Welcome to the New Year, folks!

Defense

• Ospreys land at the US Embassy in Baghdad – In video! Great way to land your reinforcements.
• LRASM now on Super Hornets – Finally, the US Navy enters the 21st century, with a proper air-launched anti-ship cruise missile.
• HMS QE launches an F-35 while moored – One advantage to the STOVL carrier: you don’t need to worry about wind as much, and you can park your carriers two in a row without impairing landing operations on either one.
• In news related to the prior bullet, HMS Prince of Wales, moored behind QE, was commissioned on December 10, and I don’t think we reported that. The UK moves into a multi-way tie for second place on the carrier leaderboards, at least until China and India commission the ones they have under construction.
• Reported on Christmas Eve: Pentagon proposes cuts to destroyer construction – And right after I visited Bath Iron Works, too.
• Also on the cut list: one FFG(X), one Virginia
• ProPublica with a deep dive into the VMFA-242 Hornet/tanker collision
• Correcting the legacy of the Los Angeles boats – They’re typically seen as Cold War warriors. A submariner who served on three says some of their most distinguished service came in the 90s and beyond.
• China is mapping the sea floor in the Straits of Malacca and the Andaman Sea – Wonder why they might be doing that.

Science and Technology

• The New York Times with a two-part story on cell phone location data tracking for advertising purposes – I feel less good about carrying a smartphone around.
• Mathematician achieves an important result on the Collatz conjecture – That is, the 3n+1 n/2 jobber. The short version is that the result shows that the conjecture is almost true for almost all numbers. The long version is, it’s a Quanta Magazine article, so you can probably follow the argument there better than I could reproduce it here.
• Is Betelgeuse going to explode? – If it does, I hope it does in the winter, because I’d trade a dozen eclipses for a supernova brighter than the full moon.
• A brief history of AT&T’s microwave relay towers – Came across it when reading a search and rescue story at the excellent Otherhand.org, discovered that I drive past an old microwave relay tower every day on my way to work. After the microwave relay system was decommissioned, ours was sold off and is now a telecom tower of some other kind.
• Drones are scouting rural Colorado – Isn’t that where Red Dawn started?
• The Internet used to be a lot more anarchic – (I put it that way because I’m playing Shadowrun: Dragonfall right now, and anarchic Flux State Berlin is a fun setting.) Walled gardens (i.e., Medium for blogs) have largely taken over, but fear not! Our little kiez here isn’t going anywhere¹.

World Affairs

• Labour is no longer the UK’s party of the working class – Literally. R² of 0.0.

Sport

• The 10 least consequential athletes of the 2010s – Nine which make a lot of sense, one which is a bit more of a headscratcher. The inestimable Jon Bois reports.

Grab Bag

• SB Nation cans more than 200 contractors who live in California because of California’s stupid contractor law
• The USNI has books of photos from the Kure Maritime Museum – With commentary translated into English.