thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
Kaiser team refused tochange their minds. They knew, as well as Nkrumah did, that without them, therewould be no dam. At the end of 1959, Nkrumah told his team to agree to Kaiser'sterms. Millions of dollars' worth of Ghanaian bauxite would remain in theground. But, with Kaiser's letter of intent in his pocket, Nkrumah knew hecould now set about raising the money to build the dam.WASHINGTON, D.C.He approached the WorldBank. It had been set up at the end of the [Second World W]ar to provide loans torebuild Europe, but now it had turned its attention to the Third World. Heasked the Bank for thirty million pounds; it was the largest loan everrequested. Yet the Bank's economists believed, as Nkrumah did, that electricitywas the key to industrial development in the Third World.J. Burke Knapp, Senior Vice-President, World Bank 19561978 We envisaged the development of this power resourceas fundamental to Ghanaian economic development. The provision of power, electric power,to Ghana was an immense economic benefit to the country was a sine qua non [for] economic development in thecountry. So, let's accept that the economic benefits of power to Ghana weretremendous.The belief that science andtechnology applied on a grand scale would somehow inevitably propel aThird-World country into the industrial age was the prevailing wisdom of thetime. It was called the "theory of takeoff". It gripped the imagination ofpoliticians and economists both in the West and in the Third World.In June 1960, the World Bankapproved the scheme in principle. But its report had important reservations.The most serious concerned the price Kaiser paid Ghana for electricity. TheWorld Bank made it clear that if Nkrumah was to get the benefits he expectedfrom the dam, he must negotiate a certain minimum rate for the power. If hedidn't, Ghana might find it difficult to "takeoff".[J. Burke Knapp] Our report essentially was saying to Ghana: thisproject will succeed and we're prepared to make a loan on it and the load can be paid off if thepower price is right. This was absolutely the key to the negotiations.But Kaiser needed a low rateif the smelter was to be profitable. Asecond round of negotiations began.Nkrumah faced a terribledilemma. His advisers and the World Bank told him that if he accepted theprice Kaiser was offering, the high expectations he had of the dam might not berealised. But if he refused, Nkrumah knew that Kaiser would pull out and thedam would never be built.Al Haji Futa, Ghanaian negotiating team Nkrumah was a man beseiged. He had to do something as you know, he had raised up hopes of the development of the country; that the VoltaRiver project would turn Ghana into a modern industrial country. He had no other programme. Insofar as he saw it asproviding this minimum of the power which he sought, he was prepared to go along [with Kaiser].The negotiations dragged onthrough the autumn of 1960. Neither side would give way on the electricityprice. Finally, one hot afternoon in December, Edgar Kaiser decided to confrontNkrumah and force the issue.Kwame Kwateng, Ghanaian negotiating team Kaiser asked for the meeting to be adjourned and
so much to help the nation.Valco, the Volta AluminiumCompany, owned and run by the Kaiser Corporation, flourished. It employed overfifteen hundred Ghanaians and brought precious foreign exchange into thecountry. It used most of the dam's electricity and so allowed the Work Bankloan to be paid off without interruption. The smelter became an integral partof Kaiser's worldwide production of aluminium.Ron Sullivan, Kasier lawyer on Volta Project 19591979 In a way, we looked at this as a giganticdry-cleaning plant. What we did was we sent alumina [aluminium oxide] from the United States to the smelter; thesmelter put electricity through it and took out the oxygen; and that made [aluminium] metal.In the 1970s, electricityprices soared throughout the world. Although the Ghanaians periodicallyrenegotiated the price Kaiser paid, itremained one of the lowest rates anywhere. This caused increasing resentment.Then, in 1979, there wasanother military coup the seventh since Nkrumah fell. It was led by a flightlieutenant in the air force. He was determined to put Ghana back on its feet.[From footage of address given by] Flt. Lt. Jerry Rawlings "I must share this fact with you: that Ghana hasno money. We cannot build a bridge or make a road orgive our people water or medicines without borrowing from other countries. We have borrowedso much that for every one hundred pounds we earn by selling our cocoa and otherexports, we use a sizeable [] percentage to pay for some of our debts. We cannot continue to borrow andbe in debt all the time."Rawlings became a popularfigure, on a par with Nkrumah. His main aim was to lift the burden of debt and one of the most obvioussolutions was to get more money from the smelter.In 1983, his government puttogether a team. Its task was to persuade Kaiser to renegotiate the agreementssigned with Nkrumah.Prof. Akilagpa Sawyerr, Chairman, Ghananegotiating team The new government decided to take the bull by thehorns and confront Kaiser directly. A number of things made them sit up and listen. I think theywere aware at all times that the new government in power was quite prepared to take drastic measures if necessary to achieve the objective of a new agreement. They must have thought us... a bit of a joke. Irecall the first day [] we met, when we had a lecture from Kaiser about [..?..] team, [?who were too many in theroom, for instance;] and I said"Well, you choose your team; we will choose our team." We were young, green and inexperienced; and I think they underrated us.Valco's management agreed tomeet the Ghanaians. But the talks soon became bogged down in disagreement. TheGhanaian team decided to raise the stakes.J. G. A. Renner, Minister for Lands and Natural Resources19821986 Then we started to... play our master plan. Wedecided that we were going to nationalise we knew that we wouldn't do it, but we wanted to put it strongly and send up apaper to government for permission to do that. We knew that it would leakout and Kaiser would get the message. Of course, we had another advantage; that was [that] the dam was shut downbecause of
the low level [of water, presumably] and we had to decide when to [reopen it] and we wouldn't [reopen it] until we got a good deal. [Interviewer, off-camera:] So Kaiser would be left [Renner:] ...with a smelter thatwas sitting there doing nothing and they would be losing money.Although Kaiser deny thatthe ploy worked, a completely new agreement was negotiated and signed inJanuary 1985. As part of it, the price Kaiser paid for electricity from the damwas increased by nearly three times. The Ghanaian people saw it as a victoryfor their country.[Akilagpa Sawyerr] [...glitch...] for the country, experience has shown that itrequires a good deal more than that. It requires a political environment; it requires awhole range of international... understandings to make it possible to transform the potential whichscience presents into actual achievement. And, regrettably, Ghana was not able to draw uponthese other elements to make its vision of "science and technology in the drivingseat" realisable.Sqn. Ldr. Clem Sowu, Rawlings' government19821985 So, it is true that one needs political power; oneneeds knowledge that is also power and then one has to combine that with the energy theelectrical power for us to get to that paradise...
similarly naive view it's no longer tinged by hope and optimism; it's tinged by pessimism and fear but we still have thisview that society can't shape technology; that that the form [] the technology takes is the form we mustaccept. And, just as [this] wasn't true in 1950, it's not true today. This is not a story of technology run amok, althoughthat's how many people understand it to be; the history of nuclear power is a history ofpolitical and economic and social decisions being made about a technology and the key decisions weren'tmade by the technologists; they were [made] in the [realm of] business []. What science and technology gives you is arange of possibilities; and those possibilities can take you in any number of directions.It's potentially a liberating force; but, to get there, society has to stop sleepwalking andstart realising that it's not a scientific choice, it's not an engineering choice it's a moral choice.[Back to the 1950spromotional film used at the start of the documentary; the father and son arenow inside and have just finished watching a film via a movie projector] [Father:] "Well, George, doesthat answer your question?" [Son:] "It sure does... [It's] given me a whole new perspective "
Around the year 1600, a rare but most fortunate constellation occurred. Not in the sky this time, but in the city of Prague. It consisted of three men whose destinies by chance crossed there and then. They could not be more different as to their origins, life stories, and careers, as well as to their characters, temperaments, and expectations. But they all played their parts in what would almost thirty years later result in a long-awaited publication, the Tabulae Rudolphinae, or the Rudolphine Tables. The three men were: Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor and patron whose name is in thetitle; Tycho Brahe, who had performed and collected the best astronomical observations the world ever saw before the telescope; Johannes Kepler, the author of the book, who out of these observationsmanaged to put an end to the old obvious truth that planets move uniformly in circles.The Danish Protestant nobleman Tycho Brahe had been awarded the island of Ven in the strait separating todays Sweden and Denmark. There he erected a castle together with the best equipped observatories available. He understood that systematically higher precision was necessary to comprehend how the planets moved. After twenty years of recorded observations on an almost industrial scale, the haughty aristocrat fell into political disfavour with the young, rising Danish king and had to abandon his island.In this period the Holy Roman Emperor resided in Prague. Rudolph II wassenior to all the other Roman Catholic monarchs. He was a patron of the arts and showed an interest towards science, mostly in the form of astrology and alchemy, but he also showed growing symptoms of mental instability. Now Rudolph was in need of a new imperial mathematician. After swallowing his aristocratic feelings, Tycho Brahe accepted the job with a sense of relief and became an employee for the first time.Tycho had by this time realized that neither he nor his assistants could find coherence in all the observations he had collected. He thought he had seen something special in the speculative mind of a young Protestant school teacher and district mathematician in Graz by the name of Johannes Kepler. In the Roman Catholic city of Graz, the last Protestants were finally ordered to leave town. Kepler travelled to Prague in hopes of a secure position and the most precious thing in his worldTychos observations. After some personal friction and scientific disagreement, Tycho decided to introduce the disillusioned Kepler to Emperor Rudolph. At an audience in September 1601 the three men met and Tycho suggested a glorious new project, to be entitled the Rudolphine Tables. Everyone was pleased, and so it happened that the two Protestant scientists were engaged in the Roman Catholic imperial epicenter of Prague. But just a month later Tycho Brahe died unexpectedly. It was promptly decided that Kepler was to take over Tychos position, and his main task was to compile the Tables. He successfully managed to achieve this goal, but the book was not published until 1627. In the meantime Kepler had several problems and conflicts to manage: fighting with the Brahe heirs who
watched over their interests; inventing a new planetary theory and other methods to improve accuracy and facilitate the reading of the Tables; procuring a salary from the imperial treasury for his family to survive; dealing with many personal disappointments; carefully maneuvering both in war conflicts and around three successive emperors; and curbing his love for new mathematical speculations.The Rudolphine Tables were the first set of astronomical tables that allowed one to calculate the position of the planets even in the far future with an accuracy sufficient to make reliable predictions. To be sure, there were earlier tables much resorted to by navigators, astronomers, and astrologers, but regardless of what model they were based on, their predictions gave errors of up to five degrees. (For comparison, the angular diameter of the moon is around half a degree.) The predictions made from the new Tables, however, proved to be 30 to 50 times more accurate. The astronomical tables themselves did not state any positions at a certain day, but they served as the basis for annual ephemerides which provided calculated daily positions of celestial objects.This is the only book by Kepler to carry an elaborate frontispiece, and he designed it himself (see Figure 1). By taking a tour around the picture, we may see how Kepler pays tribute to his astronomical predecessors. At first sight the impression is that he portrays himself in a very unobtrusive or even submissive way. It is true that he wanted to give prominence to Tycho, and that he was under pressure from the Brahe family to do so. However, after a closer look we will discover that Kepler, with subtle methods, often manages to emphasize his own achievements and hardships. After the title pages of the Tables there is a long hexameter poem by Keplers Latinist friend Johannes Hebenstreit. It is a complimentary idyll, steeped in mythology, but does not always follow the frontispiece, to put it mildly.The frontispiece nicely matches the original French architectural term designating a decorated front of a building. A frontispiece should set the character of the interior of a building or a book, soon to be disclosed to the eyes of the viewer or reader. In a book, it also gave a pleasant contrast to the often long and nested text following the title page.We stand in front of a classical temple dedicated to the muse of astronomy, Urania. She is seen at the top of the dome rushing forward in a carriage. Carrying a starred crown, she seems to be searching for someone to crown with a laurel wreath. Well, there are some good candidates further down.There are twelve columns on the high foundation, two of them hidden from our view. This corresponds to a temple shaped as a dodecagon. The twelve sides represent the signs of the Zodiac, some of them visible as sections on the floor.The increasing solidity and elegance of the columns (proceeding from the back to the front of the temple) describes the development of astronomy from ancient times until Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. Close to the columns,
version of the celestial globe displayed on the neighbouring column of Hipparchus. The smooth surface could show the stars and the constellations (seen from outside), all often designed as a work of art. Being a skilled observer, Hipparchus compiled a famous catalogue around 130 BC with hundreds of star positions, which was not surpassed, in its essence, until Tycho Brahes observations. Kepler made the lost catalogue appear again in the picture, where Hipparchus carries in his right hand a book with the Latin title Catalogus stellarum fixarum. In his left hand, we see a document labelled Test. with two affixed seals. The title could be short for Testimonium or Testamentum, a testimony or legacy not only of the influential contributions made by Hipparchus himself, but also of observations and views by his predecessors. These led Hipparchus to the discovery of precession, which we would now describe as a slow change in the orientation of the Earths axis of rotation. We should also honour him as the founder of trigonometry: the first trigonometric table listed chord length as a function of the central angle.Around the middle of the second century AD, the most important astronomical book that survived the turmoils of antiquity and its aftermath appeared. With Ptolemys Almagest we have for the first time a table and parameters that allowed the reader to calculate the heavenly motions. The author also presented a coherent geocentric model of the known universe based on his own and earlier observational data.Ptolemy, like a true mathematician, is sitting writing on the tablecloth, with his book close at hand, and we see one version of the Greek title, Megale syntaxis. Our current English title, Almagest, goes back to the mixed Arabic name meaning the greatest. A small figure can be discerned on the table: a quadrilateral inscribed in a circle. Apparently Ptolemy has just discovered his powerful theorem saying that the product of the two diagonals equals the sum of the products of the opposite sides. With its help he would generate a famous trigonometric chord table from a few basic chord values known since Euclid.On a stone tablet leaning against the pedestal, there is an illustration of the three mathematical e-constructions used by Ptolemy and his forerunners: The planet moved uniformly on a small circle called an epicycle, the center of which revolved along a larger circle. If the Earth was outside the center of this larger circle, its position was called eccentric. The most controversial trick used to account for the variation in a planets angular speed was to make the motion along the large circle uniform only when seen from another point, called the equant, different from the center and the Earth. Much of Ptolemys impressive, but incorrect, conception of the world was adopted by scholars and the Christian Church, but with the decline of the Hellenistic culture and loss of many of its texts, these ideas fossilized during the early Middle Ages.The handy flat instrument on Ptolemys column is a version of the celebrated astrolabe. It was a versatile predecessor of the simple didactic
planisphere, or (why not) an analog smartphone in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Ptolemy used and described the astrolabe, which was basically a plane model of the sky through stereographic projection, with nested revolving plates attached.Continuing on to the two most elegant columns at the front, there are but a few steps, though it calls for a giant leap in time. Copernicus is sitting close to a Roman Doric column. Right above him hangs an instrument that goes back at least to Ptolemy, but which Copernicus described in his famous book De revolutionibus orbis coelestium, lying in his lap. It was called a triquetrum, a practical design for reading the altitude of objects from the horizon. Further up we find a long cross. Although Copernicus had official positions at the cathedral in Frombork for most of his life, he never became a priest. So we should rather understand the cross as another instrument to measure altitudes and angles, known as a cross-staff or a Jacobs staff. The simplicity made it popular with navigators.Copernicus conducted many observations from his Frombork tower, still with quite primitive instruments. But as recorded through the manuscript at the base of the pillar, late in his life he was also presented with a large stock of unpublished planetary observations made by the two fifteenth century Nuremberg astronomers Regiomontanus and Bernhard Walther.For more than thirty years Copernicus developed his new model with the Earth both rotating around its axis and revolving around a static sun. In 1543, the last year of his life, he was finally persuaded to print the book De revolutionibus. Even though it is clear that he meant to describe the physical reality, there were several reasons why the theory was treated as another convenient hypothesis for mathematicians to work out the planetary motions. This was the tradition for all earlier models, and the church authorities were satisfied as long as it remained so. But even most scientists were not yet convinced. Theoretically, it was not much simpler than the more intuitive geocentric model. Copernicus had still felt the need to employ a system of circles and a few epicycles, as did Ptolemy. And practically, the observations available at this time, which should confirm a correct model, were simply not accurate and systematic enough.Tycho Brahe had advocated his own model to account for the planetary motions, a kind of compromise between the Ptolemaic and Copernican ideas, known as the Tychonic system. The Earth is still at the center with the sun revolving around it, but the other planets move around the sun. In the picture we can see Tycho pointing at the model adorning the temple ceiling while trying to persuade Copernicus, Quid si sic? (What about this?) This question appears less innocently in a popular emblem book from 1611 by Gabriel Rollenhagen (familiar to Kepler). An emblem was a picture accompanied by a short aphoristic text. In this particular one, a dwarf on stilts looks at his mirror image, and the text where he poses the question ends with the morality art can never improve
on the wisdom of nature.But the scene in the Tables frontispiece actually went back to Tycho himself. There are descriptions of the interior of his half-subterranean observatory Stjerneborg on Ven. There in an ornamented, heated, central room, the Tychonic model could be seen from the cupola-ceiling. Much in that room, such as allegorical figures, paintings, and inscriptions, must have inspired Kepler to the frontispiece, even though he never saw the room. Beyond seven paintings of astronomers from antiquity to Tycho himself, a yet unborn, messianic figure called Tychonides was portrayed, with the Latin inscription that he might be worthy of his great ancestor! In the frontispiece Tycho Brahe is leaning against the most decorated Corinthian column. After complaints from the Brahe family, he is now dressed in his well-known ermine robe with the collar of the Order of the Elephant around his neck (the highest order in Denmark). We see one of his books, the Progymnasmata, which described his planetary theories and contained the new star catalogue. Kepler completed and published the book in 1602 after Tychos death.On the column, we see two instruments which Tycho had developed and improved in order to attain better precision and stability. A breakthrough was the Medium-Sized Quadrant from 1580 made of solid brass, just above his head. He also constructed a number of sextants with 60 arcs which were mainly made of wood. They were often light and portable, but later he made them larger and fixed, like the Triangular Sextant from 1582 further up on the column. (It looks rather like a 45 octant here, but we look at it slightly from the side!)These instruments were used on the isle of Ven, which is prominently displayed in the central panel of the foundation with the castle in the middle. According to Hebenstreits poem, the important base meridian used by Tycho and Kepler is shown. The dashed line in the picture, however, is if anything perpendicular to this meridian, since the north is directed towards the right, as the compass rose correctly shows.In the panel to the left we finally catch sight of Kepler himself. By candlelight, tired and dressed in nightwear, the protagonist looks at us, perhaps asking for pity. The long hours have taken their toll on him. Only a few coins from the Habsburg eagle have reached his table, but he is the proud architect of the temple. On the table lies a replica of the dome, where he displayed his skills as the culmination of the tradition below, as we shall see. On the wall are four titles of his major works and four city coats of arms, representing Bohemia, Prague, Upper Austria, and Linz (where Kepler moved in 1612).In the adjoining panel, one of Tycho Brahes heirs points upwards at Tychos observational records and to the right at Kepler. The two panels at the other end refer to the printing of the book (in Ulm). In between them the double-headed Habsburg eagle grants the printing privilege. Below we are told that Georg Coler engraved the frontispiece in Nuremberg. laws, were