Britain to upgrade only 148 Challenger 2s – The Royal Brigade Combat Team! The Times of London reckons that makes them the world’s 56th-largest tank operator. I’ve finally started reading Britain’s Future Navy, which parvusimperator loaned me a while back, and it’s similarly depressing—not only because of the Magic Shrinking Armed Services, but also because the Queen Elizabeths were supposed to carry F-35Cs when the book was written.
Japan’s locally-sourced F-35As: troublesome? – I didn’t realize Mitsubishi was building so many of them. I can’t help but think a Japanese F-35 cockpit is the most anime thing ever.
Columbia project gets an audit – Just to make sure that the Navy’s oversight of steering and propulsion development is good, though, not of the budget.
Preparing for a digital Pearl Harbor – The most important point out of this one is that we should be training sailors, aviators, tankers, and others who interact directly with combat technology the casualty drills for computer system failures, not just physical world failures.
Science and Technology
Minecraft with ray tracing looks so incredible it makes me want to reinstall Minecraft – Technically it’s path tracing instead, which uses many rays per pixel, bounces them around the scene a bunch, and uses the results to do some really cool reflections and diffuse lighting. I’ll give it a whirl tonight when I’m at my desktop—unsurprisingly, it’s fairly GPU-intensive.
And another one in Chrome’s Javascript engine – It’s a little rich hearing a guy from Google gripe about Gmail being slow, given that nu-Gmail (the story dates to before its introduction) is objectively terrible in almost every way.
The Invention of the Salvator Mundi – On the history behind the most contentious painting attributed to da Vinci. The art world remains divided on its legitimacy, but private buyers certainly don’t—it recently went at auction for a few hundred million dollars.
Notre Dame burns – This link isn’t a great story. I was hoping for something with more detail on the progress of the fire and its causes. It doesn’t really count as news, either, since I’m sure you’ve heard about it already, but it was a sad day for European history1 and one worth noting.
There was a secret private server for the late lamented MMO City of Heroes – I was more of a City of Villains man, myself. It stayed secret for six years—that is, from about 2013 to just recently, and was run by a group calling itself the Secret Cabal of Reverse Engineers (SCORE for short). It’s hard to imagine a much more on-brand news story. In other lamented MMO news, I discovered that Pirates of the Burning Sea is still online and still active. That was one of my all-time favorites—enough depth to the sailing and combat models to appeal to me, while still being accessible enough to appeal to the average pirate fan.
Also a sad day for Christianity, but since we’re all Protestants here at the Soapbox, we don’t put nearly as much weight on the building’s shoulders. ↩
It seems like we’re not far from a time when the Royal Tank Regiment is once again the only tank regiment serving the Queen. How the mighty have fallen.
It seems like we’re not far from a time when the Royal Tank Regiment is once again the only tank regiment serving the Queen. How the mighty have fallen.