It’s late, so the commentary won’t be as inspired as usual.

Update: actually, it’s early, and I forgot to hit publish last night, so here you are.

China

• The New York Times never met a Communist dictator whose propaganda they wouldn’t happily publish – Certain US Senators still beyond the pale, as far as I can tell.
• Nobody really likes China – Hmmm. I wonder why.

Coronavirus

• You’ve heard about R, but what about k? – R is the average number of cases each new case generates. k is a measure of how clustered those cases are. COVID-19 spreads in clustered (it seems).

Defense

• Turkey and France face off over Armenia-Azerbaijan
• US Navy now shipping a new EW system
• Rods from God, the cheap version – That is, a C-17 dropping pallets of (mock) JASSMs.
• Macron says Europe should stop buying American arms – And buy French ones, presumably.
• India test-fires long-range supersonic anti-sub missile – Parvusimperator and I used this story to gripe about how awful US missile procurement has been over the past three decades.
• Haenel MK556 won the G36 replacement contest because it was cheap – Shocker.
• Her Majesty’s Death Ray: the AIM-9L in the Falklands! – Fun fact from within: some of the Sea Harrier pilots in the task force had fewer than ten hours in that jet’s cockpit prior to the fight. Ten hours into a DCS module and I can barely even start the thing reliably.

Science and Technology

• Physicists build circuit that generates electricity from graphene – That is, from the thermal motion of graphene at room temperature. They seem to have sussed out a way to make the thermodynamics work out. I wish the article said something about what kind of voltages they’re generating—how far away are we from, say, a useful sensor-with-BLE chip that lasts forever? Because that would be handy.
• Airbus and the hydrogen-fueled airliner of the future – Parvusimperator’s jokes about exploding airlines aside, it seems to me that some kind of liquid fuel is going to be required for aviation until such time as we start flying fusion jets around. Synthetic Jet-A seems more likely to me, though.
• Otto Aviation reveals the Celera 500L – Thanks to laminar flow, it gets similar fuel mileage to my car, and cruises at 460 miles per hour on (coincidentally) 460 cruise horsepower out of a 6.3L turbodiesel.

Sport

• Honda to quit F1 – It’s not the first time Honda’s quit F1 after not doing as well as they would have hoped.
• In Japan, they can’t do IPSC because nobody’s allowed to have guns, but they can do IPSC Action Air – This guy subscribed to me on Youtube, and I find the idea of a competitive shooting community in Japan oddly fascinating for some reason. The guy in the linked clip is shooting an Open gun, compensator and everything. Even without the compensator, I bet it would shoot just as flat.
• Speaking of match videos, here’s one of mine – With third-person footage and full-fat, non-airgun bullets¹.

Grab Bag

• Which US states are poorer than the UK, in terms of GDP per capita? – South Carolina, Idaho, and Mississippi. That’s all. I wouldn’t have guessed, and GDP per capita doesn’t even account for tax burden.