Missed a Wednesday again. Oops.

Books

• Celestial Matters, a science fiction novel where the science is that of ancient Greece.

China Watch

• Three Gorges Dam under rapidly-mounting flood pressure, again – And more rain is coming. Is there much danger of a collapse? On the one hand, I don’t think so. On the other hand, I heard somewhere that there have been an awful lot of evacuations from the regions just downstream of the dam.
• What happens if it breaks? – Well, tens or hundreds of millions of people die, famine strikes China, and the Third World War probably breaks out. No big deal.

Defense

• India to buy… Caracal carbines?
• Egypt buys Su-35s – To go with their MiG-29s, Rafales, and potentially-in-the-future Eurofighters. Now all they need are some American planes to complete the trifecta.
• Pentagon’s UFO unit to release some files – Probably not any especially interesting ones.
• Two men and a bot: tank crew of the future? – I can see how image recognition and ballistics computation might allow AI to play gunner. I’m not sure exactly how it breaks down in practice, and the article doesn’t seem to say outright.
• War between Greece and Turkey a real possibility? – If the potential of even more devastating floods in China wasn’t enough…
• Ethiopia claims the upper Nile, building a dam and preparing to fill it
• HMS QE’s hangar deck, overlaid on a top-down drawing – “Bloody small,” quoth parvusimperator.
• Japan’s Super F-15 one step closer to reality – Including cruise missile support, a cockpit upgrade, a new radar, and other features. Will it hold 22 missiles like the F-15EX? I hope so; that kind of missile spam is the essence of Japan-ness.

Games

• Star Wars Squadrons hands-on from PC Gamer – parvusimperator and I both cut our teeth on the X-Wing games of the end of the last millennium and the start of this one, and we’re both going to withhold judgment on this one until we’ve seen it in action. That said, there are reasons for cautious optimism.
• 12 minutes of Star Wars Squadrons in-game footage – It looks… pretty good. All the debris and huge space constructions to fly around inside are, together, something of a space flight sim trope, but it looks pretty much like Modern X-Wing Alliance otherwise.
• Computers: ha ha, we’re better at chess than you. Humans: oh yeah? – 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel! (Granted, the computer is pretty good at it.) It’s chess, except with two time dimensions (and an unused spatial z-axis counting as the fifth dimension from the title). Talking about games sounds like describing the plot to a Terminator movie.
• MS Flight Simulator 2020: Ars Technica hands-on – The PC Gamer hands-on was similarly effusive. I don’t do much flight simming presently, with summertime pursuits weighing heavily upon my time, but man, do those clouds look good.

Science and Technology

• Everything apparently has wave-particle duality? – I never so much as suspected.
• Against environmental pessimism – Did you know that the Earth has more tree cover today than it did 35 years ago?
• Discussed on Discord: a combination air conditioner/synthetic oil plant – As ever, the difficulty is input power.
• What’s going on at Intel? Why is their 7nm process so late and so disastrous?

Guns

• The P320 FCU project is getting pretty cool – Hopefully they get all the accidental-discharge problems worked out.
• New owners for H und K – A Luxembourgish holding company with a French name.
• A new barrel alloy promises twice the life of 416 stainless
• Gun-printing Twitter with an electric, solenoid-actuated semi-auto pistol
• Another revolver match video – Picking up speed again. The first two matches, I was slow but inaccurate. The third match, I was slow and accurate. This time out, I was faster but inaccurate again. Hopefully I can get it all put together.

History

• FBI motivational posters from World War 2 – Some of them aren’t particularly motivational.