Alphabetic shorthand report: still slower than ordinary English handwriting, because thinking about letters takes a long time.

I have a short day and a full day’s amount of work to do in it, so less commentary than usual today.

Defense

• The Drive with a good piece on the UAE’s F-16s – Want to buy the state of the art in Viperdom? This is the article for you.
• B-52 engine upgrade roundup
• B-52 nuclear weapon capabilities upgrade roundup – Kidding. It’s just one system.
• Big Army to buy BAE recovery vehicles
• You read about the Land 400 downselect here; now read about the reasons
• CV90 might not be the Land 400 choice, but it’s still present in Europe, and the Dutch want an APS
• Big Army chief to get back to basics: large-scale combat
• A hand grenade to do what light rocket launchers do – That is, make doors where doors were not.
• Foreign Policy says, “The United States was once considered the ‘world’s policeman.’ Now, a European army could take its place. – Yeah. Sure.
• USAF testing containerized microwave laser – Which, of course, should be called a maser, but they go with phaser instead.
• A curious mechanism to get fuel to unimproved beaches

Science and Technology

• Newly discovered neutron star almost big enough to be a black hole
• The definitive piece on the 737 Max crashes – The author is an aviation writer, so he actually knows what he’s talking about, doesn’t gloss over important technical details or describe MCAS as an ‘anti-stall system’, and is willing to blame multiple factors, rather than picking one.
• Stochastic computer built, can factor numbers – Stochastic computing is a weird voodoo math approach to computation that performs logical operations on bitstreams with 1s at a defined frequency. The hallmark of it is that the longer you observe the output, the more accurate your estimate of the result becomes.
• A price-competitive carbon-capturing natural gas plant – Also generates no NOx, because combustion happens in a mix of CO2 and O2. Excess CO2 is stored at high pressure for industrial use.
• The history of Patreon – Evidently, the guy who started it was a creative guy himself? I didn’t know that.
• Kerbal Space Program YouTuber and all-around science man Scott Manley with a SpaceX update – In keeping with the SpaceX ‘design as you build’ philosophy, the new Starship prototype is down to two fins and dedicated hull-mounted landing gear, unfortunately making it look less like a Buck Rogers rocket.
• Why does the floppy disk read cache expire after 2 seconds? – Because two Microsoft engineers couldn’t swap floppies faster than that.

Sport

• NFL Recap, Week 2 edition – How hopeful I was for my hometown Steelers then.
• The NFL’s air raid revolution is nearly complete
• … but NFL roster limits make it hard to do pure air raid offense
• The hometown Steelers’ offense in week 3 was so dink-and-dunk that only two passes were completed more than 1 yard beyond the line of scrimmage

Guns and Competition Shooting

• The stage names at USPSA hicap nationals are punny in the extreme

Grab Bag

• World’s best bush plane destroyed on takeoff – 2500lb taildraggers and 24kt crosswinds don’t mix.
• Where should a serial killer hide? In law enforcement, of course
• The Amtrak dining car is no more – Or will soon be no more, at least. On some routes, they’re getting canned on October 1. Others will survive into next year. One fewer reason¹ to take a long-distance train. According to a random dude on Twitter, the change is because Amtrak can no longer get federal reimbursement for losses incurred by food and beverage service on long-distance trains, starting sometime next year.
• China censoring the Ten Commandments in state-run churches – State-run churches always end up being a church of the state.
• A pretty average American conservative take on the Brexit debate – In related news, on Twitter, a watcher of British politics agreed with my assertion that the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act is silliness in the extreme.
• The Fed’s bailout of the repurchase market – Fortune terms it the ‘repo market’, as do most finance types, but ‘repo’ means a different thing to average people.