Uno sabe que viajò, que llego, pero, como mas o menos dijo alguien, sigue en donde partio, hasta, que un paisaje, un aroma, una frase, le dicen que no, que esta en otro lado
la frase?
Are you talking to me? dicho por un taxista, yendo al centro
domingo, 31 de agosto de 2008
martes, 19 de agosto de 2008
Tipos desconocidos
Raro que no figura en el panteon de proceres argentos
Raúl Pateras Pescara de Castelluccio (Buenos Aires, 1890 - París, 1966), Marqués de Pateras-Pescara, fue un abogado Argentino e inventor especializado en hidroaviones y helicópteros, como así también en motores, compresores, y en el llamado «Motor de pistón libre de Pescara.
Al comienzo del siglo XX, su familia regresó desde Buenos Aires a Europa. El trabajo con Gustavo Eiffel en investigaciones con un Túnel de viento para probar un modelo de Hidroavión Lanza torpedos llamado el "Pateras-Pescara".
En 1912, el ministro de la armada italiana evaluó el primer lanzador de torpedos acuático, basado en el modelo de Pescara. Pescara se encontró con Alberto Santos Dumont en París al comienzo de la primera guerra mundial.
En 1917, solicitó en España las patentes números 63.659, del 7 de abril de 1917, seguidas por otras 98 patentes más hasta 1929.
En 1919, Pescara construyó varios helicópteros de hélices contrarrotativas principalmente descritos en su décima patente francesa número 533.820 enviada desde España el 21 de febrero de 1920. Titulada "Rational Helicopter" esta patente de hecho describe a un verdadero helicóptero. Desde 1919 hasta 1923, envía más de cuarenta patentes a varios países.
Provisto de uno de estos vehículos de doble rotor coaxial, el 18 de Abril de 1924 fue capaz de alcanzar un nuevo récord mundial de vuelo con 736 metros de recorrido en 4 minutos 11 segundos. (Aproximadamente 13 km/h) a una altura de 1,8m.
En 1929, junto a su hermano Henri, el ingeniero Italiano Moglia, y el gobierno español, funda la Fabrica Nacional de Automóvilescon una inversión de 70 millones de pesetas.
El Nacional Pescara fue exhibido en 1931, en el gran palacio.En 1931 este auto de ocho cilindros gana la carera del Grand Prix de la costa europea. La Guerra civil española fuerza a Pescara a regresar a Francia. El 28 de Febrero de 1933, la compañía Pescara Auto-compressor fue dada a conocer en Luxemburgo. Los registros públicos muestran su dirección como Bv. Royal 33. Se mantuvo activo comercialmente durante 30 años, respaldado por 6 patentes francesas. Uno de los accionistas fue Pescara & Raymond Corporation con base en Dover, Delaware, USA.
Durante la segunda guerra mundial, Pescara trabajó en equipos para energía eléctrica en Portugal. El motor de pistón libre acaparó la atención nuevamente cuando fue producido en forma masiva por SIGMA, empresa que desarrollo el GS34, un generador de 1200-HP. Pescara se reúne con sus hijos en París en 1963 donde cumplió tareas como experto en S.N Marep para las pruebas del motor de 2000-HP el ELPH 40.
El 29 de diciembre de 1965, delega el mando a su hijo mas pequeño Christian de Pescara para llevar adelante todas las tareas de los negocios relacionados con las maquinas de pistón libre para su desarrollo y sus diversas aplicaciones en la industria.
Raúl Pateras-Pescara propone luego la producción de maquinas mas potentes (nuevos generadores en tandem basados en los generadores clásicos EPLH 40 y GS34 con fotos disponibles en su sitio oficial. La creación de una compañía para aplicar estos conceptos estaba en camino cuando muere Pescara.
Raúl Pateras Pescara de Castelluccio (Buenos Aires, 1890 - París, 1966), Marqués de Pateras-Pescara, fue un abogado Argentino e inventor especializado en hidroaviones y helicópteros, como así también en motores, compresores, y en el llamado «Motor de pistón libre de Pescara.
Al comienzo del siglo XX, su familia regresó desde Buenos Aires a Europa. El trabajo con Gustavo Eiffel en investigaciones con un Túnel de viento para probar un modelo de Hidroavión Lanza torpedos llamado el "Pateras-Pescara".
En 1912, el ministro de la armada italiana evaluó el primer lanzador de torpedos acuático, basado en el modelo de Pescara. Pescara se encontró con Alberto Santos Dumont en París al comienzo de la primera guerra mundial.
En 1917, solicitó en España las patentes números 63.659, del 7 de abril de 1917, seguidas por otras 98 patentes más hasta 1929.
En 1919, Pescara construyó varios helicópteros de hélices contrarrotativas principalmente descritos en su décima patente francesa número 533.820 enviada desde España el 21 de febrero de 1920. Titulada "Rational Helicopter" esta patente de hecho describe a un verdadero helicóptero. Desde 1919 hasta 1923, envía más de cuarenta patentes a varios países.
Provisto de uno de estos vehículos de doble rotor coaxial, el 18 de Abril de 1924 fue capaz de alcanzar un nuevo récord mundial de vuelo con 736 metros de recorrido en 4 minutos 11 segundos. (Aproximadamente 13 km/h) a una altura de 1,8m.
En 1929, junto a su hermano Henri, el ingeniero Italiano Moglia, y el gobierno español, funda la Fabrica Nacional de Automóvilescon una inversión de 70 millones de pesetas.
El Nacional Pescara fue exhibido en 1931, en el gran palacio.En 1931 este auto de ocho cilindros gana la carera del Grand Prix de la costa europea. La Guerra civil española fuerza a Pescara a regresar a Francia. El 28 de Febrero de 1933, la compañía Pescara Auto-compressor fue dada a conocer en Luxemburgo. Los registros públicos muestran su dirección como Bv. Royal 33. Se mantuvo activo comercialmente durante 30 años, respaldado por 6 patentes francesas. Uno de los accionistas fue Pescara & Raymond Corporation con base en Dover, Delaware, USA.
Durante la segunda guerra mundial, Pescara trabajó en equipos para energía eléctrica en Portugal. El motor de pistón libre acaparó la atención nuevamente cuando fue producido en forma masiva por SIGMA, empresa que desarrollo el GS34, un generador de 1200-HP. Pescara se reúne con sus hijos en París en 1963 donde cumplió tareas como experto en S.N Marep para las pruebas del motor de 2000-HP el ELPH 40.
El 29 de diciembre de 1965, delega el mando a su hijo mas pequeño Christian de Pescara para llevar adelante todas las tareas de los negocios relacionados con las maquinas de pistón libre para su desarrollo y sus diversas aplicaciones en la industria.
Raúl Pateras-Pescara propone luego la producción de maquinas mas potentes (nuevos generadores en tandem basados en los generadores clásicos EPLH 40 y GS34 con fotos disponibles en su sitio oficial. La creación de una compañía para aplicar estos conceptos estaba en camino cuando muere Pescara.
lunes, 18 de agosto de 2008
canibalismo y Kuru
U me hizo acordar de esto
Kuru
El kuru o "muerte de la risa" es una enfermedad neurodegenerativa e infecciosa causada por un prion
. La palabra kuru significa en lengua aborigen "temblor, con fiebre y frío", uno de los signos que manifiestan los afectados por dicha enfermedad. Fue inicialmente descrita a comienzos del siglo XX en Nueva Guinea, y comenzó a investigarse de manera científica en la década de los 50.
Su desarrollo es lento, y el período de incubación puede durar hasta 30 años. Una vez que se manifiestan sus síntomas resulta letal, y los pacientes fallecen en el plazo de un año.
Inicialmente se pensó que era una enfermedad hereditaria, ya que afectaba a los miembros de una tribu nativa de Nueva Guinea. Sin embargo, tras las investigaciones de Gadjdusek se demostró que en realidad estaba causada por un agente infeccioso, transmitido por la ingestión de tejidos cerebrales de personas difuntas con la intención de adquirir la sabiduría durante los ritos funerarios. Gajdusek descubrió que lo que se transmitía en realidad era un agente infeccioso que denominó "virus lento", y que posteriormente Stanley B. Prusiner llamó un prion.
De Wikipedia
lunes, 4 de agosto de 2008
Microsoft, joda y el marketing viral
O, como probe los 6 grados de separacion mirando en Messenger
Microsoft 'proves' six degrees of separation theory
All corporate news is six steps away from reality
Microsoft researchers claim to have proved the pop-social-psychology shibboleth that we are no more that six degrees of separation removed from any other human being on the planet.
The six degrees of separation theory first espoused by Stanley Milgram has given students and newspaper columnists something to talk about since the late 1960s.
Researchers at Redmond apparently took it upon themselves to analyse messages sent by users of its IM service in June 2006. The database of messages – stripped of identifying information we are assured – yielded 180 billion pairs of users.
The researchers found that 78 per cent of the pairs could be connected in seven hops or less, and that the average number of hops from one individually to another was 6.2. However, before you start thinking that you might be able to get into Natalie Portman’s inbox by the end of the day, the researchers said some users could only be connected by 29 hops.
"What we're seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity," Eric Horvitz, one of the researchers told the Washington Post. "People have had this suspicion that we are really close. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore."
Which is fine as long as you believe that humanity consists of people in rich countries who are rich enough to own computers and so time-rich they they can sit around playing on IM all day, rather than, say, growing food to feed their families.
Interestingly, a search of the Microsoft website throws up no details of the research, and all the coverage seems to be traceable back to the Washington Post story on Saturday.
Which simply demonstrates the long-held popular belief that 79 per cent of what you read is no more than seven degrees of separation away from a canned PR briefing from a comms professional to a tame journalist on a major newspaper.
domingo, 3 de agosto de 2008
Voodoo sciences ( 1 de n)
Dado que a alguna gente le gusto el termino, aqui empezamos un poco de lo que le afano al creador ( en rigor el dice que a la reaganomics la llamaron voodoo economy)
enjoy
Insultos, por favor dejarlos en la SRA, gracias
(no pude con mi genio, disculpas)
"I wouldn't know anything about politics," my friend said the other day. "I'm only an engineer."
He happens to be a very good engineer, but he named his profession as if he were ashamed of it. I see this a lot. The social scientists are automatically assumed to know more about society and politics than the hard scientists--even when the subject matter is something like nuclear power.
I wouldn't be so sure.
Now go again to your typical university. Find an engineering students and a social science student. I'll bet you anything you like that the engineer will have read about as much history and literature and genuine liberal arts as the social scientist; while the social scientist will know nothing of engineering and physics, little of biology, and no mathematics. He may protest that he "took stat"; which will mean that he knows how to do cookbook calculations to produce the mean, median, and mode of a bunch of numbers. Given a little help he may also be able to compute the standard deviation; and with a textbook and a bit of luck he might even be able to do a "T" test, although the odds are that he won't have the foggiest notion of what the T test assumes.
Go now to a rally protesting a nuclear power plant. There'll be a lot of students here. How many will be engineers? And how many will be social scientists? Of the social scientists, how many will understand anything of nuclear physics? How many will know the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation?
Engineering students may apologize for deficiencies in "culture." The man who started the People's Lobby, the first of
The fact is that engineers and scientists will have studied far more of the liberal arts than social scientists will have of physics or engineering. (And, alas, neither will know any history.)
jueves, 24 de julio de 2008
El futuro?
dejando, o no, de lado lo cotidiano, pra ver como se mueve el mundo, y como va a ser el futuro de la soja, entre otras cosas
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1036105/How-Chinas-taking-Africa-West-VERY-worried.html
el texto es el que sigue
How China's taking over Africa, and why the West should be VERY worried
On June 5, 1873, in a letter to The Times, Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and a distinguished African explorer in his own right, outlined a daring (if by today's standards utterly offensive) new method to 'tame' and colonise what was then known as the Dark Continent.
'My proposal is to make the encouragement of Chinese settlements of Africa a part of our national policy, in the belief that the Chinese immigrants would not only maintain their position, but that they would multiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race,' wrote Galton.
'I should expect that the African seaboard, now sparsely occupied by lazy, palavering savages, might in a few years be tenanted by industrious, order-loving Chinese, living either as a semidetached dependency of China, or else in perfect freedom under their own law.'
Enlarge Close relations: Chinese President Hu Jintao accompanies Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing
Close relations: Chinese President Hu Jintao accompanies Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing
Despite an outcry in Parliament and heated debate in the august salons of the Royal Geographic Society, Galton insisted that 'the history of the world tells the tale of the continual displacement of populations, each by a worthier successor, and humanity gains thereby'.
A controversial figure, Galton was also the pioneer of eugenics, the theory that was used by Hitler to try to fulfil his mad dreams of a German Master Race.
Eventually, Galton's grand resettlement plans fizzled out because there were much more exciting things going on in Africa.
But that was more than 100 years ago, and with legendary explorers such as Livingstone, Speke and Burton still battling to find the source of the Nile - and new discoveries of exotic species of birds and animals featuring regularly on newspaper front pages - vast swathes of the continent had not even been 'discovered'.
Yet Sir Francis Galton, it now appears, was ahead of his time. His vision is coming true - if not in the way he imagined. An astonishing invasion of Africa is now under way.
In the greatest movement of people the world has ever seen, China is secretly working to turn the entire continent into a new colony.
Reminiscent of the West's imperial push in the 18th and 19th centuries - but on a much more dramatic, determined scale - China's rulers believe Africa can become a 'satellite' state, solving its own problems of over-population and shortage of natural resources at a stroke.
With little fanfare, a staggering 750,000 Chinese have settled in Africa over the past decade. More are on the way.
The strategy has been carefully devised by officials in Beijing, where one expert has estimated that China will eventually need to send 300 million people to Africa to solve the problems of over-population and pollution.
The plans appear on track. Across Africa, the red flag of China is flying. Lucrative deals are being struck to buy its commodities - oil, platinum, gold and minerals. New embassies and air routes are opening up. The continent's new Chinese elite can be seen everywhere, shopping at their own expensive boutiques, driving Mercedes and BMW limousines, sending their children to exclusive private schools.
The pot-holed roads are cluttered with Chinese buses, taking people to markets filled with cheap Chinese goods. More than a thousand miles of new Chinese railroads are crisscrossing the continent, carrying billions of tons of illegally-logged timber, diamonds and gold.
Mugabe has said: 'We must turn from the West and face the East'
New horizons? Mugabe has said: 'We must turn from the West and face the East'
The trains are linked to ports dotted around the coast, waiting to carry the goods back to Beijing after unloading cargoes of cheap toys made in China.
Confucius Institutes (state-funded Chinese 'cultural centres') have sprung up throughout Africa, as far afield as the tiny land-locked countries of Burundi and Rwanda, teaching baffled local people how to do business in Mandarin and Cantonese.
Massive dams are being built, flooding nature reserves. The land is scarred with giant Chinese mines, with 'slave' labourers paid less than £1 a day to extract ore and minerals.
Pristine forests are being destroyed, with China taking up to 70 per cent of all timber from Africa.
All over this great continent, the Chinese presence is swelling into a flood. Angola has its own 'Chinatown', as do great African cities such as Dar es Salaam and Nairobi.
Exclusive, gated compounds, serving only Chinese food, and where no blacks are allowed, are being built all over the continent. 'African cloths' sold in markets on the continent are now almost always imported, bearing the legend: 'Made in China'.
From Nigeria in the north, to Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Angola in the west, across Chad and Sudan in the east, and south through Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, China has seized a vice-like grip on a continent which officials have decided is crucial to the superpower's long-term survival.
'The Chinese are all over the place,' says Trevor Ncube, a prominent African businessman with publishing interests around the continent. 'If the British were our masters yesterday, the Chinese have taken their place.'
Likened to one race deciding to adopt a new home on another planet, Beijing has launched its so-called 'One China In Africa' policy because of crippling pressure on its own natural resources in a country where the population has almost trebled from 500 million to 1.3 billion in 50 years.
China is hungry - for land, food and energy. While accounting for a fifth of the world's population, its oil consumption has risen 35-fold in the past decade and Africa is now providing a third of it; imports of steel, copper and aluminium have also shot up, with Beijing devouring 80 per cent of world supplies.
Enlarge President Robert Mugabe leaving the eleventh ordinary session of the assembly of the African Union heads of State and government in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt
President Robert Mugabe leaving the eleventh ordinary session of the assembly of the African Union heads of State and government in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt
Fuelling its own boom at home, China is also desperate for new markets to sell goods. And Africa, with non-existent health and safety rules to protect against shoddy and dangerous goods, is the perfect destination.
The result of China's demand for raw materials and its sales of products to Africa is that turnover in trade between Africa and China has risen from £5million annually a decade ago to £6billion today.
However, there is a lethal price to pay. There is a sinister aspect to this invasion. Chinese-made war planes roar through the African sky, bombing opponents. Chinese-made assault rifles and grenades are being used to fuel countless murderous civil wars, often over the materials the Chinese are desperate to buy.
Take, for example, Zimbabwe. Recently, a giant container ship from China was due to deliver its cargo of three million rounds of AK-47 ammunition, 3,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 1,500 mortars to President Robert Mugabe's regime.
After an international outcry, the vessel, the An Yue Jiang, was forced to return to China, despite Beijing's insistence that the arms consignment was a 'normal commercial deal'.
Indeed, the 77-ton arms shipment would have been small beer - a fraction of China's help to Mugabe. He already has high-tech, Chinese-built helicopter gunships and fighter jets to use against his people.
Ever since the U.S. and Britain imposed sanctions in 2003, Mugabe has courted the Chinese, offering mining concessions for arms and currency.
While flying regularly to Beijing as a high-ranking guest, the 84-year-old dictator rants at 'small dots' such as Britain and America.
He can afford to. Mugabe is orchestrating his campaign of terror from a 25-bedroom, pagoda-style mansion built by the Chinese. Much of his estimated £1billion fortune is believed to have been siphoned off from Chinese 'loans'.
The imposing grey building of ZANU-PF, his ruling party, was paid for and built by the Chinese. Mugabe received £200 million last year alone from China, enabling him to buy loyalty from the army.
In another disturbing illustration of the warm relations between China and the ageing dictator, a platoon of the China People's Liberation Army has been out on the streets of Mutare, a city near the border with Mozambique, which voted against the president in the recent, disputed election.
Almost 30 years ago, Britain pulled out of Zimbabwe - as it had done already out of the rest of Africa, in the wake of Harold Macmillan's 'wind of change' speech. Today, Mugabe says: 'We have turned East, where the sun rises, and given our backs to the West, where the sun sets.'
Despite Britain's commendable colonial legacy of a network of roads, railways and schools, the British are now being shunned.
According to one veteran diplomat: 'China is easier to do business with because it doesn't care about human rights in Africa - just as it doesn't care about them in its own country. All the Chinese care about is money.'
Nowhere is that more true than Sudan. Branded 'Africa's Killing Fields', the massive oil-rich East African state is in the throes of the genocide and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of black, non-Arab peasants in southern Sudan.
In effect, through its supplies of arms and support, China has been accused of underwriting a humanitarian scandal. The atrocities in Sudan have been described by the U.S. as 'the worst human rights crisis in the world today'.
Mugabe has received hundreds of millions of pounds from Chinese sources
Mugabe has received hundreds of millions of pounds from Chinese sources
The government in Khartoum has helped the feared Janjaweed militia to rape, murder and burn to death more than 350,000 people.
The Chinese - who now buy half of all Sudan's oil - have happily provided armoured vehicles, aircraft and millions of bullets and grenades in return for lucrative deals. Indeed, an estimated £1billion of Chinese cash has been spent on weapons.
According to Human Rights First, a leading human rights advocacy organisation, Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifles, grenade launchers and ammunition for rifles and heavy machine guns are continuing to flow into Darfur, which is dotted with giant refugee camps, each containing hundreds of thousands of people.
Between 2003 and 2006, China sold Sudan $55 million worth of small arms, flouting a United Nations weapons embargo.
With new warnings that the cycle of killing is intensifying, an estimated two thirds of the non-Arab population has lost at least one member of their families in Darfur.
Although two million people have been uprooted from their homes in the conflict, China has repeatedly thwarted United Nations denunciations of the Sudanese regime.
While the Sudanese slaughter has attracted worldwide condemnation, prompting Hollywood film-maker Steven Spielberg to quit as artistic director of the Beijing Olympics, few parts of Africa are now untouched by China.
In Congo, more than £2billion has been 'loaned' to the government. In Angola, £3 billion has been paid in exchange for oil. In Nigeria, more than £5billion has been handed over.
In Equatorial Guinea, where the president publicly hung his predecessor from a cage suspended in a theatre before having him shot, Chinese firms are helping the dictator build an entirely new capital, full of gleaming skyscrapers and, of course, Chinese restaurants.
After battling for years against the white colonial powers of Britain, France, Belgium and Germany, post-independence African leaders are happy to do business with China for a straightforward reason: cash.
With western loans linked to an insistence on democratic reforms and the need for 'transparency' in using the money (diplomatic language for rules to ensure dictators do not pocket millions), the Chinese have proved much more relaxed about what their billions are used for.
Certainly, little of it reaches the continent's impoverished 800 million people. Much of it goes straight into the pockets of dictators. In Africa, corruption is a multi-billion pound industry and many experts believe that China is fuelling the cancer.
The Chinese are contemptuous of such criticism. To them, Africa is about pragmatism, not human rights. 'Business is business,' says Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Zhou Wenzhong, adding that Beijing should not interfere in 'internal' affairs. 'We try to separate politics from business.'
While the bounty has, not surprisingly, been welcomed by African dictators, the people of Africa are less impressed. At a market in Zimbabwe recently, where Chinese goods were on sale at nearly every stall, one woman told me she would not waste her money on 'Zing-Zong' products.
'They go Zing when they work, and then they quickly go Zong and break,' she said. 'They are a waste of money. But there's nothing else. China is the only country that will do business with us.'
There have also been riots in Zambia, Angola and Congo over the flood of Chinese immigrant workers. The Chinese do not use African labour where possible, saying black Africans are lazy and unskilled.
In Angola, the government has agreed that 70 per cent of tendered public works must go to Chinese firms, most of which do not employ Angolans.
As well as enticing hundreds of thousands to settle in Africa, they have even shipped Chinese prisoners to produce the goods cheaply.
In Kenya, for example, only ten textile factories are still producing, compared with 200 factories five years ago, as China undercuts locals in the production of 'African' souvenirs.
Where will it all end? As far as Beijing is concerned, it will stop only when Africa no longer has any minerals or oil to be extracted from the continent.
A century after Sir Francis Galton outlined his vision for Africa, the Chinese are here to stay. More will come.
The people of this bewitching, beautiful continent, where humankind first emerged from the Great Rift Valley, desperately need progress. The Chinese are not here for that.
They are here for plunder. After centuries of pain and war, Africa deserves better.
Lo ultimo, suena a Belgica y Leopolod 2do
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1036105/How-Chinas-taking-Africa-West-VERY-worried.html
el texto es el que sigue
How China's taking over Africa, and why the West should be VERY worried
On June 5, 1873, in a letter to The Times, Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and a distinguished African explorer in his own right, outlined a daring (if by today's standards utterly offensive) new method to 'tame' and colonise what was then known as the Dark Continent.
'My proposal is to make the encouragement of Chinese settlements of Africa a part of our national policy, in the belief that the Chinese immigrants would not only maintain their position, but that they would multiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race,' wrote Galton.
'I should expect that the African seaboard, now sparsely occupied by lazy, palavering savages, might in a few years be tenanted by industrious, order-loving Chinese, living either as a semidetached dependency of China, or else in perfect freedom under their own law.'
Enlarge Close relations: Chinese President Hu Jintao accompanies Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing
Close relations: Chinese President Hu Jintao accompanies Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing
Despite an outcry in Parliament and heated debate in the august salons of the Royal Geographic Society, Galton insisted that 'the history of the world tells the tale of the continual displacement of populations, each by a worthier successor, and humanity gains thereby'.
A controversial figure, Galton was also the pioneer of eugenics, the theory that was used by Hitler to try to fulfil his mad dreams of a German Master Race.
Eventually, Galton's grand resettlement plans fizzled out because there were much more exciting things going on in Africa.
But that was more than 100 years ago, and with legendary explorers such as Livingstone, Speke and Burton still battling to find the source of the Nile - and new discoveries of exotic species of birds and animals featuring regularly on newspaper front pages - vast swathes of the continent had not even been 'discovered'.
Yet Sir Francis Galton, it now appears, was ahead of his time. His vision is coming true - if not in the way he imagined. An astonishing invasion of Africa is now under way.
In the greatest movement of people the world has ever seen, China is secretly working to turn the entire continent into a new colony.
Reminiscent of the West's imperial push in the 18th and 19th centuries - but on a much more dramatic, determined scale - China's rulers believe Africa can become a 'satellite' state, solving its own problems of over-population and shortage of natural resources at a stroke.
With little fanfare, a staggering 750,000 Chinese have settled in Africa over the past decade. More are on the way.
The strategy has been carefully devised by officials in Beijing, where one expert has estimated that China will eventually need to send 300 million people to Africa to solve the problems of over-population and pollution.
The plans appear on track. Across Africa, the red flag of China is flying. Lucrative deals are being struck to buy its commodities - oil, platinum, gold and minerals. New embassies and air routes are opening up. The continent's new Chinese elite can be seen everywhere, shopping at their own expensive boutiques, driving Mercedes and BMW limousines, sending their children to exclusive private schools.
The pot-holed roads are cluttered with Chinese buses, taking people to markets filled with cheap Chinese goods. More than a thousand miles of new Chinese railroads are crisscrossing the continent, carrying billions of tons of illegally-logged timber, diamonds and gold.
Mugabe has said: 'We must turn from the West and face the East'
New horizons? Mugabe has said: 'We must turn from the West and face the East'
The trains are linked to ports dotted around the coast, waiting to carry the goods back to Beijing after unloading cargoes of cheap toys made in China.
Confucius Institutes (state-funded Chinese 'cultural centres') have sprung up throughout Africa, as far afield as the tiny land-locked countries of Burundi and Rwanda, teaching baffled local people how to do business in Mandarin and Cantonese.
Massive dams are being built, flooding nature reserves. The land is scarred with giant Chinese mines, with 'slave' labourers paid less than £1 a day to extract ore and minerals.
Pristine forests are being destroyed, with China taking up to 70 per cent of all timber from Africa.
All over this great continent, the Chinese presence is swelling into a flood. Angola has its own 'Chinatown', as do great African cities such as Dar es Salaam and Nairobi.
Exclusive, gated compounds, serving only Chinese food, and where no blacks are allowed, are being built all over the continent. 'African cloths' sold in markets on the continent are now almost always imported, bearing the legend: 'Made in China'.
From Nigeria in the north, to Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Angola in the west, across Chad and Sudan in the east, and south through Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, China has seized a vice-like grip on a continent which officials have decided is crucial to the superpower's long-term survival.
'The Chinese are all over the place,' says Trevor Ncube, a prominent African businessman with publishing interests around the continent. 'If the British were our masters yesterday, the Chinese have taken their place.'
Likened to one race deciding to adopt a new home on another planet, Beijing has launched its so-called 'One China In Africa' policy because of crippling pressure on its own natural resources in a country where the population has almost trebled from 500 million to 1.3 billion in 50 years.
China is hungry - for land, food and energy. While accounting for a fifth of the world's population, its oil consumption has risen 35-fold in the past decade and Africa is now providing a third of it; imports of steel, copper and aluminium have also shot up, with Beijing devouring 80 per cent of world supplies.
Enlarge President Robert Mugabe leaving the eleventh ordinary session of the assembly of the African Union heads of State and government in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt
President Robert Mugabe leaving the eleventh ordinary session of the assembly of the African Union heads of State and government in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt
Fuelling its own boom at home, China is also desperate for new markets to sell goods. And Africa, with non-existent health and safety rules to protect against shoddy and dangerous goods, is the perfect destination.
The result of China's demand for raw materials and its sales of products to Africa is that turnover in trade between Africa and China has risen from £5million annually a decade ago to £6billion today.
However, there is a lethal price to pay. There is a sinister aspect to this invasion. Chinese-made war planes roar through the African sky, bombing opponents. Chinese-made assault rifles and grenades are being used to fuel countless murderous civil wars, often over the materials the Chinese are desperate to buy.
Take, for example, Zimbabwe. Recently, a giant container ship from China was due to deliver its cargo of three million rounds of AK-47 ammunition, 3,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 1,500 mortars to President Robert Mugabe's regime.
After an international outcry, the vessel, the An Yue Jiang, was forced to return to China, despite Beijing's insistence that the arms consignment was a 'normal commercial deal'.
Indeed, the 77-ton arms shipment would have been small beer - a fraction of China's help to Mugabe. He already has high-tech, Chinese-built helicopter gunships and fighter jets to use against his people.
Ever since the U.S. and Britain imposed sanctions in 2003, Mugabe has courted the Chinese, offering mining concessions for arms and currency.
While flying regularly to Beijing as a high-ranking guest, the 84-year-old dictator rants at 'small dots' such as Britain and America.
He can afford to. Mugabe is orchestrating his campaign of terror from a 25-bedroom, pagoda-style mansion built by the Chinese. Much of his estimated £1billion fortune is believed to have been siphoned off from Chinese 'loans'.
The imposing grey building of ZANU-PF, his ruling party, was paid for and built by the Chinese. Mugabe received £200 million last year alone from China, enabling him to buy loyalty from the army.
In another disturbing illustration of the warm relations between China and the ageing dictator, a platoon of the China People's Liberation Army has been out on the streets of Mutare, a city near the border with Mozambique, which voted against the president in the recent, disputed election.
Almost 30 years ago, Britain pulled out of Zimbabwe - as it had done already out of the rest of Africa, in the wake of Harold Macmillan's 'wind of change' speech. Today, Mugabe says: 'We have turned East, where the sun rises, and given our backs to the West, where the sun sets.'
Despite Britain's commendable colonial legacy of a network of roads, railways and schools, the British are now being shunned.
According to one veteran diplomat: 'China is easier to do business with because it doesn't care about human rights in Africa - just as it doesn't care about them in its own country. All the Chinese care about is money.'
Nowhere is that more true than Sudan. Branded 'Africa's Killing Fields', the massive oil-rich East African state is in the throes of the genocide and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of black, non-Arab peasants in southern Sudan.
In effect, through its supplies of arms and support, China has been accused of underwriting a humanitarian scandal. The atrocities in Sudan have been described by the U.S. as 'the worst human rights crisis in the world today'.
Mugabe has received hundreds of millions of pounds from Chinese sources
Mugabe has received hundreds of millions of pounds from Chinese sources
The government in Khartoum has helped the feared Janjaweed militia to rape, murder and burn to death more than 350,000 people.
The Chinese - who now buy half of all Sudan's oil - have happily provided armoured vehicles, aircraft and millions of bullets and grenades in return for lucrative deals. Indeed, an estimated £1billion of Chinese cash has been spent on weapons.
According to Human Rights First, a leading human rights advocacy organisation, Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifles, grenade launchers and ammunition for rifles and heavy machine guns are continuing to flow into Darfur, which is dotted with giant refugee camps, each containing hundreds of thousands of people.
Between 2003 and 2006, China sold Sudan $55 million worth of small arms, flouting a United Nations weapons embargo.
With new warnings that the cycle of killing is intensifying, an estimated two thirds of the non-Arab population has lost at least one member of their families in Darfur.
Although two million people have been uprooted from their homes in the conflict, China has repeatedly thwarted United Nations denunciations of the Sudanese regime.
While the Sudanese slaughter has attracted worldwide condemnation, prompting Hollywood film-maker Steven Spielberg to quit as artistic director of the Beijing Olympics, few parts of Africa are now untouched by China.
In Congo, more than £2billion has been 'loaned' to the government. In Angola, £3 billion has been paid in exchange for oil. In Nigeria, more than £5billion has been handed over.
In Equatorial Guinea, where the president publicly hung his predecessor from a cage suspended in a theatre before having him shot, Chinese firms are helping the dictator build an entirely new capital, full of gleaming skyscrapers and, of course, Chinese restaurants.
After battling for years against the white colonial powers of Britain, France, Belgium and Germany, post-independence African leaders are happy to do business with China for a straightforward reason: cash.
With western loans linked to an insistence on democratic reforms and the need for 'transparency' in using the money (diplomatic language for rules to ensure dictators do not pocket millions), the Chinese have proved much more relaxed about what their billions are used for.
Certainly, little of it reaches the continent's impoverished 800 million people. Much of it goes straight into the pockets of dictators. In Africa, corruption is a multi-billion pound industry and many experts believe that China is fuelling the cancer.
The Chinese are contemptuous of such criticism. To them, Africa is about pragmatism, not human rights. 'Business is business,' says Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Zhou Wenzhong, adding that Beijing should not interfere in 'internal' affairs. 'We try to separate politics from business.'
While the bounty has, not surprisingly, been welcomed by African dictators, the people of Africa are less impressed. At a market in Zimbabwe recently, where Chinese goods were on sale at nearly every stall, one woman told me she would not waste her money on 'Zing-Zong' products.
'They go Zing when they work, and then they quickly go Zong and break,' she said. 'They are a waste of money. But there's nothing else. China is the only country that will do business with us.'
There have also been riots in Zambia, Angola and Congo over the flood of Chinese immigrant workers. The Chinese do not use African labour where possible, saying black Africans are lazy and unskilled.
In Angola, the government has agreed that 70 per cent of tendered public works must go to Chinese firms, most of which do not employ Angolans.
As well as enticing hundreds of thousands to settle in Africa, they have even shipped Chinese prisoners to produce the goods cheaply.
In Kenya, for example, only ten textile factories are still producing, compared with 200 factories five years ago, as China undercuts locals in the production of 'African' souvenirs.
Where will it all end? As far as Beijing is concerned, it will stop only when Africa no longer has any minerals or oil to be extracted from the continent.
A century after Sir Francis Galton outlined his vision for Africa, the Chinese are here to stay. More will come.
The people of this bewitching, beautiful continent, where humankind first emerged from the Great Rift Valley, desperately need progress. The Chinese are not here for that.
They are here for plunder. After centuries of pain and war, Africa deserves better.
Lo ultimo, suena a Belgica y Leopolod 2do
jueves, 3 de julio de 2008
Me hizo acordar U
Demonio de Maxwell
El Demonio de Maxwell es el nombre de una criatura imaginaria ideada en 1867 por el físico escocés James Clerk Maxwell como parte de un experimento mental diseñado para ilustrar la Segunda Ley de la Termodinámica. Esta ley prohíbe que entre dos cuerpos a diferente temperatura se pueda transmitir el calor del cuerpo frío al cuerpo caliente. La segunda ley también se expresa comúnmente afirmando: "En un sistema aislado la entropía nunca decrece". En la primera formulación el demonio de Maxwell sería una criatura capaz de actuar a nivel molecular seleccionando moléculas calientes y moléculas frías separándolas. El nombre "Demonio" proviene aparentemente de un juego de cartas solitario conocido en Gran Bretaña en el que se debían ordenar cartas rojas y blancas análogas a moléculas calientes y frías. El demonio de Maxwell aparece referenciado también como Paradoja de Maxwell.
El demonio de Maxwell separa las moléculas de los gases A y B.
Partimos inicialmente de la premisa de que el demonio es capaz de diferenciar entre moléculas de gas a diferente temperatura, y separarlas en función de dicho factor. Aprovechando este colaborador, podríamos construir una máquina térmica con un 100% del rendimiento.
El diseño sería el siguiente: Imaginemos una mezcla equimolar de dos gases A y B, ambos con diferente calor específico (con lo cual es de suponer que, a iguales condiciones, las moléculas de uno de los dos se muevan a mayor velocidad que las del otro); contenida en un recipiente ideal en el que tenemos una pared intermedia que separa el recipiente en dos mitades, unida a un émbolo que sale del recipiente; y dotada de una "puerta" controlada por nuestro demonio.
Si por ejemplo, el calor específico de A es mayor que el de B, nuestro demonio se pondrá a trabajar y en un lapso determinado nos habrá separado (por el simple método de abrir selectivamente la puerta a las moléculas más rápidas para que pasen al otro lado del recipiente) los dos gases; "violando" la segunda ley de la termodinámica -ha habido disminución de la entropía del sistema-. El ciclo de la máquina se completa abriendo la puerta, y dejando que A vuelva a mezclarse con B (el movimiento espontáneo para tender de nuevo al estado de entropía máxima del sistema originará un cambio del volumen del lado en el que se encuentra B), provocando así el movimiento de la pared y con ella del émbolo, produciendo así un trabajo (se supone que entre la pared central unida al émbolo y el resto del recipiente no hay fricción).
Resolución de la paradoja
Leo Szilard resolvió en 1929 la paradoja de Maxwell al formular los aspectos relativos a la información y energía necesaria para la interacción entre el demonio y el sistema. Szilard se percató de que nuestro "Demonio" no es un trabajador desinteresado. El mero hecho de poder distinguir entre A y B requiere de un aporte de energía y de una interacción con el sistema. La energía invertida en "capacidad de decisión" es la que se utiliza para separar ambos gases. En otras palabras, la Segunda ley de la termodinámica no puede violarse por sistemas microscópicos con información. La paradoja de Maxwell ha dado lugar a una amplia investigación en los aspectos fundamentales de la termodinámica y la teoría de la información.
De Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
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