MARK GODDARD: former racing driver now managing third-tier racing organization in Asia

MARK GODDARD is the managing director of the Asian Forumula Three Corporation, which is based in Manila in the Philippines. Though he is British, there are a lot of Brits involved in the Asian racing scene, probably because it's a pretty new thing to have competitive racing events in Asia, and there are so many British expats living in Australia. Also, Asia means opportunities that don't exist for many drivers in Britain, as the cost of having a team in Asia is a fraction of what it would cost in Britain (about $160,000 US as opposed to the $800,000 it would cost in Britain).

F3 is for newer drivers, by winning these races a driver can work their way up to the Formula One racing that gets the big audiences and sponsorship money.

The Asian Formula Three Corporation are eight racing teams, including "Team Goddard", of which Mark Goddard is the Team Principal. Thus he probably traveled with his team to Zuhai China for the first 3 rounds in January, to Albert Park Australia in March, and I think the team isn't advancing farther than that this year but if they did they would go to Sentul Indonesia in May and finally back to Zuhai China in July.

Mr. Goddard never got that far as a driver, his best showing was finishing 3rd in the B-series in British F3. But was apparently a roomate of former worldclass F1 driving Eddie Irvine, who even was able to win with cars designed by overrated Jaguar, while that company briefly experimented with F1 racing. Irvine is now the fifth richest person in northern Ireland.

SCID: a severe congenital disease, a chess database, a database using meta-application, a diagnostic procedure, and an ID# from fiber optic technology

SEVERE COMBINED IMMUNODEFICIENCY is one kind of SCID -- being born without an effective immune system. This is what David Vetter, the original Bubble Boy, suffered from, forcing him to live his short life in a bubble, venturing out a couple of times in a suit made by NASA. Nowadays someone born with a SCID doesn't have to live in a sanitized bubble, they can give them bone marrow transplants.

SHANE'S CHESS INFORMATION DATABASE is another SCID. It is a nice way of gathering many different chess games played by chess masters and comparing them. It is available for Unix, Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems. It is free and open source -- though apparently some of the code was stolen from a similar application, ChessDB.

STRUCTURED CLINICAL INTERVIEWS FOR DSM-IV (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is another SCID. This is a process developed for researchers to obtain a diagnosis of what mental disorders someone they are interviewing has. DSM-IV is the major classification system used across the United States, and its classifications are recognized by Psychologists, Biologists, Sociologists and other Ologists.

SOURCE CODE IN DATABASE is an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment (an application made for the development of other applications) that uses a database to store bundles of pre-packaged code for the coder who uses it.

Finally, SCID is a SONET CARRIER IDENTIFICATION, SONET being the protocol by which data is decoded, through pulses of light carried on fiber optic cable, and the carrier (probably) being a telecom. For instance, Verizon will provide you with some SCID codes if you buy service from them using SONET.

HUGO HERGESELL: a scientist tests the atmosphere for the air war

Hugo Hergesell was a German meteorologist born in 1859 in Bromberg in Prussia, which is and was also called Bydgoszcz to the Poles. The Teutonic Knights took it briefly in the 14th century, and then Prussia took it in the first division of Poland in 1772. It had been split between the powers of Prussia, Russia, and Austria in an agreement in order to maintain the balance of power. Frederick The Great treated his new subjects well, unlike what would happen to them later when Hitler's Wehrmacht were to annex the place in 1938.

Hergesell became a professor of meteorology at the University of Strasbourg, the capital of another historically contentious territory, Alsace (taken by Germany in 1871, then reclaimed by France after WWI, and taken again by Germany in WWII, now again part of France). He conducted many of the first important research on the atmosphere using balloons, manned and unmanned, in the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th century. This research was both a product of and integral to the development of aviation technology. This may be why he was so close with Kaiser Wilhelm, the agressive militaristic leader of the German state, and why they went on trips together in the years preceding WWI. In an expedition to Tenerife, an Island posession of Spain off of the West coast of Africa (conveniently located between Germany and its German colonies), Hergesell helped set up weather stations donated by the Kaiser himself.

In 1934, Hergesell was awarded the Third Reich's medal for German achiever's, the Eagle Cross, for his contributions to Science and Avaiation -- probably pinned on his chest by Adolf Hitler himself, as was usually done. Hergesell died in 1938 at the outbreak of the Second World War.

THE SOUTH-WEST AFRICA CAMPAIGN: Brits order Boers to kick Germans out of their favorite African colony

One of the first actions taken by the British Empire in Africa after hostilities had broken out in World War I was to get their South African client government to attack the German's South West African colony, in the area now known as Namibia. In August 1914 Louis Botha, the Prime Minister of modern South Africa's predecessor nation, The Union of South Africa, said he could send some troops to France. London asked him if he could invade German South West Africa instead, and Botha gave the order to invade to his armed forces.

However, this wasn't what many of his Generals or other soldiers of the Boers wanted to do. Only 12 years before, the Boers had been at war with Britain, and Britain had been responsible for a terrible scorched earth campaign against the Boers, finally sending tens of thousands of them to concentration camps (this is where the name actually comes from, they were concentrated in small areas). Some 27,000 whites and 14,000 blacks or more died of starvation and disease. Other blacks, maybe as many as 600,000 or so, were killed by the Boers during this time, as the oppressive Boers thought the Blacks were allying or might ally with the British. Well that's off the point, the real issue was that Germany had been their ally during this 'Second Boer War' of 1899-1902. Many of the Boers had escaped across the border and never signed the peace agreement and fealty to the British government that Britain had made the Boers sign as a condition of peace after defeating them.

And so it was that when the call to arms came, some Boer Generals were conspiring together to protest, resign, rebel -- some combination of these. But what really set off the Maritz rebellion was the death of Koos de la Ray, General and war hero of the Second Boer War, when the car he was riding in was gunned down after riding through a government roadblock. The driver probably thought the government set up the roadblock to arrest the General, who was on his way to meet up with other conspiring war leaders opposed to the British. In reality the roadblock was set up to stop a group of murderous bandits known as the Foster Gang. His death on September 15, 1914 triggered the rebellion -- which was quashed pretty quickly by the Union of SA forces, who stayed true to their oath to the British Government.

The Boers weren't kind to the indiginous people of South Africa, as we know. But the Germans who they had kicked out by 1915 were actually worse. The first Genocide of the 20th century was not the Armenian genocide, as I suggested in an earlier post. It was actually the attempted German extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples -- specifically singled out for their race and identity for destruction, after they rebelled against the German colonists (The Germans had been enslaving their people to work on farms and in diamond mines, expropriating their land and settling the area). By 1907 there were only a small fraction of their original population left.

TRANSMEDIALE: Berlin avante garde music festival too cool for the U.S.

Transmediale is a festival held in the Club Transmediale since 2001, which receives a major grant from the German government to invite music and video artists from around the world for a several weeks avante garde noise and video extravaganza.

The U.S. government doesn't put up money for this kind of thing. But a much smaller percentage of the U.S. population is into this kind of art. Now if the government did fund it, then there would be an event which would get a bigger audience for it. But I can only imagine it really working out in New York City. And even though New York City is New York City, it's still not Berlin, which really specializes in this kind of hipster avante garde scene. I can imagine this festival happening in Williamsburg Brooklyn -- and attracting a lot of Germans, especially.

HAMMARLUND: the radio manufacturer that put the ham in hammy

Hammarlund was one of the first manufacturers of radio equipment, founded by Oskar Hammarlund, a Swedish immagrant to the USA, in New York City in 1910. It became the biggest name in radios just before and during WWII, when their radios, particularly the "Super Pro" radio as pictured above, was bought in large quantities by the US government for military use. The resulting surplus ensured that these radios are still found and collected by vintage radio collectors today. The company itself shut its doors in the 60s.

The name "Hammarlund" may be the origin of the "ham radio operator", a term used to refer to an amateur user of radio equipment to broadcast. These people still need a license to do so, and the reason for this may be that in time of war these folks could be useful to the government to get word out -- of a zombie attack, for instance.

I wonder also if it might have been the source of another use -- to "ham it up", to overract, as people did in the serial radio shows of the 1930s and 40s.