We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
The technology uses high power electromagnetic energy instead of explosive chemical propellants (energetics) to propel a projectile farther and faster than any preceding gun. At full capability, the rail gun will be able to fire a projectile more than 200 nautical miles at a muzzle velocity of mach seven and impacting its target at mach five. In contrast, the current Navy gun, MK 45 five-inch gun, has a range of nearly 20 miles. The high velocity projectile will destroy its targets due to its kinetic energy rather than with conventional explosives.
A very big advantage of kinetic energy weapons is the reduction in size of a warships Achilles heel: the explosives magazine. With a railgun you would not need propellant charges.
The safety aspect of the rail gun is one of its greatest potential advantages, according to Dr. Elizabeth D’Andrea, ONR’s Electromagnetic Railgun Program Manager. Safety on board ship is increased because no explosives are required to fire the projectile and no explosive rounds are stored in the ship’s magazine.
I am not sure I believe you would get rid of all explosives as you might still want to lob an HE shell over the horizon and downwards on a target. If you are firing on a target 200 miles away, you cannot use direct fire unless you intend to blast a tunnel through a whole lot of water. That means the impact velocity on another ship using indirect fire would only be the normal terminal velocity of the falling shell. Nonetheless, the chance of a repeat of the HMS Hood disaster is much decreased.
What I would like to know is: has anyone done the calculations about direct fire at high elevation? Aircraft are naturally one of the targets. One wonders if it could reach out and touch something at a rather higher altitude.
For those unfamiliar with naval battles of WWII, the HMS Hood was sunk by one lucky salvo from the Bismarck that came straight down into the aft magazine. The ship was on the way to the bottom almost before the smoke cleared. There were (I believe) only 4 survivors.
Iraq is still in a descent to normalcy according to this DOD report:
Weekly attacks in the Baghdad security districts for the past 15 weeks matched levels last seen consistently in 2005. Bombings increased last week, but remained below the long-term average for the 23rd week in a row, he said. Throughout Iraq, weekly casualties decreased by three percent last week, continuing to remain below the long-term average for the 21st week in a row, Anderson said. Civilian casualties have dropped from 1,700 in January 2007 to 170 this month.
I think I can speak for the rest of the Samizdatistas when I raise my glass and say to our armed forces: “Well done lads!”
One of the not-so-secret reasons why motor cars are popular, to the fury of some, is that some of the designs are just staggeringly beautiful. As with aircraft or yachts, the aesthetics of a perfectly designed machine should never be underestimated. At a time when much so-called Modern Art (the capital M and A says it all) is such empty, vacuous tosh, it is a fact that needs to be remarked that so much industrial design that we have today is outstanding, inventive, clever, even a bit naughty.
This must surely be contender for one of the very best, courtesy of those clever men at Alfa Romeo.
CNN man to Senators Clinton and Obama: “People all over the country are saying if you got together it would be a Dream Ticket”.
Senator Obama: “I was a friend of Senator Clinton before the nomination race began and I will be a friend of Senator Clinton’s after the nomination race is over”.
Senator Clinton: “The Republicans are more-of-the-same, we represent change. You can tell that just by looking at us”.
In short “change” means race and gender – not lower government spending or less regulations.
Indeed both Senators Clinton and Obama think the Republicans should have spent even more taxpayers money on health, education and welfare, and passed even more regulations.
As for CNN – it is like the rest of the main stream media. It can not ask tough questions to ‘liberals’ because its folk share all their basic assumptions.
The cover story in this weeks New Scientist is about how genetics determines political opinions.
However, the story did have some odd assumptions. ‘Liberals’, who the New Scientist seemed to be defining as people who vote Democrat, were described as people who are “open to new ideas”. However, the basic characteristic of such a ‘liberal’ is that they are not “open to new ideas”. For example, they continue to support spending ever more taxpayers money on health, education and welfare programs, regardless of the evidence that this does not work and disregarding any argument for reforms.
‘Liberals’ have a set of assumptions that they never question – for if they questioned them they would no longer be liberals.
More government Welfare State spending – good, anyone who opposes this hates the poor.
Government support for the arts – good, anyone who opposes this is a philistine.
Anti discrimination regulations – good, anyone who opposes them is a bigot.
Anti trust regulations – good, anyone who opposes them is in the pay of big business.
And so on and so on.
So any group of ‘scientists’ who accept the assumption that “liberals are open to new ideas” are not scientists at all. Still I suppose the dream of finding an ‘anti-Progressive’ gene (or combination of genes) will continue – so they can seek to exterminate us. But then that might be interpreted as proving another finding of the studies “conservatives fear death more than liberals”.
Hard to square this with the fact that conservatives are more likely to join the armed forces than liberals are. But then I think this form of ‘science’ (depending as it does on ‘surveys’ and so on) is best described as ‘crapology’.
It seems thespian Wesley Snipes has been duking it out with vampires the IRS based on the rather reasonable notion he should not have to pay them his hard earned lucre.
Wesley Snipes’ attorneys admitted his ideas were crazy – that Americans have no obligation to pay taxes and the IRS cannot legally collect them. […] Co-defendants Eddie Ray Kahn, the founder of a known tax protest group, and Douglas P. Rosile, a delicensed accountant, were convicted Friday by the same jury of tax fraud and conspiracy. Both face up to 10 years in prison.
Oh yes, the notion the state has no right to your money is… crazy. If there is one thing the state will not tolerate, it is choking off the kleptocratic basis of all its power. So is Wesley destined to become the poster boy for anti-statist tax protesters? I am far too cynical to think a Hollywood actor could have coherent anti-statist views, but he would cut a dashing figure for ‘our side’ if it were true.
Last year I traveled continuously from mid-May to early November, not to mention a couple other months on the road earlier that year. One of the trips was to Wyoming in July and while there Jim Bennett and I visited Frontier Astronautics rather unique home office.
Jim and I drove for a long time.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
We found their sign miles down a back road off a County road.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
After a ‘short’ drive up their private road we arrived at the main gate where Jim rang the door bell.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Two engineers came out and led us on the trek to the bunker doors. They are large enough to pass an Atlas missile on a truck.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Back in perhaps 1962 the bunker center section held a liquid fueled Atlas ICBM. This is the flame trench that would be underneath the ICBM. The sections of the bunker to the left and right contained the fuel and oxidizer tanks used to fuel it. The center section is now (probably) the world’s only indoor engine test stand. Interior walls are 30 inch thick reinforced concrete: this allows the engineers and their monitoring gear to sit mere feet away from a firing engine.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The office also has a sun roof… These many, many ton reinforced concrete doors were built to slide to either side so the Atlas could be raised into firing position.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Speaking of the engineers, here are the two who gave us the grand tour.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
This is the tunnel to what was once a control room. The consoles are long gone and it now contains a modern flat where the owner, a former Titan IV engineer, and his wife live.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
It is without a doubt the only family home with an indoor rocket engine test stand.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
There is a very interesting story in parts of the media today. Large parts of the Middle East and (in particular) India are suffering a major internet outage. It seems that a storm in Alexandria in Egypt has led to ships going off course and their anchors damaging the SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG fiber optic cables connecting India with Europe and Asia, and capacity to India has thus been reduced. There are some older, lower capacity cables still in use, and there are cables to the US also, but these were the main connections to India. It seems at this point unclear whether the two cables were both ruptures near Alexandria, or whether one of the outages was off Marseilles. But in any event, two of the world’s key cables were damaged within a few hours. This seems quite remarkable. The TWO main cables between Europe and India were both damaged within a matter of hours. It seems an extraordinary coincidence. It may or may not be an extraordinary coincidence, and we will find out.
However, as a science fiction fan and a reader of Wired Magazine, the mention of these two cables brings back a thought of one of the finest articles ever published in the magazine. In 1996, science fiction author Neal Stephenson (of Snow Crash fame) wrote a long and wonderful essay for Wired Magazine entitled “Mother Earth, Motherboard”. This article was written as the 1990s telecoms boom was gearing up to great heights of enthusiasm, and in a period in which global telecoms at least appeared to be gaining new levels of competition. Stephenson wrote about travelling to a large number of locations around the world, watching the laying of an undersea fibre optic cable named FLAG (Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe), or more specifically the section of it connecting Europe and Asia. He discussed the technologies, and the politics, and the history of communications and other related matters that went with it, and the history of the places he saw along the way. In return for paying what must have been a very considerable expense claim, Wired Magazine got a spectacular piece of writing, but Stephenson clearly got more than they did, as many of the locations that were researched for this essay popped up again in considerable detail in his novel Cryptonomicon, and to a lesser extent in his Baroque Trilogy that followed. Many of them cropped up in sections of those novels set in various eras in the past, particularly in the second world war.
The list of places that Stephenson visited during the laying of FLAG has a very trading empire quality about it, and mostly a British trading empire quality about it: Alexandria, Port Said, Bombay, Penang, Hong Kong, Shanghai, places that contain, as Stephenson puts it, “British imperial-era hotels fraught with romance and history, sort of like the entire J. Peterman catalogue rolled into one building”. The reason for the confluence with the British Empire makes perfect sense when you think about it: the strongest parts of the British Empire were outposts to defend Britain’s control of trade routes, and so they are at key points on those trade routes. If you are laying an undersea cable, then you want to lay it along the shortest route that it can safely be placed. What is required is a mixture of minimum distance and political stability. The minimum distances for cables today are the same as the minimum distances for ships in the nineteenth century (and generally for ships today, also). Between Europe and Asia, there are two key bottlenecks through which you must travel, as the alternatives are either much longer or much less politically stable. Those two bottlenecks are of course through Egypt between the Mediterranean and the red sea, and through the Straits of Malacca between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Hence Alexandria and Penang. Of course, these places have been strategic since long before the British Empire, which is why a lighthouse and a library were built in Alexandria, but the British Empire is recent enough for its mood to linger. → Continue reading: Some thoughts on India’s internet outage
Bill Gates’ Microsoft has made an unsolicited bid – at a cool $44.6bn – for Yahoo!. The offer is either in stock or in cash. I must say there comes a point where the sheer, mind-bendingly large sums of money that are involved (thanks to years of inflation) make it hard to relate to the sizes on offer.
And to think that $44.6bn is chump change to Gates.
Tomorrow evening we are doing a blogger bash and one of the Samizdatistas, Michael Jennings in a bout of generosity is bringing a whole leg of Serrano ham to share. Another blogging groupie is kindly bringing a ham stand and a knife. So the video below is particularly relevant and wonderfully silly:
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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