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sebzilla posted:What will? Well, it's hard to say. In my opinion the only real route to leftism will be the creation of dual power systems. This will involve mass unionisation of both the key workforce but also renters and even thkse who pay mortgages. Maybe that won't even work or isn't possible but Labour will literally never deliver leftism because elections are essentially decided by the media, and as soon as you get a left wing Labour party the media turns on it viciously. Also let's remember that even Jezzas Labour was left wing in only the mildest of ways. It was still a pro capitalist party. If you want to see the end of capitalism then every second you put into Labour is a complete waste of time.
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May 16, 2020 17:57
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forkboy84 posted:Discovered some exciting news today. A free cassette I got nearly a decade ago with a magazine & never even opened because nothing to play it on is worth near enough £50 in mint condition & unopened. Yeah, I bought that Batman issue where they left in a dong and I'm never going to bother selling it.
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May 16, 2020 18:38
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https://twitter.com/georgina_199/status/1261684884256559106?s=19 The copper being on a bike makes this perfect
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May 16, 2020 18:40
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Lobster God posted:https://twitter.com/georgina_199/status/1261684884256559106?s=19 I'm not sure I am digging this new reboot of BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner.
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May 16, 2020 19:00
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Who had the shopped version that said "Let our teachers be dead"? I can't find it now.
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May 16, 2020 19:09
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Guavanaut posted:Hey VideoGames, is this you? Kirby games are the best and my favourite thing to calm down or if I'm feeling poorly is watching Medibot's LP of Epic Yarn. So wholesome.
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May 16, 2020 20:37
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Right as punishment for this thread's sins, as threatened, here are far too many words about the BT Tower. Basically this was a draft for my blog, one of a few that don't really fit into my local history theme so have sat in limbo for ages. I thought you guys might appreciate them - particularly the series I started on secret sites in London, inspired by Trevor Paglen's excellent Black Spots On The Map about the geography of the American secret state. They're a bit rough and for obvious reasons I've not been able to fill them out with my own photos, but I suffered for these and now you have to too. Here's the first, I'll try and get the next two (on cold war bomb shelters and intelligence agency buildings) out in the next week or so. Imagine a state so oppressive and so paranoid that the tallest building in the country, slap bang in the middle of the capital city, visible from 50 miles away on a clear day, does not appear on maps. Official Government documents do not mention it. Even acknowledging its existence to the wrong person could land you in prison. It's the height (hah) of Cold War lunacy, but it didn't happen in Moscow, Beijing or Pyongyang, but right here in London. This is the story of the BT Tower, the building that didn't exist for the first 40 years of its life.  The GPO Tower as was, not long after completion, existing in blatant contravention of the Official Secrets Act. The story of this most un-secret secret base starts, suitably enough, with one of the greatest secrets of the war. Britain had started World War 2 with one massive technical advantage over the Axis powers - radar (actually, let's give it it's proper Dan Dare name, RADAR). By transmitting out radio signals and listening for them to return after bouncing off distant aircraft, the RAF could see approaching aircraft hundreds of miles away. However the CHAIN HOME system was flawed in multiple ways. First of all, it wasn't exactly what you'd call portable:  A CHAIN HOME station. The cover story of it being washing lines for the Great National Laundry never fooled anyone. These transmitters and receivers were massive targets for the Luftwaffe. It was also not very precise - the long waves it used could easily sail straight past single aircraft. Shorter waves tended to bounce around off the ionosphere, making the picture cluttered with false returns, and the technology just didn't exist to strongly focus the beams enough for the true holy grail - a system capable of letting an aircraft engage another aircraft in total darkness. The solution was a device originally played with in the 1920s, when it was thought it might be possible to focus the then-new radio waves so strongly that they might be used as a death ray. The cavity magnetron - a carefully-shaped lump of copper with magnets arranged around it - could take a high-voltage electrical input and output a strongly-focused beam of radio waves. No moving parts, mechanically rugged, and easily manufactured it was the Holy Grail of the air war. A very British aside is that the first working example was to be taken to the US as part of the Tizard Mission, along with all the other great secrets of the war effort, in an attempt to sway the Americans away from neutrality. The prototype promptly went missing at Euston station, and the poor bugger transporting it no doubt had a very busy few seconds of trying to work out how the greatest secret of the war had escaped him before realising an overly-eager porter had picked it up and placed it in his carriage for him.  This machine kills fascists. The magnetron gave such an advantage to the Allies that for quite a while it was forbidden for planes to carry it over enemy territory at all, lest they be shot down and the secret of their amazing night-fighting performance (explained away as the pilots eating lots of carrots to improve their night vision) fall into enemy hands. As it turned out they needn't have worried - when the Germans did get their hands on one from a crashed Mosquito they assumed that the lump of copper was actually just part of the mounting for the transmitter, given that their far worse-performing klystron tubes were made of glass and infamous for breaking just from rough handling, let alone crashing into the ground at hundreds of miles an hour. By the way, the magnetron found another use later in the war - being able to focus microwaves made it an effective heater, so it was used in drying the wood and glue in the plywood used by the Mosquito. It was that use that made it probably the most common spinoff of WW2 technology in use today - there's one in your microwave oven, and every other microwave oven on Earth, that's basically identical to the ones that won the war. Because nothing’s allowed to be purely good though, the cavity magnetron was also what enabled the H2S surface-tracking radar which allowed the RAF to bomb semi-effectively at night. And by semi-effectively I mean “lob bombs in the general direction of a city”. Without the cavity magnetron we’d have no microwave ovens but Dresden would have a lot more old buildings, so it’s impossible to tell if it’s bad or good. The third big use for the magnetron came a little after the war. A powerful, narrowly-focused beam of radio waves was exactly what the General Post Office was looking for in the 50s when they were looking to expand the radio relay network for remote communities. They had been using conventional radio for these but that’s both very inefficient in both power and frequency allocation, and not really ideal for private conversations when you’re literally broadcasting to everyone in a 50 mile radius. Small towers started to spring up in Scotland, Wales and across the north of England to allow remote communities to have a telephone service - copper was in desperately short supply and this was far cheaper than having to lay trunk cables. This was so successful that they started to use it for major trunk links too, saving hugely on the rollout of the post-war telephone network. Then came that other fun spin-off of the war - the atom bomb.  Actual canned sunshine in action. The bizarrely-named STARFISH PRIME nuclear test was part of America's fun policy of "What if <x> but with an atom bomb?" that dominated the late 50s and early 60s. Specifically it was to test the effects of letting off bombs in the ionosphere, the electrically-charged area of the atmosphere that is both massive help and hindrance to long-range radio communications. They hoped to boost the strength of the ionosphere to make long-range radio more predictable, and also (because why not) by chucking a load of radioactive particles into the upper atmosphere they might learn something about its dynamics, but this definitely feels like something tacked on the end of the proposal in the hope to be given a nuke to play with. Not that they needed a huge amount of persuasion - they were also merrily talking about using nukes to dig out harbours, heat water tables to generate steam for power generation, and loosen up natural-gas-producing rock formations. That's right - fracking with nukes. Unfortunately for them (but fortunately for a million hack Clancy-wannabe authors) the actual outcome was an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to damage electronics and power lines in Hawaii, 800 miles away. This surprised the physicists involved, but that's because presumably none of them were radio hams. Radio operators, power grid operators, and even steel cable makers had all encountered the phenomenon of EMP almost since the beginning, even if it took decades for them to realise exactly what was going on. All they knew is that any time you had a long conductive wire, every once in a while a power surge would hit it like a bolt of lightning out of a completely clear sky. We now understand this is due to charged particles - particularly from the sun, but sometimes from the other side of the universe - hitting the atmosphere at exactly the right angle. A nuclear bomb generates uncountably huge numbers of charged particles, and unleashing them in the ionosphere induced gigantic amounts of current in anything capable of receiving it, and any long conductor was more than capable of doing so, generating thousands to millions of volts in the process. The militaries of the West were badly shaken by this - copper wire had been the backbone of their secure networks after they had all seen how bad an idea it was to transmit your greatest secrets over the radio, no matter how cleverly you thought they’d been encrypted. A select few would also have known of the fatal security flaw with (buried) copper cables - in 1946 MI6 and the CIA had tunneled from West Berlin to East, tapping the cables that carried East Germany’s secret communications, particularly the link to Moscow. As it turned out this project had been rumbled almost immediately, but they weren’t to know this - in theory at least the tap, safely buried under the street, was invisible. Meanwhile the falling cost of copper had intersected with the rising level of telephone traffic, and the GPO had started to dismantle the network used to serve those remote communities, but were repurposing the kit for a new use - relaying TV signals from studios to remote transmitters. The technical reasons why conventional radio and copper lines weren’t suitable for this are boring and tangential *even by the standards of this post* so I won’t go into them, but the rudiments of a national microwave network were being assembled by the GPO just at the time the Ministry of Defence was looking for exactly such a thing.  The first draft of the GPO microwave network. Notice it says SECRET at the top? You’re all under arrest The MoD asked the GPO if they could expand this network to provide secure communications for their most important installations. The GPO were happy to oblige - partly for patriotic reasons, partly because the MoD were waving a huge amount of cash under their noses, but mostly I suspect because they wanted to use their network for something more exciting than what passed for entertainment on 1950s television: https://youtu.be/h13XVkJ_kp0?t=33 However this would require a serious change to the network, particularly the heart of it in London. Notice how on that map (hah made you look again, you’re under double arrest) the only node in London is Highgate (actually Alexandra Palace, then the main BBC television studio and transmitting site)? This would be no good for the military, who needed a rather beefier system much closer to Whitehall. Putting it in Whitehall itself was unthinkable - not for secrecy reasons, but because Westminster Council then as now hated tall buildings, and protecting the sightlines to Big Ben was considerably more important than surviving a nuclear war. Fortunately the GPO had another nearby site they could use, Museum exchange in Bloomsbury. (Museum originally was sited directly behind the British Museum, but moved a half mile the other side of Tottenham Court Road when UCL wanted to use the space to build Senate House in the 20s). Museum was perfect for a number of reasons. It already had secure links to Kingsway Hardened Exchange (about which more, possibly, in another post) and thence to the transatlantic phone lines and the GPO secure tunnels under Whitehall (again, maybe more coming soon). It was also linked to the Goodge Street deep shelter, used in the war for Eisenhower’s HQ (again, more soon on that) and West Central sorting office with the Mail Rail tunnels also available for further secure links. Perhaps most importantly it was also in Camden, who didn’t give a poo poo about tall buildings, and had already happily nodded through an existing microwave tower (used for backup trunk connections) on the roof of the exchange. However this tower was nowhere near big enough for this new use. Height was important - microwaves can only travel in straight lines and even though we know the earth to be flat, London is surrounded by hills, so it needed to be able to see over them, as well as any other tall buildings that happened to pop up (Euston Tower, which went up a few years later, had to knock 5 storeys off their plans to stop from blocking one of those links). Height bought problems though. Microwave links have to be very precisely aimed - half a degree in any direction makes them useless. In a country as windy as Britain this is an issue. Existing towers were steel trellis affairs, massively over-engineered to stop them from flexing, but the higher they got and the more heavy transmitters and receivers stacked on them, the harder it got to stop them moving - especially in the middle of town, where big guy cables to steady them weren’t really an option. This fantastic old news reel demonstrates the problem nicely: https://youtu.be/xAc8dmZMC9o Notice that the tower visibly moves even with the fairly small simulated load - that would have been more than enough to bugger up any microwave links on the tower. Those of you paying attention to my council house posts will know what the solution was, though - the most New Elizabethan of materials, reinforced concrete.  Pye Green, a full-on Brutalist chubby However the GPO wanted to do something a bit more showy for the new jewel in its crown in the middle of London. After all you’re building the tallest building in the country, slap bang in the middle of town, at the height of Britain's post-war, post-austerity pomp about the new era. A simple concrete tower wouldn’t cut it. As they were still part of the Government they could call upon the services of Eric Bedford, Chief Architect of the Ministry of Works and the youngest-ever recipient of a RIBA Medal for architecture. His design - like most of his designs - was ruthlessly utilitarian and efficient. However unlike his other, rather less celebrated buildings (in particular the fuckawful Marsham Street Towers) the function of the building led to a fairly pleasing form - as the only design brief was “Make sure it doesn’t move” he settled on a tube-in-tube reinforced concrete core, much like Pye Green above, but added an outer tube of glass-clad space anticipating it would be used as offices (however they were never used as such, being far too small - most of the space was taken up by power and assorted plant to support the antennas). The result is probably the most solidly-built building in London. Despite appearing spindly compared to other tall buildings, the very top moves less than 15 centimetres in a 70mph wind, and the whole structure will remain intact even after a 15psi overpressure on one side - equivalent to a 400mph gust of wind or a blast equivalent to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima going off 500 metres away. Admittedly it would lose all of the glass and almost all of the antennas, but the crane still installed on the roof would have been able to return it to service in under 24 hours. For comparison, the NatWest Tower (I’ll be cold in the ground afore I calls it Tower 42), which took the tower’s place as London’s tallest building, moves over a metre at the top in a 70 mph wind.  Wilson, Benn and Attlee at the Post Office Tower. Excuse me, I think I need to go have a little lay down. You think it’d be an easy matter to say when a building opens, wouldn’t you? Well that picture above - of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Postmaster General (yes, really) Tony Benn, and Clement Attlee is just one of three “openings” the tower had. It was officially commissioned and relaying data before it had even been topped out - in particular it was needed to relay TV signals for the newly-expanded ITV in 1962, with antennas installed on the scaffolding around the structure. Then came the official opening in 1965 where Harold Wilson made a phone call to the Mayor of Birmingham (Birmingham got its own, smaller and uglier as befits it, tower 3 years later) which - given the more secure nature of microwave links we’ve already discussed - was probably the only call Wilson made in the 60s without MI5 listening in. The third opening was the best though. A viewing gallery at the top had been in the plans from the beginning, but early in construction it was decided to make it rather more grandiose. After all it was the most visible building in London, a city which has always had a bit of inferiority complex about Paris, so more than one person expressed the hope that the tower would be as internationally-known as the Eiffel Tower. The actual form of the attraction at the top has a more clear influence though - the Seattle World’s Fair of 1962 had had an electrifying effect on certain sections of Whitehall, and the centrepiece of it was the Space Needle, topped by a revolving restaurant. I can only imagine some proto-wonk bursting into the Ministry of Technology and saying, like Ernest Bevin had about the atom bomb, “We've got to have this thing over here whatever it costs ... We've got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it.” The GPO had no particular desire to run a restaurant, moving or otherwise, so the running of it was passed on to someone who would know how to handle a world-class culinary and cultural experience at the bleeding edge of technology… <check notes>... Billy Butlin. Actually I’m being extremely unfair to one of the most interesting and innovative people in the history of entertainment, and TBH handing it over to him is a *very* 60s Labour thing - the pinnacle of this technical marvel would be very much for the people, not some rarified gourmet hangout for the gentry. After a lot of wrangling over the technology to make the restaurant rotate (the Space Needle’s architect held a patent on it, which didn’t apply outside the US, but it was - unbelievably - a sticking point in trade negotiations with the US) the restaurant was opened by Billy Butlin and Tony Benn on the 19th of May 1966  Surprisingly no images exist on the internet of the greatest double act of all time, so have this still stolen from Getty Images of the opening Alas the restaurant was short-lived. The rotating mechanism was troublesome, the kitchens were too small, and the lift - specced to take a couple of engineers up and down to fettle the kit - was far too small to deal with the amount of traffic. On the plus side it was the first fire-rated lift installed in a building in the UK - that tube-in-tube construction meant that it was safe to use it even if the entire outer structure was on fire, which was just as well because the extremely tight emergency staircase would never have been suitable for a mass evacuation. The killing blow was when a bomb went off in the toilets in 1971 - ridiculously to this day nobody knows exactly who placed it and why. The so-called Kilburn Battalion of the IRA claimed responsibility, as did the Angry Brigade, a North London anarchist group. However neither group had demonstrated, before or since, the level of sophistication used in this bombing. The Kilburn Battalion mostly collected money in buckets in pubs around North London (and there’s… conflicting reports about whether any of the money collected ever made it to Ireland, or indeed further than the till in those same pubs). The Angry Brigade were, charitably, a bit Four Lions-y and while they had planted bombs in the past targeting Conservative MPs, banks, and, erm, Miss World (the event, not the lady) they had been small devices that caused mild property damage. The bomb in the restaurant had both been placed with some sophistication (a roof panel had been removed and the bomb placed behind it) and was *huge* by the standards of the time - at least 10 kilos of a military-grade high explosive, enough to obliterate the restaurant and blow out two one-foot-thick supporting walls. The rack on which the restaurant rotated was also warped by the explosion, which suggests it may not have been able to continue operation in a nuclear war. It’s suspected (but still unconfirmed, as nobody was ever prosecuted for the bombing) that it was actually carried out by a splinter group from the IRA, which was busy splitting into several groups at the time, possibly with assistance from the Kilburn Battalion.  The aftermath of the bomb. Although I’m sure it’s not the way they’d want it proved, the actual telecoms equipment was completely unfazed despite extensive damage directly above. The damaged supporting walls carried the floor above, which was equally unaffected - as Eric Bedford was quoted as saying, “It was built to survive much worse”. Let’s talk about that equipment, because it’s the actual reason for the secrecy around this very unsecret building. Those triangular structures are receivers - the transmitters are much smaller and are at the bottom. This type of receiver revels in the name of a “feedhorn”, and it’s actually a fairly clever way of making a very sensitive receiver that’s very cheap and very rugged. Although microwave beams can be very narrowly focused (spreading less than a degree), they’re also easily absorbed by water vapour and rain (as anyone with a Sky dish can tell you). In heavy rain power can drop by 99% a mile, and some of these links covered over 50 miles, meaning by the time it reached the tower it could only be tiny fractions of a milliwatt. What you need then is a lens to focus those feeble waves to your antenna so you have a chance to receive them. Fortunately microwaves reflect off of metal (pretty much any metal will do), so the obvious solution is a parabolic antenna (just like that Sky dish that HAS STOPPED BLOODY WORKING AGAIN WHO DESIGNS A UK SERVICE THAT DOESN’T WORK IN RAIN FOR FUCKS SAKE). The problem is that good parabolas are really hard to make, and even harder to keep in focus, especially if you make them out of metal that expands and contracts as the weather changes. You can either make them out of thick metal, which is heavy and expensive, or brace them massively which is bulky and expensive. I take the piss but the modern TV satellite dish is actually a miracle of modern manufacturing, with very tight tolerances and an incredibly cunning antenna design - compare it to the older generation ones which were huge and unreliable despite having a much stronger signal to receive. This particular antenna design has a very space-age progenitor. When Bell Labs needed a very sensitive radio receiver for NASA experiments with communication satellites they didn’t have the Big Science budget that gave the UK Jodrell Bank, and effectively had to build it out of stuff they had knocking around:  My what a big horn! I lasted as long as I could before doing that joke. It’s a really clever design - the large curved section focuses incoming radio waves in one dimension, then the sides (the horizontal bits in that picture) then focus the reflected waves in the second dimension. It’s not as good as a proper parabolic reflector, but it’s lighter, cheaper, and way more rugged - and was good enough for that shed-looking contraption to discover the cosmic microwave background radiation. The white square on the horns on the GPO Tower is just cotton (later plastic) - doesn’t stop microwaves, does stop pigeons. Pigeons were actually a recurring problem for the tower - although they could keep them out of the receivers there was no way of stopping them roosting around the transmitters and the other high-voltage gear around there, meaning local residents occasionally got a half-cooked sky-rat hitting them at terminal velocity. As those local residents were mostly UCL students though, nobody really cared. The coke-fuelled 80s saw a massive increase in the use of the tower. TV signals were now being carried by satellites, but newer encoding schemes (and much smaller antenna designs and supporting kit) saw it transition to carrying much more voice and data traffic - at one point becoming the busiest node in post-privatisation BT’s entire network, and 80s nuclear sabre-rattling saw its secret role massively expanding. Now, about that secret role, which was what this post was supposed to be about until I realised if I diverted into technicalities I could make a “big horn” joke. The tower (I really CBA keeping up with it’s various name changes over the years) was at the heart of not one, but three critical national networks. The first is the one already mentioned, the GPO’s “Backbone” microwave network that would allow Whitehall to talk to military installations around the country. The second was that in the aftermath of a nuclear war it would be a relay site for the Wartime Broadcasting Service, allowing the nation to enjoy a playlist of Radio 4 comedies, The Sound of Music, and no doubt loads of Vera Lynn in their fallout shelters, presumably to encourage people to go take the Long Walk and not be a drain on resources. The last use though was the really big secret. The tower would be the centre of the London air defence system in the event of nuclear war. At the beginning of the war it would connect the ROTOR and LINESMAN radar sites to Whitehall and RAF Fighter Command, and also to Royal Observer Corps sites to track nuclear weapon strikes and fallout. Museum Exchange would also be the heart of the HANDEL warning system, injecting a signal into the Speaking Clock time signal already being sent to every exchange in the country to set off air raid sirens and (if enough of the network survived) fallout warnings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgOybc8Jdoo Can’t get this far into a Cold War Britain post without a little bit of Protect and Survive, can we? So secret was this use (and in particular the location of the ROC sites, which were also Regional Seat of Government bunkers from which a post-nuclear Britain would be run as a series of fiefdoms) that the microwave horns for it were deliberately pointed in the wrong direction, or not even installed. Obviously nobody thought that the existence of the tower could be kept secret, and realistically its use in war could be guessed at by any interested observer, but at the very least they could avoid giving away the locations of the most important sites in a nuclear war by having a massive antenna in the middle of town pointing directly at them. This sounds silly but to take one example (and the place I picked up this titbit of information) Kelvedon Hatch Bunker, the RSOG for north-east London and Essex and major node in the ROTOR network, is a pretty well-disguised farmhouse in the middle of the Green Belt on the edge of London. As a cover for the bunker, the IBA “asked” the GPO to route the microwave link to Norwich via Kelvedon Hatch, and a little shed with a big tower sticking out the top duly appeared in the middle of a farmers field - the ruse being slightly broken by the fact that while the tower had three antennas pointing at London, only one pointed towards Norwich, suggesting that the cows had asked for a couple of hundred phone lines to be installed in the milking shed. Incidentally, when we do eventually come out of our The secrecy of the tower itself is often overstated. I mentioned at the start that it didn’t appear on official maps, but that’s… not strictly true. It doesn’t appear on Ordnance Survey maps published in the 60s, but disappointingly this wasn’t secrecy - it’s that they update the maps on a rolling 10-year basis and don’t show buildings under construction, and it dutifully showed up on maps in the 70s as they updated. I also suspect (but have no proof) that it might have also been caught up in a policy started in WW2 and unevenly applied afterwards right up to the 90s for the OS not to show telephone exchanges on maps at all. Prior to the war they were always shown on OS maps because they were often fairly important local landmarks, but in the invasion panic of the war it was realised that they were important strategic targets, so they were swiftly scrubbed from the maps (despite being, like I say, important landmarks and also findable by just, you know, following the telephone wires). Exchanges then played peekaboo on OS maps for the rest of the century, so it’s probable that people are getting the fact that the tower itself is shown, but with no indication of what it was (and what the building underneath was) confused with the building itself not being shown. The other oddity was that the tower didn’t show up on GPO/BT network maps - or rather it didn’t show up as being attached to Museum/Bloomsbury exchange, instead appearing as just another relay node. Again the ruse wasn’t brilliant, because the code for this site was YTOW - “Y” being the prefix for a relay tower, and TOW being a completely uncrackable code for what the site was. (Rumours persist there is also a “QTOW” node, “Q” being BT’s again completely uncrackable code for secret networks)  However it’s still true that the actual purpose of the tower - including even the civilian applications - were sensitive information covered by the Official Secrets Act, which had an almost comically broad definition of what constituted a secret. Investigative journalist and perpetual annoyance to intelligence agencies Duncan Campbell used this peculiarity as part of his defence in the ABC Trial in the seventies. He became the first person in the British media to mention the existence of GCHQ in print. Until that point anybody not involved in the intelligence world probably had never even suspected that the agency even existed (the government did not officially acknowledge its existence until 1994), but Campbell had - through simply investigation - determined not only its existence but its role, breaking (or so the government said) the OSA in the process. Campbell pointed out that by that standard, anyone with knowledge of radio communications who so much as glanced at the Post Office Tower was breaking the Official Secrets Act (there’s no way of knowing whether he knew at the time about it’s military purpose) which said: quote:(a) approaches, [inspects, passes over] or is in the neighbourhood of, or enters any prohibited place within the meaning of this Act; or with “prohibited place” being (among other things): quote:[(a) any work of defence, arsenal, naval or air force establishment or station, factory, dockyard, mine, minefield, camp, ship, or aircraft belonging to or occupied by or on behalf of His Majesty, or any telegraph, telephone, wireless or signal station, or office so belonging or occupied, and any place belonging to or occupied by or on behalf of His Majesty and used for the purpose of building, repairing, making, or storing any munitions of war, or any sketches, plans, models or documents relating thereto, or for the purpose of getting any metals, oil, or minerals of use in time of war]; This made talking about the existence of, drawing a picture of, or just being in the neighbourhood of the tallest building in the country an offence. Demonstrations were held at the tower to support him. Hilariously, after a lengthy discussion between the judge and the Government’s lawyers, Campbell was not allowed to mention the tower by name in his defence in open court. As the articles for which he was on trial mentioned many secret intelligence and military installations, they were only referred to as Location <x> - and London’s tallest building duly became Location 23. The trial ended in a no-score-draw. Cambpell and the other defendants were convicted - after all with how broad the definitions were in the OSA they could hardly not be - but were not punished, and the OSA was changed (ten years later, no need to hurry) to be slightly more sane. Alas, BT closed down their long-range microwave network at some point in the early 00s (short-range links are still used between exchanges and to mobile phone towers - those little circular things that look like drums on the side of a mobile phone masts) and so the tower was left without a firm purpose. The antennas and other plant were removed, and while I understand the value of getting rid of heavy, redundant kit they could have used at least some of the money they used for the big 360-degree video screen they built around the top floor to put up some plywood mockups - the poor thing looks weird and naked without them, and I think they should at least make a nod to the original purpose. Ultimately the tower only had a working life of 40 years but it’s a symbol of probably the last time Britain felt relatively confident in itself and looked to an optimistic future rather than revelling in a long-dead past, and that deserves to be preserved. Right, that’s way too many words about a massive erection even for the internet. I’ll make a start on polishing up the next one, about nuclear shelters under London, unless enough used tenners come my way. You have been warned.
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May 16, 2020 21:11
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https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1261751654208229376?s=19 Starmer Surge
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May 16, 2020 21:17
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 And yes, very much enjoyed that post about the BT Tower. Didn't even know there had been a restaurant up it at one point. Let alone that a bomb went off there. forkboy84 fucked around with this message at 21:55 on May 16, 2020 |
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May 16, 2020 21:53
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That was a really interesting read. Thanks for writing + sharing!
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May 16, 2020 21:55
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This was great. Thanks for posting it!
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May 16, 2020 21:56
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Good post about a large erection. So just to be clear, BT tower is currently empty and completely unused?
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May 16, 2020 22:34
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a pipe smoking dog posted:So just to be clear, BT tower is currently empty and completely unused? That's what they want you to think 
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May 16, 2020 22:35
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Location 23. goddamnedtwisto posted:The third big use for the magnetron came a little after the war. A powerful, narrowly-focused beam of radio waves was exactly what the General Post Office was looking for in the 50s when they were looking to expand the radio relay network for remote communities. They had been using conventional radio for these but that’s both very inefficient in both power and frequency allocation, and not really ideal for private conversations when you’re literally broadcasting to everyone in a 50 mile radius. 1) They're bad at holding a single pure frequency. That's fine if you're aiming them at a frozen chicken tikka masala, a flying lump of metal, or the city of Dresden, but less good for communications. Slight changes in the temperature or alignment with the magnets can send it all over the place. 2) They're absolute poo poo to modulate. They have no grid or control input, adding one would ruin the magnetron effect. You can attempt to control them by modulating the magnetic field with coils, or by modulating the voltage across them. I personally wouldn't, because the signal that you'd get out would be modulated, but due to goddamnedtwisto posted:technical reasons are boring and tangential So for the things that you definitely couldn't see on the secret tower, they ended up just using arrays of triode power valves, like you'd use in a guitar amp because pentodes are for scrubs. Precisely made ceramic ones with very different insides to audio/radio ones, but triodes nonetheless. This is all probably still secret stuff and therefore it's no surprise that you can find very similar Russian ones on eBay. Also because microwaves are dark majick straight from Crowley's taint, the insides of any of the transmitters would look more like Wilhelm Reich Presents Mousetrap! than any sane electrical equipment.  I'll report myself to the Postmaster General now.
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May 16, 2020 22:36
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a pipe smoking dog posted:So just to be clear, BT tower is currently empty and completely unused? also an air quality / solution monitoring station. and 360° light up sign telling us to stay home / stay alert.
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May 16, 2020 22:42
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Fantastic words about a massive erection This is just wonderful. Alongside that thank you so so much for this prose style. I have had to go through Herodotus at the moment and this breezy talkative style is so so welcome. Guess where is going to be Draculas castle in London if I ever run a Nights Black Agents game!
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May 16, 2020 22:49
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forkboy84 posted:And yes, very much enjoyed that post about the BT Tower. Didn't even know there had been a restaurant up it at one point. Let alone that a bomb went off there. Great post, I always knew it as the Post Office Tower. Here's a newsreel from 1966 about the restaurant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMPXmnK8G8E
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May 16, 2020 22:56
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a pipe smoking dog posted:So just to be clear, BT tower is currently empty and completely unused? The restaurant at the top is used by BT for private events and there's still a load of kit actually inside the building they've not got round to decommissioning yet - mostly high voltage stuff full of asbestos, mercury, and all the other fun stuff that comes with vintage electric kit. In terms of actual telecoms use yeah it's unused - ironically there are a couple of mobile phone masts on the roof of Bloomsbury exchange itself. Cerv posted:the building's still in use by BT. but as a hub for for fiberoptic cables, not microwave transmissions. Bloomsbury exchange itself - with the most fun code on the entire network - is still up and running and there's a load of offices in the building too. goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 23:06 on May 16, 2020 |
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May 16, 2020 23:00
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I'm absolutely sure that Brum's BT tower wasn't even in the top 20 of the ugliest buildings in the city centre when I lived there between 1998 and 2003
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May 16, 2020 23:01
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Guavanaut posted:This is an excellent post and I'm glad this bit was in it. It doesn't appear to be anywhere else on the internet other than Wikipedia and a cabbie blog, but it's 100% true. Huh, the BT bloke on the tour who told me about the magentrons seemed to think they were used in it, but he worked for BT so I don't know why I even trusted him.
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May 16, 2020 23:05
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Some good and interesting words, goddamnedtwisto, thank you for posting them.
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May 16, 2020 23:20
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If your thirst for Cold War telecoms madness still isn't sated from that amazing post, please dig into the story of John Stonehouse. Bullet points (and these are incredibly truncated, please read all about this man's absolutely ludicrous life): Labour MP in the Wilson government who eventually rose to the position of Postmaster General, became a spy for the Czechoslovakians, went to Miami, faked his own death Reggie Perrins-style, was found in Australia where he was investigated because they thought he might have been Lord Lucan.
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May 16, 2020 23:24
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Huh, the BT bloke on the tour who told me about the magentrons seemed to think they were used in it, but he worked for BT so I don't know why I even trusted him. There's been attempts to modulate them for comms since the 50s because it'd be really nice to have a rugged cheap continuous wave microwave oscillator that you can control, but all of them have ended in long documents of STEM tears.  But any actual real magnetron labelled 2.45GHz is probably putting out something more like  drifting around the actual line whenever it wants to. 1940s magnetrons definitely spurred on a generation of small metal-ceramic valves running in the low GHz range, like that Russian tube (which despite the listing, almost definitely does not have an output power of 350W, that's more likely what it dies at, but they start thermally drifting all over the place over 200W), so they ended up going with triodes in cans full of weirdo springs and the massive receiver horns.
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May 16, 2020 23:28
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If the press had any sense they'd be on an all out pro Starmer offensive, a blairite labour win would definitively put a possible labour left resurgence six feet under and pat the dirt down.
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May 16, 2020 23:39
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Coohoolin posted:If the press had any sense they'd be on an all out pro Starmer offensive, a blairite labour win would definitively put a possible labour left resurgence six feet under and pat the dirt down. Citation loving needed, basic loving theory needed, some semblance of modern materialism needed, any justification of the point beyond being-a-stupid-gobby-oval office needed. I kind of liked that whole talk people were saying of 'maybe the UKMT should be nicer to itself', I agree, but don't put the burden just on the posters calling out dumb maximal edgelord statements, maybe critique the lovely posters we're responding to too. Forums user Coohoolin objectively made a stupid, useless, boring post, it's a maximalist position with literally zero justification for the position and it's not even funny or informative.
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May 17, 2020 00:29
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I always enjoy your long rambles GDT and that one was also splendid.
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May 17, 2020 00:42
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goddamnedtwisto posted:good post This is a great post, My Dad designed some of the later microwave aerials on tower, (and lasted long enough at bt to see them taken down). I will have a look and see if I can dig up some of his photos. In the meantime I have this already scanned. This is one of the ends of the microwave network somewhere around late 1980s at goonhilly downs earth station. Satellite dish in the back is Aerial 3, now decommed but at this point in use by intelsat. 
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May 17, 2020 01:16
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As someone who has just passed my amateur radio licence, I understood some of that too! Thanks goddamnedtwisto
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May 17, 2020 01:31
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Vitamin P posted:Citation loving needed, basic loving theory needed, some semblance of modern materialism needed, any justification of the point beyond being-a-stupid-gobby-oval office needed. Lmao are you ok dude?
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May 17, 2020 02:15
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I hope Vitamin P finds some peace
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May 17, 2020 02:31
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Vitamin P posted:Citation loving needed, basic loving theory needed, some semblance of modern materialism needed, any justification of the point beyond being-a-stupid-gobby-oval office needed. 
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May 17, 2020 03:05
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https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1261764355634475008?s=19 The Mail won't stop until every left leaning middle class profession is dead.
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May 17, 2020 04:27
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goddamnedtwisto posted:
 Another excellent effortpost from twisto, a feat both entirely expected and highly engaging.I actually had no idea the '71 bombing had never seen a conviction, I guess I had kind of assumed (things being as they were in the 70s in the UK) that they'd just have thrown the Kilburn Batallion in the pokey, and failing an ability to actually locate said enterprising fighters for Ireland, have simply rolled grabbed a couple of particularly fenian looking lads off the street.
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May 17, 2020 05:27
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Gonzo McFee posted:The Mail won't stop until every profession is dead. Seems more accurate. Work until your death. Which won't take long now. Are you not working? Then die. No one is too sick to work. No one is too old to work. Pain is irrelevant. Life is irrelevant. Mental state is irrelevant. Relationships are irrelevant. You are a drone. We haven't found a way to keep you working after your death, but we're sure Science will come up with something.
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May 17, 2020 05:49
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The mail doesn't want to mess around with that kind of necromancy (though asking are diana her thoughts on modern race science is perfectly OK) because the dead are a major source of funding for the conservative party.
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May 17, 2020 05:54
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Yeah no it can't be that a doctor has legitimate reasons based on their medical knowledge of a viral infection to reach a conclusion, ultimately correct or not, that the risks involved in increasing exposure of a specific age group and profession to increased likelihood of close contact with others will be too high to counteract the potential benefits. It must be because they're a radical loony lefty who hates the very institution of schooling and by extension all society, frothing with pure loathing of the idea of children being able to learn and fish and chips and the local smiling policeman and the heterosexual family unit. They have declared a War on us, dear readers, they have Threatened the Great Nation we have built together and must be Crushed. Their home address is listed on page 17.
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May 17, 2020 06:34
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Ultimately the tower only had a working life of 40 years but it’s a symbol of probably the last time Britain felt relatively confident in itself and looked to an optimistic future rather than revelling in a long-dead past, and that deserves to be preserved. speaking of revelling in a long-dead past... (I kid; that was an interesting essay. This sentence did jump out at me though)
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May 17, 2020 07:35
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Gonzo McFee posted:https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1261764355634475008?s=19 It's unfortunate that while journalism is dead as a profession we still have all these zombie journalists around, going through the motions out of some vague instinct but tragically unable to produce anything of meaning.
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May 17, 2020 07:46
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I wonder if michael mosley is any relation to the other mosley the mail is fond of?
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May 17, 2020 07:48
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| # ? May 23, 2024 19:21 |
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Hurrah for the black death!
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May 17, 2020 07:52
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