V2 rocket

pages: 339 words: 92,785

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Television news broadcasts showed flickering black and white images of a cross-hair settling over a building or vehicle, before the screen flashed blinding white as the target was destroyed. And lastly, the Patriot interceptor batteries, deployed to Israel to guard against Saddam’s threats to attack its cities with his crude ‘Scud’ missiles, a derivative of the venerable Nazi V2 rockets. The brief combat was so one-sided that almost everyone was surprised, including the Americans, who had anticipated a tougher fight. The lesson was clear—combat veterans with capable legacy equipment were simply no match for the new American high-tech way of war. The innovations built on America’s growing dominance in information technologies, and the strong links between its university research community, the Pentagon, defence contractors, and even the more freewheeling high-tech community in Silicon Valley.1 Thirty years earlier, President Eisenhower had soberly warned of a ‘military industrial complex’ that might test the social contract in America.

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A-10 Warthog abacuses Abbottabad, Pakistan Able Archer (1983) acoustic decoys acoustic torpedoes Adams, Douglas Aegis combat system Aerostatic Corps affective empathy Affecto Afghanistan agency aircraft see also dogfighting; drones aircraft carriers algorithms algorithm creation Alpha biases choreography deep fakes DeepMind, see DeepMind emotion recognition F-117 Nighthawk facial recognition genetic selection imagery analysis meta-learning natural language processing object recognition predictive policing alien hand syndrome Aliens (1986 film) Alpha AlphaGo Altered Carbon (television series) Amazon Amnesty International amygdala Andropov, Yuri Anduril Ghost anti-personnel mines ants Apple Aristotle armour arms races Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Arnalds, Ólafur ARPA Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) art Artificial Intelligence agency and architecture autonomy and as ‘brittle’ connectionism definition of decision-making technology expert systems and feedback loops fuzzy logic innateness intelligence analysis meta-learning as ‘narrow’ needle-in-a-haystack problems neural networks reinforcement learning ‘strong AI’ symbolic logic and unsupervised learning ‘winters’ artificial neural networks Ashby, William Ross Asimov, Isaac Asperger syndrome Astute class boats Atari Breakout (1976) Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) Space Invaders (1978) Athens ATLAS robots augmented intelligence Austin Powers (1997 film) Australia authoritarianism autonomous vehicles see also drones autonomy B-21 Raider B-52 Stratofortress B2 Spirit Baby X BAE Systems Baghdad, Iraq Baidu balloons ban, campaigns for Banks, Iain Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Fleurus (1794) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) batwing design BBN Beautiful Mind, A (2001 film) beetles Bell Laboratories Bengio, Yoshua Berlin Crisis (1961) biases big data Bin Laden, Osama binary code biological weapons biotechnology bipolarity bits Black Lives Matter Black Mirror (television series) Blade Runner (1982 film) Blade Runner 2049 (2017 film) Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire blindness Blunt, Emily board games, see under games boats Boden, Margaret bodies Boeing MQ-25 Stingray Orca submarines Boolean logic Boston Dynamics Bostrom, Nick Boyd, John brain amygdala bodies and chunking dopamine emotion and genetic engineering and language and mind merge and morality and plasticity prediction and subroutines umwelts and Breakout (1976 game) breathing control brittleness brute force Buck Rogers (television series) Campaign against Killer Robots Carlsen, Magnus Carnegie Mellon University Casino Royale (2006 film) Castro, Fidel cat detector centaur combination Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) centre of gravity chaff Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Chauvet cave, France chemical weapons Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) chess centaur teams combinatorial explosion and creativity in Deep Blue game theory and MuZero as toy universe chicken (game) chimeras chimpanzees China aircraft carriers Baidu COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) D-21 in genetic engineering in GJ-11 Sharp Sword nuclear weapons surveillance in Thucydides trap and US Navy drone seizure (2016) China Lake, California Chomsky, Noam choreography chunking Cicero civilians Clarke, Arthur Charles von Clausewitz, Carl on character on culmination on defence on genius on grammar of war on materiel on nature on poker on willpower on wrestling codebreaking cognitive empathy Cold War (1947–9) arms race Berlin Crisis (1961) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) F-117 Nighthawk Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) joint action Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons research and SR-71 Blackbird U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN Cole, August combinatorial creativity combinatorial explosion combined arms common sense computers creativity cyber security games graphics processing unit (GPU) mice Moore’s Law symbolic logic viruses VRYAN confirmation bias connectionism consequentialism conservatism Convention on Conventional Weapons ConvNets copying Cormorant cortical interfaces cost-benefit analysis counterfactual regret minimization counterinsurgency doctrine courageous restraint COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) creativity combinatorial exploratory genetic engineering and mental disorders and transformational criminal law CRISPR, crows Cruise, Thomas Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culmination Culture novels (Banks) cyber security cybernetics cyborgs Cyc cystic fibrosis D-21 drones Damasio, Antonio dance DARPA autonomous vehicle research battlespace manager codebreaking research cortical interface research cyborg beetle Deep Green expert system programme funding game theory research LongShot programme Mayhem Ng’s helicopter Shakey understanding and reason research unmanned aerial combat research Dartmouth workshop (1956) Dassault data DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) dead hand system decision-making technology Deep Blue deep fakes Deep Green DeepMind AlphaGo Atari playing meta-learning research MuZero object recognition research Quake III competition (2019) deep networks defence industrial complex Defence Innovation Unit Defence Science and Technology Laboratory defence delayed gratification demons deontological approach depth charges Dionysus DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) dodos dogfighting Alpha domains dot-matrix tongue Dota II (2013 game) double effect drones Cormorant D-21 GJ-11 Sharp Sword Global Hawk Gorgon Stare kamikaze loitering munitions nEUROn operators Predator Reaper reconnaissance RQ-170 Sentinel S-70 Okhotnik surveillance swarms Taranis wingman role X-37 X-47b dual use technology Eagleman, David early warning systems Echelon economics Edge of Tomorrow (2014 film) Eisenhower, Dwight Ellsberg, Daniel embodied cognition emotion empathy encryption entropy environmental niches epilepsy epistemic community escalation ethics Asimov’s rules brain and consequentialism deep brain stimulation and deontological approach facial recognition and genetic engineering and golden rule honour hunter-gatherer bands and identity just war post-conflict reciprocity regulation surveillance and European Union (EU) Ex Machina (2014 film) expert systems exploratory creativity extra limbs Eye in the Sky (2015 film) F-105 Thunderchief F-117 Nighthawk F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning F/A-18 Hornet Facebook facial recognition feedback loops fighting power fire and forget firmware 5G cellular networks flow fog of war Ford forever wars FOXP2 gene Frahm, Nils frame problem France Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) Future of Life Institute fuzzy logic gait recognition game theory games Breakout (1976) chess, see chess chicken Dota II (2013) Go, see Go Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) poker Quake III (1999) Space Invaders (1978) StarCraft II (2010) toy universes zero sum games gannets ‘garbage in, garbage out’ Garland, Alexander Gates, William ‘Bill’ Gattaca (1997 film) Gavotti, Giulio Geertz, Clifford generalised intelligence measure Generative Adversarial Networks genetic engineering genetic selection algorithms genetically modified crops genius Germany Berlin Crisis (1961) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Russian hacking operation (2015) World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Ghost in the Shell (comic book) GJ-11 Sharp Sword Gladwell, Malcolm Global Hawk drone global positioning system (GPS) global workspace Go (game) AlphaGo Gödel, Kurt von Goethe, Johann golden rule golf Good Judgment Project Google BERT Brain codebreaking research DeepMind, see DeepMind Project Maven (2017–) Gordievsky, Oleg Gorgon Stare GPT series grammar of war Grand Challenge aerial combat autonomous vehicles codebreaking graphics processing unit (GPU) Greece, ancient grooming standard Groundhog Day (1993 film) groupthink guerilla warfare Gulf War First (1990–91) Second (2003–11) hacking hallucinogenic drugs handwriting recognition haptic vest hardware Harpy Hawke, Ethan Hawking, Stephen heat-seeking missiles Hebrew Testament helicopters Hellfire missiles Her (2013 film) Hero-30 loitering munitions Heron Systems Hinton, Geoffrey Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) Hoffman, Frank ‘Holeshot’ (Cole) Hollywood homeostasis Homer homosexuality Hongdu GJ-11 Sharp Sword honour Hughes human in the loop human resources human-machine teaming art cyborgs emotion games King Midas problem prediction strategy hunter-gatherer bands Huntingdon’s disease Hurricane fighter aircraft hydraulics hypersonic engines I Robot (Asimov) IARPA IBM identity Iliad (Homer) image analysis image recognition cat detector imagination Improbotics nformation dominance information warfare innateness intelligence analysts International Atomic Energy Agency International Criminal Court international humanitarian law internet of things Internet IQ (intelligence quotient) Iran Aegis attack (1988) Iraq War (1980–88) nuclear weapons Stuxnet attack (2010) Iraq Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) Iran War (1980–88) Iron Dome Israel Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) Jaguar Land Rover Japan jazz JDAM (joint directed attack munition) Jeopardy Jobs, Steven Johansson, Scarlett Johnson, Lyndon Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) de Jomini, Antoine jus ad bellum jus in bello jus post bellum just war Kalibr cruise missiles kamikaze drones Kasparov, Garry Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) Kennedy, John Fitzgerald KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) Khrushchev, Nikita kill chain King Midas problem Kissinger, Henry Kittyhawk Knight Rider (television series) know your enemy know yourself Korean War (1950–53) Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie Kubrick, Stanley Kumar, Vijay Kuwait language connectionism and genetic engineering and natural language processing pattern recognition and semantic webs translation universal grammar Law, Jude LeCun, Yann Lenat, Douglas Les, Jason Libratus lip reading Litvinenko, Alexander locked-in patients Lockheed dogfighting trials F-117 Nighthawk F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning SR-71 Blackbird logic loitering munitions LongShot programme Lord of the Rings (2001–3 film trilogy) LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Luftwaffe madman theory Main Battle Tanks malum in se Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marcus, Gary Maslow, Abraham Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Matrix, The (1999 film) Mayhem McCulloch, Warren McGregor, Wayne McNamara, Robert McNaughton, John Me109 fighter aircraft medical field memory Merkel, Angela Microsoft military industrial complex Mill, John Stuart Milrem mimicry mind merge mind-shifting minimax regret strategy Minority Report (2002 film) Minsky, Marvin Miramar air base, San Diego missiles Aegis combat system agency and anti-missile gunnery heat-seeking Hellfire missiles intercontinental Kalibr cruise missiles nuclear warheads Patriot missile interceptor Pershing II missiles Scud missiles Tomahawk cruise missiles V1 rockets V2 rockets mission command mixed strategy Montezuma’s Revenge (1984 game) Moore’s Law mosaic warfare Mueller inquiry (2017–19) music Musk, Elon Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) MuZero Nagel, Thomas Napoleon I, Emperor of the French Napoleonic France (1804–15) narrowness Nash equilibrium Nash, John National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Security Agency (NSA) National War College natural language processing natural selection Nature navigation computers Nazi Germany (1933–45) needle-in-a-haystack problems Netflix network enabled warfare von Neumann, John neural networks neurodiversity nEUROn drone neuroplasticity Ng, Andrew Nixon, Richard normal accident theory North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea nuclear weapons Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) dead hand system early warning systems F-105 Thunderchief and game theory and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Manhattan Project (1942–6) missiles Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) second strike capability submarines and VRYAN and in WarGames (1983 film) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Obama, Barack object recognition Observe Orient Decide and Act (OODA) offence-defence balance Office for Naval Research Olympic Games On War (Clausewitz), see Clausewitz, Carl OpenAI optogenetics Orca submarines Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) pain Pakistan Palantir Palmer, Arnold Pandemonium Panoramic Research Papert, Seymour Parkinson’s disease Patriot missile interceptors pattern recognition Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) Pentagon autonomous vehicle research codebreaking research computer mouse development Deep Green Defence Innovation Unit Ellsberg leaks (1971) expert system programme funding ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story intelligence analysts Project Maven (2017–) Shakey unmanned aerial combat research Vietnam War (1955–75) perceptrons Perdix Pershing II missiles Petrov, Stanislav Phalanx system phrenology pilot’s associate Pitts, Walter platform neutrality Pluribus poker policing polygeneity Portsmouth, Hampshire Portuguese Man o’ War post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Predator drones prediction centaur teams ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story policing toy universes VRYAN Prescience principles of war prisoners Project Improbable Project Maven (2017–) prosthetic arms proximity fuses Prussia (1701–1918) psychology psychopathy punishment Putin, Vladimir Pyeongchang Olympics (2018) Qinetiq Quake III (1999 game) radar Rafael RAND Corporation rational actor model Rawls, John Re:member (Arnalds) Ready Player One (Cline) Reagan, Ronald Reaper drones reciprocal punishment reciprocity reconnaissance regulation ban, campaigns for defection self-regulation reinforcement learning remotely piloted air vehicles (RPAVs) revenge porn revolution in military affairs Rid, Thomas Robinson, William Heath Robocop (1987 film) Robotics Challenge robots Asimov’s rules ATLAS Boston Dynamics homeostatic Shakey symbolic logic and Rome Air Defense Center Rome, ancient Rosenblatt, Frank Royal Air Force (RAF) Royal Navy RQ-170 Sentinel Russell, Stuart Russian Federation German hacking operation (2015) Litvinenko murder (2006) S-70 Okhotnik Skripal poisoning (2018) Ukraine War (2014–) US election interference (2016) S-70 Okhotnik SAGE Said and Done’ (Frahm) satellite navigation satellites Saudi Arabia Schelling, Thomas schizophrenia Schwartz, Jack Sea Hunter security dilemma Sedol, Lee self-actualisation self-awareness self-driving cars Selfridge, Oliver semantic webs Shakey Shanahan, Murray Shannon, Claude Shogi Silicon Valley Simon, Herbert Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) singularity Siri situational awareness situationalist intelligence Skripal, Sergei and Yulia Slaughterbots (2017 video) Slovic, Paul smartphones Smith, Willard social environments software Sophia Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Goethe) South China Sea Soviet Union (1922–91) aircraft Berlin Crisis (1961) Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War collapse (1991) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) early warning systems Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons radar technology U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN World War II (1939–45) Space Invaders (1978 game) SpaceX Sparta Spike Firefly loitering munitions Spitfire fighter aircraft Spotify Stanford University Stanley Star Trek (television series) StarCraft II (2010 game) stealth strategic bombing strategic computing programme strategic culture Strategy Robot strategy Strava Stuxnet sub-units submarines acoustic decoys nuclear Orca South China Sea incident (2016) subroutines Sukhoi Sun Tzu superforecasting surveillance swarms symbolic logic synaesthesia synthetic operation environment Syria Taliban tanks Taranis drone technological determinism Tempest Terminator franchise Tesla Tetlock, Philip theory of mind Threshold Logic Unit Thucydides TikTok Tomahawk cruise missiles tongue Top Gun (1986 film) Top Gun: Maverick (2021 film) torpedoes toy universes trade-offs transformational creativity translation Trivers, Robert Trump, Donald tumours Turing, Alan Twitter 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film) Type-X Robotic Combat Vehicle U2 incident (1960) Uber Uexküll, Jacob Ukraine ultraviolet light spectrum umwelts uncanny valley unidentified flying objects (UFOs) United Kingdom AI weapons policy armed force, size of Battle of Britain (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Cold War (1947–9) COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) DeepMind, see DeepMind F-35 programme fighting power human rights legislation in Litvinenko murder (2006) nuclear weapons principles of war Project Improbable Qinetiq radar technology Royal Air Force Royal Navy Skripal poisoning (2018) swarm research wingman concept World War I (1914–18) United Nations United States Afghanistan War (2001–14) Air Force Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Battle of Midway (1942) Berlin Crisis (1961) Bin Laden assassination (2011) Black Lives Matter protests (2020) centaur team research Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culture cyber security DARPA, see DARPA Defense Department drones early warning systems F-35 programme Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) IARPA Iran Air shoot-down (1988) Korean War (1950–53) Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marines Mueller inquiry (2017–19) National Security Agency National War College Navy nuclear weapons Office for Naval Research Patriot missile interceptor Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Pentagon, see Pentagon Project Maven (2017–) Rome Air Defense Center Silicon Valley strategic computing programme U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) universal grammar Universal Schelling Machine (USM) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), see drones unsupervised learning utilitarianism UVision V1 rockets V2 rockets Vacanti mouse Valkyries Van Gogh, Vincent Vietnam War (1955–75) Vigen, Tyler Vincennes, USS voice assistants VRYAN Wall-e (2008 film) WannaCry ransomware War College, see National War College WarGames (1983 film) warrior ethos Watson weapon systems WhatsApp Wiener, Norbert Wikipedia wingman role Wittgenstein, Ludwig World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Pearl Harbor attack (1941) radar technology V1 rockets V2 rockets VRYAN and Wrangham, Richard Wright brothers WS-43 loitering munitions Wuhan, China X-37 drone X-drone X-rays YouTube zero sum games

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Lancaster by John Nichol

back-to-the-land, British Empire, colonial rule, haute cuisine, Louis Blériot, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

One went so far as to say how surprised he was that they’d heard no explosions, and that the attack on London hadn’t yet commenced.2 The conversation not only confirmed the validity of the Oslo Report, now hastily resurrected, but the other pieces of information that had dribbled in since – the enemy had been quietly developing what came to be known as ‘V’ or ‘vengeance weapons’: the V1 flying bomb, which would fall to earth and detonate when its fuel ran out; the V2 rocket, which could reach targets many hundreds of miles away; and the V3 supergun, which would be able to bombard southern England from positions dug into the cliffs of northern France. Tucked away in that nondescript fishing village in northern Germany was part of the development programme that would lead to the V2 – a weapon like nothing seen before: a long-range ballistic missile, nearly 46ft high and 5.5ft wide, carrying a 27,600lb warhead.

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Battle-hardened German troops would soon make a comprehensive stand in north-western Europe over the bitter midwinter, launching a month-long counteroffensive – the Battle of the Bulge – which brought the Allied advance to an unexpected standstill. Their new jet fighters were making the first forays into battle, and although the threat from V1 ‘Doodlebugs’ had disappeared as Allied land forces overran the launch sites, the more terrifying V2 rockets were still targeting south-east England, killing and maiming thousands. After five final training flights on their new squadron, Ron Needle, Harry Stunell and Ken Darke were ready to take their own war to the enemy by mid-November. Their first few ops were relatively uneventful, but then they ran into their first German fighter: a solitary JU88 over the railway yards in Heilbronn, north of Stuttgart.

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Flying low at 200mph to avoid radar and fighters, he and his crew were suddenly aware of an eerie sight. ‘A call from Jim in the rear turret made me look back over the top of our Lanc in time to see a bright, luminous vapour trail rising up and arching high into the sky over our heads. Higher and higher it went, until eventually lost to my sight. It was a V2 rocket on its way to London – the first of several I would see.’20 It hardly seemed possible to Ted that only nine years earlier, as a schoolboy, he’d been so impressed by his very first sight of an aeroplane of any kind. Now, rockets were bringing death and destruction to Antwerp, Paris, London and Maastricht.

pages: 192 words: 63,813

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

We must remain mindful of the huge spans of time lying ahead, when our descendants, w hether human or post-human, w ill surely witness ever more amazing ventures. To quote the author and visionary H. G. Wells, “The past is the beginning of the beginning, and all that has been is but the twilight of the dawn.”3 Appen d i x Timeline of Key Events in Space Exploration June 20, 1944 German V2 rocket makes the first journey into space, defined as reaching altitudes above 100 kilometers (62 miles). 1945–1952 V2 rockets used in test flights in Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States (White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico). 1952–1958 Redstone rockets, the first large US ballistic missiles, are developed and deployed under the leadership of German rocket scientists brought to the United States, with launches from the White Sands Proving Ground.

pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

While space transportation might feel like the cutting edge of technology, no rocket has yet surpassed NASA’s Saturn V – first launched in 1967. To this day it remains the tallest, heaviest, most powerful vehicle ever built. Its design and construction were overseen by Wernher von Braun, the engineer behind Nazi Germany’s V2 rocket – the first man-made object to reach space. In the fifty years since, we have yet to see a more impressive machine than one whose construction was led by a man born before a plane even crossed the Atlantic. In order to send humans to Mars, Musk’s SpaceX will have to deliver precisely that. Enter the BFR – short for ‘big fucking rocket’ – the intended successor to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters.

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Yet that is in keeping with market fundamentalism and, as Marx writes, the likes of Jain have viewed the bounty of nature as somehow the result of capitalism for centuries: Natural elements entering as agents into production, and which cost nothing … do not enter as components of capital, but as a free gift of Nature to capital, that is, as a free gift of Nature’s productive power to labour, which, however, appears as the productiveness of capital, as all other productivity does under the capitalist mode of production. To repurpose the phrase from capitalist realism: is it easier to imagine the end of the world than public ownership of the immense wealth beyond it? Why should it be? For the first sixty years of space exploration, every significant breakthrough was achieved by nation-states. From von Braun’s V2 rockets to the USSR’s Sputnik and NASA’s iconic Apollo missions, private investment had no influence in any of these technological developments. As a result, there is an overwhelming case for space to indeed be the province of all. The technologies which are set to bring its abundance within reach were funded by ordinary people – not wealthy investors.

pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

His letter to FDR can be seen below: Figure 1.6: Einstein’s letter to FDR on nuclear weapons (Source: National Archives) While this line of research led to the birth of nuclear energy, it also—as Einstein postulated—led to the instigation of the Manhattan Project in 1942. The deployment of nuclear weapons became inextricably linked to advancements in rocket technology. The V2 rocket (the Vergeltungswaffe 2 in German, or “Retribution Weapon 2”) was one of the most devastating long-range weapons of World War II. Hitler’s forces successfully fired 3,000 of these weapons at London and its surrounds, Antwerp and Liège. The V2 was not the only advanced weaponry that the Nazis developed, but it was probably the most successful.

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At the end of the war, both the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)16 and the United States rushed to gather as much intelligence on German weaponry research as possible. In the final days leading to the collapse of the German army, there was an all-out effort by both Soviet and US forces to capture any of the rocket scientists who had worked on the V2 rocket and other such efforts. Ultimately, captured scientists were given the option to emigrate and work on US and Soviet rocket programmes or face life imprisonment. One of the leading rocket scientists working on the V2 programme was a German aerospace engineer named Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun, or simply Wernher von Braun.

pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

To create his vision of the game, Spielberg employed Dale Dye, a former US Marine officer who had become a military advisor to Hollywood. Of the game that emerged, a reviewer wrote, “Not just a shoot ’em up, it offers miniature history lessons while you play, offering background on everything from the OSS to the Gestapo to V2 rockets while nostalgic art and video clips convey a sense of the period.” As such, the “original Medal of Honor remains arguably the most educational FPS ever made.”12 However, in a sign of the future controversies over videogame violence, following the Columbine massacre the game also went through last-minute changes, in which all blood and gore was removed.13 Continuing the Second World War theme, the Battlefield series started with Battlefield 1942 in 2002.

pages: 212 words: 65,900

Symmetry and the Monster by Ronan, Mark

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, conceptual framework, Everything should be made as simple as possible, G4S, Henri Poincaré, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, New Journalism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, V2 rocket

This was sophisticated mathematics – it used differential equations, and had to take into account the change of air pressure with altitude. He was a fantastic mathematics teacher, and when I went to Frankfurt University I had no need to attend any of the lectures on differential equations. Germany was a leader in rocket science, producing the V2 rocket during the later stages of the Second World War. Fischer’s teacher was not a rocket scientist but a mathematician, and his way of using mathematics to deal with physical problems inspired Fischer, who went to university intending to take a master’s degree in physics, and then do a PhD in mathematics.

pages: 229 words: 67,599

The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age by Paul J. Nahin

air gap, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, New Journalism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, thinkpad, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket

There he would enjoy an astonishingly creative fifteen years, including the production of his masterpiece—what Scientific American called “the Magna Carta of the information age”—the 1948 “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Initially his work at Bell Labs dealt with anti-aircraft fire-control systems, the need for which had grown in importance with the appearance of the 400 mph German pulse-jet V1 “flying robot bomb,” the world’s first cruise missile. (The German V2 rocket—the world’s first ballistic missile—is also often lumped in with the V1 as driving fire-control system development during Shannon’s day, but it would be quite difficult to shoot down a V2 today, during its 2,000 mph terminal atmospheric reentry phase, much less with 1940s gun technology!) Later work at Bell Labs took Shannon into the arcane world of cryptography, during which he met the English mathematician Alan Turing (1912–1954), who was a key player in the supersecret British Ultra program (“Ultra” was the code-name for the intelligence obtained from intercepted messages sent by German Enigma coding machines that the Nazis incorrectly thought unbreakable).

pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Max Kelly: The SRL guys had a studio down in Bayview, which at the time was not the place to be. We’d regularly find cars on fire, and people would run up and try to carjack you all the time. The thing was you could do whatever you wanted down there and no one would give a shit. And these crazy white guys are sticking a rocket engine—a V2 rocket engine—out the side of their garage and turning it on. Test firing! A V2 rocket engine! Okay, it might have been a V1, but it was definitely an old Nazi rocket engine. Dan Kottke: It was a jet engine, running on kerosene. They had it on a sled, and they would fire it up. And it was very, very loud and exciting. I used to go to those SRL events.

A Schoolmaster's War by Jonathan Ree

anti-communist, Nelson Mandela, unemployed young men, V2 rocket

Fouillette, Roger (‘Brazza’, 1905–1979): born in Paris to a mother from Alsace and a father from the Vosges, who then moved to Montbéliard to work as an engineer for a Peugeot plant at Valentigney; Roger trained as an elementary schoolmaster and was deployed to Alsace in 1927 to restore the use of the French language in a region dominated by German and Alsatian; he quickly married Marie Jund, daughter of a local butcher, with whom he had a daughter and a son, Colette and Raymond; in September 1939 he was drafted into the French army, serving as a lieutenant in command of a casemate on the Maginot Line overlooking the Rhine; he was captured in June 1940 and held as POW for several months; his father persuaded his employer Rodolphe Peugeot (a childhood friend of Roger) to certify (falsely) that Roger was an important engineer, and around November he was released and sent to Audincourt, Montbéliard where he resumed his profession as a schoolmaster; in April 1943 he became leader of OCM and head of FFI in Montbéliard, working closely with HR until he was arrested, 27 October 1943, after which he was detained in the Butte at Besançon, deported 27 January 1944; in Buchenwald his knowledge of German afforded him some protection and in February he was transferred to the secret Dora subcamp, spending eight months in a subterranean factory where the V2 rocket was being developed; as American forces approached in April 1945 he was sent on a ‘death march’ to Ravensbrück, and liberated by Russian troops on 3 May; he reached Montbéliard three weeks later to find that his wife and children had moved to Nantua; Rodolphe Peugeot lent him a car, and he was reunited with them on 26 May, and they all returned to Alsace on Bastille Day, 14 July 1945.

pages: 302 words: 74,350

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

It was built as a weapon against the Soviet Union. To think that a government which had created a tool wouldn’t use that tool to perform the basic task of every government, which is to say exert control over the lives of its citizens, was a bit strange. It was an expectation akin to running beneath Wernher von Braun’s V2 rockets and hoping you’d be showered with flowers rather than death. Snowden gathered up an unfathomable number of documents circulating inside the NSA. These documents bore evidence of the NSA’s systems of global surveillance. These systems had been constructed with help from companies like Google, Facebook and Apple.

Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Berchtesgaden Learn how this breathtaking Alpine town became Hitler’s southern headquarters at the Dokumentation Obersalzberg, then exorcise Nazi ghosts on the trip up to the ‘Eagle’s Nest’ (Click here) Concentration Camps The darkest side of WWII is commemorated in camps at Bergen-Belsen (Click here), Buchenwald (Click here), Dachau (Click here), Mittelbau Dora (Click here) and Sachsenhausen (Click here) Remagen The pivotal capture of the Bridge at Remagen by American troops in March 1945 is poignantly remembered in the Friedensmuseum (Click here) Peenemünde The deadly V2 rocket was developed in a research facility on Usedom Island, now the Historisch-Technisches Informationszentrum (Click here) Nuremberg See the site of Nazi mass rallies at the Reichsparteitagsgelände, then visit the courtroom where the Nuremberg Trials took place (Click here) Laboe In this town on Kiel Firth, you can clamber around WWII-era U-Boat 995, which is similar to the one featured in the 1981 movie Das Boot (Click here) Jewish Sites Jewish history in Germany is often equated with the Holocaust, but even the Nazis could not wipe out 1600 years of Jewish life and cultural contributions to this country.

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Exhibits in the Libeskind wedge zero in on such socio-cultural aspects as women in the war, animals in the war, war-themed toys, the economy of war and the suffering brought on by war. The historical wing presents a chronology of German wars from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Standouts among the countless intriguing objects are a 1975 Soyuz landing capsule, a V2 rocket and personal items of concentration camp victims. Budget at least two hours to do this amazing museum justice. Kunsthofpassage ARCHITECTURE Offline map Google map (www.kunfsthof-dresden.de; enter from Alaunstrasse 70 or Görlitzer Strasse 23; 24hr) Take a web of grimy courtyards, a load of paint and a bunch of visionary Dresden artists and out comes the Kunsthofpassage, one of the most refreshingly artistic spaces in the Neustadt.

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Train Frequent trains travel to Quedlinburg (€2.20, 12 minutes) and Wernigerode (change in Halberstadt; €11.10, one hour). Mittelbau Dora From late in 1943, thousands of slave labourers (mostly Russian, French and Polish prisoners of war) toiled under horrific conditions digging tunnels in the chalk hills north of Nordhausen. From a 20km labyrinth of tunnels, they produced the V1 and V2 rockets that rained destruction on London, Antwerp and other cities during the final stages of WWII, when Hitler’s grand plan became to conduct war from production plants below the ground. The camp, called Mittelbau Dora, was created as a satellite of the Buchenwald concentration camp after British bombers destroyed the missile plants in Peenemünde in far northeastern Germany.

pages: 361 words: 83,886

Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics and the Coming Robotopia by Frederik L. Schodt

carbon-based life, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, factory automation, game design, guest worker program, industrial robot, Jacques de Vaucanson, Norbert Wiener, post-industrial society, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce

Second was the VI and V2 missiles that the German Nazis developed. I had heard that Hitler tried to use them as an ace in the hole to reverse his waning fortunes. The third influence was from the American movie Frankenstein."8 In the story he devised, Iron Man was given the number 28 because, like the VI and V2 rockets, he had originally been designed by the Japanese military as a last-ditch secret weapon to reverse its sinking fortunes. All the models up to No. 28—and the end of the war—were failures, however, so Iron Man No. 28 became a civilian robot. It is hard to imagine a robot more different from the humanistic, family-oriented Atom, but both characters resemble each other in that they were used to help mankind, and both have competed for fans until this day.

pages: 266 words: 86,324

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, feminist movement, forensic accounting, Gary Kildall, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, index fund, Isaac Newton, law of one price, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pepto Bismol, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

But any meaning we assigned them would be misconceived because these data are identical to the earlier set of 200 random Xs and Os, except for the geometric 5-by-40 arrangement and the choice of which letters to put in boldface. This very issue drew much attention toward the end of World War II, when V2 rockets started raining down on London. The rockets were terrifying, traveling at over five times the speed of sound, so that one heard them approach only after they had hit. Newspapers soon published maps of the impact sites, which seemed to reveal not random patterns but purposeful clusters. To some observers the clusters indicated a precision in the control of the rockets’ flight path that, given the distance the rockets had to travel, suggested that German technology was much more advanced than anyone had dreamed possible.

pages: 326 words: 93,522

Underground, Overground by Andrew Martin

bank run, Boris Johnson, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, garden city movement, gentrification, Large Hadron Collider, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, plutocrats, Stephen Fry, traveling salesman, V2 rocket

Graves writes: One old woman proudly announced that she had brought enough cheese and tea-cakes for a fortnight, and indeed it was noted that she did not leave the East End railway platform which she had chosen for fourteen days, except to get a ten-minutes breath of fresh air when there was no air-raid in progress. The Tube stations offered warmth, camaraderie. You didn’t pay for light or heat; there were, in fact, few overheads, except the one that really mattered. There were two peaks of sheltering: the first, and highest, was during the Blitz; the second during the rain of V1 and V2 rockets in 1944. A count taken one night early in the Blitz found 177,000 Londoners sheltering in the Tubes. It is said that about 4 per cent of Londoners took to the Tube at some point during the Blitz. You could book your space in advance by acquiring a ticket (no charge was made, of course) that allocated you a space on a platform.

Lonely Planet France by Lonely Planet Publications

banking crisis, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, double helix, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Just south of town is a protected area of grass-covered dunes known as Dunes de la Slack . LA COUPOLE A top-secret subterranean V2 rocket launch site just five minutes’ flying time from London – almost (but not quite) put into operation in 1944 – now houses La Coupole ( 03 21 12 27 27; www.lacoupole-france.com; adult/child/family incl audioguide €9.50/6.50/24; 9am-6pm Sep-Jun, 10am-7pm Jul & Aug, closed 2 weeks in Dec) , an innovative museum that uses film and images to present information on the following: » Nazi Germany’s secret programs to build V1 and V2 rockets, which could fly at 650km/h and an astounding 5780km/h respectively » Life in northern France during the Nazi occupation » The postwar conquest of space with the help of V2 rocket technology – and seconded V2 engineers La Coupole is 49km southeast of Calais just outside the town of Wizernes, near the intersection of D928 and D210.

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Wildlife Watch » Vultures in Parc National des Pyrénées » Wolves in Parc National du Mercantour and Parc Animalier des Monts de Guéret » Whistling marmots in Chamonix » Sharks at aquariums in Paris, Monaco, Boulogne-sur-Mer, St-Malo, Brest, La Rochelle, Lyon and Biarritz » Dancing horses in Saumur, Versailles and Chantilly » Bulls and flamingos in the Camargue » Storks and kingfishers at Le Teich Parc Ornithologique, near Arcachon, and Alsace’s Centre de Réintroduction Cigognes et Loutres » Fish (through a snorkelling mask) at the Domaine du Rayol and off island shores (Porquerolles, Port-Cros and Corsica) Rainy Days » Build a house, Bob-style (over threes), Cité des Sciences, Paris » Romp through sewage tunnels with rats, Musée des Égouts de Paris » Create your own perfume at Le Studio des Parfums, Paris » Ride a house-sized, mechanical elephant (any age), Les Machines de l’Île de Nantes, Nantes » Ogle at skulls (teens), Les Catacombes, Paris » Play cave dwellers (any age) in caves riddled with prehistoric art, Vézère Valley » Delve into the depths of the ocean at Cité de l’Océan, Biarritz » Learn all about chocolate at Planète Musée du Chocolat, Biarritz Hi-Tech Experiences » Discover something new with science-experiment workshops (over 10s) at the Palais de la Découverte, Paris » Learn how planes are built (over sixes), Jean Luc Lagardère Airbus factory, Toulouse » Discover V2 rocket technology in a subterranean bunker (teens), La Coupole, St-Omer » Enter wannabe-mechanic heaven (any age), Cité de l’Automobile and Cité du Train, Mulhouse » Meddle in science at Strasbourg’s interactive Le Vaisseau science and technology museum » Spin in a fish on a hi-tech vintage carousel or climb aboard a giant mechanical elephant at Les Machines de I’Île de Nantes, Nantes Hands-On History & Culture » Delve behind the scenes of a world-class art museum with a visit to the restoration and storerooms of the groundbreaking Louvre-Lens, northern France » Pretend you’re back in 1920s Paris: chase vintage sailboats with a stick in Jardin du Luxembourg, just like Parisian kids did a century ago » Relive the battle between Julius Caesar and Vercingétorix at Alésia in 52 BC, with reconstructed Roman fortification lines et al, at Burgundy’s first-class MuséoParc Alésia » Become acquainted with the fine art of perfumerie in Grasse (perfume studios, museum, workshops) and nearby Mouans-Sartoux (flower gardens) » Play medieval builders at Chantier Médiéval de Guédelon, Burgundy » Go Roman (over fives) at Ludo, Pont du Gard, near Nîmes » Watch Victorian-era machines clatter and clank to turn thread into lace at Calais’ Cité Internationale de la Dentelle et de la Mode » Explore the beachfront site of a derelict dynamite factory in Paulilles, Roussillon WHAT TO PACK Babies & Toddlers » A front or back sling for baby and toddler: France’s cobbled streets, metro stairs and hilltop villages were not built with pushchairs (strollers) in mind.

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LA COUPOLE A top-secret subterranean V2 rocket launch site just five minutes’ flying time from London – almost (but not quite) put into operation in 1944 – now houses La Coupole ( 03 21 12 27 27; www.lacoupole-france.com; adult/child/family incl audioguide €9.50/6.50/24; 9am-6pm Sep-Jun, 10am-7pm Jul & Aug, closed 2 weeks in Dec) , an innovative museum that uses film and images to present information on the following: » Nazi Germany’s secret programs to build V1 and V2 rockets, which could fly at 650km/h and an astounding 5780km/h respectively » Life in northern France during the Nazi occupation » The postwar conquest of space with the help of V2 rocket technology – and seconded V2 engineers La Coupole is 49km southeast of Calais just outside the town of Wizernes, near the intersection of D928 and D210. From the A26, take exit 3 or 4. The neatly organised Musée 39-45 ( 03 21 87 33 01; www.musee3945.com; adult/child €7.40/5; 10am-6pm, weekends only Mar & Nov, closed Dec-Feb) , at the northern edge of Ambleteuse, features realistic tableaux of WWII military and civilian life, and a 25-minute film. The dashing but wildly impractical French officers’ dress uniforms of 1931 hint at why France fared so badly on the battlefield in 1940.

pages: 445 words: 105,255

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

A proper history of the origins of spaceflight would note Tsiolkovsky’s limited influence outside Russia and the later, independent roles of Robert Goddard in the United States and Hermann Oberth in Germany with their concrete technical contributions: building actual, physical, liquid-fuel rockets. The history then would tell of the rise of rocketry on the tides of war, led by visionaries sharing Tsiolkovsky’s dream of the conquest of space. The leading example was Werner von Braun, the German scientist who led the German V2 rocket project that rained bombs on London from the edge of space, envisioned a detailed plan for interplanetary exploration (Das Marsprojekt, published as The Mars Project in 1953), was ordered to refrain from launching a satellite for the United States in 1956, and at last led the team that developed the Saturn V boosters that launched men to the Moon.

pages: 624 words: 104,923

QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, British Empire, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Fellow of the Royal Society, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, trade route, two and twenty, V2 rocket, Vesna Vulović

Nobody really knows where the expression ‘guinea pig’ comes from but the most likely suggestion is that they reached Europe as part of the triangle of slave-trade routes that linked South America to the Guinea coast of West Africa. What was the first animal in space? The fruit fly. The tiny astronauts were loaded on to an American V2 rocket along with some corn seeds, and blasted into space in July 1946. They were used to test the effects of exposure to radiation at high altitudes. Fruit flies are a lab favourite. Three-quarters of known human disease genes have a match in the genetic code of fruit flies. They also go to sleep every night, react in a similar way to general anaesthetics and, best of all, reproduce very quickly.

pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

One was imprisoned, the other executed, and, when Herzstark protested to the Gestapo, he was arrested for his trouble. In short order, he was sent to prison and then on to Buchenwald, the first and largest of Nazi Germany’s network of concentration camps.38 As a skilled engineer, Herzstark was offered a second Faustian bargain. In exchange for supervising a cadre of inmates who fabricated components for V2 rockets and repaired looted calculating machines, he would be allowed to live. He used his position to mastermind a number of small rebellions, requesting the transfer of vulnerable prisoners into the camp’s machine shop and teaching them how to look useful should an SS guard pass by.39 Even in such precarious circumstances, with bombing raids and executions mere facts of life, Herzstark could not contain his enthusiasm for his miniature arithmometer.

pages: 369 words: 120,636

Commuter City: How the Railways Shaped London by David Wragg

Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Crossrail, financial independence, gentrification, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Louis Blériot, low interest rates, North Sea oil, railway mania, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Winter of Discontent, yield management

At Chiselhurst in Kent, the caves provided a natural air raid shelter, and many people would ‘commute’ by train to Chislehurst each evening to seek shelter in the caves. This was just one example, but Paddington was amongst those termini seeing ‘reverse commuting’ in wartime, first at the height of the Blitz and then during the period of V1 and V2 rocket attacks. Shortages of skilled staff in the workshops and the conversion of many of these to war production, as well as shortages of materials, meant that the intervals between routine overhauls were extended. Economy measures on the Great Western were typical and included a new colour scheme for passenger carriages of reddish-brown with a bronze waistline and black roof, while locomotives were painted plain green without any lining out on being sent for overhaul or repair.

pages: 410 words: 122,537

Engines of War: How Wars Were Won & Lost on the Railways by Christian Wolmar

anti-communist, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Ford Model T, Khartoum Gordon, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, V2 rocket

In Britain, the War Department built and owned over a thousand ‘Austerity’ locos and a clutch of shunting locomotives, many of which were transferred to British Railways in the 1950s, but, as with the German war locomotives, others ended up all over the world. Hitler liked technology and expended much effort, fruitless as it turned out, on developing the V1 and V2 rockets that were launched towards Britain in the final stages of the war, but he was also obsessed with producing guns that could destroy enemy positions from a great distance. Inevitably, these had to be rail-mounted and in 1941 Germany constructed two enormous 800mm guns intended for use against Gibraltar, but Franco would not allow them to cross Spanish territory.

pages: 447 words: 126,219

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City Forever by Christian Wolmar

Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, Crossrail, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, invention of the telephone, junk bonds, land bank, lateral thinking, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, South Sea Bubble, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

There were, too, various redundant or partly built sections of the Underground which had been turned over to the shelterers with official blessing, such as the disused stations at South Kentish Town, British Museum and City Road, and the unfinished section of lines at Bethnal Green, the largest in the capital with accommodation for 5,000, and Highgate. The deep shelters announced by Morrison were not available for use during the Blitz of 1940–41 and they were kept in reserve, as numbers in the shelters dwindled during the subsequent lull. Five of them finally found use as shelters briefly in the summer of 1944 during the assault by V1 and V2 rockets, but in terms of protection from the bombs they were too little, too late. They were later used to house returning evacuees made homeless by the bombing. The elite of shelters was probably Aldwych. The whole little-used branch line to Holborn was given over for the use of thousands of shelterers soon after the onset of the Blitz, by Lord Ashfield.

Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World by Giles Milton

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, clean water, operation paperclip, post-war consensus, V2 rocket, wikimedia commons, éminence grise

In ‘Special Intelligence Report 3’, covering the early weeks of that year, he revealed that ‘in each factory we have an agent of whose reliability we are certain … [and] within the next months it will be possible to present a picture which will substantially cover the activities in Russian-occupied Germany.’ This proved to be the case. At a specialist colour-processing plant run by the photographic company, AGFA, forty miles from Berlin, Parkin’s undercover agent was a certain Dr Ziegler. He reported on everyone who might be of value to Britain. At the V2 rocket plant in Sömmerda, the insider information came from one E. H. Schön, ‘a very valuable agent’, said Parkin, who revealed that many of the factory’s specialists were keen to flee the Soviet yoke. ‘There has been for some time a concerted determination to work for the western democracies.’ This intelligence work carried substantial risks.

pages: 1,088 words: 297,362

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Brixton riot, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nick Leeson, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, union organizing, V2 rocket

Nevertheless, the two companies formed a partnership in 1899, but it was not until the arrival of Southern Railway in the 1920s that the wall between the two stations was removed. VICTORIA LINE The Victoria Line, which opened in 1968 as London’s first new tube line since 1907, owes its existence more to civil defence needs than transport requirements, dating back to government concerns in 1944 about German A-bomb-tipped V2 rockets dropping on London. This led the authorities to construct a number of bomb-proof tunnels that could take cables between strategically important buildings: Buckingham Palace; the Curzon Street bunker in Mayfair where the royal family took shelter during the war, later used by MI5; BBC Broadcasting House; the Museum Telephone Exchange, which was also home of the BBC’s national distribution centre, on Maple Street, Fitzrovia (where Telecom Tower now stands); and the railway termini of Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross.

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‘The Cage’, No. 8 Built by Owen Jones in the 1850s, and later owned by the art collector Lord Duveen of Millbank, who also had a suite at Claridge’s, No. 8 was used during the Second World War as the headquarters of the War Crimes Investigation Unit interrogation centre known as ‘The Cage’, where German prisoners of war who had been close to the upper echelons of the Nazi Party, or those who had specialist knowledge of the V1 and V2 rockets that were bombarding London, were questioned. The prisoners, whose number included a small proportion of stool pigeons, usually German or Austrian Jews, who, it was hoped, would be accepted as genuine Nazis, were kept in cells with floors of solid concrete and windows covered with barbed wire. There were no furnishings that could be used by a prisoner to hang himself, and each cell door had a ‘Judas hole’ to enable the guards, who moved noiselessly around the complex, to spy on the inmates without being heard or seen.

pages: 441 words: 135,176

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World by Deyan Sudjic

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, megastructure, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, Victor Gruen

Leon Krier, the architect best known for his role in planning Seaside, the outpost of New Urbanism on the Florida panhandle, and the Prince of Wales’s village of Poundbury, has been the most active voice in attempting to rehabilitate Speer. Why, he wondered, was it considered necessary to destroy the inoffensive street lights that Hitler’s architect had designed for Berlin? Why, Krier asked, did Speer end up as Spandau’s penultimate prisoner? Long after Werner von Braun, who devised the highly destructive V2 rockets that were built using slave labour and which killed so many Londoners, had bypassed the prisoner-of-war camps and flown to the USA to build the arsenal of democracy, Speer was still in jail. Could architecture actually be regarded as a weapon of war like a V2? Perhaps the answer lies in the way that we tend to blame the architect more than the engineer – because he envisaged the shape of a totalitarian state.

pages: 409 words: 129,423

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton

Apollo 11, Charles Babbage, classic study, Colonization of Mars, computer age, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, sexual politics, the scientific method, trade route, undersea cable, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration

He discovered that he loved the landscapes of the Southwest. He loved the pines, he loved the open spaces, and he loved the great, vaulting skies. He stared up at the desert moon with wonder. In the field, he did not have much contact with the rest of the world. But he did get the Caltech alumni newspaper, which revealed that experiments with captured V2 rockets elsewhere in New Mexico were reaching the very edge of the atmosphere. It was a revelation. “Why, we’re going to explore space,” he later remembered thinking, “and I want to be part of it! The moon is made of rock, so geologists are the logical ones to go there—me, for example.” Shoemaker kept his wild dream to himself—a decade before Sputnik there was little call for space-age geology.

pages: 618 words: 146,557

Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, clean water, en.wikipedia.org, friendly fire, full employment, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, trade route, V2 rocket

Gorbachev called an emergency meeting on 10 March to consider the request. It was rejected.8 But further attacks were broken up by the government’s own aircraft and by April the government troops were on the offensive. They bombarded the mujahedin with over four hundred Scud missiles developed from the Germans’ wartime V2 rockets and fired by the Soviet crews who had remained behind. Like the V2, you got no warning of the Scud’s arrival until it had exploded. ‘The mujahedin, who, one would have thought, were already inured to the use in their homeland of every kind of weapon,’ wrote Greshnov, who visited Jalalabad at the time, ‘…were psychologically unable to cope when these rockets were employed against them … Losses among the civilian population could be counted in thousands, and the battle itself acquired such a massive and brutal character that it could be compared in military terms perhaps only with the battle for Stalingrad.’9 The soldiers cleared the road from Kabul – the old ‘English’ road, along which the Army of the Indus had retreated in 1842 – and relieved the city.

pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Source: https://www.wttc.org/-/media/files/reports/economic-impact-research/2017-documents/global-economic-impact-and-issues-2017.pdf Chapter 12 – From the wonder years to the malaise: 1945–1979 1. Quoted in Armand van Dormael, Bretton Woods: Birth of a Monetary System 2. Frieden, Global Capitalism, op. cit. 3. Von Braun was the man behind the V1 and V2 rockets that fell on London. He subsequently became part of the US space programme. As Tom Lehrer sang, “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun”. 4. Stephen D. King, Grave New World: The End of Globalisation, The Return of History 5. David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival 6.

France (Lonely Planet, 8th Edition) by Nicola Williams

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, double helix, flag carrier, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information trail, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, post-work, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, Sloane Ranger, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Return to beginning of chapter LA COUPOLE A top-secret subterranean V2 launch site just five minutes’ flying time from London – almost (but not quite) put into operation in 1944 – now houses La Coupole ( 03 21 12 27 27; www.lacoupole.com; adult/student/5-16yr/family incl audioguide €9/7.50/6/19.50; 9am-6pm, to 7pm Jul & Aug, closed 2 weeks from Christmas), an innovative museum that uses lots of moving images to present Nazi Germany’s secret programs to build V1 and V2 rockets (which could fly at 650km/h and an astounding 5780km/h respectively); life in northern France during the Nazi occupation; and the postwar conquest of space with the help of V2 rocket technology – and seconded V2 engineers. La Coupole is 5km south of St-Omer (the circuitous route is signposted, but confusing), just outside the town of Wizernes, near the intersection of the D928 and the D210.

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This tour ventures out of the ordinary into France’s quirkiest sights and sounds – and smells, in the case of the Paris sewer where it starts. Gawp at more skulls than you can imagine in the capital’s catacombs, then venture north to the spot near Compiègne, where WWI officially ended. Top off your day with a subterranean dose of V2 rocket technology in a bunker near St-Omer. A few drops of Christ’s blood in Fécamp on the Normandy coast inspired monks to concoct Benedictine liqueur: visit the Palais Bénédictine and get a free shot – then tell yourself you’re not drunk as you tour the ‘laboratory of emotions’ in Honfleur’s wacky Les Maisons Satie.

pages: 564 words: 163,106

The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine by M. D. James le Fanu M. D.

Barry Marshall: ulcers, clean water, cuban missile crisis, discovery of penicillin, double helix, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, rising living standards, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, tacit knowledge, telerobotics, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, V2 rocket

By contrast, the MAOIs arose – like chlorpromazine – from a chance felicitous clinical observation that a drug used in the treatment of one condition, in this case tuberculosis, had side-effects that might be put to good use in another. In 1944 the Germans had used a new type of fuel – hydrazine – to propel their V2 rockets over southern England. Come the end of the war hydrazine thus became available relatively cheaply, so pharmaceutical companies bought it up to use as a starting material for investigation of its possible therapeutic properties, even though it was not an easy compound to work with, being flammable, caustic, extremely poisonous and explosive.

The Companion Guide to London by David Piper, Fionnuala Jervis

British Empire, cakes and ale, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Ford Model T, gentrification, haute couture, Isaac Newton, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Nelson Mandela, South Sea Bubble, V2 rocket

Eastwards, the grounds of the Hospital join on the wooded, nooked and delled Ranelagh Gardens, where not a trace remains of the apparatus of pleasure which made Ranelagh famous as a centre of entertainment between 1733 and 1805, when for years at a stretch it was visited by almost anybody who was anybody, from Dr Johnson downwards; it saw concerts (including the infant prodigy Mozart, aged eight, in 1764), masquerades that were forerunners of the Chelsea Arts Balls, fireworks, balloon launchings and other galas. Its focus was a famous building, the Rotunda, which can still be seen in Canaletto’s painting of it in the National Gallery. The Hospital suffered in both wars, and in the second war lost to a V2 rocket notably the Infirmary (where once Robert Walpole’s house had stood). A splendid supplement stands nearby: the National Army Museum. Moved to Chelsea from Sandhurst, it recounts the history of the British Army from the Battle of Agincourt up to the present day. The collection consists of relics, uniform and insignia of the army, as well as a number of fine paintings.

pages: 618 words: 180,430

The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

anti-communist, antiwork, Arthur Marwick, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business climate, Corn Laws, deep learning, Etonian, garden city movement, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, New Journalism, New Urbanism, plutocrats, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, rent control, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, V2 rocket, wage slave, women in the workforce

More than 2,000 fires were started and 3,200 people were killed or injured. Many roads and most railway lines were blocked and the firefighters were struggling to put out fires for eleven days. After it was over, London was changed for ever; yet the city would go through a second wave of attacks in 1944 when first the ‘Doodlebug’ flying bombs and then the V2 rockets, harbingers of the post-war age, rained down, killing between them another 8,000 people. Croydon, once a beautiful market town, now a concrete metropolis, was particularly badly hit. Though London took the worst, it is not clear whether it suffered more proportionally than other blitzed cities.

pages: 686 words: 201,972

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

barriers to entry, British Empire, California gold rush, corporate raider, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, megacity, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Peace of Westphalia, post-work, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, vertical integration, working poor

In 1942 the Hitler Youth had dug out all the hybrid vines in Alsace, to be replaced with Aryan strains. The luxury of time they had anticipated—a thousand-year Reich—was over three years afterward—too soon for the replacements to come into service. Domestic supplies of drink were further reduced to feed the Nazi war machine. Distilled alcohol was needed for munitions and as fuel, notably for the V2-rocket bombs. The small quantity of looted or stockpiled booze remaining was diverted to the armed forces and the Nazi elite. Indeed, the only parts of Germany where alcohol was freely available were those under Russian control. After their victory at Stalingrad in 1942, the Soviet armies had pushed the Nazis out of Russia and forced them back into their own territory.

pages: 840 words: 202,245

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

“The great achievement of capitalism is not the accumulation of property,” he wrote, “it has been the opportunities it has offered men and women to extend and develop and improve their capacities.” But dozens of events in Friedman’s lifetime showed just the opposite. The martial technology of Germany, including the V2 rockets, were created under the directives of a central government. That most creative and dreadful product made by the human species, the atomic bomb, was the result of a U.S. government directive to J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues. Radar was developed by government. It is now a commonplace that the Internet originated in the Pentagon.

Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Return to beginning of chapter MITTELBAU DORA From late in 1943, thousands of slave labourers (mostly Russian, French and Polish prisoners of war) toiled under horrific conditions digging tunnels in the chalk hills north of Nordhausen. From a 20km labyrinth of tunnels, they produced the V1 and V2 rockets that rained destruction on London, Antwerp and other cities during the final stages of WWII, when Hitler’s grand plan became to conduct war from production plants below the ground. The camp, called Mittelbau Dora, was created as a satellite of the Buchenwald concentration camp after British bombers destroyed the missile plants in Peenemünde in far northeastern Germany.

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Elegant 1920s villas with wrought-iron balconies grace many traditional resorts along its northern spine, including Zinnowitz, Ückeritz, Bansin, Heringsdorf and Ahlbeck. All have tourist offices. Usedom Tourismus ( 038378-477 10; www.usedom.de) can book accommodation island-wide. It was at Peenemünde, on the island’s western tip, that Wernher von Braun developed the V2 rocket, first launched in October 1942. It flew 90km high and a distance of 200km before plunging into the Baltic – the first time in history that a flying object exited the earth’s atmosphere. The research and testing complex was destroyed by the Allies in July 1944, but the Nazis continued their research in Nordhausen in the southern Harz (see Mittelbau Dora, Click here).

pages: 927 words: 236,812

The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham

agricultural Revolution, air gap, American ideology, Bletchley Park, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial exploitation, distributed generation, European colonialism, fixed income, full employment, global village, guns versus butter model, indoor plumbing, labour mobility, land reform, mass immigration, means of production, profit motive, rising living standards, trade route, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

‘[Sigi] slipped on to the subject of food and now he talks endlessly about some marriage luncheon … everyone tells him to keep quiet but within ten minutes Béla is describing … a recipe to make meat-pies with corncobs and lard and spices … and he is cursed, sworn at and a third one begins to describe …’133 In Auschwitz these conversations were known as ‘stomach masturbation’.134 In 1942 concentration camp prisoners were transferred to undertake productive work in the aircraft and rocket industries. The most notori-ous of such projects was Dora Mittelbau in the Harz mountains, where concentration camp inmates constructed an underground factory for the production of the V2 rockets which were to menace Londoners in the final months of the war. They had to sleep inside the tunnels amid the noise and dust of the work, and saw daylight only once a week. The sanitation was rudimentary and they never had enough water to drink. One third (20,000) of the workers died. The tunnels were littered with the dead bodies of prisoners who had collapsed from overwork and malnutrition, and corpses swung from the ceilings overhead, placed there to remind the workers of the fate of recalcitrants.

pages: 851 words: 247,711

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

The young Erich Honecker being voted first chairman of the Free German Youth; a post-Christmas meeting of the French Communist Party at the Vel d’Hiv, Paris, complete with gloomy Christmas tree, both January 1946 7. and 8. Aftershocks. Surviving Jewish families fleeing from Poland in the summer of 1946 following anti-Semitic violence; the origins of the American space programme: a V2 rocket being fired in New Mexico, August 1946 9. and 10. The end of the British Empire. British troops pulling casualties from the rubble of their headquarters at the King David Hotel, Jerusalem, July 1946, and Greek Communist prisoners in Salonica with ‘The British Must Go’ spelled out in French on their shirts, March 1947 11. and 12. and 13.

pages: 1,006 words: 243,928

Lonely Planet Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, Burning Man, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Kickstarter, Lyft, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, remote working, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, trade route, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

It’s the tallest of its type on the West Coast. 1Georgetown & West Seattle oMuseum of FlightMUSEUM (%206-764-5720; www.museumofflight.org; Boeing Field, 9404 E Marginal Way S, Georgetown; adult/child $25/16, 5-9pm 1st Thu of month free; h10am-5pm, to 9pm 1st Thu of month; c; g124) It’s no surprise that the city that spawned Boeing has stumped up with one of the nation’s finest aviation museums, chronicling flight history from Kitty Hawk to the Concorde. It’s a multifarious affair gluing together a broad sweep of flight-related memorabilia in several hangar-sized galleries. The exhibits include some of the most ingenious human-made objects that have defied gravity: menacing V2 rockets, Apollo lunar modules and aerodynamic gliders. Alki Beach ParkBEACH (%206-684-4075; 1702 Alki Ave SW, West Seattle; h4am-11:30pm; g37) Alki Beach has an entirely different feel from the rest of Seattle: on a sunny day this 2-mile stretch of sand could be confused for California. There’s a bike path, volleyball courts, and rings for beach fires. 1Green Lake & Fremont oFremont Public SculpturesMONUMENT (btwn N 34th St, N 36th St, Aurora Ave N & Evanston Ave N, Fremont; g5) F You don’t need to pay museum entrance fees to see some of the best and most iconic art in the city.