The memory hierarchy is one of the abstractions in computer architecture that has withstood the test of time for at least the past 30 years. It was a lot simpler in the '80s, since computers did not have caches and while mainframes had access to tape storage, most microcomputers did not have hard disk drives.
There are many figures of merit to memory. The most important consideration is the distinction between size and speed: you can have one or the other. There are frontiers to what is possible with memory using today's technology. There is no memory that has the capacity of a modern hard disk with the access time of an CPU register, even for all the money in the world. However, since a computer needs to be able to execute programs using instruction and data memory very quickly, and it needs to store large files for future use, there need to be present multiple levels of memory in all digital systems except for the most very basic embedded systems. Other considerations exist: cost per gigabyte, reliability, physical size, and expandability.
Volatility
An unmentioned characteristic of the fastest memory is that it is invariably short-term. It is possible to execute code that rewrites the entire register file a million times in the blink of an eye. The SRAM on the processor, known as the cache, is short-term memory for the processor and it is constantly updated to whatever is most likely to be used by the processor, possibly changing every entry in the table every time a new process is completed. DRAM modules, historically and still known as "main memory," need to be constantly refreshed and they vanish when the power is out. Flash memory is persistent semiconductor memory, but compared to a disk it cannot be written as frequently; the mean longevity of flash-based memory as of this writing is about 10,000 writes; nevertheless, manufacturers as of 2013 are capable of warrantying SSDs (solid-state drives, or hard drives based on flash) to the same length as conventional disk drives. Nevertheless, the cost per gigabyte of semiconductors is much more than magnetic disk platters, so HDDs remain dominant for persistent storage at this time.
The bad old days
In the beginning, there was obviously no defined hierarchy. However, even the earliest machines had registers, even if it was only an accumulator for intermediate arithmetic results. The computer programs of the 1940s to 1960s were mostly arithmetical, designed to provide mathematical solutions to artillery trajectories, business solutions, and bookkeeping batch processing. Instructions and data still had to be entered into the machine's memory from punched cards or tape, and the "main memory" went through some ugly experimentation (UNIVAC used mercury delay line memory) until in 1954 it settled on magnetic core memory. This had a great run, but by the end of the 1970s it had been totally superseded by semiconductor-based DRAM.
All of these memories were slow (DRAM is still very slow compared to CPUs today and it will never catch up), but the main performance bottleneck has almost always been getting data into memory. It took far longer to enter the punched cards and read them into the machine than it did to execute the instructions. Although memories became larger and could store ever more complex programs, they were always outpaced by the demands of programs. Efficient memory usage was especially critical on the small-scale microcomputers that were the vanguard of the PC revolution in the early 1980s. These had a small amount of ROM that was always loaded when the computer was powered on to run the BIOS; the cheaper 8-bit home computers like the VIC-20 and Apple IIe did not have hard disk drives and this untouchable ROM was the only persistent memory on the machine, save for external floppy disks. The IBM PC started shipping with a hard drive in 1983, and eventually everybody else got the idea.
Does anyone miss reading programs into memory on microcomputers using floppy disks, or, even worse, compact cassettes? Neither do I. Computers sucked back then. I can be nostalgic about some aspects of old technology, but we should be infinitely grateful for what the past 20 years has brought us in terms of computing.
In the 1980s, the processor rarely had access to any on-chip memory aside from the register file, and coders in assembly (or compilers, for that matter) routinely used as many of the registers as they could, so it was impossible to use them for any kind of storage. DRAM was universally used to load programs, but, as previously stated, was just as slow relative to the CPU then as it is now. To get around this problem, Intel started putting L1 cache memory on-chip for the 486 processor, and with the Pentium Pro they finally had L1 and L2 caches. Cache memory stands alongside pipelining and multiple cores as one of the most important breakthroughs in microprocessors. Since then we've added L3 cache as well, since the roles of each cache level have changed a bit with multiple cores on the same die, but the memory hierarchy has remained in the same form since c. 1995.
Priebe's analogy*
All of the various types of memory have different roles to play. They are all needed in some way. All general purpose computers built nowadays will have a CPU with a register file, onboard cache, and will need RAM on the motherboard, and will probably also need an SSD or HDD. For truly massive data storage, tertiary storage sits below the disk.
To understand the role they each play, and the timeliness versus capacity tradeoff, I'll share with you Priebe's analogy. Suppose you are watching a football game at home. You are responsible for providing access to beer whenever one of your friends runs empty.
All beer enters your mouth from a bottle in your hand. Think of a beer in your hand as a register (and when everyone present in the party has a beer in their hand, you may be said to be fully utilizing the register file). It is so quickly available that it is practically no latency. However, just as you can only hold one beer in your hand, the register file can't hold much data, perhaps on the order of hundreds of bytes.
You could go to the fridge each time someone wants a beer (perhaps like you once did in the olden days) but you have yourself a fancy cooler onsite. Think of the cooler as the cache. This cooler also provides a short access time, although not as quite as short as bringing the bottle to your lips, you can still lean over, flip the lid, and grab a cold one in a few seconds. It takes maybe ten times longer to do this than to drink from a beer that is already in your hand, but this can't be helped. If you use an operand in the register for as long as you can and consistently find what you need in the cache, it's the best possible outcome.
The fridge is the lowest level of access that could be described as readily available. Think of the fridge as main memory. You're going to take a couple minutes to get what you need and load the cooler back up, making it much less convenient. However, it is still basically present. If someone had beer in their fridge, they would treat it like it was on the premises. Going into memory is a distinct penalty from using the cache, but it is only thousands of times slower. I guess if we wanted to make it realistic, the main memory access should take hours compared to the cache access! Still, as we're going to see, it could be a lot worse.
You have a large party and they consume all the beer in the fridge! If the fridge is empty, this is a very bad thing. You can't cancel all the festivities, but everyone is in for a long wait. You have to go to the store to get more beer. Think of the supermarket as the disk drive, or secondary storage. The difference between walking to the fridge to retrieve even one beer compared to driving through heavy traffic and standing in an enormous checkout line to purchase a new supply of beer, which you had to get at the rearmost aisle, is somewhat analogous to the difference between a memory access and a disk access. Except that a disk access is on the scale of milliseconds, which amounts to millions of cycles. It's massively slower than main memory, so it's truly a tragedy for performance whenever a disk access occurs (sometimes through a page fault), but its size is practically unlimited for most purposes.
For desktops, the disk is as far down as the hierarchy goes and it is where the example ended in class. However, I personally wanted to carry it further! If an organization had implausibly high demands for beer and denuded an entire store of its supply, they would just go to another one, and another until their demands were met. Likewise, a user who needed more storage space than a single disk would simply have to buy more disks until the demand was satisfied. However, there are businesses whose sole role is to deal in beer and provide it to people, and for them, their own supply might exceed that of any supermarket's supply, so it makes sense that they would incorporate a layer of supply that went above and beyond going to the store and buying some. Likewise, there are archives and databases of tertiary storage which store petabytes of data, far more than any individual would normally acquire, and stores them on magnetic tape libraries, swapping between sections of the library as needed. Accessing data on a tape archive amounts to billions of cycles. It's so slow that, using the same time scale as the previous examples, you could think of tertiary storage as founding a brewery and building it from the ground up to be one of the world's largest breweries. It's incredibly, agonizingly slow, but archives do need to exist to back up data in huge quantities, just like someone had to spend the time to make a successful brewing company, or else we wouldn't have beer available to us in the first place.
*- This analogy was mentioned in a lecture of my introductory computer architecture class as taught by Dr. Apan Qasem in Spring 2013. Dr. Roger Priebe is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at Texas State University, my alma mater. Dr. Qasem is an Assistant Professor at the same institution.
This is a very underrated action movie. The scenes in the sub are rather terrifying. I really like Rock Hudson in this role. I think Patrick McGoohan also did a fantastic job. I also like the cars.
The Marines arrive
The first tenth of the movie takes place in the United Kingdom, at a US submarine base. US Marines are quickly mustered as part of a very hush-hush rescue operation in the Arctic. They are carried to the base in trucks that are obviously not of local manufacture.
1965 Ford F-100
It's clearly visible that these are Ford trucks with the spaced-out F O R D lettering across the grill. The general shape of the truck leads us into the 1961-1966 fourth generation. The fact that the amber turn signals are mounted co-linearly with the Ford lettering means that it must be 1965-1966, and the fact that it uses the simple eggcrate grill rather than the more overwrought later grill makes it pretty definitively a 1965 Ford F-100. If this movie were not made in 1968, leaving no doubt that the trucks can be identified by grill trim, then it would be a lot harder to establish the provenance of these trucks. On older trucks (even moreso than cars), grills are often swapped for adjacent model years by the restorers to fit with their own tastes or what parts are available. The military versions obviously use painted trim rather than chrome on the grill, but the details are all still there to find out.
Jones's escort vehicle
Right after the convoy pulls away, a poncy British luxury car pops up. Keen eyes will notice that it's an obviously Bentley grill, but identifying it from the front-end only is very difficult. If there were any questions that it's a Bentley, the winged B logo can be seen clearly in an earlier scene.
Even in the 1960s, Rolls-Royce and Bentley still often allowed customers to purchase rolling chassis whose bodywork would be built up by outside coachbuilders. However, by the late 1940s RR-Bentley were also employing John Polwhele Blatchley to design in-house bodywork designs. With a separate chassis, the coachbuilders had a free hand in where to make the door hinges, and Blatchley's "standard steel sports saloon" design for the Bentley Mark VI chose to have suicide front doors (with hinges at the rear) and conventional rear doors (hinges at the front). So too does the car in this movie. But the same could also be said about the R Type, its successor.
From the rear...
The rear shots of the car while driving through the countryside are what shows that it must be a Mark VI and not the later R Type: the rather stubby boot. The distinguishing feature between the R Type and earlier Mark VI was that the former had a much longer boot. The fact that the Mark VI was over twice as common on British roads also makes it a more obvious choice to put in the film.
Bentley didn't do distinct model years (far too American and vulgar) so it's not straightforward to distinguish between the earliest 1946 Mark VIs and the latest from 1952; this car, by my estimation, could come from anywhere in that timeframe.
...the difference is clear. Bentley Mark VI for sure.
Ah, this is a great film. One of the exemplars of the film noir genre. This is one of several high-quality Bogart/Bacall pictures by Warner Bros. in the 1940s. Bogie is at his smoothest and cleverest. I loved the character of Philip Marlowe and the fact that he drove around in the same car throughout the movie meant that it was begging to be named. The car itself was not called upon to do any dangerous chases, and towards the end of the movie he lets air out of one of his own tires as an excuse to request help from the auto shop which is a front for more sinister operations.
Marlowe doesn't ask for any money from the General above his "$25 a day plus expenses". A working man's car suits a working man's wage. It's clearly a 1938 Plymouth coupe. In 1946, most Americans still had prewar cars, and the last ones had been built in very early 1942. By 1949, most of these had been replaced with new cars. Still, the expansion of the market was inexhaustible, and demand kept outpacing supply until about 1954, when the Ford-Chevy price war resulted in record sales for both, and started pushing the independents out of business.
A beautifully preserved '38 Plymouth
An additional fun fact- the car wasn't the only old thing about the movie when it was released. Filming on The Big Sleep was actually completed early in 1945, but it lay on a shelf until Warner Bros. finished releasing its backlog of war-related films, since these were assumed to have a dwindling shelf life, while The Big Sleep was not time-sensitive. The wartime scenery includes a "B" fuel ration window sticker on Marlowe's Plymouth. This entitled him to a whopping eight gallons of gasoline per week!
Welcome to the "Name that Car" feature, where I attempt to provide a solid identification of an interesting or well-known car in film, video games, or other visual media.
It's 1999. If you're a cool kid, you have a PlayStation. I wasn't a cool kid and I had a Nintendo 64. Just between Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time, I probably had more fun than the cool kids. But that's a subject left for another article.
Driver was a very popular PS-1 game released in 1999. I got to play just a bit of it on my brother's PlayStation. The general idea is that you were a getaway driver for various criminals and you had to start off by proving your driving skills. The rest of the game seemed to involve escaping from cops, keeping your "felony level" down, not wrecking your ride too much, meeting time deadlines, and blah blah blah... Grand Theft Auto III would become so enormously popular two years later that we already fully know how this kind of game operates.
But unlike in GTA, you couldn't pick your ride. Oh no, that would be too easy. It's not about the car, it's about the driver! So to show how awesome you are, you get to tool around in what looks like a lousy Malaise-mobile. Let's take a few looks at it.
Based on the general order of the back end I'm going to start with 70s Buick. If the front end didn't have dual headlights, I would say it's a perfect 1975-1979 Buick Skylark coupe. The side profile is simple, just a straight line running across with a curved roofline going backwards to a fairly stubby trunk. This points me in the direction of the GM X-body from the mid-to-late 1970s, something shared with the Chevy Nova, Pontiac Ventura, and Oldsmobile Omega. Only the Buick has that characteristic slatted grill treatment. Still, the dual headlights are quite clearly present, which disqualifies that prediction. We have to find a closest match!
The Buick Regals from 1973-1977 also have the grill treatment we're looking for, while they do have the vestigial inside lights that match the square shape of the Driver car. From the front it's a dead ringer. The back end is not quite as pinched with the bumper not quite as high, but let's chalk it up to artistic exaggeration on the part of the game designers. From the side, it looks like the Driver car is too stubby to be a longer pre-1977 Buick, but this isn't carried over to other views of the car which incorporate a partial angle. With few polygons to play with, the swoopy profile of the Regal might have been mashed a bit for that side view. I'm going with a 1975 Buick Regal black coupe, final answer.
It really helps to see these two images, for comparison. Got a better idea than me? Feel free to mention it in the comments.
For one of the best board games ever, Monopoly has gotten poor treatment in the digital realm.
The board game
I am a very big fan of a game of Monopoly on a plain, unadorned board. There is nothing like the joy of starting a Monopoly game with your family or best friends. If you want to have some unpredictability, you'll need more than two people. On the other hand, because so much of the game is spent on players planning their moves, six or more players is unwieldy. With three to five players, you've got a fun game going.
One of the most charming factors about Monopoly is its accessibility. There are metal tokens for player characters, there are title deed cards, there is money, and there are houses, hotels, chance cards, and community chest cards. But none of this clutter adversely affects the ability to start a game and play it. While firmly outside of the realm of real life, all of the mechanics of the game are sensible.
The single most endearing factor about Monopoly is clearly its customizability. With all of these game elements in play, and several ambiguous board locations (Free Parking?) there are many opportunities for players to experiment with new rules, and keep those that tend to speed gameplay or make it more exciting.
Probably all of my readers have played to the end of a Monopoly game at least once. But if the money supply is kept stagnant except for GO money, the following problems arise:
Each player starts with $1500 and can only get it from other players or from passing GO and obtaining $200 each lap of the board. This puts a firm brake on the supply of money needed to buy property and trade.
The only other way to obtain money is through the pittances available on Chance and Community Chest. But what these cards giveth with one hand, they taketh away with the other: street repairs, school tax, as well as the income tax and luxury tax squares, will have the bank eating up more money than it would yield from the second place beauty contest opportunities.
When in Jail, according to the traditional rules, you can still obtain money from your properties. It makes Jail a cushy place to be.
Free Parking is simply a blank square. It is begging for more meaning.
We can solve all of these problems with the addition of very common "house rules":
Free Parking Jackpot: Start with $500 under Free Parking. All monies taken from players on Luxury Tax, Income Tax, Chance, or Community Chest go straight into the Free Parking pool. Basically, whenever the bank is owed money, it goes into the Free Parking pool instead. Whoever lands on Free Parking gets the jackpot. After the jackpot is won, it's started off again with $500 from the bank.
No rent can be collected from players in Jail. In the late stages of the game, Jail is a luxury because players inside don't have to go around the board for three turns unless they roll doubles. Players should have a disincentive to go to Jail, and this can be enforced by not paying them for their own property usage while incarcerated.
Random bargaining. For example, if a creditor asks a debtor to pay only half because that would prevent his or her bankruptcy, it is allowed. Whatever satisfies the creditor is OK.
The video game version
Why shouldn't Monopoly prove to be a decent video game? I know it would have to be priced lower than most modern video games, since a Monopoly board, if not in your closet already, can certainly be found for under $20. With the game mechanics already so well-known, it sounds like development should be quick and painless, and correspondingly cheap. A video game version of Monopoly should exist, because it would solve the biggest problems with the game as it currently exists.
Length. Some rounds take hours and hours to conclude, and it would be nice to save the current state of the game and get back to it at a later time, without leaving the board and all of its cards and doodads sitting on the kitchen table.
Cheating. If the banker is a computer, and the dice rolls are truly randomized, cheating is practically impossible. If you like playing with your cousin Frank but you know he's a cheater, this could let him get in on the game.
More variations. People shell out decent money to buy countless specialty versions of Monopoly. There is almost no cost associated with porting different "skins" to the digital board and pieces. Why hasn't it been done? Why can't we have a choice of various game modes?
We should start with a list of some of the attempts that were made before sorted by console, with the year of release, and a review score following. This is by no means an exhaustive list; there are well over a dozen unique Monopoly games.
Sega Genesis, 1992, 60/100 (Sega-16) Nintendo 64, 2000, 50/100 (X64) Playstation, 1997, 42/100 (Gamespot) Nintendo Entertainment System, 1991, 6.25/10 (Electronic Gaming Monthly) Windows, 1995, 60/100 (PC Games) Windows, 1997, 3/5 (High Score)
Current version for sale
The Playstation port of Monopoly suffered from other even worse reviews, but I've given the most median score I could find. Generally they are rated poor-to-middling. The most recent EA version, released in 2008 for PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360, is not generally considered a classic either, scoring 54% for PS3 and 56% for Xbox on Metacritic.
They are sometimes rated higher in retrospect, after prices plummet and you can find an old-gen Monopoly game for spare change. But if the low expectations engendered by depreciation actually affect how good a game is, then surely we would all be ignoring the new franchises out today and spending our time on carts from Second Time Around. Come to think of it, that actually sounds appealing to me, since the cost of a new video game console and $50-60 games is a bit perilous to me. But I'm not everyone.
The problems
Let me take an archetypal example of the problem with Monopoly video games: Monopoly for SNES, a game that I owned and never liked. Why was it bad?
Transactions should be natural and quick in Monopoly. Instead, with the necessity of switching between menus and submenus to find the right property and select the correct amount of money in your deal, dealing becomes a hassle and something you'd rather avoid. At its heart, Monopoly is a board game with many different actions that are done most comfortably with human hands, and it is hard to apply the same level of choices to a video game with just a handful of buttons.
Turn-based video games don't allow continuous communications between players. Table-talk is essential or any board game would be stiflingly dull.
The rules of the game cannot be adjusted infinitely. There was no ability to change the rules, which means it proceeded at a rate that I found dull.
It's hard to graphically improve the real world. We're all used to playing Monopoly in board game form. Video games can hardly make haptic tasks like rolling dice and handling money any better than the real thing. The makers like to incorporate sound bites and animations as well, and while these might be funny the first game you play, it's annoying to hear the same one-liner again after the one hundredth time you've been released from Jail.
Computers are not your friends. Monopoly is not like chess. We do not play Monopoly or most other board games to become masters with the highest ranking. We play because the experience is fun with our friends and family. Computers are stiff bargainers and utterly joyless in deal mongering.
Despite all these problems, Monopoly remains a perennial remake for each subsequent video game console generation. The general lackluster feel of each video game seems to have no effect on the popularity of the board game itself. Some board games are less popular than they were before, but Monopoly is the flagship of the huge Hasbro enterprise, and it still sells in significant quantities and earns considerable revenue for Hasbro, helped no doubt by the presence of nearly 100 specialty versions.
Can any board games translate well to video games?
Definitely. Chess is almost better in digital form than physical form. Chess is an art form with no random chance whatsoever, where there is such a huge continuum of expertise that poor players will never defeat superior players. This factor is a bit of a barrier to entry for those who are not prepared to learn how to improve, and a point of embarrassment for many poor players (me included). Playing against a decent chess AI will usually also end in defeat, but at least chess experience can be gained this way without congratulating a human being for beating you.
Chess's seriousness is part of the essence of it. Nobody expects a chess AI to be a wordsmith. And that's worked for the entirety of video games during the 20th century, which could only support the logic involved in predicting how to win the game, not how to entertain you.
The future
A board game like Monopoly is fun in its original form because it involves human beings who are playing a game. The table talk, bickering, random gags, haggling, and even cheating are elements of human interaction that add in intangible ways to the gameplay, but haven't yet been emulated by computers.
Robust human-computer interaction is predicted by most experts for the coming years. Researchers for companies and universities have been trying to make robots more lifelike, with more advanced mannerisms and gestures. This is an extremely ambitious task that will no doubt take decades to complete. However, the task of believable computer personalities simply in the digital realm (using inputs from a user's keyboard and returning text or even voice responses) is more readily achievable and I think that it will start to appear in user interfaces and video games long before physical robots start to do so. Robotics will be expensive for a very long time to come, but computing power is still expanding with Moore's Law, and a purely software-based human simulation will be more sooner developed, and more readily available, than a human simulation which incorporates a physical body.
I am not myopically worried about making a good Monopoly video game. What I suggest is not so much a proposal that adding intelligent human-like AI to Monopoly would make it a good game, as a proposal that we can use the mechanics of Monopoly and an observation of the social behavior involved, in order to improve the state of human-computer interaction. When computers become decent social companions in a game, they are one step closer to being decent companions in the real world.
As far as this one game is concerned, I think that there will always be a role for Monopoly on a home video game system. It's just such a shame that it never translates as well as it should. The ingredients for a classic Monopoly video game shouldn't be hard to isolate. I think you should start with:
A user interface that lets you see your own properties, and those of your others, with relative ease, so even though you can't blow on the dice and whisper your demand, at least you know right off the bat what you don't want to roll to stay alive.
A huge variability in rules changes. They have been getting better at this in more recent versions.
Computers which are unpredictable and entertaining. Let's throw in the option of making your opponents gullible 8-year-olds, or by plying everyone at the table with booze.
The following is a reworded re-post of a Facebook note that I wrote in 2007.
If you believe in the validity of IQ (intelligence quotient), then the inevitable conclusion of the Flynn effect, which states that IQ scores tend to rise over time, is that we are getting smarter. Going back one generation would see marginally lower IQ scores, and going back one more would compound the effect. Wouldn't it be great if we could entitle ourselves to a pat on the back for just being born in this time period? How great does it feel to be the smartest generation that ever lived?
However, I don't think that IQ is a measurement that stands up well to the course of time. If you extrapolated backwords and accounted for regional differences, the inhabitants of Salina, Kansas, USA in 1895 would not appear to rank high in terms of brainpower. And yet here is their 8th grade final exam:
8th Grade
Final Exam: Salina, KS -1895 Grammar
(Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters. 2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no
modifications. 3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph. 4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal
parts of "lie," "play,"' and "run." 5. Define case; Illustrate each case. 6. What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of
punctuation. 7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show
therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
***************************************** Arithmetic
(Time, 1.25 hours) 1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic. 2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide.
How many bushels of wheat will it hold? 3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at
50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare? 4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the
necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have
$104 for incidentals? 5. Find the cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton. 6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7
percent. 7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft.
long at $20 per foot? 8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10
percent. 9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the
distance of which is 640 rods? 10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.
******************************************** U.S.
History (Time, 45 minutes) 1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.. 2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus. 3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War. 4. Show the territorial growth of the United States. 5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas. 6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the
Rebellion. 7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell,
Lincoln, Penn, and Howe? 8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607,
1620, 1800, 1849, 1865..
******************************************* Orthography
(Time, one hour) 1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic,
orthography, etymology, syllabication 2. What are elementary sounds? How classified? 3. What are the following, and give examples of each:
Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals 4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.' 5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two
exceptions under each rule. 6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate
each. 7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a
word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup. 8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the
following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir,
odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last. 9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site,
sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays. 10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate
pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
********************************************* Geography
(Time, one hour) 1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend? 2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas? 3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean? 4. Describe the mountains of North America. 5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver,
Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco. 6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S. 7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of
each. 8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the
same latitude? 9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean
returns to the sources of rivers. 10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination
of the earth.
Please share your opinions and tell me if you think that was a cakewalk. If you didn't, then remember to show your elders a little more respect. And before you mention how most students never got further than 8th grade or high school, try and imagine how much harder they had to work for their college degree. Try and understand how many of them still had to get degrees in order to build the society and technology of the 20th century. The old men and women of today might not know some things you know, but they know a lot of stuff that you don't know, and might never have to learn.
Today I welcome the first non-US contribution to the Hall of Fame. You may have noticed that I prefer to tout American accomplishments, but far be it from me to marginalize any great nation, and Japan is truly one of the greatest. The story today is a heartwarming one. Toyota, the automotive equivalent of Ebenezer Scrooge or unseasoned lentils, the company that killed off every fun car that it had during the 1990s, shows us that it has a heart buried deep within. Because there are actually two Toyotas, not just one.
Two Toyotas
In the year 2007, Toyota broke a 77-year winning streak when they overtook General Motors as the world's largest automaker. The recall issues and certain quality concerns, not to mention the loss of production associated with the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, have proved enormous hurdles. And yet, Toyota broke a winning streak so long that the only longer one you'll find is in the virtually non-competitive America's Cup of yachting, and as of 2012 Toyota is still on top of the world.
But the cars that made Toyota #1 are not the cars that I want to buy. The Camry and Corolla are offensively bland and thoroughly uninspired to drive, look at, and think about. They have added comfort and quietness where previous small cars were rattly and skateboard-like. In so doing, they have made Americans in particular snobby dullards. Just when we were making some progress in the 70s and 80s in small cars, Toyota comes along and allows Americans to enjoy couches on wheels just like they did before the oil crisis, albeit with nonexistent styling, and high fuel economy and reliability to keep them top sellers. Soulless appliances all, I promise you that not one person, in Japan or America or elsewhere, has ever dreamed a daring thought or done anything exciting or noteworthy while in the process of designing or assembling a Toyota Camry. They sacrificed everything noteworthy about it so that it could sell globally, and give nothing offensive or exciting to buyers of any country.
And that's all well and good if you think of a car as an expensive device that is a practical necessity. Notwithstanding the 10 million cars that they recently recalled, Toyota will still assemble you a perfectly suitable A-to-B machine that should prove reliable and economical. This is the Toyota with which you are familiar. If the name didn't sound Japanese, and it was more generic (like Quality Motors Ltd), you might think it was Korean, or Chinese, or Russian, or even American. There are no culturally identifying cues.
What about the good old days? What if you want a Japanese car that is thoroughly Japanese, something Japanese enough that the Emperor would be chauffeured in one? Something that is not the product of ruthless accounting, a global market philosophy, and California stylists? Something that is not a hybrid of cultures, but goes back to the days when a Japanese car was made for Japan's tastes and these alone? Something of this sort could skirt the precipice of boring appliance and turn into an interesting cultural study as well as a machine that is classy, elegant, and understated. There is a second Toyota, not a globalist cash machine, but one that is interested in serving the enthusiasts of Old World luxury.
There are two Toyotas. The second of these continues to cater to the needs of Japan's traditional luxury car buyers. This part of Toyota makes the only Toyota I would ever consider owning: the Century.
The Toyota Century entered production in 1967 and at the time of its launch, it was not unique as a large Japanese luxury car. The Mitsubishi Debonair in 1964 had started the ball rolling, and the 1965 Nissan President was even better. Nissan, furthermore, was given the tremendous privilege of building the cars for the Royal Household in 1966-1967. The Nissan Prince Royals (six total) were replaced only in 1997, and by this time the Toyota Century was the obvious choice.
However, both the President and the Debonair were available with many engine options, spanning from 2.0L four-pots all the way through inline-6s and a V8 at Nissan. These cars were conservatively styled and pushed all the same buttons, but except for top-line V8 Presidents, they don't have the class as the Century. If the Century was in production at the time that the Royal Family needed to replace their creaky old Rolls-Royce and prewar Mercs, I think it would have gotten the nod.
Let's look at the production history. The Debonair was killed off in 1998, the year after the Century got a refresh that it retains to this day. The President lasted all the way to 2010, but with a measly 4.5 L V8 compared to the Century's absolutely bespoke 5.0 L V12, it's a two-pair against a straight flush.
Right off the bat, it was exclusive; the Century was V8-only from 1967 until 1997. There was only one engine offered at a time. After a 30-year production run with virtually no changes, they overhauled the design and relaunched it with a V12 engine. Let me cite the superlatives: The first and only V12 from Toyota. The first and only V12 from any Japanese manufacturer. The only V12 still in production for smoothness only, sacrificing power and fuel economy at the same time.
Why is the Century so good?
It's not made like any other Japanese car
I know, it says Toyota on the badge, but it's not made by Toyota's factories. As productive and innovative as Toyota has been over the years, and as much respect as is warranted to them, something more special is required for a true luxury car.
1967 Toyota Century
Toyota also owns a subsidiary Kanto Auto Works, Ltd. In Japanese style of the time, it was an independent contractor but did all of its work producing Toyotas (the Japanese did not yet practice vertical integration in the automotive field). As of 2012, Kanto is wholly owned by Toyota and was merged with two other contractors, losing its name in the process. Still, the Yokosuka plant which makes the Century is not the same as other Toyotas are built upon.
The cars are largely hand-made at the plant in Yokosuka. The metal for the bodywork is polished before paint even goes onto it. They use substantially more mass of paint; it's comparable to old-school Mercedes-Benz back in the days when those were made like tanks. Kanto Auto Works build every Century to order, so it will be personally yours. At this price point, it's pretty uncommon to see that.
1997 Toyota Century
It's also been utterly unchanged in appearance from 1967 to the present day. Don't believe me? Just try and spot the difference. 1997 was the year of the last redesign. You are looking at a car that you can still buy new today.
Let me give you an analog of developments in Europe, which may be more familiar to American readers. Mercedes-Benz was once, many years ago, merely a specialist luxury car company which sold cars in the hundreds. It fully reinvented itself starting in the 1960s to become a mainstream brand that was known and respected throughout the world, with sales in the millions. On the other hand, Bentley and Rolls-Royce did not modernize and expand in the same way. The Rolls-Royce Phantom is mostly handmade in England by craftsmen who spend 150 hours of labor per vehicle; even if demand were to suddenly skyrocket, they could not ramp up production to meet it. The R-Rs are also substantially more expensive than Mercedes-Benz cars, except the most expensive from that brand. If you'll permit the comparison, Lexus is the Mercedes-Benz of Japan, while the Toyota Century is that country's Rolls-Royce.
Its name is both sensible and honorable
Sakichi Toyoda (1867-1930)
Century has always used English lettering on the trunk
In America, a multi-brand strategy was essential for the Japanese to conquer new markets. But in Japan it wasn't this way; Toyota is perfectly elastic and it runs the gamut from the tiniest econoboxes to large barges like this. In Japan, Lexus does not exist, and there are merely upscale Toyotas to fill the void. Excellent, I say! Why invent a new brand for your luxury car? Sakichi Toyoda is far from as much of a celebrity as Henry Ford or Soichiro Honda, but he was an influential industrialist in Japanese history nonetheless. This model is called the "Century" because it began production in 1967, exactly one hundred years after the birth of the founder. That is sensible; it brings to mind the prewar designation of Japanese military equipment by the number of years that the current Emperor had been reigning.
Century is a venerable name for cars. Before Buick ruined the name on a dull FWD midsize, the prewar 1936 Buick Century was quite a special car, using the big Buick straight-8 in a smaller sedan body to give it a top speed of 100 mph (hence the name "century" for 100). That was very fast for a luxury car in the 1930s. Buicks of the time were very well-built cars and Buick engineers were among the most fiercely independent of all the GM staff. The 1950s Century, when it returned, repeated the formula of Buick's most powerful V8 engine in a lighter body, making it an extremely good performer.
It is as conservative as a 2600-year-old monarchy
There is no shortage of choice for full-size executive cars. In this field already, its similarly-priced competitors include the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, BMW 7-Series, Jaguar XJ, Audi A8, Lexus LS, and I suppose we'll throw in the Volvo S80 and Cadillac XTS for completeness.
The Century has every single one of these vehicles beat when it comes to care and quality of assembly. The aforementioned vehicles are made on largely conventional production lines and cannot be said to be basically hand-made, which can be said about the Century. If you want comparable production methods, you would have to go a few rungs up the ladder and compare it to a Rolls-Royce Phantom, Bentley Mulsanne, or Maybach 62 (no longer in production). Those cars are all above $300,000, so the Toyota Century, under half that price, possesses a certain amount of value. It is a traditionally craftsman-made car with no embellishment over its name and heritage, and for a fair price.
A total of four Century Royals were produced for the Imperial Household Agency. The changes included stretching the wheelbase, adding granite entry steps to the rear passenger compartment, and including Japanese rice paper headlining for the passengers. It is assumed that some additional armor and security measures are in place, but as for US Presidential vehicles, the details have been kept secret.
Toyota Century Royal for the Imperial Household
The target market for the Century, apart from its obvious appeal to the Royal Family and Japanese dignitaries because its inimitable Japanese-ness, is for hardworking executives who have worked for the greatest part of their lives towards honest prosperity. The literature surrounding the car states that "the Century is acquired through persistent work, the sort that is done in a plain but formal suit."
The Toyota Century is usually ordered in exactly the way that preserves this modesty intact. It is typically equipped with lace curtains instead of tinted windows for the backseat passengers. The curtains provide privacy more thoroughly than tinted windows, and are believed to generate less attention. Leather usually means luxury to an American, but to a Japanese buyer the soft creak of the leather seating surface breaks the complete silence that might otherwise be enjoyed, and the smell of leather is not usually considered pleasant to Japanese tastes. The seats in a Century are consequently usually ordered in wool cloth. Colors are theoretically unlimited, because the factory will make any color the buyer requests, but in practice the buyer never intentionally defiles his or her Century with a gaudy paint job, and sticks to conservative black or gray on the outside, with royal blue, black, burgundy, or dark brown interior colors.
There are modern luxury touches, of course. It has massage seats, it has reclining rear seats, and the designers have shown a certain amount of obsessiveness in making the door handles electric, so that the opening of the door has no vulgar mechanical clunk. Thereafter, the doors can be pushed gently to ajar, and the electric motors in the doors will pull them the rest of the way silently.
It's the sort of car so dignified that the chauffeur would avert his eyes when opening the car for the passenger. The Japanese used to believe that their Emperor was God incarnate. If there is a car that is fit for a representative of God on Earth, from a Japanese perspective, the Toyota Century is the obvious choice.
It has a V12 just for the sake of it
Toyota's sales forecast for the Century never exceeds 200 units per month. Bentley sells more than that! It is almost never exported outside Japan except for their embassies and ambassadors abroad. Their introduction of a V12 engine as a Century exclusive is absolutely jarring. It is unheard of for a mainstream manufacturer to put such lavish investment in a small-selling halo car except for short periods, but Toyota seems committed to indefinite production of the Century as a matter of honor.
1GZ-FE mounted in a Toyota Century
The engine's technical name is 1GZ-FE. It's a 4996cc 48-valve DOHC V12. It was given two ECUs which can each operate on one bank independently, so even if there is a complete failure of one of the banks, the engine can still operate as a straight-6. At the time of the 1997 introduction of this engine, there was an ongoing gentlemen's agreement among all Japanese manufacturers not to quote any of their engines as having more than 276 hp, regardless of what its actual output is. The Century followed in this tradition and was quoted at 276 hp, although for export they revised it to 300 hp, which is considered closer to the "true" value, most likely about 310 hp. It is blessed with ample torque, 481 Nm at peak, with over 400 Nm available at idle. That's the good kind of torque, the effortless and instantly available kind. A well-designed V12 has inherent primary and secondary engine balance that cannot be achieved with a V8. Compared to bigger Mercedes-Benz V12s, the Toyota engine is not very powerful, but that's not why you'd buy this car. You're just going for buttery smoothness, and the big Century delivers.
If you would like to know more technical details about the engine, may I direct you to an excellent article by Philip Bradshaw from New Zealand.
There is a certain old Lexus LS commercial that shows a large stack of champagne glasses on the hood of a Lexus as it accelerates on a dynamometer. The engine is so smooth and the gear changes so unnoticeable that the glasses are not perturbed at all. I would very much like to see how a Century V12 would fare. In fact, you could stack them directly on top of the engine and I bet it would do just as well. But this is an academic question, since Century buyers probably do not care to see such silly, vulgar stunts.
Toyota shows it has a soul deep down. They must have known they would never break even on the development costs of the V12 unless it was amortized among more car lines. They must have done a cost analysis and figured out that it didn't make good business sense unless the car was priced in the Rolls-Royce realm, making it a largely unreachable aspiration for the honest, persistent businessmen in plain but formal suits. And yet it was not made more expensive. It is not so stratospherically expensive that few could aspire to own one. To buy one in dollars would cost approximately $110,000. It is somewhat more expensive than a Lexus LS600h, and less expensive than many Mercedes-Benzes.
Toyota developed a lovely, smooth, docile, unique V12 just for this vehicle so as to retain its pride as Japan's most coveted state vehicle. And while it's expensive, they did not price it into the realm of fantasy. It's downright patriotic.
It is the anti-Lexus... from the folks who brought you Lexus
Japan's automakers started off with cheap offerings in the US, but as they gained acceptance, they sought to turn their compact owners into buyers who would be happy to grow into Japanese luxury car buyers.
The problem is that luxury cars are very rare in Japanese history. There was very little motorization in Japan before WWII and it was broadly agreed that cars were not a necessity for civilians. The American oversight of Japan's recovery in the period 1946-1955 reversed this trend completely, and Japan started motorization from the bottom upwards. They did not start, as in Europe and the United States, with a handful of craftsmen producing very expensive cars for the wealthy of their country and across the world. They had basically a fresh start after WWII. Japan started the 1950s with a large demand for cheap, efficient personal transportation. It was originally met with motorbikes, but as the prosperity grew, the Japanese people started to demand cars at all levels of income. But at the top, the wealthy had few choices of true luxury vehicles unless they imported something from outside Japan.
If we ignore the Century and its ilk (and for now we will) the Japanese did not mount a mainstream offensive in the export luxury market until the 1980s. They realized that a multi-brand approach, as had been pioneered by GM and others, was superior to having all models under one brand. But they also did not want to push Japanese culture in their cars, and they thought that the President and Century would simply not sell in the US. So with that in mind, Honda launched Acura and Toyota launched Lexus. Nissan followed suit with Infiniti. The smaller brands like Mazda could not afford to create an entirely new division, but it did try to match the large car segment with its ill-fated 929. With the game changed, and Americans and the rest of the world ready to buy Japanese cars at all levels of the market, Mazda and other single-brand stalwarts like Suzuki and Subaru fell behind their diversified Japanese competitors as the US and larger world market for Japanese cars grew in the 1990s and beyond.
Speaking nothing about the engineering excellence of these luxury brands, I take issue with the very names they have. Acura means nothing; it is an invented word and the criteria they used to invent it were shady marketing tricks. Likewise, Lexus was a meaningless name created simply because it sounds prosperous and slick to an upper-middle class American businessman. The innate luxury of a Lexus springs from technology only, and its heritage is as fake and cynical as a hooker's smile. You pay for something that really wants you to like it and be satisfied, but you are not a part of anything greater. No piece of history was ever written by a Lexus. It was a car planned by greedy businessmen using a Powerpoint presentation, with huge dollops of fake enthusiasm, and it was worked into production by indifferent assemblers who had no particular attachment to the Lexus brand. The existence of Lexus is a wound to car fanatics who like to think that our particular field of interest is unsullied by such crass examples of soulless consumerism. I laud Lexus for its impressive engineering, but as a brand I could never warm up to it.
If you buy a Century in preference to a Lexus, you are not trying to show off your wealth, but you are enjoying it nevertheless. A Century will get you noticed, but from a smaller section of the population, and mainly by those who appreciate quality and value. I mean value in a traditional sense implying that spending as much as one can afford to get the finest work of an expert craftsman is superior to skimping and buying a subpar product. I don't mean value in the vulgar sense of simply being cheap compared to competitors. In that field, a Lexus is somewhat better value, and really a full-spec Toyota Camry should be best. But neither of those are special, and the Century is.
Hall of Fame inclusion criteria
It is uncommon that I want to give a shout-out to vehicles or other pieces of technology that are still in current production. But, if you've been following, the Hall of Fame main criterion is that this must be under-appreciated, and the Century definitely is. You may not want to import one, you might say it's ridiculous that anyone would. You can say it's ugly if you don't have an eye for old classics, you can say it's outdated and the dash looks like a 1985 Mercury Grand Marquis. You can say all that stuff, but this is a special vehicle that is out of the ordinary and it deserves your respect. For how much effort goes into building it, is worth every yen. It's a reminder that Japan wasn't always so obsessed with tech that they forgot the philosophical experience of car ownership. When this thing goes out of production, it will be a very sad day for the state of the world's motor industry, even if it is not reported by news agencies outside Japan.
This list is a non-exhaustive singling-out of misconceptions whose enduring presence in common knowledge, both by dim-witted and bright individuals, is irritating or frightening to me.
When I have more ideas in mind, more parts will be posted. Comment if you have a suggestion.
Lincoln Town Car was not named because Americans think it's a suitable city car. This misconception is prevalent in Europe. This car was not named as a "town car" as a synonym for "city car," popular though it is to mention this nameplate as evidence that American vehicles are oversize and excessive. It comes from the historical term "town car," which described certain prewar cars with a halfway-closed cabin for the rear passengers only. We know that the full-size Lincoln is a big car; it's clearly not a "city car" as Europeans understand it.
Corvette leaf springs are not hand-me-downs from trucks. This misconception is also prevalent in Europe. The Corvette's suspension does not use longitudinal leafs like a truck. It uses transverse leafs made of composite, which provide simple, tough, and communicative suspension which also functions as an anti-roll bar. It's not in place to save money or use off-shelf parts. It's bespoke for the car, and it's an effective solution.
Vertigo is not the same as "fear of heights." The proper term for that condition is "acrophobia," while vertigo is actually a type of dizziness. Perhaps the Hitchcock film Vertigo plays a role, where the main character suffers from acrophobia, causes this misconception. Although the film itself is named Vertigo, the dialogue correctly identifies the sufferer's condition as acrophobia.
Ulysses S. Grant was not a drunkard or corrupt as President. This oft-repeated accusation is bogus and it stems from attempts to smear his personality. To be fair, this was at a time in which his administration was filled with corrupt scoundrels and the old general was too naive to notice. Grant can be described as a very decent and honest man, brilliant as a single-minded wartime strategist, who was over his head in the nuances of national politics, but tried his very best nonetheless. He is also one of the most accomplished presidential authors, with his exciting posthumous memoir selling millions.
Higher clock speeds do not equal a faster computer. This is also known as the "megahertz myth", which was tacitly approved in marketing of x86 processor-equipped machines (which usually had the highest clock speed) from the 1980s all the way to about 2004. In truth, clock speed is not a good indicator of the speed to complete tasks unless comparing different-clocked versions of the same architecture. Far more important indicators are how many clock cycles are needed for each instruction, and how long it takes to complete a given task. The death knell for this scheme came when Intel was unable to keep increasing the speed of its Pentium 4, hitting a practical barrier of 3.7 GHz before effective air cooling became impossible. In the same vein...
...multicore processors don't multiply the speed by how many cores are in the CPU. Even if the executed code is completely parallel, there will still be some overhead on scheduling tasks for each core. And in fact, most code is not parallel, since it is hard to manually achieve this, and we are not yet at a level of development where compilers can do it automatically. Of course, multicore processors do improve throughput substantially, but it is not a simple scaling factor.
Driving a truck with tailgate down is not better for fuel economy; it's verifiably worse. The Mythbusters attacked this problem with solid science. In theory, the tailgate allows the bed to be enclosed on four sides and lets a pocket of slowly-swirling air to exist, and so the faster-moving air around the cab and the rest of the bodywork do not interfere and cause more wind resistance. In practice, the manufacturer's tailgate is always better up than down (or else they would do EPA tests with tailgate down, duh!), but the best solution is actually one of the very common mesh aftermarket tailgates, perhaps due to keeping some of the same aerodynamic effects, but lacking the weight of a heavy metal tailgate. In any event, manufacturers wouldn't self-install mesh tailgates since they assume you want that piece of steel in the back for holding loads in place, and relaxing and having fun atop it.
Higher octane gas won't make your car run better unless it's needed in the first place. The only meaning of the octane rating is its resistance to "knock" (pre-detonation of fuel). If you put 95 in an 89-rated vehicle, it won't run any smoother or last any longer. Ask any chemical engineer. If your car requires premium gasoline, use it. If it doesn't require it, you're being a fool and wasting your money. In fact, most modern vehicles which require premium fuel will even run fine on regular, but with reduced power because the ECU has to retard ignition whenever detonation is detected. I have an ex with a turbocharged Volvo that clearly specified premium only, and it is still doing fine at 220,000 miles and has never once seen better than 89 octane gasoline in it. But I wouldn't recommend this. There have been cases of exotic turbocharged engines suffering damage without sufficiently high-octane fuel.
Driving in Formula One may be more glamorous, but NASCAR is not any easier. Just ask Juan Pablo Montoya. He had seven F1 wins in six seasons (2001-2005, partial 2006, all during the Schumacher reign). But when he moved to NASCAR in 2006, where he has been ever since, competing in seven seasons has netted him just two wins. If you think oval tracks are easy, then I challenge you to drive it at 190 mph in a car with no driver aids whatsoever (not even a fuel gauge) and a carburetted V8 pushing out nearly 900 hp. At least two Americans who earlier did stock car racing went on to win races in Formula 1 (Dan Gurney and Mario Andretti, who also won the 1978 world championship), but the only emigrant from F1 to win at NASCAR is Montoya.
High explosive doesn't mean something is "very explosive". It's a specific type of explosive whose speed of blast varies from 3-9 km/s. Yes, there is such a thing as "low explosive", as it refers to something which explodes more slowly, such as gunpowder.
Inflammable does not mean "not flammable". These words have the same meaning, but due to linguistic differences both terms occasionally remain. If you see something marked either "flammable" or "inflammable," that means it can burn easily.
George Washington never chopped down a cherry tree. Author Parson Weems invented this story for his 1800 biography The Life of Washington.
The nuclear weapon was not a massive game-changer when it was deployed against Japan. General Curtis LeMay masterminded the strategic air campaign against Japan in 1945, and oversaw the near-destruction of 64 Japanese cities purely from large waves of low-altitude B-29s carrying incendiary munitions. In Tokyo, the firebombing of March 9-10 was the deadliest bombing of the entire war, worse than the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. In modern combat, nukes would clearly be superior, but during WWII the US achieved such aerial dominance over the skies of Japan that they could afford to sortie with hundreds of bombers at once, making the firebombing campaign just as effective. Actually, the use of the nuclear weapon in August 1945 was more effective than anything else at taming Stalin's potential aggression into Western Europe, as he was impressed by the power of the bomb. If the Soviets had decided to use their vast strength in 1945 against the Western allies, then the only way they would have been defeated is if the United States could quickly mass produce and deliver nuclear weapons at the tactical level.
There is no handgun that does not appear on a metal detector. Don't believe Die Hard (or whatever movie it was). Even the so-called "plastic pistol" Glocks are mostly metal, with just a composite shell on the outside. You cannot really make a functional, reliable gun entirely out of plastic at our current technology. Actually, for those not keeping track, all-steel guns are getting rarer, and composite handguns have become the norm in the 21st century because they are cheaper and lighter. Still, in the year 2012, there is no security system except for a defective one that would fail to screen handguns either on a person's body or in baggage.
The Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty were made of iron, not steel. The vast majority of all skycrapers and large towers ever built have used steel, but when the Statue of Liberty and Eiffel Tower were constructed in 1886 and 1889, puddle iron was still a cost-effective alternative to steel before the Bessemer process came to be dominant. In the next decade, and certainly by the turn of the 20th century, steel became cheap enough that structural wrought iron was almost never called for. When iron was what was needed, it was still cheaper to convert Bessemer steel into iron using the Ashton process than to use the older puddling process.
Human: Robochef, make me a sandwich.
Robochef: Of what variety?
Human: PB&J.
Robochef: 5 minutes please. (5 minutes later)
Human: This sandwich weighs a ton and it tastes of feathers and metal?
Robochef: That is accurate. You requested a Pb and jay sandwich.
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