Busy morning at the office. Commentary status: limited.

Defense

• Richard Spencer maybe doesn’t want to be SecNav anymore? – The real headline: he blasts Congress and shipyards.
• A Chally 2 Streetfighter prototype – Regrettably, the Brimstone launcher is on a vehicle parked behind the tank, not the tank itself.
• Al-Baghdadi down
• Navantia unveils Joint Support Ship design – Does a little bit of everything—70% of the fuel capacity of the recently-retired Australian oilers, 70% of the load capacity of HMAS Choules (an LPD), a full hospital, and so forth.
• Dutch military police find 11 kilos of cocaine on a Dutch LPD – Evidently, someone decided to take a little side trip during a deployment to the Caribbean.
• Navy backing down from 355-ship plan – Why 355? we found ourselves asking. It turns out the number comes from a force structure assessment conducted in 2016.

Games

• A pre-alpha tech demo of Task Force Admiral, a really good-looking WW2 carrier command game – Items of particular note: cloud physics, seamless map zoom.
• Blizzard writes a buffer overflow emulator – Highly technical article, on how Blizzard emulated a bug in Starcraft which was used to create most of the Starcraft custom map ecosystem.

History

• Google and Facebook didn’t kill newspapers, the Internet generally did
• A 1924 shot of USS Langley transiting the Panama Canal

Grab Bag

• How Scientology bought downtown Clearwater, Florida
• Certain AMD processors’ high-quality random number instruction always yields -1 – The problem with randomness is that you can never be sure.
• Didn’t we try this once already? – Mortgages for anyone with a pulse!
• The collapsing crime rates of the 90s might have had something to do with cell phones – If you can sell drugs to anyone, anywhere by telephone, you don’t need to hold turf. If you don’t need to hold turf, you don’t need to kill people to keep it.
• California is on fire again.

This week, the ‘approximately Fishbreath’s birthday’ edition.

Books

• Given that it’s me, my birthday presents were primarily books.
• Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, courtesy Parvusimperator: widely regarded as the best of the bunch when it comes to golf books, or at the very least, the one everyone who plays that game should read.
• Castles of Steel, courtesy my in-laws: I’ve read this before via the War College Library, but I’m delighted to have my own copy and to read it again, just as soon as I finish Dreadnought.
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, also courtesy my in-laws: I enjoyed the TV series and like the worldbuilding that seems to have gone into it. The book should be a delight.
• The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, courtesy my wife: making bread is a hobby of mine, but I’m not very good at it right now. This will help with that.

Defense

• The Coast Guard ought to be more combat-ready – …argues this Coast Guard blogger. Not that we disagree.
• Tankograd’s BMP-2 post is as excellent as all their other content – This isn’t news, but it is something I read this week.
• A Leclerc crew wins the shooting competition at the Iron Spear exercise
• CDR Salamander takes a heterodox view on the CVL concept – Namely, that it isn’t trash. I have no issue with building amphibious assault ships that happen to work well as baby carriers, too, but the numbers don’t work out for replacing big carriers with small ones. (A lesson clear to players of Rule the Waves 2!)
• HMS QE‘s hangar – Quite roomy. High ceilings.
• The Visby-class remains one of my favorite corvettes – Warship of the future, today!
• Report to Congress on the state of FFG(X) – The warship of today, tomorrow!
• Northrop to install a laser on USS Portland – A 150kw laser. That’s some serious oomph.
• Update from last week: the NorK SLBM looks real – Thanks to Chris Bradshaw for the link.

Science and Technology

• Remember the SuperMicro story, about spy chips placed on server motherboards? – As much as that particular story has fallen apart, my opinion of the plausibility of the general concept has done nothing but rise.
• Remember that story about galaxies without dark matter? – I think we might have shared that one, and possibly a refutation based on distance measurements¹. Now, new Hubble data drives a refutation of the refutation, which suggests that NGC 1052-DF4 is as far away as originally thought, and therefore actually deficient in dark matter.
• On netcode design for fighting games – An interesting read, which goes into some depth on the subject.
• Annoyed software engineer hacks ransomware gang after falling victim to ransomware attack, posts decryption keys on Pastebin
• Doctorin’ is hard – The modern scientific system is biased toward discovery over reproduction, so it’s easy to get a novel treatment into broad usage, but hard to pull it back if later studies can’t confirm that it does anything.
• Elon Musk sends Tweet via Starlink broadband – SpaceX is targeting mid-2020 for initial customer service in the US, which realistically means sometime in 2021, by SpaceX’s usual deadline inflation.
• NordVPN compromised – They lost control of their private keys, the fools.

Guns

• The curious case of Joseph Roh – Who got off with a super-light sentence for running an 80%-lower-finishing operation because his lawyers convincingly argued that an AR-15 lower isn’t a firearm by the ATF’s own definition.

Grab Bag

• Preliminary report on the Collings Foundation B-17 crash
• Car and Driver likes the mid-engine 2020 Corvette – $60,000 for a car that can go 0-60 in 2.8 seconds. What a world we live in.
• Had you heard about how Mexican cartels defeated the Mexican military in pitched battle? – Mexico is falling apart.
• Cities are less happy than suburbs or exurbs – Water still wet. Sky still blue.
• ‘Amazon Synod’ in Rome causing strife among Catholics – There’s a bit of a flap over a display of what are pretty clearly fertility idols in the Vatican Gardens. Some Catholics of a more traditional bent stole them and threw them into the Tiber. I’m pretty much on board with that.

After the raging kegger we threw to celebrate the 50th WWRW, we needed a week off.

Actually, it was a busy week at work and I just forgot. Enjoy this special double edition.

Long Reads

• A Chinese martial arts master travels the country, challenging and defeating those whose kung fu he perceives as weak – Plot of a wuxia movie? Well, yes, the plot of every wuxia movie, but also a true, ongoing story in modern China. The best thing I’ve read in the last two weeks.

Quiz of the Week

• Which of these two force hierarchies pictured on Twitter is attacking, and which is defending? – See the spoiler tags at the end of the post for our guesses and the answer key, respectively, but I encourage you to take a look, think about it, and give your answers/justifications in the comments before checking the answers.

Defense

• Check out these goofy anti-flash goggles – A view of a B-52 flying a nuclear alert mission. This week on the Many Words Discord (see sidebar at right): a discussion of antiflash paint on bombers, and why it may have gone away.
• Bell is trying to cast Raise Dead True Resurrection on the Comanche – It’s the purest helicopter of the new scout helicopter competitors, so I like it, even if it does have wings. Also this week on the Many Words Discord: a discussion of tandem vs. side-by-side seating for military aircraft. Ars Technica reports they’re calling it ‘Invictus’ this time..
• Let’s play parade analysis – By which I mean, let’s let someone else play parade analysis. What’s the news from China’s National Day parade?
• Boeing’s why-you-should-buy-Chinook-Block-II website – The nice thing about helicopters is that you can slap new engines and a new gearbox in, and even without doing any work on the hull you’ve suddenly created a new, more compelling product.
• Iran says it foiled an assassination attempt on the commander of the Quds Force
• A video on the BAE Amphibious Combat Vehicle – A much less cool vehicle than the previous attempt to replace the AAV. 2700hp in the water by using open-circuit seawater cooling!
• Speaking of the Marines, they’re working on ways to fight China – We shared a story a few weeks ago on the planning document for same.
• Zerohedge: NoKor tests sub-launched ballistic missile? – The question mark is mine, because I don’t know if I fully trust Zerohedge’s reporting, and don’t have the time to run the story down myself.
• CDR Salamander is not happy about the Navy permitting fatigues in DC – Honestly, I’m against letting anyone with a staff job wear anything besides a proper uniform.
• Lynx 41 disqualified from the Bradley replacement game – Why? Because of bureaucracy and bad requirements, that’s why.
• … and the program is at risk of three failures in a row
• Iraq is in flames – Self-inflicted this time, though.
• Germany proposes ‘European’ aircraft carrier – Me: “Maybe Graf Zeppelin?” Parvusimperator: “What’s the German for ‘dock queen rustbucket’?”
• Defence Technology Review has some good articles this week, in particular on speculative amphibious assault ship designs
• Norway’s F-35 drogue chutes aren’t working right
• The AS21 rollout in photos – As AFVs go, I think it’s quite handsome.
• Big Army looking to replace the Longbow radar?
• Rheinmetall brought a 130mm gun to AUSA
• Puma Czechs out – I had to use Parvusimperator’s punny headline. The Germans decided not to submit the Puma to Czechia’s IFV program, but they have three other bids.
• Baby flattop all grown up – USS America has 13 F-35s on deck.

Sport

• This Week in Sportsball, Week 4
• And Week 5

Science and Technology

• The scientist behind the Navy’s UFO patents has filed one for a compact fusion reactor – A two-meter box capable of generating between a gigawatt and a terawatt of thermal energy. Naive back-of-the-napkin math suggests 2600 gallons per second of cooling water at one gigawatt, and five Rhines or two-thirds of a Mississippi at one terawatt.
• Science takes another crack at a reactionless thruster – This one uses relativistic mass change to get more impulse from a forward-moving particle than a backward-moving one. Nobody’s built one yet—rather, it’s a ‘the concept seems plausible’ thing, by a NASA engineer, who admits it’s a long shot.
• Update your Linux boxes – An exploit in sudo! It’s less serious than I thought, though, and basically only affects users/groups with a RunAs (ALL,!root) configuration).
• Teslas run Linux, Linux writes a lot of logs, flash memory in Tesla ECUs is not rated for a lot of writes, flash memory problems are bricking Teslas – ‘About four years’ seems to be the lifespan. Ol’ Musky says on Twitter that it’s better now.

Grab Bag

• Why is Costco so good?
• UN may run out of money by the end of October, says SecGen Guterres in letter to 37,000 employees – The headline is its own punchline.
• Washington Center for Media Self-Aggrandizement to close – That is, the Newseum.
• Blizzard suspends Hearthstone player for supporting Hong Kong – With this story, you can see why I try to do these weekly. The story’s advanced a bit. Anyway, isn’t it refreshing to see traditionally leftist media outlets calling out a company for suppressing unpopular speech, rather than shrugging, saying something about freedom of speech not meaning freedom from consequences, and forgetting about it a day later? $10 says they forget the lesson again next time it’s identifiably conservative speech.

It’s the 50th anniversary edition of Wednesday What We’re Reading, in which we… don’t really do anything out of the ordinary.

Defense

• Lightweight stainless/aluminum ammunition coming? – See also discussion on Discord of how much extra volume you get in a cartridge of the same size.
• Thrym invents beer gut replacement for operators – It’s an electronics case which fits, at least optionally, to the front of a plate carrier, so you can open it up and look down at your phone, or what-have-you.
• The US still needs carriers – Roughly a year in to What We’re Reading, and it’s as true as it ever has been.
• F-35 testing delays continue beyond its combat debut – Thinking face emoji.
• The Columbia boomers are on track for their scheduled delivery… – … but 2028 is a long way off, and more problems like the one with missile tube welds recently could push that date.
• The Navy Reserve is broken – Not as an organization, but in terms of actually paying its reservists.
• China builds an amphibious assault ship/baby carrier in a year or so, probably – Pictures of its keel under construction appeared late this past spring. It’s unclear how much work was done before then, at least in sources I can get at.
• Branch of service which operates boats beats branch of service which operates airplanes to airplane readiness goals
• Good Loren Thompson alert: five reasons the Digital Century series is doomed to failure – The most compelling reason is that, by and large, the original analog-era Century Series failed.
• Winchester selected to operate Lake City ammo plant – Is it a tell for the next-gen squad weapon? After all, Winchester is working with one of the competitors.
• Useless Camo Pattern retired today
• Armata program continues to deflate – Down to 130 tanks, and much of the fancy technology from the original demonstrator vehicles is gone.
• First photo of the new Chinese rifle – Not a bullpup, American-esque barrel lengths.

Science and Technology

• LockMart gets another cost-plus contract for the Orion spacecraft – After 15 years of development, this is a cost-plus contract to deliver six units, which will presumably be renewed even after we’ve all died working in Grand Overseer Musk’s Marsium mines.
• Our county uses hackable surveillance cameras – Time for a campaign of guerilla camera vandalism?
• Tesla debuts summon mode – No-driver Teslas immediately start hitting things in parking lots.
• Samsung Galaxy Fold lasts at least six days – More on this record-breaking performance as we have it.
• What can you solve with a quantum annealer? – Ars Technica explains why you might want one of those big D-Wave jobbers.

Nerd Culture

• Spider-Man back in the MCU, at least for now – This is a good thing. Tom Holland is the best live-action Spidey to date, and Sony’s track record, box office takes notwithstanding, is mixed at best¹.

Grab Bag

• Brexit and the British judiciary – Parliamentary government is weird. At the same time, the institution of Parliament, with shouting and dramatic speechgiving, is better than the institution of Congress.
• The article I meant to link with the above summary
• President Xi’s power grabs have cost China a great deal of stability
• Kickstarter laughs at coalition of leftist magazines who want it to be more union-friendly – All of the greatest successes of unions came in the days when they had Pinkertons and fire hoses to deal with anyway.
• Looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys – The effects of red meat and processed meat consumption are so small that they only show up in analyses of vast populations. Nutrition scientists were angry at the journal which published the paper because it’s going to damage public confidence in nutrition science.
• Measuring wealth by orders of magnitude – Top-down space game Starsector uses a similar system for measuring population.
• $172 red light camera ticket in Delaware represents is less than $100 and can’t be challenged, court says