I’m thinking about getting a progressive press to make my USPSA reloading go a bit faster. Any recommendations? I’m thinking about waiting for that Frankford Arsenal FX-10 jobber to go on sale before I make a final decision.

Fishbreath’s Story of the Week

• If you stare into the machine-learning ad segmentation market, the machine-learning ad segmentation market stares back – AI-driven market segmentation for advertising doesn’t just learn from the world, it shapes it. It puts you into a bucket (which may not even exist organically). It shows you content relevant to that bucket. You become more a part of that bucket.

Defense

• Iran’s big AOR catches fire, sinks – They just commissioned another one, though.
• Big Army tips Oshkosh for Stryker 30mm cannon – Unmanned turret, with up to six brigades possible. A $942 million deal, if it goes all the way.
• Swap the barrel, and your 7.62 NATO gun can be a 6.8 TVCM one – Wonder if maybe we’re finally going to start seeing non-metallic cases take off? Wonder if they’re cheaper than brass for reloaders.
• Another bit on how McDonnell-Douglas’ culture ruined Boeing – It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s why we put links to the full stories.
• Navy’s tanker drone makes history: refuels a manned aircraft for the first time
• The first B-21 bombers are in production and will soon be ready to test – Ground testing, in advance of flight testing. Also, “B-21 Raider” sounds very 1930s.
• Hyundai’s SoKor baby carrier isn’t so baby anymore – It’s basically HMS QE, but with Made In Republic of Korea stamped on the side. The Drive has more.
• Hyundai also pushing their IFV on Europe – Content warning: Norwegian.
• Drone fries other drones with microwaves
• Hawaii F-22s scramble on FAA request – But nobody’s saying why, and the FAA’s statement is hilariously vague. So I guess it’s aliens again.
• To distract you while we memory-hole the above story, here’s a photo of an F-22 wing tank storage facility – Or maybe it’s a set from a Bond flick. Hard to tell.
• Space Force moves at orbital speeds, builds and launches satellite in four months – That’s pretty good speed, especially as GPS

The ‘Rona

• The lab leak theory is now running in that noted right-wing conspiracist rag, Vanity Fair – Also, Jon Stewart apparently did a bit on it. Mainstreaming what I’ve kind of thought for a year now.
• Half of US enhanced pandemic unemployment benefits may have been paid out fraudulently – Good to know we’re getting value for our tax dollar.

Guns

• The true distance of a typical gunfight – A careful examination of the evidence suggests that it’s… the 3-5 yards that you hear as the received, unsourced wisdom.
• Biden admin’s ATF nominee lost a service weapon after leaving it in a car

Grab Bag

• Baseballers, robbed of steroids, turn to sticky substances – Or would a better headline be, pitchers get back at batters? Either way, rules are being broken, and authorities are turning a blind eye.
• Doctors afraid to use race-based statistics in diagnosis and treatment
• Master and Commander (film) to get a prequel – Well well! That’s good news. Somehow I suspect Russell Crowe may not be playing the title role again, if it’s a prequel.
• FBI builds fake encrypted-comms app to lure in criminals – I’ve always been a little suspicious of honeypots like this as a policing tactic.
• Princeton’s classics department drops Greek, Latin requirements – … isn’t that the whole point?
• Remember Dimming Betelgeuse earlier this year? – Or whenever that was? Turns out it was just dust, and the star isn’t going to obligingly go supernova and give us something cool to look at in the sky.

According to WordPress, I missed numbering one of these 113. The auto-post-numberer adds a ‘-2’ to duplicate names, so if I hadn’t renamed this one, it would have been 112-2-2.

Anyway, on to the news. Or, in some cases, the olds.

State-Sponsored Hijacking in Belarus

• Ryanair 4978 receives a fake bomb threat from Belarussian authorities, backed up by a MiG-29 – Because a dissident was on board.
• The UK, ex-EU, appears to be growing a pair – I think the EU later joined the UK in doing something similar.

Defense

• MLOK SA80 – How modern of them!
• Amphibious MC-130J is a dumb way to make a seaplane – It’s a C-130 floatplane, and it looks as silly as it sounds.
• Also on the shopping list, a high-speed VTOL plane
• Elbit strikes back on its BMS security
• I heard you like drones, so I put drones in your drones – Along with self-defense options from General Atomics, an article on how to keep drones relevant in a peer-on-peer conflict. By which The Drive seems to mean a conflict between peers with developed anti-drone capabilities, given how effective they were in the Armenia-Azerbaijan dustup.
• AReS is a strike HARM – I think? It’s not super-clear. Anyway, it launches from a shipping container, and might have more stages than the ‘one’ of the HARM.
• Beijing knows exactly what it’s saying when it rebuffs Washington’s request for high-level military talks – You might need paywall eliminator for this one.
• LockMart goes woke – At least in its executive training.
• Ronald Reagan, forward-deployed in Japan, will make a patrol to the Middle East to cover the Afghanistan withdrawal – Somehow, that feels like a bad idea to me, like the kind of bad idea people put in the history books under ‘reasons the war started’.

Science and Technology

• The story of the microwave, alternate edition: mini-documentary – Featuring the world’s best-preserved centenarian (or near-centenarian; I forget).
• Install a Russian keyboard to prevent ransomware attacks – Seriously. Russian hackers try to avoid hitting Russians, because they don’t want to attract the attention of local law enforcement, so they use ‘has a Russian keyboard’ as a proxy.
• Motorcycle airbag vests as a service – Sorry, you missed your payment! Now your airbag vest thing no longer works. On the one hand, I guess fair is fair. On the other hand, not everything ought to be sold on a subscription model.
• David Hilbert and the Fifth Roots of Unity – Mathematicians have answered one of Hilbert’s Big Questions, about constructions analogous to roots of unity for number systems beyond the rationals.

Guns

• Ammo shortage will stretch out for years, say manufacturers – On the other hand, I’ve heard anecdotes that primers are getting easier to find.
• H und K patents some manner of compact handgun – Little late to the party.
• New guns are hard to make – Gun Jesus tells you why.

Grab Bag

• Naming the elements in Chinese is really hard
• The word ‘lox’ has meant ‘salmon’ for 8,000 years
• Professional distance runner: a job for Ethiopian immigrants – Not a snide headline; actually just a description of the story.
• Amazon abandons arbitration clause in its terms of service – … because enterprising lawyers managed to make the process of filing for arbitration efficient enough that it started hitting Amazon’s bottom line. It’s like when Tom Brady plays the Ravens—just root for injuries.
• The Harmonica Yokocho is a 30,829 square-foot section of Tokyo supporting 100 shops, restaurants, and bars – I keep on telling you, the cyberpunk future is now.
• Things are rough for Boeing in the wake of removing the engineers from control and running the company like any other corporate behemoth – I mean, in the wake of the 737 MAX safety scandal.

Another two-week gap, but happily, I don’t think we have very much breaking news to turn into yesterday’s news.

Projects

• For some reason, my 3D printer is still having a devil of a time with miniatures (after having worked perfectly previously). Maybe it’s the nozzle. I plan to switch it back to a larger nozzle, with which to print some more Little Wars bits and bobs, before I eventually go back to miniatures.
• If you’ve been following the video half of my content production, you will have noticed the revolver reliability problems. I think I’m finally almost done with that. We’ll see sometime next week, most likely, when Bowen sends me the Ruger double-action revolver bushing tool I ordered.

Defense

• Why do F-16s carry wingtip AMRAAMs? – Reduces wing flutter.
• NATO exercise in the Black Sea includes all littoral countries except Turkey and Russia – Except for the two largest, most important countries with a Black Sea border, everyone was there!
• China builds villages inside Bhutan – Has been for five years.
• Why Kiribati and Kanton matter – Salamander points out that the great circle route from San Diego to Brisbane goes within 30 miles of the island of Kanton. Guess who wants to rebuild an airfield there?
• Army’s new fitness test fails 7% of men, 44% of women – Dog bites man more than man bites dog, to use the news analogy.
• The French generals wrote a second letter
• DTR writes some ad copy for Hanwha and Rheinmetall – Some pretty pictures.
• Iraq’s F-16 fleet may fall to the greatest enemy of all – Lack of maintenance. Lockheed contractors are on the way out.
• Strike Eagle ships JASSMs
• While the F-15EX will carry an oversized air-to-air missile
• Old experiments sadly abandoned: helicopter operation from submarines – The nice thing about having so much obsolete hardware around after the Second World War is that we could use some of it to experiment with random things like troop carrying submarines with a helicopter deck.
• The Long Range Hypersonic Weapon has a range of 1,725 miles
• Australia drops Elbit’s Battle Management System
• Perennial Soapbox favorite DCS is good enough for VR training Warthog pilots – There was a recent A-10C Block II or whatever in DCS. Maybe this is why?
• Army joining us in the 21st Century and building modularity into tank computer systems
• Biden administration caves to Kremlin on a Russian pipeline – Shortly before a German election likely to scupper the project anyway, but still.

Non-Breaking News

• Oh yeah, something did happen – The Colonial Pipeline thing!
• There was a state of emergency
• Why is there no shortage in Pittsburgh? – Because we have at least three major sources of fuel—pipelines from the Gulf, the Midwest, and the East Coast.
• Krebs on Security looks at the criminals behind the pipeline ransomware attack
• Colonial Pipeline paid $5 million ransom, part of the $90 million the crime gang took in before shuttering

Iron Dome

• Palestinian rocket attacks are bad for Israel… – … but they do make for good Iron Dome in action footage.
• Also good for long-exposure photography
• IDF dupes gullible media by reporting a ground invasion of Gaza, which drives fighters into tunnel systems, which Israel then bombs

Grab Bag

• The mysterious case of the Masters pimento cheese sandwhich – Augusta National fired a caterer, who kept the recipe secret. The next caterer, at great personal difficulty, figured out the secret ingredient. The club then fired that caterer.
• Patents filed: the Glock Rifle? – On the one hand, it’s literally just patent filings at this point. On the other hand, it’s pretty detailed patent filings.
• Historical photo: lowering a 16″ naval gun into a furnace to finish it
• Neural implant lets person type by imagining writing – Curiously, the implant requires retraining every few weeks. I wouldn’t have expected that.
• Progressive prosecutor presides over homicide spike – Water still wet, sky still blue.
• Are plate tectonics critical to life? Scientific American investigates

A bit late on the draw this week: work has been ridiculously busy, as has been the pattern lately.

I did at least fix the occasional ‘your IP address has been blocked’ message you might have been seeing: that page was getting cached as the homepage when spammers visited. It’s not fixed in the sense that the anti-spam plugin and the homepage play nice, but I turned off the anti-spam plugin and cleared the cache, so it looks solved from your perspective, non-logged-in readers.

Onward!

Defense

• NSM box launchers on unmanned trucks: the future of Marine aviation – The second part is maybe unwarranted snark, but they have been talking about giving up the baby carriers just at the point when baby carriers get useful with F-35s, haven’t they?
• Private aggressor aircraft provider Top Aces, not satisfied with having the coolest job in the world, now have the coolest Skyhawks – AESA, IRST… I wonder if you can stick AMRAAMs on?
• Oh, they also own 29 F-16s – I repeat: coolest job in the world.
• The technical alignment chart – These keep getting more niche… and I am on board.
• FNH builds a new lightweight machine gun – The “EVOLYS”. Just rolls off the tongue. It has some neat features, though, which I won’t spoil.
• Belgian farmer moves rock, expands Belgium – The former border dated back to the Treaty of Kortrijk (1820). “We should be able to avoid a new border war,” said the mayor of the neighboring French village, displaying an alarming lack of certainty. If the farmer doesn’t return the stone, the case goes to the Belgian foreign ministry, which would then summon a Franco-Belgian border commission inactive since 1930. European history is hilarious sometimes.

Sport, Motor, Formula

• After the 2014 rules changes, Mercedes F1 had an ‘idle mode’ to keep from destroying the field by too much – Relevant meme. The current team boss denies it, but then, of course he would.

China, Coronavirus, and Other Related Topics

• Here at the Soapbox, we like to demonstrate our editorial independence by honking off the Chinese government at every opportunity.
• The Chinese property market looks to me like some kind of scheme, perhaps one shaped like a three-dimensional triangular solid – Deposits from new buyers are being used to finish old construction, claims a guy on Twitter.
• Brazil rejects the Russian vaccine, which contains a replicating cold virus – Oops. Well, my Made in Russia Soviet Union pocket watch stopped working in pretty short order, and also, I spent enough time in Russia to develop an appreciation for all the nuance of на ремонт, so I can’t claim I’m totally surprised that something made in Russia would be of less than the best quality.
• It only took a year, but we finally figured out how COVID spreads! – Respiratory droplets. Shame that the lesson (avoid large groups in poorly-ventilated spaces) is now almost irrelevant, thanks to the widespread availability (in the US, at least) of vaccines.
• The lab leak hypothesis: increasingly likely – Not to say it was engineered, but any sober or even slightly tipsy examination of the evidence has to allow the possibility.
• Contractor with the PA health department leaks PII for 72,000 people – I don’t think I’m one of them, at least.

Twilight of the West

• We also like overwrought headings under which to sort articles.
• 20 French generals, 80 officers, and 1,000 men signed an open letter expressing concern over ‘mortal dangers’ that face the Republic – They don’t quite call for a coup. Quite.
• A Day in the Life: South African armored car driver – The armor holds. Late breaking: dashcam footage!
• Eviction moratoriums: both sides – For a commie rag, the Washington Post is slightly more sympathetic to the landlord side than I would have guessed.

Grab Bag

• Excavator shoveling slag – It’s the most metal thing I saw last week. … don’t forget to tip your waiters and waitresses.
• Ars Technica slobbers all over Invincible, the Amazon animated superhero series, which is good but not quite as good as the ArsTech review says – Issue 1: ‘fun’ is the wrong word for it. It’s very rarely fun in the traditional superhero sense, and when it is, it’s quickly interrupted by ultra-gory realism. Issue 2: the voice cast is extremely uneven, because there aren’t a lot of people in it with serious experience doing voice work. (J.K. Simmons is, as always, worth the price of admission.) Issue 3: there’s an attempt at young adult drama, which is deeply tonally inconsistent with the rest of the show, and mostly just drags.

Again with the Skypirates! developer log in place of a what-we’re-reading last week, since the news folder was looking a bit light.

Not so this week!

The Cyberpunk Future

• Prospectus on Próspera – Astral Codex Ten’s Scott Alexander on a particular instance of the charter city movement, where a private company receives limited grant from the government of Honduras to compete with the government of Honduras. The typically clear-eyed Alexander says, “If you were a completely ordinary Honduran, making $1,300 a year, having a medium lifetime risk of being murdered, with the government occasionally taking your land and killing you if you complained – would you want the option of moving to Próspera? With its civil rights, property rights, strong security, good education, and higher salaries? I have these things right now in America and they’re great.”

Have you tried turning it OMFV and on again?

• Everyone’s favorite IFV program, after a brief cancellation, is back in the news
• BAE’s entry – Parvusimperator notes: looks like an Elbit UT30 Mk. 2 turret on an AMPV hull, which is a turretless Bradley hull with some mine resistance and layout changes.
• Oshkosh is partnering with Hanwha, to (probably) enter the AS21 or something similar
• Rheitheon/Raynmetall are back too, along with GenDynLandSys (the only entrant last time)
• There are some small business entrants, as well: MettleOps and Point Blank Enterprises – Since phase 1 is basically just concept art, you don’t need much to get a foot in the door. Both of the wee tiny entrants seem to plan to work with bigger manufacturing partners if their entries get the nod for further development.

Defense

• Meme #1: 2021 is as far from 1981 as 1981 is from 1941 – Looks like the link is broken. It’s an F-35, an F-14, and a Wildcat.
• Meme #2: the aircraft carrier alignment chart – Featuring a great dig at Big Kuz.
• Indonesia lost a submarine – Pour one out.
• The MAWL-CLAD – Clever name. It’s an IR pointer for guns, except in a different wavelength so typical NVGs can’t see it.
• Tracking soldiers’ phones is super-easy, and reveals an awful lot about what the US is up to – cf. the Huawei story a bit further down.
• PLAN intel #1: radar helicopter – With radar deployed! A rare spot.
• PLAN intel #2: identifying the members of the Liaoning battlegroup as it passes Okinawa
• Marines ditching RQ-21 drones – The new hotness is new and hot, I guess?

Science and Technology

• Northrop Grumman wee spacecraft docks with a satellite again, and this time it’s a live satellite – It’s a life-extension limpet!
• Huawei, network equipment provider to the Netherlands, has been spying on the Netherlands for a decade – Like, listening in on the Prime Minister’s conversations spying.
• Google now building its own custom video transcoding chips for YouTube – Each PCI-E card mounts 20 encoder cores, each of which can encode 4K60 in real time.
• How to use Tesla autopilot without being in the driver’s seat – But I was told this was impossible!
• Giving the Artemis lander contract to SpaceX is a big deal – In no small part because it’s funds for Starship development. SLS is planned to cost $2 billion. Throw $2 billion at an up-and-running Starship launch system, and NASA could launch something every other week for a year.
• Building Maxwell’s demon – Curiously imprecise for a Quanta article.
• Wokelash at BaseCamp – It was either ‘wokelash’ or ‘whacklash’ (cf. whackjob). The locals aren’t happy.

Games

• Gunner, HEAT, PC preview from Tally Ho Corner – Mr Stone at T.H.C. is perhaps the internet’s preeminent examiner of simulations and wargames, and seems pleased with the state of the game so far.

Guns

• DC’s Gun Recovery Unit already does everything pro-gun people say will happen if guns are broadly criminalized – Civil rights violations, invasive searches, the whole nine yards.
• In what can only be described as a Power Move, USPSA contender Christian Sailer wins an Area championship in a division in which he isn’t classified – That is to say, he’s shot it in matches with classifiers fewer than six times.

Grab Bag

• Lies about knife fighting – It’s recognizably a fight, you won’t get cut up, and other fun facts.
• Cop morale: low – Unsurprising.

The last two updates were 109 and 110, fun numbers if you’re a Messerschmitt fan.

Last week’s Skypirates! developer log was a calculated choice, to give us time to build up a list of interesting stories for you.

Defense

• The Germans are installing Trophy APS on Leopard 2A7A1s – That’s quite a model number, isn’t it? Anyway, it seems to me that it barely matters, in light of the recent chart we shared calling Germany a NATO freeloader.
• Israel receives new Oron ISR plane – Looks a bit awkward, as do many of its competitors in the genre, but good aerial surveillance is the substrate of modern warfare.
• A Burke and a Zumwalt under construction at Bath Iron Works – The missus and I, on our delightful vacation to Maine a few years ago, saw Bath Iron Works from the front—we were on the right side of the picture, from one of the two docks upstream of the little headland.
• Battle Order with a video on Japan’s Rapid Deployment Forces – The fiction that Japan’s military is purely for self defense grows thinner by the moment. Coming soon, the Japan Ground Self Defense Force Rapid Overseas Expeditionary Response Team, or something similarly silly.
• The Diehl Defense IRIS-T-SLS Mk III SHORADS – A pretty cool system behind an alphabet soup of acronyms.
• Big Army to replace TOW – But not with Spike, because it wasn’t invented here.
• ‘Accident’ at Iran’s Natanz atomic site – What do you think? 500lb Joint Direct Accident Munition, Small Diameter Accident, ground-deployed satchel accident?
• Improved plate carriers in a constrained fiscal environment

Science and Technology

• Supreme Court punts on API copyrightability claims, declares Google’s use of Java in Android fair use
• Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider and Fermilab point toward the Standard Model being incomplete](https://www.quantamagazine.org/muon-g-2-experiment-at-fermilab-finds-hint-of-new-particles-20210407/) – Different anomalies: the LHC is seeing unusual decay in b-mesons, while Fermilab is looking into the magnetic moment of muons. Complicating the latter story, a new calculation of the expected value matches the observed value more closely than the presently-accepted value.
• A real-time map of Evil Genius Elon Musk’s satellite network – Spoiler: he has a lot of them up there.
• Ford studying prechamber ignition for gasoline engines – Deep into The Secret Horsepower Race, I find stories like this extra-fascinating.
• Build your own wire EDM machine! – It only takes some custom-machined parts and a €2995 arc generator.
• Citibank loses $500 million on a misclick – UI design is important. We might have shared this already, but it’s a good one.
• Mathematician disproves the unit conjecture – Parvusimperator, former math grad student, said it was interesting.
• A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would wreck the global economy for years – Because even if TSMC’s fabs survive undamaged, and even if TSMC retains its employees, and even if China can immediately get a state-owned TSMC back into operation, it’s still a dead company walking, because its supply chain is deeply dependent upon Western technology and equipment.

Guns

• Making a short-barreled shotgun from a Remington 870 – A fun DIY project.
• It’s match season again – The wheelgun has been giving me some reliability problems to start the year. Going up to the range with parvusimperator and company this weekend, in the hopes of confirming my diagnosis.

Grab Bag

• Los Angeles has had a backlog of container ships for six months – The backlog is not six months long—the wait is only a week or so—but there’s been a wait for six months. Imports have been way up in the past year.
• How Brexit saved Britain: a COVID story
• Ever Given to remain in the Suez Canal until restitution is paid
• France to use ancient oaks, planted with the aim of supporting Age of Sail naval ambitions, to rebuild Notre Dame’s spire – Smart! The environmentalists are, of course, up in arms.
• Late frost in France hurts vineyards – The wife and I prefer Italian wines anyway.
• Archaeologists find “the lost golden city of Luxor” in Egypt – Not a Skypirates story; actually happened.
• Censorship, indoctrination, and actual-race-hatred racism in modern schools

This is about as far from a Wednesday update as it’s possible to get, and it’s also a bit on the late side, but so it goes. At least 4/3/21 is a fun countdown.

Local News

• The spam-stopper plugin is doing its job (1.5 million spam registrations/comments blocked!). If it’s doing its job too well and preventing any of you regulars (or newcomers who happen to read this) from commenting, let me know in the Discord, and I’ll try whitelisting you.
• The 3D printer had recently ceased to go brr, because printing tabletop-quality miniatures is a very, very tricky affair at the knife edge of the machine’s capabilities, but it’s running again after an afternoon picking thin coatings out of threads on two mating parts.
• A book recommendation from the Discord (The Secret Horsepower Race) has been great reading so far. I think I got to page 53 before I came across a full four-column, two-page spread with no fascinating pictures or diagrams. Serendipitously, this is What We’re Reading 109, an auspicious number given the subject matter of the book.

Suez Canal

• I caught wind of this on Tuesday, March 23, and if I’d published it in the scheduled timeslot, I would have been well ahead of the curve. As it stands, I’d be a little behind the curve linking a postmortem. Oh well. I imagine you don’t come here for breaking news, and if you do, I’m a little concerned about how up-to-date you are on any number of current events.
• Relatedly, it’s been a bad year for container losses at sea – Volumes are up, schedules are tight, stormy seas are less easily avoided.
• Memes made Suez Canal workers work faster – National pride cited as the reason, in that I guess the Egyptians thought we were laughing at them, and not the situation generally?
• On that note, I saw someone on Twitter remark that, given his long experience in Egypt, he was surprised the shouting over the situation wasn’t audible in space.

Defense

• The four quadrants of an alliance – “[…] not all nations are of equivalent utility at war. Due to national caveats, a company of Estonians are many orders of magnitude [my emphasis] to any commander than a company of Belgians.” Harsh.
• Sub-hunting Intruders: a missed opportunity? – Not just a history of that, but a brief history of fixed-wing ASW through the middle of the Cold War, courtesy of The War Zone. I think I knew some of it already from Friedman’s Carriers, but it’s a good refresher and/or short treatment. Oh, and here the article cites Friedman.
• USMC fielding Squad Common Optic – That’s Uncle Sugar’s name for the Trijicon 1-8×20 VCOG, if you’d forgotten. The existing Rifle Combat Optic is a fixed 4x number. Having a 1-6x scope on a rifle of mine, and having run that rifle once or twice at two-gun matches, I can confidently say being able to drop to no magnification is a huge advantage.
• There is about to be an earth-shattering kaboom: an album of precision munitions instants from impact
• Marines emulate Somalis; test Javelin teams in inflatable boats
• Congresscritter: the US urgently needs a maritime-focused national defense strategy – Vice Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, so it’s a little less surprising that she wrote a cogent and well-argued piece on defense, but still pretty surprising.
• Russia making a move on Ukraine? – Lots of Russian hardware moving in that direction, along with the trick from Red Storm Rising (and real life, I guess) where units who rotated in for exercises stay after the exercises are over. Maybe this makes up for Suez—a pre-breaking story!
• The history of the sonobuoy – I didn’t realize that air-dropped sonobuoys have as long a history as they do.
• The ‘RQ-180’, or whatever it’s officially called: a drone’s drone – The War Zone showing why they’re the paid professionals, and we’re the pikers who mostly link to other places and make snide remarks. A lot of it is speculation, but it’s well-informed speculation, and well worth the read.

Science and Technology

• GPT-3 is a bunch of hot air – That is, it doesn’t understand language in the way a lot of people seem to dearly want it to.
• Is part of a spider’s cognition embodied in its web? – TLDR: yes, but only in the same way that a grocery list embodies part of mine.
• Shocked Pikachu: scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized with possible COVID-19 symptoms in November 2019 – I have some college acquaintances who were simply aghast, last summer, that I thought lab escape was a plausible hypothesis.
• Europe beginning to freak out about SpaceX – I’m sure they’ll schedule a meeting to convene a committee to establish a commission to investigate the issue any year now.

Guns

• Back on March 17, I noted that I was hearing rumors of the Pennsylvania background check system going down, as people converted stimulus checks into handguns.
• The top US general in Afghanistan carries a Glockblaster – Compensator and slide-mounted red dot. Suggestion box is open for appropriate Glockblaster-themed names.

Grab Bag

• This madman built a machine to cook a chicken by slapping it – It even kind of worked. Content warning: modern YouTube personality.
• Germany is not happy with EU leadership over COVID vaccine missteps – It turns out that the Trump-era solution (“deliver dump trucks of money to vaccine manufacturers in exchange for first crack”) was better than the EU strategy (“negotiate as a large buyer”). It’s the New York Way, or something.

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?