Why Vinegar Joe was sour
QUESTION According to a biography of Viscount Alanbrooke, U.S. Army General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell had a hatred of anyone or anything British. Is anything known as to why he had this attitude?
Joseph Warren stilWell was born in palatka, Florida, in 1883. irascible and insecure, his unruly behaviour at Yonkers high school led his father to persuade him to join the U.s. Military academy at West point, rather than Yale University as planned. he graduated in 1904.
While he appears to have found most of humanity objectionable, his particular hatred for the British was formed during World War i. as chief intelligence officer for iV Corps in France, stilwell was attached to the British 58th Division, where he found the British command ‘damned snotty’, their condescending attitude gnawing at stilwell’s innate insecurities.
an indication of how he felt can be seen in this diary entry of the time: ‘ “this is the hon sir Dick pisspot at the phone. are you . . . ?” he was apparently a titled ass — for he had no use for me.’
as an instructor at the infantry school at Fort Benning in the early thirties, one of his students drew a cartoon of stilwell rising out of a vinegar bottle, a reflection of his sour personality, and the name Vinegar Joe stuck with him for the rest of his career.
a natural linguist, stilwell was fluent in Chinese, French, spanish and Japanese. in 1942, with the rank of lieutenantgeneral, he was made commander of the U.s. army Forces of the China-Burmaindia (CBi) theatre.
arriving in india on February 25, 1942, to fill this role, he faced the challenge of dealing with well- entrenched Japanese forces. he successfully negotiated with Chiang Kai- shek for control over his Chinese forces and created a nominally integrated Chinese-american army.
stilwell’s anti-British sentiments, which came close to paranoia, were initially viewed as amusing eccentricity, but when the lives of thousands of British Chindits were put in his charge, his prejudice
Bitter: U.S. Army General Joseph Stilwell became dangerous. he didn’t hesitate to voice his criticisms of what he viewed as hesitant behaviour, and outrageously dubbed the Chindits ‘lily-livered cowards’. ninety per cent of Chindit casualties were incurred in the last phase of the campaign from May 1944, when they were under his command.
stilwell was later appointed commander of the U.s. tenth army in the pacific, and in august 1945 he received the surrender of more than 100,000 Japanese troops in the ryukyu islands. he died after surgery for stomach cancer on october 12, 1946, at the presidio of san Francisco, while still on active duty.
Richard Mellor, Twyford, Berks.
QUESTION Is it possible to store binary information on a vinyl disc? If so, how much?
this has been done. Many home computers in the eighties, such as the BBC Micro and the ZX spectrum used audio cassette tapes for storage. the binary data was converted into audio tones and recorded on the tape using a normal cassette recorder. the recording could later be played back into the computer to load the program or data.
at least one of the magazines for such c omputers c a me with a fl e xi bl e gramophone record. You connected the record player to the computer in place of the cassette recorder and played this disc to load the programs stored on it.
obviously, it used the same audio tones as the normal tapes for this machine, and the computer didn’t know or care where those tones came from. and while this was a flexible disc, not strictly a vinyl one, there is clearly no reason why a normal vinyl lp couldn’t be used in this way.
as for the amount of data that could be stored in this way, a typical machine of the time would transfer 1,200 bits per second from a cassette. a byte is eight bits, but there was also a start bit and a stop bit added to each byte, making ten bits stored on the tape for each byte. this gives 120 bytes per second.
if we estimate that a side of an lp disc plays for 20 minutes, or 1,200 seconds, that gives a storage capacity of 144,000 bytes per side.
however, i think it is possible to do better than that. some older professional computers such as the hewlett-packard 9830 recorded data on a special two-track tape recorder.
a signal on one track represented a ‘0’ bit, a pulse on the other track a ‘1’ bit. i think it would be possible to do much the same thing using the two channels of a stereo lp disc.
i would guess a data rate approximately ten times greater would then be possible (based on the audio performance of lp discs), meaning that each side could store 1,440,000 bytes, or about the same amount of data as a 3.5in floppy disk.
Dr Tony Duell, Biggin Hill, Kent.
QUESTION Is it true that in the Thirties the inventor Royal Rife came up with a device that killed all infections in the body, but he was closed down by the pharmaceutical companies?
FUrther to the earlier answer, doctors use constructive interference mechanics to treat kidney stones, a rare case where the laws of quantum mechanics have been harnessed as a therapeutic tool.
Kidney stones are crystals whose atoms vibrate at a specific frequency.
Constructive interference results when the focused energy waves interact with the atoms in the kidney stones. like the atoms in the crystal glass, the atoms of the kidney stones explode and then dissolve.
Mark Cole, Birmingham.