Projects

• Little Wars: I have 135 infantry and 72 cavalry printed in various colors and styles, and have another 45 and 24 (respectively) in progress. Future battles will be larger than ever before!
• Gun stuff: the Glockblaster 3D progresses apace.
• Many Words Press World HQ Library: carpet incoming soon; bookshelves to come.
• Skypirates! (the PC game): did some design thinking, settled on a flat map covering only part of the world, at least to begin with.

Defense

• Zumwalt does fine in rough seas trials – The only really interesting quotation is from Zumwalt‘s CO, who noted that it has a short roll compared to his old Tico.
• On US arctic strategy – In the Discord, we did some short analysis: every US base is a long way from the middle of the Bering Strait, but the situation isn’t any better for the Russians or the Chinese.
• The KC-46’s most infamous problem – It’s not one of the ones I’d heard about, either!
• Turkey, sans F-35Bs, is going to equip its wee baby flattop with UCAVs instead – Seems like Turkey’s been making strides in autonomous weapons technology.

Science and Technology

• Creating a new map projection more accurate than others – Speaking of flat maps, here’s one that makes a claim (a map projection better than others) without remarking on its main disadvantage (it’s a two-sided disk, as though you ran over a globe with a steamroller, which means it’s not ideal for display use).

Guns

• Everyone is lying about the link between gun ownership and gun deaths
• “The magic gun evaporation fairy” – This guy does fun things with data.

Grab Bag

• Is this the time for permanent DST? – Please, yes.

I believe we’ve made a near-final carpet selection here at Many Words Press World HQ, which means the library will soon be a) done and b) capable of hosting the largest Little Wars battles yet, on the order of 15′ x 10′, which should easily support coalitions of more than 100 soldiers. Hopefully, we can bring you one of those in the not too distant future.

Defense

• A fun aerobatic display – Look at the outside guy go!
• USAF reverse-engineering parts for the B-2 – Presumably, because the supply chain for them no longer exists.
• Packing Helices into an Udaloy – Warship helicopter hangars: cramped.
• 5.7x28mm NATO – What an odd choice.
• Olivier Dassault dies in helicopter crash
• IAF F-15s photographed carrying Sparrows – The War Zone speculates as to why.
• 2021: China passes the US for fleet size?
• On that note, the US has almost four times as many VLS tubes as the whole of Europe, and that’s not even counting submarines
• The USSR had a railway-based ICBM with an inflatable nose – Video included.

Science and Technology

• Mathematician makes progress on the Collatz conjecture, or 3x + 1 problem – This being a particularly thorny part of math, the progress he made is proving it’s almost true for almost all numbers.
• Some mad Russians formed a transparent valve cover and oil pan, so you can look inside a running Lada engine
• Neural networks with multimodal neurons are vulnerable to text attacks – That is, if you label an apple ‘library’, the network identifies it as a library. Oops. Also, content warning: terrifying visions from the vilest darkness, if you look too closely at the synthetic maximum-activation images.
• New algorithm breaks record for linear equation solving – Turns out, with sparse systems, guessing randomly and iterating is faster than actually solving the system in the standard way.

History

• Austrian battleships in 1901

Grab Bag

• Always worth bringing up: the US is ludicrously wealthy in GDP per capita
• The North Face (the clothing brand) snubbed an oil and gas company, so the Colorado Oil & Gas Association gave The North Face a tongue-in-cheek award for being an excellent customer – “Probably three-quarters of the mass they ship is actually our product,” quoth the head of the industry association.
• GIF of an Indonesian volcano erupting

Oh my, it’s been a month.

Well, in the intervening time I had to sell my Mini and buy a new car (blew a valve, or maybe a head gasket), among other things. So it goes.

Defense

• Korea to buy a light carrier – Hasn’t your resident extremely-amateur navalist said that the promise of the F-35B is giving any yobbo with a few billion behind the couch cushions access to aircraft carriers?
• More on Korea Carrier – $1.8 billion, expected complement of about 20 F-35s.
• Carriers in the Fog: HMS QE
• Sonobuoy pods for the Fire Scout – Good idea. Fishbreath stamp of approval. Apparently, there’s a similar pod for the Reaper. Also good idea. Also stamp of approval.
• The KC-46 is a lemon – Relevant document: this Boeing internal report on how outsourcing too much is bad.
• Navy to cancel conformal tanks on Block III Super Bugs? – Another Boeing failure?
• Finalized design for Korea’s next-generation destroyer – It’s turning into boost Korea and bash Boeing week. Anyway, this one has fewer VLS cells and fewer anti-ship missile canister launchers, and switched from RAM+Goalkeeper to Phalanx. The lower missile count arises from South Korean strategists’ concerns about having too many missiles on one hull. We don’t have an explanation for their decision to ditch the fancy modern CIWS for the old champion.
• Abolish the RAF – In favor of a Royal Naval Air Service and a Royal Army Air Service.
• Also from Hushkit, the Hipster’s Guide to Aircraft
• An inventory of NATO ASW assets – If you aren’t France or Canada, you’re freeloading.
• Privateers and commerce raiding: breaking China’s war economy – China relies on imports from East Africa and South America. Those sea lanes won’t be open in a war, but it’s even easier to keep them closed if we send privateers after them.
• China retreats from disputed Indian territory? – I’m not sure if it’s the same disputed territory from earlier, but there you are.
• On Big Army’s new night vision/thermal sights
• How big is the Typhoon boomer? Big
• US Navy rust: it’s not just CDR Salamander talking about it

Science and Technology

• Amazon’s electric delivery vans make a funny noise
• All electric cars should be forced to make the Jetsons sound
• Living in the Cyberpunk Now: proposed legislation in Nevada would allow tech companies to form Innovation Zones – An Innovation Zone is an area of land where county-level government functions are provided by the corporation which owns the land.
• Bad news for Stadia, part one million – The developer of Terraria got a Google account ban out of Youtube, and has spitefully but not unwisely decided to move away from every Google product he can.
• A laptop battlestation with seven screens – Okay, I kind of want one.
• How to start some 5500hp diesel engines on a tugboat – Cool video.
• Another cool video: a flight track of a Tasmanian wedgetailed eagle
• The Postal Service picks a new truck – It’s in no danger of being less visually distinctive than the good old LLV, I’ll put it that way.
• Big Tech Detective: a browser addon that tells you when sites load big tech resources – Many Words loads some fonts from Google Fonts, and some Javascript from Facebook and Amazon around the social sharing buttons nobody ever uses. (Maybe it’s time to retire those, and perhaps put the fonts on the Many Words server somewhere…)
• Industrial controller vulnerability allows for remote control by attackers – Which is bad.

Space

• SLS: cancellation is too good for it
• There’s a SpaceX Starship launch on tap for today – Link to unofficial stream; when they get closer to launch, you’ll be able to swap over to the better cameras from the official one.

History

• Ancient bronze swords: just for show? – Scientist-historians debate.
• The Onion on the outbreak of the Great War

Guns

• This guy is 3D-printing a .45-70 semi-auto rifle – Now that’s a space cowboy gun.
• CZ buys Colt for… $220 million, wow – Maybe CZ wants to get into the AR game, and thought, “Well, we could buy a factory for $220 million, or we could buy a factory and a brand name for $220 million!”

The ‘Rona Etc.

• The importance of non-expert specialists – Boils down to how expert specialists can get bogged down in the traditions of their own fields, for me.
• The kids are having a hard time, short film edition
• Coronavirus variants: a primer – Content warning: Ars Technica, which has developed a near-terminal case of the woke brainworms lately.

Grab Bag

• Why you shouldn’t invade America – Coming to you live from the intersection of ‘CMP People’ and ‘Backwoods People Who Still Know the Old Ways’, although there are a lot of ‘Backcountry Hunters’ around these parts too.
• Life in New York’s super-tall towers is not all glamor and ritz
• “How dare you suggest there was a vast conspiracy surrounding the election; also, here’s the definitive history of the secret conspiracy surrounding the election”: Time Magazine
• Every NFL team’s season summed up in a Simpsons clip
• Is there anything more American than looking at a piece of technology and thinking, “It would be better with a V8?” – Apparently, there’s a whole division of V8-powered competition chainsaws.
• 90-year-old man gets fiber internet after taking out a Wall Street Journal quarter-page ad to complain – Old solutions to new problems.
• Another cool video: a landing approach in Greenland – A greenlanding?