90 Percent of What Kurt Loder Says

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

Kurt Loder has a new book coming out, The Good, the Bad, & the Godawful, and in this interview he explains the preponderance of bad reviews by quoting Keith Richards:



Citing Keith Richards seems so wrong that I have to wonder if this was a calculated effort to get thousands of geeks to publicly denounce him and cite Sturgeon’s Revelation, from 1958:

I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Excarnation

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

The structure of concentric stone circles known as Rujm al-Hiri may have been an astrological temple or observatory, or a burial complex, or a not-quite-burial complex:

Rujm al-Hiri’s unremarkable appearance from the ground belies its striking form when seen from the air: It consists of four circles — the outermost more than 500 feet across — made up of an estimated 42,000 tons of basalt stone, the remains of massive walls that experts believe once rose as much as high as 30 feet. It is an enormous feat of construction carried out 6000 years ago by a society about which little is known.

It seems likely that Rujm al-Hiri served residents of excavated villages nearby that were part of the same agrarian civilization that existed in the Holy Land in the Chalcolithic period, between 4500 and 3500 B.C. This predates the arrival of the Israelites as described in the Bible by as much as three millennia.
[...]
The Chalcolithic people of the Holy Land buried their dead in ossuaries, small boxes used to house bones. Use of ossuaries requires that the flesh first be removed, which can be achieved by burying bodies for an initial period in temporary tombs until only the bones remain. But archaeologists have not found evidence of such preliminary graves from Chalcolithic times, Arav said, suggesting a different method for disposing of the flesh.

Arav found a clue in a trove of Chalcolithic artifacts discovered to the south, near the Dead Sea: a small copper cylinder with a square opening like a miniature gate and, crucially, figures of birds perched on the edge.

He also noticed a similarity to round, high-walled structures used by Zoroastrians in Iran and India, known as dokhmas or towers of silence. These are buildings used for a process known as excarnation or sky burial — the removal of flesh from corpses by vultures and other birds. The winged scavengers perch on the high circular walls, swoop in when the pallbearers depart and can pick a skeleton clean in a matter of hours.

Rujm al-Hiri, Arav believes, was an excarnation facility.

The cylindrical object found near the Dead Sea, he believes, is a ceremonial miniature of such excarnation sites. He cites evidence — including a mural showing vultures and headless human corpses — that excarnation was practiced several millennia earlier in southern Turkey, where the local Chalcolithic residents are thought to have originated.

(Hat tip to Samuel Lenser.)

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Why Science and Engineering Majors Change Their Minds

Monday, November 7th, 2011

It’s hard not to get a chuckle out of the New York Times reporting that science and engineering majors change majors because their classes are so hard:

The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.
[...]
The latest research also suggests that there could be more subtle problems at work, like the proliferation of grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences, which provides another incentive for students to leave STEM majors. It is no surprise that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are clear-cut and there are no bonus points for flair. Professors also say they are strict because science and engineering courses build on one another, and a student who fails to absorb the key lessons in one class will flounder in the next.

After studying nearly a decade of transcripts at one college, Kevin Rask, a professor at Wake Forest University, concluded last year that the grades in the introductory math and science classes were among the lowest on campus. The chemistry department gave the lowest grades over all, averaging 2.78 out of 4, followed by mathematics at 2.90. Education, language and English courses had the highest averages, ranging from 3.33 to 3.36.

I’m not sure I agree with this commenter, but I enjoyed how he made his point:

People who study science want to become scientists. People who study engineering want to become engineers. People who study liberal arts want to get a degree. This is the difference.

This re-raises the question of what all these degrees and GPA-measurements are for.

If you already have a technical degree, you probably don’t want to see its value degraded by a new “dumbed down” curriculum. (Fortunately, many schools already offer an “information technology” degree to avoid diluting their computer science degree, but I don’t know of any “chemical engineering concepts” degrees.)

On the other hand, if you do technical work, you probably don’t use even the tiniest fraction of what you learned in school. Very little of that rigorous and rather theoretical mathematical analysis makes itself useful.  And the key concepts you learned? Well, all those B and C students, who got degrees just like yours?  They didn’t learn those key concepts.

The same classes that test a student’s grit and intelligence may not be the ones that teach useful skills for actually engineering something.

Posted in Education, Science, Technology | 18 Comments »

Why is war less common now?

Sunday, November 6th, 2011

Why is war less common now than in the first half of the 20th century?, Steve Sailer asks:

The simplest explanation, I would argue, is not Pinker’s multifaceted movement toward Enlightenment values. Instead, it’s now clearer that war doesn’t pay. In the past, most of the value of the potential conquest was in the dirt acquired: mines or cropland. War couldn’t hurt dirt. Conquering California in 1846, for example, did little damage to the place, which turned out to have gold in the ground.

Today, though, most of the asset value of a territory is in the buildings and people above ground, which are very easy to blow to smithereens with modern weapons. And if you don’t raze your enemy’s cities, they provide formidable makeshift fortresses for resistance to your invasion. You can’t win. The expected profit isn’t worth your trouble. You might as well stay home.

In the West, we have easier ways now to make a killing than killing. If Sir Francis Drake, the great admiral-pirate of Elizabethan England, were a young man today, would he emigrate to Somalia to get a start in the piracy industry? Of course not. He’d apply for a job at Goldman Sachs.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Russian paraglider vs Himalayan griffon vulture

Sunday, November 6th, 2011

When I shared that ParaHawk footage a few days ago, commenters yearned for more action. I give you Russian paraglider vs Himalayan griffon vulture:

Posted in Animals | No Comments »

Grapplers Stop Armed Robber

Saturday, November 5th, 2011

I love stories like this.  While in town for the World Jiu-Jitsu No-Gi Championship in Long Beach, two grapplers from Oregon stopped a robbery at their hotel:

Alvarez, who owns a mixed martial arts studio in Eugene, Ore., and Denney, one of his students, were getting off the elevator just before midnight Sunday when they stumbled on the suspect forcing the motel clerk at gunpoint to empty the cash drawer.

The clerk yelled, “Gun! He robbed me!” Alvarez said he saw a flash of the weapon before the suspect plunged it into his bag with the money.

A former hip-hop club bouncer, Alvarez said that 10 years of training in self-defense and defusing conflict kicked in. The suspect didn’t seem to want to hurt them, either, Alvarez said, but kept insisting he did it for his daughter.

The man begged to be released so he could kiss the daughter one last time.

“He wasn’t trying to punch us; he just seemed like someone who had run out of options,” Alvarez said Friday evening. “I think back now and wonder what the hell was I doing? I should of hit him and knocked him out.”

Alvarez said he eventually got the suspect in a body lock and chokehold, and the clerk called the police.

Police arrested Luis Rosales, 31, at the scene. Authorities said a loaded 9-millimeter handgun and the money from the cash register were found inside Rosales’ backpack.

The video’s really not that exciting:

Posted in Crime, Martial Arts | No Comments »

The Veil War

Saturday, November 5th, 2011

If U.S. Marines vs. Roman Legions flash-fiction can get a Hollywood deal, perhaps U.S. Marines vs. Goblin Hordes fiction can as well. Our own perfidious Buckethead has put virtual pen to paper to describe The Veil War:

Lewis heard the clack-clack-clack of the claymore trigger. Explosions downrange – dozens of the goblins were down. “Mortars!” he ordered. Thunk, thunk, thunk. Explosions rent the goblin line – Lewis saw the little toy figures of goblins tossed by fire and grey smoke, but they dressed ranks and kept coming. Another salvo of mortar shells dropped a half dozen more. Most of them just got up again. How can they survive mortar fire? The goblins refused to slow.

He could hear the guttural chanting of their officers keeping the time under the eerie howl of the war horns. God, he hated that noise. The ground sloped down from the village – mostly flat and sandy here, far from the rivers. Dust and emptiness, and more dust. The dessert sun gave everything a sepia cast, like he was watching a western movie with an overeager cinematographer. The goblins came on, relentless.

“Prepare to volley fire” he said softly to Pethoukis. A week ago, he never would have imagined giving that order. But between the goblin’s damnable armor and Evan’s problems with finding a target – the only way to kill any of them was with massed fire across a front. Even machine guns were hardly worth a damn. Magic, something muttered in the back of his head. At least he could deliver volley fire faster than any civil war officer could have dreamed.

Pethoukis’ deep voice boomed out. “Company! Ready!

The Marines brought their assault rifles to their shoulders. “Aim!” Neither Lewis nor Pethoukis could remember the actual commands for volley fire. Lt. Nichols might have. But he took an arrow to the eye three days ago. They’d left the body by the reservoir.

“Fire!”

The sound was still strange to Lewis’ ears. He was so used to hearing the high-pitched popcorn pop of the M4 coming off in bursts. 57 of them firing at once, in unison, was just… odd. The goblins were now close enough that he could see sparks off their armor where rounds were hitting. They didn’t drop. Another round of mortar shells hit the line – perfect! he thought – and maybe ten more were down. 100 yards. The mortars would keep firing until the goblins were close. Danger close.

His marines fired again. This time, he saw a couple drop – head shots, he knew, because that was the only way to drop them. Their armor just shrugged off 5.56 rounds. They might have been shooting BBs for all the good it did. You had to get them in right in the eye, through the open slot of the visor. His troops were good – but still, asking for a perfect shot was asking a lot, even on the range, let alone in battle on a moving target.

He paced behind the line. His men were firing once every three seconds. Wait, he thought. He followed Jackson’s aim – another head shot. Jackson said, “Red Feather!” Lewis watched him aim at a goblin with a long, dark red feather sticking out of the top of his helmet. Another hit – but that wasn’t Jackson’s shot.

He tapped Jackson on the shoulder. “Corporal. What are you doing?”

“I’m calling the shot, sir. If we all shoot at the same guy, one of us might hit ‘em.” He looked embarrassed – “It fucks with their mojo, sir.”

Posted in Media, War | 4 Comments »

U.S. Marines vs. Roman Legions

Saturday, November 5th, 2011

After watching HBO’s Rome and Generation Kill at the same time, some guy posed this question to the geeks at Reddit — Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU?

James Erwin — a technical writer, reference author, and two-time Jeopardy champion — began writing a short story in response:

DAY 1 The 35th MEU is on the ground at Kabul, preparing to deploy to southern Afghanistan. Suddenly, it vanishes.

The section of Bagram where the 35th was gathered suddenly reappears in a field outside Rome, on the west bank of the Tiber River. Without substantially prepared ground under it, the concrete begins sinking into the marshy ground and cracking. Colonel Miles Nelson orders his men to regroup near the vehicle depot — nearly all of the MEU’s vehicles are still stripped for air transport. He orders all helicopters airborne, believing the MEU is trapped in an earthquake.

Nelson’s men soon report a complete loss of all communications, including GPS and satellite radio. Nelson now believes something more terrible has occurred — a nuclear war and EMP which has left his unit completely isolated. Only a few men have realized that the rest of Bagram has vanished, but that will soon become apparent as the transport helos begin circling the 35th’s location.

Within an hour, the 2,200 Marines have regrouped, stunned. They are not the only moderns transported to Rome. With them are about 150 Air Force maintenance and repair specialists. There are about 60 Afghan Army soldiers, mostly the MEU’s interpreters and liaisons. There are also 15 U.S. civilian contractors and one man, Frank Delacroix, who has spoken to no one but Colonel Nelson.

Miraculously, no one was killed during the earthquake but several dozen people were injured, some seriously. All fixed-wing aircraft and the attack helicopters were rendered inoperable by the shifting concrete, although the MEU did not lose a single vehicle or transport helicopter.

As night falls, the MEU has established a perimeter. A few locals have been spotted, but in the chaos no one has yet established contact. Nelson and his men, who are crippled without mapping software and GPS to fix their position, begin attempting to fix their location by observing stars. The night is cloudy. Nelson orders four helicopters back into the air at first light, to travel along the river in hopes of locating a settlement.

Erwin cranked out eight days’ worth of material, as his audience ate it all up, and that led to Warner Bros. buying his pitch for Rome, Sweet Rome.

If I’d known it was that easy…

Erwin recognizes his good fortune:

Here’s the thing. I was very, very lucky to post what I did at the moment I did. It wasn’t just the idea of coming up with just the right answer — if I’d posted the same text an hour later, everyone would already be bored with the question. They wouldn’t have seen it and it wouldn’t have blown up. So that was definitely a lightning-in-a-bottle situation.

On the other hand, I’m not a fresh-faced young kid hitting it out of the park the day after landing on the LA tarmac. I’m a 37-year-old who’s been writing nonfiction (encyclopedias, reviews, software documentation) for a decade. I have years of experience as a communicator and a professional. These are all skills you need to succeed whenever you declare yourself any kind of writer. So, with a week of perspective, I think there are a couple of lessons here. First, when you see an opportunity to write about something you love, take it. Second, when you don’t, write anyway. Try your hand at new genres, new techniques. Experiment, and study, and look earnestly at any feedback you get. The best way to be a writer is to write. That will give you the experience and confidence to make the most of an opportunity when it arises — and you never know when you’ll create one for yourself.

Popular Mechanics asked historian Adrian Goldsworthy for his opinion on the scenario:

“In the short term and in the open, modern infantry could massacre any ancient soldiers at little risk to themselves,” Goldsworthy says. “But you could not support modern infantry. So all of these weapons and vehicles could make a brief, dramatic, and even devastating appearance, but would very quickly become useless. Probably in a matter of days.”

With no need to lay down suppression fire or even to take cover, the Marines can make every shot count — and if things really hit the fan, then they can rock ‘n’ roll with a few machine-guns, which should end any infantry charge.

Strategically though, they need to remember Cortés and Pizarro, and their campaigns to conquer the Aztecs and the Incas. They need allies, if only to provide food and water.

I haven’t read it yet, but Jonathan Hickman’s Pax Romana graphic novel addresses the same basic scenario — with a twist or two:

In 2045, as Islam has overrun Europe and the West openly shuns monotheism, the Vatican funded, CERN Laboratories ‘discover’ that time travel is possible. The Pope orders the creation of a private army, and led by a few handpicked Cardinals and the finest graduates of selected war colleges, they travel back in time to 312AD — the reign of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine. Upon arrival, conflicting agendas, ideological differences, and personal greed see grand plans unravel. Pax Romana is the tale of 5,000 men sent on an impossible mission to change the past and save the future.

Posted in Media, War | 3 Comments »

Defense through Decentralization

Friday, November 4th, 2011

Modern Paris owes its urban design, with its wide avenues and parks, to Napoleon III’s security concerns — he needed the ability to move troops and artillery against revolutionary mobs.

Modern America owes its suburban design, with its highways and parking lots, to Eisenhower’s security concerns — he needed the ability to move troops and evacuate civilians in case of World War III, and he needed American industry dispersed before such a war.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists made this point early and often:

The dispersal — that is, defense-through-decentralization — of cities and industries has been urged in the Bulletin ever since 1946.
[...]
It has been stated often before, but cannot be emphasized often enough, that reduction of vulnerability of our cities to atomic attack is important not only to win a future war, but above all, to avoid it.

Posted in Urbanism, War | 1 Comment »

Organized Violence

Friday, November 4th, 2011

Steven Pinker draws little distinction between disorganized violence and organized violence, Steve Sailer notes:

In the first half of the 20th century, disorganized violence tended to decline throughout the West, while the power of organized violence mounted to previously unimagined levels. It’s not a coincidence that the countries that wreaked so much havoc abroad during the World Wars tended to be orderly at home.

The urge to get better at organized violence drove many of the reforms that Pinker lauds, such as mass education. After the German-speaking lands had been Europe’s designated punching bag in the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, the Prussians increasingly rationalized their society to support an army powerful enough to be victimizer rather than victim. The most famous Enlightened Despot was the Age of Reason’s greatest general, Prussia’s Frederick the Great.

As Edmund Burke pointed out in the 1790s, “The Revolution was made, not to make France free, but to make her formidable.” After Bonaparte humiliated the Prussians at the Battle of Jena in 1806, they redoubled their modernization drive. Educator Horace Mann then brought the “Prussian Model” to Massachusetts in the 1840s.

Posted in Crime, Policy, War | No Comments »

Mars500

Friday, November 4th, 2011

I’m a bit perplexed by the European Space Agency’s Mars500 mission, which just welcomed back its six “brave” volunteers, who spent 17 months in physical isolation — with a slight delay in electronic communications, to represent the lag when sending messages while en route to Mars.

Nuclear submarines routinely go out for three months at at time, and sometimes stay out twice as long. Antarctic bases don’t go anywhere, of course, but most members of their “crews” stay for a whole summer, while some stay as long as two winters and three summers — much longer than 500 days.

So we have plenty of experience with fairly small crews spending months and months away from home and the larger society, at normal gravity, without dangerous cosmic radiation.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Steven Pinker on The Decline of Violence

Friday, November 4th, 2011

Steven Pinker discusses the decline of violence — the topic of The Better Angels of Our Nature — with Ronald Bailey of Reason TV:

Posted in Crime, Policy, War | 2 Comments »

Haussmann’s Paris

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

Joseph Fouché recently alluded to Georges-Eugène Haussmann‘s rebuilding of Paris for Napoleon III:

High rise housing surrounded by open space and broad avenues sounds terrible if you assume they were designed to cultivate the optimal human existence for its patrons. They sound great, however, if you want easily contained human corrals surrounded by wide open fields of fire that are perfect for timely whiffs of grapeshot.

I think the high-rise housing has to get a lot higher, and the open space has to get a lot more open, before we get modern banlieues.

Anyway, Fouché continues on his own blog, The Committee of Public Safety:

Haussmann’s city planning was based on the principle that the safety of a city street depends on the number of unencumbered shots that government forces can get off against the eyes that are watching them. Haussmann built broad streets and parks because it made it easier to mass and deploy men, horses, and cavalry against the revolutionary mobs that kept Paris in revolutionary tumult from 1789 through the middle of the nineteenth century while denying those mobs the narrow streets that were easy to clog up with defensive barricades. If Jacobs’ triumph was found in keeping New York planning dictator Robert Moses from running a highway through Greenwich Village, Haussmann’s triumph was found in the ease with which Adophe Thiers crushed the Paris Commune in 1871.

Here’s where he starts to lose me:

Both of these principles are subsets of the greater principle that morality is the annihilation of public space. In political economy, this means recognizing that the expansion of what’s considered a private matter means a contraction in public space. In theology, it means recognizing that truly private space is impossible under the unblinking Omniscience of the Divine.

(By the way, the French pronounce Haussmann’s clearly German name more like Ossmann.)

Posted in Policy, Urbanism, War | No Comments »

What happened in the mid-1960s that we had to start locking our cars and houses?

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

So what happened in the mid-1960s that we had to start locking our cars and houses?, Steve Sailer asks:

Why did Watts and then so many other inner cities explode into rape and pillage?

This is a dangerous issue for Pinker, one he handles creatively. He praises the “Rights Revolutions” of the 1960s for reducing domestic death and destruction, but his graphs don’t actually show much evidence for that. His basic marker, the homicide rate, hit bottom in America in 1957 and started shooting up again about the time the 1964 Civil Rights Act was signed. A few years later, women’s lib legalized the abortion of tens of millions of fetuses.

(Impressively, Pinker acknowledges this objection to his paean to the pacific powers of feminism. He argues in response that, in the long view, abortion replaced infanticide. Okay, but when I was conceived in 1958, I was in far less danger of being exposed on a mountainside than anyone conceived in the 1970s was of being aborted. A better argument is Pinker’s last one: abortion has been in modest decline for the last two decades.)

Black and feminist leaders object forcefully to mention of any side effects of their ascents to power. Brilliantly, Pinker, who still wears his hair like Roger Daltrey of The Who, sidesteps these landmines by blaming the high crime rate of 1965-1995 on his own kind: the damn, dirty hippies.

While we don’t fully understand crime trends — perhaps lead poisoning played a role in the 1960s? — reducing the imprisonment rate while the murder rate was growing was the most characteristic cause of the 1960s disaster. Pinker notes that from 1962 to 1979, “the likelihood that a crime would lead to imprisonment fell… by a factor of five.” That America allowed rape and robbery to get out of control around 1964 reflected a shameful dereliction of duty by elites.

We’ve since quelled random violence to some degree, primarily by throwing a vast number of men in jail. The actual outcome of the Rights Revolutions appears to be more freedom for the upper reaches of society and more prison for the bottom. In 1960, only 1 percent of black male high-school dropouts were incarcerated, compared to 25 percent in 2000.

Posted in Crime, Policy | No Comments »

Ian Fleming and Geoffrey Boothroyd

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

I recently found a short BBC piece on the guns of James Bond, and now I’ve found a 1962 Sports Illustrated article in which Ian Fleming shares the original letter from Geoffrey Boothroyd:

I have, by now, got rather fond of Mr. James Bond. I like most of the things about him, with the exception of his rather deplorable taste in firearms. In particular, I dislike a man who comes into contact with all sorts of formidable people using a .25 Beretta. This sort of gun is really a lady’s gun, and not a really nice lady at that. If Mr. Bond has to use a light gun he would be better off with a .22 rim fire; the lead bullet would cause more shocking effect than the jacketed type of the .25.

“May I suggest that Mr. Bond be armed with a revolver? This has many advantages for the type of shooting that he is called on to perform and I am certain that Mr. Leiter would agree with this recommendation. The Beretta will weigh, after it has been doctored, somewhere under 1 pound unloaded. If Mr. Bond gets himself an S & W .38 Special Centennial Airweight he will have a real man-stopper weighing only 17 ounces loaded. The gun is hammerless so that it can be drawn without catching in the clothing and has an overall length of 6½ inches. Barrel length is 2 inches, but note that it is not ‘sawn off.’ No one who can buy his pistols in the States will go to the trouble of sawing off pistol barrels as they can be purchased with short 2-inch barrels from the manufacturers. In order to keep down the bulk the cylinder holds five cartridges, and these are standard .38 S & W Special. It is an extremely accurate cartridge and when fired from a 2-inch barrel has, in standard loading, a muzzle velocity of almost 700 ft./sec. and muzzle energy of around 200 ft./lbs. This is against Bond’s .25 Beretta with muzzle velocity of 758 ft./sec. but only 67 ft./lbs. muzzle energy. So much for his personal gun. Now he must have a real man-stopper to carry in the car. For this purpose the S & W .357 Magnum has no equal except the .44 Magnum. With the .357, Bond can still use his S & W .38 Special cartridges, although not vice versa. The .357 Magnum can be obtained in barrel lengths as follows: 3½ inches, 5 inches, 6 inches, 6½ inches and 83/4 inches long. With a 6½-inch barrel and adjustable rear sights Bond could do some really effective shooting, getting with the .357 Magnum a muzzle velocity of about 1,300 ft./sec. and a muzzle energy of nearly 600 ft./lbs. Figures like these give an effective range of 300 yards, and it’s very accurate, too — 1-inch groups at 20 yards on a machine rest.

With these two guns Bond would be able to cope with really quick-draw work and long-range effective shooting.

Now to gun harness, rigs or what have you. First of all, not a shoulder holster for general wear, please. I suggest that the little Centennial Airweight be carried in a ‘Lightning’ Berns-Martin Triple Draw holster. This type of holster holds the gun in by means of a spring and can be worn on the belt or as a shoulder holster. I have played about with various types of holster for quite a time now and this one is the best. Here are descriptions of how it works — as a belt holster and as a shoulder holster:

A Series. Holster worn on belt at right side. Pistol drawn with right hand.

  1. Ready position. Note that the gun is not noticeable.
  2. First movement. Weight moves to left foot. Hand draws back coat and sweeps forward to catch butt of pistol. Finger outside holster.
  3. Gun comes out of holster through the split front.
  4. In business.

This draw can be done in 3/5ths of a second, and with practice and lots of it you could hit a figure at 20 feet in that time.

B Series. Shoulder holster. Gun upside down on left side. Held in by spring. Drawn with right hand.

  1. First position.
  2. Coat drawn back by left hand, gun butt grasped by right hand, finger outside holster.
  3. Gun coming out of holster.
  4. Bang! You’re dead.

C Series. Holster worn on belt, as in A, but gun drawn with left hand.

  1. Draw commences. Butt held by first two fingers of left hand. Third finger and little finger ready to grasp trigger.
  2. Ready to shoot. Trigger is pulled by third and little finger, thumb curled round stock, gun upside down.

This really works but you need a cutaway trigger guard.

D Series. Holster worn on shoulder, as in B, but gun drawn with left hand.

  1. Coat swept back with left hand and gun grasped.
  2. Gun is pushed to the right to clear holster and is ready for action.

I trust this will explain what I mean. The gun used is an S & W .38 Special with a sawn-off barrel to 2½ inches. (I know this contradicts what I said over the page but I can’t afford the $64 needed, so I had to make my own.) It has target sights — ramp front sight, adjustable rear sight — rounded butt, special stocks and a cutaway trigger guard.

If you have managed to read this far I hope that you will accept the above in the spirit that it is offered. I have enjoyed your books immensely and will say right now that I have no criticism of the women in them, except that I’ve never met any like them and would doubtless get into trouble if I did.

Fleming’s response:

I really am most grateful for your splendid letter of May 23rd.

You have entirely convinced me and I propose, perhaps not in the next volume of James Bond’s memoirs but, in the subsequent one, to change his weapons in accordance with your instructions.

Since I am not in the habit of stealing another man’s expertise, I shall ask you in due course to accept remuneration for your most valuable technical aid.

Incidentally, can you suggest where I can see a .38 Airweight in London. Who would have one?

As a matter of interest, how do you come to know so much about these things? I was delighted with the photographs and greatly impressed by them. If ever there is talk of making films of some of James Bond’s stories in due course, I shall suggest to the company concerned that they might like to consult you on some technical aspects. But they may not take my advice, so please do not set too much store by this suggestion.

From the style of your writing it occurs to me that you may have written books or articles on these subjects. Is that so?

Bond has always admitted to me that the .25 Beretta was not a stopping gun, and he places much more reliance on his accuracy with it than in any particular qualities of the gun itself. As you know, one gets used to a gun and it may take some time for him to settle down with the Smith and Wesson. But I think M. should advise him to make a change; as also in the case of the .357 Magnum.

He also agrees to give a fair trial to the Bern Martin holster, but he is inclined to favour something a little more casual and less bulky. The well-worn chamois leather pouch under his left arm has become almost a part of his clothes and he will be loath to make a change though, here again, M. may intervene.

At the present moment Bond is particularly anxious for expertise on the weapons likely to be carried by Russian agents and I wonder if you have any information on this.

As Bond’s biographer I am most anxious to see that he lives as long as possible and I shall be most grateful for any further technical advices you might like me to pass on to him.

Again, with very sincere thanks for your extremely helpful and workmanlike letter.

I can’t stop sharing these letters. Boothroyd again:

I was truly delighted to receive your charming letter. This is the first time I have had either the inclination or the temerity to write to the author of any books that pass through my hands; quite frankly, in many cases the rest of the material is not worth backing up by correct and authentic ‘gun dope.’ You have, incidentally, enslaved the rest of my household, people staying up to all hours of the night in an endeavour to finish a book before some other interested party swipes it.

If I am to be considered for the post of Bond’s ballistic man I should give you my terms of reference. Age 31, English, unmarried. Member of the following Rifle Clubs: N.R.A., Gt. Britain, English Twenty Club, National Rifle Association of America (nonresident member), West of Scotland Rifle Club, Muzzle Loaders Association of Gt. Britain. I shoot with shotgun and rifle — target, clay pigeon, deer but, to my deep regret, no big game. (I cherish a dream that one day a large tiger or lion will escape from the zoo or a travelling circus and I can bag it in Argyle St., Glasgow, or Princes St., Edinburgh.) I do both muzzle-loading and breech-loading shooting, load my own shotgun and pistol ammunition. Shoot with pistol, mainly target, and collect arms of various sorts. My present collection numbers about 45, not as many as in some collections, but all of mine go off and have been fired by me. Shooting and gun lore is a jolly queer thing; most people stick to their own field, rather like stamp collectors who specialise in British Colonials. Such people shoot only with the rifle and often only .303, or only .22. There are certain rather odd types like myself who have a go at the lot, including archery. It’s a most fascinating study if one has the time, and before long it’s either given up and you collect old Bentleys or it becomes an obsession. We all have a pet aspect of our hobby, and mine at present is this business of ‘draw and shoot,’ or the gun lore of close-combat weapons. On reflection it is pretty stupid, as it’s most unlikely that I shall ever do this sort of thing in earnest, but it has the pleasant advantage of not having, very many fish in the pond and however you look at it you are an authority. In Scotland I have the space to do this sort of thing, and have two friends who are not 150 miles away to talk to. I seem to have taken up a lot of space on this — must want to impress you!

Now to the work. The S & W Airweight model is not common in England, at least in a shop. I therefore enclose S & W’s latest catalogue, which shows current models. Perhaps you would let me have this back, as I have to send it off to another chap who is going to S. America and he wants to buy a gun when he gets there. The only people in London who may have S & W new-model pistols will be Thomas Bland and Sons, William IVth St., Strand, and Cogs-well and Harrison. Current demand for pistols in this country is restricted to folks going off to Kenya, Malaya, etc.

Some people have bought modified guns from Cogswell and Harrison. This type is a cut-down S & W .38 Special Military & Police Model. I’m sorry I can’t help regarding an actual inspection of a new-model S & W. The only people who may have one are Americans in this country or James Bond.

Re holsters. A letter to S. D. Myres Saddle Co., 5030 Alameda Blvd., El Paso, Texas, will bring you their current holster catalogue. The Berns-Martin people live in Calhoun City, Mississippi, and a note to Jack Martin, who is a first-class chap and a true gunslinger, will bring you illustrations of his work. Bond’s chamois leather pouch will be ideal for carrying a gun, but God help him if he has to get it out in a hurry. The soft leather will snag and foul on the projecting parts of the gun and he will still be struggling to get the gun out when the other fellow is counting the holes in Bond’s tummy. Bond has a good point when he mentions accuracy. It’s no good shooting at a man with the biggest gun one can hold — if you miss him. The thing about the larger calibres is, however, that when you hit someone with a man-stopping bullet they are out of the game and won’t lie on the floor still popping off at you.

Regarding weapons carried by Russian agents. I have had little experience of using weapons from behind the Iron Curtain or of meeting people who use them. I did once meet a Polish officer who was some sort of undercover man and cloak-and-dagger merchant and he used an American Colt automatic in .38 cal. I would suggest that a member of SMERSH would in all probability make his choice from the following, and use either a Luger with an 8-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch or 16-inch barrel with detachable shoulder stock or a Mauser 7.63 automatic with shoulder stock for assassination work from a medium distance, say across a street. A short-barrel 9-mm. Luger (Model 08), 4-inch barrel, might be carried for personal protection, although it is rather large to carry about. In the same class as the Luger and having equal availability to someone employed by SMERSH would be the Polish Radom Model 35. This takes the standard Luger cartridge and also the more powerful black-bulleted machine pistol 9-mm. round. It closely resembles the Colt Model 1911, or perhaps more so the Colt 9-mm. Commander. Another choice would be the Swedish 9-mm. Lahti. This is a strong and very well-made pistol strongly reminiscent of the Luger. It weighs 44 ounces loaded as compared with 34 ounces for the short-barrel Luger.

The Russian Tokarev pistol Model 30 appears to be the standard sidearm of the Soviets, and once again is a close copy of John Browning’s basic pistol. Calibre 7.62 Russian or 7.63 Mauser and designed in the 1930s. This pistol looks like the Belgian Browning auto pistol made by Fabrique Nationale, Liège, except that it has an external hammer. There is no manual safety, and if the gun is carried loaded at full cock, obvious safety hazards exist. Carried at half-cock the gun undoubtedly would be safer, but the hammer design is such that cocking the hammer is not an easy job and the first shot would be a slow one from the draw.

In this same general class would be the Walther P-38, which was used by the German army as a replacement for the Luger. Evidence is that the pistol is not quite as good as it might be, this being probably due to production difficulties met with during the war. This also takes the 9-mm. cartridge. One of the advantages of the Walther is that it can be used double-action, i.e., there is no need to cock the hammer for the first shot provided the barrel has a cartridge ‘up the spout.’ After the first shot the gun operates as does the normal auto pistol.

For carrying on the person the following arms could be chosen: Walther PPK 7.65-mm., Mauser HS c. 7.65-mm. or the Walther PP in 7.65-mm. cal., Sauer Model 38 H in 7.65-mm. calibre.

All of the above were tested for accuracy, endurance, etc., by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in 1948. Also included were the Japanese Nambu and the American Colt 1911A1 Auto. In accuracy the Nambu came first, followed by the Russian Tokarev, the Sauer being third. Colonel F. S. Allen, USAF, who wrote an article on the findings of the O.C. tests, concluded by saying that for an emergency defence weapon he would have a lightweight .38 Special, a decision which I heartily agree with.

I hope that when the SMERSH operative, armed perhaps with one of the guns mentioned above, meets Bond, your friend will be able to adequately demonstrate the effectiveness of Anglo-American cooperation, a competent English pistol man behind a truly lethal .38 Special.

The above should give some idea of the type of weapon likely to be carried by SMERSH men, the Russians being rather similar to ourselves where firearms are concerned. They do not hesitate to use foreign weapons if they are better than those produced by themselves. An instance of this was their use of the Finnish Soumi light machine gun during the last war. In brief, one could be safe in arming an agent of SMERSH with the Tokarev, Radom or Luger, in that order. Pocket weapons would be either German Mauser or Walther.

Please convey warmest regards to Mr. Bond and assure him of my closest interest in his activities and very willing cooperation in his ‘gun needs’ for as long as he wishes. Instead of remuneration, an introduction to Solitaire would more than adequately compensate me for the little trouble I have taken. Between you and me, I quite enjoy it.

And Fleming:

I have been away in Vienna, and seeing a man about a flying saucer in Paris, and I have only just had your letter of June 1st with enclosures.

Thank you again most sincerely for taking all this trouble, and also for sending me the very interesting information on your own career and hobbies. You certainly seem to lead a full life!

I am intrigued by your mention of archery. I have long thought that Bond could do a lot of damage with a short steel bow and appropriate arrows. What do you think of this suggestion, and do you know someone who would instruct me on weapons, ranges and so forth?

I am returning the Smith & Wesson catalogue and, since I am off to New York at the end of July, I propose to purchase a Centennial Airweight.

Would this not, in any case, be the best weapon for Bond? There is no hammer to catch in his clothes.

I am vastly intrigued by your own M & P model and by the way you have beautified it. Bond will certainly adopt your two-thirds trigger guard. I don’t intend to go too deeply into the holster problem and I intend to accept your expertise in the matter of the Berns-Martin holster.

Only one basic problem remains in changing Bond’s weapon, and that is in the matter of a silencer. It would have to be an extremely bulky affair to silence a .38 of any make and I simply can’t see one fitted to the Centennial. Have you any views?

As a matter of fact, a change of Bond’s weapons is very appropriate. In his next adventure, which deals with an intricate plot by SMERSH to kill Bond, he finally gets into really bad trouble when the Beretta — with silencer — sticks in his waistband.

It is too late now to save him from the consequences, but in the book that follows, if I have the energy and ingenuity to write one, I shall start off with a chapter devoted entirely to his re-equipment along the lines you suggest.

But in this chapter the matter of a silencer will have to be overcome and, in fact, in his latest adventure, which I mention above, he could hardly have used an unsilenced .38 in the room at the Ritz Hotel in Paris where he wrestles fruitlessly with his snarled gun.

Turning to foreign weapons, have you by any chance got the article by Colonel Allen on the findings of the O.C. tests, or could you tell me where it appeared? It sounds most useful to my purposes.

Once again, please accept my very warm thanks for your kindness in taking Bond’s armoury in hand and sorting it out. As a small recompense for your trouble I am sending you a shiny and rather expensive book on Odd Weapons which has just appeared and which perhaps you do not possess. It is not exactly on your beat, but it may entertain.”

Back to Boothroyd:

Silencers. These I do not like. The only excuse for using one is on a .22 rifle using low-velocity ammunition, i.e., below the speed of sound. With apologies, I think you will find that silencers are more often found in fiction than in real life. An effective silencer on an auto pistol would be very ponderous and would spoil the balance of the gun, and to silence a revolver would be even more difficult due to the gas escape between the cylinder and the barrel. Personally I can’t at this stage see how one would fit a silencer to a Beretta unless a special barrel were made for it, as the silencer has to be screwed on to the barrel, and as you know there is very little of the barrel projecting in front of the slide on the Beretta.

This business of using guns in houses or hotels is a very strange one. So few people are familiar with what a gun sounds like that I would have little hesitation in firing one in any well-constructed building. This remark is only regarding the noise or nuisance value. I would not fire a pistol in a room without some thoughts on the matter, as bullets have a bad habit of bouncing off things and coming home to roost. I have fired .455 blanks at home on several occasions, even in the middle of the night, without any enquiries being made. The last time was at Christmas when I blew out the candles on the Christmas cake with a pistol and blanks. To conclude, if possible don’t have anything to do with silencers.

I found this letter excerpt from Fleming intriguing:

I sympathize with you about not liking silencers, but the trouble is that there are often occasions when they are essential to Bond’s work. But they are clumsy things and only partially effective, though our Secret Services developed some very good ones during the war, in which the bullet passed through rubber baffles. I have tried a Sten gun silenced with one of these and all one could hear was the click of the machinery.

I rather like the picture of you going through life firing bullets ‘in any well-constructed building’! But I agree with you that one could probably get away with a single shot in a Paris hotel bedroom. Your Christmas trick would, of course, be helped by its association in a listener’s mind with cracker-pulling.

He had fired a silenced Sten gun, and it was in fact silent?

Anyway, this is what gun nuts had to do before the Internet. I’m having trouble imagining Bond with an American revolver.

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