Thursday 22 January 2009

Bad News for Lloyds

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Into WH Smiths, look at the headlines, get the papers, get the papers.
Tick.
Go to Tesco's buy washing powder, feel bad for feeding the behemoth.
Tick.
Go to the bank, pay some money in... but what's this? A music channel plays apathy on the screen that once showed the BBC news. I ask the man behind the desk about the channel change.
"It's too gloomy."
Ha! Too gloomy for you maybe. Was it not too gloomy when people started dying at the hands of NATO in Iraq or Afghanistan? Was it not too gloomy when Madeleine McCann went missing? 
Men, women and children dying.
Tick.
Banks start loosing money. Quick! Turn it off! Turn it off! 
"People have a right to know". 
I walk away.
Tick. 

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Thursday 15 January 2009

The Dream

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A baby is born to a dead mother.
A baby is born with her genetic code programmed to avoid the shadow of breast cancer. Flat screen displays in MacDonald's, gaming with multiple people in multiple time zones, satellite navigation in your car, smart phones and Ipods as fast as you PC five years ago. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. 
Think America in the 50's, think Star Trek. A time, a place where technology is thought to solve the problems of humanity. Greed is out-shone by transporters, warp drive and a dream of nuclear power. An ideal of shiny things and common goals. 
No.
Not here.
Not here where Gaza runs red with the blood of Palestinian children. Not here where Hamas refuses to negotiate with a government it neither recognises nor wants compromise. The absolute and total destruction of Israel. The absolute and total destruction of Hamas and its supporters. You choose, You decide.
Can't?
Welcome to the modern world, welcome to how its always been. Welcome to how it will always be. Welcome to humanity...

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Wednesday 7 January 2009

The Duelist

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It took the best part of a decade to develop the Bugatti Veyron. When Ferdinand Piech turned his imperial eye on the culturally rich but financially poor French supercar maker he had a dream. He would instigate the creation of a hypercar that would categorically put everything else in the shade. It would be his legacy, Volkswagen's technical statement and quite possibly the zenith of what could be done with the internal combustion engine. Now very much in the autumn of its life. 
In the beginning three main technical foundations were laid. 
It would have 1000PS. 
It would be capable of 400kph. 
It would meet all of the same quality standards that a Volkswagen Polo has to achieve.
Whilst the first two are difficult, when coupled to the third you, as an engineer, are faced with an almost impossible task. Just think. You go and buy a brand new Polo from a dealer. It is guaranteed by Volkswagen not to go wrong for three years or 60,000 miles. That is three years of everyday drudgery. Hitting that same pothole a bit too hard everyday. Going a bit too fast on the motorway everyday, sitting in traffic for hours every week without over heating, shrugging off freezing temperatures at night and  starting first time in the morning. The modern motor car really is an everyday engineering miracle. Now imagine doing that with a Ferrari. Now double the power of said supercar and with it quadruple the complexity. When all was said and done and production model number 001 rolled off the line the project had cost Volkswagen so much that for every unit produced it is estimated that between 2 to 4 million Euros is lost. So you win the lottery /work very hard / inherit the family estate, walk into a Bugatti dealership and buy a Veyron. By doing that you've just cost Volkswagen in the region of 3 million Euros. 
Here's another thing. In the Alsace, where the Veyron is carefully constructed, it snows on average 1 day in a year. Now, the local authority, council, whatever prefers salt for its icy roads and duly peppers (salts) its roads during the cold season. In the best spirit of car making Bugatti like to take every Veyron produced for a gentle (really?) drive a round the local roads. When the roads are salted they could just do the same, bring the car back in, put it on a ramp and pressure wash the underside, getting rid of any unsightly salt that could cause future corrosion. No one would ever know. Instead 14 gentlemen from the Alsace load the car and themselves onto a transporter and support vehicles and travel to the south of France where they do the bedding in there. 
In many ways this is an amazing, glorious testimony to the sheer determination of Ferdinand Piech. After all, almost all of the great achievements in the relatively short history of humankind have been driven by single-minded men. On the other hand, and this is where I find a point of conflict, a dualism within myself, it is criminally wasteful. For every Veyron produced how many schools could have been built in Nigeria? How many courses of medicines could have been put into the hands of those 1 in 5 that suffer from AIDS in Africa? What about farming subsidies in Columbia or disaster relief in central Asia? Don't even get me started on political determination within the African Union. 
The Veyron is a wide eyed achievement. It is something that inspires, awes and upsets me all in equal measure. It is the same as the tanks that rumbled through Stroud train station the other day. As a fully grown adult I actually ran back into the station to watch those magnificent machines being marched past atop their own cars. I wanted to pilot them, to fire them, to use them in anger, but I also had to quell a desire to throw stones at them, call them names, sabotage them in some way.

This then is where A Slice Of The Now Splits. The current affairs blog will continue every Wednesday (or there abouts) but it will now be joined by a second blog that will celebrate all things machine.
I wish you and yours a happy new year. 


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