I’m working on a tightly-estimated customer project at work these days, so I haven’t been doing as much reading during the day, nor as much blog-post-assembling. Sorry for the wait!

Coronavirus

• NYC social distancing narc line flooded with obscenities
• Digital media taking a coronavirus-related drubbing – Which is kind of a surprising outcome to me. You’d think that online publications advertising things you can ordinarily order online would be doing pretty well.
• New York City: mask-wearing mandatory; New York State: mask-wearing is a crime
• Did Vietnam react to the coronavirus quickly because its state-sponsored hackers knew the extent of the issue in China? – If so, yet another item in my ‘we’re living the cyberpunk future’ file.
• A gaijin living in Japan reports on the state of Japanese hospitals
• The wuflu causes blood clotting problems – At least, that was the story on April 22.
• Analyzing wuflu super-spreader events to reason about its mode of transmission – The author comes down on ‘large droplets’ as the most common mode, which means that wearing just about any mask will make you safer. Relatedly, any bets on when it’ll go back to being strange to see someone wearing a mask in a grocery store?
• COVID sparks hunger around the world

Defense

• A Viking pilot reminisces on late-Cold War carrier aviation – Good read.
• Bombers on Guam are over, Lancer sorties from South Dakota to Japan and back are in
• Airbus tanker carries out world-first automatic refueling contacts – That is to say, a boom tanker without a boom operator.
• Hornet entering the pattern at 600 knots – That’s a little on the spicy side.
• Parvusimperator’s AFV Photo Pick of the Week
• Pentagon confirms three UFO videos are authentic – Not that they show aliens, but that they show unidentified objects. So, who’s the audience, and what’s the message? Not ‘UFO cranks/aliens are out there’, I would guess, but rather, ‘Hey, Commies, bet you don’t have flying saucers like we do’.
• Multiple shipyards for FFG(X)? – ‘A handful of viable shipyards’ seems like a worthy policy goal.

Science and Technology

• This guy has a fleet of homemade trucks powered by Harbor Freight 6.5hp engines – If I had some land…

History

• A series of videos on the Bronze Age Collapse – And perhaps a warning to hyper-interconnected modern societies? I saw a guy on Twitter ask whether Singapore or North Korea has greater food security. Granted, I agree with him that the answer is Singapore in almost every case, but there are moderately-plausible scenarios where the answer flips. If the merchant republics of Italy and their dealings with the Ottoman Empire are any indication, tiny rich city-states have some serious downsides in times of strife.

The weeks seem to get longer and longer every day.

Books

• Parvusimperator finished the French Rifle Book from Headstamp Publishing, and speaks very highly of its content and production values. He’s now reading First In, Last Out, a history of South African artillery in the latter days of the Cold War.

Time-Sensitive

• There’s a SpaceX launch livestream today at 1:40 p.m. ET – They’ve missed the last two landings-at-sea, so there’s even a chance of fireworks.

La Corona

• The hemoglobin-attacking theory seems to be pretty well debunked – Never let it be said we don’t walk back claims when we’re obviously wrong!
• Some doctors write in favor of hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin as an early-stage coronavirus treatment protocol
• What’s going on in Japan? – Why did its numbers look so good at first, and why do they look more average now?
• CDC’s bad coronavirus tests were contaminated with coronavirus – I can see how that would cause trouble, yeah.

Defense

• Need to fortify a house? Here are some handy tips
• USAF working on palletized weapons systems – Use those C-130s to carpet-bomb the poor sods who can’t shoot back, save your better bombers for bigger tasks, I guess.
• A look at the Alfa-type submarines’ reactors
• Raytheon gets the LRSO missile nod
• Vortex gets the nod for the Army’s next-gen-squad-weapon sight – It has a rangefinder and ballistic computer built in.
• Armatas in Syria: Russia sends the newcomer overseas for field testing
• Inside the AUTEC – That is, the shadowy submarine training range near the Bahamas. (At this rate, maybe you should just subscribe to The Drive’s RSS feed instead of ours.)
• Russia gives up on cruiser-sized nuclear destroyer and destroyer-sized frigate projects
• The Losharik affair provides insights into Russia’s Arctic ambitions

Guns

• The guns of the SOG – From Vietnam.
• The guns of the International Sniper Competition… 2019 edition – All of our local matches have been canceled too.
• Extreme precision shooting: 0.025-inch groups – That’s not a typo. It’s actually 25-mil groups. I wonder if there are any warehouses around that we could put a big shooting range into.
• The Gunwerks SKUHL dangerous game rifle is moderately pretty – Some nice receiver engraving, at least, and the cost of entry is well below the bigger names in the field at $8000 for a base-model gun.
• Biden’s gun control agenda is out – It’s exactly what you’d expect.
• Rail-mounted tactical light and gun camera – We like the idea of it as a USPSA addon—splitscreen gun camera and hat camera, maybe.

Sport

• Gronk comes back to football – But he wants to go to Tampa Bay with his boy Brady.

Grab Bag

• On randomized controlled trials: a joke article
• A randomized controlled trial on the preceding paper’s subject
• Cleaning the battlefields of the Second World War: recovery tanks and scrap heaps – Picture-heavy. Very cool.
• It’s time to build – But we seem to be unable to do so. Why is that, the author wonders?
• Xi fears manufacturing exodus – I say there’s maybe a 25% chance that big supply chain changes happen.
• Huawei and COVID
• A PIT maneuver at 130mph ends with a surprising 50% survival rate for the participants
• US newspaper business in its final death throes? – Parvusimperator and I are divided on this one. He doesn’t like Gannett, which is the main player in the local newspaper industry. I hold that Gannett or no, local newspapers are basically the only useful media outlet left in the world. I’m sure there’s massive corruption in the government of, say, Pittsburgh, but there’s nobody around to hold their feet to the fire, because we have exactly one daily print newspaper, and there’s no competition for the first scoop.
• How is COVID going to hit the autonomous car industry? – Hard, is my guess.

Reverse Tax Day edition! (Your correspondents got their economic stimulus payouts today. If you’re due one and don’t need it, consider sending it, or some of it, to a local food bank.)

Books and Other Media

• I read Under the Eagle, which I found at a library sale a while ago. It’s the first in a long line of historical military fiction set in Imperial Rome. I’m likely to try to find some others.
• I will be reading the next two Jim Butcher books, which are due out this year. Finally.
• I’m presently reading the My Hero Academia manga, because I enjoy the show and have a lot of time on my hands.
• Parvusimperator is reading entries in the Australian Army Journal.

The Game’s Afoot: Tactical Decision Game #1

• TDGs are miniature exercises to develop your ability to understand and react to tactical situations on a short timeline – This is a fun one. We may do something of a similar nature as a monthly feature, perhaps backed by a scenario in some wargame or another. (Maybe Armored Brigade, which has sufficient resolution to get down into the weeds like this.)

Wuhan Coronavirus

• Journalists among the non-essential – Unfortunately, this is likely to disproportionately fall on local reporters who might actually contribute something to society, as opposed to the glorified celebrity bloggers in the White House press corps.
• State Department cables warned of dangerously-lax procedures at Wuhan labs… in 2018

Defense

• Is it rude to stare at a ship’s well deck?
• Remember the carrier window puzzles from last time? The Ford class has a fancy digital version
• The story you’ve been waiting for: Venezuelan patrol boat fires upon, rams cruise liner; subsequently sinks
• Photo gallery: Bonn, replenishment ship of the KriegsDeutsche Marine.
• One of China’s LPDs-under-construction caught fire
• OMFVv2 requirements are out, and they listened to parvusimperator – Transportability by aircraft is a subitem under priority #7.
  • Here’s the requirements document
• The Navy needs more frigates – Endorsed!
• Air USA buys 46 Hornets – Old RAAF birds, except ‘old’ undersells them. They’re well-specced and have been well maintained. Between this and their other planes, by my reckoning this makes Air USA the 57th largest air force in the world.
• Royal Canadian Navy paints a frigate in dazzle camo – I like it.
• The Drive with an article on modern torpedoes – With the exception that it glosses over firing transients, it seems like a pretty good look. On the topic of submarines and subsims, I give Cold Waters the thumbs up. It’s a little arcadey when you’re dodging torpedoes, but the tension on the hunt is exactly right.
• The anti-torpedo torpedo system in development in the US is no longer in development

History

• An idea perhaps best left in the history books – Looks cool, though.
• Fialka, the best rotor encryption machine ever designed

Science and Technology

• SEO ruined the internet
• Google ruined the internet – By, the argument goes, emphasizing popularity over accuracy. I think this is true, but the causality is reversed. People used to care more about being right or linking to correct things on the Internet. We here actually feel the recency bias pretty keenly. Many of our (by which I mean parvusimperator’s) most popular articles were written a few years ago, which is eternities in Internet time.

Guns

• Plans for Deterrence Dispensed’s FGC-9 are now available – The FGC-9 is a 9mm carbine you can make with a 3D printer, a set of calipers, common power tools, and zero gun parts. It accepts Glock magazines, but there are plans for making your own Glock-compatible magazines. DIY ammunition is forthcoming.
• How fast do precision rifle barrels erode? – This article aims to answer that question.
• First-time gun buyers in lefty states shocked to discover you can’t just walk into a store and walk out with a gun – Well, in some states, at least. You can definitely do that here in PA.
• Parvusimperator bought Gun Jesus’ book on French military rifles, and now Headstamp Publishing has one coming on British bullpups – Parvusimperator endorses the product line wholeheartedly.

Grab Bag

• Remember the story about how the Bloomberg campaign was a champagne-soaked orgy of excess? – Now Lil’ Mike is trying to stiff his campaign workers out of owed pay.
• Also, Lil’ Mike fired a bunch of people he’d soft-promised to keep on through the election – Honestly, I suspect the DNC will use the money (which is where Bloomberg sent it) will use it less well than he would have done.
• The _Brillante Virtuouso story – A hijacked tanker. An unsolved murder. A potential insurance fraud?
• Parvusimperator had a heartwarming story about a guy who paid $20,000 above asking price for a bottle of Pappy a restaurant was selling to help keep the lights on, but it won’t load now, so I have neither details nor a link. Update: I have a link.

Full isolation continues. Food and ammunition stocks holding out well.

No April Fool’s jokes here. We’re all business.

Wuhan Coronavirus: Maps and Data

• Coronavirus resource use projections, state by state – I can’t vouch for their methodology one way or the other.
• A new champion (in the field of US coronavirus maps) rises – This one has county-level data, but also more charts than Johns Hopkins’ effort and a link to the massive CSV containing all their data.

Wuhan Coronavirus: Other

• Spain bought a bunch of coronavirus tests from Shenzhen – They don’t work.
• How Texas grocery chain H-E-B managed the coronavirus prepper demand spike – They’ve been prepping for a pandemic since 2005.
• Iceland’s mass testing shows a 50% asymptomatic positive rate – Confounding factors: they might have found people infected but pre-symptomatic; false positives could drive the rate up.
• de Blasio’s worse week as mayor couldn’t have come at a worse time – It’s even a New York outlet saying so.
• Estimates suggest Wuhan death rates are much higher than officially reported – Tyrannical bureaucratic state undercounts things that make it look bad? Shock!
• [Abbott (the health care equipment manufacturer) has a coronavirus test coming soon](https://www.abbott.com/corpnewsroom/product-and-innovation/detect-covid-19-in-as-little-as-5-minutes.html0 – Also, the ‘lab’ it runs in is a toaster-sized box that looks like it was designed by an Apple alum. Abbott expects to have five million tests produced in April, which would more than double the current test-per-day capacity in the US if they can all be processed.
• A guy on Twitter reads a biochemistry paper so I don’t have to figure it out for you – It proposes a mode of action for the coronavirus, by computational analysis: the virus makes proteins which kick iron out of hemoglobin, reducing oxygen delivered by the blood. Lung issues are a result of lack of O2 in the blood, not its cause. Chloroquine binds to the hemoglobin-busting proteins, hence its effectiveness. In the Discord, boomerang-pigeon provides some additional context.
• On the heels of British sources saying China may be downplaying their COVID epidemic by a factor of 40, US sources say that yes, China was definitely lying – I did some amateur analysis and thought to myself, “A factor of 15 sounds like a lot. I’d better propose it as a worst case.” Au contraire! A factor of 15 means they’re up to ~50,000 deaths. A factor of 40 says ~132,000. This on the heels of uncritical reporting from a number of American outlets calling the US outbreak the worst in the world.

Defense

• The BBC Presents: a Naval Mystery – One they solved, rather than one you can attempt to solve yourself.
• Germany to split its Tornado replacements between Eurofighters, Super Hornets – A NATO agreement requires that Germany operate aircraft that can drop American nuclear gravity bombs. Hornets are an easier platform to make meet that requirement than Typhoons.
• US Marine Corps force design 2030 – Parvusimperator doesn’t like it. Ask him why.
• Why ditch tanks? They’re not survivable enough on the modern battlefield – Or rather, they’re on the poor end of the spectrum in what the article calls the hider-finder conflict.
• The SR-71 almost came back for spying on terrorists – Missed opportunities.
• Oshkosh gets the nod to rebuild HEMTTs and PLS trucks – They’ve done it in the past, they’ll do it again.
• KC-46 suffers from ‘excessive fuel leaks’ – Excessive is not defined in the article, beyond Boeing’s statement that maintainers are finding fuel between the primary and secondary fuel leakage barriers.
• Grumman’s latest spy drone is called the Great Horned Owl – As always, The Drive does great work.

History

• Photo: the US Navy, in 1927, anchors in Guantanamo Bay
• Old story of the week: listen to the guns fall silent on the Western Front, courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, on the centennial thereof – I listened to it and thought to myself, “Wait! Those sound like crappy TV, movie, and video game sound effects!” Of course, those are the sound effects for ‘large-bore artillery’ because they were, in many cases, recorded off of WW1 field pieces.

The Final Frontier (it’s Space)

• SpaceX publishes the first version of the Starship user’s guide – Want to put a huge payload in orbit? Start here!
• Space internet company OneWeb goes bankrupt – I saw it observed that someone’s going to get a sweet deal on a bunch of orbital hardware, and that railroad companies in the 1800s oftentimes grew in similar ways. First, you go bankrupt. Then, someone buys your assets at a deep discount, finishes the last bit of the work you couldn’t, and turns out to be massively profitable.

Grab Bag

• The crude oil market is broken – Worldwide oil demand is down by 25%. Wyoming Asphalt Sour, was bid at -$0.19—they’ll pay you to take it. Also, apparently, there are only about 700 oil refineries worldwide¹.

Up to full isolation here at the world headquarters.

Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague

• Original research! – I was interested how quickly mitigating measures work, so I made a timeline showing deaths, daily percentage increase in deaths, and mitigation measures across five European countries, the US, South Korea, and China. It also has a chart of deaths vs. tests in the US, to compare growth between the two numbers.
• Masks work – Tomorrow or over the weekend, I’m going to turn some things (dish towels, cotton t-shirts) into homemade masks and report on the process.
• Masks work: Czechia edition – A massive popular effort in the Czech Republic yielded near-100% mask-wearing with almost no central direction, and seems to have helped dramatically in arresting the spread of the coronavirus.
• Chinese scientists forced to destroy COVID-19 samples in December – ‘A regional health official in Wuhan […] demanded the destruction of the lab samples […]’ Sure. A regional health official, not acting under central direction. Totally believable.
• Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin: a treatment protocol? – Hydroxychloroquine, an analogue of regular chloroquine, is an old anti-malarial drug¹.
• Aggressively serious anti-coronavirus propaganda banners in China – “Everyone you encounter on the streets now is a wild ghost seeking to take your life.”
• Clinical predictors of mortality due to COVID-19 – Age, pre-existing conditions (which include things like hypertension and asthma, so it’s not just the seriously sick who are dying).
• How many asymptomatic coronavirus cases are there? – About 20% of the total, based on experience from the Diamond Princess outbreak.
• A social distancing scoreboard for the US, down to the county level – To my surprise, Pennsylvania’s actually doing pretty well, along with much of the US that’s actually imposed lockdowns. Also of note: who are these people, and where do they get their location data? (Tracking libraries for phone apps, almost certainly.)

Defense

• What’s this panoramic windowed room for on American aircraft carriers? – My first guess, ‘admiral’s dining room’, was not correct.
• Big Army, Navy conduct first test of hypersonic weapon – Zoom zoom.
• Big Army M4 modernization continues – Turning more M4s into M4A1s, for one, but also doing some other stuff.
• Marines to ditch tanks – Parvusimperator is not a fan. Discord regular Kilo Sierra sees the merit. Stop by the Discord and spit in the face of death by talking about tanks instead of some dumb virus.
• As expected, Bell’s V280 and Sikorsky-Boeing’s SB-1 get the nod for prototype evaluation in the Black Hawk replacement program – Neither one is much of a helicopter in the classic sense.
• BAAINBw publishes tender for SSchtzWakRw G26 – That’s the German federal office for Bundeswehr procurement, and the Scharfschützenwaffe kurze Reichweite. G26.

Self-Defense (also Guns)

• Realistic de-escalation; or, how to talk people down from high-tension situations
• American Holoptics buys EOTech
• Indian Army breaks tradition, makes a sensible small arms procurement choice – 16,000 IWI Negevs, coming soon to an Indian unit near you.
• Boom operator photo: four B-1Bs in formation with his tanker
• Oh, the era of 25mm AT guns – A bygone era, to be sure.

Grab Bag

• Pablo Escobar’s hippos are filling a vacancy in the Colombian ecosystem – Two vacancies, actually. They’re similar in diet and size to extinct giant llamas, and similar in size and habitat to extinct (checks notes) notoungulates.

We’re going into Day 4 of partial isolation here at Soapbox World HQ, and the news is all coronavirus-related.

Late-breaking: parvusimperator, back from vacation, has provided a few non-coronavirus links.

Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague: Scare Pieces

• Satellite images of Iran digging mass graves
• Is the cure worse than the disease, asks Victor Davis Hanson – The Imperial College report which made Britain change its tune predicted that uncontrolled spread would yield 2.2 million deaths in the US. Obviously, uncontrolled spread was never going to happen, but I lean toward thinking that successful aggressive attempts to arrest the spread of the virus are going to make it look like aggressive attempts were not required.

WBSDP: Maps and Data

• I may not like how much politics sneaks into the New York Times’ news pages, but blast me if their data visualization people aren’t top notch – They’re maintaining the only US-wide map with county-level resolution, although granted, the New York clusters are starting to cover up issues elsewhere in that state.
• Time-shifting coronavirus diagnoses – Even after mitigating measures go into place, the official count of cases will go up for a while, as people infected before the lockdown started become symptomatic, get tested, and find their way into the official counts. You can see the same thing with Italy on the avatorl.org dashboard, which implemented lockdown measures on 3/9 and only started seeing results on 3/14.

WBSDP: Other Useful Information

• Inside China’s coronavirus fight – Item of note from this story: the Chinese government pulled in a bunch of public servants from other fields altogether and roped them into coronavirus service. You don’t need epidemiological training to do contact tracing, or much medical training to gown up and take people’s temperatures.
• Italy: 99% of fatal coronavirus cases had another medical condition – Granted, that includes things like ‘high blood pressure’, which is pretty widespread here, too.

Books We’re Reading

• Me: Masterpieces of Mystery – The Golden Age – Part II, selected by Ellery Queen.
• John: Churchill, by Andrew Roberts, and then Chassepot to Famas by Gun Jesus, in the lovely preorder blue (bleu?).

Defense

• The world’s most advanced F-5s are in private hands – Tactical Air Support, Inc. in Reno has added full-color helmet-mounted displays, an advanced radar and RWR, large-panel glass cockpits…

Guns

• Stuff you should know about buckshot – And part 2.

Space

• On the impact of Starlink satellites on astronomical observation – “At low elevations near twilight at intermediate latitudes (45-55 deg, e.g. much of Europe) hundreds of satellites may be visible at once to naked-eye observers at dark sites.” Honestly, I think that would be pretty cool.

Lighter Notes

• Racing sim streams fill the gap left by delayed auto racing seasons – Taking part were a bunch of racing sim regulars, Max Verstappen, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr.
• Tom Brady leaving Patriots – Word is, Tampa Bay is courting him most seriously.
• Texans trade star wide receiver for late-round draft picks, washed-up running back – File under Jobs I Could Make A Better Go At.

Parvusimperator is on vacation this week, both from our day job and from the Soapbox, so with the exception of one or two items from the end of last week, this one’s all me.

Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague

• Your correspondent is under the weather, but it’s not the coronavirus¹ – That said, if you have to pick a time to catch it, ‘first case in your region’ is second only to ‘the last person to catch it’.
• Universities moving to online courses – The undergraduate alma mater of the Soapbox contributors and the alma maters² of several Soapbox associates
• Coronavirus dashboard of the week – This one shows US infections by county. Note that the counts on the map do not appear to be entirely accurate, but at the very least, they give you an idea of density on a sub-state level.
• Honorable mention: avatorl.org’s Compare Countries 2 – Compare how long it takes countries to go sub-exponential.
• There are at least two active Wuhan coronavirus strains
• Also, it can linger in the air for up to 30 minutes, or on certain surfaces for several days
• This isn’t the next Spanish flu
• How did the CDC screw up coronavirus testing so badly? – Okay, to be fair, this only touches on how they screwed up coronavirus tests in the technical/scientific sense.
• Gates Foundation working on home-testing kits for COVID-19 – Isn’t technology awesome?
• How did the CDC screw up coronavirus testing so badly? – This one strikes more to the heart of the issue. (Thanks, NYT.)
• A coronavirus survivor tells his story

Defense

• Turkey’s UAV fleet strikes Russian-made air-defense assets in Syria
• Marines bringing back the land-based Tomahawk
• Historical photo of the day: Hellcats and Corsairs lined up in Vought’s factory, waiting to be shipped
• Japan retires its last Phantoms – Farewell, old girls!
• Britain can’t afford new weapons
• China can – Another new amphibious assault ship is launching soon. On that note, the Johns Hopkins coronavirus dashboard now calls Taiwan ‘Taipei and environs’.
• A new weapon system: armed UAVs launched from shipping containers – By Kratos Defense. A relative of mine works there!
• ERCA fires test shots 40 miles
• Statistics, models, and mine-hunting – It looks interesting, but since I’m under the weather, as I said, everything gets a little blurry.

Science and Technology

• A SpaceX launch photo you’ve never seen before – Long-exposure plume interactions between the first and second stage of the final CRS mission, showing the second stage’s engine igniting and the first stage starting its boostback burn.
• Russian submarine design bureau un-biased-ly proposes enormous LPG tanker submarine – Why would you think they have a vested interest in selling submarines? Don’t be absurd.

Grab Bag

• Little Mikey’s Wild Ride – Inside the Scrooge McDuck-style money pool which was Bloomberg’s run at president.
• Inside the world of Silicon Valley VCs – In which 20-somethings fresh out of college determine which startups will succeed and which will not.
• What does it cost to run a successful Boston restaurant? – A deep dive into one particular restaurant’s books.

Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague

• This coronavirus dashboard lets you play with the data in a huge number of ways – Linked is the country comparison page, which is far and away the niftiest one. It lets you answer questions like, “How bad is it in Iran compared to Italy?”
• Zerohedge: China, lying on official numbers? – Say it ain’t so!
• A biochemist’s analysis of Trump’s coronavirus news conference – It’s from last Thursday, so analyzing it now will almost certainly yield a ton of fun ‘well that’s out of date’-ing.
• Welcome to Coronavirus Central – Well, Italy, which is more like Coronavirus Satellite 2, but nevertheless.
• Singapore’s Health Minister makes a statement on the coronavirus – Singapore, as you might expect, is well on top of things.
• Singapore’s dashboard is an information gold mine/privacy nightmare hell-pit – Depending on your point of view. Cases->Network Graph is particularly awesome/scary.
• Perspective: the numbers aren’t as bad as they seem
• Counter-perspective: it’s much worse for the rest of the world than it is for China – I don’t quite agree with the undercurrent of ‘China dealt with it, and we should be willing to take similar extreme measures’. I do think the individualist West is poorly suited to the task of containment, though. China could authoritarian-lockdown its way to safety. On the fate of other Asian peoples, I point to the Japanese and the habit of wearing masks not to prevent getting sick but to prevent transmission. That’s just not the sort of thing that happens in the West.

Defense

• Turkey to allow refugees from Syria in
• It must be nice for Britain, being a carrier power again – Photo of Prince of Wales‘ vast flight deck.
• Then and now: who does it take to get a carrier aircraft into the sky? – Thursday update: fixed a possibly-broken link.

Science and Technology

• When Mars simulations go wrong – What happens when a fake Mars habitat on a Hawaiian volcano has a real life-threatening problem?
• What’s beneath the lunar regolith? – A lot more regolith, it turns out, thanks to China’s dark side Chang’e 4 over on the dark side.
• Adversarial attacks can easily defeat reinforcement-learning neural networks – By ‘easily’ I mean with 50 times less effort than learning in the first place. Take a look at the two GIFs in the article; they’re a good indication of what this actually means.
• Cloudflare goes AMD – At this point in processor development, it’s irresponsible not to. The price/performance ratio is absurdly slanted in AMD’s favor right now.
• How is software so reliable without being mathematically proven? – Although I object to the implication in the title,

American Sportsball

• Tom Brady to leave the Patriots? – C’mon, Oakland…

Grab Bag

• Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai arrested – Staunchly anti-mainland. I wouldn’t call it entirely unexpected, but I am a little surprised China’s moving right now. Maybe they want to combine the flak they’re taking for anti-democratic moves with the flak they’re taking for coronavirus response?

It’s still the 26th.

Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague

• The CDC’s summary page, if you haven’t found it already
• Community transmission detected in the US – This is the point at which I buy a month’s worth of red beans and rice boxes and canned chunk chicken, I think. Is it the end of the world? Doubtful. Will I want the option to not go anywhere for a month or two, if it comes to that? Getting there.
• Avoiding clickbait on the death plague – For instance, the “sulfur dioxide from mass burning of corpses?” story is very likely bunk.

Defense

• 75th Ranger Regiment releases photos of its armory – Nice.
• Navy researching new class of medium amphibious ships – On the one hand, cool. On the other hand, why let them steal budget from your big amphibious ships, which, with the F-35, have the benefit of being better backup aircraft carriers than everyone else’s front-line aircraft carriers?
• L’Armée de Terre teste un canon de 140 mm au Leclerc Terminateur – No idea if that Frenchy talk is right, but you get what you pay for, and what you are paying for is not expertise in French.
• Navy looking for a containerized sonar system for long-term deployments – Ad-hoc SOSUS. Good to see Big Navy thinking about ASW.
• USAF and SpaceX teaming up in live-fire exercise – Presumably, it’s the Air Force doing the live firing, and SpaceX providing support. I’ve written in these pages about how SpaceX represents a massive strategic advantage with an expiration date. Plowing money into a flying Starship for total reusability makes perfect sense to me in an era when satellites are increasingly likely to be shot down in a war¹.

History

• YouTuber Drachnifel on why the Mark 14 torpedo’s failures occurred – In gory detail.
• Same Drachnifel on marine boilers, design adn development of – Go subscribe to this guy. I’m shocked I somehow missed him for this long.

Science and Technology

• Bell tests a Model 429 with electric ducted fans for anti-torque – I’m not sure if it looks cool or weird, but the benefits are manifold.
• Oil field fires got you down? Put ’em out with a pair of MiG-21 engines on top of a T-34 chassis – Non-broken video here.
• h/t Kilo Sierra via Discord: Astra is a rocket company with a containerized, no-launchpad-required rocket – I half considered putting this under Defense, given that it was a) built with DARPA money and b) the lion’s share of the prize money comes from being able to roll up to a new location, uncrate, and launch in good order.

Grab Bag

• A knitter peers deep into my heart and writes about my life – ‘Second sock syndrome’ is what (some?) knitters call the tendency to start a pair of socks and quit midway through. As in knitting, so in everything.

Making up for a light week last week, a heavier one this time around.

Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague

• Watt’s Up With That has a wonderfully in-depth coronavirus update from last Friday

Defense

• Marine Corps marksmanship test to get harder – Appropriately, in the parlance of competitive shooters, they’re moving to Trooper Class.
• Raytheon gets the nod for a 360-degree radar for Patriot batteries – It uses three AESAs, one main array in the direction of greatest interest and two small ones facing off-line.
• Video of a South Korean exercise – Whatever Korean for ‘hooah’ is, it makes me want to say that.
• Raytheon’s advertising video of Griffin missile testing looks like it was ripped off a VHS from 1986
• Amazon’s lawyers interrupt Microsoft’s JEDI celebration – A judge halted further work until a court can shake out whether the contract was correctly awarded.
• What’s an expeditionary force? – Spoiler: the current official definition (“Expeditionary Force: An Armed Force organized to achieve a specific objective in a foreign country”) is over-broad to the point of uselessness.
• How can small units prepare for large conflicts? – The short version is, do what they always do but more so.
• On the GAU-5/A – Which, if you recall, is the Air Force’s new M4-like survival carbine. It fits under an ejection seat.
• In the mid-2020s, the Royal Navy will be smaller than the French Navy and the Italian Navy – Not combined, smaller than each one individually. The heroes of the past roll over in their graves.
• QC problems plague the M109A7, the AMPV – Deep cuts in the 2021 budget will hopefully give them time to get back on track.
• What do US military missiles and bombs cost? – Thanks to this helpful article from The War Zone, you too can play budgeteer!

History

• Ever wanted posters on how to maintain a T-62 or BTR-60? – Now you too can buy them! They’re even originals.
• Want to help save an F-117 from the scrap heap? – The Air, Land, and Space Museum in Vegas has a line on one. Shipping and restoration is a $45,000 task, though. Share it around.
• AirCorps Aviation, producer of warbird parts and restorer of warbirds, has acquired thousands of original North American Aviation manufacturing drawings – Thanks to one engineer who said, “Maybe we shouldn’t just shred all of these?” in the 1980s, when short-sighted managers were in a tidying mood. Some of them duplicate the microfilm versions already available, but with dramatically higher quality.

Guns

• The TEC 9: A History of Infamy

Science and Technology

• App-based car rentals don’t work if you take them off-grid – You’d think they would have thought of that, but nobody in Silicon Valley making hardware is big on making hardware that sees much testing outside of Silicon Valley, so I can’t say I’m surprised, strictly.
• Will Boeing make a full recovery after the MAX crashes? – This opinion writer thinks the answer is yes.
• The UAE gets the Arab world’s first nuclear power plant
• Scientific American with a long, detailed, and helpful summary of the ongoing Hubble Constant cosmological crisis – News to me: there’s now a third method of measuring that number which provides a third, non-overlapping answer to the question. (Or, perhaps, an answer which overlaps with the other two, based on a response paper, but the two classic methods still don’t agree.)

Sport

• Every NFL team’s record against winning opponents – That is, opponents who finished .500 and up.
• And against losing opponents – Your hometown Steelers sitting pretty in the #2 spot in the link above, and a few further down the list here.
• Who wants to play for the Cincinnati Bengals? – Not top prospect Joe Burrows, that’s for sure.

Grab Bag

• Intranecine wrangling between Democratic presidential candidates ongoing – There’s something about watching a train wreck in slow motion…
• Buy-the-White-House Bloomberg pays influencers to post 2020 campaign memes – Of course, I very much doubt he’s the only one.
• The complete list of everything banned by Mayor Mike
• Getty Images represents that people can’t use public domain photos without paying Getty – Photographer responds with a billion-dollar lawsuit.
• Counterfeit products: scourge of Amazon customers everywhere – There are some things I’m happy to buy online, but safety-critical items are not among them.
• 56% of the world’s companies founded more than 200 years ago are located in Japan – There’s a story about a construction company which went bankrupt in 2006, bringing an end to 14 centuries of continuous operation.

Lighter Notes

• The ideal airplane design, as seen by various groups involved in its development