Andrew Roberts summarizes (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon’s first few months in power:
In less than fifteen weeks Napoleon had effectively ended the French Revolution, seen off the Abbé Sieyès, given France a new constitution, established her finances on a sound footing, muzzled the opposition press, started to end both rural brigandage and the long-running war in the Vendée, set up a Senate, Tribunate, Legislative Body and Conseil d’État, appointed a talented government regardless of past political affiliations, rebuffed the Bourbons, made spurned peace offers to Britain and Austria, won a plebiscite by a landslide (even accounting for the fraud), reorganized French local government and inaugurated the Banque de France.
‘Today I’m a sort of mannequin figure that’s lost its liberty and happiness,’ Napoleon wrote to Moreau, the commander-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine, on March 16 as France prepared to re-engage Austrian forces. ‘Grandeur is all very well, but only in retrospect and in the imagination. I envy your happy lot; you are going to accomplish grand things with your gallant men. I would willingly exchange my consular purple for the epaulette of a brigadier under your orders… I strongly hope that the circumstances may allow me to come and give you a helping hand.’ Three weeks later circumstances would allow just that, when the Austrian General Michael von Melas defeated General Nicolas Soult at the battle of Cadibona, pushing him back towards Savona and forcing Masséna into Genoa, which was subsequently besieged. It was time to return to the battlefield.
He had ordered the covert formation of a 30,000-strong Army of the Reserve based at Dijon on January 7, 1800:
He was counting on an element of surprise: no one had taken an army over the Alps since Charlemagne, and before him Hannibal. Although Napoleon wouldn’t be travelling with elephants, he did have Gribeauval 8-pounder and 4-pounder cannon, whose barrels weighed over a quarter of a ton, to heave over the mountain range. Snow was still thick on the ground in early May, when the advance began, so Marmont devised sledges for the barrels made out of hollowed-out tree-trunks, which one hundred men at a time hauled up the Alps and then down again, to drumbeats. (Since the Italian side is much steeper than the French, they found it harder going down than up.)
Money and supplies were sent ahead to the monasteries and hostelries along the route, and local guides were hired and sworn to secrecy.
[…]
‘An army can pass always, and at all seasons,’ Napoleon told a sceptical General Dumas, ‘wherever two men can set their feet’.
[…]
In the strategy meeting he allegedly asked Bourrienne where he thought the decisive battle would be fought. ‘How the devil should I know?’ answered his Brienne-educated private secretary. ‘Why, look here, you fool,’ said Napoleon, pointing to the plains of the River Scrivia at San Giuliano Vecchio, explaining how he thought Melas would manoeuvre once the French had crossed the Alps. It was precisely there that the battle of Marengo was fought three months later.
[…]
In all 51,400 men crossed the Alps, with 10,000 horses and 750 mules. They went by single file in some places, and had to start at dawn every day to reduce the risk of avalanches once the sun had risen.
[…]
Napoleon rode a horse for almost the whole journey over the Alps, and a mule (as it was more sure of foot) for the iciest stretch around Saint-Pierre.
[…]
It was at this stage of the campaign that the sheer ruthlessness that helped make Napoleon so formidable a commander revealed itself once again. Instead of marching south to relieve starving Genoa, as his troops and even his senior commanders assumed he would do, he wheeled eastwards towards Milan to seize the huge supply depot there and cut off Melas’s line of retreat towards the Mincio river and Mantua. Ordering Masséna to hold out for as long as possible so that he would tie down Ott’s besieging force, Napoleon outfoxed Melas, who had taken it for granted that Napoleon would try to save Genoa. He had therefore left Nice and marched back from Turin to Alessandria to try to head Napoleon off.
[…]
At 6.30 p.m. that same day Napoleon entered Milan by the Verceil Gate in the pouring rain and installed himself at the archducal palace, staying up until 2 a.m. dictating letters, receiving Francesco Melzi d’Eril, who had run the Cisalpine Republic, setting up a new city government and releasing political prisoners interned by the Austrians, who had used Milan as their regional headquarters. He also read Melas’s captured despatches from Vienna, which told him the enemy’s strengths, dispositions and state of morale.
[…]
Genoa surrendered on June 4, by which time around 30,000 of its 160,000 inhabitants had died of starvation and of diseases associated with malnutrition, as had 4,000 French soldiers. Another 4,000 soldiers who were fit enough to march out were allowed to return to France with the honours of war, and a further 4,000 sick and wounded were transported to France in Royal Navy ships under Admiral Lord Keith, who had blockaded the port but saw the advantage of evacuating so many French away from the theatre of war.
Masséna’s health was broken, not least because he had insisted on only eating what his troops did. He never wholly forgave Napoleon for not rescuing him. Equally, Napoleon – who was never besieged in the whole of his career – criticized Masséna for not having held out for ten days longer, recalling when in exile on St Helena, ‘A few old men and some women might have died of hunger, but then he would not have surrendered Genoa. If one thinks always of humanity – only of humanity – one should give up going to war. I don’t know how war is to be conducted on the rosewater plan.’
The D-21 drone used a ramjet, just like its Oxcart mothership, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), and needed to be launched at supersonic speed:
For public safety reasons, the plan was to launch the triplesonic drone off the coast of California in March of 1966 for the first test, and to prepare his pilots, Colonel Slater had them swim laps each day in the Area 51 pool, first in bathing suits and then with their pressure suits on. “We’d hoist the guys up over the water in a pulley and then drop them in the pool. As soon as they hit the water the first time, the pressure suit inflated, so we had to have that fixed,” Slater recalls. When it came time to practice an actual landing in a large body of water, the Agency’s highest-ranking officer on base, Werner Weiss, got the Coast Guard to seal off a large section of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir of water in the United States, located just east of Las Vegas.
[…]
Both aircraft flew west until they were a hundred and fifty miles off the coast of California. There, the M-21, piloted by Bill Park, prepared for the D-21 launch. A camera in Slater’s airplane would capture the launch on 16-millimeter film. Down below, on the dark ocean surface, a rescue boat waited. Park hit Ignite, and the drone launched up and off the M-21. But during separation, the drone pitched down instead of up and instantly split the mother aircraft in half. Miraculously, the drone hit neither Park nor Torick, who were both trapped inside.
The crippled aircraft began to tumble through the sky, falling for nearly ten thousand feet. Somehow, both men managed to eject. Alive and now outside the crashing, burning airplane, both men were safely tethered to their parachutes. Remarkably, neither of the men was hit by the burning debris falling through the air. Both men made successful water landings. But, as Slater recalls, an unforeseen tragedy occurred. “Our rescue boat located Bill Park, who was fine. But by the time the boat got to Ray Torick, he was tied up in his lanyard and had drowned.”
Kelly Johnson was devastated. “He impulsively and emotionally decided to cancel the entire program and give back the development funding to the Air Force and the Agency,” Johnson’s deputy Ben Rich recalled in his 1994 memoir about the Lockheed Skunk Works. Rich asked Johnson why. “I will not risk any more test pilots or Blackbirds. I don’t have either to spare,” Johnson said. But the Air Force did not let the Mach 3 drone program go away so quickly. They created a new program to launch the drone from underneath a B-52 bomber, which was part of Strategic Air Command. President Johnson’s deputy secretary of defense, Cyrus Vance, told Kelly Johnson, “We need this program to work because our government will never again allow a Francis Gary Powers situation develop. All our overflights over denied territory will either be with satellites or drones.”
Three years later, in 1969, the D-21 drone finally made its first reconnaissance mission, over China, launched off a B-52. The drone flew into China and over the Lop Nur nuclear facility but had then somehow strayed off course into Soviet Siberia, run out of fuel, and crashed. The suggestion was that the drone’s guidance system had failed on the way home, and it was never seen or heard from again. At least, not for more than twenty years. In the early 1990s, a CIA officer showed up in Ben Rich’s office at Skunk Works with a mysterious present for him. “Ben, do you recognize this?” the man asked Rich as he handed him a hunk of titanium. “Sure I do,” Rich said. What Ben Rich was holding in his hand was a piece of composite material loaded with the radar-absorbing coating that Lovick and his team had first developed for Lockheed four decades before. Asked where he got it, the CIA officer explained that it had been a gift to the CIA from a KGB agent in Moscow. The agent had gotten it from a shepherd in Siberia, who’d found it in the Siberian tundra while herding his sheep. According to Rich, “The Russians mistakenly believed that this generation-old panel signified our current stealth technology. It was, in a way, a very nice tribute to our work on Tagboard.”
Marc Andreessen recently commented on the popularity of psychedelics in Silicon Valley:
Charles Manson’s cult introduction method was daily dosing of LSD and speed. Today we do that to ourselves with LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, DMT, MDMA, nitrous and Adderall.
I was never particularly interested in the Manson murders, but enough different people had recommended the book that I gave it a go, and the story is even weirder than I’d imagined.
First, it was an odd time:
Less than three weeks earlier, NASA had put the first man on the moon, an awe-inspiring testament to technological ingenuity.
Conversely, the number one song in the country was Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” which imagined a dystopian future where you “ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies / Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today.” It would prove to be a more trenchant observation about the present moment than anyone would’ve thought.
This passed me by when I was just listening to it, but reading it I realized I’d never heard of Zager and Evans or their number-one song:
If you go back and revisit the Top 40 from each year, it’s fascinating how many hits have disappeared down the memory hole.
The murderers were an unlikely bunch:
Late that night at the Spahn Movie Ranch, a man and three women got in a beat-up yellow 1959 Ford and headed toward Beverly Hills. A ranch hand heard one of the women say, “We’re going to get some fucking pigs!”
The woman was Susan “Sadie” Atkins, twenty-one, who’d grown up mostly in San Jose. The daughter of two alcoholics, she’d been in her church choir and the glee club, and said that her brother and his friends would often molest her. She had dropped out of high school and moved to San Francisco, where she’d worked as a topless dancer and gotten into LSD. “My family kept telling me, ‘You’re going downhill, you’re going downhill, you’re going downhill,’” she would say later. “So I just went downhill. I went all the way down to the bottom.”
Huddled beside her in the back of the car—they’d torn out the seats to accommodate more food from the Dumpster dives they often went on—was Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel. Twenty-one, from Inglewood, Krenwinkel had developed a hormone problem as a kid, leading her to overeat and fear that she was ugly and unwanted. As a teen, she got into drugs and started to drink heavily. One day in 1967, she’d left her car in a parking lot, failed to collect the two paychecks from her job at an insurance company, and disappeared.
In the passenger seat was Linda Kasabian, twenty, from New Hampshire. She’d played basketball in high school, but she dropped out to get married; the union lasted less than six months. Not long after, in Boston, she was arrested in a narcotics bust. By the spring of 1968, she’d remarried, had a kid, and moved to Los Angeles. She sometimes introduced herself as “Yana the witch.”
And at the wheel was Charles “Tex” Watson, twenty-three and six foot three, from east Texas. Watson had been a Boy Scout and the captain of his high school football team; he sometimes helped his dad, who ran a gas station and grocery store. At North Texas State University, he’d joined a fraternity and started getting stoned. Soon he dropped out, moved to California, and got a job as a wig salesman. One day he’d picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys — a chance occurrence that changed both of their lives forever.
That night in the Ford, all four were dressed in black from head to toe. None of them had a history of violence. They were part of a hippie commune that called itself the Family. Living in isolation at the Spahn Ranch — whose mountainous five hundred acres and film sets had once provided dramatic backdrops for Western-themed movies and TV shows — the Family had assembled a New Age bricolage of environmentalism, anti-establishment politics, free love, and apocalyptic Christianity, rounded out with a vehement rejection of conventional morality. More than anything, they lived according to the whims of their leader, the thirty-four-year-old Charles Milles Manson, who had commanded them to take their trip that night.
They all seemed to have developed drug problems before Manson took them to the next level.
I wouldn’t expect any of them to be any good at violence, except Tex.
Another detail that passed me by while listening was the name of the film Roman Polanski was working on overseas when his wife was murdered:
The four arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive, where the actress Sharon Tate lived with her husband, the filmmaker Roman Polanski. He was away in London at the time, scouting locations for The Day of the Dolphin, a movie in which a dolphin is trained to assassinate the president of the United States.
That is perhaps the most late-60s, early-70s movie imaginable — and it did get made a few years later, directed by Mike Nichols and starring George C. Scott.
The attack is premeditated:
Watson scaled a pole to sever the phone lines to the house. He’d been here before, and he knew where to find them right away. There was an electric gate leading to the driveway, but instead of activating it, the four elected to jump over an embankment and drop onto the main property. All of them were carrying buck knives; Watson also had a .22 Buntline revolver.
I had assumed that the .22 revolver was a small gun, but I looked up what a Buntline revolver was, and it is not small gun:
The Colt Buntline Special was a long-barreled variant of the Colt Single Action Army revolver, which Stuart N. Lake described in his best-selling but largely fictionalized 1931 biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. […] Lake described them as extra-long Colt Single Action Army revolvers, with a 12-inch (300 mm)-long barrel, and stated that Buntline presented them to five lawmen in thanks for their help in contributing local color to his western yarns.
In Tombstone, Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) carries a Colt Buntline Special.
The murder weapon was apparently missing its trigger guard:
So many details don’t make sense to me:
At the top of the driveway they found Steven Parent, an eighteen-year-old who’d been visiting the caretaker in the guesthouse to sell him a clock radio. He was sitting in his dad’s white Rambler, having already rolled his window down to activate the gate control. Watson approached the driver’s side and pointed the revolver at his face. “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything!” Parent screamed, raising his arm to protect himself. Watson slashed his left hand with the knife, slicing through the strap of his wristwatch. Then he shot Parent four times, in his arm, his left cheek, and twice in the chest. Parent died instantly, his blood beginning to pool in the car.
Those four shots rang out through Benedict Canyon, but no one in the house at 10050 Cielo seemed to hear them.
Visiting the caretaker in the guesthouse, after midnight, to sell him a clock radio?
I’m curious how Tex cocked the hammer on that single-action revolver, with a buck knife in his left hand, because that first victim might have had a chance to get away with survivable injuries if he’d just floored it before taking all four shots.
Even if you’re in a nice neighborhood, you might want to lock all your doors and windows:
Finding no open windows or doors, Watson cut a long horizontal slit in a window screen outside the dining room and gained entry to the house; he went to the front door to let Atkins and Krenwinkel in. In the living room, the three killers came across Wojiciech “Voytek” Frykowski, a thirty-two-year-old Polish émigré and an aspiring filmmaker, asleep on the couch with an American flag draped over it. Frykowski was coming off a ten-day mescaline trip at the time. Having survived the brutal Second World War in Poland, he’d gone on to lead an aimless life in America, and friends thought there was something “brooding and disturbed” about him; he was part of a generation of Poles who’d been put on “a crooked orbit.”
This is where Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood diverges drastically from what happened in our timeline. Hollywood stuntman and tough guy Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), while high as a kite, just handles it:
What really happened does share a few elements:
Now, rubbing his eyes to make out the figures clad in black and standing over him, Frykowski stretched his arms and, apparently mistaking them for friends, asked, “What time is it?”
Watson trained his gun on Frykowski and said, “Be quiet. Don’t move or you’re dead.”
Frykowski stiffened, the gravity of the situation beginning to seize him. “Who are you,” he asked, “and what are you doing here?”
“I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business,” Watson replied, kicking Frykowski in the head.
In a linen closet, Atkins found a towel and used it to bind Frykowski’s hands as best she could. Then, on Watson’s instructions, she cased the house, looking for others. She came to a bedroom, the door ajar, where she saw a woman reclining on a bed, reading: Abigail Folger, twenty-five, the heiress to a coffee fortune. She’d been staying at the house with Frykowski, her boyfriend, since April. Now she glanced up from her book, smiled, and waved at Atkins, who responded in kind and continued down the hall.
If this were fiction, I’d be baffled that the author threw the Folger’s coffee heiress into the story — but it gets weirder:
She peered into a second bedroom, where a man sat on the edge of a bed, talking to a pregnant woman who lay there in lingerie. The man, Jay Sebring, thirty-five, was a hairstylist. His shop in Beverly Hills attracted a wealthy, famous clientele; he’d been the first one to cut hair in a private room, as opposed to a barbershop. He’d served in the navy during the Korean War. An intensely secretive man, he was rumored to allow only five people to keep his phone number.
On the bed with him was his ex-girlfriend, Sharon Tate, then twenty-six and eight months pregnant with her first child. She’d recently filmed her biggest role to date, in The Thirteen Chairs, and her manager had promised she’d be a star someday. Born in Dallas, Tate was the daughter of an army officer, and she grew up in cities scattered across the globe. Her beauty was such that she’d apparently stopped traffic, literally, on her first visit to New York. She’d been a homecoming queen and a prom queen; even at six months old, she’d won a Miss Tiny Tot contest in Texas.
The Thirteen Chairs (French: 12 + 1; Italian: Una su 13) was released posthumously:
You really, really don’t want to find yourself taking orders from deranged criminals:
In their shock and confusion, they offered the intruders money and whatever they wanted, begging them not to hurt anyone. Watson ordered the three who’d come from the bedrooms to lie facedown on their stomachs in front of the fireplace. Tate began to cry; Watson told her to shut up. Taking a long rope, he tied Sebring’s hands behind his back and ran a length around his neck. He looped the rope around Tate’s neck next, and then Folger’s, throwing the final length over a beam in the ceiling.
Sebring struggled to his feet and protested — couldn’t this man see that Tate was pregnant? He tried to move toward Tate, and Watson shot him, puncturing a lung. Sebring crumpled onto the zebra-skin rug by the fireplace. Since they were all tied together, his collapse forced the screaming Tate and Folger to stand on their toes to keep from being strangled. Watson dropped to his knees and began to stab the hairstylist incessantly; standing up again, he kicked Sebring in the head. Then he told Krenwinkel to turn off all the lights.
Tate asked, “What are you going to do with us?”
“You’re all going to die,” Watson said.
Frykowski had managed to free his hands. He lurched toward Atkins, attempting to disarm her, but she forced her knife into his legs, stabbing him constantly as they rolled across the living room floor, a tangle of limbs glinting with steel. He pulled her long hair. His blood was spraying everywhere, and he’d been stabbed more than half a dozen times, but Frykowski staggered to his feet. Atkins had lost her knife, so he made a run for the front door and, with Atkins still pummeling him, got as far as the lawn. Watson halted him with two bullets and then tackled him to the ground, pounding the butt of his gun against the back of his head again and again, with such force that the right grip shattered, and Frykowski’s skull cracked.
I would expect a guy who’d survived the war in Poland to put up a fight. I’m assuming the 10-day mescaline trip left him impaired.
Inside, Tate was sobbing. Then Folger, who’d lifted the noose from her neck, ran down the hall and out of the house through a side door. She was halfway across the front lawn, her nightgown flowing behind her like an apparition, when Krenwinkel caught up to her and brought her knife down, stabbing her twenty-eight times. Watson joined in and Folger went limp, saying, “I give up. I’m already dead. Take me.”
Drenched in blood and their own sweat, the two killers rose to see Frykowski, yet again, on his feet stumbling toward them. Soon they were stabbing him with the same mechanical precision, forcing steel through flesh, bone, and cartilage. The coroner tallied fifty-one stab wounds on the Pole, plus thirteen blows to the head and two bullet wounds.
[…]
Watson came back inside and ordered Atkins to kill her. Tate begged her to spare her life, to spare her unborn child. “I want to have my baby,” she said.
“Woman, I have no mercy for you,” Atkins responded, locking her arm around Tate’s neck from behind. “You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.” She stabbed her in the stomach. Watson joined in. The pair stabbed her sixteen times until she cried out for her mother and died.
Atkins dipped her fingers into one of Tate’s wounds and tasted her blood. It was “warm, sticky, and nice,” she’d recall later. “To taste death and yet give life,” she said, “wow, what a trick.” She soaked a towel in Tate’s blood and brought it to the front door, where, following Watson’s instruction to “write something that would shock the world,” she scrawled the word “Pig.”
[…]
When Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian returned to the Spahn Ranch early that morning, they went to their beds and slept soundly.
Infantry Combat: The Rifle Platoon is a simultaneous Military Tactics and Leadership crash course and semi-political argument about the wrong lessons that were learned from Operation Desert Storm (it was first published in 1995) in the format of a “Choose your own Adventure” novel.
And my god does it work. Its argument is incredibly well presented, its intangible concepts and ethos are really strongly conveyed, it teaches an impressive amount of theory and application despite NOT being a textbook of theory or doctrine…
And it just has no conceivable right to work as well as it works.
[…]
A choose your own adventure is just a series of binary choices, maybe a few 3 pronged choices to mix it up. That clearly can’t teach anything.
But Antal’s writing and veteran understanding of the concepts can, and he exploits the format perfectly to REALLY creates painful choices and moments of indecision. Your pre-knowledge of even very broad pop-military concepts, or study of history, is GREATLY rewarded. Your observing the map ever so much longer is rewarded. And your attention to detail is rewarded. Your intuitive understanding of leadership or your having read about the subject, or your complete lack of any such instincts, plays a shockingly impactful role for leading what are static words and binary decisions.
I’m certain there are skilled military officers and professionals who could go in this and get the best ending right, first try… But I doubt it’d be a majority of even actual infantry officers.
Likewise an attentive amatuer or student of history could probably do it…
But I died shot by friendly fire my first read/playthrough, so not me.
[…]
Life isn’t a videogame. There isn’t instant feedback when you’ve screwed yourself and everyone around you. The fatal decision can be 10 decisions back and every subsequent decision is just determining exact conditions and flavor text of how that failure will happen…
And absolutely all of it makes sense, is tied into the core principles Antal is teaching, and has a necessary logic such that once you see it you understand why that could only have ended that way.
I’m being incredibly vague because I don’t want to spoil the book. Failing and getting the bad endings is the real teaching part of the exercise, and if it is “Spoiled” the actual teaching value is greatly reduced.
That’s your cue to get your own copy and run through it.
France’s Defense Innovation Agency (AID) and Cailabs have established high-speed optical satellite communications between a nano-satellite in low orbit and a commercial optical ground station:
The Cailabs ground station “is a white dome that measures around four metres in diameter with a large telescope that sticks out of it.” He explained that the technology lies in the way the light is treated once it’s entered the telescope.
The laser communication terminal aboard the nano-satellite, made by Unseenlabs, another small French company, also is an off-the-shelf product. These terminals “are sold by lots of companies and thanks to the US Space Development Agency, they are all required to be interoperable,” Morizur explained.
[…]
The French experiment was launched at the end of 2023 by AID with the launch of the Keraunos satellite and the aim of testing high-speed optical communications based on the innovative technology developed by Cailabs. AID provided €5.5 million ($6.1 million) to fund the Keraunos project which also involved Unseenlabs, another startup based in Rennes, western France.
The team was able to establish a stable laser link over several minutes and thereby not only track the nano-satellite flying in low Earth orbit from the optical ground station, but also receive data sent from the satellite.
In a statement, the Defense Ministry explained that “the advantages of the optical link over the usual radio link are its speed, discretion and independence from regulations that coordinate the use of radio waves. Even if this optical link can sometimes be perturbed by atmospheric turbulence, the Keraunos satellite is able to circumvent them in order to achieve optimum transmission quality.”
For example, you might teach a computer to learn to ride a virtual bike in a simulated 3D environment by rewarding the distance pedalled, and penalising the number of times the bike falls over.
The challenge comes when the reward function misses what the human programmers really wanted. Perhaps the AI will avoid the risk of falls by leaving the bike on the floor, or maximise distance pedalled by wobbling in a big circle or even by standing the bike upside down and cranking the pedals.
[…]
The more complex the desired behaviour, the easier it is to accidentally reward the wrong thing. But there is a clever and effective approach for training computers to solve a fairly wide range of problems: reward curiosity. More precisely, reward the computer when it encounters situations in which it finds the outcome unpredictable. Off it will go in search of something it hasn’t seen before.
Shane writes: “A curiosity-driven AI will learn to move through a video-game level so it can see new stuff, avoiding fireballs, monsters and death pits because when it gets hit by those, it sees the same boring death sequence.” Death is to be avoided not for its own sake, but because it’s terribly predictable.
All this is fascinating in its own right, and hints at why humans themselves might have evolved a sense of curiosity. But AI systems, like 13-year-old boys, can also be curious to the point of distractibility themselves. For example, ask a curiosity-driven AI to teach itself to play a Pac-Man-style game in which ghosts move randomly around a maze, and you will struggle: the AI doesn’t need to do anything to have its curiosity satisfied, because unpredictable ghosts are endlessly fascinating. Or, as Shane explains, a curiositybot will quickly learn to navigate a maze, unless one of the maze walls has a TV on it that shows a series of random images. “As soon as the AI found the TV, it was transfixed.” Much like my son. Or, for that matter, me.
This problem is sufficiently well known to AI researchers that it has a name: the “noisy TV problem”,
[…]
One solution is defensive: avoid noisy TVs.
[…]
But a second approach focuses more on the positive. As well as trying to cut out mere novelty, we should seek out things worth being curious about. This is easier than one might think, because thoughtful curiosity builds knowledge, and knowledge builds thoughtful curiosity.
[…]
The more you know, the more you will prefer something in-depth, rather than the next thumbnail recommended by YouTube.
On February 19, 1800, Napoleon left the Luxembourg Palace, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), and took up residence at the Tuileries:
He was the first ruler to live there since Louis XVI had been taken away to the Temple prison in August 1792, an event he had witnessed as a young officer.
[…]
From this period can be dated Josephine’s central role in the creation of what became the Empire style, which influenced furniture, fashion, interior decoration and design. She also championed the revival of etiquette after a decade of revolution.
Soon after his arrival at the Tuileries, Napoleon collected twenty-two statues of his heroes for the grand gallery, starting, inevitably, with Alexander and Julius Caesar but also featuring Hannibal, Scipio, Cicero, Cato, Frederick the Great, George Washington, Mirabeau and the revolutionary general the Marquis de Dampierre.
The Duke of Marlborough, renowned for his victory at the battle of Bleinheim, was included, as was General Dugommier, whose presence alongside such genuine military giants as Gustavus Adolphus and Marshal Saxe must have been based on his perspicacity in spotting Napoleon’s worth at Toulon. Joubert was there too, since he was now safely dead.
Surrounded by these heroes, about half of whom were in togas, had its effect: it was in Jean-Auguste Ingres’ painting of him as First Consul that Napoleon is first seen with his hand tucked inside his waistcoat.
[…]
It was characteristic of Napoleon that he wanted value for money in all this. Concerned that the upholsterers were cheating him he asked a minister how much the ivory handle at the end of a bell-rope should cost. The minister had no idea, whereupon Napoleon cut it off, called for a valet, told him to dress in ordinary clothes and inquire the price in several shops and order a dozen. When he discovered they were one-third cheaper than billed he simply struck one-third off the charges made by all the tradesmen.
[…]
A significant part of the pre-revolutionary French economy, especially in areas like Lyons, the centre of the European silk industry, had been dependent on luxury goods, and Napoleon was determined to revive it.
Preparing for Oxcart missions involved punishing survival-training operations, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), but the high-desert survival training at Area 51 felt different — and would involve psychological warfare by mock enemy Chinese:
“I crawled slowly through the brambles, bugs, and mud for about thirty minutes when, suddenly, I hit a trip wire and alarms went off. A glaring spotlight came on and ten Chinese men in uniform grabbed me and dragged me to one of their jeeps.” Collins was handcuffed, driven for a while, put into a second vehicle, and taken to so-called Chinese interrogation headquarters. There, he was stripped naked and searched. “A doctor proceeded to examine every orifice the human body has, from top to bottom—literally,” which, Collins believes, “was more to humiliate and break down my moral defenses than anything else.” Naked, he was led down a dimly lit hallway and pushed into a concrete cell furnished with a short, thin bed made of wood planks. “I had no blanket, I was naked, and it was very cold. They gave me a bucket to be used only when I was told.”
For days, Collins went through simulated torture that included sleep deprivation, humiliation, extreme temperature fluctuation, and hunger, all the while naked, cold, and under surveillance by his captors. “The cell had one thick wooded door with a hole for viewing. This opening had a metal window that would clank open and shut. A single bright light was on and when I was about to doze off, the light would flash off, which would immediately snap me out of sleep.” For food, he was given watery soup, two thin pepper pods, and two bits of mysterious meat. “I had no water to drink and I was always watched. I didn’t know day from night so there was no sense of time. The temperature varied from hot to very cold. The voice through the viewing window shouted demands.”
Soon Collins began to hallucinate. Now it was interrogation time. Naked, he was led to a small room by two armed guards. He stood in front of his Chinese interrogators, who sat behind a small desk. They grilled him about his name, rank, and why he was spying on China. The torturous routine continued for what Collins guessed was several more days. Then one day, instead of being taken to his interrogators, he was told that he was free to go.
But halfway across the world, on November 1, 1963, Ken Collins’s experience was being mirrored for real. A CIA pilot named Yeh Changti had been flying a U-2 spy mission over a nuclear facility in China when he was shot down, captured by the Chinese Communist government, and tortured. Yeh Changti was a member of the Thirty-Fifth Black Cat U-2 Squadron, a group of Taiwanese Chinese Nationalist pilots (as opposed to the Communist Chinese, who inhabited the mainland) who worked covert espionage missions for the CIA. In the 1960s, the Black Cats flew what would prove to be the deadliest missions in the U-2’s fifty-five-year history, all of which were flown out of a secret base called Taoyuan on the island of Taiwan. When the CIA declassified most of the U-2 program, in 1998, “no information was released about Yeh Changti or the Black Cats,” says former Black Cat pilot Hsichun Hua. The program, in entirety, remains classified as of 2011.
Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, the man who would later become the commander of Area 51, remembers Yeh Changti before he got shot down. “His code name was Terry Lee and he and I played tennis on the base at Taoyuan all the time. He was a great guy and an amazing acrobat, which helped him on the court. Sometimes we drank scotch while we played. Both the sport and the scotch helped morale.” Slater says that the reason morale was low was that “the U-2 had become so vulnerable to the SA-2 missiles that nobody wanted to fly.” One Black Cat pilot had already been shot down. But that didn’t stop the dangerous missions from going forward for the CIA.
Unlike what had happened with the Gary Powers shoot-down, the American press remained in the dark about these missions. For the CIA, getting hard intelligence on China’s nuclear facilities was a top national security priority. On the day Yeh Changti was shot down, he was returning home from a nine-hour mission over the mainland when a surface-to-air missile guidance system locked on to his U-2. Colonel Slater was on the radio with Yeh Changti when it happened. “I was talking to him when I heard him say, ‘System 12 on!’ We never heard another word.” The missile hit Yeh Changti’s aircraft and tore off the right wing. Yeh Changti ejected from the airplane, his body riddled in fifty-nine places with missile fragments. He landed safely with his parachute and passed out. When he woke up, he was in a military facility run by Mao Tse-tung.
This was no training exercise. Yeh Changti was tortured and held prisoner for nineteen years until he was quietly released by his captors, in 1982. He has been living outside Houston, Texas, ever since. The CIA did not know that Yeh Changti had survived his bailout and apparently did not make any kind of effort to locate him. A second Black Cat pilot named Major Jack Chang would also get shot down in a U-2, in 1965, and was imprisoned alongside Yeh Changti. After their release, the two pilots shared their arduous stories with fellow Black Cat pilot, Hsichun Hua, who had become a general in the Taiwanese air force while the men were in captivity. Neither Yeh Changti nor Major Jack Chang was ever given a medal by the CIA. The shoot-down of the Black Cat U-2 pilots, however, had a major impact on what the CIA and the Air Force would do next at Area 51. Suddenly, the development of drones had become a national security priority, drones being pilotless aircraft that could be flown by remote control.
Drones could accomplish what the U-2 could in terms of bringing home photographic intelligence, but a drone could do it without getting pilots captured or killed. Ideally, drones could perform missions that fell into three distinct categories: dull, dirty, and dangerous. Dull meant long flights during which pilots faced fatigue flying to remote areas of the globe. Dirty included situations where nuclear weapons or biological weapons might be involved. Dangerous meant missions over denied territories such as the Soviet Union, North Korea, and China, where shoot-downs were a political risk. Lockheed secured a contract to develop such an unmanned vehicle in late 1962. After Yeh Changti’s shoot-down, the program got a big boost. Flight-testing of the drone code-named Tagboard would take place at Area 51 and, ironically, getting the Lockheed drone to fly properly was among the first duties assigned to Colonel Slater after he left Taoyuan and was given a new assignment at Area 51.
“Lockheed’s D-21 wasn’t just any old drone, it was the world’s first Mach 3 stealth drone,” says Lockheed physicist Ed Lovick, who worked on the program. “The idea of this drone was a radical one because it would fly at least as fast, if not faster, than the A-12. It had a ram jet engine, which meant it was powered by forced air. The drone could only be launched off an aircraft that was already moving faster than the speed of sound.” The A-12 mother ship was designated M-21, M as in mother, and was modified to include a second seat for the drone launch operator, a flight engineer. The D-21 was the name for the drone, the D standing for daughter. But launching one aircraft from the back of another aircraft at speeds of more than 2,300 mph had its own set of challenges, beginning with how not to have the two aircraft crash into each other during launch. The recovery process of the drone also needed to be fine-tuned. Lovick explains, “The drone, designed to overfly China, would travel on its own flight path taking reconnaissance photographs and then head back out to sea.” The idea was to have the drone drop its photo package, which included the camera, the film, and the radio sensors, by parachute so it could be retrieved by a second aircraft nearby. Once the pallet was secure, the drone would crash into the sea and sink to the ocean floor.
A fighting robot is inherently scary. Robot dogs with weapons will be even worse, even if they are clumsier and less capable than human footsoldiers. An opponent that feels no pain or fear, and who is immune to gunfire, is not like one made of flesh and blood.
But the UGV may be much more than an effective psychological weapon. Unlike aerial drones, the UGV can threaten an enemy position. Driving up and parking a remote-controlled machinegun turret next to them means the enemy have to either destroy the UGV or retreat. This makes it something quite new, an uncrewed weapon able to take ground, and potentially to hold that ground.
At a cost of around $16,000 per unit — as much as six artillery rounds, or a tenth of a Javelin missile — the Ukrainian Lyut UGV is, he explains, entirely expendable.
With renewed fighting against Austria and her allies looming, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon needed to replenish the near-empty Treasury:
He instructed Gaudin to borrow at least 12 million francs from the fifteen or so richest bankers in Paris. The best they would offer was 3 million francs, helpfully suggesting that a national lottery be established to raise the rest. Unimpressed, on January 27, 1800 Napoleon simply arrested Gabriel Ouvrard, the most powerful banker in France and the owner of the vast navy supply contract from which he was rumoured to have made a profit of 8 million francs over the previous four years. (It cannot have helped Ouvrard that he had refused to help finance the Brumaire coup.) Ouvrard’s experience helped loosen the purse-strings of other bankers, but Napoleon wanted to place France’s finances on a far surer footing. He could not continue, in effect, to need bankers’ and contractors’ permission before he could mobilize the army.
On February 13, Gaudin opened the doors of the Banque de France, with the First Consul as its first shareholder.
[…]
In April 1803 the bank was granted the exclusive right to issue paper money in Paris for fifteen years, notes which in 1808 became French legal tender, supported by the state rather than just the bank’s collateral. In time the confidence that Napoleon’s support gave the bank in the financial world allowed it to double the amount of cash in circulation, discount private notes and loans, open regional branches, increase revenues and the shareholder base, lend more, and in short create a classic virtuous business circle. It was also given important government business, such as managing all state annuities and pensions.
In the twelfth chapter of Area 51, Annie Jacobsen discusses “covering up the cover-up”:
Jim Freedman remembers the first time he brought up the subject of UFOs with his EG&G supervisor at Area 51. It was sometime in the middle of the 1960s and “UFOs were a pretty big thing,” Freedman explains. Flying saucer sightings had made their way into the news with a fervor not seen since the late 1940s. “I heard through the rumor mill that one of the UFOs had gone to Wright-Pat and was then brought to a remote area of the test site,” Freedman says. “I heard it was in Area 22. I was driving with my supervisor through the test site one day and I told him what I had heard and I asked him what he thought about that. Well, he just kept looking at the road. And then he turned to me and he said, ‘Jim, I don’t want to hear you mention anything like that, ever again, if you want to keep your job.’” Freedman made sure never to bring the subject of UFOs up again when he was at work.
In the mid-1960s, sightings of unidentified flying objects around Area 51 reached unprecedented heights as the A-12 Oxcart flying from Groom Lake was repeatedly mistaken for a UFO. Not since the U-2 had been flying from there were so many UFO reports being dumped on CIA analysts’ desks. The first instance happened only four days after Oxcart’s first official flight, on April 30, 1962. It was a little before 10:00 a.m., and a NASA X-15 rocket plane was making a test flight in the air corridor that ran from Dryden Flight Research Center, in California, to Ely, Nevada, during the same period of time when an A-12 was making a test flight in the vicinity at a different altitude. From inside the X-15 rocket plane, test pilot Joe Walker snapped photographs, a task that was part of his mission flight. The X-15 was not a classified program and NASA often released publicity photographs taken during flights, as they did with Walker’s photographs that day. But NASA had not scrutinized the photos closely before their public release, and officials missed the fact that a tiny “UFO” appeared in the corner of one of Walker’s pictures. In reality, it was the Oxcart, but the press identified it as a UFO. A popular theory among ufologists about why aliens would want to visit Earth in the first place has to do with Earthlings’ sudden advance of technologies beginning with the atomic bomb. For this group, it follows that the X-15 — the first manned vehicle to get to the edge of space (the highest X-15 flight was 354,200 feet — almost 67 miles above sea level) would be particularly interesting to beings from outer space.
Two weeks after the incident, the CIA’s new director, John McCone, received a secret, priority Teletype on the matter stating that “on 30 April, A-12 was in air at altitude of 30,000 feet from 0948-106 local with concurrent X-15 Test” and that “publicity releases mention unidentified objects on film taken on X-15 flight.” This message, which was not declassified until 2007, illustrates the kind of UFO-related reports that inundated the CIA at this time. In total, 2,850 Oxcart flights would be flown out of Area 51 over a period of six years. Exactly how many of these flights generated UFO reports is not known, but the ones that prompted UFO sightings created the same kinds of problems for the CIA as they had in the previous decade with the U-2, only with elements that were seemingly more inexplicable. With Oxcart, commercial airline pilots flying over Nevada or California would look up and see the shiny, reflective bottom of the Oxcart whizzing by high overhead at triple-sonic speeds and think, UFO. How could they not? When the Oxcart flew at 2,300 miles per hour, it was going approximately five times faster than a commercial airplane — aircraft speeds that were unheard-of in those days. Most Oxcart sightings came right after sunset, when the lower atmosphere was shadowed in dusk. Seventeen miles higher up, the sun was still shining brightly on the Oxcart. The spy plane’s broad titanium wings coupled with its triangle-shaped rear fuselage — reflecting the sun’s rays higher in the sky than aircraft were known to fly — could understandably cause alarm.
The way the CIA dealt with this new crop of sightings was similar to how it handled the U-2s’. Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, Area 51’ s base commander during this time, explains “commercial pilots would report sightings to the FAA. The flights would be met in California, or wherever they landed, by FBI agents who would make passengers sign inadvertent disclosure forms.” End of story, or so the CIA hoped. Instead, interest in UFOs only continued to grow. The public again put pressure on Congress to find out if the federal government was involved in covering up UFOs. When individual congressmen asked the CIA if it was involved in UFOs, the Agency would always say no.
On May 10, 1966, the most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite, hosted a CBS news special report called UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy? To an audience of millions of Americans, Cronkite announced that the CIA was part of a government cover-up regarding UFOs. The CIA had been actively analyzing UFO data despite repeatedly denying to Congress that it was doing so, Cronkite said. He was absolutely correct. The Agency had been tracking UFO sightings around the world since the 1950s and actively lying about its interest in them. The CIA could not reveal the classified details of the U-2 program — the existence of which had been outed by the Gary Powers shoot-down but the greater extent of which would remain classified until 1998 — nor could it reveal anything related to the Oxcart program and those sightings. That remained top secret until 2007. In Cronkite’s exposé, the CIA looked like liars.
It got worse for the Agency. The Cronkite program also reopened a twelve-year-old can of UFO worms known as the Robertson Panel report of 1953. Dr. Robertson appeared on a CBS Reports program and disclosed that the UFO inquiry bearing his name had in fact been sponsored by the CIA beginning in 1952, despite repeated denials by officials. The House Armed Services Committee held hearings on UFOs in July of 1966, which resulted in the Air Force laying blame for the cover-up on the CIA. “The Air Force… approached the Agency for declassification,” testified secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown. Brown stated that while there was no evidence that “strangers from outer space” had been visiting Earth, it was time for the CIA to come clean on its secret studies regarding UFOs.
[…]
The year 1966 was the height of the Vietnam War, and the federal government’s ability to tell the truth was under fire. Pressure on Congress to make more information known did not let up. And so once again, as it had been in the late 1940s, the Air Force was officially “put in charge” of investigating individual UFO claims. The point of having the Air Force in charge, said Congress, was to oversee the untrustworthy CIA. One of the great ironies at work in this was that only a handful of Air Force generals were cleared for knowledge about Oxcart flights blazing in and out of Area 51, which meant that to most Air Force investigators, Oxcart sightings were in fact unidentified flying objects. Further feeding public discord, several key Air Force officials who had previously been involved in investigating UFOs now believed the Air Force was also engaged in covering up UFOs. Several of these men left government service to write books about UFOs and help the public persuade Congress to do more.
[…]
Many citizens believed the government was trying to cover up the existence of extraterrestrial beings; people did not consider the fact that by overfocusing on Martians, they would pay less attention to other UFO realities, namely, that these were sightings of radical aircraft made by men.
[…]
In 1942, when the jet engine was first being developed, the Army Air Corps desired to keep the radical new form of flight a secret until the military was ready to unveil the technology on its own terms. Before the jet engine, airplanes flew by propellers, and before 1942, for most people it was a totally foreign concept for an airplane to fly without the blades of a propeller spinning around. With the jet engine, in order to maintain silence on this technological breakthrough, the Army Air Corps entered into a rather benign strategic deception campaign involving a group of its pilots. Every time a test pilot took a Bell XP-59A jet aircraft out on a flight test over the Muroc dry lake bed in California’s Mojave Desert, the crew attached a dummy propeller to the airplane’s nose first. The Bell pilots had a swath of airspace in which to perform flight tests but every now and then a pilot training on a P-38 Lightning would cruise into the adjacent vicinity to try to get a look at the airplane. The airplane was seen trailing smoke, and eventually, rumors started to circulate at local pilot bars. Pilots wanted to know what was being hidden from them.
According to Edwards Air Force Base historian Dr. James Young, the chief XP-59A Bell test pilot, a man by the name of Jack Woolams, got an idea. He ordered a gorilla mask from a Hollywood prop house. On his next flight, Woolams removed the mock-up propeller from the nose of his jet airplane and put on the gorilla mask. When a P-38 Lightning came flying nearby for a look, Woolams maneuvered his airplane close enough so that the P-38 pilot could look inside the cockpit of the jet plane. The Lightning pilot was astonished. Instead of seeing Woolams, the pilot saw a gorilla flying an airplane — an airplane that had no propeller. The stunned pilot landed and went straight to the local bar, where he sat down and ordered a stiff drink. There, he began telling other pilots what he had definitely seen with his own eyes. His colleagues told him he was drunk, that what he was saying was an embarrassment, and that he should go home. Meanwhile, the concept of the gorilla mask caught on among other Bell XP-59A test pilots and soon Woolams’s colleagues joined the act. Over the course of the next few months, other P-38 Lightning pilots spotted the gorilla flying the propellerless airplane. Some versions of the historical record have the psychiatrist for the U.S. Army Air Corps getting involved, helping the Lightning pilots to understand how a clear-thinking fighter pilot could become disoriented at altitude and believe he had seen something that clearly was not really there. Everyone knows that a gorilla can’t fly an airplane. Whether or not the psychiatrist really did get involved — and if he did, whether he was aware of the gorilla masks — remains ambiguous to Dr. Craig Luther, a contemporary historian at Edwards Air Force Base. But for the purposes of a strategic deception campaign, the point is clear: no one wants to be mistaken for a fool.
[…]
One of the more enigmatic figures involved in the Roswell mystery was Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the first man to run the CIA. Hillenkoetter was the director of Central Intelligence from May 1, 1947, until October 7, 1950. After his retirement from the CIA, Hillenkoetter returned to a career in the navy. Curiously, after he retired from the Navy, in the late 1950s, he served on the board of governors of a group of UFO researchers called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Hillenkoetter’s placement on the board was a paradox. He was there, in part, to learn what the UFO researchers knew about unidentified flying crafts. But he also empathized with their work. While Hillenkoetter did not believe UFOs were from outer space, he knew unidentified flying objects were a serious national security concern. In his position as CIA director Hillenkoetter knew that the flying disc at Roswell had been sent by Joseph Stalin. And he knew of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s fear that what had been achieved once could happen again. Which makes it peculiar that, in February of 1960, in a rare reveal by a former cabinet-level official, Hillenkoetter testified to Congress that he was dismayed at how the Air Force was handling UFOs. To the Senate Science and Astronautics Committee he stated that “behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” He also claimed that “to hide the facts, the Air Force has silenced its personnel.”
Hillenkoetter remained a ranking member of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena until 1962, when he mysteriously resigned. Equally puzzling was that the man who later replaced Hillenkoetter and became the head of the board of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in 1969 was Joseph Bryan III — the CIA’s first chief of political and psychological warfare. Not much is known about Bryan’s true role with the ufologists because his work at the CIA remains classified as of 2011. If his name sounds familiar, it is because Joe Bryan was the man scheduled for a hunting trip with Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell’s friend and predecessor at the CIA. But before Bryan arrived that day, on October 29, 1965, Wisner shot himself in the head.
At the CIA, during the mid-1960s, the thinking regarding UFOs began to move in a different direction. Since the birth of the modern UFO phenomenon, in June of 1947, the CIA had maintained three lines of thought on UFOs. They were (a) experimental aircraft, (b) the delusions of a paranoid person’s mind, or (c) part of a psychological warfare campaign by the Soviet Union to create panic among the people and sow seeds of governmental mistrust. But by 1966, a faction within the CIA added a fourth line of thought to its concerns: maybe UFOs were real. This new postulation came from the Agency’s monitoring of circumstances in the Soviet Union, which was also in the midst of a UFO sea change.
[…]
But curiously, in 1964, after Khrushchev’s colleagues removed him from power and installed Leonid Brezhnev in his place, articles on UFOs began to emerge. In 1966, a series of articles about UFOs were published by Novosti, Moscow’s official news agency. Two leading scientists from the Moscow Aviation Institute not only were writing about UFOs but were split on their opinions about them, which was highly unusual for Soviet state-funded scientists. One of the scientists, Villen Lyustiberg, promoted the idea that UFOs were the creation of the American government and that “the U.S. publicizes them to divert people from its failures and aggressions.” A second leading scientist, Dr. Felix Zigel, had come to believe that UFOs were in fact real.
Declassified CIA memos written during this time reveal a concern that if the leading scientists and astronomers in the Soviet Union believed UFOs were real, maybe UFOs truly were real after all. In 1968, the CIA learned that a Soviet air force general named Porfiri Stolyarov had been named the chairman of a new “UFO Section of the All-Union Cosmonautics Committee” in Moscow. After learning that Russia had an official UFO committee, the CIA went scrambling for its own science on UFOs.
Last September, seismologists detected a monotonous hum emanating from Greenland — for nine days:
Soon after the vibrations began, a cruise ship sailing near fjords in Greenland noticed that on the remote Ella Island, a key landmark — a base used for scientific research and by the Danish military for sled dog patrols — had been destroyed.
[…]
The initial trigger came when warming temperatures caused the tongue of a thinning glacier to collapse, the researchers found. That destabilized a steep mountainside, sending a rock and ice avalanche crashing into Greenland’s deep Dickson Fjord. That displaced a massive volume of water, so a towering wave traveled across the narrow fjord, which is about 1.5 miles wide.
The tsunami waves — some at least as tall as the Statue of Liberty — ran up the steep rock walls lining the fjord. Because the landslide struck the waterway at a nearly 90-degree angle, waves bounced back and forth across it for nine days — a phenomenon scientists call a seiche.
[…]
The team determined that Ella Island — about 45 miles from the landslide — was battered by a tsunami at least 13 feet tall. Tourists sometimes visit the island.
“Just a couple of days before the event, cruise ships were there and they were on the beach,” Svennevig said. “It was really, really lucky that no one was there when it happened.”
This seiche was the longest scientists have ever observed. Previously, tsunamis caused by landslides typically created waves that died out within a few hours.
I hadn’t heard the term seiche before, and I wasn’t sure how to pronounce it. Was it Danish? Japanese? No, French — or Swiss-French:
A seiche (SAYSH) is a standing wave in an enclosed or partially enclosed body of water. Seiches and seiche-related phenomena have been observed on lakes, reservoirs, swimming pools, bays, harbors, caves, and seas. The key requirement for formation of a seiche is that the body of water be at least partially bounded, allowing the formation of the standing wave.
The term was promoted by the Swiss hydrologist François-Alphonse Forel in 1890, who was the first to make scientific observations of the effect in Lake Geneva. The word had apparently long been used in the region to describe oscillations in alpine lakes. According to Wilson (1972), this Swiss French dialect word comes from the Latin word siccus meaning “dry”, i.e., as the water recedes, the beach dries. The French word sec or sèche (dry) descends from the Latin.
Anduril has unveiled its Barracuda family of cruise missiles — or “air-breathing, software-defined expendable Autonomous Air Vehicles (AAVs)” — that are optimized for “affordable, hyper-scale production”:
The United States and our allies and partners do not have enough missiles to credibly deter conflict with a near-peer adversary. Our existing arsenals of precision-guided munitions would be exhausted in a matter of days in a high-end fight. The problem extends beyond inventory alone, however: existing cruise missiles are defined by limited production capacity, nonexistent on-call surge capacity, and minimal upgradeability when technology and mission needs inevitably change. That is because existing missile designs are highly complex, require thousands of unique tools to produce, demand highly-specialized labor and materials, and are built on the backs of tenuous, brittle, and defense-specific supply chains. We need an order of magnitude more weapons, and we need them to be more producible, intelligent, upgradeable, and flexible.
The Barracuda family of AAVs is designed to rebuild America’s arsenal of air-breathing precision-guided munitions and air vehicles. Barracuda features advanced autonomous behaviors and other software-defined capabilities, and it is available in configurations offering 500+ nautical miles of range, 100+ pounds of payload capacity, 5 Gs of maneuverability, and more than 120 minutes of loitering time. The vehicle’s fast speeds, high maneuverability, and extended ranges are made possible by Barracuda’s turbojets, air-breathing engines that take in air to combust their fuel. The result is a highly intelligent, low-cost weapon system that is capable of direct, stand-in, or stand-off strike missions in line with existing requirements but rapidly adaptable to future mission needs due to its high degree of modularity and upgradeability.
Barracuda-100M, Barracuda-250M, and Barracuda-500M are the most producible cruise missiles on the market today. A single Barracuda takes 50 percent less time to produce, requires 95 percent fewer tools, and 50 percent fewer parts than competing solutions on the market today. As a result, the Barracuda family of AAVs is 30 percent cheaper on average than other solutions, enabling affordable mass and cost-effective, large-scale employment.
[…]
Barracuda can be produced by the broad commercial automotive and consumer electronics workforce, rather than relying exclusively on the much smaller, over-stretched, highly-specialized, defense-specific manufacturing labor pool required to produce existing solutions.
Every Barracuda variant is made up of a handful of common subsystems to ensure that the missiles can be rapidly optimized based on changing mission needs. New subsystems can be rapidly swapped into live production lines when threats evolve and new technologies emerge, providing warfighters with the agility required to adapt at mission speed. And unlike existing solutions that leverage brittle, defense-specific supply chains, Barracuda’s subsystems are made up of commercially derived and widely-available components that provide supply chain resiliency, redundancy, and surge capacity.
Student-athletes gained the right to profit off their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) a few years ago, which was a boon for female gymnast Livvy Dunne:
Livvy has amassed more than 8.1 million followers on TikTok and 5.3 million on Instagram at the time of this writing.
With her massive following, Livvy has earned a total of $9.5 million during her time at LSU. According to On3.com, she earns $3.9 million per year, up from a $3.3 million evaluation before LSU won the national championship.
T. Beholder: (there weren’t both IN that one) I enjoy a humble shitpost, it must be admitted, but the truth really is… Not what the actual participants plainly admitted? Here’s a less-humble shitpost by Itchy Bacca, compiling more (from this article and others).
Jim: I enjoy a humble shitpost, it must be admitted, but the truth really is that Thanksgiving really is a naked celebration of the White Anglo Native American’s bounty in North America taken and held by greater commitment and superior virtue. Anything else is ethnocultural erasure.
Phileas Frogg: The Manson murders are just another shuffling intimation at, “The Man Behind the Curtain,” so to speak, which are always fascinating when viewed beyond the mere brute facts of the case and placed in that context. I suppose one could consider it boring for anyone who’s already pulled the curtain back and taken a gander, but I still appreciate adding to the tally of the sheer number of milestones.
Michael van der Riet: The Manson murders are fundamentally boring and I didn’t come here to be bored.
T. Beholder: Finders and their keepers. So “mystery solved”, yes. The curiously persistent details spammed around and laughingtrack.jpg were due to focused application of smoke and mirrors.
T. Beholder: Quotes from the actual participants suffice, to be honest. William Bradford and Ralph Hamor summarized it well enough in The Real Meaning of Thanksgiving: The Triumph of Capitalism over Collectivism.
Jim: Thanksgiving is the wholesome, inclusive day that many tawny Central, Southern, and Eastern European wannabes join all white British Isles-descended Americans in celebration of our glorious supremacy in the total war of all against all that was the North American continent before the Englishman sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to dominate the Indian savage and make this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus. Observations Concerning the Increase of...
Jim: T. Beholder: “And then there were the ‘finders’.&# 8221; Finders, keepers?
Jim: Polanski seems like a Rosemary’s Baby sort of guy.
Jim: “Espera denied this claim until he passed away in 1999, despite his family producing a baptismal certificate with his real name.” What a stud. Notwithstanding his Italian origin, he went out like a true American.
Jim: This is one of the rare JREs whose full and complete viewing is mandatory.
Bob Sykes: The idea that there are widespread anti-government protests in China is utter nonsense, and anyone promoting those ideas is a liar or worse. Our problem is that the Chinese model is working. China’s economy, already at least 50% larger than ours (which now lags behind India, too) is growing about three times as fast as ours. China has the most modern factories and transportation systems in the world, at least one and more likely two whole technological generations ahead of us....
MF: I read somewhere that there are close to 15 million Chinese living in what is actually Russia due to the population just spilling over. Arable farmland to feed their masses is job #1. MF Long time site surfer. Buying this book.
T. Beholder: He suspected British spies were behind the murder, although the actual perpetrators were a group of …local puppets content with the whole place being a British economical colony. Paul’s policies supporting the middle classes had been seen as threatening the Russian nobility. Paul’s policies opposing export-oriented slave driver economy had been seen as threatening the major landowners who ran it. The rest of nobility was not necessarily united in this or any other position. The same conflict...
Phileas_Frogg: Which do you prefer to see in your ruler between the two: - A theoretical love of man, and a practical contempt? or - A practical love of man, and a theoretical contempt? I know my answer, but I did have to consider it for a moment.
McChuck: Perhaps Mr. Tabarrok should volunteer himself for the next Ebola vaccine trial? After all, it’s “safer” than waiting for some poor village to contract it naturally. And it’s for “the greater good”. Doctor Mengele had this same belief, and the political apparatus to act upon it. We still use his medical data, so what he did must have been ethical, good, and morally right, wasn’t it?
T. Beholder: Firewire 7 says: Hollywood personality caught portraying another individual. I thought that was the business model for the whole industry. (Flash forward) Meet the black Knights of the Round Table.
T. Beholder: So many of this. Starts sensible, then veers into ”utilitarianism good, personal responsibility bad”.
Handle: A good test for “peak woke” claims would be whether any media withdrawn from circulation, sale, or publication during the purportedly “that’s all in the past now” bad times is restored to its former status. Will Disney soon put Song of the South on Disney+? Will anyone stream PCU? Will the Dr Seuss estate soon reauthorize publication of “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” and the others? I’m not holding my breath. If peak woke just means...
Andrew Roberts summarizes (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon’s first few months in power:
