Political Survival, Catholic Theology, and Marxist Frameworks

Friday, August 7th, 2009

In discussing Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s fascinating thoughts on political survival, Anomaly UK makes this aside:

I have a bit of an interest in Catholic theology, on the basis that since this is what the brightest minds half the world could produce spent about a thousand years on, it is likely to have some value, even if it is fundamentally flawed.

In the same way, a large proportion of political science in the twentieth century was carried out in a Marxist framework, and while it is no doubt the worse for it, it is a stretch to dismiss it as worthless, less worthy as a point of comparison than Hobbes or Machiavelli, or to examine Lenin and Mao as political practitioners without giving any attention to the theories they expounded before coming to power.

Posted in Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Policy | No Comments »

A New Approach to Fusion

Friday, August 7th, 2009

General Fusion, a startup in Vancouver, Canada, claims that its new approach to fusion could lead to a prototype power plant within a decade for less than a billion dollars:

So far, it has raised $13.5 million from public and private investors to help kick-start its ambitious effort.

Unlike the $14 billion ITER project under way in France, General Fusion’s approach doesn’t rely on expensive superconducting magnets — called tokamaks — to contain the superheated plasma necessary to achieve and sustain a fusion reaction. Nor does the company require powerful lasers, such as those within the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to confine a plasma target and compress it to extreme temperatures until fusion occurs.

Instead, General Fusion says it can achieve “net gain” — that is, create a fusion reaction that gives off more energy than is needed to trigger it — using relatively low-tech, mechanical brute force and advanced digital control technologies that scientists could only dream of 30 years ago.

It may seem implausible, but some top U.S. fusion experts say General Fusion’s approach, which is a variation on what the industry calls magnetized target fusion, is scientifically sound and could actually work. It’s a long shot, they say, but well worth a try.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Hackers and Fighters

Friday, August 7th, 2009

A part of me feels like I should have written Hackers and Fighters:

This essay was prompted by a post on comp.lang.lisp by Joe Marshall.
Some of the people in this group have, or are pursuing, advanced degrees in computer science. Some have bachelor’s degrees. Some have degrees in related fields. Some have degrees in completely unrelated fields. Some have dropped out before getting a degree. Some are autodidacts.

Is there a correlation between studying computer science and knowing about computers? Do people gain anything by pursuing an advanced degree in computer science, or would they be as well served by saving the money, buying a PC, and teaching themselves? There is a romantic ideal of the untutored hacker that program circles around MIT grad students. Is that absurd or commonplace?

This reminds me of another debate which takes place in martial arts — about martial arts students and street fighters. Geoff Thompson touched on this in his excellent and extremely funny book Watch My Back. Geoff is a trained martial artist, a karateka, a grappler and the victor in over 200 street fights as a bouncer. In his book he compares two styles of fighter — the school-trained martial artist and the untutored but hardened street fighter.

The street fighter fights in a ring with no rules and no boundaries. The school-trained martial artist trains for a circumscribed contest with known parameters. What Geoff says is roughly this: the street fighter, if transplanted to the tournament ring, will often fare poorly. Contrariwise the trained martial artist in no-holds fighting will generally be taken out by a good street fighter unless his level of skill is very high and he has trained for combat situations. However, the combination of the two, the street fighter who has also formally trained in the dojo, will surpass either.

This is also true for programmers.

Posted in Education, Martial Arts, Technology | No Comments »

Gina Carano

Friday, August 7th, 2009

MMA continues to go mainstream as the New York Times takes a look at women’s MMA star Gina Carano:

In an interview at a diner near her home, Carano recounted the curiosity of a strict religious upbringing in Las Vegas. She was enrolled in a private school not far from the Strip. Celebrating Halloween was forbidden. Her family walked out of a screening of “Forrest Gump” because of the sinful language. Her sisters seemed so effortlessly thin and pretty, until the older one dragged the family through a crucible of the drug variety.

Enrolled in psychology classes at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Carano was 30 pounds too heavy, rudderless, half-lost to drinking and chatting up other girls’ boyfriends by the time a friend’s muay Thai instructor finally called her a mess. And the church of athletic redemption narratives found itself another lost soul.

“I’ve only answered to God, sometimes my family, sometimes not, and fighting,” Carano said. “No relationship, no boyfriend, girlfriend; it’s the only thing that has kept me focused.”

In time she was traveling the world, taking fights in Thailand and staving off concerned relatives. After a while she started making money. After a while she developed a sense of mission.

Posted in Martial Arts | No Comments »

Bullet Effectiveness

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

Dave Spaulding has spoken to a couple hundred gunfight survivors and asked about the effectiveness of various bullets:

I have spoken with a little old lady who severed the aorta of a home invader with a FMJ .32 while, at the same time, talking to a police officer that could not stop a knife-wielding assailant with five rounds of .45 ACP hollow-point. As a matter of fact, many of the people that I spoke with continued to fire until the threat was no longer in front of their gun. Think about the time it takes for gravity to pull a 200-pound male to the ground. As a matter of fact, time it for yourself.

Lay a mattress on the floor and just collapse on it. It will take between one and two seconds to hit the floor. A lot of rounds can be fired in one to two seconds. Dr. Vincent DiMaio, a noted pathologist and author of the book Gunshot Wounds, has been quoted as saying the stopping power comes from, “Where you hit the person and how many times you can hit them.”

Interestingly, few people remember taking notice of any immediate effects of their bullet strikes. Some reported that they expected small chest explosions like they saw in the movies and were surprised when that did not happen. Some recall the suspect’s shirt puckering or moving, but most have no recollection of any bullet strikes. Most of the people I spoke with remember shooting and then their opponent “just not being there any more.” At the same time, gunfight survivors who are shot vary greatly in their recollection of what happened when they were shot. People, who are shot in the leg, unless a bone is hit, take less notice than other areas of the body that are hit. People who are shot in the chest remember being slammed or being punched at the time. How they handled the impact seems to fall totally on how much anger and resolve they felt at the time they were shot. Doctors and emergency medical technicians have told me over the years that if you are not killed instantly by a gun shot wound (a vital organ being hit) or bleed out in a few very short moments, you probably will not die from your wound.

There are a lot of crazy gunshot-wound stories out there:

The most dramatic wound that I ever personally saw involved a woman who was shot in the head by a .357 Magnum. I was a patrol deputy and responded to a public housing project on the report of a shooting. I arrived at the same time as the medic crew and found a white female sitting on the sofa with a dimpled hole in her forehead.

There was a similar wound on the back of her head. As I spoke to her at the scene (to find out who shot her, not to further my personal research) I was told that she had been in an argument with her live-in boyfriend when he picked up a snub-nosed .357 revolver and shot her in the forehead. She advised that her head, “Slammed back and I fell back onto the sofa. I have been sitting here ever since. I have a big head ache.” It later turned out that the 158-grain jacketed semi-wadcutter bullet used in the shooting had spilt the lobes of her brain finer than any surgeon could have hoped to. The bullet left a hole in the rear of her skull, which was patched in some way. This victim was released from the hospital and then refused to testify against her boyfriend. (“I still love him.”) He was prosecuted anyway. This incident remains one of the strangest things that I have ever seen.

Posted in War | No Comments »

Air Power, Mithril and National Self-Confidence

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

Anomaly UK addresses the important issues — raised by one EKR — of Air Power, Mithril and National Self-Confidence:

As to the fellowship, I think an important point in considering the geopolitical situation of Third-Age Middle Earth is that the elves, after previous catastrophes, are in a kind of Vietnam Syndrome. They do not believe that any good can come of military action.

The Fellowship includes nobody from Rivendell. Aragon was a ward of Elrond but is engaging in the operation as part of his project of uniting the Northern and Southern kingdoms of Men. Legolas is a visitor from Mirkwood. Elrond explicitly considers and rejects the idea of sending elvish warriors.

Rivendell is not a city-state or city, but a house — “The last homely house West of the mountains”, as it is described in The Hobbit. It is something like a medieval manor house, inhabited by the Lord’s extended family and a few guests and retainers. It is not adequate as a base for military operations.

As for importing supplies from Lothlórien, as suggested by ekr, that is absurd. Not only was there no Fed-ex, long journeys were extremely rare and dangerous. Elrond’s wife Celebrían (Galadriel’s daughter) was captured by Orcs on a journey from Rivendell to Lórien, and the wilderness only became more dangerous since. There is no mention of merchants in The Lord of the Rings (the gathering of supplies to Isengard is the only trade I can think of), and the idea that the roads will be used by “messengers of the King, not bandits…” is a prediction made by Frodo after the fall of Mordor, in contrast to the past.

Possibly ekr was confused by the film, where Elrond and Arwen apparently teleport around Middle-Earth at random, and a mysterious Elvish army arrives from nowhere at Helm’s Deep. This was due to the filmmakers writing and rewriting the story, and having to use already-filmed scenes after changing their minds about the plot.

The only plot difficulty I saw along the lines of ekr’s objections was the low profile of the eagles. In both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the eagles appear as Deus ex Machina at the end to save the day: first in the Battle of the Five Armies, and then to rescue Frodo and Sam after the fall of Barad-dûr. In both cases it appears that they could have done a lot more good by getting involved earlier.

Even this problem I am no longer too worried by. Just because there is no air-to-air combat in Tolkien, one should not assume that air superiority is not a consideration. For most of the period of The Hobbit, there is a dragon in the Lonely Mountain, and the eagles only show up after it is killed by Bard. It seems highly probable that eagles would not wish to hang around where there was a dragon flying about.

Similarly, they only approach Mordor after Sauron, and with him the Nazgûl, have been defeated. An air defence system consisting of a Palantír-based DEW line plus winged nazgûl would probably be impenetrable. True, the winged nazgûl are only introduced once the fellowship have already sent out, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that Sauron had other airborne assets, and that the air at least in Eastern Middle-Earth was as dangerous as the ground.

It is explained by Gandalf, in The Quest of Erebor, that his involvement with Thorin’s expedition in The Hobbit was motivated by concerns over air-power — specifically that in a war, Smaug could be used to attack Lórien.

Posted in Media, War | No Comments »

German radicals turn to arson

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

German radicals turn to arson — because the authorities won’t come after them for mere property crimes:

During the past six months, more than 170 cars have been destroyed by fire in Berlin and police confirm conservatively that 93 were politically motivated attacks.

A mysterious, single page website, brennende-autos.de (Burning Cars of Berlin), shows the number of cars set alight and where the crimes occurred, revealing clusters in ‘‘richer’’ areas, or in suburbs where gentrification and redevelopment are changing the demographic of local neighbourhoods.

Demonstrations and protests in Berlin have also become more violent. During the past seven months traditional street marches or political celebrations such as May Day — when 21 police were hurt and 102 arrests made — have degenerated into ugly confrontations between left-wing activists and an increasingly frustrated police force.
[...]
According to a spokeswoman for the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz (the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), there has been a measurable increase in left-wing extremist action, including the targeting of police and the property of businesses perceived to be involved in military or ‘‘imperialist’’ activities.

DHL, a company involved in logistics for the German armed forces, has been a recent target.

‘‘It is not just anti-militarism we are seeing … it is anti-imperialism, a catalogue of anti-things … anti-fascism, anti-gentrification. The people we are seeing are the so-called ‘autonoma’, people operating in groups without hierarchy, who are not well organised and so classical anarchy is in the background of their thinking,’’ she says.

‘‘Yes, they are young in the main and while we do not see it as another beginning of [’70s-style] left-wing terrorism, we do not underestimate what is done through these violent actions … the big difference for now is that it is violence against property, not against people.’’

This week, an evening walk along the riverside in west Berlin’s affluent Tiergarten riverside district revealed four burnt cars on a single avenue.

Frank Millert, a spokesman for the Berlin police, described the increase in politically motivated arson as sizeable, with numbers close to doubling each year over the past three years.

Police cars, too, are being targeted. The favoured method is to use the slow-burn barbecue fire starters, which take time to smoulder and provide plenty of get-away time for the perpetrators.

‘‘It is very difficult to get evidence. The fire can be started underneath a car but the person that did it can be many streets away when it is alight,’’ Mr Millert said.

Since 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, there has been increasingly vociferous opposition to the wave of redevelopment and gentrification that has transformed areas of east Berlin, traditionally occupied by artists, into smart apartments and commercial centres.

The phenomenon has also sparked a schism between the police, the left-leaning mayor, Klaus Wowereit, and the conservative national Government, amid claims that left-wing political crimes are treated with less rigour than those of the extreme right.

According to the head of the German Police Union, Rainer Wendt, authorities are not doing enough to stymie the rise in left-wing violence and protests like May Day this year resulted in more police being injured than ever before.

He also accused Mr Wowereit and his left-wing governing coalition of being openly sympathetic to the extremists.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

The Essence of Government

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

Jim Henley considers libertarians the court jesters of politics:

I mean that in a good way. We whisper to Caesar that that he is mortal. We caper about, turning ourselves blue if necessary, reminding everyone that government power is inescapably violent and inescapably self-interested. You’re probably not going to care, but we’re going to make you actively decide not to care. And sometimes, maybe you’ll care after all. As a class, we can be stupendously silly people, believing and saying the most absurd things. But our rulers are silly people too, in different and more malignant ways. And as fools, we have the freedom to say so.

The problem, Anomaly UK says, is that all politics is based on a lie — that the essence of government in a democracy is to serve the people, and that political questions are about how best to serve the people:

In fact the essence of government, in a democracy or elsewhere, is that the strong enslave the weak. What democracy provides is not a different essence, but, by the mechanism of dividing the strong against each other, a situation where the strong enslave the weak much less effectively. The point of democracy is to provide ineffective government, which is a good thing.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Why I am Not a Professor

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

Universities are extraordinary institutions, Mark Tarver notes, as he explains why he gave up his tenured lecturer position:

They are in fact, the last bastions of mediaevalism left in modern society outside, perhaps, the church. Like churches they attracted a certain type of person who did not share the values of the commercial world. The oldest universities date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries — hundreds of years before the invention of the printing press. In an age where books were scarce, communication was difficult and people who could read and write were almost as rare as the books, it made sense to centralise the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge. If you wanted to learn you headed towards where the books were and the people who could read them and that meant the great universities like Paris and Oxford. Poor communication, expensive reading materials and illiteracy were the foundation blocks for the universities. If today we have excellent communications, free online information and general literacy, we also have an environment in which the universities are struggling to maintain their position. That, of course, is not an accident.
[...]
It began at the top from the government in a drive towards egalitarianism reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. Like the Cultural Revolution it ended by inflicting misery and degrading everybody involved.

Just as the Cultural Revolution, the ostensible aims started out by sounding noble. Lets widen access to university and increase student choice, argued education ministers, and increase the accountability of the lecturers by introducing some form of assessment of teaching and research.
[...]
But the goal of widening access to education is a noble one and very much in line with the motivations of the post-war British governments. One way of implementing it would have been to investigate why so few students went to university, and, having constructed a careful social analysis, to have increased the percentage of entrants by improving the educational qualities of the average school leaver. Of course thats the hard and genuine route and it takes a generation. An easier way is to water down the educational system to a lower standard and then peg the university income to the number of students accepted while reducing the funding per head. In that way universities are given the happy choice of losing money and enforcing redundancies or watering down their requirements. No prizes for guessing which route the government took and how the universities responded.

After a few years of letting students take only the courses they wanted to take and dropping all the hard classes that no one was taking any more, the results percolated through to Dr. Tarver’s office:

I could see the results in the lecture hall, but the procession of students who walked into my office and said “Dr Tarver, I need to do a final year project but I can’t do any programming”… well, they are more than I can remember or even want to remember. And the thing was that the School was not in a position to fail these students because, crudely, we needed the money and if we didn’t take it there were others who would. Hence failing students was frowned upon. By pre-1990 standards about 20% of the students should have been failed.

However there are lots of ways round this little problem. One of them is doctoring the marks. Except its not called ‘doctoring’ its called ‘scaling’ and its done by computer. You scale the marks until you get the nice binomial distribution of fails and firsts. You can turn a fail into a II(ii) with scaling. Probably you want to be generous because otherwise students might not elect to study your course next year and then your course will be shut down and you’ll be teaching Word for Windows. Scaling was universal and nobody except the external auditors (who were lecturers who did the same thing themselves) got to see anything but the scaled marks.

Graduating computer-illiterate students who had to do a project in computer science was more of a headache. The solution was to give them some anodyne title that they could woffle or crib off other sources. It was best not to look too closely at these Frankensteinian efforts because otherwise you would see stitches where they lifted it off some text which you were never likely to find short of wiring them to the mains to get the truth. It was of course, a lie, but the cost of exposing that lie was likely to have ramifications beyond the individual case. Very few lecturers would want to stir such a hornets nest or have the necessary adamantine quality to inflict shame upon a student whose principal failure was to be allowed to study for a degree for whch he had little ability.

After seven years of the new regime, I had the opportunity to compare the class of 1999 with the class of 1992. In 1992 I set an course in Artificial Intelligence requiring students to solve six exercises, including building a Prolog interpreter. In 1999, six exercises had shrunk to one; which was a 12 line Prolog program for which eight weeks were allotted for students to write it. A special class was laid on for students to learn this and many attended, including students who had attended a course incorporating logic programming the previous term. It was a battle to get the students to do this, not least because two senior lecturers criticised the exercise as presenting too much of a challenge to the students. My Brazilian Ph.D. student who superintended some of these students, told me that the level of attainment of some of our British final year students was lower than that of the first year Brazilian students.

He also had to deal with Teaching Quality Assessments:

These audits were designed to fulfil the accountability of the lecturers by providing a visible proof that they were doing their job in the areas of teaching and (in another review) research. In view of the scenario described, you might well wonder how it is possible for such a calamitous decline in standards to go unremarked. The short answer is that, the external auditors, being lecturers, knew full well the pressures that we were facing because they were facing the same pressures. They rarely looked beyond the paperwork and the trick was to give them plenty of it. The important thing was that the paperwork had to be filled out properly and the ostensible measures had to be met. Students of the old Stalinist Russian system will know the techniques. Figures record yet a another triumphant over-fulfilment of the five-year plan while the peasants drop dead of starvation in the fields.

Research was an even more important criterion:

The mandarins in charge of education decreed that research was to be assessed, and that meant counting things. Quite what things and how wasn’t too clear, but the general answer was that the more you wrote, the better you were. So lecturers began scribbling with the frenetic intensity of battery hens on overtime, producing paper after paper, challenging increasingly harassed librarians to find the space for them. New journals and conferences blossomed and conference hopping became a means to self-promotion. Little matter if your effort was read only by you and your mates. It was there and it counted.

Today this ideology is totally dominant all over the world, including North America. You can routinely find lecturers with more than a hundred published papers and you marvel at these paradigms of human creativity. These are people, you think, who are fit to challenge Mozart who wrote a hundred pieces or more of music. And then you get puzzled that, in this modern world, there should be so many Mozarts — almost one for every department.

The more prosaic truth emerges when you scan the titles of these epics. First, the author rarely appears alone, sharing space with two or three others. Often the collaborators are Ph.D. students who are routinely doing most of the spade work on some low grant in the hope of climbing the greasy pole. Dividing the number of titles by the author’s actual contribution probably reduces those hundred papers to twenty-five. Then looking at the titles themselves, you’ll see that many of the titles bear a striking resemblance to each other. “Adaptive Mesh Analysis” reads one and “An Adaptive Algorithm for Mesh Analysis” reads another. Dividing the total remaining by the average number of repetitions halves the list again. Mozart disappears before your very eyes.

But the last criterion is often the hardest. Is the paper important? Is it something people will look back on and say ‘That was a landmark’. Applying this last test requires historical hindsight — not an easy thing. But when it is applied, very often the list of one hundred papers disappears altogether. Placed under the heat of forensic investigation the list finally evaporates and what you are left with is the empty set.

And this, really, is not a great surprise, because landmark papers in any discipline are few and far between. Mozarts are rare and to be valued, but the counterfeit academic Mozarts are common and a contributory cause to global warming and deforestation.

And that’s why he finally quit.

Posted in Education | No Comments »

Fighting Talk

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

Joseph Fouche has reworked the 40 maxims of Colin S. Gray’s Fighting Talk:

  1. The overlapping contexts of war are all important.
  2. War is about peace. Peace can be about war.
  3. It’s harder to make peace than it is to make war.
  4. War works but beware the unexpected side effects.
  5. Peace and order aren’t self-enforcing. Somebody has to create and maintain them.
  6. When a political community makes war and peace, its society and culture make war and peace.
  7. While reason controls war, passion and chance are always plotting against it.
  8. There is more to war than warfare.
  9. While politics rules war, it is frequently ignorant of just what it’s gotten itself into.
  10. War is always a gamble.
  11. Knowledge of strategy is vital: the flame of strategic understanding must be kept burning.
  12. Strategy is more difficult than politics and tactics.
  13. Bad strategy kills but bad politics and bad tactics are accomplices to the crime.
  14. If Thucydides, Sun Tzu, and Clausewitz didn’t say it, it’s probably not worth saying.
  15. Today’s hip new strategic concept is tomorrow’s stale left-over, at least until it’s rediscovered, recycled, and revealed as a new strategic gospel handed down from on high.
  16. The enemy gets a vote. Bugger for us.
  17. Time is the most unforgiving dimension of strategy.
  18. You can’t escape friction but it doesn’t have to kill you.
  19. Geography is the medium through which all strategy must act.
  20. Strategy deals with more than the military.
  21. The impossible is impossible: impossible is a permanent condition, not a passing problem.
  22. People matter most.
  23. Military power is the final arbiter of politics.
  24. The only test of military excellence is performance in war.
  25. Military excellence can’t guarantee strategy success.
  26. Victory in battle does not guarantee political or strategic success but defeat all but guarantees failure.
  27. There is more to war than firepower: the enemy is more than a set of target coordinates.
  28. Logistics is the arbiter of strategic opportunity.
  29. Bad times return.
  30. There are always thugs, villains, rogues, and fools out there who’re out to get us.
  31. Existential threats happen.
  32. Prudence is the supreme virtue in statecraft and strategy.
  33. Strategic history punishes good intentions.
  34. Defense costs are certain. Security benefits are uncertain and debatable.
  35. Arms can be controlled but not with arms control.
  36. Nothing of real importance changes: modern history is not modern.
  37. History can be twisted to prove anything. But it’s the only guide to the future we have.
  38. The future is not foreseeable: nothing becomes outdated faster than today’s tomorrow.
  39. Surprise is unavoidable but its impact is not.
  40. Tragedy happens.

Posted in War | No Comments »

No One Shoots Back in "Latin Impact" Class

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

A depressed misogynist walks into an LA Fitness gym outside Pittsburgh, makes his was to the aerobics room, where they’re holding a “Latin Impact” class, fusses with his gym bag, pulls out some handguns, turns off the lights, and proceeds to shoot the helpless women.

My condolences go out to the victims.

As always, I find the reporting about these events… odd:

A gunman made “test runs” earlier in the day before he opened fire at a huge health club with as many as 100 people inside, killing three of them — including himself — and wounding several more on Tuesday night.

Wouldn’t anyone outside the journalist community say that he killed two women, wounded several more, and then killed himself? Including the killer in the count seems like an especially forced attempt at “objectivity”. (If the reporter isn’t including the killer in the count, then that sentence is terribly ambiguous.) Also, “several” seems vague.

The AP story is more specific; it says that he killed three women, wounded nine more, and then committed suicide. Police apparently collected 52 casings, implying that the whole situation could have been much, much more lethal.

Going back to the first story, it’s hard to trust any of the details when reporters clearly know nothing about guns:

Police said Sodini , 48, of Scott Township, used three guns with fully loaded clips to carry out what appeared to be a long-planned mission at LA Fitness in the Great Southern Shopping Center on Route 50/Washington Pike.

Sodini walked in with the guns — two 9 mm semiautomatics and a .45-caliber revolver — hidden in his gym bag shortly before 8 p.m., then made his way to an aerobics room where at least 20 people were working out in a Latin Dance class, police said.

Witnesses told police that Sodini turned off the lights in the class, and the next thing they heard were gunshots. Three women were killed and nine were wounded with the two 9mm weapons before Sodini used the .45 to commit suicide, Moffatt said.

I suppose it’s pedantic to complain about clips — the correct term here is magazines — but why call out that they’re fully loaded? Wouldn’t any reasonable person assume that much? And, returning to the use of clips, the third gun was a revolver. I’m pretty sure it had no clip or magazine, fully loaded or otherwise.

Posted in War | No Comments »

Front sight?

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Shooters are taught to focus on the front sight of their weapon — but there’s some question about how easy it is to maintain that focus in a real confrontation. Dave Spaulding has spoken to a couple hundred gunfight survivors, and he has found that the people who remember seeing or using their front sight are the ones who were prepared to engage in combat:

Good examples of this are soldiers on the field of battle or SWAT cops who know going in that they are quite likely to shoot. These folks kept sights in their “cone of vision” and relied on them when a hostile target was encountered. I have also experienced this phenomenon while working narcotics for a number of years. Prior to raids and vehicle takedowns, I would visualize in my head what I planned on doing, including where my firearm would be. This position would always be some type of high ready position where the gun and its sights were within my “cone.” I found that during the operation itself, that when I encountered potential hostiles, I could shift between the actions of the suspect and the location of my front sight with little problem. The big difference here is that I was “prepared” to engage and not caught in startlement. Awareness is as important to gun fighting as is trigger control.

There was another factor — the sight itself:

I have noted two distinct categories of individuals who remember using their sights; they are those that used long guns and those that used a revolver. The reason for the long gun use of sights seems to be directly related to responding as one is trained. All that I spoke with advised that when they saw the threat facing them, they brought the gun up until their cheek connected with the stock and the fired. None of the people I spoke with advised that they had ever been taught to fire their rifle or shotgun from the hip. When asked why they remember their sights, a common response was, “Because they were shoved up in front of my face.”

Revolver shooters continuously told me things like, “I remember that big red (or orange, or green) front sight coming right up in front of my eyes and laying right on his chest.” For those of us who broke into defensive shooting using revolvers, we can remember how well that red front insert contrasted with the wide black rear sight on our Smith & Wesson Model 66 or Ruger Security-Six. Those of us who did not have such an insert would usually paint our front sight with some high visibility color. Think about what is now available on semi-automatic pistols. We now have to line up three dots or we have to place a dot on top of a bar, all of which I believe is too complicated for our eyes to do quickly. The revolver’s simple, but contrasting, sight system was easy for the eyes to use under stress.

Posted in War, Weapons | No Comments »

Comprehensive Bibliography of Military History

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Joseph Fouche found Williamson Murray’s comprehensive bibliography of military history in an obscure corner of the Web and decided to repost it:

Ancient Warfare to 500 AD

The Eighteenth Century (1686-1789)

General Works: Military History and Strategy

The French Revolution and [Nabulione Buonaparte] (1789-1815)

The American Civil War (1861-1865)

General Works: Military History and Theory

The First World War: Literature

The Interwar Period (1919-1939)

The Second World War: General Works

The Second World War: Strategy

The Second World War: Airpower

The Second World War: Memoirs, Diaries, Biographies, and Literature

The Second World War: The War at Sea and in the Pacific

The Second World War: Intelligence (1939-1945)

War and Strategy Since 1945

Posted in War | No Comments »

Neolithic Public-Choice Theory

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Anomaly UK reads Filipe Fernández-Armesto’s Civilizations and explains Neolithic Public-Choice Theory:

He makes an interesting point, which I’d seen before, which is that hunter-gatherers appear to have better lives than arable farmers. What is significant historically, he argues, is not at what point farming is “discovered”, but at what point, and for what reasons, a society chooses to give up its easy gathering lifestyle in exchange for hard work in the fields.

My assumption was always that farming is inevitable because a farming society, with its high population density, will defeat any low-density gatherer society it comes into conflict with. But this can be seen as analogous to the erroneous group-selection arguments in evolutionary biology; a particular behaviour may be beneficial to a group, but if is detrimental to the individual, individuals without it will take over groups faster than groups with it will out-compete groups without. It is not enough for a farming society to defeat a non-farming one, if farmers can have a better lifestyle by abandoning their fields. My explanation needs a few gaps filled in.

What Fernández-Armesto doesn’t quite say, but suggests strongly, is that the change from gathering to farming particularly benefits leaders. By making underlings absolutely dependent on central infrastructure (cleared land, irrigation), the leader increases his control over them. Public choice theory, neolithic edition. (That sounds so good I’m putting it in the title).

Fernández-Armesto makes an analogy with 19th-century industrialisation. Landowners benefited, but workers didn’t. (Of course, in the long run we all benefited from both farming and industrialisation, but as Fernández-Armesto correctly points out, that could hardly justify them at the time if they made most peoples’ lives worse).

The point here is that central control is the mechanism for preventing “defection” back to more pleasant lifestyles.

This second explanation rings true to me:

There is a second explanation, which is randomness plus a ratchet — even if going from gathering to farming is unpleasant, going back, once population has increased, is likely to be much worse. So for whatever freakish reason agriculture starts, it’s likely to stay, and spread.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 3 Comments »

Clunkertown, USA

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Bill Waddell describes the Cash for Clunkers program in less-than-glowing terms:

Buying America’s assets and scrapping them in order to spend money borrowed from our grandchildren to replace them will go down in the history books as one of the dumbest ideas ever, but so be it — the program is in place and running at a breakneck pace. So fast we are about to pour another $2 billion into it.

To me, it seemed like the kind of political expedient one might need to get a gasoline tax through Congress — but there’s no medicine to go with the sugar this time.

Waddell notices that the cars people are buying — and the cars they’re dumping — validate lean manufacturing:

The cars Americans are buying with the cash (in order):
Ford Focus, Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Toyota Prius, Toyota Camry, Hyundai Elantra, Honda Fit, Ford Escape, Dodge Caliber, and Chevy Cobalt.

7 out of 10 from a car maker managed somewhere other than Detroit — and the Detroit winner, Ford, the leanest of the three and the one that did not need a bailout

The top 10 clunkers they are trading in to buy this array of non-GM/Non-Detroit products?

Ford Explorer 2WD and 4WD, Ford F-150 2WD and 4WD, Jeep Grand Cherokee 2WD & 4WD, Dodge Caravan, Chevy Blazer 4WD, Chevy Silverado 1500 2WD, and Ford Windstar.

All from clunker ground zero — Detroit.

Posted in Business, Policy | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »