enemy bomber fleet it was too late to intercept it before they dropped their bombs.

The legal aspects of aerial bombing circa 1910 need not concern us beyond a failure to appreciate the limits of the technology of aerial bombing resulting in a fairly circular argument about when an aerial siege might be considered to have started and ended.

What the RAF spotted, and put in to practice with the sound mirrors, and the networks of observers and then radar stations was that whilst mid-30's fighters probably couldn't outpace mid-30's bombers information about the location of the bombers could be moved very quickly if only you had a good system to move information, understand it and then move instructions back out. Quickly enough that you could just about get your fighters to the bombers in time to intercept them.

So much of an improvement was made to the home air defence of the United Kingdom over the 1930's that whilst most sorties by RFC fighters in 1914-18 war resulted in the fighters not even sighting the enemy by 1940 most sorties resulted in an actual interception and shots being fired.

[andrewducker]

Interesting. Any idea why bombers were faster than fighters?

[danieldwilliam]

They had two or three engines.

And I think it took some time for people to work out how to make different engines for eg small, fast, agile fighters or large, load carrying bombers.

[andrewducker]

Thanks, That makes sense.

[randomdreams]

I posted the maxwell equation paper elsewhere and got this wholly amazing response: http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1420.html

[andrewducker]

Thank you!