After All - General

Questions, Answers and Wonders: Summing Up Readers' Feedback

Vitali Vitaliev — 2013-05-20T12:20:22 00

It is a truism of course, but time does fly! It feels as if it was only yesterday that I asked you in this blog to share techno- names you have invented or may have come across; and only the day before yesterday that we invited E&T readers to fill tin he tenth - empty - square on our OneToTen England's Top Engineering Monuments spread, in which we reproduced the list of nine engineering marvels, as recently suggested by Visit England. Well, it could be the extremely cold spring in the UK that made the first four months of 2013 look like an extended Christmas period without days off. Yet the fact remains: both of the above mini-challenges were issued three months ago, so time has come to sum them up and announce the winners.

The response to my techno-names "After All" in issue 2, 2013, and the corresponding blog post was good, but not overwhelming: indeed, creating new techno-names is not easy and coming across the already existing ones outside the former USSR is even harder. Therefore I decided not to announce overall winners here, but will be pleased to add to my ever-growing techno-names collection two interesting, if somewhat tongue-breaking, suggestions from Peter Lewis:
XIMBTER - a boy's name made from 'Ximbter is More Beautiful Than Earth Rise' pulling in the geek's 'X" with the self reference and the wonderful photograph taken by William Anders from Apollo 8 in 1968", and
ATAEBA - again, somewhat narcissistic girl's name made from "All Technological Advances Eclipsed by ATAEBA", which, in Mr Lewis's opinion, is "geekish, technological and human at the same time."
I would also happily make a note of the names, invented by my active and long-time correspondent, Collete Gates, on the condition that she gives me a ring to explain - or better demonstrate - how to pronounce them:
ATARNINTENSEGOXII (Atari Nintendo Sega X Box Wii) - "for an intense gamer with an ox-size ego", and
"MOPHOBUSTRATTRAFRY (Mobile phone bus train tram ferry) - for someone who clearly likes to chat while on public tra... tra...nsport.
Thanks, Collete. I am tra...tra... mendously grateful for your con... tra...tra... butions!
As for the real-life techno-names, reader Anthony Berridge thought that I might like be introduced to his neighbour Beatrice, who abbreviates her name to Beatie but her friends call her Entielle. Charming, if not very "techno". Nice to meet you, Beatrice, alias Entielle!
Also, I rather enjoyed the unorthodox self-construed etymology of "William Shakespeare" (from "shake" and "spear"), suggested by John Fransis. And many thanks to Brian Aitchison, who reminded me of a famous Indian cricket player called Farokh Engineer. To be honest, not being a cricket fan (I've always preferred darts to cricket), I had never heard of him before. "It seems that 'Engineer' is a more common name that one might expect," concludes Mr. Aitchison in an appropriate coda to this engaging (or so I hope) mini-competition. But before closing this subject for the time being, I'd like to refer all those interested in techno-names, techno-terms and their etymology to a fascinating book "Netymology" by Tom Chatfield. The punchy and capacious subtitle of this compact hardback just released by Quercus, "From Apps to Zombies. A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World", speaks for itself: a mini-synopsis in itself, it saves me the effort of telling you what the book is about. I can just say that it is both greatly educational and extremely amusing.

Unlike a timid, like biting of a bream in April, response to the techno-names challenge, our call to come up with England's tenth most important engineering landmark (issue 2, 2013) resulted in many dozens of emails and comments. Unfortunately, a number of entries had to be invalidated, for rather than nominating an object or a structure, as requested, some readers put forward either famous inventors (like Henry Maudslay) , or their inventions (like gas lighting or telegraph cables), none of whom (or of which) can be safely described as an engineering landmark (particularly if he or she was/is a person).
Of the remaining entries, we have selected the following:
The world's first screw- cutting lathe (c1800) - by Peter Gain, MIET; Croydon Aerodrome - the world's first purpose-built commercial airport (R.G.Spardbrow); the Great Grimsby Ice Factory Chris Lester, MIET); the Anderson Boat Lift ("a simple but outstanding piece of engineering ... to link two waterways" - Graham Harper, NNPPI); the traditional Land Rover (Mike Clarke); the SS Great Britain, now moored in Bristol (John Rye); rail tunnel under the River Severn - until the Channel Tunnel, the longest underwater tunnel in the UK (Robert Dines); the Iron Bridge over the Severn at Coalbrookdale (Brian Gerrard); London Sewerage System designed by John Bazalgette (Steven Whittard-Swift, GE Aviation); John Harrison's Chronometer, finished in 1735 - Jack Moore, C.Eng. MIET); and - last but not least, the Settle to Carlisle railway, nominated by John Harrison - NOT the Chronometer's inventor, I hasten to add.
Calculating the winning entries in this case was not hard and did not require a jury. Remembering some basic rules of arithmetic, we simply selected the structures/objects most frequently mentioned in your emails. They were: Concord supersonic airliner at Duxford aerodrome (R. Spradbrow and others); the Bletchley Park Computer Site, with its famous Colossus computer (John Rye, Ian Dufour and many others) and - an absolute winner - Ironbridge, Staffordshire, with the remains of Abraham Derby's blast furnace in the Gorge Museum (Bob Walker, John Wilson and many others) - the site, which , I am happy to report, has featured repeatedly in E&T.

All the above suggestions will of course be duly dispatched to Visit England, who may in future come up with a list of ten, not nine, engineering marvels of England.

Before I finish, can I have the temerity to nominate my own engineering landmark? Thank you. I'd like to suggest the spectacular IET London offices at Savoy Place, occupied by the IET since 1909. "IET London: Savoy Place", as it is officially known, is awash with engineering history, and it is only appropriate to look back at it now, when the building is about to close down for a major refurbishment. It will reopen in a couple of years time as an even better and much more modern home for engineers and the IET. And the history will live on.

The Emerging Art of Techno-Dining

Vitali Vitaliev — 2013-04-16T15:58:11 00

"Bang! Crash!!" Preoccupied with moving the cursor along the surface of the table with my index finger, I inadvertently touched a glass, full of water, with my elbow. Well, it was no longer full of water, all of which was now resting on disapproving faces and uncomplaining clothes of my fellow diners at neighbouring tables (thank God it was not red wine!). And the glass itself was no more - smashed to smithereens, crunching under the feet of passing waiters, like some well-coagulated snow on a skiing piste.
I was at Inamo, London's peculiar technology restaurant in Regent Street, and I was having fun! In fact, it was probably the most exciting and technologically challenging solitary dinner in my entire life. As a travel writer of many years standing (or, to be more exact, of solitary globe-trotting), I knew only too well that, alongside the art of dining in a company or with a friend, there was also a much more complicated art of solitary dining which every professional traveller has to master, or else face the often ugly consequences.
I will never forget that gruesome dinner in a hotel trattoria in Livigno, a high-altitude Alpine town in the Valley of Valtellina. Half an hour into my meal, I spotted a stuffed stag's head hanging on the wall opposite my table and staring at me intently, as if inviting to a conversation. Out of sheer loneliness, I decided to accept the invitation.
"Sorry, mate, it was not I," I told him (it), referring to the deplorable absence of his body. He (it) didn't seem to believe me, and I didn't blame him (it) for that. For several long minutes, I tried to share with the head my travel impressions of the day, but he (it) didn't respond, at which point I felt even lonelier than before: indeed, whereas everyone else in the restaurant was sitting with a friend or a partner, I had to face the stuffed head of a stag, with his (its) conspicuously superfluous horns bringing about thoughts of infidelities and adulteries.
"Get stuffed!" - I told the head angrily (which was unnecessary, for it has been stuffed already) and went back to my room...
The problem of diners' loneliness had been successfully resolved in Inamo, where each table surface doubled as a huge computer screen. A projector above my head beamed down the titillating Asian fusion menu which I had to navigate with a touch pad. The most striking feature (to me) was that as the cursor was moving from one menu item to another, each appetising dish was automatically projected onto an empty plate in front of me creating an illusion that it was already there. A culinary AR of sorts! The illusion was so powerful that initially I was tempted to taste one or two of the projected dishes, but all my attempts to pick up a juicy-looking steamed dumpling or a maki roll only led to the ear-grating noise of a chop stick scratching against an empty plate. And although Inamo was some time ago voted one of London's best dating venues, I felt I did not need a date to enjoy that technocratic dinner, with a playfully interactive e-table, created by Compurants Ltd, as my trusted, engaging and ever-so-challenging companion.
E-table's friendly functionality was not limited to examining the menu and ordering the dishes which I liked (with a simple click of the cursor). I was also able to change the colour of the "table-cloth", to call a waiter and ask for a replacement glass of water (instead of the broken one), to peep into the kitchen with the help of an in-built "chef cam" and - if I wanted (which I didn't on that occasion) to play games, look at London maps and even call a cab, had I been in a hurry to leave (which I wasn't).
All those amazing features added up to create what Inamo PR brochures called "the Wow Factor". Uncharacteristically, for once I was ready to swallow that promotional soundbite together with the the chunk of super-delicious succulent black cod, which literally melted in my mouth. And here was the clue to Inamo's success: "the Wow Factor" could only work in conjunction with "the Yum Factor", for patrons come to a restaurant not to watch the 9 o'clock News, board a flight to Malaysia or play a game of chess, but to have a good meal. The food at Inamo was excellent, and technology therefore became a welcome accompaniment to it, like a yummy desert, or rather a side dish that goes equally well with your starter, your main and your pudding. On the other hand, if to imagine for a moment (hard as it may be) that the food at Inamo was... er... average, then no interactive surfaces would make it taste better. "The Wow Factor" would therefore be lost to be replaced with "the Yuk Factor", and no amount of technology would change it, for, let's face it: nicely fried potato chips will always taste better than their silicon namesakes, no matter how many megabites of data the latter could hold.
Yes, techno-dining is not so much about scanning, browsing and occasional clicking as about chewing, munching and occasional (if you excuse me) burping. Food comes first, technology follows. That was why, leaving Inamo (on foot, not by an e-table-called taxi), I was ready to disagree with the headline of one of the national newspaper's reviews of that truly amazing restaurant - "Eat like a Geek". The Inamo crowd did not look geek-ish at all: just ordinary and reassuringly tipsy diners, mostly in their 20s and 30s, most of whom would probably find it hard to afford Heston Blumenthal's Michelin-starred "Fat Duck" in Bray, with all its molecular gastronomy.

The art of techno-dining is spreading, and the Compurants' e-table has already established itself in Holland and in Istanbul. An undisputed flagship of global techno-dining, Inamo now leads a small flotilla of techno-restaurants which includes Dalu Rebot restaurant with robot staff (! - I wonder if they accept tips) in Jian, China; Hajime Robot Restaurant in Bangkok; Mizuya Restaurant in Sydney, Australia, and even a technology-ridden Burger King branch in Roppongi, Japan, to name just a few. Here we cannot help mentioning Mojo Cuisine intercative restaurants in Chicago and (more recently) in Taipei, run by Chicago-based and Cordon-Bleu-educated scientist-cum- chef Homaro Cantu, the inventor of a "food replicator" that prints flavoured images onto edible paper resulting in a unique and utterly delicious 25-course menu, as testified by Cheryl Knight, E&T's USA stringer, who tasted it several years ago (E&T was the first publication outside the USA to write about Homaro Cantu's culinary innovations, see cover story in E&T, issue 1, 2008).

It looks like "the Inamo Yum Factor" (do forgive my neologism) is here to stay - to the sheer delight of solitary travellers and travelling engineers alike.

Bon appetit!

Would you rather live in Concrete or in Belt?

Vitali Vitaliev — 2013-03-11T17:08:03 00

I will never forget my first ever solitary train ride. I was 13 and, playing truant, covertly took an elektrichka (a colloquial Russian name for an electric shuttle train) to the nearest to our large industrial city suburban town of Ljubotin. An unhurried forty-minute ride, to me it was no less revealing and unpredictable that the first round-the-world voyage of Magellan. One detail that remains firmly imprinted in my memory is that - in line with the all-permeating and cruelly enforced Soviet patriotic ardour - almost all whistle stops on the way had industry-related names, preceded with the word "krasniy" (red): Red Builder, Red Miner, Red Excavator, Red Hammer, even (possibly) Red Aluminium and Red Whitewash, if my memory doesn't fail me here...

Your enthusiastic response to my previous "After All", in which we talked about technology-inspired personal names, has prompted the idea of today's column: places (towns, cities, villages, areas etc.), named after an industry, technology or craft, which is practised (or used to be practised) in them. Or "toponymical engineering", if you wish.

You don't have to travel far for examples, particularly if you live in Wales, where engineering and other industrial activities have been reflected in numerous place names, derived from "porthladd" (port), "melin" (mill), "mwyn" (mineral), "glo" (coal) and "ffwrnais" (furnace). The latter, incidentally, could be safely spelled with a capital "F", for it is the exact name of a Welsh village between Aberystwyth and Machynlieth.

In England, we aren't deprived of technology-inspired toponyms either. Suffice it is to remember London's Millwall, whose name testifies to numerous corn-grinding windmills built along the Thames. Or Corby, a town near Peterborough, named after the world-famous trouser press. I've just made up this last particular etymological link, I have to confess, for, most likely it was the other way round: the trouser press was named after the town where it was invented (I cannot seriously vouch for that either).

I've recently found out that the glorious town of Stevenage, famous - among numerous other things - for being home to E&T's editorial offices, also used to be known as Silkingrad, and my first guess was that the name was due to a thriving local industry churning out Russian-themed ("grad" stands for "town" in old Russian) textiles and silk. I was wrong of course. A knowledgeable colleague explained that the locals used to ironically call it "Silkingrad" after the 1940s Minister of Town and Country Planning, Mr Lewis Silkin - one of the founders of the controversial Stevenage's New Town. Nothing to do with either silk or silicon, as you can see...

True, place names (and those include technology-inspired ones) can often be not just confusing, but also outright misleading. And here it is hard not to agree with my good friend John Lloyd, who co-authored with late Douglas Adams, a best-selling book "The Meaning of Liff", in which they tried to give a new meaning to heaps of seemingly meaningless place names. "The world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places," they wrote in the preface to the book's sequel "The Deeper Meaning of Liff". There is one engineer-related entry in it, by the way: "Lydiard Tregoze (a small town in Italy, or possibly in Spain - VV) - ... an unrequited early love of your life who inexplicably still causes terrible pangs even though she is married to a telephone engineer."

The same phenomenon of seemingly useless toponyms was duly spotted some time ago in the USA. Yet rather than simply taking a mickey out of it, they decided - with purely American pragmatism - to turn them (place names) into a powerful advertising and marketing tool. And I am not talking here just about Silicon Valley, but also about such less known towns and areas as Boston's Innovation District (formerly Cyber District) as well as the towns of HALF.COM, Oregon (formerly Halfway, Oregon) and DISH, Texas (formerly Clark, Texas). All 125 residents of the latter have unanimously agreed to the name change in exchange (pun unintended!) for having every single house equipped with EchoStar Communications Satellite dishes - a brilliant case of place-name engineering, and of toponymic marketing too! "Putting faith in the power of words, government and business leaders rename neighbourhoods to attract new companies," concluded Boston Globe in 2011. This may be so, but, if you ask me, I'd rather live in Half.com than in Halfway. Or say, in Lick Fork (Virginia). Wouldn't you?

A quick look at the detailed map of the USA and an equally quick peep into the 2200-page-thick "Columbia Lippincott Gazetteer of the World" - the world's undisputed toponymic Bible, leaves one with little doubt that there's still a lot of room for place-name engineering in the US of A, the country which proudly accommodates towns, with names like Eek (Arkansas), Greasy (Oklahoma), Gripe (Arizona), Climax (Colorado) and even Sod (West Virginia). Let alone the settlement called No Name (Colorado)!

And here are some places with direct technology connotations: Bivalve (California), Parachute (Colorado), Hourglass (Connecticut), Steam Corner (Indiana), Oven Fork (Kentucky), Scooba (Mississippi), Belt (Montana), Concrete (North Dacota), Energy (Texas), Short Pump (Virginia); Gravity, Experiment, Telescope, Moon and Torpedo (all five in Pennsylvania); Boring (Oregon) - I hope this implies "drilling", not "tedious", or possibly both - and so on.

At this point, one is tempted to ask: "Why?" not realising that this (Why, no question mark) is also the name of a town (in Arizona). And I will answer: simply because in my next column I want to introduce you to a city with the most beautiful name in the world - Ljubljana, which translates into English as "Loved One". It is also one of those rare places whose name truly corresponds to reality. Coincidentally, "Ljubljana" echoes the town of my first ever railway sojourn - "Ljubotin" (see above) which doesn't mean anything al all.

I visited Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, recently to attend the World Engineering Forum on sustainable construction, of which the city itself is a brilliant example, and was smitten with the lovely urban "Loved One" - not entirely unexpected for someone born in a "closed" Soviet town known as Post Box OM 216 ST/2, or something of that sort...
***

In the meantime, do not forget to contribute your comments with technology-related town names, overlooked in this blog, or email them to vvitaliev@theiet.org

What's in a name??

Vitali Vitaliev — 2013-02-11T15:16:58 00

What's in a name?" William Shakespeare once enquired rhetorically.
Well, it was easy for him - with a typical English name like that...
I wonder what he would have said, had he had a name like mine... Or that of my former colleague of Lithuanian origins from the Melbourne Age newspaper who was called Jonas Masanauskas?
Jonas's desk was directly opposite to mine in the Age's spacious news room, and we both spent half of our working day spelling our respective names over the phone:
"My name? Just a tic, I'll spell it for you: "V-I-T..." No, not "P" for "Peter", but "T" for "Tim". No, Tim is not my name, it is "Vitali" - "V-I-T-A..." and so on.
Having lived in the English-speaking West for nearly 25 years, I still get engaged in such lively dialogues several times a day. "Can I order a cab please? My address is... What? Are you sure you need my name too? OK, let me spell it for you: "V-I-T..."
Depositing a shirt at the dry-cleaners, booking a table at a restaurant, buying a weekly travel card at a tube station - all these routine activities are a torture for a bearer of a foreign-sounding name. At times, I seriously wish I were called Bill Smith, Bob Brown or even Nick Clegg, in the worst of scenarios. But names are like parents: you don't choose them, they choose you. And unless you are a spy (which I am not!) or a hardened criminal with a number of aliases, they stick to you for like like birthmarks.
As someone who is routinely referred to as "Vivaldi" (composer), "Vitari" (Australian yoghurt) or "Vitara" (car), I was rather amused to learn recently about an Israeli couple who named their newborn daughter "Like", after the popular Facebook button. A "short and sweet" name indeed. And not too difficult to spell. Just like (not the girl's name in this case) another couple in Egypt, who - in 2012- named their daughter "Facebook", and her full name therefore became "Facebook Ibrahim". Without realising it, these two ingenious couples (I wonder if they were all engineers?) have created a techno-names trend, and one can already see on the web other suggestions for technology-inspired monikers: Mac, Linus, Ada (a programming language), Pascal, Byte (!) and even PC! Still, none of those are as hard to spell as "Vitali Vitaliev".

Incidentally, this trend for techno names is not that new. It started over 80 years ago in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Had I (or you) been born in 1930s USSR, my (or your) first name could have easily been Combine, "Drive Gear ("Shestiernia") or even Power Station ("Elektrostantsiya"). It was done on the wave of the so-called "socialist industrialisation" (the latter, by the way, became a female name too!). I've even heard of a chap whose first name and patronymic were Inzhenyer Ivanovich, or Engineer Ivanovich, if you wish... The most hooray-patriotic first name of those times was ... The 23rd of February (I've knew a bloke called that!), after the Red Army Day. Just imagine: The 23rd of February Vitaliev!
But I've digressed.
Coming back to technology, or rather to techno names - or to name-engineering, if you wish - I have recently discovered (from some very reliable sources) the following real-life Soviet pearls:

 LORIZRIK - an anagram male first name for "Lenin, October Revolution, Industrialisation, Electrification, Radiofication and Communism). This name would be best suited for an extremely greedy man, eager to have it all in one go.
 LAGSHMIVARA - a female first name to denote "Lager' Schmidta v Arktike" - "The Camp of Schmidt (a Soviet explorer) in Arctics.
 CHELNALDINA - "Cheliuskin na ldine" - "MS Cheliuskin (an Arctic explorer boat) stuck in ice".
With Arctic-inspired names like those, the last two ladies were bound to have an icy touch, with Chelnaldina also being stubborn and inflexible.
Want some more? Here we go:
 VATERPEZHEKOSMA - "Valentina Tereshkova - pervaya zhenshchina-kosmonavt" - "Valentina Tereshkova - the first ever female astronaut".
 URYUVKOSA - "Ura, Yura v kosmose!" - "Hooray, Yura (meaning Yuri Gagarin - VV) is in space!"
And to crown it all:
 PERKOSRAKA - "Pervaya kosmicheskaya raketa" - "First Space Rocket".
The problem with the last female first name is that it clearly echoes a very rude colloquial Russian word for ... a human behind... I can bet that the unfortunate bearers of this name were not be overly enthusiastic about the achievements of the Soviet space programme, no matter how spectacular the latter might have been...

As you see, all those lovely little Likes, Facebooks and Bytes start looking (and sounding!) rather trivial compared to the above Soviet linguistic inventions. Learning about them made me feel much more relaxed about my own name - "Vitali Vitaliev". It could have been much-much worse, particularly so as I grew up in the family of scientists and engineers. Luckily, my parents and other close relatives were neither overly hooray-, nor (thank God and Lenin too) "Yur-ay"-patriotic.

Being reminded of all those Soviet neologisms has inspired me to start experimenting with English names in an attempt to create some topical linguistic techno monikers (or shall we say "monstrikers" - from "monster"?) to rival "Likes" and "Facebooks". Here's what I've come up with within minutes - straight off the top of my head (after a quick look around):

Eastcotrina - (female) from "East Coast Trains"

Thamesbarris - (male) a merger of "Thames Barrier" and "Boris", the eccentric London Mayor

Dyvacleena - (female) - from "Dyson vacuum cleaner"

Cerna - (female) this one is easy - from Geneva's "CERN"

Ipadan - (male) this one speaks for itself

You probably know what's going to follow. Yes, I am going to ask you to send me techno names, or "monstrikers" you have encountered or may have come up with, i.e. both real and invented. You can send them to vvitaliev@theiet.org or post on this blog. The best will appear in E&T and on the blog alongside your own ones.
As for now, let's simply call it a day...

Technology of Wildlife Watching

Vitali Vitaliev — 2013-01-22T12:19:17 00

Let's face it: modern technology has infiltrated not just all spheres of human life, but wildlife too. Particularly, the so-called "watchable wildlife" - a tongue-breaking term which I first heard in Alaska where I once went (or rather flew) on a bear-watching tour. Yes, to watch the famous Kodiak brown bears in their natural habitat, I had to fly a four-seat Cessna 206 hydroplane to the shores of Fraser Lake in the depth of Alaskan wilderness. Apart from the pilot, there were two more passengers on board: a young married couple.
"Can your hydroplane land on the ground?" the husband asked the pilot shortly after we took off.
"Yes, it can. But only once," he replied.
There was some discrepancy in the fact that to access the untouched wild nature, one had to use a flying technological wonder, even if a smallish one...
I loved every moment of watching the wild bears, but was unable to pursue bear-watching seriously on return to Europe for one simple reason: absence of bears in its forests. I was only able to spot a bear once - in a Polish wood. He (the bear) rode past me on bicycle (I swear!) - the sight that nearly made me faint. As it turned out, the animal was an escapee from a travelling circus who had borrowed the bicycle from a passing schoolboy... Technology again!
Instead of bear-watching I had to satisfy myself with cow-watching and sheep-watching until a friend advised me to try watching birds. He assured that the only equipment required would be a pair of binoculars and a silly Panama hat. And he was wrong!
Those two essential items were certainly not enough for a birdwatcher in the Faroe Islands where there's always a danger of being attacked by an Arctic skua, a bird who defends its young by dashing at any potential threat, including birdwatchers. As one traveller advised, the best way to protect yourself was to carry a chair leg above your head: if the bird attacked, it would be the leg, not your head, that would get the bashing. Unfortunately, there was no chair leg in my luggage. I could also do with such useful 'gadgets' as a large round tray, a medieval knight's shield or any other cover to protect my poor head from torrents of birds' droppings, mixed with rain, falling down from the sky. My only consolation had to be that sheep and cows could not fly...
As for birdwatching in the Falklands, where I actually acquired a simple Tasco binocular, I didn't need any aids at all, for most of the birds were totally unaware and hence unafraid of humans and were easily approachable. I got quite used to tiny black Tussocks pecking matter-of-factly at my shoes. As for the red-nosed Gentoo penguins, I was literally able to rub shoulders with them as they were walking past me like lunchtime shoppers in Oxford Street, bumping into each other and into myself and moving on without apologies...

Well, it was different in Northern Greece, where I had a chance to do some serious birdwatching during my short stay at the luxurious Sani resort. Sani boasts excellent sandy beaches, but I am not a beach person, and it was for people like myself that the resort managers introduced birdwatching tours in the surrounding wetlands. My plastic Tasco was useless there. Instead, we were equipped with powerful Yukon binoculars and a Celeston Ultima 65 telescope, mounted on a Velbon tripod, resembling a multiple-amputee octopus. Yet, even with this cutting-edge equipment, it took my eyes some time to adjust, and initially I kept spotting just bushes and occasional joggers from the resort - until at last I saw a buzzard, who at a closer inspection turned out to be a crow. Two most populous migratory bird species on that late-autumn afternoon were (as pointed out by my guide Mariza) ducks from the UK and grey swans from Siberia - a contingent not dissimilar to the one at the resort itself where Brits and Russians constituted the majority of holidaymakers.
"By offering our guests birdwatching tours, we offer them a change of pace, a different energy, which combined with the beaches and Greek food, creates a special synergy of Sani," Mariza said rather poetically.
To my surprise, however, the most technology-ridden birdwatching could be found much closer to home - at the Rutland Water Birdwatching Centre at Egleton. Rutland Water, Europe's largest artificial reservoir, is a spectacular engineering achievement in itself. Built in the 1970s, this man-made 'mini-sea' has become one of Britain's favourite spots for migratory birds and hence for birdwatchers too. It is for birdwatchers, not for the birds, that multiple "hides" have been built along the lake's perimeter. From them - armed with some truly awesome optical equipment which can be acquired in the Centre's own gadget shop - they can safely aim barrels of their telescopes and binoculars at their unsuspecting flying targets.
It is here that satellite tracking of ospreys and their migration routes is being conducted. The technology of it is as follows:
A solar or battery-powered transmitter is fitted on each bird's back using a special cotton-laid teflon harness. With time, the cotton rots and the transmitter safely falls off. The signals are picked up by polar-orbiting satellites which send the data to processing centres in France and in Rutland. Thus the ornithologists are able to track the birds' annual commute all the way from Sweden and Finland (via Britain) to Central Africa and back. Tim Mackrill, who works at the centre, told me a moving (in more than once sense) story of an osprey called 09 (ornithologists like giving birds spy-sounding names) who flew from Rutland to Africa but was attacked and killed by an eagle owl in Sahara desert, where he stopped for a short rest. Scientists were able to reconstruct 09's route in minute detail and recover the still-bleeping transmitter from the dead bird. Tim allowed me to hold that very transmitter, which resembled a robotic beetle - with a small antenna protruding from its back next to a tiny solar panel. What a remarkable bird he was - osprey called 09!
Now you will understand why I chose to forsake the day's special - Whole Roast Partridge Served with Bubble & Squeak, Blue Sauce and Thyme Gravy - at Don Paddy's gastro pub in Uppingham where I stopped for lunch on the way home...
"Not for me, thank you. I am a birdwatcher, not a bird eater!" I said to the waiter proudly.

For more info see:

www.ospreys.org.uk

www.sani-resort.com/en_GB/your-stay/activities/item/bird-watching-tours

And listen to my podcast here:

http://eandt.theiet.org/videos/podcasts/index.cfm

Old Gadgets as a Time Machine

Vitali Vitaliev — 2012-12-18T11:53:21 00

In the course of 5.5-year-long history of my After All column and nearly 3 years of this blog, I have repeatedly touched upon the fascinating subject of time-travelling. Not so much from an engineering, but rather from a literary, or even poetic, perspective. After all, "poetry is always ahead of science", as Oscar Wilde once wrote. And Israeli physicist Amos Ori supported the great writer's dictum by developing a theoretical model of time machine in 2007 thus proving that time travel was possible. Theoretically at least...
The best time to talk about time travelling is of course Christmas eve when we all like summing up certain periods of our lives by teleporting ourselves (mentally of course) to the past and trying to peep (no less mentally) into the future, and I am proud to announce that I recently discovered another way of travelling through time - with the help of vintage gadgets.
It all started with an ad in our local newspaper inviting volunteers "to spend a few hours in Letchworth Garden City's very own Big-Brother-styled house in a trip back to the 1970s and '80s while surrounded by gadgets from the two decades". It also said that the webcams, installed in the house, would enable people to watch its occupants online.
Needless to say, I volunteered immediately and, after a short telephone interview, was accepted. The only off-putting part of this "social experiment" by Letchworth Arts Centre was the Big Brother concept, which for me, who grew up in the real-life Big Brother of a state, called the USSR, was about being spied upon, interrogated and possibly even arrested.
Soon, a list of House Rules arrived in the post. "No alcohol! No smoking! No tweeting or Facebook!", it demanded and then, somewhat worryingly, promised "the food themed from the 70s and 80s" and noted in passing that "You must not threaten or use physical violence towards any other housemate..." (here I couldn't help remembering the late Jade Goody).
The last warning, however, proved superfluous, for on that day I was the only "housemate" in the House and didn't feel like using physical violence towards myself.
The "House" was a spacious one-room flat, and its interior was astounding: everything - from the wallpaper to pieces of furniture and togs inside wardrobes - was from the 1970s and 80s. And the gadgets of course: from a cute, if somewhat bulky, hostess's trolley with an in- built heater to a Sanyo Hi Fi System ST W175, playing a vinyl record of "ABBA's Greatest Hits", and a compact stylophone, the original electronic organ, on the coffee table strewn with old issues of "Jackie" and "Auto Car" magazines and bits from "Trivial Pursuit" and "Risk" board games. Multiple weighty TV sets (Fergusson TX, Hitachi etc.) in wooden boxes were showing the 70s and 80s movies and TV programmes, out of which I only recognised "Clockwise" with John Cleese and an ancient Bond film with Roger Moore.
"You can learn anything but experience," Andrei Tarkovsky once said. Indeed, I felt very much like an alien in that environment, for my own 70s and 80s were riddled with entirely different movies, games and gadgets. Among the latter was "Erica" - an East German-made electric typewriter which would make a clatter comparable to that of a platoon of Soviet soldiers goose-stepping on the Red Square cobbles and was likely to give you a nasty electric shock via your finger-tips. And a peculiar KVN TV set, with a screen the size of a match box which needed a special magnifying lens. Local wits would decipher its mysteriously abbreviated name "KVN" as "Kupil, Vkliuchil - ne rabotaet" - bought, switched on - doesn't work"...
Then something amazing happened. After a vintage lunch of spam sandwiches and malt loaf, and lulled by the muffled sounds of Paul Young and Spandau Ballet, I dozed off in a wicker chair and saw a very graphic dream.
I was a "simple" engineer in the 1980s Soviet Union working at a large factory manufacturing primitive electric heaters, the so-called "reflectors", which didn't heat very well, and equally primitive refrigerators, which didn't freeze properly. These two main products of the factory could be easily swapped and interchanged with no one noticing the difference. Nobody at the factory cared whether the gadgets we were making worked well, not-so-well or didn't work at all. The workers' and engineers' responsibility finished the moment another dodgy-looking gadget would slide off the conveyor belt. Selling them was someone else's problem, and using them was not a problem at all, for most of them didn't work anyway. At least, they knew very well which brand of appliances to avoid having in their own households, if any.
As a rule, during three first weeks of each month I was relaxed about his working duties, and most of his days were spent in endless smoking didn't breaks in the company of my fellow workers. But the last week of the month was different. In the end of each month, government controllers would count the quantity of manufactured items and if it were lower than the accepted targets, it could negatively affect our bonuses. On the other hand, if the targets were met or - in an unlikely scenario - exceeded, the bonuses would be safe. Not that the latter were significant - hardly enough for the traditional boozy end-of-the month celebration - but losing them would have been a shame. Luckily, unlike the quantity, the quality of the factory's output was never an issue. It was not even considered by the controllers, simply because for them it didn't matter. This production "storming" reached its peak in the end of the year, when the output would be the highest and quality - the lowest. Everyone in the country was aware of that schedule and tried to stay away from anything made in the end of a month, let alone of a year. It was the same in each field and area: the end-of-the-year tractors, locomotives, sauce-pans, pencils, boats, buttons, tanks, handkerchiefs and spaceships were almost certainly defective and hence - if you could help it - not to be touched with a bargepole...
I woke up and stared in disbelief at the "Western" 1970s-80s gadgets with which I was surrounded. 30-40-year-old, they all seemed in good working order. I could bet they had not been made in the end of a month, let alone a year...
My journey back in time was complete. I got off the wicker chair and left the Big Brother House.
No crowds of noisy fans were meeting me outside. The streets of Letchworth, my home town, were empty, clean and inexpressibly beautiful.
I looked at my electronic watch with a calendar. "18/10/1979, Thursday" it said.

To listen to my podcast, recorded inside the Big Brother House, follow the link below and go to Episode 24:
http://eandt.theiet.org/videos/podcasts/index.cfm

Spectacular, but not for me, thanks

Vitali Vitaliev — 2012-11-19T11:05:49 00

Among all technological attractions of the 2012 Olympics, there is one that I've been obsessively trying to stay away from, despite the fact that it has quickly become an inseparable part of East London's skyline and Boris Johnson, the eccentric London Mayor, himself branded it "a fantastic piece of engineering". I am talking about the spectacular (in the true sense of this word) Emirates Air Line - a one-kilometre-long cable-car link across the River Thames, built at the cost of £44 million and with the help of MDG (Monocable Detachable Gondola) technology, whereby one and the same cable is used for both propulsion and support of the gondolas.
No, I don't suffer from fear of heights, but a mere mention of a cable car brings back memories of one of the foolhardiest things I've ever done.
During a recent Tirol Technology Night at London's famous Trinity House, which for the duration of the Olympics was transformed to the Austrian House of Tirol, I was drawn to a large map of the Samnaun area of the Alps.
"Have you been to this part of Tirol?" a young Austrian official asked me politely.
"Not only have I been there, I crossed the Alps all the way from Ischgl to Samnaun - in winter and without skis!" I replied.
"I am sorry, Sir, but I don't believe you: everyone knows it is impossible to cross the Alps in winter without skis!" cackled the official...

I heard exactly the same reaction in Ischgl when I announced my intention to get to Samnaun, a peculiar Swiss enclave in Austrian Alps (I was researching a book about enclaves) the following day, to a lady in the local tourism office. But I was firm saying that for such a long journey I would rather rely on modern technology than my own feet, with slippery pieces of wood (i.e. skis) attached to them. I knew that it was possible (well, theoretically at least) to short-cut to Samnaun by crossing the Alps in a succession of cable cars and chair lifts, of which the area had a well-developed network. Foolishly, I didn't take into account the gaps in-between...

Orderly formations, of German skiers - skis on their shoulders and hangover on their faces - were marching purposefully to Silveretta Bahn cable car station next morning. As they were boarding - in a rush, yet without fuss - I suddenly realised that I was the only person around without skis.
I squeezed myself inside the cabin, crowded to the extent of a Moscow rush-hour tram. As it was climbing higher and higher up, I couldn't help registering how hostile and forbidding the Alps looked from close-by. I thought of the daring smugglers, who used to criss-cross these treacherous slopes on primitive skis, with bags of cheap Swiss sugar (or flour) behind their backs.
With relief, I jumped out of the cabin at Idalp and immediately fell up to my knees through the snow. As I was trying to extricate my feet from its tight ice-cold grip, skiers were whooshing past me indifferently: the snow was consolidated enough to support the skis, but not my wrinkled M & S boots. Above my head, cable-car ropes criss-crossed on different levels, like roads at a spaghetti junction.
Eventually, I found a Flimjochbahn cable car station about a hundred yards away. It was a chair-lift, and the cabins were much smaller than Silveretta's: each had only two seats. Apart from the plastic roof, they were open to the elements, with passengers' legs hanging precariously above the abyss. In the cabins travelling in the opposite direction, everybody was wearing skis. They stared at my dangling boots with a mixture of pity and disdain, as if I had no feet.
I got off on the very top of the mountain, where a heavy blizzard was raging. It suddenly became bitterly cold. My next chair-lift station was about 300 yards away. I crawled towards it on my belly to stop myself from falling through the snow. Having reached it in mere 40 minutes, I learnt that they were about to close it down because of the blizzard.
The cable operator must have pitied me, for after about five minutes, during which I kept cursing myself for being so stupid as to have ventured across the Alps without skis, he briskly walked out of his booth and pushed me into an open cabin with a plastic screen in front. I was shivering all the way down to Altrida - either with bone-piercing cold or with fear that they would stop the chair-lift any moment and I would be left hanging in the air above the precipice until the blizzard died down, or, possibly, until spring arrived - like a frozen turkey left to thaw on a balcony of a sky-scraper.
Sinisterly, I was the only passenger going down or up. At times, my cabin would screech to a near-complete halt, but after some dilly-dallying, it would reluctantly resume its slow downwards progress.
I was frozen stiff by the time I reached Altrida. Of course, the moment I stepped out of the chair-lift, I fell through the snow again and was nearly run over by a passing skier. In the distance, about 200 yards away, I saw a large log cabin, with the word "Restaurant" on top. I needed some warming up, or rather defrosting, before I could proceed to Samnaun (there were two more chair-lifts to go!). Using my freshly acquired crawling skills and propelled by a hallucinatory vision of a steaming espresso cup, I reached the log-cabin in record time of less than half-an-hour...
On the very last leg to Samnaun I travelled in the relative comfort of a warm Pendelbahn cable car, with soft music played from invisible loudspeakers. I looked at my fellow passengers - all skiers - with a bit of triumph: I could bet none of them had made it there from Ischgl with the help of technology (read cable cars and chair lifts) alone, as I did - If not to count my frozen belly that is...
In the end, it turned out that Samnaun was not an enclave - so I didn't need getting there at all!

Now you will understand why I start shivering instinctively at the prospect of a nice and a 100-percent-safe cable car ride 90 metres above the Thames.

I'd like to hear stories of your journeys and other adventures, made complicated by over-reliance on technology. Please send them to this blog or email to vvitaliev@theiet.org

Travels in the World of Engineering: Northern France

Vitali Vitaliev — 2012-10-25T10:29:20 00

It was like an old childhood dream - or a classic Bond movie - coming to life...

I was inside the Channel Tunnel, its service part of course: they didn't allow me to the main part on the grounds that I was NOT a train - the point I was finding hard to dispute.
I was on the Calais side of the Chunnel, and in front of me lay 23,5 miles of a winding dimply lit corridor, which ended in Folkestone, Kent. And again, like in that semi-forgotten Soviet dream, I felt a powerful urge to run along the tunnel - towards Britain. The sheer possibility of it was dazzling, but a burly French security guard in an orange vest was walking fifty metres ahead of me, and his presence was a powerful deterrent for any foolhardy escapes. Another deterrent was an oblong yellow SSTS (Service Tunnel Transport System) vehicle crawling towards me snake-like from the British end of the Tunnel. Looking like a creature of darkness - a peculiar technological reptile, it was one of the 24 specially designed rubber-tyred vehicles used for the Chunnel maintenance, fire-fighting and other emergencies and capable of carrying up to twenty-two workers. Due to the relative narrowness of the service tunnel, the vehicle was incapable of turning and had to travel the whole 23,5 miles - from one end to another. Despite the international nature of its track, it was to be always driven British-style - on the left, with the driver sitting on the right. In case a forgetful French driver inadvertently veered to the right, special sensors inside the vehicle would trigger an alarm ...
Ii is not widely known that, in the late 1990s, the American Society of Civil Engineers listed the Channel Tunnel among seven engineering wonders of the modern world (alongside the Panama Canal, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building), and there was no better place to start the press trip (organised by UbiFrance and Nord France Invest) aimed at familiarising journalists with Europe's largest railway cluster in the North of France. Not only it was the area where the persisting world speed record for conventional train of 574.8 km/h was set in 2007 by a TGV ("Train a Grand Vitesse"), it was also the only region in Europe where they could build a complete train from scratch! Home to such giants of railway industries as Bombardier and Alstom, the North of France also houses over 100 railway-related companies, 20 relevant engineering schools and university departments, 33 research laboratories and, last but not least, the European Railway Agency headquarters. No wonder this part of France is often referred to as a Transport Silicon Valley of Europe.
One thing that stands in the way of the above metaphor is the weather - more British than Californian. It was raining heavily during our three-day-long visit to the North of France, and the only place where we could experience abundant sunlight was the Sun Exposure Simulating Laboratory in Technopole Valenciennes - a vast technopark of the transport sector innovation and research. Inside the Laboratory, also known as Sunlight Room, engines, brakes and paint coats of rail carriages and cars were tested day and night by dozens of powerful 375 W lamps, and transport scientists were studying deformation of plastics and other materials caused by sunlight and heat. I was tempted to ask our hosts if I could return to the laboratory for a holiday weekend...
Our trip began in Lille, home of the Lille urban metro - the world's first and longest automatic subway, and the beginning was slow, because our hotel lift did not work. But the subsequent visit to the Eurotunnel site in Coquelles, a brisk walk around its Europe's longest rolling stock repairs and maintenance workshop, stretching for half-a-mile, and the rare opportunity to get inside the Tunnel (see above) could not fail but uplift our mood and increase the journey's momentum.
Afterwards the going was smooth - like that of a TGV train. Incidentally, at one of the many meetings with French railway professionals, we were told that quite a lot of them commuted daily by TGVs to Lille form Paris, with the 137-mile journey taking under 70 minutes, and the annual ticket costing under 1000 euros (about L800). Compared to my wife's daily 30-mile 40-minute commute from Letchworth to London, with the annual ticket costing L3 500, it all sounded like a nice "Chemin de Fer"-ry tale.
TGV trains also featured on the front pages of French newspapers for less positive reasons: due to exorbitant costs, noise and environmental damage, the French government was cutting 14 TGV routes, mostly in the South, and leasing several other to be run by public-and-private partnerships, like some hospitals in the UK. Another ground-breaking news story was introduction of the country's and the world's first ... low-cost TGVs. The no-frills TGV trains, with no bars, no first class and no service of any kind (apart from taking you from A to B, of course), will initially run from Marne Le Vallee near Paris to Montpelier - a 4-hour journey, with all tickets costing 25 euros. There will be Ryanair-style baggage restrictions, with only one bag per passenger allowed on a TGV. What next? Priority boarding? A charge for using the train's toilet?..
From Lille we travelled (by bus) to the Picardy town of Amiens, where the idea of a tunnel under the English Channel was first suggested to Napoleon in 1802. These days, Amiens is remarkable for its modernistic and rather incongruous 110-m-high residential tower - by far the loudest architectural statement in the area, and its modest and lovely railway station - one of the prettiest and neatest I've ever seen. Surprisingly, both structures were built at about the same time and by the same architect - August Perret. On the day of our visit, the main story in all Picardy newspapers was the news of the ground-breaking sale to Germany of a "Compact Distributor Valve & Brake Station", manufactured by the Amiens-based Faiveley factory, which, among other things, makes platform doors for London Tube's Jubilee Line. We visited the factory and met Monsieur Guillaume Lucas, its director general, whose photo was in the papers too. It left like having an audience with a true local celebrity.
French newspapers often run railway-related stories on front pages, much more frequently than in the UK. In France, railway matters are considered to be of primary importance and railway engineering - an extremely prestigious occupation.
I was returning to London by Eurostar via Paris and spent the first stretch of the journey, in an empty, light, spacious and almost lifelessly clean Intercity Express which I boarded in Compiegne, with my face buried in yet another railway story in Le Figaro newspaper. The train flew along the track completing the journey in less than 40 minutes. As it was sliding under the platform of La Gare du Nord, I thought that "French Railways" - alongside the Channel Tunnel - could be safely added to the list of the modern world's engineering wonders.

What other structures and enterprises could be listed in a 2012 list of engineering wonders? Please send your nominations to this blog and/or to vvitaliev@theiet.org

Confessions of a Kindle Convert

Vitali Vitaliev — 2012-08-21T10:19:53 00

I recently launched two of my latest books on Kindle. Sorry, I am told I am supposed to say "for Kindle", don't know why...
To mark the occasion, my e-publishers threw a nice party at an old London pub. Beer and wine flowed, the pub's famous toasties crunched on the guests' teeth. At the height of the festivities, however, a treacherous thought hit me: what are we actually launching? Where is the product or products? Where are the books?? I know they are somewhere in cyberspace from where they can now be downloaded (or possibly uploaded?) and then read from a Kindle, or another e-reader's, screen. For that, you have of course to own a Kindle, or another e-reader, which, as I knew, most of the guests at the party didn't!
So for the latter it was pretty much the launch of nothing, or of nothingness, if you wish...That was why - as a form of a greeting to all the guests - I had to come up with a highly uncertain address which ran approximately like this:

"LADIES AND GENGLEMEN! LADIES AND HAMILTONS! ENGINEERS AND SPORTSMEN! CATS AND SAILORS! COLUMNISTS AND DRUG ADDICTS! WRITERS AND PEOPLE! PUBLISHERS AND BEGGARS! JOURNALISTS AND GROCERS! MONKS AND NANNIES! PUBLICANS AND REPUBLICANS! CARTOONISTS AND CONDUCTORS! COUNCILLORS AND CRIMINALS! VEGETARIANS AND RASTAFARIANS! PHARMACISTS AND WAR MONGERS! MR PRESIDENT! MRS SECRETARY! MRS CHAIRMAN! MR CHARWOMAN! MR CHAIR! MR ARMCHAIR!..

I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY..."

Kindle books are ideal for launch parties. I remember a brilliant tip from the Spectator magazine's agony aunt "Dear Mary" (alias Mary Killen) advising how to avoid buying a book at a book launch to which you were invited. All you have to do is bring a thoroughly wrapped up book-shaped parcel from home and - at some point during the launch party - clandestinely place it inside a plastic bag, also brought from home. After that, you can continue networking (i.e. guzzling free wine and gobbling complimentary canapés) making sure you brandish and flaunt the bag with its unidentifiable book-shaped load as much as you can which should make everyone assume that you've duly acquired the launched book already. With Kindle books, however, you don't have to resort even to this simple chicanery. Just pat yourself on the pocket and say: "I've got it on my Kindle - uploaded an hour before the party!" You can even say you had bought a thousand copies - no one will ask you to switch on your e-reader to make sure... A thousand copies of a Kindle book should not be too hard to carry: according to Prof John Kublanowski of the University of Berkley, CA, filling a 4GB Kindle to its full capacity, i.e., thousands of average-size books, increases the gadget's weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram, with each book weighing as much as your average DNA molecule! Not too much of a burden, is it?

E-readers and e-reading are both extremely uncertain - all about dark shades of grey and grey shades of black... E-book titles and covers are easier to conceal on a bus or a Tube train from the prying eyes of some annoying peeping-over-your-shoulder Toms. That is probably why the eponymous S&M variations of Mills & Boon books by E L James are selling like hallucinogenic mushrooms...

Likewise, uncertainty reigns over any attempts to find out how your own book is selling on Kindle. Checking is all but impossible, for all those Amazon best-seller rate figures do not actually mean a lot. In a matter of seconds, a book can travel from being 100,786,456.3 on the list to number 29. You think: "Here we go - I've written a new "Harry Potter!", whereas in actual fact, it was some middle-aged and depression-prone petunia breeder from Pierre, South Dakota, who bought it by mistake thinking it was a sex manual only to cancel the purchase moments later! Despite this, you can't refrain from waking up repeatedly during the night to check the numbers again and again...

Kindle can do almost everything. Except for second-hand, antiquarian and coffee-table books which it doesn't do. Not yet. It can even do the Holy Bible, and I recently downloaded (uploaded?) all 1072 pages of its "Optimised Digital Text Edition". So thoroughly it is "optimised" that, despite countless cross references, I have so far been unable to find any divine presence on its pages. Lots of links, but no God...

One more thing that e-readers do not do very well is cook books, no matter how optimised they can be. Here's an example - Kindle edition of "Many Ways of Cooking Eggs" by Sarah Tyson Heston Rorer - an author with almost as many names as the ways of cooking eggs listed in it. It is a truly useful book with only one serious drawback: after the first dozen of eggs break above it, it becomes virtually unreadable (for the book of course rests in front of you on the kitchen desk ready to consult), simply because half of the eggs inevitably end up on top of the screen rather than in the middle of a sizzling frying pan. As a result, the device quickly gets not only dirty, but also sticky, and pressing a page-turning button can lead to having your right-hand index finger glued to it. And when you try to release it with two fingers of your left hand, they stick to the smudged e-reader too.
It can get even worse when consulting another useful (and free!) Kindle cook book - "Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats" by Miss Leslie. Imagine the degree of both stickiness and smudginess that can be achieved with all those Miss Leslie's pastries, let alone sweetmeats! A friend of mine advised wiping my Kindle with a towel after every spillage onto its screen. As a result, not just my fingers, but the towel too became inseparable from the device, and my wife had to cut them apart with a kitchen knife.
In the end of the day, the would-be Kindle chef's only available option is to chuck the egg-yolk-oozing e-reader, together with the botched up meal, in the bin.
The alternative is of course a disposable one-off Kindle, or else its un-smudgeable and non-stickable version which, I am sure, is being developed as we speak...

Like most authors, I used to be a staunch Kindle refusenik. But now I am proud to call myself a Kindle convert. I absolutely adore my e-reader, carry it with me everywhere and cannot imagine my life without it. It is a great feeling to be able to carry my 150 or so favourite books of all time up/downloaded in my pocket. It is also nice to have my own (I mean authored by me) books on Kindle (or should I say "for Kindle"?) too.

NB. My latest books "Life as a Literary Device" and "Passport to Enclavia" have just been made available for (or on?) Kindle by Thrust Books

Olympics and the Art of Window Dressing

Vitali Vitaliev — 2012-07-17T14:28:55 00

I was one of those lucky Muscovites who were allowed to stay in the city for the duration of the 1980 Games rather than sent away to temporary settlements at least 100 kilometres away from the Soviet capital, as they did to schoolchildren, prostitutes, homosexuals and people with criminal records. As a 26-year-old able-bodied heterosexual and duly Moscow-registered male, with no recorded frictions with the authorities (those came later) I was deemed suitable to be exposed to the inner workings of the Soviet propaganda machine trying to create three weeks of Communism inside one city.
What was the technology of that spectacular deceit?
To begin with, the authorities made sure that during those three weeks the shops were stuffed with all sorts of "defitsitniye" (hard-to-obtain) goods. My most long-lasting memory of the Moscow Olympics is ... canned beer which I tried for the first time in my life. The beer was Finnish, and its sudden appearance on the normally bare Moscow shop shelves was an important part of the campaign to promote the Soviet way of living, albeit how exactly could the brief availability of Finnish beer - as well as New Zealand mutton, Dutch butter and other Western goodies - could promote Soviet way of living remained a mystery. Queues disappeared, as if by magic, and a corpulent sales woman at our local bakery (now clad in a specially allocated - for three weeks only! - and near-white gown instead of her normal dirt-grey one) who only yesterday was yelling at the top of her lungs: "You are many and I am one!", asked me: "What can I do for you?" and smiled through clenched teeth. Having spotted her smile, which looked more like a snarl, some customers dropped their "just-in-case" string shopping bags and fled the shop in panic...
The militiamen (policemen) swarmed all over the city sporting snow-white (well, again, almost) uniforms. The streets were clean and deserted, with most roads turned into giant ZIL Lanes in which only VIP limos and buses carrying foreigners (of which there weren't many due to the international boycott in protest against the war in Afghanistan) were allowed to travel. Most of the hotels stood empty and on stand-by, in case of a sudden influx of visitors from abroad. On top of it all, wild rumours were persistently circulated at public gatherings and special trade union meetings (we had one at a research institute where I then worked) about devious Westerners who covertly injected fatal drugs into Soviet citizens unsuspecting behinds in the underground crowd and treated ever-so-trusting Soviet children with poisoned sweets. The aim was to minimise contacts with those few foreigners who did turn up despite the boycott. On stadium terraces, they were supposed to sit inside special, isolated from Soviet spectators, enclosures.
The biggest shock happened with the closure of the Olympics. The three-week paradise ended, and overnight the shop assistants in their old dirty overalls became rude again, delicacies disappeared form the counters, policemen reverted to wearing their normal grey-blue baggy tunics, trucks no longer brought ice to Pepsi stalls, and the famous American drink was sold tepid. As for the queues, they were longer than ever: the whole country rushed to the re-opened capital attracted by the stories of unseen abundance. But there was nothing left. Only the wind was rolling empty Finnish beer cans along the curbs of newly littered roads...

It would be both ridiculous and unfair to draw any serious parallels between 1980 Moscow and 2012 London, yet, to be honest, I cannot help noticing some small and worrisome, similarities - if not in the scale of the window-dressing exercise, then definitely in the technology of it all. And I am not alone. "If you live in London, a little bit of Soviet Russia will be coming down your way during the Olympics... What we will be getting are ZIL lanes," according to Christian Wolmar, Britain's leading transport commentator, writing in The Oldie magazine. Here I have to explain that ZILs were the favourite black limos of the Soviet officialdom. I had a ride in a ZIL only once - during a filming trip to Chernobyl where one of them had been abandoned by a visiting big cheese due to its (I mean the vehicle's) high radioactive contamination.
London's ZIL lanes will be reserved exclusively for the Olympics VIPs, and ordinary motorists who strand into them by accident, will be subject to hefty fines.
Here it has to be said that after a huge public outcry (something that would have been impossible in the 1980s Moscow unless, of course, it was a chorus of unanimous admiration and approval) TFL chiefs said they would allow limited access to all 30 miles of ZIL lanes to non-VIP motorists at certain off-peak times (like, say, at 3 o'clock am?).
Having backtracked a bit on ZIL lanes, TFL recently emailed its customers (including yours truly) advising "to avoid driving in central London and on and around the ORN and PRN", meaning the Olympic and Paralympic Route Networks (incidentally, I find this passion for tongue-breaking abbreviations unmistakeably Soviet). And although I was never intending to drive either in central London or on and around the unpronounceable ORN/PRN, the moment I read the forbidding email I felt a powerful urge to do so - out of pure spirit of contradiction, I presume.
And then there's sponsorship - all permeating, like Moscow's Olympics mascot, Misha the Bear, and at times almost totalitarian... This is where technology and manufacturing proper do come into the picture - from the Oral B PC500 - an "official Olympic electric toothbrush" (image by Getty, the Olympics official photographic agency!), Omega - "the official Olympic timekeeper (for the 25th time in history, it has to be noted, so Omega does keep its timings well) and the NFC-enabled Samsung Galaxy S3 official Olympics phone (will then the calls made from any other phone be officcially unofficial?) to an "official Olympic beer Heineken": no British ales will be allowed inside the venues. The latter brings back memories of the Finnish canned beer in Moscow which could also be branded "official", simply because it was the only one available.
I could of course go on and on about the small Moscow reminders of London 2012: corporate sponsors whose environmental records place them among the world's biggest polluters; food and drink providers whose products could be terrific for Michael Phelps' 12,000 calories a day diet, but would only clog the arteries of those visitors who do not have to swim 52 miles daily. But not wishing to be a party pooper, I'd better stop here and quote George Orwell who once wrote: "Sport is war minus the shooting".
I sincerely hope that, despite the much-criticised deployment of Mach 2.5 Rapier missile systems (another unavoidable 2012 Olympics technological association), there won't be any shooting in London - except for the eponymous Olympic event and the fireworks at the opening and closing ceremonies of the tremendously successful Olympic Games.

More Engineering Humour

Vitali Vitaliev — 2012-06-18T14:03:26 00

For nearly two months, E&T's strict production cycle has been frequently interrupted (but not disrupted!) with smiles, giggles and occasional bursts of out-loud laughter flying back and forth across the news room chaotically - like sparrows stranded inside a marquee. And the blame for this rests entirely with you, dear "After All" readers. Well, partly with me too for asking you to send me more engineering jokes in my April issue column. Since then, opening my overflowing email box of a morning - from being an unwelcome, yet necessary, chore accompanied by a deep doomed sigh - became a sought-after pleasure, accompanied by a cackle and followed with: "Listen to this!" directed at my invariably hard-working colleagues.

The number of responses - again! - has outstripped all expectations proving - for the umpteenth time - that engineers in their majority are not a bunch of anti-social "hairy-eared" nerds but a cheerful lot, with a great sense of dry self-deprecating humour.

Well, I am sorry to say that for most of you the good news ends here and severe reality intervenes. From this point on, I have to be ruthless. You may have guessed what is to follow. Quite right! I am going to name the readers who have sent in the best (from my point of view) jokes - a mind-bogglingly difficult task, made only somewhat easier by the fact that a number of entrants have ignored an important requirement: BREVITY! An endlessly long joke is an oxymoron and a paradox, like a four-angled triangle - that was why I asked for offerings NOT to exceed 100 words.

"Rira bien qui rira le dernier," as the French say ("He who laughs last, laughs best"). With this Gaulic wisdom in mind, let's reveal the best ten entries:

 The machine was broken and three men were considering the problem. The Craftsman knew he needed to hit it, the Technician knew where, but the Engineer knew how hard (Trevor Miles, IEng MIET)

 A mathematician, an engineer and a physicist are being interviewed for a job, and each one is asked the same question: "How much is one plus one?". The mathematician thinks for a moment and says: "I am not sure, but I think it converges." The physicist says: "I am not sure, but I think it's on the order of one." The engineer gets up, closes the door of the office, and says: "How much do you want it to be?" (Alexander Balazs)

 I went into a pub the other day where I heard this parrot say: "Pieces-of-seven, pieces-of-seven!" I turned to the landlord and said: "He's got it wrong: it's 'pieces-of-eight', isn't it?" The landlord said: "Don't worry; it's only a parity error!" (Andrew Ainger BSc, Ceng. FIET)

 Four engineers were trying to establish whose was the oldest discipline. Electrical Engineer claimed the honour because electrical activity brought life to the planet. "Rubbish!" said Mechanical Engineer. "The mechanics of the mountains and volcanic eruptions were there long before life started!". The Civil Engineer made it clear it was civil engineering which had brought order to the planet and took it out of the chaos. "And who do you think created the chaos in the first place??" demanded the Consulting Engineer triumphantly. (Roy Girling)

 Faced with a half-full glass, the Accountant thinks that it is twice too large, whereas the Engineer is likely to be pondering whether a factor of 2 is the best design margin to avoid spilling while in transit (John Harrison)

 Two engineers were trying to find the height of a flagpole, but didn't have a ladder, so they were just standing there, looking up. A woman passer-by volunteered to help. She took a wrench from her purse, loosened a few bolts and laid the pole down. She then took a measure tape from her pocket, measured the pole, announced: "Five metres!" - and walked away. One of the engineers shook his head and laughed: "Ain't that a typical blonde! We ask for the height and she gives is the length!" (Craig Wilson)

 Two navvies are laying flagstones on a footpath. A chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce pulls up alongside. The passenger rolls down the window and says proudly to the navvies: "My good men, I'll have you know that my company makes a machine which can measure the distance between those flagstones to within 2 microns." The head navvy looks up and replies: "Well, boss, it wouldn't be any use to us: we have to get these bang on!" (Noel Clarke, IEng MIET MCQI CQP, Dublin).

 During the French Revolution, a Doctor, a Lawyer and an Engineer were arrested for spying. The penalty was execution by guillotine, face up. The Doctor was laid down first, but the release mechanism didn't work. The officials said: "He must be innocent!" and let him go. Then the Lawyer was put down, with the same result. The Engineer's turn came. Just as they were about to operate the guillotine, he called: "Hey! That lever is jamming against the pin, that's why it's not working!" (Roger Anderson, MIET).

 Q: What does an engineer use as contraception? A: His personality. (Ian Carrington)

 There are only 10 types of people in the whole world: those who understand binary and those who don't. (Brian Burgess, FMM FIMechE FIET FCMI).

Here, it would also be relevant to announce the winner of our issue 3 competition in which we asked you to come up with a caption for the drawing which accompanied Jason Goodyer's feature .... on engineering codes of ethics. The drawing features a fracas between two engineers in an office, with their colleagues looking on (see). Dozens of entries were received, but the winning one came from Bill Whyte ("They are debating the text of the ethical charter").

Coming back to the above-quoted French proverb, I decided it would be improper for me to have the last ("le dernier") and hence "the best" ("bien") laugh. I'd rather leave the last chuckle to you, my dear readers. Here's the last (for the time being) bonus joke from Brian Burgess (see above):

"The Engineer and the Mathematician arrive at the gates to Heaven. St Peter positions them two paces from the entrance and says that they must step into the gates by taking steps successively halved. St Peter then shouts: "Go!". The Mathematician doesn't move, smugly knowing that 1+1/2+1/4+1/8<2. The Engineer takes six steps, declares that is close enough and enters the gates."

***
Please keep sending samples of engineering humour to this blog and to vvitaliev@theiet.org. Who knows, one day they may all end up in a special E&T collection...

Do monks need mobiles?

Vitali Vitaliev — 2012-05-22T11:31:31 00

How technology is changing the face, if not the spirit, of Mount Athos

Outside the walls of Great Lavra, Mouth Athos' main monastery, a row of solar panels stared up at the deep-blue Hellenic sky. Against the backdrop of the medieval monastery walls, the panels appeared alien and out of place - like bikini-clad models at a black-tie dinner - and I felt like pinching myself to make sure I was indeed in Mouth Athos, the 1000-year-old all-male Orthodox monastic republic in the north of Greece, notorious for its stubborn resistance to any whiff of modernity.

It was my third visit to Mount Athos, one of the world's most spiritual places, where Orthodox monks spend their lives in prayers and contemplation. For over a thousand years - in accordance with a special edict of the Patriarch - "no smooth-faced person" has stepped on its rocky, sunburnt shores. "Mount Athos is one of the few places in the world that does not change with time," I wrote after my previous "pilgrimage" to the Holy Mountain (another name for it) in 1996.

I was aware of the ongoing changes from the rare articles in the media and from first-hand impressions of the visitors - ever rarer than the articles, for entry to Mount Athos is still conditional on a "diamonitirion" - an impressive-looking (resembling an honorary diploma) special visa issued sparingly, reluctantly and slowly by Macedonia's government and signed by all four members of Iera Epistasia (the Holy Administration) of Mount Athos. With disbelief, I would browse websites, claiming to be Mouth Athos-based and offering pricey (over 50 euros a piece) "virtual tours" of some monasteries and no-less pricey lightings of a no-less-virtual candle.

Frankly, I was finding all of the above hard to imagine in a place, where just 15 years ago there was hardly any heating, the electricity supply was both erratic and sporadic, and means of public transportation were limited to a fleet of reliable and low-maintenance mules and only one car - an ancient Unimog truck, driven by the legendary Father Makarios - a chain-smoking monk wearing greasy jeans under his grimy habit.

The Holy Mountain's technological change caught up with me still on mainland, in the Greek village of Ouranopolis - the gateway to Mount Athos, from where there was now a regular ferry connection. I noted with wonder that the village's only couple of dusty streets had become an open-air supermarket of Mount Athos-related paraphernalia - mostly kitsch. Yet the biggest shock was inside the visa-issuing office where the coveted "diamonitirions" (visas) were now churned out by three laser printers, with the "Iera Epistasia" members' signatures reproduced as facsimiles!

At the ferry's first stop - the monastery of Dochiariu - a couple of pick-up trucks were waiting on the pier. A handful of disembarked monks and pilgrims boarded them to be driven up the hill.

The next on the ferry's coastal route was the Russian monastery of St. Panteleimonos - so huge it looked like a medieval fortified city, with numerous secular buildings and blue onion domes of churches sticking out among them. In the early 1900s, it was the Holy Mountain's biggest and richest abbey, with the world's largest bell and over 3000 prosperous monks. One of them was allegedly so rich that he had accumulated Europe's biggest private collection of telescopes which he himself had never used! By 1996, however, St. Panteleimonos had (for obvious reasons) degraded to the point when it was semi-ruined and had just 12 monks, with one of whom - stocky and freckled Father Filaret - I then had a short conversation in Russian.

In April 2012, the monastery looked thriving again, with neat freshly painted facades and masts of construction cranes stretching up towards the skies.

More cars and mini-buses were waiting for our ferry in Dafni, the Holy Mountain's tiny port of entry where we all went ashore. Around me, I could also hear monks' mobile phones ringing with peculiar Orthodox chant-like or prayer ring-tones! A monk then would ferret the gadget out from underneath his loose black robes - like some circus trickster, and, having finished the conversation, would drop it back - almost imperceptibly - into the seemingly bottomless dark recesses of his clothing. That was a significant change for the place where the first public phone cabin was installed as recently as in 1995 causing a heated debate and controversy comparable to the introduction of steam power in the early 19th-century Europe...

Unlike in 1996, the Holy Mountain now boasted of several stretches of proper road - near Dafni and around Karies, the capital. Occasionally, one could spot a timid freshly painted road sign pointing to a near-by monastery. There was even one brand-new (and, no doubt, freshly painted) bus shelter, made of wood! Apart from those, driving (and riding) was still very slow and extremely bumpy, with an additional risk of a collision with another monastic vehicle. With tracks generously strewn with sharp pebbles, flat tires were common, and the driver of our Mercedes mini-van, Father Ignatius, had to pull over repeatedly to help a fellow monk driver to change the wheel, while we were patiently waiting inside the van.

At the the "Archondariki" (guest quarters) of Great Lavra where I spent the first night, a batteries recycling bank had been installed next to a public phone cabin. A strict sign in the corridor called on pilgrims and monks alike not just to refrain from exposing any bits of their "naked flesh" (apart from the face that is) even in the washrooms (!), but also to make sure their mobile phones were permanently switched off when anywhere inside the monastery. Well, there's no denying the fact: modern technology often brings with it noise and pollution.

Understandably, there is no consensus about the ongoing Mount Athos modernisation. According to some, instead of a place for mediation and prayer which it had been for over 1000 years, Mount Athos has now turned into a vast secularised construction site, with trucks, machinery and land cruisers.

Our driver monk, Father Ignatius, however, was very much in favour of the change saying that new machinery and new roads were helping to restore old monasteries at reduced costs - and the results were obvious to everyone.

One area that stays untouched by modern technology, however, was the liturgy. The only tools that were used by monks during the majestic 8-hour long all-night Easter vigil at the "katholikon" (main temple) of Iviron monastery were long sticks with small candle-extinguishing "bellows" at the end. At some point during the service, all candles inside the temple were put out, and the magnificent monastic chants sounded for some time in pitch darkness until all the lights were suddenly back on, and massive brass chandeliers were being swung in celebration of Christ's resurrection...

The fact that - in line with the Holy Mountain's modernisation - the call for that service was simultaneously broadcast on the monastery's radio system did not make the magic moment I was experiencing, or the divine liturgy itself, less meaningful and less spiritual.

And that was my silent answer to the question of whether technology has changed the Holy Mountain. It certainly has. But only for the better.

Please write to this blog (or email vvitaliev@theiet.org) about other places in the world which either stay untouched by modern technology or have only recently started embracing it.

You can also read an extended version of this blog post and see some related photos by following the link: http://bit.ly/eandt-mobile-monks

Your favourite reference books

Vitali Vitaliev — 2012-04-25T14:35:47 00

Readers of this column/blog never stop surprising me. I mean pleasantly. The feedback to my timid call to share a favourite reference book started pouring in immediately after I made it in my issue 2, 2012 "After All". The conclusion is that "After All" followers in their majority appear to be not just extremely well- read, but also - as it fits a true engineer - tremendously versatile in their passions and interests.

It would have been brilliant to have enough space to quote all the emails/letters in full (and I would be particularly tempted to do so, because most of them contained warm and kind - at times, much too kind - words about this column), but then there wouldn't have been much of space left for anything else in the current issue of E&T, I am afraid. So I have to be brutally strict (if not strictly brutal) and will simply list some of the books, chosen by the readers, with occasional commentary/quote to liven it up, so that we end up with a kind of a short reference source - of your passions and interests - on this page:

1. "The Electric Guide for Repairs, Additions and Alterations by the Handyman" (late 1940s-early 1950s), nominated by Alan Davies, MIET. Quote: "When changing a fuse, always stand on a dry board or box".
2. Stanley Gibbons' "Stamps of the World", 2010 edition in 5 volumes and with over 5,000 pages - brought in (must have been heavy to carry!) by L.A. Lawson MEI from Bury St Edmunds.
3. "Jack's Reference" (around 1913) from John Gray in Birmingham. Quote: "We are unable to speak definitely of the financial prospects of engineers - they are without limit in both directions; but for the man of brain (sic. VV) and energy there are few finer professions. Such a man, when fully qualified in his duties, will probably get little more than £100 a year at first, but ... by the time he is 40, an able man ... may expect to be earning £1,000 a year." How about an equally "able" woman, I wondered? Alas, "Jack" stays mum about the issue...
4. Books on architecture (not strictly reference) by Ian Nairn, suggested by Paul Taylor from Newcastle. I am happy to admit sharing a passion for Nairn's writing and his courageous, yet largely futile, stance against the "brutish" 1960s/70s UK architecture. His book "Nairn's London" is a pride of my own collection.
5. "The Door into Summer" by Robert Heinlein (1957) - from Terry Bramer Bsc (Eng) CEng MIET. Again, more science fiction than reference, yet, as Terry assures, "ingenious and full of clever ideas", including "engineering, cryogenic storage of humans and almost fully believable time travel". I haven't read Heinlein, but am going to order this book for my Kindle ASAP - and that's a promise.
6. Chambers Etymological Dictionary, The Oxford Dictionary of Art and the "impressive" "British Rail Rule Book" ("that was some manual") - all from Edwin Scott, who doesn't reveal much about himself, but I think I can safely guess that, despite his other various interests, his main job was (is?) railways-related.
7. "Humorous Poetry", circa 1880, compiled by William Michael Rosetti - a precious contribution from 92-year-old (if we believe him) John JL Weaver, Ceng FIEE/MIET, who assures he has had it for 75 years, which probably means that by now he knows most of its 226 "compositions" by 96 authors in 488 pages by heart. Mr weaver then comments that each of the poems reflects "history of its time" and therefore "truly" represents "an ossified time carcass" - as I referred to old reference books in my column.
8. "Baedeker's Lower Egypt, with the Fayum and Peninsula of Sinai, 1885" was nominated by Norman Wilcox to my considerable delight, simply because I am a passionate collector of old Baedekers myself, albeit, sadly, I don't own the above title.

Incidentally, I find guide-books, particularly old guide-books, amazing. Among other things, they offer us a proper time-scale of technological progress without which it is hard, if not impossible, to decide where exactly we stand and whether we have actually gone ahead or retreated. I am sure that the best way to travel - particularly for engineers, whose very profession requires unending curiosity about the world - is with one eye on the past.

As for Karl Baedeker himself, he was simultaneously a scholar and a sportsman, a bon-vivant and a botanist, an archaeologist and a theatre-goer, an artist and a historian. He never minced his words: "The Sweizerhaus ... is an inn built 10 years ago, which however provokes complaints because of the landlord's lack of politeness," he wrote in the first 1846 edition of "Handbook for Travellers in Germany and the Austrian Empire". Or take the following tip from his 1904 "Central Italy": "Iron bedsteads should if possible be selected as being less likely to harbour the enemies of repose."
Likewise, Baedeker never went into raptures and was very sparing with the "stars" he himself invented to award to the best (in his opinion) hotels, churches, towns/cities and even views. All later guide-book writers simply "borrowed" this simple method of evaluation. Had it not been for Baedeker, clichés like "a five-star hotel" or a "three-star restaurant" would not have existed.
He was also a master of different styles, often combined in one and the same sentence: "Over all the movements of the walker the weather holds despotic sway (reflective): the blowing down of the wind in the valleys in the evening, the melting away of the clouds (poetic); West winds also usually bring rain (scientific)". He could also be dryly and reservedly facetious: "Landlords sometimes make exorbitant demands on the death of one of their guests, in which case the aid of the authorities should be invoked."

Old Baedekers are full of fascinating engineering detail, like, for example, Baedeker's own matter-of-fact dossier on the state of London transport covering cabs (both "Hour-wheelers" and "Hansoms - "from the name of their inventor", the former "small and uncomfortable" and the latter "drive at a much quicker rate than the others", altogether "over 11,000 cabs, employing nearly 20,000 horses"), omnibuses (all 150 lines), tramways (130 miles with 1200 cars, with "horses ... still the chief motive power", "carrying 150 million passengers annually"), coaches, railways (including "electric" and early underground trains) and "steamboats" -- in his classical "London, 1900".

You may have guessed already that I am going to ask you to write to me about your favourite - from an engineering and technology point of view - guide-books - old and new: Baedekers, Murrays, Bradshaws, Bradts etc. etc. It would be also great if you could tell me about little-known engineering-heritage sites and objects (bridges, buildings, machines, vehicles, installations etc.), overlooked by guide-books, so that we could then compile an "After All" engineering and technology mini-guide-book on this page!
As always, I look forward to the flow of your emails and blog entries. Please send them to this blog or to vvitaliev@theiet.org

"Hairy-Eared" Engineers Can Be Funny Too

Vitali Vitaliev — 2012-03-26T15:50:59 00

Have you heard the one about an engineer who met a frog while crossing the road?.. Or about an engineering student who got himself a new bike?. And do you know how many mechanical engineers it takes to change a light bulb? OK, I'll tell you the answer to the last one: five! One to decide which way the bulb ought to turn, one to calculate the force required, one to design a tool with which to turn the bulb, one to design a comfortable - but functional - hand grip, and one - to use all this equipment to change a light bulb! Funny? Not so sure... Thought I had already heard a similar one about a policeman...
Never before have I had such fun while researching a column. Its topic - engineering jokes - was prompted by the approaching April Fool's Day and by Christine Evans-Pughe, one of E&T writers, who pitched a feature a computational humour for the April issue of the magazine. Having acquainted myself with some computer-generated jokes, quoted by Christine, I felt like restoring human race's supremacy in humour and spent many hours browsing through books, websites and periodicals, dedicated to jokes in general and engineering jokes in particular. Yes, my first major discovery was that engineering jokes do exist as a separate genre alongside countless quips, gags and puns targeting residents of one particular area - be it a province, a state or a neighbouring nation. In Australia, it is Tasmanians; in Canada - Newfoundlanders, or "Newffies"; in Russia - Georgians and, yes, my fellow Ukrainians. Ukrainians are probably the most hard-done, for they are stereotyped as both stingy (like the Scots) and dumb (like the Irish). The Irish and the Jews, it has to be said, are targeted universally, and the reason for that is simple: Irish and Jewish jokes are almost always self-deprecating!
And that was precisely what struck me about engineering jokes too. Told mostly by engineers themselves, they routinely portray members of their profession as boring and "hairy-eared", yet rather likeable, nerds, immersed in their own little world and totally detached from reality:
One engineering student asks another: "Where did you get such a great bike?" "Well, I was walking along yesterday across the campus when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike. She threw the bike to the ground, took off all her clothes and said: "Take what you want!". The first engineer then nodded approvingly: "Good choice; the clothes probably wouldn't have fit."
Another distinctive feature of engineering jokes was that most of them were much too long. I have always believed that, to slightly paraphrase Chekhov, brevity was a sister of wit, yet the majority of the jokes I came across were lengthy, curvy and substantial like CERN's Large Hydron Collider, so I thought I would focus solely on those whose length did not exceed 50-60 words.
I also noticed a certain repetitiveness. Over half of the jokes were nothing but variations of the same six, one of which - about a bicycle (or rather about a woman - sorry, I think I am getting somewhat "engineer-ised" too) - was reproduced above. Here are the remaining five:
1. To the optimist, the glass is half-full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
2. Mechanical engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
3. Three engineering students are discussing the possible designers of the human body. One says: "It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints. Another says: "No, it was electrical engineer - look at the nervous system, with many thousands of electrical connections..." The last one says: "Actually, it was a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?
4. Four engineers are travelling in a car which breaks down. "Sounds to me as if the pistons have seized, and we'll have to strip down the engine," says a mechanical engineer. "Well", says the chemical engineer," the fuel must be contaminated, so we should clear the fuel system." "I think it might be a faulty plug lead," says the electrical engineer. They all then ask the computer engineer what he thinks they should do. "Ummm... perhaps if we all get out of the car and then get back in again?."
5. The architect says he likes being with his wife and building a solid foundation for their relationship. The artist says he enjoys being with his mistress, because of the passion and mystery of the affair. The engineer says he likes both his wife and his mistress because they each assume he is spending time with another, while he goes to the lab and gets some work done!

It appears that mechanical and computer engineers are often "the Jews" and "the Irish" of the engineering jokes world which is fairly internationalist and doesn't distinguish between engineers of different nations. It is only once that I encountered a quip featuring an Irish engineer called Murphy. It was too long to be reproduced here. And, frankly, it wasn't at all funny...
My favourite engineering jokes were punchy one-liners and question-answer ones:
 How can you tell an introverted engineer? He looks at his shoes when he is talking to you... How can you tell an extroverted engineer? He looks at YOUR shoes while talking to you.
 From a recent engineering graduate's letter to his parents: "Once I couldn't even spell ijunear, and now I are one!"
 Normal people believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet" (this is from "The Dilbert Principle" comic strip by Scott Adams. To me, it echoes Oscar Wilde's famous expression: "Technology is something that doesn't quite work yet").
 The Science graduate asks why it works, the Engineering graduate asks how it works, the Accounting graduate asks how much it will cost, the Arts graduate asks: "Do you want fries with that?"
The most meaningful and long-lasting jokes, however, always come from real life. When I was completing my "research" of engineering jokes, I received the following email from Doug Woof, Senior Automation Engineer at Automated Control Solutions (no joke!) in Burton-upon-Trent - one of the many responses to my column on curious technology terms:
"A colleague was puzzled to receive a request for a spare "Water Sheep" for some equipment he had supplied. Eventually this transpired to be a request for a hydraulic ram."
As they might say at an R&D department of an engineering company, one cannot invent this on purpose...
I plan to continue the excursion into engineering humour in my future "After All" columns and may need your help. Do send your favourite short (no more than 100 words each) engineering jokes to vvitaliev@theiet.org or to this blog, if you wish.
In the meantime, enjoy the 1st of April, the only day of the year when humans are encouraged to laugh at each other. And at engineers too (only joking!!).

The Kindle editions of my books "Life as a Literary Device" and "Passport to Enclavia" are now available from amazon.co.uk

Unlikely Bookshelf Neighbours

Vitali Vitaliev — 2012-02-23T11:10:52 00

It is hard to find two objects more different than these two gems of my ever-growing collection of unusual reference books. The first one is a brand-new compact hardback of "An Engineer's Alphabet" (Cambridge University Press, 2011), compiled and written by Prof. Henry Petroski, America's most famous engineering writer and educator. It is a long-awaited quirky "abecedarium" of little-known facts, anecdotes, thoughts and other "gleanings from the softer side" of the engineering profession.
From this handy little volume, an inquisitive reader will grasp that the first ever Code of Ethics for Engineers was formally adopted in 1912 by the IET's USA counterpart, American Institute of Electrical Engineers; that in pre-digital age, the word "computer" used to denote "a person, more likely a woman, who carried out a usually repetitive computational task". He or she will get acquainted with some peculiar "fight songs for engineers" from famous engineering schools, the most well-known of which, "Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech", begins with the following no-nonsense stanza:

"I am a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech and the hell of an engineer,
A helluva, helluva, helluva, helluva, hell of an engineer,
Like all jolly good fellows, I drink my whiskey clear..."

And so on.

One can even try and chant it aloud, albeit I wouldn't recommend doing that at work (unless you work place is Georgia Tech, of course).

And how about an "Elegy to an Engineer's Sweetheart" - a tongue-in-cheek "piece of advice" which appeared in a number of American engineering magazines in the mid-1950s: "Verily I say to you, marry not an engineer;/For an engineer is a strange creature possessed of many evils; /Yea, he speaketh eternally in parables, which he calls formulae;/He wildeth a calibrated stick which he calls a slide rule, and his Bible is a handbook..."

In short, a sheer delight of an "abecedarium" and a powerful rebuff to anyone who believes in the persisting stereotype of an engineer as an unimaginative character who "speaketh" in formulae. And its author, Henry Petroski, to my mind, fully deserves Joseph Bordogna's definition of an engineer which he himself quotes in this fascinating little reference volume - "society's master-integrator".

The second reference book has a similar pocket-size format. Similarities, however, end here and striking differences begin. First of all, the latter is in Russian. Second of all, it is red. But before I translate its title and introduce its contents, let me quickly tell you how I came to own it.

In spring 1993, when I was a staff columnist on the now-defunct European newspaper, I was sent on an assignment to Lithuania to report on the withdrawal of Russian troops from that newly independent Baltic republic. In Kaunas, I was able to see the last echelons of the occupying army leaving the train station. The soldiers were untidy, disorderly and often drunk.
Same afternoon, with a young Lithuanian army major, proudly sporting a new spick-and-span officer's uniform, we were touring the abandoned Russian army barracks. "Abomination of desolation" would be a gross understatement in describing the unspeakable mess left, as if on command (if fact it probably WAS on command) by the departing Russian soldiers. Everything that could be smashed and shattered was. Electric plugs were torn out of the walls. Not a single light bulb was left in place. Mountains of rubbish were everywhere. It was in one such pile that I spotted the book. It was hard to miss due to its hooray-patriotic bright-red cover which read: "Directory of the Soviet Army and Navy Propagandist and Agitator". It was obvious that the Russian Army was happy to use the inherited propaganda of its ill-fated Soviet predecessor...
I picked the book up, opened it and was immediately thrown back into my Soviet childhood and youth.
The book began with the "lyrics" of the Soviet national anthem:

"Unbreakable Union of free republics
Was rallied forever by the great Russia.
Long live the mighty and united Soviet Union
Created by the peoples' will!"

Well, no so "mighty" and not "forever", as it turned out...

Back in London, to where I brought the "Directory" as my life's first and only military trophy, I discovered that it contained a number of other memorable (to me at least) entries - from the "Solemn Oath of the Young Pioneer" ('I, a young pioneer of the Soviet Union, solemnly promise before my comrades to love my Soviet Motherland dearly, to live, learn and fight - sic: VV - as the great Lenin bequeathed to us, as the Communist party teaches us!") which we had to recite from memory at the beginning of school lessons, to the "Moral Code of the Builder of Communism" (not to be confused with engineers' "codes of ethics"!) which consisted of twelve meaningless Soviet "commandments" of the type: "Devotion to the cause of Communism, love of the socialist Motherland and of the socialist countries; conscientious labour for the good of society: he who does not work, neither shall he eat..."
In the end, after dates and decisions of countless Communist Party congresses, quotes from Lenin and Brezhnev and other pompous gobbledygooks, there was a concise "world gazetteer" which characterised Great Britain (among others) as "one of the world's leading imperialist powers, still maintaining strong positions in the system of world capitalism, active member of aggressive military-political blocks, like NATO , CENTO, EEC (sic - VV), and other imperialist unions..."

These two small volumes: "An Engineer's Alphabet" and "The Soviet Army Propagandist Directory" are now standing next to each other in a bookshelf inside my garden office. My new life and my previous one joined together at the edges...

Next to them are other gems of my reference books collection: the 1802 R. Brookes' "General Gazetteer", the beautifully illustrated 1870s Mackenzie National Encyclopaedia ("Factory - all buildings wherein steam, water or any other mechanical power is used to work any machinery employed in the manufacture of any article of cotton, wool, hair, silk, flax, hemp, jute, or tow, or of lace", and a highly opinionated and arrogant 1910 "Near Home or Europe Described" by Longman's, Green & Co ("In Poland, the men shave their heads...").

To me, these tattered and no-so-tattered volumes are full of magic, and touching them is like touching eternity itself, for bygone realities and practicalities of the past come to life on their pages. In this respect, reference books are preferable to fiction: they provide an ossified time carcass which I am free to fill with the contents of my own imagination - an ultimate intellectual and time-travelling experience.

If you want to share a story of your favourite reference book or books - engineering or general, old or modern - please write to this blog or email to vvitaliev@theiet.org

Kindle edition of one of Vitali's latest books, "Life as a Literary Device", is now available from amazon.co.uk

Directions to "vasutallomas"

Vitali Vitaliev — 2012-01-25T12:45:59 00

This is an unexpected "After All" blog. Not in my wildest dreams could I anticipate the amount of feedback to my "Breeding Words for Technology in the Faroe Islands" "After All" column and blog in issue 11, 2011. If formerly I had reasons to believe that my readers' favourite subjects were trains, planes and automobiles, now I could easily add "languages" (or, to be more exact, technology terms) to that list. If we believe ancient Romans, who used to say that one was as many times a human being as many languages he could speak, it would be safe to conclude that double, triple and quadruple humans (and I am NOT talking about split personality disorders here!) are not a rarity among the highly intelligent readers of E&T magazine in general and my end column and blog in particular. I therefore decided that it would be proper to fully devote the New Year's first "After All" to those respected multi-humans - as well as polymaths and polyglots - and their opinions.

Just a quick reminder: the column in question was about creating new technology terms, which in some countries, like say, the Faroe Islands, are based on local traditions and linguistic roots rather than on Americanisms, Anglicisms and other widely accepted, yet alien to native languages, foreign borrowings...

"Vitali, like yourself, I tend towards 'purism' in language," writes my veteran correspondent Brian Ellis from Cyprus. He carries on to say that, contrary to what I assert in my column, "France detests anglicisms, almost to the point of paranoia" and insists that in France "it is a criminal offence to write a single word in English in certain classes of documents if a French word exists." This may well be true, but I can't help remembering the now-ubiquitous for so many French towns tongue-breaking, if not-too-appetising, sign "Sandwicherie" as well as a recent engineering conference in France during which I witnessed a peculiar panel discussion, with all six participants being French and addressing a predominantly French audience, yet all talking in stilted and heavily accented English, resplendent with Anglo-American technical terms...

"Hello, Vitali! The Hungarians had quite a go at inventing their own technological terms," remarks John Talbut before referring me to the following web link as a proof:
http://www.epa.hu/01300/01367/...f/04muhelykerdesek.pdf

Now, if any of you, my dear readers, have just tried to follow this link (as I did), you will realise it is all in Hungarian. And I have to confess that, with several tongues on finger tips (as my late friend Peter Ustinov used to reply when asked how many languages he spoke, "I make mistakes in eight"), Hungarian is not one of them. In fact, Hungary is probably the only country in Easter and central Europe when would invariably end up with a copy of unreadable (to me that is) local newspaper in response to a modest request for a bottle of mineral water ("l'eau minerale, aqua minerale, "mineral'naya voda" etc.). I will never forget how I once got hopelessly lost in the small Hungarian town of Sarospatak trying to find a railway station from where the day's only train to Budapest was about to depart. Having exhausted all my languages while asking for directions, I started making hooting and puffing sounds impersonating an outdated steam engine. As a result, a passing granny offered me a dried red paprika, having probably mistaken me for a street busker... I did make it to the train, after all, but only due to the fact that the vasutallomas, or the station in Hungarian (I should have guessed!), was just round the corner!

In line with the above, Mr Talbut's unspoken assumption that I should be as fluent in Hungarian as he is, sounds extremely flattering, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek...
He goes even further and suggests that in E&T we should "use Cyrillic when writing Russian words rather than transliterating them" and adds that "engineers should know enough of the Greek alphabet to get the idea..."
If that last statement is true, I am happy to start writing my "After All" columns in Russian from now on, but as a true democrat will have to put this to vote first and encourage all "After All" readers to express their agreement or disagreement with the above by emailing me in Russian, Ukrainian or Greek.

Interestingly, two of the readers simultaneously take exception to the term "Random Access Memory". "Contrary to what many engineers think, there is nothing random about random access memory, or there had not better be," writes Peter Chapman, MIET from Canada. And David Watson remarks that "Random Access Memory, or RAM, should be 'Memoir Vive' (living memory), while Read Only Memory, or ROM, should be 'Memoir Morte' (dead memory)" - all according to an ancient French Academy decree. "There was, of course, the famous Intel seminar where the unprepared simultaneous translator rendered RAM as 'male sheep' throughout," he concludes.

In the end of my 11/11 "After All", I asked the readers to send in foreign technology terms they thought were interesting. Below are some of the contributions:

"peer-seer" - a colloquial word for "computer" in Afrikaans originating from "PC, but pronounced in a "true" Afrikaans fashion, with the stress on the "P" (Tony Fischer MIET)
"mahshev" - Hebrew for "computer" and "mikledet" - for "keyboard (Slava Petrov)
"logisiel" - French for "software" and "materiel" - for hardware (Brian Ellis).
"harmonogram" - Czech for "schedule" (Richard Selby, Prague)

And last but definitely not least:

"Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" - a German term that simply means "captain of a steamship company working on the Danube river" (Richard Selby again).

A huge thank-you (merci, danke, gracias, grazie, dekuji and "takk" - in Faroese!) to everyone. And do keep all these foreign terms coming in!

Post your comments on this blog or email vvitaliev@theiet.org

P&O Ferry Becomes Time Machine on New Year's Eve

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-12-12T15:35:25 00

The dimensions of the brand-new P&O Cross-Channel Ferry "The Spirit of Britain" are truly mind-boggling: 212.97 m in length and with the height (from keel to funnel) of 39.8 m, she is capable of carrying... wait for it... four miles of cars in one load!
Yes the astounding size of the new vessel was not the first thing on my mind - boggled as it was - as I was standing on one of her 12 decks and looking at the receding "White Cliffs of Dover"... I was thinking of ferries in general, ferries as a metaphor for connecting people and for linking together cultures, countries and continents by negotiating seas and oceans of prejudice and misunderstanding...

You will forgive me this sudden poetic licence when I explain the role ferries played in my life. It was by ferry that I first came to Britain and to the West. It was by ferry that my first journey to Freedom was concluded.

I will never forget getting off the aptly monikered East-West Express at the Hook of Holland and boarding a P&O ferry (I think it was 'Queen Beatrix") on that sunny October morning in 1988. To me, fresh from the all-permeating Soviet drabness of Moscow, she looked like a floating Intourist hotel, packed with neatly dressed nice-smelling foreigners. I remember popping into the toilet and, overwhelmed by mirrors and smells of deodorants, rushing promptly out, convinced I had wandered into a hairdressing salon by mistake... I stood speechless and dumbfounded at the entrance to the boat's small duty-free shop, not daring step inside. It had many more goods on display than all late 1980s Moscow supermarkets taken together...
During the first hour of the crossing, all the UK-bound passengers from the East-West Express carriage huddled together in a spacious sitting compartment below deck. "What a shame!" a Latvian babushka said in Russian pointing at a punk girl with a ring in her nostril and the clean-shaven skull of a new recruit. "Isn't it?" agreed a Ukrainian lad. "Doesn't the militia want to do something about it?"
"Don't you know they don't have militia in Britain?" they have police instead," one omniscient fellow-passenger explained.
"Still she has no right to look like that," insisted the babushka...
With relief, I noticed that Western passengers appeared totally indifferent to my compatriots' shameful verbal exchanges and, in accordance with a wonderful British tradition I had been reading so much about, were largely "keeping themselves to themselves"...
Yes, my first ever encounter with 'Western civilisation" was on board a ferry. And despite the fact that it ended with a two-hour Customs search in Harwich - the result of my ill-considered joke to a Customs officer to the effect that "I don't carry drugs, sorry..." - it was truly unforgettable. The sight of the White Cliffs which I was sure I would never feast my anglophile eyes upon...

It was also on board a P&O ferry that - several years later - I carried out one of my career's most bizarre journalistic assignments and undertook my life's first and only journey back in time.

I was to report on the unveiling of the Single European Market (which incidentally didn't happen then) and for that purpose boarded a speedy cross-channel ferry in Dover at about 11 pm on the 31st of January. My task was to meet the New Year twice within two hours - first in Calais and then back in the British waters - an hour behind but only a 40-minute hop away by a fast ferry.
It was on the way back to Britain that I found myself in the black hole of time. Indeed, it was past midnight in France, yet not quite midnight in Dover, and I was in-between in that peculiar time loop!

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I'd like to remind you that we are now back in the Old Year!"

On her way back to Dover our ferry found herself in the no man's time zone - the one-hour time loop between Central European Time and GMT. This could not fail to attract a couple of ghosts from the past. I was looking for two in particular, without whom the Single Market celebrations guest list would not have been complete. Both tried to unify Europe by force in their own time and both failed.

After another glass of Chateau Tourbier, I spotted the first.

With a cocked hat on his disproportionately large (in comparison to his body) head, he was standing on the upper deck looking at the receding shore through an old-fashioned spyglass, his black mantle flying in the wind.

"What do you think of European Union?" I asked
"I've always said that this Channel is a mere ditch, and we'll be across as soon as someone has the courage to attempt it."
"But aren't you pleased that England and France have become much closer?"
"Ha! L'Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers! " he chuckled.

I decided to change the subject.

"You look amazingly fit for your 223 years," I said.
"The bullet to kill me has not yet been molded," he muttered.
"Shall we drink to that?"
"Not tonight, Josephine," he replied turning away and pressing the spyglass back to his eye.

I found the second ghost in the Club Class lounge.

Throwing back the fringe of black hair from his forehead with twitchy jerks of his head every now and then, he was tossing coins into a slot machine. He was dressed in a grey semi-military service jacket and gleaming high-boots with jodhpurs. From the angry look on his face, with a dot of mustache under the nose, it was plain that he was losing.

"Sorry to interrupt you," I said, "but what do you think about the Single European Market?"
He turned back sharply.
"It's a big lie," he barked, piercing me with his beady, fierce eyes. "The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one."
"But didn't you try to unify Europe in your own way?"
"This is the last territorial claim that I have to make in Europe," he answered sadly, pointing to the gambling machine. "I go the way that providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker!"
"But don't you agree that this is a historic night?" I asked.
Jetzt ist die Nacht der langen Messer!" he screamed suddenly, and, snatching a long SS dagger from his pocket, chased me around the ship.

I was saved by the sound of Big Ben, We were back in the New Year, and my persecutor vanished into the think wintry air...

We are all on board the unstoppable cross-time ferry, and the blinking lights of the approaching New Year Pier can already be discerned on the horizon.

A Happy Crossing to 2012 for all our readers!

The Spirit of Britain Details:

Builders - STX Europe, Rauma, Finland
Deadweight - 9188 tons
Gross tonnage - 47592
Net tonnage - 14277
Speed - 22.0 knots
Max persons including crew 2200

Machinery:

4 x 7600kW MAN engine
4 x 1.42kW MAN aux engines
3 x 3000KW Wartsila Bow Thrusters
2 x MAN VBS controllable pitch
Alpha 4 bladed Propellors
2x Blohm & Voss Retractable Fin stabilisers

Linguistic Engineering or Breeeding New Technology Terms

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-11-18T15:35:42 00

by Vitali Vladimirsen

Appearance of a new technology is normally followed by birth of a new word to describe it. I remember heated debates of 15 years ago about the word "podcast", with some conservative linguists asserting it would never get absorbed into the language of Shakespeare, Dickens and Nicci French. Every single year, Oxford Dictionary gets enriched (or damaged, as some tend to believe) with several new technology terms, the latest additions of 2011 being "re-tweet" (meaning "tweet again" - remember that hat old song "Let's tweet again like we did last summer... para-ram-pam-pam...); "sexting" (sending sexually explicit messages from one's mobile phone, or "cell phone", as it is known in the States) and "cyberbullying" (fairly self-explanatory).
We are lucky to be operating in a language doubling as the international science and technology lingua franca which also means that there's no need to adjust new technological terms for our everyday use, for most of them get coined in English in the first place. In other countries, however, it is different.
Whereas in Germany and France, say, they simply use the same (yet heavily accented) English terms, in Russia most of new techno words get transliterated (i.e. phonetically copied) from their English counterparts - the phenomenon that led to the birth of such linguistic mongrels as "kliknut" - to click: "disketa" - compact disk, and "mobil'nik" - mobile phone. For a linguistic purist, like myself, such words are tantamount to physical mutilation of the language, which, in most cases, is capable of supplying its own suitable equivalents. For example, my late father, a nuclear physicist, who worked with first-generation Soviet computers, initially referred to them as "vichislitel'niye mashini" - "calculating machines" - a tongue-breaking (for English-speaking tongues that is) term that nevertheless conveyed the meaning of the word well without sounding alien for "Russian-speaking ears". It has to be said that some years later he too succumbed to the growing "anglicisation" trend and started - like everyone else - using the "cool" foreign word "komp'yuter" instead.
There is, however, one tiny nation that has so far managed to resist that anglo-american linguistic onslaught - the Faroe Islands, a self-governing Danish dependency of eighteen barren volcanic islands in the North Atlantic, with the population of 50,000. One of the highlights of my visit to the archipelago some years ago was meeting professor Johan Hendrik W. Poulsen, the country's leading linguist. His small cubicle of an office on the Faroes University campus in Torshavn could be best compared to a salmon-breeding farm in the nearby Vestmanna bay. Only, instead of fish, he bred new Faroese words there.
The ancient Faroese language, a derivative from old Norse and West Norwegian, was practically banned on the islands until 1938, and the only permitted official tongue was Danish. Until 1890, there was no literature in Faroese - a dynamic, poetic and melodious sister-language of Icelandic, with some Celtic words in it too.
This is not longer the case. The tiny nation now boasts of eight (!) national daily newspapers in Faroese! Another amazing side of modern Faroese culture is the number of books (nearly 200 titles a year!) written and published in the native language. Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoyevsky and even Homer have all been translated.
"Yes, our language can accommodate hexameters," smiled Professor Poulsen, who was also a member of the Faroes Committee for the Protection of the Language.
"Some time ago, we introduced a parliamentary bill to protect our personal names," he carried on. "Unless the Committee decides otherwise, any child born on the islands has to be given a Faroese name when registered or baptised..."
That might sound a bit too harsh, but the Faroese did have a point: their beautiful language had to be revived after five centuries of Danish domination, and that required tough measures...

The biggest linguistic problem faced by the Faroese in trying to recreate their old spoken tongue and turn it into a language of literature and science was the absence of the words for technological terms and such modern notions as "television", "video", "computer", "compact disc", "hard drive" and so on. And that was where Professor Poulsen's "word-breeding farm" came into the picture, or rather into the dictionary.
Rather than using foreign borrowings, he decided to cultivate some genuine Faroese neologisms.
"Words are like bubbles of air resting at the bottom of the ocean which can one day pop back up to the surface," he told me. Thus a computer became "telda" - from "tal" (number); a computer screen -"skiggi", from the sheep's stomach stretched across smoke-holes in the roofs of traditional Faroese houses to keep out the rain and let in light (predecessors of windows); the compact disc was baptised "floga" - from round wooden pancakes put underneath haystacks.
"It took me a long time to find a proper Faroese word for a CD," Professor Poulsen confessed. "Creating new rods is like spreading seeds: some fall on good soil, some on rock."
"My work is like that of a poet, only my poems consist of one word only," he said.
I remember thinking then that he was not just a poet, but a kind of a linguistic engineer too. What a joy and what an honour it must be: engineering one's own language!

Having said "Farvoel" to Professor Poulsen, I went to see the nearby salmon farm.
"We have 106, 379 young salmon in this cage," my guide told me proudly.
"Come on," I thought sarcastically. "Do you count them or what?"
"Are you sure?" I said aloud, looking intently at the cage's wavy surface. "To me, it looks rather like 106, 378..."
And then my guide, who was speaking in Faroese via an interpreter, said one word: "Telda!" - meaning it was not him, but a computer that not only counted, but also fed the fish!

His answer filled me with pride for two reasons: 1. I was pleasantly surprised with my sudden proficiency in Faroese. 2. I was ever so happy that Professor Poulsen's linguistic creations were alive and well, just like all those 106, 379 (or possibly 106, 378) salmon in the cage...

It takes me enormous pleasure to byline this blog post in Faroese, which doesn't have last names - only first names and patronymics. Since my father's first name was "Vladimir", my own full name in Faroese would be:

Vitali Vladimirsen (i.e. Vitali, the son of Vladimir)! My Dad would have liked that, I am sure...

Any interesting foreign technology terms you'd like to share? Send them to this blog!

Darkness and lights (including red ones) on the Indian Pacific Express Journey

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-10-19T15:36:07 00

Locomotives, trains and railways seem to be the most popular engineering creations among "After All" readers, a number of whom (Richard Selby, Richard Hoptroff, Paddy Farrell, Mike Smith and many others) have kindly shared with me their own memorable railway experiences this year. My column in issue 8 ("The Isle of Man and a Steam-Driven Australian Dream"), where I mentioned my trip across Australia on board one of the world's greatest trains, the Indian Pacific Express, generated considerable feedback, with some inquisitive - as every true engineer should be! - readers (Neil Greenwood, Steve MacFarlane and others) asking me to expand on that particular three-day-long journey from Melbourne/Adelaide to Perth which happened some years ago when I lived and worked down under. Well, to do that, I first had to undertake a brief expedition to my cottage's loft, where piles of my old disheveled notebooks are stored. I did keep a diary during that trip and will reproduce some extracts from it below.

DAY TWO

I am writing these lines on board the Indian Pacific Express, joining two great oceans of the world in one trans-Australian train ride. We are in "the long straight", the longest stretch of straight railway track in the world, which, if you believe The Guinness Book of Records, extends for 478 kilometres.
The window of my compartment is like a television screen showing an endless landscape movie. For three hours already, this movie has featured nothing but red desert, flat as a dining table, with thickset, grey shrubs growing here and there and empty oil barrels lining the track: every motorist who ventures across the desert is encouraged to carry several spare barrels of petrol in his vehicle, for running out of fuel here means an almost certain death... The landscape is both depressing and invigorating: it reminds me of a red ocean with neither waves, nor ship masts on the horizon. Eternal calm, immeasurable vastness...

Cook Station. "If you are crook come to Cook, " the sign on the platform says. My beginner's "Strine" seems sufficient to grasp that the invite to come to Cook is not to swindlers, but to those who are unwell ("Crook" means "sick" in Aussie slang). Another signpost, next to the first one, confirms my guess: "Help our hospital, get sick." Very welcoming... Thanks, Cook...

DAY THREE

In the middle of the night, the Indian Pacific Express is chugging through the pitch-black Nullarbor desert. Australian darkness is much thicker than European. Travelling by overnight trains in Europe, you can nearly always see, if not the lights of a town or a station, then at least a glow of lights on the horizon. The Australian darkness is solid and impenetrable...

The conversation at the club car dinner tonight was about the coming stop at the old gold-mining town of Kalgoorlie where the train was due to arrive at 9 pm. It was announced that during a forty-minute stop there would be a guided bus tour of the town. The males in the club car were winking at each other and rubbing their hands in anticipation.
"What's so special about Kalgoorlie?: I asked a middle-aged man at my table. He squinted at his wife sitting next to him, then hissed in conspiratorial whisper: "There is a terrific red-light district there, mate. Just like in Amsterdam or in Hamburg..."
"Not a chance, mate!" his wife snapped. "You won't leave the bus for a single moment!"

An old tattered bus was indeed waiting behind the Kalgoorlie station building. In no time, it was filled with Indian Pacific passengers, mostly men.
It was like driving through a real-life Hollywood western: saloons, bars and pubs with ornate colonial verandahs were on every corner. Just to make sure nothing much is left of a miner's salary, I thought.
In the town square stood a small monument to an Irishman called Patrick Hannah, who once stumbled over a huge gold nugget and thus signalled the start of the gold rush in Kalgoorlie whoich later attracted adventure seekers from all over the world. Among them was a young American Samuel Clemens, aka the future great writer Mark Twain...
The pragmatic locals have turned the Hannah monument into a drinking fountain. Very ingenious, for water had always been scarce in Kalgoorlie. It was first brought to the town by another Irishman, C.Y. O'Connor - an engineer who stretched a pipeline from Perth. Ironically, he is not commemorated by any monument - the fact that shows a certain lack of respect for engineers in Australia (only joking).
We passed the goldmines where work never stops. The garlands of lights made them look like giant Christmas trees. Truck and rail carts were moving to and fro... Excavators were folding and unfolding their metallic trunks... The gold rush was still in full swing, it seemed...

"Well, this is what you all have been waiting for, our red-light district," our female guide announced ruefully as our bus crawled into notorious Hay Street ten minutes before the end of the tour.
All the males on the bus were glued to the windows. In the windows of three low oblong houses, lit by pink lamps from inside, several topless girls with bored faces were sitting in state. They started at the us with indifference. Only one waved lazily and all the men on the bus (me included) waved back. What for? No idea...
In less than a minute it was all over and we were riding back to the station.
"The girls undergo weekly checks," the guide announced apologetically (as if it mattered) and added: "We have a big single male population in Kalgoorlie, you know..."
In the seat opposite to mine, my club-car neighbour's wife cackled in her handkerchief...

The Indian Pacific Express rattles away from Kalgoorlie - back into darkness. Only the dwindling crackling sounds of the local 6KG radio station can be heard from the radio in my compartment for some time, but soon they too disappear without a trace...

Keep your rail travel stories coming in please!

***

Technical details of Indian-Pacific Express:

Route: Sydney - Adelaide - Perth
Duration: 3 nights in either direction
Distance: 4352 kilometres
Frequency: Twice weekly in both directions
The train currently has three classes, branded as Platinum, Gold Kangaroo and Red Kangaroo.
Locomotive type - NR20

Armchair legs and hangman's nooses

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-09-12T14:49:35 00

"There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all," Rebecca West once stated bluntly. Well, let me disagree with the classic on this occasion: four years since its inception, this "After All" blog remains a popular tribune not for some "intersecting" ego-driven monologues of the writer and/or the readers, but for an animated DIALOGUE (read conversation) of the above - a conversation resplendent with lively verbal exchanges, guesses, puzzles, jokes and so on. And competitions too.
A proof of the ever-increasing conversational activity on both sides is the fact that, unlike in 2007-2010, when we would routinely sum up your responses in the last "After All" of the year, in 2011 the volume of the writer-reader interaction has increased so much that we have to do it now.
My column/blog 'Trains, Tanks and Hearing-aids' in issue 3, where I invited readers to add to my list of the collectors of interesting (read "unusual") techno items also triggered a considerable feedback. Bill Metclaff, after kindly branding "After All" "the best part of E&T (thanks, Bill), told the story of his neighbour, an inveterate collector of motor vehicles as well ... wait for it... "de-commissioned hangman's nooses". In comparison, reader Anthony Berridge's confession to being a collector of ... mains adaptors ("My more than 50 varieties date from the earliest Bakelite beauties to the international indispensables of the present day...") sounds almost as routine as keeping a herbarium.
I was also rather pleased with the readers' reaction to my call ("Forgotten Art of Reading Between the Airlines" in issue 4") to come up with humorous low-cost airline advertising slogans. Here are some of the offerings from Collete Gates: "To air is human", "Fancy-Free Flight (with an almost indistinguishable hyphen)", "On the wings of Angles" and - my favourite - "We take you up and bring you down".
And now... time for the wows of victory... as well as the wails of defeat! In my March column, a new photo competition - "Capturing the Unseen", whereby readers were invited to submit photos of familiar engineering objects from an unusual angle - was unveiled. As we soon received (among many other entries) what was decided to be the winning shot, the second (and last) stage of the competition was announced in issue 6: readers had to send in their guesses as to a). what exactly featured in the photo reproduced here and b). what sort of engineer the photographer was.
Numerous unlucky guesses ranged from: "bakelite darning mushroom/textile engineer" (Brian Hark), "an alarm bell going/safety engineer" (John Dowling) to "a hand brace drill used by carpenters" (Marek Piechocinski) and "the handle of a knife or a cutting tool" (Neil Ajgaonkar).
The readers who came closest to the right answer were: Paul Muller ("a domed object suck on the bottom of a chair leg/ ergonomics engineer"), Robert David ("a foot or glider pad attached to a piece of wood-framed furniture/furtniture test engineer)" and Chris Barwise ("the leg of a sofa or armchair with a floor protector/ test engineer"). In fact, the last answer was a very near miss (a or a near-hit, if you wish), for it named the object correctly! With "furniture testing engineers" being a bit of a rarity (I doubt if even IKEA has many on its payroll), let's reveal our absolute winner - Richard Walker, MIET, the author of the photo depicting (indeed!) an armchair leg. What kind of engineer is he? A retired (or an armchair) engineer, of course! What made Mr Walker's tongue-in-cheek photo stand out among many other was - first and foremost - its sense of humour, one of the main must-have ingredients of all E&T competitions. He deservedly receives the prize - a 4 Dane-Elec My Ditto networked storage device with E&T's sincere congratulations and my very best wishes thrown in.
"I enjoy your writing," Mr Walker kindly wrote in his laconic email to accompany the photo.
This is mutual, my dear readers: I enjoy your comments (and photos) too, which means that, in deference of Rebecca West, our continuing conversation is real - and not an illusion!

Please keep your opinions, questions etc. coming to this blog or to vvitaliev@theiet.org. They are always very welcome!

A Non-Erotic Passion for Steamy Engines

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-08-23T10:49:15 00

An undisputed gem of my ever-growing collection of antiquarian travel books is "Observations of the European People by Samuel Laying, Esq, published in England in 1850. It starts with a colourful description of the author's cross-Channel journey on an early paddle steamer: "What a world of passengers on our steamer! Princes, dukes, gentlemen, ladies, tailors, milliners, people of every rank and calling, all jumbled together. The power of steam is not confined to material objects. Its influences extend over the social and moral arrangements of mankind. Steam is a great democratic power of our age, annihilating the conventional distinctions, differences and social distance between man and man as well as natural distances between place and place..."
Try to replace "steam" with "Internet", change the politically incorrect "man and man" to "person and person" - and you'll have a pretty adequate description of the latter. Indeed, social significance of the early steam engine was on par with that of the Internet nearly 200 years later. Call me a retrograde, but I often feel nostalgic for the golden age of steam...
Luckily, there is a place where I can satisfy that steam (not "steamy") passion of mine - the Isle of Man, famous for its still functional (i.e. carrying daily commuters, alongside train buffs and tourists) Victorian Steam Railway.
The present sixteen-mile track from Douglas to Port Erin is a reminder of a railway network that once served the whole of spacious (227 square mile) island.
The first stretch from Douglas to Peel was opened on July 1, 1873. Despite lots of bureaucratic fretting about political and moral (sic) dangers of rail transport, narrow-gauge railways developed quickly on the island; at its height, the Isle of Man Railway Company empire extended to forty-six miles of track, with a proud fleet of sixteen locomotives, around seventy-five carriages and dozens of assorted wagons.

The red-brick station building in Douglas had a distinctive 19th century ambience. Inside, there were wooden floors, a tiny coffee shop, an old clock and a ticket window. A handful of my fellow train buffs were clicking their cameras while boarding "The Manxman" - our little train (I wondered how it had avoided being renamed "The Manxperson" to suit the 21st century's rigorous PR rules). "C.H. Wood" - a minuscule, almost toy-sized, engine - was spitting out clouds of vapour and puffing loudly, as if chronically short of breath. The platform smelled of coals and steam - the semi-forgotten aroma of my childhood journeys.
The engine gave a high-pitch whistle, the conductor slammed the door shut - and the train started with jerk...

The carriages were equipped with window straps, wood panels and gas lampshades, now covering electric bulbs. "Keep your head, arms and legs inside the carriage," the brass plate above the window warned. I always suspected that all superfluous warning signs like this were compiled by one and the same person: a short, bald and extremely boring fellow, a retired tax inspector and a secret graphomaniac. Having failed to publish any of tedious writings, he resorted to creating warnings and instructions and thus having his revenge on the whole of human kind who had failed to appreciate his non-existing talents and whom he hates. He writes them in longhand on small piece of tracing paper during the night. And when he comes up with something as brilliant as Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the carriage," he starts giggling nastily into his inkpot and rubbing his little head, arms and legs in glee...

The carriage was so compact that it brought back memories of my trans-Australia journey by the Indian Pacific Express some years ago. The ride across the red-hot Nullarbor desert took three full days, and my first-class compartment was a masterpiece of practicality: everything in it bent and folded. The washing tub, the sleeping berth and even the toilet were all collapsible. It looked (and smelled) like a medium-size snuff box without tobacco, and I could hardly sneeze... sorry, squeeze myself inside with my suitcase...
Instead of tobacco, my snuff box was filled with ominous-sounding signs, warnings and instructions on how to flush the toilet and what to do in case of fire ("point one: tell the conductor and other people"). Remember the little bald fellow...

Trying to lower the sleeping berth, I faced a dilemma: the compartment could accommodate either the lowered berth or myself, but not both of us simultaneously. I eventually went out into the corridor, lowered the berth through the open door of my compartment and quickly leapt onto it, slamming the door shut in my flight.
To use the loo, normally covered by the berth on which I slept during the night, I had to carry out the following actions:
a). leave the compartment; b). lift the sleeping berth from the corridor; c) enter the compartment; d). use the loo; e). leave the compartment; f). lower the sleeping berth back into place; g). leap onto the berth form the corridor, shutting the door in my flight (see above). It was great fun, and I hardly noticed how all seventy hours of the journey went past, for even without calls of nature, sleep was hard to achieve: the tiny snuff box on wheels was brimming with the sounds of constantly vibrating objects, and each vibrated with its own distinctive pitch and tone. The water glass was clinking in its metallic holder; the Diet Coke was rustling inside the can like surf; the door hinges were squealing like two old trams turning the corner; the tea spoon in the glass was jingling like a conductor's bell calling the second shift of passengers to the restaurant car for dinner. Even my trainers, stuck according to instruction (a brass plate saying "Shoes") in a tiny dark closet in the wall, were rubbing against each other and making a muffled clattering sound, as if dancing, shivering with cold, or possibly even snogging each other...

Another high-pitch whistle of the tireless C.H. Wood brought me back to reality and made me realise that I had just re-visited Australia without leaving the Isle of Man - the never-ending magic of steam. Samuel Laying, Esq. would have liked that, I am sure...
Watching the island's pastoral scenery floating past the window, I made notes in my jotter. Tiny black specks of coal landed on the page form time to time like fossilised fragments of the bygone, yet still reachable, technology epoch...

My recent train journeys on the Isle of Man included a ride inside an engine driver's cab during which I kept recording my next E&T podcast. You can listen to it here: http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/podcast.cfm

The Boat of Love

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-08-01T14:54:44 00

"Necessity is mother of invention", or so they say. We were very familiar with this all-encompassing proverb in the USSR of the mid-1980s. To us it simply meant that, with chronic shortages of almost everything that was needed for normal existence, one had to keep looking for substitutes.

We learned to put smetana (Russian sour-cream) on sandwiches instead of hard-to-find butter, to consume fatty and starchy pale-grey sausages under the guise of the non-existing red-meat; to drink foul-smelling sparkling plonk instead of champagne and the peculiar 'Troinoi" perfume instead of cognac. We had to substitute toilet paper with Pravda newspaper or pages from Lenin's collected works. Instead of the few permanently packed and unhygienic cafes and restaurants where one had to be careful not to be assaulted by the staff or - worse - get severe food poisoning, we used gateways and staircases for quick drinks with our mates. Some of the most unexpected substitutes, however, could be found in the world of technology - in particular, public transport.

A tyro journalist with one of Moscow's leading newspaper, I was once tipped off about massive dissipation and orgies on board "Akademik Vernadsky" - a German-built river cruise motorship undertaking daily 4-hour-long excursions along the Moscow Canal. Dubbed "The Boat of Love", the four-deck vessel with comfortable cabins, had become Moscow's favourite dating venue. Why? The answer was simple. By Soviet laws, two people of opposite sex were not allowed to share a hotel room - or any other state-run types of accommodation - unless there were married and were able to prove it by showing a marriage stamp in their passports at Reception. On board MS "Vernadsky", however, due to some minor bureaucratic oversight (of which there were plenty in the former USSR), such proofs were not required, and 4-hour-long trysts during the smooth and affordable river cruise had soon become very popular among the amorous Muscovites, the only alternative being an overnight journey in a "soft" first-class compartment of "The Red Arrow" Moscow-Leningrad train, where they didn't check passports for marriage stamps either), but the latter was much pricier and had been booked solid for many months ahead.

"You won't believe it, Vitali," said my contact , "but I recently went on "Vernadsky" and during all four hours of the cruise not a single person could be seen on any of the four decks. Only occasionally, a bare-feet and topless guy would run down to the buffet and hastily return to his cabin with a bottle... And the amount of pitching and rocking accompanied by loud moans from all the cabins!.. A real floating nest of debauchery it is, nothing else!" he concluded emphatically.

According to him, the real journalistic value of an investigation into the "illegal lecherous happenings" on board "Vernadsky" was the fact that a number of high-ranking - and married! - Party and Komsomol apparatchiks were using the boat for secret sex sessions with their mistresses. It had just become fashionable to expose - "in the true spirit of new openness", i.e. glasnost - small peccadilloes of low and medium-range bureaucrats...

With great difficulty, my newspaper got me two tickets for a cruise: I was to go with my wife - not to arouse suspicions...

At first, the cruise was progressing smoothly, and I was listening (without much interest) to a guide droning through he intercom about Russia's first passenger motor ship "Borodino", with its 6-cylinder diesel motor, built by engineer Arshaulov in 1911, and the three main elements of a river lock: a chamber, a gate and a set of valves... Passengers were all hiding in their cabins, from where lascivious screams were periodically heard. I was still worried as to how I would conduct my investigation two hours later, when "Vernadsky" reached the farthest point of the itinerary where the Moscow Canal (built in the late 1930s by Gulag prisoners on Stalin's orders) gave way to the Volga River. From there the boat was supposed to start a 2-hour long return journey back to the Khimki River Terminal in Moscow.

On that occasion, however, she was unable to do so due to a very thick fog which suddenly descended onto the river and reduced the visibility to almost zero. There she was - stuck in the middle of the Moscow Reservoir blowing foghorns - while back in Moscow spouses and bosses were waiting for their faithful husbands/wives and their hardworking subordinates to return from their important "business meetings", "family emergencies" and whatever other pretexts were used by the boat's playful adventure-seeking couples to justify their absences.

The situation soon became critical. Families, reputations and careers were all under threat. Whereas some particularly desperate couples were trying to lower the life-boats and even to swim to the nearest shore of the vast reservoir (a couple of miles away), other passengers organised themselves and sent a delegation to the captain demanding he started the engines. The captain refused which triggered a full-scale riot on board "Akademik Vernadsky".

I watched with awe as the rebellious sinners soon overwhelmed the captain and the crew, tied them up and locked them inside the boat's kitchen and the heads. Just like during the 1917 Bolshevik coup d'etat, the power on board the ship was usurped by the "people" who hardly knew what they were doing, their sole desire being to steer the boat back to Khimki on time...

A mutiny on "The Boat of Love", no less...

It was a great story which never saw the light. Despite the first timid signs of "openness", the vigilant censors would never agree to publish an investigative article (let alone a documentary novel) exposing debauchery involving Party and Komsomol apparatchiks in Moscow - the "exemplary Communist city". While one could get away with mild criticism of the provincial "big cheeses", Moscow remained a well-guarded taboo. I knew it very well after my fairly innocuous article about shortages of light bulbs and socks in Moscow shops (asserting humorously that if the room were dark, it didn't really matter if you wore socks or not, or something of that sort) was spiked.

Today, nearly 25 years later, I am revealing it for the first time.

With the recent tragic accident of the same-type boat on the Volga River, the story of general chaos and incompetence on Soviet/Russian waterways has aquired a new sort of significance, or so it seems... Your comments are weclome!

Hollywood and the Red Mercury

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-06-15T13:27:00 00

Among recent technological ripping yarns, a special place is taken by Red Mercury - a mysterious (and, as it appears, totally mythical) KGB-favoured explosive with astonishing destructive powers. Throughout the 1990s, a number of Russian crooks tried to sell to gullible westerners boxes of harmless reddish face powder under the guise of Red Mercury. The hoax reached its crescendo in 2009, when the rumour was spread in Saudi Arabia that old Singer sewing machines (sic - VV) might contain Red Mercury in their oily underbellies. Tailors' shops were burgled, and the price of a "red-mercury-loaded" Singer had reached $50,000 on the black market... It is still unclear how that rumour was generated, but I have reasons to suspect that Hollywood might have played a role. How would I know? The truth is that some time ago, I very nearly became a part of that spectacular techno hoax myself.
Let me explain.
`Morning! I am calling from a Beverly Hills studio,' the male voice in my telephone had a thick American accent, as if my interlocutor was constantly tongue-rolling a small Capitol building in his mouth.
`Here it comes, at last,' I thought with trepidation, which was mostly the result of a severe hangover, I presume.
`Mister Vitaliev, we need your help, sir. We are developing a multi-million-dollar movie about the Russian mafia stealing technological know-how from the West. You were recommended to us as an expert ("In the mafia or in stealing Western technology?" I wondered sleepily - and silently too. - VV). Would you consider collaborating on a script for a modest fee of five hundred thousand bucks?'
`Who? Me? No thanks... Sorry, what am I saying?.. I wanted to say: yes, of course!'
`Great! You are a star! One of our top producers will be coming to London next week. Will you meet him at the Savoy Hotel's American Bar for a quick vodka?' He pronounced the last word as `vadka' which removed my last doubts as to the caller's authenticity: none of my facetious prank-prone London friends was able to articulate it like that.
Preparing for the meeting, I discarded suit and tie as too conventional and opted for a pair of tattered corduroy trousers and an open-necked denim shirt, which was supposed to emphasise my unorthodox, bohemian soul. Then I phoned a couple of mates just to say: `Sorry, pal, I can't see you tonight. I've got a meeting with one of those Hollywood fat cats. Yeah, they want to commission me a script on the Russian mafia . . . Where do you think? In the Macdonald's in Oxford Street - joke! In the Savoy, where else?'
The flock of green US dollar-birds was flying towards me from LA. I could (almost) hear them rustling their crispy wings pleasantly above my head.
When I entered the bar, the producer was already there sipping his vodka (sorry, vadka). He was a roly-poly little fellow in a baggy Armani suit. He said: `Let's have a drink. I love Russian vadka. I love Russia, although I've never been there. We are going to make a great movie!' In the course of the next half-hour he told me about his hard multi-millionaire's life; about his three mansions in LA, in Paris, and in Honolulu; about his six kids from his three (or four) former wives; about his friendship with Roman Gibson and Mel Polanski (or vice versa), to whom he referred simply as `Roman' and `Mel'.
`Now let me tell you how I see the technology of this screenplay,' he said at last. `First of all, I want lots of Georgians in it!'
I choked on my vadka. `Why Georgians?' `I don't know . . . I simply love Georgians - they are so . . . colourful. Also I want gypsies, Cossacks and lots of horses. Hundreds and hundreds of horses. And fireworks, of course. Just imagine all those gypsies and Georgians galloping away pursued by Cossacks under the velvety Russian sky punctured with fireworks.'
`I thought . . . I thought the film was about the Russian mafia,' I muttered, downing my glass.
`Sure thing!' shouted the producer. `The Georgians are going to steal heaps of Red Mercury from the Russian mafia and hide it in the Moscow Metro, where it will be found by a young Cossack who will turn out to be a Jew and will be crowned as the new Russian tsar in the end. I have already had a word with Mel and he is dying to see the script. I can clearly visualise the final scene with all the cast singing "Volga Boatmen" as credits start to roll!' And he burst into `Volga Boatmen' in a high-pitched drunken falsetto.
I suddenly realised that he was deadly serious. `I am sorry,' I said replacing my glass. `I think you've made a mistake. My name is Vitali Vitaliev, not Harold Robbins.'
I could (almost) see a flock of green US bucks flying away from me through the rotating hotel doors in a perfect wedge-like formation and heading south, towards the Thames or, possibly, Beverly Hills.
`Give my regards to Mel,' I said and went out into the Strand, along which - manoeuvring among black cabs and red (the colour of Red Mercury) double-deckers - `colourful' gypsies and even more colourful Georgians were galloping, pursued by whip-wielding Jewish Cossacks with skull-caps on their heads. The sky was ridden with fireworks. The air reeked of sulphur, horse manure and petrol fumes. I walked towards Charing Cross Station feeling free and (almost) happy...
For several years since then, however, I had been suffering from a curious sort of amnesia finding it impossible to remember the plot, or even the title, of a Hollywood thriller I had just watched. The moment I left the cinema, the whole thing would become a murky blend of Harrison Willis fist-fighting with Arnold Costner on the roof of a skyscraper, or in an underground car park, for the fleeting attention of the voluptuous, but virtuous, Claudia Pfeiffer. Or for a final exposure of the charismatic mafia-connected wheeler-dealer Robert de Pacino. Or for the naked charms of the demi-monde strip dancer Demi Streep. And the title . . . was it "Independence Impossible", "A Mission to Kill" or "Naked Nun"? Search me, as they say in the US of A...

A country whose name may cause toothache

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-05-18T16:16:28 00

"I treasure my bad teeth as souvenirs of all the good food I have eaten..."
/Ostap Bender, protagonist of "The Twelve Chairs" by Ilf and Petrov/

Whenever I hear the word "Liechtenstein", my few remaining "natural" teeth start aching.

Indeed, I haven't got many teeth left. One London dentist fainted after a quick glimpse of my mouth cavity, which resembles a railway junction - plenty of gaping tunnels, cavities and iron bridges crisscrossing at different levels (the dentist ironically referred to them as "Lenin bridges", when he regained his senses that is). The reason for this is simple: the most popular method of dental treatment in the former USSR, where I grew up and "matured", was tooth extraction. My poor extracted teeth are scattered all over the former Soviet Empire, since, as we all know, they have a nasty habit of causing you pain as soon as you hit the road. I had my teeth taken out with pliers (with no anaesthetic), knocked out with a hammer and a chisel and pulled out with bare (and not very clean) hands of tipsy infirmary attendants in some God-forsaken Russian villages.
And that was despite the fact that I was in a rather privileged position compared to most of my compatriots: my Mum was a chemical engineer, worked in dental plastics industry and therefore had considerable pull among dentists which didn't stop them from pulling my long-suffering teeth out mercilessly at a tiniest available opportunity!
I remember once ending up in Moscow's only emergency dental clinic with excruciating tooth ache in the middle of the night. Several hundred of my fellow sufferers, with swollen cheeks and doomed expressions on their distorted faces, were queuing outside and moaning in an uneven chorus. The dental surgeons, all bulky grinning men, looked like market butchers at the end of a long trading day in their blood-splashed gowns. Countless removed teeth, generous scattered all over the floor, crunched under their boots like previous week's snow.
When my turn came, one of them shoved a pair of huge saliva-covered forceps into my mouth and pulled for all he was worth. A bright lightning of pain, starting somewhere in the very depth of my consciousness, shattered my whole body. "Here we go!" the butcher shouted with perverse delight while holding my former tooth in his forceps.
On the subway train back home, pain returned, and I was climbing the walls again. It turned out that the Dracula-like surgeon had pulled out a wrong (and perfectly healthy!) tooth by mistake...

Ok, but what has it all got to do with Liechtenstein - a tiny principality in the Swiss Alps ruled by Prince Hans Adam II, Europe's last monarch with absolute power, looking down at his domain from a medieval castle on top of a rock in Vaduz, the country's capital?
Well, hold your horses, or rather your yellow Swiss post buses - the only means of public transport that can get you to Liechtenstein which has neither an airport nor a railway station: I am getting there slowly but surely.

Liechtenstein (population 35,000) is often called "a mini-industrial giant". Its 1700 industrial enterprises specialise in precision engineering, metal finishing, textile and ceramics. The country even has its own tiny airport (for model planes that is) and is the world's leader in... wait for it... manufacturing of sausage skins and false teeth. Yes, here's the connection at last. Not between sausage skins and false teeth (albeit there's a flimsy link here too: one needs good teeth to bite through a sausage skin!), but between Liechtenstein and my life-long dental troubles, for the country's main employer is Ivoclar, the world's biggest false teeth manufacturer. I once visited the company's headquarters in Shaan, Liechenstein's second largest "metropolis" (after Vaduz, which is ten minutes walk away), with the population of 5,000 people.

With dentistry being my sore point (see above), I entered the company's premises cautiously. Yet Michael Both, Ivoclar's PR manager, did not look at all like a butcher. He was sporting a smart Italian suit and an impeccably white shirt, without a single spot of blood or saliva on it. He showed me around the building which was modern, brightly lit and appeared sterile. In the corridors, false teeth of all imaginable shapes and sizes - from tiny baby's milk teeth to vampire's fangs - were displayed in special glass containers.

"Each year we produce forty-five million high-quality aesthetic teeth which we export to more than a hundred countries worldwide," Mr Both was saying. "The teeth come in eighteen different colours"..."
"Eighteen colours?" I repeated in disbelief.
"Yes," smiled Mr Both, revealing a set of perfect (Ivoclar-made?) incisors. "You see, human teeth are not necessarily snow-white ("Mien are definitely not," I thought ruefully). It's only Americans who like snow-white teeth these days. Most people prefer different shades of colour."
"Life light-brown, dark-brown and pitch rotten black," I wanted to say but didn't. I suddenly felt ashamed of my teeth, these little fragments of the rotten Soviet Empire in my mouth, and I didn't feel like exposing them by opening my mouth too often.

My host went on to explain that Ivoclar employed over 7000 people, half of whom lived in neighbouring Austria and Switzerland, and had branches in many countries of the world, including Australia. I tried to visualise all those millions of people around the globe who carry little ceramic pieces of Liechtenstein in their mouths. Unfortunately, I was not one of them.

"Goodbye!" I said to Mr Both through my remaining clenched teeth.

They gave me a little souvenir at Ivoclar. Guess what? No, neither a prosthetic jaw, nor even a toothbrush. They gave me a pair of ... shiny nail scissors in a neat brown-leather case. It was perhaps a gentle hint to the fact that whereas my teeth were already well beyond repair, I still had a good chance of keeping my nails healthy and neat. Wherever I go, I carry this fine sample of tiny Liectenstein's precision engineering in my travel kit.

I am pleased to inform "After All" readers and fans that the blog/column has been - again! for the second time in three years! - shorlisted for a prestigious PPA UK Columnist of the Year Award. Will find out on teh 15th of June whether I won it... In the meantime, touch wood, fingers crossed and, as we used to say in Russia (don't ask me why): "Neither fluff, nor feathers!"
Thanks, everyone, for your continuing support!

Reading Between the Airlines

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-04-20T08:51:02 00

More on the subject of techno-collections started in my previous "After All". Whereas some wealthy enthusiasts do manage to hoard old cars and military hardware, hardly anyone, not even my later friend Sir Peter Ustinov, seems able to afford collection airplanes. Several years ago, however, I made an important step towards starting such a collection. Not of planes themselves (I am still waiting for a long-promised salary increase), but rather of airlines. Or to be more presise, of airlines advertising slogans.
I first got the idea while on a journalistic assignment in Valetta, where I was invited to visit the offices of Air Malta. At the reception, I noticed a stack of colourful pamphlets all bearing the airline's advertising logo: `The Power of Chance.' `Why have you chosen such an off-putting motto for your young airline?' I asked a business-like Air Malta official. `It is not `The Power of Chance',' he replied. `It is `The Power of Change!" I had to squint at the brochure before it became clear: the `c' had become `g' from a distance.

In an airline slogan, not just every word but every letter should be clear and devoid of second meanings and unintended puns. Otherwise, a carrier can find itself in the same soup I once tried (metaphorically speaking) at an Irish pub, with a blackboard of daily food specials enticingly entitled "BAD FOOD". It took me a lot of squinting at the chalk-drawn letters to realize that what they meant to say was "Bar food", but made "R" look very similar to "D"!

Well, would you ever board an aircraft with `The Power of Chance' written across its fuselage? The best commercial slogan I have come across was for an American condom company: `Your Heart May Break But Our Condom - Never!' But the word `never' is tricky, especially in a slogan or ad. `Never say never' goes a good English proverb. But in America, where they do not always respect old English wisdoms, there is a tendency to abuse this word. While in New York, I was taken aback by a huge ad in Novoye Russkoye Slovo, a Manhattan- based Russian daily. `NEVER!' it started in two-inch characters, and then carried on in smaller print: `Weiner Brothers' Funeral Parlour will NEVER refuse service to Russian Jews!' This cheerful ad brings me back to airlines. And, sadly, to the eternal question of life and death, which most of us - contrary to the theory of probability - tend to associate with flying.

Driving to Melbourne's Tullasmarine airport one day, I noticed a massive highway poster with a bikini-clad beauty on it. It was not the model but the slogan of Air Mauritius (which the poster was supposed to advertise) underneath it that grabbed my attention. `Go Straight To Heaven,' it said. I thought that it was not a very attractive prospect for a potential Air Mauritius passenger, who might not mind going to heaven eventually (although not within the next couple of hours) but would probably prefer getting to Port Louis or, say, Kuala Lumpur first.

`Both Our Right And Left Wings Are Equally Committed to Europe,' a British Airways billboard at the entrance to one of Heathrow's car parks used to announce a couple of years ago. `What if there's a slight tilt in this commitment?' I thought. I was tempted to change my BA flight to Helsinki and fly instead with Finnair, one of whose planes was taxiing along the tarmac. Written on it was: `The Official Airline of Santa Claus.' I decided to stay with BA, which, despite its shaky European commitments, was likely to be more committed to carrying Vitali Vitaliev than Santa Claus, who would probably prefer his faithful reindeer Rudolf anyway.

The only airline that never needed a slogan was the good old Soviet Aeroflot, whose name used to speak for itself (and still does). As the USSR's only carrier, it had no competitors inside the country and did not require any PR. The rare Aeroflot ads were therefore pretty laconic. `Fly Planes,' they ran. Had it not been for that reminder, the gullible Soviet citizens would have probably flown cucumbers, kettles and fountain pens, which would certainly have been safer.

I have survived dozens, if not hundreds, of crammed Aeroflot flights, with my knees stuck into the back of the seat in front of me and someone else's sharp knees sticking into my back from behind, and came up with my own slogan for Aeroflot: `Prop My Back And I'll Prop Yours.' When the young children of an Aeroflot Airbus captain were left in the cabin to fiddle with the plane's controls and quickly sent the jet into a nosedive, my 13-year-old son suggested the following slogan: `Fly Aeroflot - the World's First DIY Airline!' The old Soviet Aeroflot is no more (thank God and Gorby). It has now split into dozens of smaller companies in the former Soviet republics - the process that is bound to create a renewed demand for airline slogans, especially for carriers like Kazakhstan Airlines or Azerbaijan Airlines - uncomfortable even to pronounce, let alone fly.

The new Aeroflot, now proudly calling itself Russian Airlines, at some point chose a flying elephant as its symbol. One can only speculate about its hidden meaning (Clumsy hostesses? Overloaded flights?) As for a new slogan for Aeroflot, maybe it should follow the example of Qantas - `The Spirit of Australia' - and call itself `The Spirit of Russia.' It could work, despite its unavoidable association with vodka. After all, it is better to be drunk than dead, even if you `Go Straight To Heaven!'.

I'd now like to invite you to come up with advertising slogans for a modern low-cost airline (no names) - the funniest of which will be revealed in this column. The winner may even receive a free low-cost one-way flight to his or her chosen destination (provided he/she pays his/her own fare).

To inspire you, here are some real-life (and not necessarily low-cost) airline mottos:

"Up, up and away" - TWA
"The world's most refreshing airline" - Swissair
"We really move our tails for you" - Continental
"A whole different animal" - Frontier Airlines, USA
"If you've got it, flaunt it" - Braniff Airways
And the last but not least, a new Aeroflot logo: "Sincerely yours"

I wish you a good flight of fantasy and wit!

Collecting collectors

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-03-15T15:10:25 00

To continue the railway obsession theme started in my first After All of 2011.

On a train from Leeds to London, I once sat beside a fidgety young man with darting eyes, who threw furtive glances through the window and made notes on a dog-eared pad. After each scribble he rubbed his hands in glee, as if he'd spotted his own six-figure bank balance written in pebbles beside the track.

My curiosity was sparked off. Pretending to be immersed in some Guardian obituaries, I craned my neck and squinted at his notes. They read: `113, 114, 115, 116 . . .' Perhaps he was one of the 20,000 Brits who responded to a recent M15 recruitment ad, practicing his spycraft en route to the interview?..

The train rattled through Yorkshire, swiftly passing numbered mile-posts: `117, 118, 119 . . .' I suddenly realised what engrossed my travel companion: he was recording the figures on the mile-posts! Collecting these numbers, he later told me, was his hobby.

This wasn't my first encounter with a peculiar breed of British collectors, to which I myself had come to belong. But on that later...

Travelling by British Rail, I often bump into agitated characters in search of rare steam-engines. Since it is difficult to put life-size steam-engines into an album, or dry them off for a herbarium, these men content themselves with writing down the collected numbers in special tattered notebooks and boasting about them afterwards in smelly station buffets: `Have you seen that gorgeous, if slightly asthmatic, WZM/123 at Dogford-upon-Tavern?' they ask. `It's a beaut!'

I have a friend in Canterbury collecting and capable of playing all imaginable musical instruments, but only if they are of gigantic proportions. His flute is the size of a ship's funnel; his saxophone resembles a motor-bike bent in the middle; and his didgeridoo could pass as a high-calibre howitzer. When he starts playing his clarinet - as long as a boa-constrictor, thick as an oil pipeline - it sounds like one of the trumpets of Jericho which caused stone walls to fall (and indeed his house has cracks all over the ceiling). No wonder his ex-wife (from whom he has just got divorced) had such an angry face.

Another friend, a writer and a convinced Russophile, collects Russian obscenities, the sort that would make even the rudest Moscow cobblers blush. His only problem is lack of practice (which is probably why he's always so pleased to see me); at times, he tests his esoteric knowledge in the streets of London by hurling weighty Russian abuse at unsuspecting pedestrians. `You must be careful, James,' I told him. `One day you will bump into a touchy Russian gangster and he will beat this linguistic garbage out of you!'
To my mind, collecting is a true (at times risky) passion which also involves a lot of knowledge and expertise. I see it as a natural escape from the often dull and unrewarding reality.

So, what do you yourself collect, you may ask? And I will answer: "I collect old Baedeker guide-books". But I also collect collectors. Not all collectors, I mean, but only those who collect vehicles, gadgets, engines, tanks (see below), contraptions and other technological paraphernalia.

The pride of my collection of collectors was (and still is) my late friend Sir Peter Ustinov, who kept an impressive set of vintage cars on his country estate in Switzerland. He also had a private jet, but I am not sure if he collected airplanes too...

A real paradise of old car collectors is of course Malta. I will never forget my first time there. Valetta airport's parking lot contained collections of old, very old and vintage cars in different stages of disrepair. Mysteriously, the ancient jalopies kept coming and going with grumbling noises. My first thought was that a meeting of the local vintage car collectors club was underway at the airport. It took me a while to find out that old cars and buses are considered national treasure in Malta. It is cool to drive them around and exporting them is illegal! A nation of car collectors, no less...

I will never forge my first bus ride in Malta. After an hour of waiting, I heard a loud sneezing and coughing sound. A green something - a cross between a motorized iron and a century-old Singer sewing machine - rolled up to the bus stop jauntily. Its ramshackle cracked doors, resembling a dumped concertina, folded in with a squeak of fifty defective violins being tuned simultaneously... That pre-historic mechanical monster was at least fifty years old. The driver was a shaking nanogenarian, suffering from St. Vitus Dance. He had a helper, also a nanogenarian, presumable to assist him with changing gears and to replace him behind then wheel if he started nodding off or died of old age while driving...

Old jalopies aside, just one issue of the UK's "Antiques &Collectables" magazine runs special features on the intricacies of collecting globes, Russian Matrioshka dolls, antique fishing gear, automatons, American model trains and sewing accessories (e.g. "Steel scissors with design of the man in the moon. Italian, 1850-70" - not to be confused with Needle Armstrong!). And from the fascinating old (yet not antique) volume "Fortune in Your Attic" by Tony Curtis, I found out about the existence of the individuals collecting car parts, electrical appliances ("1950's electric toasting machine"), corkscrews, dental instruments (probably in memory of the no-longer-existing teeth) and even hearing aids ""Silver ear trumpet by Rawlings & Summer, 1833).

What can I say? The breed of British techno-collectors seems alive and well. The latest example comes from a 17th of February issue of a popular national newspaper which ran a story of a Norfolk newspaper delivery man, called Shaun Mitchell, who collects military vehicles and keeps his collection at home, or rather in his back yard where an 8-tonne Sabre tank, a Jeep, a WWII lorry, an anti-aircraft gun and an armoured personnel carrier are all parked. Shaun's girlfriend did not share his passion for tanks and left him, which, as the newspaper, sardonically commented "wasn't exactly a bombshell" - ha-ha-ha. "I have no bad habits, apart from the compulsion to buy military vehicles," admitted poor Shaun and added that he was still searching for a girl "who likes tanks too".
I am more than happy to add Shaun to my ever-growing collection of collectors and hope he finds his tank-loving girl soon.

Eager to keep extending my collection, I am asking you, my dear readers, to write/email/blog to me about gadgets, engines, tanks, contraptions and other technological paraphernalia that you may be collecting hope, so that YOU can be added to my ever-growing collectors collection too!

A touch of life-saving engineering

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-03-01T14:45:49 00

Last week, a normal flow of life for many was interrupted by the news of the second earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. In my family, we had reasons to be more worried than most: my partner's close relatives live in Christchurch.

We hadn't heard anything from them for several days and were extremely concerned until the following email arrived this morning:

"...To recap, the second earthquake again ripped the power and phone lines from our house and all water stopped. We had water restored on
Thursday at low pressure, so no hot water. Friday our power was
reconnected to the house but needed an electrician to tape wires in
the house before the power went. Saturday, half way through a load of
washing, the water stopped again. The gusher over the road was stopped and our water along with it!
A water collection site was set up at the nearest primary school which
is very close to us. So we are able to collect and all water we need
for hand washing, teeth cleaning and cooking. We have been to friends
who have power and water to have a shower every second day.
Yesterday we had our phone restored. As with the power, they had to
put extra length into the wires as the earthquake had moved the top of
the power pole further away from our house!!"

It all made me think of those nameless workers and engineers: electrical, communications, sanitary etc. (there may be the IET members among them too!) who are now working so hard to restore some normality to everyday life in Christchurch. We hear a lot about the heroism of rescue teams, fire brigades, volunteers etc., but not about the seemingly "mundane" efforts of our Christchurch colleagues. They deserve better recognition for their real, life-saving engineering.
If you know any of them, please write to this blog.

Capturing the Unseen

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-02-16T10:42:00 00

"Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited while imagination embraces the entire world."
/Albert Einstein/

I will never forget my first photo-camera. Its legendary unreliability began with its name - "Smena", which meant "Replacement" in Russian. To me, it echoed the first-generation Soviet "KVN" TV set (a huge black crate with a matchbox-size screen in the middle), which some home-grown wits deciphered as "Kupil, Vkliuchil - Ne rabotayet" - "bought, switched on - doesn't work".
Given to me by my Dad as a birthday gift, "Smena" was basic: with the simplest possible lens, the case made of plastic and, indeed, in constant need of a replacement, for the only functioning it did well was preceded by the prefix "mal". To me, it nevertheless symbolized the very miracle of photography, even if the only thing that was clearly discernable on my very first grossly overexposed prints was my own complicated dactiloscopia. It was only occasionally that I allowed my Dad to snap a quick photo of myself with his much more sophisticated Zenith.
What I enjoyed most of all, however, was developing photos in the dark communal kitchen of our flat. The treacherous red light added mystery to the process making it into a magic ritual. I would watch with fascination how the familiar features of my relatives and friends, only slightly disfigured by my smudged fingerprints, came to life on blank sheets of photographic paper when immersed in smelly developing liquid. When I stirred the tray slightly, their fuzzy faces would smile or frown, and that was both amazing and somewhat scary, as if I - a little Soviet boy - was somehow in control of their lives.
As the age of ten, I already knew that most photos were destined to outlive the people they featured...
My passion for photography did not last for long. It was soon replaced by another, much more challenging, one - for writing. But I am still grateful to "Smena" - my first photo camera, which had taught me to look at the world through the lens of my own perception and my own unique "point of view".
The epoch of optical photography is well and truly over now, and near-weightless digital cameras have replaced the bulky "Smenas", "Leicas" and "Zeniths". At times, however, I feel nostalgic for that bygone era, and I am not the only one. This is how the amateur photographer protagonist of "The Big Picture" - the best-selling novel by a renowned American writer and my good friend Douglas Kennedy - describes his treasured collection of cameras:
"I still have that Brownie. It's stored on the first shelf of my cabinet, next to my first Instamatic (Christmas '67), my first Nikkormat (my fourteenth birthday), my first Nikon (high school graduation), my first Leica (college graduation, 1978 - present from my mother six months before an embolism snuffed out her life at the age of fifty-one). On the three lower shelves are the cameras I have collected since then. There are a few rare museum pieces (a Pentax Spotmatic, an original Eastman Kodak box camera, and a first-edition Kodak Retina). And then there is my working gear: an original SpeedGraphic for gritty journalistic shots, a new Leica M9 (with a $5,000 Leica 300 Sumicaron lens), a LeicaFlex, a Hasselblad 500 CM 500 CM, and a solid cherrywood DeoDorf that I only use for very special landcsape or portraiture work."
Life in cameras, indeed. In cameras, not in "cams"!

With the main challenges of photography shifting from technical (exposure, distance, focus, light etc. are now all done automatically) to purely visual (proper frame, correct - or unusual - angle etc.), the final outcome often rests with the photographer's imagination and his or her ability to see and to capture something that most people can't.
"What you see is not what you see, and what you see is not what it means!" - such is the message behind "Sunflower Seeds" - a composition by China's leading conceptual artist Ai Weiwei now on display in the spacious Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern. It consists of 100 million sunflower seeds which turn out to be made of porcelain on closer inspection.
All of which leads me to announcing a new readers' competition - as promised in my last "After All" of 2010. Incidentally, in that very column, I covertly made the first step towards this new contest - by illustrating my copy with two photos of silly posters made and sent by Terry Bramer, an E&T reader from Suffolk.
Yet what I want to suggest now is much more challenging.
I want you to take a photo of a machine/installation/gadget/contraption you work with on a daily basis - but from an UNUSUAL ANGLE, so that for the rest of the readers it wouldn't be immediately obvious what it is you have captured.
To illustrate the task, I refer you to a little book "Close-Up Puzzles. Optically Confusing Photographs", published by Mad Mouse Press...
Each of your "mystery" snapshots should contain hidden answers to two questions: "What is on the photo?" and "What do I do?", i.e. "What kind of engineer am I"?
The photos (resolution - min 300 dpi; format - jpeg; size - min 5/10 mb open file) should be sent to vvitaliev@theiet.org.
The judging panel will then select the best and the most mysterious photo which will be published in E&T, and the readers will be invited to send in their guesses as to what's on it and what sort of engineer the photographer is. The first correct answer will receive a prize which in the first round will be a 4 Dane-Elec MyDitto networked storage device on which you can store volts of images, videos etc and which you can attach to your router. If no correct answers are received within a fixed period - the same prize goes to the photographer. Simple!
And let's call this competition "CTU" - "Capturing the Unseen" thus underlying the importance of imagination - for engineers and for everyone else, as so beautifully said by Albert Einstein.
Let me finish with two more quotes:
"Everything you can imagine is real" /Pablo Picasso/
"The man who can't visualise a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot" /Andre Breton/

We look forward to receiving your first "What am I?" photos ASAP. Good luck!

Welcome!

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-01-26T16:15:08 00

Welcome to my After All blog!

Among the first responses to my latest column on the romantic side of train timetables was an email (this blog was not quite ready yet) from Denis Howroyd who attached the following clipping from a British magazine he did not name:

"... three years ago, Michael Portillo reflected about his lifelong passion for trains....'Do you know what the Russian for railway station is?' asks a smiling Michael... He fakes his surprise when the answer comes back in the negative.
'It's vokzal,' he explains. In the early 19th century we had railways and the Russians didn't and they sent a delegation over. Southern Railways didn't have a Waterloo or a Victoria at that point, and the railway stopped at Vauxhall. The Russians apparently asked 'what do you call this?' - and the answer was "we call it Vauxhall", hence the Russian word for railway station is vokzal!"

'Could you please tell me if this is true?' asks Denis Howroyd.

Well, unlike Michael Portillo, I won't even try to fake my surprise, simply because surprised I am not!
The above story is one valid explanation of the origins of the peculiar Russian word for 'railway station'.
There is, however, another version (etymology is not a science, you know). The first railway in Russia (in the early 19th century) connected the then capital - St. Petersburg - with the summer residence of the Tsars in the suburban village of Tsarskoye Selo ('Tsars' Village'). The village terminal, which is still there, was an attractive and solid structure with large windows where - in-between the very rare trains - musical recitals and concerts were held (what a good example for some modern British stations to imitate, don't you think?). Singing, of course, was featuring prominently in those concerts, so the terminal building became known as 'vokal'niy zal' which means 'vocals hall'. As it was Russia's first ever railway station (outside St. Petersburg that is), the terminal building's abbreviated name 'vokzal' came to denote ANY railway station!

"Simples!" - as the cute "Russian" meerkat from a popular TV ad would say.

I would be interested to hear from you about the likely origins of other railway terms - like platform, locomotive (this one is easy), diesel (even easier) etc. And how about 'pantograph'? Etymology may not be a science, but it is definitely fun!

And do take a moment to look at my brand-new podcast on E&T's brand-new website. You can find the link to it (with some difficulty: teething problems, you know) on the following webpage: www.eandtmagazine.com/podcast
I look forward to your comments!

So long, overseas timetable

Vitali Vitaliev — 2011-01-19T12:39:49 00

There was, amidst the countless goodbyes and hellos that marked the passing of another year, one that crept by almost totally unnoticed in 2010. Only the occasional train buff, railway professional, or dromomaniac - a person experiencing an irresistible passion for purposeless travels - will have sensed the event.

In November, the very last edition of Thomas Cook's 'Overseas Timetable' was released, drawing to a close the global phenomenon that had shaped the lives of real travellers as well as bringing joy and hope to countless armchair buccaneers since 1873.

What can be so exciting about 600 pages of train-times and city maps? Who should mourn the passing of small-print advising those who take the 0600 train from Anchorage to Beaver Creek in Alaska that 'it is the passenger's responsibility to obtain overnight accommodation at Beaver Creek, it is not included in the fare'? Allow me to explain.

My nickname at school was 'machinist' (engine-driver), and I was secretly proud of it.

I treasured back issues of the Union of Railway Workers newspaper Gudok (Hooter), cutting out bleak and fuzzy photos of stations, sleeping-car attendants and engine drivers.

I collected the drab and badly printed Soviet train timetables and never parted with a pocket-sized plastic-bound edition of 'Schematic Atlas of the USSR's Railways'. While most of my schoolmates would keep marbles or beetles, I treasured a tarred wooden chip, which I had covertly peeled off a freight car at a railway station and stored in an empty matchbox. I would often open the box and sniff it; my classmates thought it reeked of tar, but to me it conjured adventurous journeys and sunsets in the tropics.

In the evenings, before falling asleep on my old-fashioned narrow bed, I would knock its nickel-plated leg gently with my knuckles - ta-ta, ta-ta; ta-ta, ta-ta - to imitate the rattling of train wheels. I risked waking my parents, who slept close by in the same and only room of our flat, just in order to feel like I was drifting off to the sweet music of the railroad.

No other technology has ever felt as romantic and as appealing to me as railways. Trains, stations, maps and timetables were so special because, with freedom of movement severely restricted in the former USSR, I travelled very, very seldom. It was the forbidden fruit. Without knowing it, by the age of 14, I had turned into a typical armchair traveller, a vicarious adventurer with no prospect of ever seeing the world.

The industrial Ukrainian city where I lived was not resplendent with masterpieces of architecture or historic monuments, except for a regulation statue of Lenin with his outstretched hand pointing either to the bright future or, as local wits assured, to the nearest vodka shop.

The only building of architectural note was a huge railway terminal - an ugly and pompous structure. Inside, it was covered with frescos in the best traditions of Socialist Realism: heroic workers and peasant women with bulging eyes clutching red banners in their sinewy muscular hands. That particular style of architecture and interior design was referred to (in whispers, of course) as 'Stalin Gothic'.

Despite its ugliness and intimidating proportions, the railway station used to attract me like an oversized magnet. Playing truant, I used to walk there across the whole city with my best friend and fellow travel-fanatic, Sasha. We would stand on a wooden footbridge hanging above the tracks and gape at moving trains below for hours on end, until our heads started spinning and we had the illusion that it was we who were moving, floating in the air above immobile train carriages.

It was from there that we once ventured on our first real journey - 'real' meaning that we travelled on our own, without parents or any other adults to supervise us. Of course, the whole plot was planned and executed in utter secrecy, under cover of a normal school day. It was just a 40-minute ride on a shuttle train, but to us it was no less dangerous and revealing than the first round-the-world voyage of Magellan.

In line with the forced Soviet ardour, almost all stations and whistle-stops on our way had 'krasniy' (red) in their names: Red Village, Red Field, Red Corner, Red Excavator, even Red Whitewash, as far as I can recall. We got off the train in the sleepy suburban town of Liubotin, bought a couple of elderly, wrinkled meat-pies at a station kiosk. Having made no provision for overnight accommodation, as visitors to the remote and unknown to us Alaskan settlement of Beaver Creek will be advised by 'Overseas Timetable' - we promptly took the same shuttle back to the city. It was simply unforgettable - looking through the window of the moving (or rather crawling) train, chewing meat pies and being on our own.

At times, I can still feel the oily aftertaste of those cheap (and not very fresh) meat pies on my lips. I did feel it again when leafing through the very last edition of 'Overseas Timetable' - that ultimate armchair traveller's Bible.

So what made 'Overseas Timetable' special and worthy of mourning? The answer, I think, is in the eyes of the beholder - or traveller, in this case. For some, the need to 'obtain overnight accommodation at Beaver Creek' is an inconvenience and waste of time. For others, it is the blue forest and the snow, and a solitary Orthodox church in the shadow of a mountain scratching the vast, stormy and pinkish (as if chronically inflamed and itchy) Alaskan skies with its missile-shaped onion dome...

Rest in peace, 'Overseas Timetable'. We will never forget you.