An eVinci microreactor and surrounding infrastructure is about half the size of a hockey rink

December 7th, 2023

The Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC) is poised to become Westinghouse’s first customer for its eVinci microreactor — a flagship 5-MWe/13-MWth “nuclear battery”:

At the heart of the eVinci is a fully passive heat pipe–cooled design that will use tristructural isotropic (TRISO) fuel. Its alkali metal heat pipe technology relies on alkali metal phase change to capture temperature uniformity within the reactor core. The reactor’s core, built around a solid steel monolith, has channels for both heat pipes and fuel pellets, with each fuel pin placed adjacent to several heat pipes. The array of closed heat pipes essentially removes heat from the nuclear core and transfers that heat to air, which then turns a turbine in an open-air Brayton thermodynamic power conversion cycle.

Along with providing redundancy of the primary heat removal path, the heat pipes eliminate the need for a reactor coolant pump, bulk coolant, and associated equipment, as well as enable a modular core design, Westinghouse President of eVinci Microreactor Jon Ball told POWER in October.

An eVinci microreactor and surrounding infrastructure is about “half the size of a hockey rink,” Westinghouse says. In addition, unlike a high-temperature gas reactor (HTGR), heat pipe reactors are not pressurized and have no moving parts, though they are passive (naturally driven) and can self-adjust to the amount of heat transferred—which allows inherent load following

Posted in Technology | 4 Comments »

Cold air doesn’t hold much moisture, so it dries the airways

December 6th, 2023

One in five competitive athletes suffers from exercise-induced bronchoconstriction, or EIB:

The numbers are even higher in endurance and winter sports. Puzzlingly, studies have found that athletes with EIB who somehow make it to the Olympics are more likely to medal. What’s so great about wheezing, chest tightness, and breathlessness?

The answer isn’t what you’re thinking. Sure, it’s possible that some athletes get a boost because an EIB diagnosis allows them to use otherwise-banned asthma medications. But there’s a simpler explanation: breathing high volumes of cold or polluted air dries out the airways, leading to an overzealous immune response and potential long-term damage. “It’s well established that high training loads and ventilatory work increase the degree of airway hyper-responsiveness and hence development of asthma and EIB,” explains Morten Hostrup, a sports scientist at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of a new review on EIB in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports. In other words, the athletes who train hard enough to podium are more likely to develop EIB as a result.

[…]

Activities with the highest risk involve sustained efforts of at least five minutes, particularly if they take place in cold or polluted air. Cold air doesn’t hold much moisture, so it dries the airways. This affects skiers, runners, and triathletes, among others. Indoor environments like pools and ice rinks are also a problem, because of the chloramines produced by pool water and exhaust from Zambonis.

[…]

Before the 1998 Winter Games, U.S. Olympic Committee physiologists examined Nagano-bound athletes to see whose airways showed abnormal constriction in response to arduous exercise. Almost a quarter of the athletes tested positive, including half the cross-country ski team.

[…]

If you do get an EIB diagnosis, your doctor can prescribe asthma medication, including inhaled corticosteroids like fluticasone and airway dilators like salbutamol. If you’re an elite athlete subject to drug testing, you’ll need to tread carefully, since some of those medications are either banned or restricted to a maximum dosage. Hostrup and his colleagues note that there’s also evidence that fish oils high in omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin C, and even caffeine might help reduce EIB symptoms. And on the non-pharmaceutical side, you can minimize the chance of an attack by doing a thorough warm-up of 20 to 30 minutes, including six to eight 30-second sprints. This can temporarily deplete the inflammatory cells that would otherwise trigger an airway-narrowing attack

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

The mycorrhizal fungi act as a kind of protective shield against pathogens in the soil

December 5th, 2023

Researchers in Switzerland treated 54 fields with Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), which can enhance plant nutrient uptake and reduce plant stress, to quantify the effects on maize (corn) growth, and found the results highly variable, ranging from negative 12 percent to positive 40 percent:

With few soil parameters and mainly soil microbiome indicators, we could successfully predict 86 percent of the variation in plant growth response to inoculation. The abundance of pathogenic fungi, rather than nutrient availability, best predicted (33 percent) AMF inoculation success.

More:

“On a quarter of the plots, the mycorrhizal fungi enabled up to 40 percent better yields. That’s huge,” says the study’s co-lead, Marcel van der Heijden, a soil ecologist at the University of Zurich and at Asgroscope. But there’s a catch: on a third of the plots, the yield did not increase and sometimes even decreased. The research team was initially unable to explain why this happened.

[…]

“We discovered that the inoculation functioned best when there were lots of fungal pathogens already in the soil,” says co-first author Stefanie Lutz from Agroscope, the federal center of competence for Agricultural Research.

“The mycorrhizal fungi act as a kind of protective shield against pathogens in the soil that would weaken the plants.” As a result, the normal yield can be maintained in fields where, without mycorrhizal fungi, there would have been losses. In contrast, mycorrhizal fungi had only a minor effect on fields that were not contaminated with pathogens.

“The plants there are strong anyway and grow excellently. The use of mycorrhizal fungi in such cases brings no additional benefits,” says the other first author, Natacha Bodenhausen from the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture.

Posted in Science | 2 Comments »

As usual, nobody liked a smart robot

December 4th, 2023

Swarm Troopers by David HamblingIn contrast to the DASH, which started out as a combat aircraft and ended as a target, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), the Teledyne Ryan Firebee started out as a target and ended as much more:

The Firebee was a sleek, jet-powered machine, twenty-three feet long and with a top speed of over 700 mph. It could fly at any height from the treetops to fifty thousand feet. It could be launched from an aircraft and remotely controlled from two hundred miles away. The Firebee would return to the ground on a parachute, an easy feat for a small plane with no human inside risking broken bones.

There was little interest from the Air Force’s mainstream, but the highly unconventional BIG SAFARI team liked the idea. BIG SAFARI was set up to circumvent the usual complexities of Air Force procurement, to provide quick solutions to urgent problems. They funded development of a version of the Firebee called Fire Fly or Model 147, and it went through their streamlined channels without the interference it might have otherwise endured.

[…]

In the first trials the F-102 Delta Dagger and F-106 Delta Dart pilots never even saw the drones they were trying to shoot down, and only caught brief glimpses of them on radar. Further tests followed. In one, a Delta Dagger fired a burst of cannon fire at the drone, but the rounds missed. Before the pilot could line up for another shot, his jet engine flamed out because of the high altitude. He dropped to lower altitude to reignite the engine, at which point other planes mistook his aircraft for the target. Fortunately, they did not shoot, but the Fire Fly had escaped. Later on two Delta Darts achieved a radar lock on the Fire Fly, but not for long enough to fire a missile.

[…]

The military was unhappy with the results. Many felt the test was intended to make them look bad. Robert Schwanhausser of Teledyne Ryan says the results were classified Top Secret, and he was ordered to burn every piece of information on them.

[…]

They were sent on virtual suicide missions, to test Vietnamese radar and missile defenses.

When losses mounted, the developers at BIG SAFARI started equipping their drones with electronic bags of tricks. One device, known as High Altitude Threat Reaction and Countermeasure (HAT-RAC) responded to being lit up by radar by throwing the drone into a series of sharp turns.

[…]

When the Chinese downed their first Fire Fly in 1964, it was only after some sixteen MiGs had made over thirty passes trying to hit the little drone.

[…]

A decoy version of the Fire Fly was produced. This was known as the 147N and was fitted with radar reflectors to make it look like a bigger aircraft. The 147Ns were originally purely intended to distract defenders away from the real Fire Flies equipped with cameras, but they survived and managed to return so frequently that they were later fitted with cameras of their own.

[…]

On one mission, the pictures from a Fire Fly captured the subject’s faces from close range: “You could see features on the guy’s face. If it would have been in color, you could have seen the color of his eyes.”

This was at a time when the U-2 spy planes were taking pictures from fifty thousand feet or higher, with resolution only good enough to recognize objects two feet across. The low-level Fire Fly pictures were a revelation in the art of the possible.

[…]

The basic drone could only handle acceleration of about 3G, but a modified Firebee equipped with “Maneuverability Augmentation System for Tactical Air Combat Simulation” or MASTACS could pull 6G for several seconds at a time. This put it pretty much on a par with manned fighters. In 1971, the MASTACS developers challenged Commander John C. Smith, head of the Navy’s Top Gun combat training school – the “Top Gun” of the 1982 movie – to try and shoot MASTACS down.

Smith and his wingman, both flying F-4 Phantoms, made repeated attacks on the remotely controlled Firebee. It was far too agile for them. They fired two Sparrow radar-guided missiles and two Sidewinder heat-seekers without scoring a hit. Meanwhile, the Firebee kept circling around and lining itself up in firing position behind the Phantoms. Had it been armed, the Firebee would have had easy shots.

As usual, nobody liked a smart robot. MASTACS was deemed “too sophisticated” for training purposes.

[…]

Even the memory of the Fire Fly seems to have been lost. In 2014 the US Navy proudly announced in a press release that, “Truman will be the first aircraft carrier in naval aviation history to host test operations for an unmanned aircraft.” It seems that amnesia buried the 1969-70 Fire Fly operations from the USS Ranger, not to mention the TDR-1s flown from the USS Sable in 1943.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

His only indulgence was allowing breaks for intense video-game binges

December 3rd, 2023

Elon Musk by Walter IsaacsonFrom the very beginning of his career, Musk was a demanding manager, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), contemptuous of the concept of work-life balance:

At Zip2 and every subsequent company, he drove himself relentlessly all day and through much of the night, without vacations, and he expected others to do the same. His only indulgence was allowing breaks for intense video-game binges. The Zip2 team won second place in a national Quake competition. They would have come in first, he says, but one of them crashed his computer by pushing it too hard.

When the other engineers went home, Musk would sometimes take the code they were working on and rewrite it. With his weak empathy gene, he didn’t realize or care that correcting someone publicly — or, as he put it, “fixing their fucking stupid code” — was not a path to endearment. He had never been a captain of a sports team or the leader of a gang of friends, and he lacked an instinct for camaraderie. Like Steve Jobs, he genuinely did not care if he offended or intimidated the people he worked with, as long as he drove them to accomplish feats they thought were impossible. “It’s not your job to make people on your team love you,” he said at a SpaceX executive session years later. “In fact, that’s counterproductive.”

He was toughest on Kimbal. “I love, love, love my brother very much, but working with him was hard,” Kimbal says. Their disagreements often led to rolling-on-the-office-floor fights. […] “Growing up in South Africa, fighting was normal,” Elon says. “It was part of the culture.” They had no private offices, just cubicles, so everyone had to watch. In one of their worst fights, they wrestled to the floor and Elon seemed ready to punch Kimbal in the face, so Kimbal bit his hand and tore off a hunk of flesh. Elon had to go to the emergency room for stitches and a tetanus shot. “When we had intense stress, we just didn’t notice anyone else around us,” says Kimbal. He later admitted that Elon was right about Zip2. “It was a shitty name.”

Elon scuttled a potential merger and demanded to be made CEO again:

“Great things will never happen with VCs or professional managers,” Musk told Inc. Magazine. “They don’t have the creativity or the insight.” One of the Mohr Davidow partners, Derek Proudian, was installed as interim CEO and tasked with selling the company. “This is your first company,” he told Musk. “Let’s find an acquirer and make some money, so you can do your second, third, and fourth company.”

In January 1999, less than four years after Elon and Kimbal launched Zip2, Proudian called them into his office and told them that Compaq Computer, which was seeking to juice up its AltaVista search engine, had offered $307 million in cash. The brothers had split their 12 percent ownership stake 60–40, so Elon at age twenty-seven walked away with $22 million and Kimbal with $15 million. Elon was astonished when the check arrived at his apartment. “My bank account went from, like, $5,000 to $22,005,000,” he says.

The Musks gave their father $300,000 out of the proceeds and their mother $1 million. Elon bought an eighteen-hundred-square-foot condo and splurged on what for him was the ultimate indulgence: a $1 million McLaren F1 sports car, the fastest production car in existence.

Posted in Business | No Comments »

The second wave never materialized

December 2nd, 2023

How Hitler Could Have Won World War II by Bevin AlexanderHitler had faith, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), that chance could bring fortuitous circumstances:

His greatest hero was Frederick the Great of Prussia, who had held on against impossible odds in the Seven Years War 1757–1763 until the empress of Russia died and the coalition against him evaporated.

[…]

The key to Hitler’s plan was to strike at a time when bad weather would endure for a week, keeping Allied aircraft out of the sky for that period. He figured it would take his panzers that long to reach Antwerp.

[…]

Secrecy was mandatory. Hitler prohibited transmission by telephone, telegraph, or radio. The few let in on the plan signed a pledge of secrecy on the pain of death. Rundstedt was not brought into the picture until the late stages.

On October 21, Hitler called in Otto Skorzeny, the officer who had rescued Benito Mussolini from his captors in 1943. Hitler promoted him to SS lieutenant colonel and told him to form a special force to go in advance of the offensive. In the first wave, a company of English-speaking commandos, wearing American field jackets over their German uniforms and riding in American jeeps, was to rush ahead, cut telephone lines, turn signposts to misdirect reserves, and hang red ribbons to imply roads were mined. Second, a panzer brigade of 2,000 men in American dress was to drive through and seize the bridges over the Meuse.

The second wave never materialized. Army command failed to provide the American equipment needed. But the first wave had astonishing success. Forty jeeps got through, and all but eight returned. The few Germans who were captured created the impression that many sabotage bands were roving behind the front. MPs and other soldiers stopped every vehicle, questioning drivers to see if they were German. Traffic tie-ups created chaos, and hundreds of innocent Americans were arrested.

General Bradley himself had to prove his identity three times: “The first time by identifying Springfield as the capital of Illinois (my questioner held out for Chicago); the second time by locating the guard between the center and tackle on a line of scrimmage; the third time by naming the then current spouse of a blonde named Betty Grable. Grable stopped me but the sentry did not. Pleased at having stumped me, he nevertheless passed me on.”

[…]

The Americans could make good their losses in short order, the Germans could not replace theirs. All that Adolf Hitler achieved at this terrible cost was to delay the Allied advance in the west by a few weeks. But it actually assured swift success for the Red Army advancing in a renewed drive in the east.

Posted in War | No Comments »

You can launch without regret

December 1st, 2023

Since its founding in 2017, Anduril has argued that it’s a new type of defense contractor:

Instead of taking orders upfront from the US Department of Defense to fund development of products, Anduril has raised money from venture capitalists, including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, that it uses to build weapons it predicts the military will want. Its first product was an automated security tower designed for the US border in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency. The company then began shipping early counter-drone aircraft to the US and UK militaries in 2019.

[…]

Anduril started work two years ago on the Roadrunner, a Looney Tunes-inspired dig at Raytheon’s Coyote, because it said the US would need a lower-cost, more nimble way to combat swarms. The tiny fighter jet has a carbon-fiber body and onboard electronics that let it track objects and perform maneuvers that’d be too dangerous for a human-piloted plane. One of its main advantages is that it can be reused, which makes it easier to launch at the first sign of an unknown object. “If you see a threat, you can launch multiple Roadrunners to go out to do a closer inspection of that threat and be loitering in case they’re needed,” says Christian Brose, the chief strategy officer at Anduril. “You can recall them, land them, refuel them and reuse them, so, essentially, you can launch without regret.”

[…]

To start the test, Anduril sent a fixed-wing drone into the air from a runway behind its compound. The sentry tower quickly detected the aircraft and fed information about its speed and trajectory into the company’s Lattice software. The test pilot received imagery of the drone and then manually marked it as a hostile threat. In an instant, the lid of the Roadrunner launch container opened, the turbines fired up and the craft zipped into the air. It took off toward the target and then began feeding its own sensor data and imagery into Lattice. As the Roadrunner closed in on the target, the test pilot gave a final command to destroy the fixed-wing craft, and, seconds later, the Lattice software displayed information showing that it had been a successful attack.

For the purposes of this demonstration, Anduril used proximity sensors to confirm that it would have taken out the target and didn’t actually blow up the fixed-wing craft. If it had, the Roadrunner wouldn’t have been able to do what it did next: It turned to fly back toward the Anduril compound, shifted into a vertical position and fired its thrusters toward the ground as landing legs kicked out from its side. During a maneuver lasting about a minute, the machine got ever closer to the ground before finally settling gently on a small concrete pad in a fashion very similar to a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket. A future version of the Roadrunner will be able to land even after destroying a target, Luckey says.

The whole idea, as Anduril sees it, is to allow a single operator to manage dozens or more Roadrunners in the field with Lattice providing a full view of the surroundings, targets and weapons available. If a drone swarm approaches a base, Lattice will quickly see and identify all the drones, and, with a couple of clicks, the operator can send Roadrunners off to combat the threat. This is a major change from many of the other counter-drone weapons that require about a dozen people to operate them.

Anduril has raised $2.7 billion to date and is valued at almost $10 billion.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Faked, finger-on-the-button rage could bring the Soviets to heel

November 30th, 2023

Henry Kissinger just passed away — at the age of 100. His name has shown up here in a few dozen posts. The earliest substantive post discusses The Nukes of October:

Codenamed Giant Lance, Nixon’s plan was the culmination of a strategy of premeditated madness he had developed with national security adviser Henry Kissinger. The details of this episode remained secret for 35 years and have never been fully told. Now, thanks to documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, it’s clear that Giant Lance was the leading example of what historians came to call the “madman theory”: Nixon’s notion that faked, finger-on-the-button rage could bring the Soviets to heel.

Volume one of Kissinger is the best thing Niall Ferguson has done, in his own opinion.

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Electrified trailer cuts fuel consumption in semi-trucks by 36.3%

November 29th, 2023

When hybrid vehicles were first catching on, I wondered if electrifying a semi-truck trailer would improve performance and efficiency:

Range Energy makes truck trailers, with a clever connection to any standard tractor cab, loaded with electric powertrains to turn any semi into an efficient hybrid. They also let you push entire trailers around by hand at the depot in “shopping cart mode.”

Range’s 53-foot (16-m) RA-01 trailer packs its own 200-kWh battery, as well as an 800-volt e-axle powertrain that can put up to 14,000 Nm (10,326 lb-ft) of torque, at up to 350 kW (469 hp), through the rear wheels. The same battery also feeds a rear liftgate and powered landing gear.

It works with any electric or diesel-powered cab and is perfectly suitable for fleet operations, without any modification to the trucks. It takes its cues from a smart kingpin, which basically senses the acceleration and braking loads that the tractor is putting on the trailer, and uses its electric motors to help out.

[…]

In fuel economy testing performed by Mesilla Valley Transportation Solutions, Range reports a fuel economy boost of 3.25 mpg (72.4 L/100km) , representing a 36.9% efficiency gain against the test truck’s standard fuel consumption.

[…]

The test was conducted on a “25.5-mile (41-km) urban/highway loop at approximately 59,000 lb (26,760 kg) gross vehicle weight and 60-mph (96.5-km/h) top speeds across multiple scenarios including stop/go and steady-speed portions.”The test was conducted on a “25.5-mile (41-km) urban/highway loop at approximately 59,000 lb (26,760 kg) gross vehicle weight and 60-mph (96.5-km/h) top speeds across multiple scenarios including stop/go and steady-speed portions.”

[…]

Even beyond that 200-mile range once the battery is completely depleted, Range still expects about a 10-15% efficiency boost over a regular trailer for the rest of the trip, simply through the energy it can capture and release through regenerative braking.

[…]

And then there’s “shopping cart mode” – which uses a similar control approach to let you disconnect a fully-loaded trailer from the truck and push it around manually like a hand trolley, with the electric motors helping all the way.

Posted in Technology | 4 Comments »

Iraqi criminal organizations and militia groups target convoys and containers for weapons and equipment

November 28th, 2023

American bases in Iraq and Syria are plagued by thefts of weapons and equipment:

Military investigations launched earlier this year found that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” — including guided missile launch systems as well as drones — have been stolen in Iraq. This follows hundreds of thousands of dollars in military gear that were purloined from U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria between 2020 and 2022, as reported earlier this year by The Intercept.

America’s bases in Iraq and Syria ostensibly exist to conduct “counter-ISIS missions,” but experts say they are used primarily as a check against Iran. Since the October outbreak of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, these bases have come under regular rocket and drone attacks as part of an undeclared war between the U.S. and Iran and its surrogate militias.

The U.S. has increasingly responded to those attacks. In Syria, the U.S. launched “precision strikes” on a “training facility and a safe house” allegedly used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The U.S. has since employed an AC-130 gunship against an “Iranian-backed militia vehicle and a number of Iranian-backed militia personnel” at an undisclosed location, following a ballistic missile attack on Al Asad Air Base in Western Iraq. “The President has no higher priority than the safety of U.S. personnel,” said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, justifying U.S. strikes.

[…]

In February, military investigators were notified that 13 commercial drones, valued at about $162,500, were stolen from a U.S. facility in Erbil, Iraq, sometime last year. The agents identified no suspects, and no leads are mentioned in the file.

A separate investigation discovered that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” including targeting sight and launcher units for Javelin missiles — a shoulder-fired guided missile that locks on its targets — were stolen at or en route to Forward Operating Base Union III in Baghdad, Iraq. The loss to the U.S. government was estimated at almost $480,000.

Investigators did not believe the thefts were an inside job. “No known U.S. personnel were involved,” according to a criminal investigations file. The investigators instead refer to locals as the likely suspects. “Iraqi criminal organizations and militia groups target convoys and containers for weapons and equipment,” the document stated. “Further there have been systemic issues with U.S. containers being pilfered by these groups and local nationals outside of Union III, due to the lack of security.”

Posted in Crime, War | 1 Comment »

Losing one drone for one submarine was a good exchange rate

November 27th, 2023

Swarm Troopers by David HamblingIn the late 1950s, David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers), the latest sonar could detect a submarine more than twenty miles away, but the best anti-submarine weapons only had a range of a few miles:

The US Navy wanted to bridge the gap with a Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter or DASH. This was a small helicopter capable of carrying a single weapon and dropping it at the required spot, guided by a controller back on board ship.

The DASH was based on a one-man helicopter called a “Rotorcycle” built by Gyrodyne Company. This had two rotor blades rotating in opposite directions for lift, and a propeller for forward motion. The drone version was the size of a small car and weighed just over a ton. By 1963, the US Navy had eighty of them.

[…]

DASH was designed to be expendable; when it dropped a Mk57 nuclear depth charge it would be within the lethal radius of the resulting explosion. The powerful warhead, from five to twenty kilotons, guaranteed that the sub would be destroyed, and losing one drone for one submarine was a good exchange rate. The idea that DASH should carry a non-nuclear homing torpedo and come back afterwards was a case of mission creep; according to the original design it was only supposed to make one flight.

[…]

Executive Officer Phil King of the USS Blue modified a DASH, adding a television camera for reconnaissance and gunnery direction. Known as SNOOPY missions, these involved the DASH flying out to find targets. The operator identified them via the television link, and the destroyer then opened up with its battery of five-inch guns. The drone operator could see where the shells were landing and tell the gunners how to adjust their aim.

Further developments followed, including NITE PANTHER and BLOW LOW versions equipped with additional fuel tanks for longer range, night-vision systems and airborne radar.

The next logical step was to convert the DASH from finding targets to attacking them. NITE GAZELLE, GUN SHIP, and ATTACK DRONE were all individual modified aircraft with a range of weaponry including a six-barreled minigun firing four thousand rounds a minute, grenade launchers, bomblet dispensers and bombs, as well as a laser designator for directing smart bombs. The idea was that drones with guns would deal with the ground defenses, leaving the way clear for the bomber drones to hit targets with pinpoint accuracy.

[…]

“It became quite evident that the Navy no longer wanted DASH and wanted to move onto LAMPS manned helicopters.”

LAMPS was the Light Airborne Multipurpose System, a new manned helicopter that would operate from destroyers and take over the role of DASH. Removing DASH from the picture meant there would be no competition, and nobody would be able to argue that LAMPS was unnecessary.

[…]

The LAMPS project became the SH-60 Sea Hawk, now a multibillion dollar success story.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 6 Comments »

You could not truly be the chief technology or product officer unless you were the CEO

November 26th, 2023

Elon Musk by Walter IsaacsonFor the first six months of Zip2, Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal slept at the office, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), and showered at the YMCA:

Even after they moved in, Elon spent many nights in the office, crashing under his desk when he was exhausted from coding. “He had no pillow, he had no sleeping bag. I don’t know how he did it,” says Jim Ambras, an early employee. “Once in a while, if we had a customer meeting in the morning, I’d have to tell him to go home and shower.”

[…]

Errol Musk, not yet estranged from his sons, visited from South Africa and gave them $ 28,000 plus a beat-up car he bought for $ 500. Their mother, Maye, came from Toronto more often, bringing food and clothes. She gave them $ 10,000 and let them use her credit card because they had not been approved for one.

They got their first break when they visited Navteq, which had a database of maps. The company agreed to license it to the Musks for free until they started making a profit. Elon wrote a program that merged the maps with a listing of businesses in the area. “You could use your cursor and zoom in and move around the map,” says Kimbal. “That stuff is totally normal today, but it was mind-blowing to see that at the time. I think Elon and I were the first humans to see it work on the internet.” They named the company Zip2, as in “Zip to where you want to go.”

[…]

They bought a big frame for a computer rack and put one of their small computers inside, so that visitors would think they had a giant server. They named it “The Machine That Goes Ping,” after a Monty Python sketch. “Every time investors would come in, we showed them the tower,” Kimbal says, “and we would laugh because it made them think we were doing hardcore stuff.”

Maye flew from Toronto to help prepare for the meetings with venture capitalists, often staying up all night at Kinko’s to print the presentations. “It was a dollar a page for color, which we could barely afford,” she says. “We would all be exhausted except Elon. He was always up late doing the coding.”

[…]

They were soon astounded by an offer from Mohr Davidow Ventures to invest $ 3 million in the company. The final presentation to the firm was scheduled for a Monday, and that weekend Kimbal decided to make a quick trip to Toronto to fix their mother’s computer, which had broken. “We love our mom,” he explains. As he was leaving on Sunday to fly back to San Francisco, he got stopped by U.S. border officials at the airport who looked in his luggage and saw the pitch deck, business cards, and other documents for the company. Because he did not have a U.S. work visa, they wouldn’t let him board the plane. He had a friend pick him up at the airport and drive him across the border, where he told a less vigilant border officer that they were heading down to see the David Letterman show. He managed to catch the late plane from Buffalo to San Francisco, and made it in time for the pitch.

Mohr Davidow loved the presentation and finalized the investment. The firm also found an immigration lawyer to help the two Musks get work visas and gave them each $ 30,000 to purchase cars. Elon bought a 1967 Jaguar E-type. As a kid in South Africa, he had seen a picture of the car in a book on the best convertibles ever made, and he had vowed to buy one if he ever struck it rich. “It was the most beautiful car you could imagine,” he says, “but it broke down at least once a week.”

The venture capitalists soon did what they often do: bring in adult supervision to take over from the young founders. It had happened to Steve Jobs at Apple and to Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google. Rich Sorkin, who had run business development for an audio equipment company, was made the CEO of Zip2. Elon was moved aside to chief technology officer. At first, he thought the change would suit him; he could focus on building the product. But he learned a lesson. “I never wanted to be a CEO,” he says, “but I learned that you could not truly be the chief technology or product officer unless you were the CEO.”

Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

Adolf Hitler rejected any retreat not actually forced on him by the Red Army

November 25th, 2023

By January 1944, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), the Red Army had twice the men and tanks as the German army:

The only possibility for Germany to avoid total defeat was immediate withdrawal to the 1941 frontier and construction of a deep mine-strewn defensive line studded with antitank guns, advocated by Erwin Rommel.

Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein recommended a similar approach, but Adolf Hitler rejected any retreat not actually forced on him by the Red Army, and on March 30 ousted Manstein. Consequently, throughout 1944, German forces in the east conducted one pointless defensive stand and one retreat after another.

Posted in War | 4 Comments »

Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback

November 23rd, 2023

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsWhen I saw that Ridley Scott was directing a biopic of Napoleon, that nudged me to finally read a biography of the Emperor of the French, which I’d been meaning to do for…decades?

Dwarkesh Patel recently interviewed Andrew Roberts, the author of the biography I just read, and noted that there’s a “cult of Napoleon” in Silicon Valley:

Roberts’ introduction summarizes Napoleon’s accomplishments:

He came to power through a military coup only six years after entering the country as a penniless political refugee.

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Although his conquests ended in defeat and ignominious imprisonment, over the course of his short but eventful life he fought sixty battles and lost only seven.

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Yet his greatest and most lasting victories were those of his institutions, which put an end to the chaos of the French Revolution and cemented its guiding principle of equality before the law.

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Napoleon’s bridges, reservoirs, canals and sewers remain in use throughout France. The French foreign ministry sits above the stone quays he built along the Seine, and the Cour des Comptes still checks public spending accounts more than two centuries after he founded it. The Légion d’Honneur, an honor he introduced to take the place of feudal privilege, is highly coveted; France’s top secondary schools, many of them founded by Napoleon, provide excellent education and his Conseil d’État still meets every Wednesday to vet laws.

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The leadership skills he employed to inspire his men have been adopted by other leaders over the centuries, yet never equaled except perhaps by his great devotee Winston Churchill.

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The fact that his army was willing to follow him even after the retreat from Moscow, the battle of Leipzig and the fall of Paris testifies to his capacity to make ordinary people feel that they were capable of doing extraordinary, history-making deeds.

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Napoleon’s love affair with Josephine has been presented all too often in plays, novels and movies as a Romeo and Juliet story: in fact, it was anything but. He had an overwhelming crush on her, but she didn’t love him, at least in the beginning, and was unfaithful from the very start of their marriage. When he learned of her infidelities two years later while on campaign in the middle of the Egyptian desert, he was devastated. He took a mistress in Cairo in part to protect himself from accusations of cuckoldry, which were far more dangerous for a French general of the era than those of adultery. Yet he forgave Josephine when he returned to France, and they started off on a decade of harmonious marital and sexual contentment, despite his taking a series of mistresses. Josephine remained faithful and even fell in love with him. When he decided to divorce for dynastic and geostrategic reasons, Josephine was desolate but they remained friendly.

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He could entirely close off one part of his mind to what was going on in the rest of it; he himself likened it to being able to open and close drawers in a cupboard. On the eve of battle, as aides-de-camp were arriving and departing with orders to his marshals and reports from his generals, he could dictate his thoughts on the establishment of a girls’ school for the orphans of members of the Légion d’Honneur, and shortly after having captured Moscow he set down the regulations governing the Comédie-Française. No detail about his empire was too minute for his restless, questing energy. The prefect of a department would be instructed to stop taking his young mistress to the opera; an obscure country priest would be reprimanded for giving a bad sermon on his birthday; a corporal told he was drinking too much; a demi-brigade that it could stitch the words ‘Les Incomparables’ in gold onto its standard. He was one of the most unrelenting micromanagers in history, but this obsession with details did not prevent him from radically transforming the physical, legal, political and cultural landscape of Europe.

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Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback.

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‘They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person,’ he said after the failure of the royalist assassination plot of 1804. ‘I will defend it, for I am the Revolution.’ His characteristic egotism aside, Napoleon was right. He personified the best parts of the French Revolution, the ones that have survived and infused European life ever since.

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The ideas that underpin our modern world—meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances and so on—were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire. At the same time he dispensed with the absurd revolutionary calendar of ten-day weeks, the theology of the Cult of the Supreme Being, the corruption and cronyism of the Directory and the hyper-inflation that had characterized the dying days of the Republic.

Posted in Policy, War | 11 Comments »

Drop a howitzer on them

November 22nd, 2023

The GBU-28 is a 5,000-pound laser-guided “bunker busting” bomb:

It was designed, manufactured, and deployed in less than three weeks due to an urgent need during Operation Desert Storm to penetrate hardened Iraqi command centers located deep underground.

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The GBU-28 is unique in that time between the finalized design being approved to its first use in combat test took only two weeks between the 13th and 27th of February 1991.

The name apparently refers to the fact that this Guided Bomb Unit was designed, built, and ready to drop in four weeks:

The initial batch of GBU-28s was built from modified 8 inch/203 mm artillery barrels (principally from deactivated M110 howitzers), but later examples are purpose-built with the BLU-113 bomb body made by National Forge of Irvine, Pennsylvania. They weigh 5,000 pounds (2,268 kg) and contain 630 pounds (286 kg) of Tritonal explosive.

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It proved capable of penetrating over 50 meters (164 ft) of earth or 5 meters (16 ft) of solid concrete; this was demonstrated when a test bomb, bolted to a missile sled, smashed through 22 ft (6.7 m) of reinforced concrete and still retained enough kinetic energy to travel a half-mile downrange.

It looks more like a missile than a bomb:

F-15 Dropping GBU-28

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

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