Inventions of the Dark Age

History books, at least those that cover the period, shed lots of tears about the fall of Rome, and call the next 1000 years the Dark Ages.  Starting with Gibbon (Decline and Fall)  most historians treat the medieval period as a huge setback to civilization with no redeeming features.  Perhaps.
   Dark they might have been, but the medievals were inventive.  In the thousand years we call medieval, they invented a lotta good stuff.  What they didn't invent they imported from elsewhere and placed it into service.

1.  Trebuchet.  Weight driven catapult, powerful enough to break a masonry wall, something which the spring driven catapults of the Greeks and Romans could not do.
2.  Wooden barrels.  Shipping container that completely replaced the heavy and fragile pottery amphora used in antiquity.  Stronger and lighter than pottery
3.  Magnetic Compass.  The odds of your ship returning safely are much better if she carries a compass.
4.  Stern rudder.   Much stronger and less likely to break in heavy weather than the steering oar.  Moderns who have sailed replica vessels of antiquity (Thor Heyerdahl and Hodding Carter) always write about their steering oar breaking at sea.
5.  Spectacles (eye glasses)
6. Stirrups.  Without stirrups, it's like riding bareback.  You can do it, but you have to pay all your attention to staying on the horse.  With stirrups the horseman's seat is firm enough to fight effectively.  With stirrups the mounted knight, who dominated European warfare, becomes possible.
7. Heavy plow.  A big strong plow, often wheeled, with an eight ox team, which could turn the heavy bottomland soil, which the lighter "ard" used in antiquity could not.
8.  Three field rotation.  Let only one third of the land lie fallow, as opposed to the two field rotation practiced in antiquity.  Increases cropland by one sixth (17%)
9. Water mills.  Although a Roman invention, the Romans never built very many of them.  Whereas the Domesday book records 5 to 6 thousand water mills in England by 1087
10.  Blast furnace.  Water wheel powered bellows made a fire hot enough to actually melt iron, so that it could be poured and cast in molds.
11. Printing.  Gutenburg and all that.
12. Gunpowder. and firearms.
13. The University.
14. Crossbow.  Although known to the Romans (there is an engraving of one on a Roman tomb) it wasn't used much.  Major advantage of the crossbow; it is as simple to shoot as a modern rifle.  Any recruit could be trained to shoot well enough to be useful in a few weeks.  The long bow took a lifetime of practice to make an archer. 
15. Spinning Wheel
16.  Mechanical clock.
17.  Gothic  cathedral
18.  Horse collar.  Before the horse collar, law limited the load horses could pull to 500 pounds.  With horse collars medieval wagoneers could move 2500 pound loads of building stone.
19. Windmill
20. Arabic numerals
21. Double entry book keeping.
22. Scientific method  (Roger Bacon)
23. Wheel barrow.  Simple, but highly useful.

Washing Windows, Taking out the Trash

Doing a little housecleaning on Antique Laptop the other day.  Ran WinDirStat, a cute program that shows you where all your hard disk space has gone.  Lists all the directories in order of size and draws a neat little map of the disk, with each directory in a different color.  WinDirStat is on the web, Google can find it. 
   Anyhow, WinDirStat showed this big plump directory Windows/SoftwareDistribution.  It was plump, nearly 500 Mb.  Question, can I zap it and have my XP system survive the event?  Google drew a lot of hits on this one, ranging from don't touch it, your system will melt, to blow it away, it's worthless.  Sorting thru the answers it turns out that Windows Update is busily finding and downloading patches behind your back.  The patches come over the net in a compressed form.  Windows update decompresses the patch, applies it, and leaves the compressed version and some stuff needed if you ever want to back the patch out, in Software Distribution.  Lets be real here, nobody ever backs out a patch, unless it is killing their system.  Assuming your system is working well, you don't need the stuff in SoftwareDistribution. 
   So how do you get rid of it?  It's a little more complicated than just deleting it from Explorer.  Windows Update is a "service" a privileged piece of code that is always in RAM, and gets control of your machine when ever it likes, for as long as it likes.   Windows Update puts some kind of unbreakable protection on SoftwareDistribution so you cannot zap it in the ordinary way. How to cope?
Open a DOS window.  You do this from the start menu, hit the run box and type in "cmd".  For those of you who never had the pleasure of running DOS, it can be a little awkward.  The mouse doesn't work in DOS. Your first job is to navigate to the c:/windows directory using the CHDIR (CD for short) command. 
Do CD .. until you reach the c: root directory. 
Do CD windows and you should be there.
Do NET STOP wuauserv   to turn off windows update and unprotect the SoftwareDistribution directory.
Do RENAME (Ren for short) softwaredistribution  anynameyoulike (I used softtrash) .
Do NET START wuauserv to turn windows update back on. 

Exit DOS and check your system to make sure it still works.  Run a program or two.  Visit a website.  Then reboot to be sure that still works.   When you are satisfied, go back and zap the old softwaredistribution and recover quite a chuck of disk. You will notice that Windows Update has created a new, and smaller SoftwareDistribution  all by itself. The RENAME trick is a way to let you back out.  If something should go wrong, you can put things pack the way they were. 
   Not only does this trick recover a lotta disk, it speeds things up.  Antique Laptop boots faster, fast enogh to notice.  I think Windows Update had been wasting time riffling thru 500 Mb of patches going back to the year 2000.
   I did this trick on XP, but a lot of the net rumor I read tells me Vista, 7, and 8  has the same problem only worse.  There is a tool, DISM, in the newer Windows to deal with the ever growing Windows trash directories.  I'm still on XP so I cannot tell you much about that.

SEC bigwig blasts the agency at his retirement party

This was on NHPR this morning, although a quickly Google did not confirm it.  I missed the guy's name (NHPR is bad on names, they only  use them once and go with pronouns for the rest of the piece). 
Anyhow they had him in the studio and he used some fairly tough language to condemn the SEC for not prosecuting the biggies on Wall Street, and going after the small fry.  Which is true enough.  Nobody of consequence has been prosecuted over the 2007 crash that kicked off Great Depression 2.0.
   This guy totally didn't understand what te SEC is supposed to be doing.  He thinks the agency's mission is to prosecute Wall Streeters.  Not so.  The SEC was created after the 1929 crash with a mission to prevent another crash.  The 1929 crash caused 10 years of misery (the Great Depression) and was a major factor in kicking off WWII.  The Great Depression traveled to Germany and had a lot to do with bringing Hitler to power in 1933.  The 2007 crash was as bad as the 1929 one.  The SEC failed to prevent it.  That's total mission failure.  We ought to disband the SEC, fire all the employees, burn all their files.  And start up something new.
   Prevention, means regulations forbidding risky practices such as mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, derivatives, high speed trading,  excessive leverage, and banks playing the stock market with FDIC insured money.  Wall Street is supposed to be a place where companies go to raise money for expansion.  It is not supposed to be a casino. 
   Any how, all this retiring SEC big wig can find to complain about is a lack of high profile scalps.  This is a man who doesn't understand his job.

Obama says nice things about LBJ

He is on Fox News, making a speech about how great the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was. And how great LBJ was for pushing it thru the Congress, over the dead bodies of the Southern Democrats.  And I agree, it was a good thing.
   On the other hand I remember  LBJ was the man who took the country to war and worse, to defeat, in Viet Nam.  That was a bad thing. 

Greeks selling new bonds

This was on NHPR this morning.  For the first time in five years, the Greek government is offering bonds.  And people are buying them.  I'd like to interview some of those buyers, just to see if they are as stupid as they look.  Greece is still an economic disaster, 25% unemployment, a vast civil service drawing their pay to impede economic growth, with a neo Nazi party (Golden Dawn) gathering strength, and a mountain of debt equivalent to many years of GNP.  And these "investors" think they will get paid back?  And are willing to accept this kind of risk for a mere 5% interest?  When they can buy the soundest investment on the planet (US T bills) for 3%?  They are willing to take all the risks in Greek bonds for a measely 5%?
  Lots a Luck. 

Boston Marathon goes off this month

Which sparked a few rehashes of the Tsaernov (the bomber) case.  In actual fact, the Russians tipped us off the the Tsaernov's were mixed up with Chechen terrorists, in fact had visited Chechnia and attended a terrorist training camp.  US authorities botched the tip.  Tsaernov was never investigated.  The feds didn't bother to talk to the Cambridge police (Tsaernov lived in Cambridge).  Fox News has been complaining that the Boston police were never notified.  Forget that.  Boston is another town.  I doubt a Boston cop would even know where Webster Avenue is, let alone know anyone to talk too in the neighborhood.  Whereas the Cambridge cops, local boys all, probably have a couple of guys on the force who went to high school with the Tsaernov brothers, or who lived on their street. 
  Anyhow, we blew a solid tip from the Russians. 

Words of the Weasel Part 39

We have been hearing "investment" as a replacement for "spending" from Democrats.  This morning I heard a new one from Steney Hoyer, House Minority leader.  He talked about "disinvestment" where real people would have said "spending cut".   Does "disinvestment" sound better than "spending cut"?   Depends I suppose, on whether you believe in more spending  or less spending.