So, Winter Wargaming is Rule the Waves 2. For those outside of the know, it covers naval architecture and battles at sea between 1900 and 1955. I’m thinking France for this game, given that it has a clear route to dominating the Mediterranean, and that’s always a fun place to play.

Defense

• The Economist slams aircraft carriers for the usual reasons

Guns

• Join the American Suppressor Association, get a chance to win a can
• Colorado’s standard-capacity magazine ban is going as well as all such things do – Whoever could have guessed that widespread noncompliance would be a thing?

Science and Technology

• More Hubble parameter uncertainty – But only because the LambdaCDM model predicts something which clashes with actual observation, which is further evidence for my heterodox claim that modern cosmology is all wrong. Epicycles and the luminiferous ether also fit observations really well.
• Supreme Court to hear appeal in Oracle v. Google Google v. Oracle – That is, the zombie case that never dies; that is, the case in which the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit declared APIs copyrightable; that is, the case which has been hanging over open implementations of proprietary APIs for the past year or so.
• Magnetic, reflective carbon? – We’ll see if it holds up, or if it was merely a case of contaminated samples.
• Wind turbine blades can’t be recycled – That doesn’t seem very sustainable.
• GPS spoofing levels up – In Shanghai, individual vessels are having their positions individually spoofed, which is some next-level stuff if you remember how GPS works.
• Boeing’s current difficulties are McDonnell Douglas’ fault

Grab Bag

• New York City has a bustling black market for food cart permits – Also, they permit food vending and food carts differently.
• Californians surprised at backlash when they start ruining other states
• Related: $800 a month to rent a coffin-size pod in LA
• Ford and GM abandon all cars smaller than SUVs, immediately run into trouble – I was kind of considering a Ford Focus someday, after the Mini bites the dust, but that’s not going to happen anymore.
• A 55-foot mega-truck, built to explore Antarctica, was a failure, but a cool failure – 16-minute video.
• Conspiracy theory Twitter thread of the week, Deep State edition – Why are diplomats so big on canning Trump? Because they’re probably embezzling from foreign aid funds.
• Democrats candidates’ tax plans include uncapping Social Security taxes – Makes perfect sense to me, if they want the rich to pay their fair share, but the howling from the Bay Area and New York City will probably kill any chance of it actually happening.
• The leisure class is now the luxury-belief class – That is, the social status that once affixed to good manners and attending formal parties nonstop now affixes to having fashionable beliefs.

Protests, Rebellions, Etc.

• Bolivia protests inspire Chilean protests? – I didn’t actually read this one. It just indicates that there are protests going on in Chile.
• Hong Kong protesters not driven by hope – “They talked about Xinjiang, and what China had done to the Uighur minority. I’ve heard about the fate of the Uighurs from so many protesters over the months. China may have wanted to make an example out of the region, but the lesson Hong Kongers took was in the other direction—resist with all your might, because if you lose once, there will be a catastrophe for your people, and the world will ignore it.”
• Scenes from Hong Kong, again

No votes were forthcoming on the Winter Wargaming topic, so I’ve unilaterally decided it’ll be Rule the Waves 2. I think I’ll probably post it over at Many Words Main, so as to avoid leaving it so barren.

Defense

• Low-velocity 40mm grenade launchers are for wimps – This one shoots the full-fat version.
• Concurrent Technologies Corporation to build prototype GCV hulls – They have some new kind of welding, Parvusimperator notes.
• Twitter video: HMS QE launches an F-35 while receiving underway replenishment – Look at that! The Brits have a carrier again, even if they had to rely on the Americans to make a reasonable STOVL jet. (Yes, I know the British operate/plan to operate the F-35 as a pure STOL plane with that rolling vertical landing thing.)
• Laser mounted on USS Dewey – Nobody’s quite sure what it is, but The Drive puts its money on ODIN, a laser dazzler system, rather than a full-on weapon-class laser. We did report on the Lockheed HELIOS, I believe, en route to Florida (maybe?) a week or three ago.

Science and Technology

• Dysfunctional corporate culture a contributing factor in the self-driving Uber pedestrian death case – Shower thought: I bet there’s money to be made in being ‘startup X, except with morals’. The product isn’t (say) ride-sharing, but rather a warm fuzzy feeling in the hearts of riders.
• “We made a profit last quarter if you ignore all the things we lost money on,” Uber says
• Galileo, the EU GNSS system, had a long outage this summer – And this guy, a GNSS monitoring hobbyist, now knows why. In short: since Galileo is supposed to be very high-accuracy, it needs to do frequent ephemeris and clock updates, and if you fall behind on those, you can find yourself in a case where the issue might be either an ephemeris or a clock problem, and you can’t tell which. A full reboot takes a long time.
• Computer people: why is AI so focused on race and gender?
• People people: stereotypes are usually accurate
• AIs which do unguided, random exploring can solve certain problems better – They don’t get trapped in local maxima, because they don’t have a conception of ‘maxima’ until the researchers decide to stop the random learning.
• Wafer contamination at a Samsung fab loses it half a billion dollars – America got the happypunk dystopia, with friendly-faced private panopticons; East Asia got a more classic cyberpunk dystopia, with huge megacorporations with fingers in every pie. As such, Samsung is expected to shrug, clean out the bad wafers, and start again, and the only effect on the world market is a pause in the drop in DRAM prices.
• Is Google’s quantum supremacy claim, which we reported last wekk, actually valid? – The thrust of this ZDNet article seems to be, “Mathematically, it might not be!” Which, to me, sounds like the answer is, “Today, practically, yes.”
• Intel vulnerable to yet more timing-based data-leakage flaws – And this one has been around for a year. The consensus, as far as I’m aware, is not only that Intel is vulnerable to these kinds of issues (widely reported), but also that AMD, owing to some architectural decisions they made, is less so (not widely reported). As a longtime Team Whatever Color AMD Is Now booster, I’m maybe not the most trustworthy source, though.

World Politics

• Bolivia’s socialist president is out – South America maybe turning a corner? cf. South American GDPs over time.
• Hong Kong heats back up: pro-democracy protesters shot – Or never actually cooled off.
• Widespread chaos across the city – Pictures from CNN.
• The Beeb says on the ‘brink of total collapse’

Sport

• The hometown Steelers are emerging as a playoff dark horse? – Defense doesn’t always win championships, but it sure does help.

Grab Bag

• California’s housing crisis is entirely a density crisis – Well, except for the parts that are a land management crisis and a water crisis.
• Iceland’s Bitcoin mining heist – There’s a lot of organized bitcoin mining in Iceland, because it’s cold and has a lot of cheap geothermal energy. Some enterprising crooks thought: why not steal the mining gear? That way you’re stealing a money-generating asset, for a given value of money.
• The ‘Razzle-Dazzle Game’, a rolling-marbles scam – Proposed alternative name: the Fireball scam, because it amounts to rolling 8d6 (and you only win prizes only on very low or very high rolls).
• Video: onetime jewel thief (or robber, per his stated preference) rates movie heists – It’s an intriguing watch.
• Mooney Aviation ceasing production – Most worryingly for current Mooney owners, that’s production of planes and parts. In other news, Mooney is owned by Soaring American Corporation, a Chinese investment company which sounds like it was named by a committee of Chinese guys trying to pick an American-sounding name with no input from anyone who speaks English natively.

With the Armored Brigade review now posted, I can ask a question I’ve been waiting to ask: for Winter Wargaming this year, what’s the commentariat’s feeling on Armored Brigade vs. Rule the Waves 2?

Defense

• Russian schoolchildren taught how to assemble AKs in class – I guess it’s a sort of shop class, and also makes it really easy to change the placard from ‘Primary School 3357’ to ‘Small Arms Factory 3357’ in case of war.
• Correction alert: last week’s Challenger 2 photo did actually have a Brimstone launcher on the turret – A two-missile box on top of the turret. We aren’t sure if it has any capacity for reloads, but it’s quite a large missile and not likely to be easily manhandled within the confines of a tank. We did a little further digging, and could find no information whatsoever on ground-launch range, and only turned up the very vaguest information on penetration, but it’s definitely better than the gun.
• What happens if China gets old before it gets rich? – CDR Salamander¹ ponders.
• USAF ponders arsenal plane options – A B-52 for the modern age?
• A puff piece on the Navy’s next-generation jammer – Still, it points out how it’s better than the old one, which is better than nothing.
• A bog-standard concerned-about-A2AD-missiles article with an interesting metaphor at its heart – Namely, that such weapons systems take us back to the Age of Sail relationship between ship and fort.
• Navy cuts next batch of Virginias from 11 to 9
• Laser-guided Carl Gustaf munition gets a test – Coool.
• Small fleets of aircraft have a big impact on USAF budgets – There are high fixed costs to operating a type of aircraft, of course, and the Air Force operates a lot of types.
• How can we build force structures to be resilient in the face of battlefield surprise?
• LockMart cuts F-35 prices
• Deploy the Ford, shock test a later ship – No reason to delay it any further, and shock testing the first ship in the class has been the exception rather than the norm ever since the requirement went into place.

History

• The US rushed an MG42-to-.30-06 conversion through following the war – Here’s the report on the trials.
• Petrel finds USS Johnston (probably) – Or something else from the same class. Either way, it’s the deepest shipwreck ever located, at 24,000 feet down.

Science and Technology

• Modern open source is largely corporate philanthropy – That is, the bazaar mostly comprises people being paid by the cathedral, to revive an old metaphor.
• What is quantum supremacy, and why is it important that Google demonstrated it? – This guy is evidently one of the better commentators on the subject.
• Super-optimized dirt keeps racehorses safe – Unfortunately, it’s a story that looks like it’s going somewhere and stops before it does.
• Voyager 2 reaches interstellar space – Scientists are fascinated by the sharpness of the heliopause.

Hong Kong

• Xi Jinping still backing Carrie Lam

Grab Bag

• New York City homeless services are too expensive, so NYC rents apartments for its homeless population in different cities – … without telling the different cities.
• Whatever happened to Internet atheism? – Not the quiet sort where atheists use the Internet like the rest of us, but the loud, argumentative sort prone to blaming organized religion for all the evils of the age. Scott Alexander at SSC speculates that, ironically, it was a competitor to become the civic religion of left-leaning culture, and lost to the social justice movement.
• Why is California on fire? – Well, power lines, primarily. Witness these aerial photographs from similar altitudes, one over our native Western Pennsylvania and one in California. Here, we clearcut around power lines. There, they do not. (Granted, in California there’s typically a lot of dry brush on the ground, and here there isn’t, but still.)
• Taran Tactical range burns down – Speaking of.
• Whose fault is Eastern European nationalism? – I don’t think I quite agree with the premise of this article, but I share it nevertheless.
• What happened to Toys R Us? – The ‘leveraged buyout’ answer is accurate but, evidently, incomplete.

Busy morning at the office. Commentary status: limited.

Defense

• Richard Spencer maybe doesn’t want to be SecNav anymore? – The real headline: he blasts Congress and shipyards.
• A Chally 2 Streetfighter prototype – Regrettably, the Brimstone launcher is on a vehicle parked behind the tank, not the tank itself.
• Al-Baghdadi down
• Navantia unveils Joint Support Ship design – Does a little bit of everything—70% of the fuel capacity of the recently-retired Australian oilers, 70% of the load capacity of HMAS Choules (an LPD), a full hospital, and so forth.
• Dutch military police find 11 kilos of cocaine on a Dutch LPD – Evidently, someone decided to take a little side trip during a deployment to the Caribbean.
• Navy backing down from 355-ship plan – Why 355? we found ourselves asking. It turns out the number comes from a force structure assessment conducted in 2016.

Games

• A pre-alpha tech demo of Task Force Admiral, a really good-looking WW2 carrier command game – Items of particular note: cloud physics, seamless map zoom.
• Blizzard writes a buffer overflow emulator – Highly technical article, on how Blizzard emulated a bug in Starcraft which was used to create most of the Starcraft custom map ecosystem.

History

• Google and Facebook didn’t kill newspapers, the Internet generally did
• A 1924 shot of USS Langley transiting the Panama Canal

Grab Bag

• How Scientology bought downtown Clearwater, Florida
• Certain AMD processors’ high-quality random number instruction always yields -1 – The problem with randomness is that you can never be sure.
• Didn’t we try this once already? – Mortgages for anyone with a pulse!
• The collapsing crime rates of the 90s might have had something to do with cell phones – If you can sell drugs to anyone, anywhere by telephone, you don’t need to hold turf. If you don’t need to hold turf, you don’t need to kill people to keep it.
• California is on fire again.

This week, the ‘approximately Fishbreath’s birthday’ edition.

Books

• Given that it’s me, my birthday presents were primarily books.
• Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, courtesy Parvusimperator: widely regarded as the best of the bunch when it comes to golf books, or at the very least, the one everyone who plays that game should read.
• Castles of Steel, courtesy my in-laws: I’ve read this before via the War College Library, but I’m delighted to have my own copy and to read it again, just as soon as I finish Dreadnought.
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, also courtesy my in-laws: I enjoyed the TV series and like the worldbuilding that seems to have gone into it. The book should be a delight.
• The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, courtesy my wife: making bread is a hobby of mine, but I’m not very good at it right now. This will help with that.

Defense

• The Coast Guard ought to be more combat-ready – …argues this Coast Guard blogger. Not that we disagree.
• Tankograd’s BMP-2 post is as excellent as all their other content – This isn’t news, but it is something I read this week.
• A Leclerc crew wins the shooting competition at the Iron Spear exercise
• CDR Salamander takes a heterodox view on the CVL concept – Namely, that it isn’t trash. I have no issue with building amphibious assault ships that happen to work well as baby carriers, too, but the numbers don’t work out for replacing big carriers with small ones. (A lesson clear to players of Rule the Waves 2!)
• HMS QE‘s hangar – Quite roomy. High ceilings.
• The Visby-class remains one of my favorite corvettes – Warship of the future, today!
• Report to Congress on the state of FFG(X) – The warship of today, tomorrow!
• Northrop to install a laser on USS Portland – A 150kw laser. That’s some serious oomph.
• Update from last week: the NorK SLBM looks real – Thanks to Chris Bradshaw for the link.

Science and Technology

• Remember the SuperMicro story, about spy chips placed on server motherboards? – As much as that particular story has fallen apart, my opinion of the plausibility of the general concept has done nothing but rise.
• Remember that story about galaxies without dark matter? – I think we might have shared that one, and possibly a refutation based on distance measurements¹. Now, new Hubble data drives a refutation of the refutation, which suggests that NGC 1052-DF4 is as far away as originally thought, and therefore actually deficient in dark matter.
• On netcode design for fighting games – An interesting read, which goes into some depth on the subject.
• Annoyed software engineer hacks ransomware gang after falling victim to ransomware attack, posts decryption keys on Pastebin
• Doctorin’ is hard – The modern scientific system is biased toward discovery over reproduction, so it’s easy to get a novel treatment into broad usage, but hard to pull it back if later studies can’t confirm that it does anything.
• Elon Musk sends Tweet via Starlink broadband – SpaceX is targeting mid-2020 for initial customer service in the US, which realistically means sometime in 2021, by SpaceX’s usual deadline inflation.
• NordVPN compromised – They lost control of their private keys, the fools.

Guns

• The curious case of Joseph Roh – Who got off with a super-light sentence for running an 80%-lower-finishing operation because his lawyers convincingly argued that an AR-15 lower isn’t a firearm by the ATF’s own definition.

Grab Bag

• Preliminary report on the Collings Foundation B-17 crash
• Car and Driver likes the mid-engine 2020 Corvette – $60,000 for a car that can go 0-60 in 2.8 seconds. What a world we live in.
• Had you heard about how Mexican cartels defeated the Mexican military in pitched battle? – Mexico is falling apart.
• Cities are less happy than suburbs or exurbs – Water still wet. Sky still blue.
• ‘Amazon Synod’ in Rome causing strife among Catholics – There’s a bit of a flap over a display of what are pretty clearly fertility idols in the Vatican Gardens. Some Catholics of a more traditional bent stole them and threw them into the Tiber. I’m pretty much on board with that.

After the raging kegger we threw to celebrate the 50th WWRW, we needed a week off.

Actually, it was a busy week at work and I just forgot. Enjoy this special double edition.

Long Reads

• A Chinese martial arts master travels the country, challenging and defeating those whose kung fu he perceives as weak – Plot of a wuxia movie? Well, yes, the plot of every wuxia movie, but also a true, ongoing story in modern China. The best thing I’ve read in the last two weeks.

Quiz of the Week

• Which of these two force hierarchies pictured on Twitter is attacking, and which is defending? – See the spoiler tags at the end of the post for our guesses and the answer key, respectively, but I encourage you to take a look, think about it, and give your answers/justifications in the comments before checking the answers.

Defense

• Check out these goofy anti-flash goggles – A view of a B-52 flying a nuclear alert mission. This week on the Many Words Discord (see sidebar at right): a discussion of antiflash paint on bombers, and why it may have gone away.
• Bell is trying to cast Raise Dead True Resurrection on the Comanche – It’s the purest helicopter of the new scout helicopter competitors, so I like it, even if it does have wings. Also this week on the Many Words Discord: a discussion of tandem vs. side-by-side seating for military aircraft. Ars Technica reports they’re calling it ‘Invictus’ this time..
• Let’s play parade analysis – By which I mean, let’s let someone else play parade analysis. What’s the news from China’s National Day parade?
• Boeing’s why-you-should-buy-Chinook-Block-II website – The nice thing about helicopters is that you can slap new engines and a new gearbox in, and even without doing any work on the hull you’ve suddenly created a new, more compelling product.
• Iran says it foiled an assassination attempt on the commander of the Quds Force
• A video on the BAE Amphibious Combat Vehicle – A much less cool vehicle than the previous attempt to replace the AAV. 2700hp in the water by using open-circuit seawater cooling!
• Speaking of the Marines, they’re working on ways to fight China – We shared a story a few weeks ago on the planning document for same.
• Zerohedge: NoKor tests sub-launched ballistic missile? – The question mark is mine, because I don’t know if I fully trust Zerohedge’s reporting, and don’t have the time to run the story down myself.
• CDR Salamander is not happy about the Navy permitting fatigues in DC – Honestly, I’m against letting anyone with a staff job wear anything besides a proper uniform.
• Lynx 41 disqualified from the Bradley replacement game – Why? Because of bureaucracy and bad requirements, that’s why.
• … and the program is at risk of three failures in a row
• Iraq is in flames – Self-inflicted this time, though.
• Germany proposes ‘European’ aircraft carrier – Me: “Maybe Graf Zeppelin?” Parvusimperator: “What’s the German for ‘dock queen rustbucket’?”
• Defence Technology Review has some good articles this week, in particular on speculative amphibious assault ship designs
• Norway’s F-35 drogue chutes aren’t working right
• The AS21 rollout in photos – As AFVs go, I think it’s quite handsome.
• Big Army looking to replace the Longbow radar?
• Rheinmetall brought a 130mm gun to AUSA
• Puma Czechs out – I had to use Parvusimperator’s punny headline. The Germans decided not to submit the Puma to Czechia’s IFV program, but they have three other bids.
• Baby flattop all grown up – USS America has 13 F-35s on deck.

Sport

• This Week in Sportsball, Week 4
• And Week 5

Science and Technology

• The scientist behind the Navy’s UFO patents has filed one for a compact fusion reactor – A two-meter box capable of generating between a gigawatt and a terawatt of thermal energy. Naive back-of-the-napkin math suggests 2600 gallons per second of cooling water at one gigawatt, and five Rhines or two-thirds of a Mississippi at one terawatt.
• Science takes another crack at a reactionless thruster – This one uses relativistic mass change to get more impulse from a forward-moving particle than a backward-moving one. Nobody’s built one yet—rather, it’s a ‘the concept seems plausible’ thing, by a NASA engineer, who admits it’s a long shot.
• Update your Linux boxes – An exploit in sudo! It’s less serious than I thought, though, and basically only affects users/groups with a RunAs (ALL,!root) configuration).
• Teslas run Linux, Linux writes a lot of logs, flash memory in Tesla ECUs is not rated for a lot of writes, flash memory problems are bricking Teslas – ‘About four years’ seems to be the lifespan. Ol’ Musky says on Twitter that it’s better now.

Grab Bag

• Why is Costco so good?
• UN may run out of money by the end of October, says SecGen Guterres in letter to 37,000 employees – The headline is its own punchline.
• Washington Center for Media Self-Aggrandizement to close – That is, the Newseum.
• Blizzard suspends Hearthstone player for supporting Hong Kong – With this story, you can see why I try to do these weekly. The story’s advanced a bit. Anyway, isn’t it refreshing to see traditionally leftist media outlets calling out a company for suppressing unpopular speech, rather than shrugging, saying something about freedom of speech not meaning freedom from consequences, and forgetting about it a day later? $10 says they forget the lesson again next time it’s identifiably conservative speech.

It’s the 50th anniversary edition of Wednesday What We’re Reading, in which we… don’t really do anything out of the ordinary.

Defense

• Lightweight stainless/aluminum ammunition coming? – See also discussion on Discord of how much extra volume you get in a cartridge of the same size.
• Thrym invents beer gut replacement for operators – It’s an electronics case which fits, at least optionally, to the front of a plate carrier, so you can open it up and look down at your phone, or what-have-you.
• The US still needs carriers – Roughly a year in to What We’re Reading, and it’s as true as it ever has been.
• F-35 testing delays continue beyond its combat debut – Thinking face emoji.
• The Columbia boomers are on track for their scheduled delivery… – … but 2028 is a long way off, and more problems like the one with missile tube welds recently could push that date.
• The Navy Reserve is broken – Not as an organization, but in terms of actually paying its reservists.
• China builds an amphibious assault ship/baby carrier in a year or so, probably – Pictures of its keel under construction appeared late this past spring. It’s unclear how much work was done before then, at least in sources I can get at.
• Branch of service which operates boats beats branch of service which operates airplanes to airplane readiness goals
• Good Loren Thompson alert: five reasons the Digital Century series is doomed to failure – The most compelling reason is that, by and large, the original analog-era Century Series failed.
• Winchester selected to operate Lake City ammo plant – Is it a tell for the next-gen squad weapon? After all, Winchester is working with one of the competitors.
• Useless Camo Pattern retired today
• Armata program continues to deflate – Down to 130 tanks, and much of the fancy technology from the original demonstrator vehicles is gone.
• First photo of the new Chinese rifle – Not a bullpup, American-esque barrel lengths.

Science and Technology

• LockMart gets another cost-plus contract for the Orion spacecraft – After 15 years of development, this is a cost-plus contract to deliver six units, which will presumably be renewed even after we’ve all died working in Grand Overseer Musk’s Marsium mines.
• Our county uses hackable surveillance cameras – Time for a campaign of guerilla camera vandalism?
• Tesla debuts summon mode – No-driver Teslas immediately start hitting things in parking lots.
• Samsung Galaxy Fold lasts at least six days – More on this record-breaking performance as we have it.
• What can you solve with a quantum annealer? – Ars Technica explains why you might want one of those big D-Wave jobbers.

Nerd Culture

• Spider-Man back in the MCU, at least for now – This is a good thing. Tom Holland is the best live-action Spidey to date, and Sony’s track record, box office takes notwithstanding, is mixed at best¹.

Grab Bag

• Brexit and the British judiciary – Parliamentary government is weird. At the same time, the institution of Parliament, with shouting and dramatic speechgiving, is better than the institution of Congress.
• The article I meant to link with the above summary
• President Xi’s power grabs have cost China a great deal of stability
• Kickstarter laughs at coalition of leftist magazines who want it to be more union-friendly – All of the greatest successes of unions came in the days when they had Pinkertons and fire hoses to deal with anyway.
• Looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys – The effects of red meat and processed meat consumption are so small that they only show up in analyses of vast populations. Nutrition scientists were angry at the journal which published the paper because it’s going to damage public confidence in nutrition science.
• Measuring wealth by orders of magnitude – Top-down space game Starsector uses a similar system for measuring population.
• $172 red light camera ticket in Delaware represents is less than $100 and can’t be challenged, court says

Alphabetic shorthand report: still slower than ordinary English handwriting, because thinking about letters takes a long time.

I have a short day and a full day’s amount of work to do in it, so less commentary than usual today.

Defense

• The Drive with a good piece on the UAE’s F-16s – Want to buy the state of the art in Viperdom? This is the article for you.
• B-52 engine upgrade roundup
• B-52 nuclear weapon capabilities upgrade roundup – Kidding. It’s just one system.
• Big Army to buy BAE recovery vehicles
• You read about the Land 400 downselect here; now read about the reasons
• CV90 might not be the Land 400 choice, but it’s still present in Europe, and the Dutch want an APS
• Big Army chief to get back to basics: large-scale combat
• A hand grenade to do what light rocket launchers do – That is, make doors where doors were not.
• Foreign Policy says, “The United States was once considered the ‘world’s policeman.’ Now, a European army could take its place. – Yeah. Sure.
• USAF testing containerized microwave laser – Which, of course, should be called a maser, but they go with phaser instead.
• A curious mechanism to get fuel to unimproved beaches

Science and Technology

• Newly discovered neutron star almost big enough to be a black hole
• The definitive piece on the 737 Max crashes – The author is an aviation writer, so he actually knows what he’s talking about, doesn’t gloss over important technical details or describe MCAS as an ‘anti-stall system’, and is willing to blame multiple factors, rather than picking one.
• Stochastic computer built, can factor numbers – Stochastic computing is a weird voodoo math approach to computation that performs logical operations on bitstreams with 1s at a defined frequency. The hallmark of it is that the longer you observe the output, the more accurate your estimate of the result becomes.
• A price-competitive carbon-capturing natural gas plant – Also generates no NOx, because combustion happens in a mix of CO2 and O2. Excess CO2 is stored at high pressure for industrial use.
• The history of Patreon – Evidently, the guy who started it was a creative guy himself? I didn’t know that.
• Kerbal Space Program YouTuber and all-around science man Scott Manley with a SpaceX update – In keeping with the SpaceX ‘design as you build’ philosophy, the new Starship prototype is down to two fins and dedicated hull-mounted landing gear, unfortunately making it look less like a Buck Rogers rocket.
• Why does the floppy disk read cache expire after 2 seconds? – Because two Microsoft engineers couldn’t swap floppies faster than that.

Sport

• NFL Recap, Week 2 edition – How hopeful I was for my hometown Steelers then.
• The NFL’s air raid revolution is nearly complete
• … but NFL roster limits make it hard to do pure air raid offense
• The hometown Steelers’ offense in week 3 was so dink-and-dunk that only two passes were completed more than 1 yard beyond the line of scrimmage

Guns and Competition Shooting

• The stage names at USPSA hicap nationals are punny in the extreme

Grab Bag

• World’s best bush plane destroyed on takeoff – 2500lb taildraggers and 24kt crosswinds don’t mix.
• Where should a serial killer hide? In law enforcement, of course
• The Amtrak dining car is no more – Or will soon be no more, at least. On some routes, they’re getting canned on October 1. Others will survive into next year. One fewer reason¹ to take a long-distance train. According to a random dude on Twitter, the change is because Amtrak can no longer get federal reimbursement for losses incurred by food and beverage service on long-distance trains, starting sometime next year.
• China censoring the Ten Commandments in state-run churches – State-run churches always end up being a church of the state.
• A pretty average American conservative take on the Brexit debate – In related news, on Twitter, a watcher of British politics agreed with my assertion that the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act is silliness in the extreme.
• The Fed’s bailout of the repurchase market – Fortune terms it the ‘repo market’, as do most finance types, but ‘repo’ means a different thing to average people.

Cor, it’s Wednesday already?

I spent my morning coffee time working on learning one of the simple alphabetic shorthands, so this one’s a bit later than they’ve been.

Defense

• FNH offers a rangefinder/ballistic calculator combo for military customers only – Otherwise it would be under ‘guns’.
• Patria’s Ne(w)mo(rtar) fires some demo rounds at Fort Benning – Also, they move it around on a Cars (Pixar)-themed truck, evidently.
• SPEAR mini-cruise-missile is getting an EW variant
• Jordan unveils underwater museum of military hardware – Put another way, “We wanted to dump some old tanks in the ocean without making the environmentalists mad. Well, madder than usual.”
• Ace Combat comes closer to reality as Raytheon reveals Peregrine missile – The agility of an AIM-9X, the range of an AMRAAM, all in a 6-foot, 150-pound package, allowing fighters to ‘double or triple’ their munitions load. Notwithstanding that the physics seem a bit suspect (but I guess rocket motors have been improving), and a 150-pound missile clearly can’t have all that much explosive payload, three times 22 AMRAAMs on an F-15X is definitely Ace Combat territory.
• Germany’s military is a joke
• HK contracted to polish a turd upgrade the SA80
• SAS gamer with Benelli M4 notches five ISIS fighters in seven seconds – COD numbers.
• Speaking of gamers, the Marine Corps has map tablets with a chat function
• Want to arm your JLTV? Oshkosh Defense presents some options

Science and Technology

• WiFi turns 20 – Wait, WiFi is only 20?
• Fun with historical chemistry: the A-12 burned cesium-laced fuel to make its exhaust plume less radar-reflective
• В новосибирском центре вирусологии “Вектор” произошёл взрыв – I mean, there was an explosion at a virology center in Novosibirsk called Vector.

Sport

• NFL Week One video roundup – “But isn’t it week two?” Yes, but we’re beholden to the pace of our favored round-uppers.
• The hometown Steelers’ defense is tired and predictable

Grab Bag

• US exports more oil than Saudi Arabia
• The seedy world of semi-legal poker parlors in Texas
• US to leave the Universal Postal Union next month – It costs more to post a letter to Swissvale¹ than it does to send a reel of resistors from Shenzhen, so I think this is a fair move.

18 years on, the world is very different than it was on September 10, 2001. I don’t have a memorial to link; contemplate quietly in your own way.

Defense

• The modern tank destroyer – It’s a tracked chassis with a box of missiles on top. Less sexy than the old kind.
• USMC awards a contract for binocular NVGs
• A PDW for Parvusimperator’s next-gen grenadier? – He doesn’t like PDWs, but this one is just a tiny carbine (18 inches long collapsed, 5.7 pounds). You can even get it in trendy .300 Blackout (which he doesn’t like either).
• US Navy to hire consultants in an attempt to improve shipyard efficiency – I laughed too, at first, but apparently these same consultants helped improve some Hornet maintenance measurables, too.
• On the new, no-competition era in American nuclear procurement
• SoKor and Japan having a bit of a tiff again – Uncle Sam should step in and remind them to play nice.
• The A-10 escapes the chopping block once more
• Marine Corps might consider giving up big amphibious assault ships – In favor of smaller ones, granted, but I’m still iffy on the idea, if only because all the smaller ones pictured have terrible midships helipads.

Space

• ESA satellite performs avoidance maneuver against SpaceX satellite – SpaceX was notified that there was a 1-in-400-ish chance of collision, which may be within their thresholds to act, but nobody saw the email until after the ESA made the maneuver. Time for a more automated system of notification and maneuvering?
• Quanta Magazine: are we all wrong about black holes? – Black holes share some properties with the thermodynamic concept of entropy. It’s a good analogy, and the esteemed Stephen Hawking suggested that they were the same thing. The physics community said, “Hey, a hint to a theory of quantum gravity!” and hasn’t found anything promising, so maybe entropy is only an analogy for black holes after all.
• Europe is having trouble testing its Mars lander parachute – I can’t imagine why. It’s a simple seven-stage system¹.
• India is having trouble landing on the Moon – Which is not the same as having trouble reaching the Moon’s surface. Lithobraking is such a fun word².

Other Science and Technology Stories

• Are insect populations actually declining? – A followup to a previously-shared story. In Puerto Rico, the answer appears to be ‘no, and if they were, it wouldn’t be because of temperature change, because there hasn’t actually been any’.
• Bad ideas in computing: PingFS – It stores your files in the contents of ping packets to a remote server of your choice. It doesn’t work on LANs because the latency is too low.
• Aluminum hydride, known primarily as a rocket fuel additive, makes a superb fuel cell fuel – At the top end, the aluminum hydride fuel cell system has better energy density than JP8 and a power unit, both by mass and volume. Being a solid powder, it also doesn’t take any compressive storage. Also, it contains 148 grams of hydrogen per liter of volume, twice the density of liquid hydrogen, to say nothing of compressed hydrogen gas. The only obstacle to widespread adoption is scale of production. A Bay Area company called Ardica Technologies is working on that, but they’re at kilogram-scale right now, and DoD is putting out feelers for more than 40,000 metric tons per year³.

Global Politics

• One mechanism by which the Chinese economy might collapse – “It is needed to build more steel mills so as to build more shipyards, ports, railways and bridges so that more ships can be built to carry more iron ore to more ports and thence along more rails and bridges to more steel mills so as to build more shipyards, ports, railways …”
• UK Parliament denies Boris Johnson’s second bid for an election – How it sounds to an outsider: “The Brexit fight is absolutely crucial to Britain’s survival as a democracy, which is why we mustn’t under any circumstances permit the people to weigh in.” I’m nearing the end of Massey’s Dreadnought, which covers a tumultuous time in British history during which political figures used snap election after snap election as referenda on the issues of the moment. Apparently that changed not merely this century, but also this decade.

Grab Bag

• USDA employees bummed about having to move to Kansas City – I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of people having to relocate for a job, but goodness, what a bunch of entitled whiners these ones are. Heaven forbid that the mandarins who rule us should have to live among us. (Also, Kansas City is pretty cool.)
• A peek into The Knowledge, the exam which permits you to drive a London black cab – Bonus content: how are they faring (ha) in the age of Uber and Lyft?