We’re both back from vacation, and here’s some of what we read along the way. Mostly what I read; parvusimperator unplugs more fully than I do.

Vacation Fun

• My wife and I visited Portland (the slightly less socialist Maine version), with a brief pilgrimage up to Bath to see the Maine Maritime Museum (and thence, the only non-NO PHOTOGRAPHY view of Bath Iron Works). Strong thumbs up from me. Maine was delightfully low-key. When we vacationed to New Orleans, we didn’t want to miss anything, because it’s all steeped in a New Orleans-specific flavor¹ that you can’t find anywhere else. The parts of Maine we visited were simply coastal New England in pure form. We saw lighthouses, ate a bunch of lobster, and enjoyed the pleasant seaside weather. We didn’t see all there was to see, but we don’t feel like we missed out, either.

Books

• Nonfiction: I’m nearly done with Massey’s Dreadnought, which is good, but also not quite what I expected (an in-depth technical look at the battleship race). Rather, it’s almost a collection of biographies of interesting figures from the late 1800s through the start of the Great War.
• Nonfiction: Next on the list is When Tigers Ruled the Sky, a brilliantly-titled volume on the Flying Tigers.
• Fiction: Phobos, the debut novel from author Ty Drago (what a name!). A tense, tightly-paced moderately-hard-sci-fi thriller, framed like a classic mystery. There’s even a scene when the main character brings all the suspects together in one room and sums up the facts to date.

Defense

• On Northrop, the B-21, and lessons from the B-2 – The nice thing about the B-2 is that it was far enough ahead of its time that ‘build it again, except cheaper’ is a reasonable plan.
• Selling Vipers to Taiwan – It makes China mad, but… shrug.
• The Navy’s new carrier radar – Made from a bunch of AESAs which can be swapped individually. Easier on the maintenance, no doubt. The definitive version has three sets of arrays for permanent 360° coverage, but the article has a picture of a version on a spinning mount, which presumably cuts costs dramatically.
• Two more National Security Cutters enter service – Looking at the silhouette, I’m pretty sure the cutter calling at Portland, Maine during my stay was a member of the same class.
• Beltway insiders heed the Soapbox’s call for more drydocks – We get hits from DC at about five times the rate you would expect based on DC’s population, so clearly, the only possible explanation is that important people read this update.
• Big Army to spend many years and much money on a next-gen squad weapons program, before cancelling it as soon as it gets close to bearing fruit – Consider my prediction made.

Science and Technology

• Walmart sues Tesla over roof panel fires – Remember how Tesla bailed out legitimately purchased SolarCity? This shoddy installation job was a SolarCity-era thing that Tesla now has to deal with.
• Also, Tesla’s residential solar panels are catching fire – The problem, as I understand it from my non-expert position, is that a solar panel is cooled in part by the electricity flowing out of it. If a connector comes loose, suddenly the panel can overheat.
• Atlassian’s Bitbucket is sunsetting support for the Mercurial version control system – Well, time to evac my repositories to Github. I’ve been meaning to switch over anyway.
• Apple’s new credit card not rated for contact with wallets or jeans
• Tesla’s stock numbers are not great – The headline says Tesla has failed as a public company, which I think requires you to look at it from an investor’s point of view rather than Ol’ Musky’s.
• Deepfake technology and a Tom Cruise impressionist yield Tom Cruise as Iron Man – “The video isn’t bad, it’s just not enjoyable to watch.”
• Forbes contributor misidentifies a privately-owned oceanographic research vessel as a superyacht
• How to build a downdraft wood gasifier – You too can run a (carbureted) engine off of nothing but a bucket of burning wood.

Games

• Kerbal Space Program 2! – I’m a big Kerbal Space Program the Original booster, so I’m glad to see this. I have a big KSP mission planned; maybe I’ll take screenshots and write that up.

Hong Kong

• Loose Rounds has a series of roundups on Hong Kong – Look through the archives for ‘Hong Kong Boogaloo’.
• How to neutralize tear gas grenades – Shake ’em up in a canister of liquid nitrogen.
• Hong Kong protesters are using a Bluetooth mesh network messaging app to avoid state surveillance – Now that’s cool.
• Carrie Lam withdraws extradition bill – China blinks first. Will that be enough to stop the protests? I guess we’ll see.

Grab Bag

• K-pop tempts North Koreans into defection – Capitalist art is a great tool for breaking down poor authoritarian regimes, because man, are we ever decadent.
• Speaking of, abstract art was a CIA weapon – Unfortunately, it was a weapon designed to show Communists, “Look how free-thinking we are!” It failed on that front. If I had to choose my 20th century politics purely on the artistic merits of Socialist realism vs. American abstract… ism?, well, hand me a red banner and strike up the Internationale.
• Getting a Coast Guard rescue the hard way: ditching a plane in the ocean – That’s historically been the problem with piston engines over water.
• US militias from 1776 to the Civil War – A forgotten history.
• The Soapbox’s favorite NFL commentator/troll is gearing up for the 2019 season – He goes by UrinatingTree on Youtube. Apropos of nothing, except that a slightly ruder version of Mr. Tree’s name brings it to mind, here’s Blues Saraceno’s Hanging Tree, which came to my attention from the Rebel Galaxy Outlaw soundtrack. (Review coming sometime? Yes, I think so.)

Economics

• Negative interest rates are coming here financial industry voodoo

Long Reads

• On working homelessness – Not as common a condition as some would have you believe if you look at homelessness as ‘living on the streets’. Somewhat more common if you look at it as ‘would be living on the streets but for the charity of family’. Not that family charity is a bad thing, but The New Republic (yes, a dirty pinko rag generally) paints some interesting pictures here.
• Why hasn’t Brexit happened yet? – Because the British civil service, and European bureaucrats generally, look at Yes, Minister and see an instruction manual rather than a farce.

Parvusimperator is on vacation this week, and I’m on vacation next week, so expect a lighter WWWR than usual.

The promised USPSA match video isn’t done yet. I only recorded three of the six stages, so I have some further prep work to do for the ones missing video.

Defense

• A 60mm mortar for infantry and special forces – Every squad a mortar squad. Parvusimperator had some fun working up 40mm grenadier loadouts last week, but he might have an article on that, so I won’t spoil it.
• Statistics on ATGM use in the Syrian war
• E-2D Hawkeye manages to clip a pair of Super Hornets during a bolter and hit two more with debris, and still divert elsewhere for a safe landing – Built Grumman tough.
• Russia’s aircraft industry in crisis – They haven’t been selling very much on either the civilian or military markets lately.
• Japan officially selects F-35B to operate from its helicopter-carrying destroyers – I thought it was already official, truth be told.
• America needs a Dead Hand – +1 for correct use of ‘comprises’ in the introductory paragraph, but -1 for reaching a bad conclusion. Nuclear apocalypse was avoided several times during the Cold War because individual people with control over the systems didn’t launch when the automated systems were telling them to. I kinda prefer it that way. If it comes down to it, I’d rather lose a nuclear war than destroy humanity.
• Russian Navy evolving before our very eyes – Headline picture: a 500-ton corvette, and say it with me now, armed better than an LCS.
• Germany backs out of 2% NATO promise – Now, where’s that Polandball comic…
• Hackers find tons of vulnerabilities in F-15 systems – Granted, they got physical access, which makes it easier. Still, I’d love to have their job. “What do you do?” “Oh, I break into fighter jet computers with the blessing of the US government.”

Science and Technology

• Amazon’s facial recognition technology can smell your fear – Or at least recognize it to a high degree of confidence in a picture of your face.
• The universal law that aims time’s arrow – Quanta Magazine story. Have your coffee first.
• Astronomers observe a pair-instability supernova – Super-massive stars explode with enough energy to make gamma rays which in turn make particle-antiparticle pairs which annihilate the entire star.
• Random space fun fact: if you packed them as tightly as possible, you could fit every star in the Milky Way inside the orbit of Neptune with room to spare¹.
• Deep reinforcement learning is not an AI panacea – You heard it here before you heard it at Wired, although I phrase it in terms of when self-driving cars in their final form will be a reality. (Refresher: at least a few decades and one major AI paradigm shift away.)
• Usable renewable energy means hydroelectric or nuclear – Right now, nuclear power costs as much as solar or wind… ignoring storage for solar/wind demand shifting. See also: heat waves in Texas with minimal wind causing power shortages exactly when you’d want more power.
• Homeostasis, parasites, and antidepressants – Of course it’s a Slate Star Codex article.
• Europa Clipper is a go – That’s the Wikipedia page on the mission, but it was approved this week and is now on the way into detailed design. The ‘clipper’ name comes from how it’ll orbit Jupiter, making Europa flybys, both to reduce its exposure to the near-Jupiter high-radiation bands, and to give it more time to transmit data back to Earth in between flybys.
• The beginning of the end for Nest – Convert your account to a Google account, and lose all your Nest home automation hub features! A friendly reminder from your Soapbox contributors: don’t buy any home automation thing you can’t self-host.
• Supply chain attacks on open-source projects continue – It’s hard to sneak a backdoor into a popular open-source project. It’s easy to slip a backdoor into a tiny, unnoticed dependency of many open-source projects.

Grab Bag

• IP law and RPG stat blocks – RPJ, our house system here at Many Words Press, solves the copyrightability problem by having an open license.
• Pre-tricked-out tactical shotgun from Langdon, featuring a local stock adapter/handguard manufacturer
• It’s time for some game theory – Not the Twitter meme, but an actual interactive intro to game theory through the lens of social trust.
• GE big on fraudulent pension/benefit accounting? – As I like to say, the only reason to ask a question in a headline is if you can’t say ‘yes’ without qualification. The qualification here is that I haven’t read the linked report in detail, but the source and the first few pages look plausible.
• Steel Challenge is where people go to shoot odd guns – One more reason to get a lever-action rifle, though.
• Where have all the pirates gone? – Maritime patrols have been getting better, mostly.
• The gig economy is basically the rich creating a new servant class… – … except without the social obligations to take care of their servants. Granted, ‘rich’ is loosely defined compared to the old days. I can afford to take an Uber now and then. I can’t afford to hire a full-time driver.

Hong Kong Protests

• Imagine what would happen if, say, 10% of the Hong Kong protestors were armed – It’s just a meme, not a story, but the thought experiment remains.

Still just me, keeping the lights on. (Parvusimperator contributes stories here, too, of course.)

I’m trying something new and writing the post on Tuesday night rather than Wednesday morning. Less hurried. [Update from Tuesday night: actually, I wrote the post on Monday night because I got confused.]

In next week’s roundup, I should have another USPSA match video. As an added bonus, I should be running a few stages which I designed.

Defense

• An awesome paper on imaging infrared missile seekers and flare effectiveness against the same – By the power of simulation software, the paper’s author shows why flares aren’t super-useful against modern IR missiles—then gives one counterexample.
• US Army to deploy network authentication dongles – Tokens is the official word, but I prefer ‘dongle’ for hardware access control.
• Answers to questions posed to the Czech Army about its IFV requirements list – We posted the requirements list earlier this summer, along with a translation of the line items. This time, it’s pre-translated, and contains not merely requirements but justifications.
• In pictures: Inside USS Wasp‘s armories
• Here’s the new Big Army qualification for individual weapons – Easter egg: take a look at the sample soldier names on page 197.
• Iran jamming GPS – To nobody’s great surprise. Remember: your phone’s GPS antenna receives 500 times more power from the Andromeda Galaxy than it does from a GPS satellite. Jamming is not hard.
• USNI article argues for overhauling CVN-68 into an experimental carrier platform – Waste not, want not, I guess. The article is paywalled, but it’s an interesting idea.
• Touchscreen controls contributed to the McCain collision – Back to physical throttles it is. Also, the bridge diagram feels wrong, because sci-fi has trained me to expect the CO and XO to sit in the middle.
• The Pacific maritime democracies should cooperate on the Coast Guard front
• On the Naval War College’s homebrew wargame – Pretty much a review. The critique is that the game is not sufficiently rooted in the real world.
• In a rare well-argued article, Loren Thompson thinks threats to aircraft carriers are overblown
• Marines to further fatten squad – Three fireteams of four, plus a squad leader, assistant squad leader, and squad systems operator, for 15. Of course, the AAV can fit 21, so there’s still room for growth. Three six-man maneuver elements subdivided into two fireteams, plus the three-man command element, fits the bill perfectly, and the fighting elements also pack neatly into three Bradleys! (This is a bad idea.)
• Four ways to fix Royal Navy training – Notwithstanding that I wasn’t aware it was broken, the most interesting item is that doctrine should be short, because nobody reads long things.
• America should view China as a hostile, revolutionary power – Given the modern geopolitical stage, it’s a shame I caught the Russia bug rather than the China or Japan bug. I find the latter more and more fascinating as the years go by.
• Navy considering more advanced Burkes – That’s (more advanced) (Burkes), not (more) (advanced Burkes).
• Type 001A now undergoing sea trials
• It took the F-35 a long time to turn the corner, but this one left the factory in Fort Worth at 8 a.m., arrived at Hill AFB in Utah at 10 a.m., and went on a combat training mission at 3 p.m. – Impressive.
• The Turkish Defense Industry Product Catalogue – All of the headline items are vaporware, of course. Did you know Turkey has a 5th-generation fighter project? Neither did I!
• Marine JLTV hits IOC – I was about to ask why it was taking so long, but evidently, this is a year ahead of schedule.
• Big Army awards a laser weapon system contract
• That explosion in Russia? Nuclear thermal cruise missile
• Ars Technica story on the above

History

• James Holmes’ five favorite warships of all time
• The Cornfield Bomber – A classic Cold War aviation story.
• Long-form piece on the Second Peloponnesian War and maritime powers vs. land powers

Science and Technology

• AMD’s latest server chip outperforms two Intel chips at the same price point – That is, one AMD processor is worth two Intel processors, and each Intel processor costs the same as the AMD chip.
• Used Cisco hardware is no longer a valuable commodity – It used to be that the license to use Cisco software followed the hardware. Now, licenses are tied to the original buyer. To make things worth, Cisco is updating its older hardware to follow the same model, so if you bought used Cisco stuff, it could just stop working.
• A history of Python
• Trust nothing – By means of deepfakes, Bill Hader turns into Tom Cruise and Seth Rogen as he does impersonations thereof.
• Have $3 million? You could buy this modest Silicon Valley family home, or… Tumblr – Buy the house. (I believe Tumblr last sold in 2013. At that time, it went for $1.1 billion. Bit of a write-down there.)
• Blue Origin’s protest of the USAF launch services contract process is now a formal protest – I mean, I think they’re pretty obviously right. The space launch industry five years from now is going to look nothing like the space launch industry today. Why would you ever lock yourself in for that much time?

Sport

• AAA baseball starts using the MLB ball, hitting stats go through the roof – There’s been some controversy in baseball of late over whether the ball has been changed to yield more offense. The official story is no, so either they’re lying, or it was an accident.
• A news roundup on the hometown Steelers – I heard you liked news roundups, so I put a news roundup in your news roundup.
• LB Devin Bush could be Ryan Shazier 2.0
• Ex-Steeler locker room distraction report #1 – Antonio Brown won’t play this year unless he can wear his old helmet. The concussion gremlins must be whispering in his ear.
• Ex-Steeler locker room distraction report #2 – Unlike Brown, it looks like LeVeon Bell’s antics last year were actually calculated. He’s playing the dedicated teammate so far with the Jets.

Guns

• What to do when faced with a mass shooter – Presumes, of course, that you’re packing.
• A contributor at TTAG builds and shoots a gun for the CMP President’s 100 Match – Good read.
• A short list of liberals who have seen the light on guns
• “But how do you 3D print the barrel?” – With electrochemical machining in your kitchen, that’s how. Print a cylinder to hold wires, put those wires in the barrel, Sam Colt is your uncle.

Grab Bag

• New York Times correction of the week – “An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the law that protects hate speech on the internet. The First Amendment, not Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, protects it.”
• This Pennsylvania homeowner is delighted to hear that PA lawmakers are considering eliminating the school property tax – Leaving aside the tremendous affront to property rights that property taxes represent, they also just don’t work very well in PA. In a jurisdiction with property taxes, rising property values are bad for older homeowners. So, at least in Allegheny County, we’re still using appraisals from 2010 or so. Under that regime, however, schools don’t benefit from rising property values, so to increase their revenues, school districts raise tax rates. If we were ever to re-appraise houses at their current values, there would be a tax rebellion. Better just to get rid of the property tax altogether.
• The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust will cease to be 20 years after the last of 11 semi-random people dies – Why? Because ETFs are structurally a little unusual. SPY is a unit investment trust, which has to have a termination date. I have no idea why it’s tied to people as opposed to a simple date, though.
• Hoover once ran a very poorly considered promotion: buy 100 quid of vacuum, get free transatlantic tickets – I am reminded of the Equifax settlement fund, which offered free credit monitoring for three years or $125 cash, and whose managers were shocked, simply shocked, that people were opting for the cash rather than the credit monitoring.
• Canadians annoyed at the though of Americans buying Canadian drugs… – … because Canada is in the middle of a drug shortage. Hmm. Government-dictated low prices and shortages? What an unusual combination that has never before happened in the annals of human history!

Hong Kong Protests

• Hong Kong protests continue
• Symbols of America remain symbols of freedom worldwide
• Also, Les Miserables
• Authoritarianism in pictures

Book Review Review: Secular Cycles

SlateStarCodex reviewed Secular Cycles. Best quote: “I wish I could find commentary by other academics and historians on Secular Cycles, or on Turchin’s work more generally. I feel like somebody should either be angrily debunking this, or else throwing the authors a ticker-tape parade for having solved history.”

As is ever the case for SSC reviews, it goes into great depth and does some analysis of the key claim: that human history follows tide-like cycles. Calamity kills a lot of people, the survivors rebuild and grow rich, the rich society stagnates, stagnation leads to calamity. This seems reasonable to me. Certainly, it looks like it applies to Europe up until the postwar years. Belle Epoque, war then war again, recovery. (Or possibly continued inter-cycle stagnation?)

There’s some question over whether it applies today. A later book by the same author(s?) says yes, but I say you need some qualifiers. First, the calamity cycle only works for a society without outside inputs, as Mr. Alexander notes, and there are very few of those nowadays. None, if you’re asking about those of interest on the world stage. Second, the nation-state is no longer the unit of interest. We operate on the scale of civilizations now: the West and so forth. Third, the calamities aren’t as bad. The potential calamities are a lot worse, but the ones that actually happened are milder. The World Wars killed 15% of Germans, maybe. As a percentage of Europeans, the Black Plague killed a lot more. Fourth, we’re no longer operating in a Malthusian frame. We can skim along the top of the cycle for a lot longer before things fall apart, and they’re more likely to fall apart for ideological reasons than they are because of lack of food.

Anyway, SSC is going to review the author’s (s’?) next book, which makes the pro-cycle argument for the modern age. Maybe I’ll read both myself, rather than relying on someone else to read them for me.

Another Wednesday, another What We’re Reading post.

Come October or November, once the season for outdoor tasks and hobbies is closed, I’m going to run a wintertime Rule the Waves 2 AAR here, with some room for decision points guided by reader voting. I would start sooner, but I’m not optimistic about my ability to maintain a regular schedule for anything more than this post until I have less on my plate.

Hong Kong Protests

• White House eyeing Chinese force buildup on Hong Kong border – As the protestors who hung the old British colonial flag in the Hong Kong legislative chamber realized, the West kind of sold them out for fear of looking unfashionably colonialist. Turns out that it’s much better to be a colony of Britain than of China.
• This should give you some idea of the scale of the police response – That’s a lot of cops.
• Protestors wish they had a right to keep and bear arms – Or rather, that the natural right to do so was not infringed by the Chinese government.

Defense

• Airbus and Boeing may pull out of the Canadian fighter competition – They say it’s rigged for the F-35. “Designation number must begin with a 3 and sum to 8.” More seriously, though, if you want to buy a stealthy fighter, the F-35 is pretty much your only option.
• F-35 gets ground collision avoidance software – I bet that’s going to make pilots mad, up until it saves a few lives.
• Aggressor squadron at Nellis gets some F-35s – For many years, we practiced beating up on minor power airplanes. Now it’s time to get back on the great power competition train.
• Continuing the F-35-heavy theme, one F-35B waits to land on USS Wasp while another readies for takeoff
• The Navy has an LCS attack strategy, which… – …I’ll let this meme do the talking for me.
• US minesweeper fleet tragically neglected – We’re hardly the only power to forget that mines exist, though. Everyone has fewer minesweepers than they should.
• Another $55.5 million for Boeing to fix KC-46 boom problems – Someone probably keeps leaving sandwiches inside.
• The last time we saw economic warfare on this scale was prior to WW2
• Kilos off the English coast? – Everything old is new again. Speaking of things called ‘Kilo’, is regular commenter Kilo Sierra out there? Haven’t seen him on Discord in a while.
• On resupplying Marine forward airfields with automated shipping – I think. I only skimmed the article.
• North Korea not, in fact, serious about disarming – I was hoping this latest Kim was softer than his forebears, but I guess not.
• Aerojet Rocketdyne still thinks it has a shot to supply engines for next-gen ICBMs – Given that it’s currently a Northrop-only competition, and Northrop owns a rocket engine company now, I’m not so sure.
• Deploy or Get Out works – The legacy of Mad Dog Mattis.
• We need way more drydocks – There are backlogs for ordinary maintenance. Battle damage is going to make it even worse. In the early 1900s, naval affairs writers in Britain complained that dreadnoughts didn’t fit existing drydocks, and good old Jackie Fisher rightly said that the infrastructure is for the ships, not vice versa. The British built more drydocks.
• We need a material condition standdown – CDR Salamander says we should slow down our tempo of operations until we can fix all of the rust currently gracing US Navy vessels.
• Russian ammo depot explodes – Prompting evacuations. Are they maybe not telling the whole story? Also, the video is pretty nifty. You can watch the shockwave pretty much all the way from the explosion to the camera.
• A real-time reactive IED jamming backpack – Modern EW is pretty wild.

Science and Technology

• Stupid ways to implement malloc and free in C++ – Some of which, toward the bottom of the post, get into the territory bounded by the saying, “If it’s stupid and it works, it isn’t stupid.”
• This Medium post covers some of the same ground – As it turns out, custom memory allocators which reserve a large block of memory up front, getting all the system call overhead out of the way, then parcel it out within the confines of the program in which they run are not uncommon in the game development space, where efficiency is king.
• Happy Friendly Dystopia Watch: Ring Doorbells edition – Ring (a fully-owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc.) coaches cops on how to ask homeowners with Ring doorbells to voluntarily hand over surveillance footage.
• Serious flaw in KDE’s file explorer – View a directory containing a .desktop file and you’re hosed.
• What does it take to get a Twitter ban? – Direct calls to violence targeting specific people? That’s apparently within Twitter’s rules, as long as you’re targeting conservatives. Call reporter/snowflake Jim Acosta an asshole, however, and that’s a 24-hour ban.

Guns

• Secret Service adopts Glock 19 Gen5 – A bit downmarket for the Secret Service¹, you say? I agreed. Parvusimperator says it makes sense, though: “On USSS (or any other agency) piggybacking on a contract, remember that: If they wanted to do something else, they’d have to hold an RFP, accept bids, conduct testing & evaluation, etc. It would cost millions of dollars. If there’s a preexisting procurement program/contract that they can piggyback on (such as the ICE, CBP, or FBI contracts), then they can just pick it and go.”
• The history of mass murder in the US – Not as gun-heavy as the media would have you believe. It’s more prevalent now, though, because today’s mass murderers are constructing warrior myths in their heads, and plowing a truck into a crowd or burning down an animation studio don’t fit the stories they tell themselves.
• Analyzing NYC’s brief in NYSRPA v. City of New York – The Truth About Guns is, granted, a source likely to find that the case is looking rosy for the natural-rights side, but NYC, having changed the law following a writ of certiorari, is not on particularly solid ground here. If a child steals a toy from his brother, then guiltily gives it back when his mother notices, he’s still going to get in trouble.

Grab Bag

• The Moka pot is brilliant – The Moka pot, a stovetop steam pressure coffee maker, does indeed make a brilliant cuppa. It’s my coffee maker of choice for backpacking, given that a three-cup model² is compact and lightweight. Bialetti, the inventor and main manufacturer of such pots, is in financial trouble, though, so you might want to get one while you can. I’ve owned a few knockoffs over the years, none of which are as good as the genuine article.
• The Kure Maritime Museum has the most impressive entrance of any I’ve seen – The Central Naval Museum in St. Petersburg remains the most impressive I’ve personally been to.
• The slow death of Hollywood, and the rise of streaming providers – With a bonus note on why Netflix cancels shows early: the best Netflix subscriber from the perspective of Netflix’s financials is one who doesn’t watch anything. So, it’s in their best interests to make a bunch of interesting television, then cancel it after a season or two before the cast starts to demand raises. Of course, this business model requires consumers to have zero memory, and given how mad I still am at Google for killing about 60% of the Google products I use, I don’t think that’s likely.
• Of course, the slow death of Netflix is also maybe already in progress? – I expect that the Fishbreath household will subscribe to two streaming providers: Netflix and Disney+. We’ll, uh, creatively obtain everything else. I bought into the cord-cutting thing because streaming was convenient as much as it was cheap. A bunch of walled gardens, each with their own apps, quirks, and costs? I’m out, thanks.
• WW2 movies are played out, so why not a WW1 movie? – Decent preview.
• Between 1924 and 1976, you had to renew your copyright after 28 years, or it would expire – So, 80% of books published between those two dates are in the public domain. Unfortunately, I expect all the famous ones are not.

This is an auspicious entry in the Wednesday What We’re Reading series: #42.

Parvusimperator and I both have a few drafts for normal articles we’re working on, but summer is busy. C’est la vie.

9:38 PM edit: I just realized the title of this post said July 24 instead of July 31, and it stood for almost twelve hours. Come on, regulars! You have to dunk on us for unforced errors like that.

Defense

• Boeing backs out of next-gen ICBM project because Northrop owns a solid rocket company – Boeing sees Northrop subsidiary Orbital ATK as an unfair competitive advantage.
• China and Russia run a joint strategic bomber patrol – The Bear and the Dragon? Wait, that’s a different story.
• In a recent defense white paper, China paints itself as a victim of Westerners interfering in its backyard, but emphasizes a rosy view of the Asia-Pacific security situation – Makes sense. They aren’t quite ready for a big war yet, so…
• Also, they’re bringing bugles back – Can’t jam a bugle!
• Declaring state emergencies to call out the National Guard – …’s computer specialists in the face of a ransomware attack.
• B-21 first flight planned for December 2021 – I will believe it at such a time as I see it. Also, they’re activating more boneyarded B-52s, so maybe they don’t believe it, either.
• Another Taiwan Strait FONOPS
• Americans are war-apathetic, not war-weary – It makes sense. Where there are American boots on the ground, there’s also typically vast American advantages in supporting fire and infantry technology. For all the fighting, there are few enough American combat deaths that it’s typically local news when there is one, which is pretty wild.
• Billion-dollar contract awarded for sonobuoys – Sounds like a lot, but the contract is for 932,500 by 2023. Granted that the contract is just for manufacturing existing designs, but $1000 a pop and a four-year timeframe is pretty intense by procurement standards.
• Hydropneumatics for the Bradley? – Parvusimperator adds a link to the manufacturer’s website and a note that even if the Bradley is on its way out, there are still plenty of Bradley-platform vehicles that would benefit from a suspension upgrade.
• Big Army behind on infantry recruiting goals – It’s not a very glamorous job.
• Big Army about-faces, decides to keep more of its landing craft etc. – Do Army watercraft still use the Army rank system? “I’m the Major of this ship, and you’ll do what I say!”
• Why the JEDI cloud is single-vendor – From a technology perspective, I can’t imagine one huge company partnering with another huge company to do a huge cloud project. It’s like two continents colliding: a long, drawn-out crash bringing forth fire and brimstone at the point of contact. Also, JEDI is an ominous name for a cloud system.
• Learning from Guadalcanal for modern Pacific wars
• An analysis of NoKor’s latest missile
• China reduces the count of noncombatants in its military by nearly half – “Military organizations involved in artistic performance, sports, news services, publication, and medical and research bodies have been dismantled or simplified.”
• Can we call it the Armée de l’Espace instead of Space Command? – France plans to launch armed satellites. The age of space warfare is here!
• Forbes story on the same – Also fails to make the point that Space Command is a dumb name, and Army of Space has a better French heritage.
• Army starting to make plans for a next-generation tank – … again, which they’ll cancel in favor of an Abrams upgrade at the first whiff of delay or cost overrun.
• Save The Royal Navy takes a look inside munitions handling on HMS QE – With photographs! Worth noting that, for all the trouble Britain has had getting even one aircraft carrier to sea, all their ammunition lifts work.
• F-35s to get drop tanks? – Of a 460-gallon capacity—enough to make the stealth losses worth it, evidently.
• Royal Marines investigating jetpack suit as a way to board non-cooperative ships – Including video of the inventor of the Daedalus suit zipping around between a pair of of RHIBs and a Royal Navy patrol boat.
• Ford‘s elevators are still a work in progress – Forever a work in progress.
• Proceedings column: Embrace the SAG – We have enough destroyers to make it work, after all.
• I can’t laugh at Britain and Germany’s readiness problems if I don’t have at American ones now and then, too – About 10 percent of B-1s are currently mission-capable. And so the B-52 continues, rugged, dependable…
• DoD has a Chinese electronics problem – Not a terribly bad one, though. Evidently GoPros are a security risk? I can see printers and laptops, the other two categories, being a bit more dangerous.

Science and Technology

• You aren’t anonymous on the Internet – That is, it’s still easy to identify specific people in anonymized data sets. If you have, say, twenty demographic dimensions, merely scrubbing names out isn’t going to do very much.
• AG Barr comes out as part of the Ban Math camp – SSL/TLS was a huge pain to set up here at Many Words, but we do it for you, because good encryption is a free speech issue.
• Remember those diplomats we pulled out of Cuba after the weird attacks there? Apparently there are anomalies in scans of their brains – I’d really like to know what they were hit with.
• A better explanation of what the trouble is with those conflicting Hubble constant measurements
• Does that mean we’re in a physics crisis? – Could be. Astrophysics has been in need of a shakeup for a while, I feel like. We base an entire model of the universe on a mere handful of measurements by most other fields’ standards.
• Certain kinds of trees form root connections, so a healthy tree can keep an adjacent stump alive – Are forests actually macro-organisms rather than collections of individual plants? Maybe kind of?
• A big asteroid flew by well inside the orbit of the moon – Also, we didn’t see it until it was already almost past. Asteroids are hard to find.
• Floppy disk support in the Linux kernel is now orphaned – The guy who was maintaining it couldn’t find a working floppy drive after his broke.

Guns

• Yours truly at the other local match – Well, ‘other’ means about one of five within easy driving distance, but USPSA is pretty much a morning sport, and I don’t do sports that overlap with church if I can avoid it.
• My first attempt at some USPSA stage design – In this revision, four of the six stages are illegal for various reasons. Can you spot them? Check your answers with the spoilers at the bottom of the post. A USPSA stage repository might be a future Many Words Press project.

Games

• The Flare Path, the only worthwhile regular feature at Rock Paper Shotgun, is running an audience-participation Combat Mission scenario – I’m not participating, but I always love to follow these.
• How many people play D&D compared to other roleplaying games? – Answer: a lot. Granted that Roll20 is a D&D-focused platform, but even so, the numbers are pretty dramatic. D&D 5E campaigns represent just more than half of all campaigns played on Roll20. ‘Uncategorized’ (that is, games which aren’t 5E, Call of Cthulhu, 3.5E, Pathfinder, Warhammer, World of Darkness, Starfinder, Shadowrun (any edition), or Star Wars (any edition)) comes to just 14%.

Grab Bag

• Tactical homework reading: Michael Alan Silka and the Firefight at Manley
• Copyright troll slapped with harsh rulings – No real news here beyond a bad thing happening to someone who probably deserves it.
• Auckland University of Technology cancels a Tiananmen Square event at the request of its Chinese overlords – “Alright, Ferb, lean on him.”

Parvusimperator hasn’t had much in the way of article fodder lately, but did submit quite a number of things to this week’s What We’re Reading.

Strait of Hormuz Crisis, 2019 Edition

• Friday’s breaking news: British tanker seized in the Strait of Hormuz – Royal Navy nowhere to be seen.
• Iran releases video of commandos rappelling onto said tanker – So it was probably Iran.
• Why didn’t the British see it coming? – Because they still think of themselves as a maritime power, despite all the compelling evidence to the contrary.
• U.K.-flagged tankers flee the Gulf – HMS Montrose had to escort a few of them out.
• USS Boxer downs Iranian drones with EW
• Private satellite photography company locates seized tankers – And the era of privately-owned satellites has only just begun, given the rapidly decreasing costs promised by rockets with more and more reusability.

Defense

• Presenting the Oerlikon Skyranger – A family of SHORAD vehicles: a search radar, a gun, a Stinger/equivalent platform, and an ARAM platform.
• Australia wants to replace its Æurocoptres – Leading contenders: navalized Cobras or a Sea Apache. I’d forgotten the Æurocoptre was still a thing until just now.
• Footage of the French military waving those DroneGuns around – I guess a man-portable drone jammer isn’t very exciting to watch in action, but there you go.
• Tyndall AFB permits shorts on the flight line – Parvusimperator says: ‘not sure if heresy’. I say: the Air Force has always been the comfort-first, wimpy branch, right?
• RAF readiness woes: A400M has a 10% mission-capable rate – Engine problems. Engineering staff at RAF Brize Norton calls the plane ‘a dog’.
• USS Kearsarge transits Suez with anti-drone bugges on deck – It’s not a hack, it’s a mission module.
• The entire Royal Navy surface escort fleet: status as of July 2019 – Jackie Fisher sheds a single tear.
• Venezuelan Flanker shadows an EP-3 over the Caribbean
• VLS is a step back for US Navy expeditionary capability – We really need an at-sea reloading system, or at the very least, some way to do it ship to ship in a sheltered anchorage.
• The Space Force/Space Corps should use naval ranks – Seconded and carried.
• South Korean defense plans now include a STOVL aircraft carrier – Welcome to the club!
• Britain’s AFV upgrade programs ‘unachievable’, according to an official report – On the plus side, this justifies parvusimperator’s laughter. On the minus side, it’s LockMart who’s years late and hundreds of millions of pounds over budget.
• How Boeing won the T-X competition – TLDR: by innovative cost-saving techniques, and (counterintuitively) by offering a new airframe which could be manufactured on the cheap and doesn’t need as much maintenance as an updated legacy airframe would.

Science and Technology

• Starhopper, the SpaceX test platform for its bigger, next-generation Raptor engines, was engulfed in a massive fireball after a test fire – It appears to be undamaged, though. Good old American Stainless Steel.
• Inconsistencies found in measured vs. predicted expansion rates of the universe – The Hubble Space Telescope remains an extremely important scientific instrument. Although there are inconsistencies, the error bars on the measurements are still pretty big, because measuring distances to other galaxies is difficult.
• Kazakhstan hijacks HTTPS – Kazakh Internet users ask Mozilla to blacklist the Kazakh government’s root CA cert.

Guns

• SilencerCo is producing a Maxim 9 without an integral suppressor – The pictured gun has one attached, but it’s not a requirement.
• US DoD purchases some carbon fiber barrels for 300 MRAD rifles – Can we talk briefly about how dumb a name ‘carbon fiber barrel’ is for a steel barrel with a carbon fiber wrap?
• The Liberator 12k is a 3D-printed, revolving shotgun – Doing a shotgun is smart, because you don’t need to worry about rifling, and rifling is the hard part. Plain metal tubing (for, say, a shotgun barrel and chamber inserts) is widely available.
• 3D-printed Glock magazines, too – You still need a spring, but those aren’t too hard to find.
• Percentage of population with carry permits – Our native or adopted PA is right up there with some of the best. Note that some of the heartland states are permitless carry or soon to be, and full of farmers who are perfectly free to carry however they like on their vast properties anyway, so they may look worse in this comparison than they are.
• How long do criminals own guns before using them? – The median is two months. The article suggests that more effective enforcement of gun sales laws could have a quick effect on gun use in crime—but DAs don’t like to come down hard on straw buyers and so on, because they get accused of racism.
• On ejector rod length in wheelguns

History

• How the Order of St. John became one of Europe’s largest postwar air forces
• What caused American aircraft losses in Vietnam? – Mostly archie, which makes sense. It’s way harder to suppress a battery of guns in the jungle than a massive 70s SAM site or a MiG-sized airfield. Of the remaining 16%, 15% were unknown/operational, and 1% of losses were from friendly fire.
• Wreck of lost French submarine Minerve located in the Mediterranean – Seabed search has certainly stepped up in the past few decades.
• Operation Vulture: the joint US-French plan to relieve Dien Bien Phu by close air support with nuclear-armed B-29s – Can you come up with a sentence containing more bad ideas per word? It would be difficult.

Grab Bag

• The NY Times’ interactive desk has an excellent piece on how the Notre Dame fire started and spread – The fire warning system was confusing and complicated. It detected the fire almost immediately, but a muddled message on the console (“Attic Nave Sacristry”) led the security guard who made the check to the attic of the sacristry, a building next to the cathedral, rather than the cathedral’s attic. The fire warning system was, of course, designed and built with great effort and at great expense by a coalition of experts, and proved to be all but useless in practice.
• The Corvette C8 is a mid-engine sports car for $60,000 – They say ‘less than $60,000’, but we all know that means $59,995 list, without destination fees. Still, Chevrolet is keeping the Corvette name meaningful: if you go with them, your $60,000 buys something a great deal closer to a supercar than if you were to spend $60,000 on a BMW or a Ferrari. (Not that you could buy more than a few Ferrari parts for $60,000.)
• Chevy’s last mid-engined car – It’s come a ways.
• A few flags are mysteriously missing from Maverick’s leather jacket in the new Top Gun trailer – Oh, wait. It’s not mysterious at all. Tencent Pictures is listed under ‘production companies’ on Wikipedia.
• One year into the US-China trade war, 50 or more foreign enterprises are planning on moving manufacturing away from China – Trade wars aren’t great for prosperity, as the conservative Twittersphere will never fail to remind you, but they do sometimes attain their foreign policy goals. Or start wars. Bit of a toss-up. We’ll see how it plays out.
• Man defrauds national health insurers out of $4 million – You can get a National Provider Identifier, a number which permits you to bill insurers, with zero verification.
• Competing with MasterCard and Visa is pretty much impossible – You can’t undercut them, because they have scale. You can’t lure their customers away, because who wants to get a reader for a new kind of credit card?

Summer is in full swing, and speaking of things in full swing, I plan to continue my recent superhero kick by doing up a review of Spider-Man: Far From Home.

If the number of articles in this series were years of its age, we would now refer to it as over the hill.

Defense

• Komsomolets is leaking radiation – But it’s way underwater, and water is an excellent radiation shield, so it’s not a very big problem. Plenty of cool pictures of the wreck, though.
• Please stop calling it Skyborg – The Air Force Research Lab will be testing Boeing’s autonomous UCAV this summer. Unfortunately, the supervillain section was last week, but ‘Skyborg’ gets, at the least, an honorable mention.
• How to fight China on American terms – Spoiler: by cutting off China’s oil imports. I can’t think of any time in the past century when blocking a rising Asian power’s access to oil has ended badly¹.
• US military not planning a war on pizza after all – There were evidently some rumors that the military was going keto, but whether that was true or not, they’re definitely not now.
• More on superconducting degaussers – See also the item on Chicago in the Science and Technology section.
• Inside the B-2, like, literally: a 30-year-anniversary special
• BAE gets the green light to develop a 58-caliber gun for the Paladin – Bringing us ever nearer to the Paris gun Project Babylon the Strategic Long-Range Cannon.
• The Army wants an autoloader for that, too – Not the Albatroskanone SLRC, but the actual reasonable project.
• The San Antonio LPDs are pretty cool – Not only are they getting the superconductors, they’re also fit for-but-not-with room for a 16-cell Mk 41 system.
• France still wants to create a European Army – That way, we can centralize the neglect and procurement into one bureaucracy with no real oversight, instead of a handful with a little bit!
• Aircraft carrier Kennedy the Next gets its flight deck done
• To pay for finding new suppliers for F-35 parts from Turkey, the Pentagon will raid the F-35 spare parts budget – That seems… short-sighted, we’ll say.
• F-35 sales are America’s Belt and Road – As China uses infrastructure projects in Third World countries (in the unaligned sense from the Cold War) as a way to spread its influence, the US uses the promise of F-35 sales and parts production as a way to lean on First World countries.
• Speaking of, the US might use those parts it’s taking away from Turkey to entice new F-35 buyers
• Turkey, for its part, wants to slow-roll its S400 deployment to evade US criticism – I don’t think that’s going to work.
• Breaking! Ex-F-15 pilot favors F-15X
• The P-8A’s radar voodoos away its engine nacelles with computer magic

Science and Technology

• How the Voyager spacecraft communicate with Earth – This is but one of a series of six articles (at the time I saved the link) on the Voyager missions and their history and technology. Worth a deep dive if you have the time.
• One engineer at Commodore back in the day hated a new OS version so much that he ignored an office policy to use it… – …so all his coworkers built a version which looked like the prior one and installed it on all his machines.
• Extra! Extra! American Superconductor to connect Windy City substations with wires made from new miracle metal, Amperium! – American Superconductor is, of course, the same company doing the superconducting degaussers. This is an old story, but it’s the first I’ve heard of a) it, and b) the fact that they call their superconductor Amperium, which is a wonderful name and entirely deserving of the headline with the old-time radio announcer stylings.
• New York’s recent blackout suggests that maybe they need superconductors too
• Want to break Google’s monopoly on search? Don’t break up Google, force them to make their index public – I don’t know that I’m that much of a trustbuster, but it’s a delicious recommendation.

Guns

• USPSA match video: me, last weekend – I bought a camera which clips to the brim of a baseball cap, so I don’t have to mess around with tripods or finding someone to record me². The resolution is quite poor for an allegedly-720p video, but it does, at least, work.
• Related to the above, Facebook reminded me of a fun CZ story. When I bought the P-09 originally, I got the night sights version, even though I was planning on taking the night sights off immediately, because it came with an extra magazine and the price delta was less than the cost of one magazine. In the manual, it said that the tritium gas, if it escapes, is mostly harmless, and “[…] in case of its inspiration it is recommended to increase the intake of liquids and eventually to take some diuretic (beer with low content of alcohol) for acceleration of the body water exchange.”
• USPSA match video: one of the local fast shooters – Shared because he has a super-fancy Max-Michel-branded video app which analyzes your audio to find your shots, then lets you tag the intervening time with various activities, then gives you a breakdown of the result. Very handy—”I spent six seconds on transitions on that stage, but only three seconds on splits” tells you a lot about what you should be practicing. It’s the kind of thing parvusimperator and I might aim to recreate by hacking an open source video editor, so we don’t have to go out and buy an iDevice to use it.

Grab Bag

• A fully renewable energy economy isn’t plausible in the near term – The numbers are just too big. That’s why I present Fishbreath’s Genuine Patent Carbon Neutral Energy Economy Plan, if you’re concerned with such things: 1. Nuclear power, in the quantity ‘lots’. 2. Switch to synthetic fuels made with electrolysis and atmospheric carbon capture. #2 isn’t cost-competitive yet, but there’s a pilot plant in Canada which says it’s cost-competitive with dinosaur fuels given $200/ton carbon tax, which translates to about $2 per gallon of extra cost on refinery products. Scale up and add cheap power, and I bet you can get that cost way down.
• If France can do a nuclear energy economy, surely we, who invented it, can too
• Hedge fund managers do not think Lolita Express guy Jeffrey Epstein was a hedge fund manager – I favor the blackmail conspiracy theory myself.
• In Sacramento County, it’s largely illegal to work on your own car in your own garage – Busybodies.
• Much of US uranium is imported, which does not strike the Trump Administration as a good idea – Nor do I think it is.
• As Tommy John surgery is to pitchers, vocal cord surgery is to singers – Blow out your (arm/voice) by overexerting it? Go under the knife to get it fixed!
• Pacific Rim Zero: Kaiju Rising – Over the past week, Earth has been experiencing earthquakes at about three times the normal rate.
• Whatever happened to French cuisine? – TLDR: “nothing, and that’s the problem.” English chefs, once they discovered that there’s a whole world of colorful, tasty food out there, leapfrogged their Continental brethren, who have been slow to catch up. Still, the article is something of an elegy for and a paean to the classic French restaurant.
• Written language drives sentential complexity – It being difficult to keep track of a spoken sentence with vast numbers of subordinate clauses and dozens of words, and written language being a popular mechanism by which to conduct science, it seems that, to the linguistic world, the idea that oral languages might, to ensure ease of speaking and ease of comprehension, tend to favor short sentences and limited recursion, which is to say, nestedness of clauses, is novel. See, for instance, the preceding sentence. I don’t talk like that, but I do write that way on occasion³.

Since the long-form articles this week are both on the subject of a superhero roleplaying game, I’ve helpfully separated out the articles for today’s post which are thinly-disguised supervillain plots.

Defense (Other)

• South Korea’s doing a good job on the navy front – 32 destroyers and frigates either in service or under contract, more than half again as many as the Royal Navy.
• New details on Russia’s heavily-modified ‘special projects submarine’, which had to make an emergency surface because of a fire aboard – A secret special projects submarine very nearly made the cut for inclusion in the supervillain plots section. The new details in question are drawings published in that august Russian Ministry of Defense publication, Krasnaya Zvezda. It’s from The War Zone at The Drive, so it’s not just an in-depth article, it’s the latest in-depth article in a four-part series.
• An infographic on Singapore’s Hunter AFV – “If you know nothing about the Singapore Army’s Hunter AFV…” begins the caption, which described me perfectly.
• Five money-pit projects the USAF can do without – A Loren Thompson article, yes, but this one’s not just rah-rah stanning¹ for the Air Force or the F-35.
• Fire Scout unmanned helo now operational – I’m still leery of drones, but at least this one is a helicopter.
• Did you know that the Navy hasn’t forgotten about patrol boats? – News to me, too. Fun fact: they nearly outgun a stock LCS, shipping a pair of 25mm autocannon, six manned M2s, a bunch of mounts for miniguns etc., and space reserved for Griffin missiles. Displacement? 72 tons.
• Mitsubishi Heavy Industries reveals plans for Japan’s next-generation submarine – To be developed starting no earlier than 2025, and aimed to enter service in 2031. Knowing the Japanese, I bet they’ll hit their schedule, too. The article contains some interesting analysis of the Mitsubishi presentation, along with a drawing from H. I. Sutton.
• A Wired bit on the Sikorsky S-97, with its pusher prop for cruising and contra-rotating rotors – I’m all for contra-rotating rotors.
• America is upgrading Ukrainian ports to fit American warships
• Iron Dome on a truck – I’ll take fifty.
• Book review: Land Warfare Since 1860: A History of Boots on the Ground – Looks interesting. Rather than a deep dive into all the wars which have happened since 1860, it appears to focus on the changes in land warfare since 1860, which makes more sense for a single-volume history.
• A very brief history of repurposed American warships – Including some oddball plans for future repurposing. Of course, they touch on what to do with the LCSes, but they also have a fun idea for the Nimitzes they retire when the Fords start coming online. I’m interested to hear what you think.
• USAF suggests that long-range nuclear-armed cruise missiles will stop wars – On the one hand, the 60s were pretty tense. On the other hand, nobody’s really gotten into a major, state-on-state shooting war since nukes became a thing. Apropos of nothing, the Air Force is designing the LRSO to fit the B-52, which is a great case of ancient design decisions shaping the modern day. Only 11,968 days until we get to celebrate the centennial of B-52s in flight, and from here in 2019 I have a hard time believing that there won’t be a flyover by B-52s in active service at that time.

Defense (Supervillain Plots)

• US Navy to work on new tactics for laser-armed destroyers – “So you see, Mr. Bond, you are no match for my mighty LASER WARSHIPS!”
• Is Russia crating a Nazi-style army of genetic supersoldiers? – And now you see why the heavily-modified secret projects submarine was not worthy of inclusion in this section. Notwithstanding that the headline is a prime example of the only reason why you end a headline with a question mark², it is still pretty villainous.
• The USAF once made serious plans to nuke the moon – Okay, granted, it was the late 50s, and what better way to show those dirty Reds that you won’t be bullied by a little softball beeping its way around the planet than by H-bombing the moon? We’re not behind in the space race. You’re behind in the space race. Just imagine what the universe would have been like if, rather than racing to manned landings on various solar system bodies, we had instead raced to land bombs on them.
• Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are building instruments designed to send particles into parallel universes – The headline uses the more straightforward phrasing ‘build a portal to find parallel universes’. That’s never gone badly in the history of comic books.
• Scientists create ‘beanless coffee’ – This time they’ve gone too far.

Science and Technology

• The sinkhole that saved the Internet – A sinkhole, in this usage, is a server which sucks up traffic that would otherwise be bound for a worm’s command and control servers. In this case, the ransomware known as WannaCry had a killswitch—if it could reach a particular web address, it deactivated itself. A security researcher set up a server there, and prevented something like tens of millions of infections from going active.
• Einstein and symmetry: the man and the idea behind modern physics – A Quanta article, so have your coffee first and block off ten minutes to read it and half an hour to think between paragraphs.
• Raspberry Pi 4 has an incorrectly-wired USB-C port – Maybe it’s because I’m not a hardware engineer by trade, but if a datasheet gives me a reference circuit design, you can bet I’m going to copy it wholesale.

Guns

• Ruger continues the competition push with a custom shop SR1911 – This isn’t new new, having been announced in April, but it’s the first I’m hearing of it. $2499 for a gun suited for USPSA Single Stack. Your choice of Major or Minor—it comes in 9mm or .45, with 10-round and 8-round magazines, respectively.

Grab Bag

• China 2050: in the throes of demographic decline – The one- and two-child policies in China put its native population growth below the replacement rate. China’s closed nature and impossible language mean it doesn’t get very much immigration. In the middle of the 21st century, it could very well be looking at the same problems Japan is looking at today.
• The oyster poachers of Connemara – Shared because I quite liked Connemara on my trip to Ireland, and because ‘oyster’ and ‘poaching’ would not have been my first guess in either case if you gave me one word and asked me to guess the other.

A little patriotic overture to start the post seems fitting.

Defense

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

Defense: Czech IFV Requirements

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

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

Science and Technology

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

Grab Bag

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

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

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

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

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

Defense: China

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

Defense: FFG(X)

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

Defense: Other

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

Science and Technology

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

Guns etc.

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