DDE

I'm continuing to read Svechin - see other thread - and I've promptly stumbled upon a good example from WWI. His 6th Finland Regiment was acting as a rear guard in Northern Poland facing a good chunk of the German army with barely any support, already pretty down on men and having had a good quarter detached to a different sectir. He decided his situation was hairy enough and beat a retreat after his own rear guard (5th Company) traded fire with a German cavalry screen. The situation got pretty messy - while Svechin rode out to corral 5th Company, his deputy decided that their main withdrawal route was already taken by German outriders, and instead almost led the regiment into a full German cavalry division; sorting out this mess cost valuable time, and so the regiment rushed down a semi-random forest road, forced-march at about 8 km/h, 5th Company at the rear constantly firing at the scattered Germans hot on their heels and yelling for everyone to go even faster. Svechin realized two things were about to happen. One, his soldiers were about to start discarding their equipment and weapons and the worst conscripts might just keel over from the exertion. Two, soon afterwards, the entire regiment would likely all surrender to the first lone German they see. So he screamed at the oldest feldfebehl to start a cadence, and then screamed at 5th Company that he's going to order a 10-minute rest if they so much as try rush everyone again. So the regiment slowed down to about 3 km/h, but the shooting mostly stopped - partly because 5th Company stopped seeing the ghosts of riders behind every tree, and partly because the sparse Germans immediately lost all interest in a force they couldn't take through sheer panache. The flipside of this was that when 5th Regiment saw 6th Regiment parade towards theor positions, they proved extremely difficult to convince that the Germans were hot on their heels.

Apparently it's not uncommon to squeeze FLEXCEL fuel bladders like toothpaste by driving the tank you're refueling onto them. https://t.me/ovbron/5518

Oh, look, another publicity run by the Pleistocene Park. Check the date on this one:

Chang'e 6, on scope https://t.me/kiam_ison_network/201

SVOM's booster returns the usual way https://t.me/RingsandMoons/8257 https://t.me/RingsandMoons/8258

That's no glitch, that's the remote landscaping team aboard the Superdestroyer having their fun.

Simply mentioning scientific ethics in a scientific article makes readers more suspicious https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27150266/

"I did not know marches can have sick drops..." Max Popenker has shared his puzzlement over Soviet photos from 1940 that claim to depict a paratrooper corps' marching band set to drop in full kit

https://t.me/grimdarknessoffarspace/1919 Does the Chang'e RV look suspiciously like a Kerbal-sized Soyuz to anyone?

AFAIK Google is beginning to integrate GPTish algorithms into its search and summarization, without a choice to be disregarded.

Do you want to build or do you want to fly? Nova seems like it's trying to do Elite with better physics, CoaDE is its own very distinct and nerdy thing.

OK, a good start would be to explain the "methodology" of the responses above. Was it Google and it GPT-esque search agent? What's new, then? That the Internet would somehow lead to qualitative improvements in public discourse was a naive dream back from its early days. Access to information was never the problem.

* laughs in bronze * Designed autonomously "without human intervention", huh? Sorry, even before seeing the mention of UAE this stinks "investor bait" almost on the level of Theranos, minus the immorality of medical fraud. Edit: after having slept on it, let me refine my point. It's possible, even likely, that the statement is technically correct and that, after the humans meticulously defined all parameters, an iterative design algorithm took two weeks on a supercomputer to optimize the engine. I'm doing the wrong thing of considering only the context and the extraneous circumstances. UAE is swimming in money - not just oil, "Dubaysk" is a major destination for Russian capital, UAE isn't too stringent on sanctions enforcement and AFAIK almost ended up on FATF's grey list of jurisdictions with lacking anti-money laundering controls - and has a political mandate to diversify its economy. This means it can and will throw money at anything with "space", "AI" or "nano" like it's 2018. Saudi Arabia spends money on architectural abominations like The Wall, UAE spends it on space. Good for them, but we must acknowledge the Middle East is a major magnet for very shifty and outright fraudulent start-ups, and that the one under discussion has red flags all over.

Moscow has just had a Beaufort 9 storm with a few tornadoes, 1 dead, 18 wounded. Also, here's a new phobia for you: one guy really had to go in the middle of all of this. The wind flipped the portajohn over, door-first, trapping him inside - fortunately with a mobile phone, so he was freed in under 15 minutes. There seems to be a pretty poor habit of not bolting these down at all, causing them to "wander" the streets during the summer storms.

I'll parrot Shafarevich: objectivity as it is commonly understood involves the application of the methods developed in the "hard sciences", which rely on a lot of assumptions in order to establish a common reality, such as the SI system of measurements. However, when applied outside of that domain, objectivity becomes pure reductionism, allergic to nuance and individuality. Should one truly aspire to force their imperfect, subjective mind - whether naturally evolved or built by other imperfect minds - to operate in the deeply unnatural objective way? Especially when looking for solutions to inherently subjective problems?

Paradox - who I'd imagine had money to burn - have just killed their Sims competitor, Life by You, which theoretically could have been the cash grab of the decade if it outran Sims 5, which it would likely have.

Looks like I'll be getting a free airshow with my seaside sunbathing this year. Last year Anapa seemed to be hosting an A-50 that flew in and out like clockwork. That was rather boring. This year, I'm crossing off all the bingos. Mi-8, Mi-24, Ka-27, Su-22, Su-34, Il-38, even a Be-12...

Today I bring you the sordid tale of the Savon-K Affair. Late last week, a number of clients of a Russian delivery-only restaurant went down with botulotoxin poisoning: Moscow - 169, including a junior coworker of mine Nizhnyi Novgorod - 14 Tatarstan - 14 No fatalities reported. The cause was almost instantly tracked back to the beans in Kuhnya na Rayone salads. These beans have been tracked to a small supplier and their truly space-age facility. This would be their sophisticated red bean storage (also the employee canteen and barracks): The place was full of rotten wares. The security just let the journos onto the crime scene, but the employees - those that hadn't been rounded up by immigration authorities - fled on sight. As I wrote some time ago, if you try to protect business interests during COVID by waiving most health and safety inspections, you better be prepared to live with the consequences.

Imagine a continuous development in scale from World Wars I and II with a major global slaughterhouse every 25 or so years, until, and if, demographic transition of the early XXIst century makes expending millions of lives in war prohibitive. That's what Hiroshima and Nagasaki have spared us from.

So I've gotten myself some light (no) holiday reading. Alexander Svechin is an Interbellum military theorist and WWI military practitioner presently in the vogue, and his own biographic work about his time with the 6th Finland Rifles puts Hašek to shame. The PDF I'm reading from is really copy-paste unfriendly, so I'll do the cliffnotes version. One truly ridiculous moment is him praising his machine gun (i.e. tachanka) company ensign for keeping him, the regiment's commander, forever in the dark about the number of machine guns on hand. This appeared to help with increasing their number from 4 (all captured ones) to 32. The real hoot, though, was Svechin's description of the same division's 7th Regiment. Its first commander was the Chief Gastronomist of the General Staff (was that even an official posting!?) who died to an Austrian shell while having dinner, and the head of the regiment's officers' assembly was the owner of the prestigious Aquarium restaurant in St Petersburg. Accordingly, 7th Regiment, with its, quote, "culinary connections", would always be posted in the rear and conveniently close to Vladimir von Notbeck's divisional HQ, and only committed to fighting in the most desperate of times, at which point it would, quote, "demonstrate considerable skill at marching in place".

One of the T2 era comic books had this exact idea as the "recon sweep mode" for the T-Infinity (?) Instead, we almost got Lance Hendricks.

Fun fact: Trofim Lysenko argued he was defending Darwinism from Wesimann's heresy.

Thank you everyone for contributing. I've contented myself with ripping the first book of The Expanse from one of the many Youtube posts that keep cropping up. By that moment, I'd run out of OneDrive space and decided to stop for now. For the future, I've taken note that the hive of scum and villainy that is VK contains (or used to, pre-war) a significant underbelly on English-language audiobook channels. There's no satisfactory download solution unless you shell out for a paid subscription, but I've already been using it as a music player. A shame I'm going to spend the next couple of months never starting Steam with an active internet connection in case Valve misreads General License 25D and does something stupid with my games, but, oh well, such are the times.