A little patriotic overture to start the post seems fitting.

Defense

• Reports of Chinese and Russian AAM development prompted the US to start work on the AIM-260, the next-gen long-range air-to-air missile for the US military
• Will Big Kuz get a second lease on life or die a slow death? – Given that the rebuilding plan starts with, ‘drydock Big Kuz in 2020, provided the shipyard has built a big enough drydock by then’, I suspect it’s going to be a slow death.
• ASW AI: a growth industry – I believe it. AI isn’t good at all that many things, ultimately, but interpreting sonar data is exactly the kind of thing it’s great at.
• USS Montgomery (a Little Crappy Ship) deploys for the first time in 19 months – As CDR Salamander noted on Twitter, the only reason you keep something like that secret is some degree of doubt that it’s going to make it all the way across the Pacific.
• Proceedings on hypersonic weapons: differing approaches taken by the world’s militaries – I should get a Proceedings subscription one of these years.
• Do hypersonic weapons mean the end of the line for the Mk 41? – They’re apt to be bigger, which means we might need bigger VLS cells.
• American diplomats are not ready for war – For a number of reasons; I won’t steal the article’s thunder. I will note the parallels with early 20th century diplomacy, which I’m developing a familiarity with thanks to Castles of Steel. Nobody wanted to deal with the British, because Parliament and public opinion were too fickle.
• Machine translation is getting good enough to put (most) military linguists out of a job – High-priority, high-accuracy translations are still done by humans, but there are cases (given in the article) where someone who doesn’t speak language X can still provide useful intelligence from communications in language X with the help of a machine translator.
• Rates of STDs going up in American servicemen and women – Soldiers gonna soldier.
• China’s military not only copying Western forces in hardware, but also in force structure and buzzwords – If we produce enough meaningless jargon we don’t actually follow, maybe we can make China, more respectful of authority than we are, collapse on its own, like giving a paradox to a killer robot.
• What are American obligations in the Strait of Hormuz? And what are some of the scenarios which might play out of Iran tries to close it? – The Atlantic is usually good when they aren’t writing about American politics.
• Ten reasons to keep your aircraft carriers – Loren Thompson warning, but he’s not wrong. Even if carriers are vulnerable in a great power shooting war, they’re much too useful in every other situation to get rid of.
• ITEP engines not fully baked, and the downselect came too early, this guy argues
• Some Armata dimensions/weights are now declassified
• French vehicle availability rates, courtesy of the French legislature
• Surprising nobody, Italy’s new Trieste is getting a ski jump ramp – Smart money says it’ll end up with the same angle as the new QE.
• An unusual exercise: an American destroyer supports a joint French-Japanese carrier task force
• Pratt & Whitney is perennially late on delivering F-35 engines

Defense: Czech IFV Requirements

A Very Special Section – Since it requires some translation, which Parvusimperator provided. (I assume he found it somewhere, since unless he’s holding out on me, he doesn’t speak Czech.)

• Number of vehicles: 210
• Crew: 3 + 6 soldiers + 2 specialists
• 7 variants: IFV, command, recon, engineering, ambulance, artillery recon, recovery
• Lifetime 30 years (min. 10 000 km to general rebuild)
• Programmable ammo for the 30 mm canon
• Coaxial MG 7.62 mm
• ATGM (2 in container, 1 in the vehicle)
• Smoke grenade launchers covering 360°
• Sights with min. 4000/3500 m range day/night
• Ballistic protection (base vehicle min. K2 + addon min. K5) i.e. STANAG 4569 II/V
• APS
• Protection against IED (jammer)
• Surveillance systems: day CCD camera, night IR camera, laser rangefinder
• Top speed on the road 65 km/h, in terrain 40 km/h
• Range min. 500 km
• Air-transportable
• Intercom + VKV/UKV radios voice/data (GPS, TACSAT and cypher connection)

Science and Technology

• BitTorrent usage increases as streaming sites fragment – Thinking face emoji. Not that I would ever publicly advocate stealing intellectual property, but I confess my Netflix subscription is looking less and less compelling, and that there are now a number of things I would watch that I can’t get there¹.
• Have $400,000 and want a fun toy? Here’s a working jetpack – Parvusimperator and I, although neither of us has $400,000 to drop on a toy, agreed that we could do better. His pick: a 1980 Learjet 35A. A bit over budget, but comfortable and useful. I decided to go another direction: a 1980 MiG-21UM, for a mere $139,000. I figure I can use the remaining $261,000 to make it flightworthy and maybe buy a spare engine or two. In either case, be it fancy business jet or supersonic manned missile, I suspect we would have more fun than we would with the jetpack.
• NERVA back in the news – If I learned anything from Kerbal Space Program, it’s that nuclear propulsion is worth rushing for immediately, because skipping the oxidizer makes your delta-v budgeting easy.
• Identifying people by laser-fingerprinting their heartbeats – We live in the future. Granted that this is a Pentagon project, but it does suggest to me that the Cyberpunk Future is here already. Maybe, though, we need a new term for it—kind of inherent in the Cyberpunk Future is the idea that heavy industrial conglomerates will run the world, when it turns out to be big data conglomerates instead. Ideas?
• Cloudflare had a little outage yesterday, bringing down about 10 percent of the Internet – Not Many Words, though! Any outages you might have seen here came from a bug in the Xen guest networking driver, which caused intermittent kernel panics when conducting certain network operations, like attempting to update the Xen guest networking driver. (Fixed now, though. That’s why I keep a bunch of old kernels installed, after all.)
• Microsoft shutting down its e-book store, refunding everything customers spent – That’s nice of them, at least. Have e-books you want to own rather than rent? Well, you have options.
• Image-recognition neural networks work mostly on texture rather than shape – There’s a classic illustration of how a multi-level neural network works: the first layer takes pixels and recognizes edges, the second layer composes edges and recognizes shapes, the third layer composes shapes and recognizes objects. If you take the article at face value, this is now wrong.
• Sonic black holes exist, and emit sonic Hawking radiation

Grab Bag

• Some restaurants are making burgers out of plants; Arby’s is making carrots out of meat – Bravissimo.
• Britain’s Great Model Train Robbery remains unsolved – To be clear, they robbed a warehouse which contained the trains, not the trains themselves.
• Further protests in Hong Kong reach the Legislative Council’s chamber – In a delightful bit of fun, the protestors hung the British colonial-era flag on the podium within. I consider the article itself to be craven capitulation to the Chinese government, however, given that it mainly quotes former Hong Kong police officials aghast that the people might dare to rebel.
• Drama in mathematics: “ABC is a theorem in Kyoto but a conjecture everywhere else
• LinkedIn is a great spy recruitment tool

A little choral patriotic music to wrap up the post seems fitting.

It’s all Fishbreath all the time this week—I’m covering Thursday’s post, too.

In contrast with the competition shooting flavor of this week’s long-form posts, we have a delightfully defense-directed What We’re Reading.

As I wrap up writing all the summaries below, I would like to point out that I finished just in time for the 10:13 deadline.

Defense: China

• Everything you need to know about the Chinese military if you don’t read Chinese – For those of us who do not read the world’s most perversely difficult language, Proceedings links to two reports on the development, strategy, and technology of the Chinese military, from the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the DIA. Lots of meat on them. Highly recommended.
• Chinese carrier numbers increment differently – Carrier 001, CV-16, stays the same. Carrier 001A, now Carrier 002 or CV-17, goes up one. Carrier 002 is now 003/CV-18, the first catapult-equipped carrier. Carrier 003 is now 004 or 00X, and is either a second catapult-equipped carrier or China’s first nuclear carrier. There’s more at the link.
• Carrier 001 sails near Guam and through the Taiwan Strait

Defense: FFG(X)

• FFG(X) careens toward a roadblock: Congress wants to limit certain parts to American manufacture only – “Let’s save money by demanding that we use native parts for which we have no native manufacturing capability!” In my amateur oddsmaking for the FFG(X) project last February, ‘canceled or delayed beyond the point of usefulness’ was my guess at the favorite, and I stand by that choice. (Also, if you put money on the Freedom-class LCS-frigate, you can tear up your ticket now.)
• 32 tubes is not enough – Unhappy with the number of missiles on your frigate? Just buy F100!
• And lastly, the final FFG(X) RFP has been issued – Your remaining contenders: FREMM, F100, Independence Frigate, and an unknown entry from Ingalls Shipbuilding.

Defense: Other

• Fixing the Overseas Contingency Operations fund – OCO spending doesn’t count against the Budget Control Act spending caps, so only 40% of the money in the OCO fund is for actual overseas operations, and the rest is a slush fund.
• Raytheon’s StormBreaker completes test drop program – Tri-mode seeker with datalink. I wonder if they’ll make a knives version, like that Hellfire we pointed out a few entries ago.
• USS Billings smacks into a bulk freighter in Montreal – Its commissioning is still scheduled for August 3, so there can’t be that much damage.
• British F-35s fly their first operational missions – Joining some Typhoons over Syria. Baker Zebra¹.
• Amphetamine use was widespread on both sides in the Second World War
• Navy railgun project test fires at White Sands, could be tested at sea this year
• 40% of Marine Ospreys are not mission-capable – From a historical/analytical perspective, it’s a shame that the US has never before been in a stance of high military spending but low imminent risk of war. Would readiness have been so bad with, say, 1935 technology and a similar geopolitical position?
• Brigade Combat Teams are modern legions – That is, smallish, modular units which contain near enough to everything they need to fight. The author goes on to suggest rebranding BCTs as Legions, which is a bit too whatever-you-call-it to Rome as weebs are to Japan for my tastes. (Ed.: Although Chris Bradshaw makes a compelling counterargument in the comments.)
• Navy to buy sufficient numbers of JPALS sets to equip every carrier, including the ‘they aren’t carriers, really’ amphibious assault ships – F-35 pilots will never have to hit a hard carrier landing again! The computers will do it for them, unless they’re damaged, broken, or out of service for other reasons.
• What does it profit a man to gain military partners in the Gulf by spending tons of money and lose the will to knock in heads himself, World Police style? – Not profit, so much, but it does buy you the modern Gulf, where your partners are mostly squabbling with their local enemies, oil tankers are hitting Iranian mines with suspicious regularity, and the US Navy is stuck escorting ships through the Gulf anyway.
• Blessed Be Thy Nuclear Weapons – The Russian Orthodox Church weighs heavily on the minds of the nuclear arm of Russia’s military, but then, the Russian Orthodox Church also weighs heavily on the minds of all traditionally-minded Russians. It’s easy to forget for English-speakers, because the Anglicans are a bunch of spineless wimps nowadays and the other major English-speaking power takes a dim view of state religions, but having a church more or less unified with the state is an extremely powerful tool for the man in charge of both.

Science and Technology

• Smartphone use causes bone spurs – Point of order: I’m almost sure I have those same bone spurs, but from reading books instead of using a smartphone.
• How to factory-reset your GE smart lightbulbs: a 3-minute play in two acts – Smart homes are not, and I refuse to have any smart home technology until I can run it on a server in my basement with no outside Internet connection.
• Ubuntu to ditch 32-bit architecture, libraries – Steam, thereafter, to ditch Ubuntu. The only 32-bit things on my work laptop are, I grant you, Steam, wine, and a bunch of libraries used by Steam and wine, so it isn’t that bad for modern Linux users who don’t play games.
• Remember QuadrigaCX, the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange whose funds all mysteriously vanished and whose CEO died in India? – Yeah, he totally stole all the money by using fake accounts with fake real-world assets, and the last transaction he made was six days before his ‘death’. Watch for his wife to mysteriously disappear in the next year or two, and for a pair of people who look suspiciously like them to live out the remainder of their days on some sun-soaked tropical beach paradise.
• The Raspberry Pi 4 launches, and the launch site runs on a cluster of Raspberry Pi 4s – Could be a big savings over the Many Words VPS, but a) the Pi cluster didn’t actually run the database, the most demanding and difficult part of the whole endeavor, and b) I don’t think I know anyone who would be willing to colocate a stack of Raspberry Pis.
• The USAF launch services agreement isn’t fair to SpaceX, says this guy – But he also says that the USAF should just spend some money on SpaceX on the side, rather than delaying the LSA awards. That’s reasonable, but even as someone who’s low-key rooting for Blue Origin over SpaceX, I think it’s also reasonable to ask that the LSA should probably go to a company which actually hits the requirements today (i.e., non-Russian engines, proven reliability). Rockets are hard, and realistically, Blue Origin and ULA-with-Blue-Origin-engines will have some teething issues to work out.

Guns etc.

• SportCo Holdings, which owns a number of gun store brands declares bankruptcy with an eye toward liquidation – Evidently, they bet big on buying up lots of inventory prior to the 2016 election, on the theory that if Clinton won, there would be an Obama-esque run on the market. Oops.

Here we are at the leading edge of the summer doldrums. Parvusimperator’s low on things to write about, and I’m in at-home productivity mode. So it goes. Happily, there’s a ton going on in the world, so we do have links for you. Lots of links.

Defense

• Oil tankers attacked (?) in the Gulf of Oman – This correspondent’s guess is naval mines which slipped their moorings.
• The BBC reports that it might have been limpet mines – Like it was in May.
• In earlier reporting, the WSJ said torpedoes – Maybe they just meant ‘torpedo’ in the old sense of ‘mine’.
• Close-up shots do suggest a mine hit
• CDR Salamander: it’s fun to follow, but it’s not our problem, either
• The IAF (Indian) wants to buy IAF (Israeli) missiles – Pakistani F-16s with AIM-120-C5s outranged the Indian Flankers with R-77s, which Indian sources claim can’t really engage targets at more than 80km. India wants to replace the Vympel missile with the extended-range Derby.
• H und K is in financial trouble – Because they hate you, and you suck.
• In pictures: a bomb bird on a bomb bird – You’ll just have to click it to find out what it is.
• Small earthquake near the China/NoKor border – … turns out to be caused by the Jilin Longye Blasting Company in China, rather than by the North Korean bombs everyone suspected. At least, that’s the official story.
• Iran will shortly breach its uranium stockpile limits
• Pentagon seeks laser-armed space drones – In response to questions about militarizing space, the Pentagon claims they’re laser-armed space drones for science. (This is not actually what they claim.)
• Big Army slows its roll on ground robots, buys 9,000 small drones – Aerial reconnaissance at the squad level is a compelling buy.
• Dreadnought v. Columbia: boomers of the future
• Big Army’s future tank: picture a factory stamping upgrades on an Abrams chassis forever
• The Navy launches one of the most awkwardly-named ships of all time: USS Minneapolis-St. Paul – Comment with your votes for more awkward names.
• Boeing line workers just can’t stop leaving tools, cigarette butts, lunches, etc. in KC-46 airframes – “Didn’t you have ten wrenches when you clocked in?” “Beats me.”
• Everything old is new again, naval strategy edition – In which it is argued that the fleet should be concentrated, Mahan-style, in the Pacific. The only problem is that I think it would require some cleverness with advanced basing and perhaps corvettes/motherships of some kind¹.
• Northrop and Raytheon are working on a 3D-printed hypersonic scramjet cruise missile – I just got 21st Century Defense Story Bingo.

Hong Kong Protests

• Citizens of Hong Kong are protesting a new extradition bill which would subject Hong Kongese2 to the Chinese justice system
• A huge crowd of protestors separates to let an ambulance through – Alternate title: “Things that would never happen in America”.
• Millions of people still hitting the streets daily
• Numbers estimated at 2 million—something like 25% of the entire population of the city

Science and Technology

• Starlink is mostly going to be for rural customers – Obviously. If you look at the bandwidth per satellite and the size of the constellation, it’s clear that even 12,000 satellites isn’t enough to serve dense populations. For myself, I’m glad to rub that in the faces of people (primarily Ars Technica commenters) who a) clearly live in cities and b) are so blinded by Ol’ Musky that they were looking forward to satellite internet.
• Chinese dissidents are being executed for their organs – This is a New York Post story I found via Zerohedge, so take it with a truckload full of salt from a Chinese dissident slave camp salt mine, but maybe Larry Niven wasn’t too far off in terms of timeline³.
• The Atlantic hypothesizes on the MH370 disapperance – Chilling and plausible.

Grab Bag

• SMS König is for sale – Along with some other German warships, too. Unfortunately, they were made historical monuments in 1979, so if you’re looking to buy them as a source of low-background steel, you’re probably out of luck.
• Everything old is new again, drugs edition – Evidently, cocaine is second only to marijuana in the arsenals of young British drug users.

It’s rare that I get the What We’re Reading story filed prior to our traditional 10:13 a.m. Eastern post publication time, but today, I’ve been more diligent than usual.

Defense

• HMAS Perth stuck in drydock for want of a crew – For whatever reason, a software industry friend of mine in Australia is now also a certified general hand for near-shore vessels. Maybe time for a career change?
• Via Kilo Sierra, proceedings of the Robotics Capabilities Conference – Feel free to drop interesting articles in Discord or in comments throughout the week, and we’ll consider them for inclusion here.
• How the Navy plans to break Big E – The plan is that there aren’t really any solid plans yet. Also, the cost to break Big E alone is going to be about the cost of fielding a carrier group for a year.
• Taiwan to get tanks, Javelins, TOWs, &c., but no Vipers yet
• Those are the wrong weapons, though – With all the ink spilled about China’s A2/AD capabilities making it a headache to operate near Taiwan, maybe Taiwan should invest in A2/AD capabilities to make it a headache to operate near Taiwan the other direction.
• The Navy’s chance to return to Subic Bay – Given the difficulties in reloading VLS systems at sea (namely, we don’t have a way to do so right now), a good port close to China seems like it should be a gimme.
• In photos: the near-collision between USS Chancellorsville and Admiral Vinogradov
• Analysis of the Future Helicopter Engine competitors and selection
• Is cyber where radar was in 1942? – Yes, in the sense that nobody really understands it. No, in the sense that ‘radar’ actually described a specific technology, whereas ‘cyber’ is a meaningless buzzword.
• Understanding the F-15X purchase – I’m still for it, if only on the grounds that it behooves us to have two aircraft manufacturers with active fighter production lines. Also, jamming will be more important than stealth in the middle of the 21st century. You heard it here first.

Science and Technology

• Quantum leaps, assumed to be instant, actually take time – This has ramifications which I am unqualified to communicate. Quanta Magazine, absent from this series for some time, makes a triumphant return, with the usual endorsement that they’re great at explaining highly technical findings in physics for the average intelligent reader without physics training.
• A time lapse of Jupiter’s surface, presumably from the Juno mission – Behold the glory of creation.
• Large mass anomaly detected under the moon’s south pole – Possibly the remnants of the asteroid which blew it off of Earth in the first place? It’s a mass of metal, most likely, five times the size of the Big Island of Hawaii.

Culture

• PC games: the original creators of Star Control, Paul Reiche and Fred Ford, reached an amicable settlement with the current owner of the Star Control trademark, Brad Wardell of Stardock, by having a friendly phone call – The settlement also involves exchanges of honey (from Wardell’s beehives) and mead (from Reiche’s homebrewery), proving that end runs around lawyers are always worthwhile. I pity whoever, at the law firms involved, had to go tell everyone that the long, drawn-out IP case with billing expected to go on for years is suddenly resolved because the clients talked it out.
• Books: Barnes and Noble purchased by Waterstones – Buried lede: even with their Nook miscue and all the difficulties faced by traditional retailers, Barnes and Noble has been reliably profitable over the last few years.
• Music: in 2008, when Universal caught fire, almost 200,000 masters burned
• PC games: the official John Wick video game is an innovative take – If you asked me to write a brief for a John Wick game, I would have maybe sent back a Max Payne clone, or if I were having a creative day, a Superhot clone. A top-down, paused-real-time strategy game like Frozen Synapse would not have crossed my mind.

History

• British diplomatic cables suggest that at least 10,000 people died in Tiananmen Square
• The other major anniversary this week: Midway

Commodities

A new heading! It was originally ‘Finance’, but then I realized that every finance-related story I had was also commodities-related in one way or another.

• Millions of acres of US farmland to be out of service this year because of flooding – Apocalyptic Zerohedge warning. Maybe ten million acres will go unplanted; the US has ~370 million acres of cropland. It has been an uncommonly cool June so far here in western PA, although I remember it being wetter in 2015. That said, the way Zerohedge frames the story, it sounds like the way a Tom Clancy novel starts.
• Where will all the residual fuel oil go when ships are banned from burning it? – On January 1, 2020, ships without exhaust gas scrubbers will be banned from using high-sulfur fuel oil. The guy quoted in the article calculates that the marine fuel market’s consumption will drop from 3.5 million barrels of HSFO per day to 2.7 million, leaving about 240 million barrels per year unaccounted for.
• A tanker, loaded with Iranian oil in violation of US-led sanctions…
• …is probably part of a Chinese state enterprise

Grab Bag

Lots of headings today.

• On the charging of one of the Stoneman Douglas deputies
• Arfcom purchased by the Brownells of Brownells – I had no idea that Brownells was actually owned by a family with the surname Brownell. The more you know.
• Obligatory baseball story: on how swings have changed in these, the early years of the Flyball Revolution – The received wisdom in baseball (that you can’t radically remake your swing) is, as with much of the received wisdom in sports, wrong, as anyone who even remotely follows golf would have realized. Golfers remake their swings all the time, and they have the same obstacle (that they’ve swung so many times that it’s deeply ingrained) that baseballers do.
• USPSA stage videos – It’s match season, and we’re always talking about USPSA stuff here, so I guess we kind of owe you. Next time we’re at a match together, I’ll have to get one of parvusimperator.

It’s almost but not quite the anniversary of D-Day, and is precisely the anniversary of my marriage¹.

Between that, travel, finishing Britain’s Future Navy (depressing) and starting Massie’s Dreadnought (exciting), it’s a short one this week².

Defense

• LockMart withdraws the Freedom-class from FFG(X) – Good. Let the other defense contractors have a go. Parvusimperator and I still think the F105 is the best choice, but also not the most likely (I think). Probably time for a re-handicapping, now that the field has narrowed.
• CDR Salamander writes at USNI blog about the FFG(X) voluntary downselect and the perishable nature of industrial capacity – Put another way: don’t go the way of the Dutch.
• Reintroducing theater-range missiles in a post-INF world – It’s a brave new world.
• In pictures: the best Harrier on a merely average carrier – Spain’s Juan Carlos I, to be exact. The Harriers are the American Plus model, the only extant variant with a radar and AIM-120 capability, which makes them almost real fighters.
• Congress upset over the Ford class’s inability to deploy with F-35s – Because Congress imposed cost caps on the first two Fords, there’s been an awful lot of ‘fit for but not with’ going on. For instance, one of them is deploying with two of eleven weapons elevators operational.
• USAF has a solid lead in number of operational F-35s – 400 F-35s of all types have been delivered, and they’ve also now passed 200,000 flight hours.
• USAF also thinking about laser missile defense
• Superconductor degaussing system to be installed on some Navy vessels – I really, really want to know what kind of superconductor we’re talking about here, but the story does not relate. It does, however, suggest that the weight savings are substantial: 10 to 100 tons, depending on the size of the hull.
• Corvette carriers: a littoral combat strategy – Missile boats are awesome, but short-legged. So, build a ship to fuel them and shepherd them to wherever you want them to be. Britain’s Future Navy had a similar idea, although built to merchant standards rather than military, and for minesweepers/pirate hunters/subchasers/etc. with a logistics support/helicopter carrier mothership.
• For missile boats, the Skjald-class is a good buy; for patrol craft, why not buy the German Gepard design? – Well, because it’s retired? On the other hand, an updated, NSM-equipped design would be pretty cool, and a Gepard (at 437 tons) outguns an LCS by several times already. Both?.
• Wouldn’t you know it, the Navy already planned to do a missile ~boat~ hydrofoil with a logistics support ship! – Also, the support ship was to be a repurposed LST, which is a cool class of ship.
• Big Army wants to modernize its ammunition plants… – Most of which date to the 1940s.
• USAF has 62 Lancers, of which often only ‘single digits’ are mission-ready at any given time – Not great. B-21 isn’t here yet, guys!

Science and Technology

• Another open-source project switches to a license which excludes resellers – An interesting problem. The norm in the software industry used to be this: if you develop an open-source project, you have dibs on selling that project as a service. The Big Three cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) broke that norm, reselling open-source-projects-as-a-service. The open source projects have now fired back with a new breed of open-source licenses that permit users to do everything but that.

Grab Bag

• SlateStarCodex reviews a book about cultural intelligence – As ever, a long and interesting read³.
• Crime doesn’t pay in Venezuela: muggers can’t afford bullets for their guns
• Crime pays in Venezuela: small planes used by cocaine smugglers are often burned after one use – The difference is that the cocaine smugglers have the support of the military controlling the border crossings, because being a marshaling yard for drug smuggling is the only growth industry in the country.
• John Wick is saving action movies – I enjoy a CGI superhero romp more than parvusimperator does (much more⁴), but importantly, you watch a superhero romp for the characters, not the action scenes. John Wick (and the approximately contemporaneous Mad Max: Fury Road) dispense with the CGI in favor of watchable, clearly-shot action, not the shaky-cam quick-cut mumbo jumbo you see so often today⁵.

Defense

• F-35C bumped from four to six internal air-to-air missiles – The story does not, as far as I can tell, indicate what the mix is.
• Ominously-named Skyborg program to provide perfidious drone wingmen to F-35, F-15EX as the aerial wing of the AI uprising
• Russia’s big UCAV might already be playing sidekick
• Loren Thompson on the NRASM – Loren Thompson is the biggest DoD shill who regularly makes an appearance in these pages, but the articles are still usually fun. (Also, if DoD shilling pays, is there a signup sheet somewhere, or do they come to us?)
• Flooding in Oklahoma refloats USS Batfish – The old girl’s looking pretty good. Unlike Pittsburgh’s own USS Requin, Batfish appears to have a WW2-appropriate cut-down sail.
• A drone you can shoot out of a 40mm grenade launcher – It can move up to 10km from the launch site or loiter for twenty minutes, and it can carry all kinds of payloads, from the ever-popular camera to a variety of bombs.
• Sig’s next-gen squad weapons – Their 6.8mm cartridge is just a 6.8×51.
• On the M-1A2C – Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a built-in Easy Eight-style nickname.
• Steam catapults by presidential decree? – I’m pro-electromagnetic-catapult, given the advantages. I also think the fact that Donald Trump has an opinion on aircraft catapults is amusing and humanizing.
• Poland buying 32 F-35As

Science and Technology

• Artificial general intelligence is hard to define, much less build – The key insight is that when people talk about machines driving The Singularity, they’re talking about artificial general creativity. We have an awful lot of non-artificial general intelligence already, and much of it goes unused.
• Used IBM mainframe buyer’s guide – In case you’re looking for a fun hardware project. All you have to do is spend about as much as you would on a cheap new car, and be prepared for an extra $170-some per month in electricity¹.
• Arm2 is the latest to suspend business with Huawei – That’s terrible for Huawei, given that they do a lot of ARM-architecture processors.
• Google stored unhashed G-Suite passwords for over a decade – It’s fixed now, but this is your weekly reminder that even the big players in tech are actually terrible at their jobs.
• Offset graphene sheets superconduct at -25C – Also, about a million times atmospheric pressure, but what’s a megabar or two among friends?
• SpaceX succeeds on another launch – This one to deploy the first 60 satellites in their proposed, uh, 12,000-strong Starlink constellation. They stuck the landing, which means they’re up to 40 of 47 on landing attempts.
• No link for this one, because I forgot to pop it into our chat, but given how many Starlink satellites are planned, the FCC’s standard satellite-hits-someone-or-something calculation suggests that it’s even odds after six years that reentering debris will bonk something more important than dirt.

Baseball

• Breaking balls in MLB break more than ever before – FiveThirtyEight with its typically excellent nerdy sports coverage.
• It’s not the movement, the Washington Post retorts, but the miles… – Per hour.

Grab Bag

• France is a late-stage aristocracy – According to a French guy on Twitter, anyway.
• On the deeply comic-book-inspired animation of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – Which is up there with Homecoming in the ‘best Spider-Man movie’ category. It’s a twelve-minute video, and absolutely worth your time.
• Recent entrant to the PC game storefront thunderdome Epic suspends accounts for buying too many games during a sale – Why? Because Epic does not have a cart, and repeated small transactions look suspicious to fraud monitoring systems.