By order of the Central Commission for Calendrical Gynmastics, today is Wednesday for the next, oh, three to five minutes.

Wuhan Coronavirus

• Or COVID-19, according to the WHO – Because we live in an era where calling something by an easily-recognizable, human-friendly name is insensitive. Not being deeply concerned with sensitivity here, we’re going to stick with ‘the Wuhan coronavirus’.
• A snippet of an interview with the director of the NIH
• A paper and associated model on the start date of the outbreak, from the University of Toronto
• Big spike in cases in Hubei province… – … caused by changing methods of diagnosis. Namely, lung imaging can now be used, which may sweep up some unrelated pneumonia cases, but how many of those are there, really?
• Incubation period may be as long as 24 days instead of the standard two-week quarantine – That’s just how I’d design a virus if I wanted it to spread in spite of control efforts.
• Epsilon Theory remarks on the epidemic – I agree that China’s numbers are probably still under-reported, but disagree that, as the author thinks, we should be seeing exponential growth—that’s only the case if there are no efforts at control, and there’s been quite a lot of ink spilled over the past month or two about just such efforts.

Defense

• Ukrainian armed forces still using the Maxim gun – “Whatever happens, we have got/the Maxim gun, and they have not” – Hilaire Belloc
• OMFV no longer has a 2026 deadline – The resurrected OMFV, not the one they recently canceled. As ever, the Soapbox thinks the odds-on favorite for OMFV 2.0 is ‘canceled before entry into service’.
• US Navy to retire four of the early LCS hulls – Two of each type. The oldest ship is twelve years old. The youngest is six.

Science and Technology

• Jailbreaking used Teslas – Tesla, in the same manner as noted corporate villain John Deere, believes that a durable good and the software that powers that durable good are sold separately. Buyers of used Teslas rightfully do not like this.

History

• Navy ordered to release documents on USS Thresher – We’ll link to them when the Navy gets around to releasing them.

Guns

• Customs and Border Patrol clearly like their iron sights and don’t want to switch to optics – That’s my takeaway from the preposterous list of requirements, anyway.

Lighter News

• Texas DOT has a sense of humor about misspellings – Which is news to me; having lived briefly in Texas, I’m surprised TxDOT has a sense of humor about anything.

One month into 2020 already. Goodness.

Upcoming features for February include a continuation of parvusimperator’s Cadillac Gage commentaries (probably), a holster review (my wife has been pushing me to carry more often), and, of course, the continued exploits of our fictional French Navy for Thursday wargaming.

Wuhan Coronavirus

• How bad is it? Well, if you compare it to SARS… – Behind this link: charts and graphs of the SARS outbreak.
• Zerohedge: was this coronavirus an artificial creation?
• Also Zerohedge: Wuhan coronavirus can maybe survive on surfaces for several days? – Good thing I haven’t ordered anything from AliExpress lately.
• Cohort data! – The Lancet with an article on a particular group of coronavirus patients, and the outcomes therefrom. The short version: 16% died.
• More cohort data! – Also The Lancet. The short version: 11% died.
• Two deaths now reported outside of mainland China
• Press X to Doubt: how bad are the real numbers, not the sanitized ones for the world to see? – Taiwan News, which I’m sure has no axe to grind with the PRC, claims to have a screenshot showing Tencent’s epidemic tracker website indicating that the number of deaths is almost 25,000, rather than almost 500. That’s a big cover-up. China may be good at big cover-ups, but I don’t think covering up 24,500 excess deaths is plausible.

Defense

• On flying aircraft carriers – Wee drone aircraft, granted. Click through and scroll down for a to-scale drawing of Lockheed’s Cold War-era CL1201 flying aircraft carrier concept next to a 747.
• Un schéma du hangar de Charles de Gaulle
• US Navy to remember lessons from the Thresher as it embarks upon digitization
• US Navy remembers maritime patrol aircraft are awesome, adds weapons and missions to the Poseidon
• France builds their own maritime patrol aircraft, of course – For all their failings, I give the French massive credit for maintaining almost complete military-industrial autonomy.
• Historical sidebar: the Cold War strike cruiser – Basically, an American Kiev.
• Fitz returns to sea – A sad chapter in her history now closed.

Guns

• Virginia residents respond to gun control laws by buying a ton more guns – An appropriate course.
• Remington to shutter DPMS and Bushmaster divisions? – Or, rather, have they already done?

Science and Technology

• Fixing Apollo 14: the hack that saved that moon landing – Also featuring a deep dive into the architecture of the Apollo Guidance Computer.
• Some very preliminary NTSB statements on the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash
• With the Starliner failure, Boeing and NASA face a bit of a dilemma – Namely, will NASA let Boeing continue the sequence of test flights as planned despite its failure to reach the Space Station and perform the docking maneuver the failed test was designed to carry out? The added wrinkle: the next planned test flight is manned.

History

• Yet another first-hand account of communism – You can’t have too many of these.
• Straight from the pages of Tinpot Dictator Quarterly: defense industry ads from the 1970s and 1980s

Grab Bag

• What happened to the Iowa caucus results? – And how are they going to steal the primary from Bernie? (Not that I really care how one part of the left screws over another part of the left, as long as it suppresses left-leaning turnout.)

Workshop Projects of the Month

• Coffee roaster built from a flour sifter and a Harbor Freight heat gun – Bean capacity: 12oz.
• Brewery shelf – Shelf capacity: nearly all of our brewing stuff.

Wuhan Coronavirus

• A map of confirmed cases – Up to 6,000-some today.
• WaPo: as of 1/27, 60 people had recovered –
• Inside Wuhan’s dangerous pathogens laboratory

Defense

• F-16 shoots down drone during cruise missile defense testing – Like the Air Force, I’m burying the lede by only noting that the kill was scored with a laser-guided rocket rather than a missile here, after you’ve seen the headline.
• The inventor listed on the Navy’s UFO patents speaks to The War Zone – The short version is that he stands behind his work.
• ChTZ fails at their assigned task of building an Armata engine
• Israel makes lemonade with a guided air-to-ground missile based on the Black Sparrow ballistic missile defense test target
• Big Army: we aren’t obliged to let Boeing-Sikorsky catch up to Bell in the FLRAA competition – On the one hand, this is consistent with their behavior in the OMFV competition. On the other hand, the OMFV competition recently failed to produce results because there was only one entrant.
• How do the Zumwalts handle heavy seas? – The tumblehome design leads to minimal roll and rapid self-righting, which veterans of more conventionally-built ships said was a bit unusual, but not unwelcome.
• CDR Salamander: don’t overhype the overpromised – Put another way, don’t count on tomorrow’s systems to fill holes in today’s ships. See long-range missiles and LCS.
• Related story: Russky Zircon cruise missile experiencing teething troubles – Related so much that Sal linked it.
• Hyundais in Poland: K2 a leading contender in Warsaw’s tank trials

Guns/SHOT Show

• New compact hybrid 2011 from Dan Wesson – Hybrid: 1911 slide on a CZ-75 frame. Compact: Now it’s a compact CZ-75 frame.
• As STI sabotages its market share by price hikes and warranty policies, Blackwater steps in – The ammunition company, which, as far as I know, is not related to the private security company.

Science and Technology

• Boeing 737 MAX fix may slip to summer
• This hobbyist build a cold-launch silo-housed model rocket
• Jay Leno owns a Rolls-Royce car powered by a Merlin engine
• Antarctic neutrino detectors detect unusual neutrinos – And other neutrino detectors don’t see the kinds of neutrino sources we would expect unusual neutrinos to come from.
• A projector, a drone, and some clip art of a car can fool a Tesla’s cameras

History

• Guns firing on a Royal Sovereign pre-dreadnought – Also seen in last week’s Winter Wargaming, I think? Unless I forgot to link it.
• Air-launched ballistic missiles: older than you think – Unless you knew about Skybolt already, in which case they are exactly as old as you think. Inter-service rivalry being what it is, the Air Force wanted ballistic missiles of its own so the Navy couldn’t argue that submarines made strategic bombers obsolete.

Grab Bag

• State secession: a legal look – We’re talking part of one state seceding from another but remaining in the Union here.
• Brexit-commemorating 50p coin features quote from Thomas Jefferson – The British finally get to experience the joy of rebelling against an oppressive foreign government.
• Track and ATC comms from the LA helicopter crash – There’s speculation out there on causes, but we’re holding off on that until some more official word comes out.

Winter Wargaming may be slightly delayed—I have a lot of writing left to do on that front, and tonight in which to do it.

Books

• Rainbox Six, a re-read. The last time I read it was also post-9/11, but I’m much better informed about the state of the world today than I was last time, and the starkness of the divergence between that fictional timeline and our real one is worth mentioning.
• Castles of Steel, a re-read in progress. I’m up to just past the Dardanelles. That particular campaign (the naval side, not the ugly, unproductive land side) strikes me as one we can’t really game out. Could the Royal Navy have forced the straits alone? Maybe so. But, if so, would the Ottoman Empire have collapsed? Nobody knows for sure, and neither can we design a wargame which gives us an impartial answer.
• The Mauritius Command, which I thought was a re-read, but now that I’m halfway through I’m not so sure. You can’t go wrong with Patrick O’Brian.

Games

• Return of the Obra-Dinn, a rollicking good nautically-themed murder mystery. The conceit: an empty ship floats into harbor circa 1807. You, an insurance investigator, go aboard, with a watch in your possession which permits you to view the moment at which a person died, given a bit of their body (or a vision of their body in a vision of someone else’s death). Worth the price of entry.
• A Painted Ocean. It’s not so much a game as a toy, but it’s a brilliant little toy: you’re the skipper of a full-rigged ship with detailed physics, and you sail it around. That’s the whole game. It’s delightful. The only thing that seems a bit off to me is that she has a habit of ‘sticking’ by the wind as you come out of a tack, not making enough way for the rudder to bear her up; I usually have to reef the mizzen-sails and the spanker to get her head to come away from the wind.

Defense

• You can tell it’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, because this is an article on Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes after the Suleimani hit
• USNI blog piece on UFOs strikes this author as somebody’s op – The only question is whose? And why? I guess that’s two questions.
• USS Little Rock to get 150kw laser
• Super Bug gets an IRST – A podded IRST, but still!
• OMFV program canceled, will be restarted – Another win for the odds-on favorite for any new procurement project.
• Armata still not quite delivered to the Russian army – ‘Нет, еще пока нет,’ said the guy in charge of Ростеха. (‘Not quite yet’, more or less.)
• The Italian Navy, circa 2020
• ALIS is dead, long live ODIN – LockMart gets another chance to make a repair and mission data software package which works. It’s scheduled for 2022. Parvusimperator, how long do you think it would take the two of us?
• Sig demoing .338-caliber MG to various special forces
• A longer article on the Streetfighter II Chally package – Courtesy of our friends at The Drive.
• The aging US sealift fleet cloud lose the next war – Loren Thompson, when he isn’t being (presumably) paid to cheerlead for American military hardware, can make a good point. On the one hand, it’s worth noting that in previous wars, we didn’t have a pre-war sealift fleet. On the other hand, it’s also worth noting that we had a merchant marine.

Guns

• Vortex announces a 1-10x optic – The adjustability! It’s tremendous! Also tremendously expensive. Let me know when Primary Arms makes one.
• As gun rights cases orbit the Supreme Court, don’t forget Caetano – Which made clear that the court is willing to unanimously police compliance with a decision that not all its members feel was rightly decided. Some of the lefties dissented from Heller and McDonald. Nobody dissented from Caetano.
• Do you miss the 80s? Then you want this side-folding stock for your Ruger rifle!
• Antifa marches with gun rights protesters, because even a stopped clock is right twice a day
• A drop-in trigger system for 1911s – It’s kind of funny that, while there is only one rifle platform (in the sense that you can build one from widely available parts and swap things in and out), there are two for pistols: Glocks and 1911s.
• On the disparate racial impact of the Virginia gun bills – They’re only going to get enforced in cities, and will probably disproportionately fall on minorities.
• Heterodox take: actually, gun rights are winning – Certainly, if you look on the basis of land area or count state-by-state, as the author does. He has more compelling arguments, too, which I won’t steal.

Science and Technology

• Dark matter may not exist, says a group of scientists with a paper to push – Soapbox correspondents reportedly watching closely. I’ve said repeatedly that I look at the dark-matter-as-actual-physical-matter theories as the 21st century’s luminiferous aether.
• Cory Doctorow on the parallel computing bubble – When all you have is a massive cluster of slow but cheap and efficient processors, every problem looks like a machine learning problem. Also, in the article he remarks that, 15 years ago, he predicted that computers would stop getting faster and start getting wider, so given how exactly he called that, I think he’s earned some additional speculation.
• Reports of Tesla unintended acceleration… – … which Tesla vehemently denies, pointing out that a short-seller is behind the petition sent to the NHTSA.
• Continents of the Underworld – “It would be like having an object in the sky, and asking, ‘Is that the moon?’ And people are like, no. ‘Is that the sun?’ No. ‘What is it?’ We don’t know!” said Vedran Lekić, a seismologist at the University of Maryland.
• MIT researchers use a blanket of carbon nanotubes to heat and cure aviation-grade composites – The previous state of the art was, “Build a three-story autoclave.”
• 40-year-old tractor prices reach an all-time high – In large part because John Deere is an awful company which wants to provide tractors-as-a-service without being responsible for the cost of maintaining tractors.
• Did you know that you aren’t supposed to use Google Fi if you spend a lot of time overseas? – Which is rather annoying, given that its easy international roaming is one of its draws. (Granted, I don’t travel internationally very often, but still.)
• Coronavirus outbreak in China continues – Man, I wish I hadn’t just read Rainbow Six. If a biotech company says they just happened to be working on a vaccine, be suspicious!

Culture

• Garlic, that staple of Italian-American cooking, is regarded in Italy as seasoning for The Poors – Mind. Blown. Makes sense, though; why would you strike out across an ocean for a new country where you have to deal with two or three generations of being a minority when everything’s a-ok at home?

Sport

• Using stats to drive your sports gambling decisions – The answer isn’t ‘leverage the parallel computing bubble’, which is a little disappointing¹. It’s more along the lines of ‘think about why stat X says what it does’.
• How’s Aaron Rodgers doing? – Not great nowadays.

Grab Bag

• Two GM employees arrested for street-racing prototypes of the new mid-engined Corvettes – Bravo Zulu, guys.
• Pop quiz: when was the first automobile turn-by-turn routefinding system sold to the public? – Hint: it’s earlier than you think.
• California regression: sewage in the American River – Or rather, the American River is turning into diluted sewage.
• Manhattan’s housing market is insane – Look at all the unsold, empty condos!
• India’s housing market is insane for different reasons – Look at all the unfinished apartment buildings!

Winter Wargaming tomorrow. Don’t forget to check back and vote on the direction for our fictional France—I typically play over the weekend.

I have to write the 2019 audience report at some point. The very short version is: slightly reduced traffic over 2019, but counting Discord, massively increased audience engagement. To our regulars, both the commentariat and the lurkers, we’re happy to have you around.

Books

• Me: Castles of Steel, by Robert Massie. I’m reminded of an era when the government owned the design of its warships.
• Parvusimperator: Samurai!, by Saburo Sakai.

Defense

• Soleimani bites it thanks to good old American Hellfire, Iran retaliates, US perhaps to retaliate back? – I don’t really need to link anything for this, do I?
• Navy Act restricts LCS fleet to 35 hulls
• 8 F-15EXes for the USAF in 2020 – That’s 176 AMRAAMs, or 29⅓ F-35A/Cs, or 44 F-35Bs.
• The Diplomat on the Chinese influence campaign in the US – I still belong to the ‘Overheard at ‘ Facebook group, and it’s been utterly fascinating watching the pro-China Chinese students square off against the anti-China Westerners. For one thing, the Chinese are using the language of the social justice movement, which is a masterstroke—very few of the Western students have any idea how to argue if that rug is pulled out from beneath them.
• Iran has better missiles than it used to – In particular, these ones can actually hit point targets.
• Coast Guard to face narco-sub epidemic in 2020? – Granted that most of them are semi-submersibles rather than full-on submarines, but still. In related news, have you heard about the transatlantic narco-submarine trade? I hadn’t.
• On the next world war – The article misses the fact that latent industrial capacity is not really enough to make modern military equipment. You could convert a 1943 Ford factory to make B-24s. It would be much, much harder to convert a 2020 Ford factory to make F-35s.
• Back to H. I. Sutton: how will the balance of power in world submarine fleets change in the 2020s?

Science and Technology

• A post from 2005: why your company isn’t hiring the best N% of employees in its field
• SlateStarCodex reports on GPT-2 playing chess – GPT-2, you may recall, is the text generation AI that took the world by storm last year. It doesn’t play chess very well, but the fact that it can play chess at all by attempting to generate a FEN game record is pretty wild¹.

Games

• The former CEO of Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi flees house arrest in Japan for his native Lebanon – Oh, sorry for the misfiling. I thought this was about a new Shadowrun sourcebook.
• OpenTafl, my hnefatafl games engine, is getting some updates – A new piece type, some bugfixes, perhaps a new flavor of AI.

Grab Bag

• In 1974-1975, bush fires burned across 254 million acres of Australia – This year so far? 26 million acres.
• Cognitive bias in California’s ill-advised anti-Uber bill
• How Phineas and Ferb did the impossible – The impossible being ‘building a successful show where the main characters have no real personal arc or serious conflict’, not ‘building crazy inventions in a day’.

Welcome to the New Year, folks!

Defense

• Ospreys land at the US Embassy in Baghdad – In video! Great way to land your reinforcements.
• LRASM now on Super Hornets – Finally, the US Navy enters the 21st century, with a proper air-launched anti-ship cruise missile.
• HMS QE launches an F-35 while moored – One advantage to the STOVL carrier: you don’t need to worry about wind as much, and you can park your carriers two in a row without impairing landing operations on either one.
• In news related to the prior bullet, HMS Prince of Wales, moored behind QE, was commissioned on December 10, and I don’t think we reported that. The UK moves into a multi-way tie for second place on the carrier leaderboards, at least until China and India commission the ones they have under construction.
• Reported on Christmas Eve: Pentagon proposes cuts to destroyer construction – And right after I visited Bath Iron Works, too.
• Also on the cut list: one FFG(X), one Virginia
• ProPublica with a deep dive into the VMFA-242 Hornet/tanker collision
• Correcting the legacy of the Los Angeles boats – They’re typically seen as Cold War warriors. A submariner who served on three says some of their most distinguished service came in the 90s and beyond.
• China is mapping the sea floor in the Straits of Malacca and the Andaman Sea – Wonder why they might be doing that.

Science and Technology

• The New York Times with a two-part story on cell phone location data tracking for advertising purposes – I feel less good about carrying a smartphone around.
• Mathematician achieves an important result on the Collatz conjecture – That is, the 3n+1 n/2 jobber. The short version is that the result shows that the conjecture is almost true for almost all numbers. The long version is, it’s a Quanta Magazine article, so you can probably follow the argument there better than I could reproduce it here.
• Is Betelgeuse going to explode? – If it does, I hope it does in the winter, because I’d trade a dozen eclipses for a supernova brighter than the full moon.
• A brief history of AT&T’s microwave relay towers – Came across it when reading a search and rescue story at the excellent Otherhand.org, discovered that I drive past an old microwave relay tower every day on my way to work. After the microwave relay system was decommissioned, ours was sold off and is now a telecom tower of some other kind.
• Drones are scouting rural Colorado – Isn’t that where Red Dawn started?
• The Internet used to be a lot more anarchic – (I put it that way because I’m playing Shadowrun: Dragonfall right now, and anarchic Flux State Berlin is a fun setting.) Walled gardens (i.e., Medium for blogs) have largely taken over, but fear not! Our little kiez here isn’t going anywhere¹.

World Affairs

• Labour is no longer the UK’s party of the working class – Literally. R² of 0.0.

Sport

• The 10 least consequential athletes of the 2010s – Nine which make a lot of sense, one which is a bit more of a headscratcher. The inestimable Jon Bois reports.

Grab Bag

• SB Nation cans more than 200 contractors who live in California because of California’s stupid contractor law
• The USNI has books of photos from the Kure Maritime Museum – With commentary translated into English.

It’s an even more eclectic week here at Soapbox World HQ than usual.

Lead Story: Magnetized Target Fusion is awesome

• Fusion with pistons: General Fusion gets Bezos backing – If I were a billionaire, I’d definitely fund cool Future Technology projects, too.
• Here’s the 2007 paper describing General Fusion’s concept – Start with a steel sphere two meters across, studded with steam-powered pistons. Fill it with a liquid lead-lithium alloy. Use equatorial pumps to turn it into a vortex, and polar pumps to pull it out the top and bottom, so you get a vertical cavity. Inject plasma into that cavity. Fire the pistons, which all impact the steel sphere at the same time and make a compression wave in the lead-lithium. That compression wave ignites the plasma, heating the lead-lithium. Run the hot lead-lithium from the polar pumps through a heat exchanger, which generates steam for turbines and the pistons. Repeat once per second. Neutron activation turns the lithium into tritium, and the use of liquid lead as a working fluid means you don’t need to worry about neutron bombardment turning your steel sphere into Swiss cheese.
• Here’s a video, if my description isn’t clear – Obviously, General Fusion is invested in saying it’ll work, but the math seems to check out, and this particular approach to fusion seems to have a number of advantages over pure magnetic confinement and pure inertial confinement. The biggest one, as I see it, is that it operates on principles broadly familiar to today’s industrial equipment: it has some pumps, and it has some steam-powered pistons (with some electronics to control impact timing), neither of which is all that complicated. The devices to generate the plasma are a bit more esoteric, but well-understood.

All told, a nifty system, and one with a number of seeming practical advantages. Also, I love the idea of a fusion power plant being bulky, spiky, and loud. (All those pistons hitting a steel sphere…)

Defense

• Leaked photos of the XM907 on the XM1299 prototype – 58 calibers sure is a long gun.
• China’s next economic gambit: export surveillance technology now being tested in Xinjiang – I don’t think there are a great many buyers for that sort of thing—not because people don’t want it, but because most places rich enough to become surveillance states have an inkling that maybe letting someone else make your surveillance hardware is a bad idea.
• Advanced Powertrain Demonstrator now installed in a Bradley for testing – Parvusimperator notes that it appears to the be fruit of the Cummins-Achates opposed-piston partnership.
• Russia shows off a light carrier with a semi-catamaran hull – It’s only a model. Still, the semi-catamaran hullform has a lot to recommend itself for carrier designs. High stability and a wide beam for a given displacement? Sign me up.

Science and Technology

• Gameanalytics: increasing the efficiency of your web API the good way – “For each byte we save on this endpoint’s response which gets five billion hits per day, we save $7.50 per month.” They manage to cut nearly three kilobytes.
• Plaid: increasing the efficiency of your web API the bad, wrong way – “So, we run 4,000 Node.js workers, each of which only processes a single [web] request at a time…” Not only do they lose points for having an awful, awful, awful pre-existing system, they lose points for their solution being, “Well, we can bandage this up!” rather than “Kill it with fire!”. Also, they lose points for the silly Silicon Valley affectation of using ’30x’ (pronounced thirty-ex) as a verb¹. It boggles the mind that they posted this look at their architecture on their own website as a way to brag. The only thing it’s done for me is ensure that I recommend nobody ever use Plaid under any circumstances.
• QuadrigaCX investors/currency-holders demanding exhumation of definitely-for-sure-dead-in-India-of-a-typically-non-fatal-disease CEO Gerry Cotten – Fun fact: Cotten, in high school, was active in online Ponzi scheme communities. Also, Simpsons quote!
• Google debated leaving the cloud computing realm altogether, but instead decided to try to become a top-two player by 2023 – …and if they aren’t? Will they abandon the market then?
• From the Slashdot comment thread above, a telling description from an insider: “A perfect example is Google’s HQ in Mountain View. While the grounds are maintained, all the lawn art and furniture, all outside decorations are decaying and rotting away. All the Android statues except the latest one are tilted, broken and missing chunks. And each new version of Android has a smaller statue that the previous one. And of course, the official Google Visitor Center is permanently closed and the Google Gift Shop is open only 10-6 on work days – dealing with customers was never Google’s strong point.”

Grab Bag

• On the White Island volcano tourism tragedy – Predicting when a volcano is going to do its thing is hard even when it isn’t the sort of volcano White Island is.
• A long list of comic book lettering and dialog tropes – Like all art forms, it has its own particular conventions which differ from standard written English.
• Bloomberg is kind of an awful guy – But hey, if you spend all your time throwing money at anti-gun causes, you can get away with a lot on today’s American left.
• Discovery Networks asks composers to take an 80% pay cut – Composers seem more or less settled on saying, “Screw you guys,” and taking 100% pay cuts. This story divides Soapbox HQ: parvusimperator thinks it’s A-OK; I think Discovery is within its rights but kind of being a jerk.
• When the Patriots have lost the Boston Globe…

Thanks to church choir obligations, Winter Wargaming will likely start in early January, or possibly late December.

Defense

• Will plasma thrusters help next-gen satellites dodge attacks? – Probably, but I still lean toward large arrays of cheap satellites, thanks to the American cheap-launch strategic advantage.
• Related: the SpaceX Starlink satellites generate about as much power (3kW) as the old Soviet RORSATs, orbit only 90km higher (350km vs 260km¹), and can be launched 60 at a go.
• Chinese defector speaks out on China’s strategy – He’s currently in Australia.
• China bans US military vessels from Hong Kong – parvusimperator wondered when the last visit was. The BBC says April.
• RC-135 Rivet Joint surveillance aircraft spotted with a strange new antenna – For those, like me, who weren’t in the know, the RC-135 does all kinds of signals intelligence.
• How good is the Visby’s stealth? This good – A merchant watchstander caught one visually, then followed it on radar up to 15 miles away. The results are pretty spectacular.
• The Great Game in the 21st Century: the scramble for Africa – Three poles instead of two this time around, though—Russia, China, and, broadly, The West.
• PMCs and private security companies in modern warfare
• Some modern Polish tank destroyers – Content warning: Polish text.
• Slides from a PLAAF presentation following some J-11 vs. Gripen training – The Gripen fared poorly in dogfights and well outside of dogfights, which isn’t too terribly surprising.

Science and Technology

• How to mitigate a DDNS attack: a guide for webmasters of small and wimpy websites – Such as this one. Granted, we’ve never been attacked (knock on wood). Anyway, the more interesting fact from this story is that a federated Twitter-alike exists.
• The rise and fall of PS3 supercomputers – A chapter in computing history I’d almost forgotten.
• An e-waste recycling expose – The pictures are pretty wild—piles of ash and burning plastic by the side of the road in China.
• Rent a powered exoskeleton for a year – It’ll only cost you $100,000 annually, and runs for two hours on a kilowatt-hour of battery. In a very BattleTech move, they offload balancing to the human, which saves some on computing power needs.

Grab Bag

• An army fights on its stomach – The Landing Barge, Kitchen reflects this fact.
• Is corporate debt the next big bubble? – I just read about some rumblings in the Chinese bond market this morning.
• Cruise lines are stretching old ships instead of retiring them – It’s cheaper to add amenities and cabins to an old hull than it is to build an all-new one.
• Sig’s 2020 firearms lineup
• New England Patriots caught cheating again? – There’s an awful lot of uncertainty around this story, but at the same time, the excuse the camera crew used (“I work for Kraft Productions, doing a series about the Patriots!”) was on the list of ways Patriot cheater-teams were to try to evade capture uncovered during the last Patriots-filming-signals scandal.
• Glock releasing the Glock 44, which is a .22 pistol – It’s the closest to numerological sense Glock has made in a while!

Given that last week was Thanksgiving, you might have expected last week to be the short edition. That’s where you’d be wrong! We were both on the road, and neither of us did much of the linkable sort of reading.

Books

• When Tigers Ruled the Sky mini-review: starts slow, especially coming from an uber-detailed Massie book. Mr. Yenne tried to do the same biographies-of-everyone-involved thing, but didn’t have the page count to do it justice. It picked up dramatically after two or three chapters, when he got into the actual Flying Tigers action, and that part did not disappoint. It gets the Fishbreath Recommends stamp of approval.
• Empires of the Sea mini-review: this is a reread, so no revelations here. It’s an extremely readable account of the sieges of Rhodes (briefly), Malta (extensively), and Nicosia and Famagusta (briefly), plus the Battle of Lepanto (extensively). The author has a good sense for characters, but spends a suspicious amount of time on drawing equivalences between Christendom and the Turks in re the brutality and slavetaking common at the time. I’d have to dig up some better sources before I say I trust that take¹, but the book still gets my thumbs up. (I am, after all, reading it a second time.)

Guns

• Just in time for Christmas, a reminder that HK hates you and you suck – … but they do want your money anyway, hence this release of a genuine semi-auto MP5 pistol, complete with genuine HK pricing.
• Americans buy enough guns on Black Friday to arm the Marine Corps – Not the right kind of guns to arm the Marine Corps, but hey, I’ll take it. It’s another 200,000 reasons why a Hong Kong-style crackdown is not likely in the US.

Defense

• Right-to-repair issues hit the US military too – Also a reminder that modern military equipment is fragile, compared to military equipment of years past. We’ve been having a conversation in the comments these last few weeks about Cold War Gone Hot novels, and one of the key features of all of them is that they never last very long. Then again, peacetime militaries always look that way.
• The Pressure on China – Some speculation on the whys behind China’s current misbehavior.
• On the Islamic State’s new Caliph, and on the choosing of such men

Hong Kong

• Some photos from last week’s election – And some links thereupon, courtesy of Loose Rounds.
• Hong Kong slogans purportedly heard at protests in a Cantonese-speaking mainland city, Maoming – Story via a strongly pro-democracy daily out of Hong Kong. Take with grains of salt to taste. (I believe it could be a thing, though.)

The Solitary Grab Bag Item

• NBA teams track free throw defense—and some are better than others – Granted, the tricks people play are not legal under the rules, but refs let the first time or two slide.

Happy Thanksgiving! If you aren’t an American, you can overeat and nap tomorrow anyway. We’re very egalitarian that way.

Books

• I’m going to be spending my time on When Tigers Ruled the Sky and Empires of the Sea this Thanksgiving.

Defense

• India thankful for US sale of MK-45 naval guns – Special Black Friday deal: 13 guns, along with ammunition and supporting equipment, for $1 billion.
• Marines thankful for 1940s innovations in minesweeping – They’re bringing back a Crab-style anti-mine flail, except that it’s on the front of a robot instead of a tank.
• Israelis thankful for good electronic warfare – Video seems to show Syrian SAMs flying directly into the dirt during some Israeli raids.
• Aerial mercenaries thankful for private aerial refueling companies – In this case, though, the USAF is likely to be the most thankful. Existing private aerial refueling company Omega Air bought a boom-equipped tanker.
• USAF thankful for the long and storied career of the conventional AGM-86C – The nuclear AGM-86B soldiers on.
• Tinpot dictators thankful for new Turkish entrant into the attack helicopter market – Roughly Apache-class in takeoff weight and power. Roughly Ka-52-class in weird radar placement.
• Indian soldiers thankful for new rifle-class helmet armor applique
• Germans thankful for 40 years of the Leo 2 – Also, they’re going with Trophy as their active protection system.
• American arms inspectors thankful for New START – They had a gander at Russia’s new Avangard hypersonic boost-glide jobber.
• Think tanks grateful for the opportunity to weigh in on logistics and great power competition – Short version: you never have enough trucks.

History

• British and Argentinian carrier crews thankful for mild winds on a May, 1982 afternoon – If Veinticinco de Mayo had a little more wind to turn into, she could have launched a Skyhawk attack on the Royal Navy’s task force approaching the Falklands.

Science and Technology

• 80s cyberpunk buffs thankful for Tesla’s Cybertruck – This is a story about why it has bolsters on the side of its bed.
• Potential anonymous hackers potentially thankful for the FBI’s misattribution of the Sony hack to North Korea? – I’m stretching the established headline form a bit here, but give me a break. This isn’t easy.
• What We’re Reading author thankful for updates to old stories – Do you remember QuadrigaCX CEO Gerald Cotten, the hundreds of millions of dollars of cryptocurrency missing from his company, and his alleged death in a part of India where buying fake documents is a popular cottage industry?

Sport

• Rams and Chargers not thankful for one another – The marriage of two teams in one stadium is a rocky one.
• Small Texan high schools grateful for six-man football

Guns

• Virginia gun rights advocates thankful for sanctuary counties – And, because elections have consequences, more onerous regulations are in the pipeline.
• Gun rights advocates everywhere thankful for a former Brady Campaign president joining their team – Dan Gross switches sides.

Grab Bag

• California DMV thankful for easy access to tasty driver personal information – Which they sell, and which they made $50 million on last year. Other DMVs do it, too.
• Pro-democracy camp in Hong Kong thankful for council elections – They now hold a 17-to-1 advantage in districts controlled, up from 0-18.
• German jewel thieves thankful for lax museum security – They took the Green Vault in Dresden for items valued at a billion dollars.