History

Worthwhile Reading & Viewing

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When I met Putin as a young colonel in the KGB.

Thoughts on Russia and Ukraine, by Vitaliy Katsenelson, an American investment manager who was born in Russia.   Registration may be required–this is the first post of a three-part series.

A historian specializing in Russia has some thoughts.

A proposal to undermine Putin by stealing technical talent.

Don’t Be Preedy…a CB post from 2009 that I ran across while searching for something entirely different.

The Rise of Hot Capital, at Quillette.

And a video on Free Speech and Innovation, from Claire Lehmann and David Perell.

 

This War Comes Already Pre-Nuked

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So, the Biden (Mis) Administration, or whoever and whatever powers have the strings firmly attached to the puppet in the Oval Office seems determined to pick a fight and a war with Russia over the Ukraine. A fight in which most Americans might have some mild-to-moderate sympathies with the Ukrainians, as they were most viciously abused under Soviet rule, having the misfortune to be essentially the breadbasket of the Soviet Union and relatively unwilling to have their crops and livelihoods confiscated for the good of the Party of the Workers, and having in the interim since the fall of the Iron Curtain to have developed some pesky notions of a separate and rather rebellious national identity. The Ukraine, like Poland, is luckless geographically, in being the pathway of invading armies from either direction, so one can’t really blame them for being a little testy and proactive about another one.
But it’s not really our fight, and it seems to be one constructed in a Potemkin village fashion.
There was a story, most likely apocryphal regarding a proposed alliance sometime during the late 19th century, between (IIRC) Britain and France, likely against a bellicose Germany, wherein a high-level British diplomat and his equally high-level French counterpart began pounding out the details of the proposed military alliance. The British diplo asked his French counterpart; what would be the absolute minimum number of troops that Britain would contribute to the situation in an emergency in the case of German invasion. “Only one,” replied the French diplomat, “And we would make certain that he would be killed at once.”
That is what the Biden administration would like, apparently. They would like to be able to wave the bloody shirt, the blood-saturated BDU blouses of American military personnel as a cynical and calculated distraction from a year of epic fail.

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The Proper Frame for the Narrative

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I am watching matters develop with regards to the trucker strike, with appreciative interest, seeing that is really another variant of a grass-roots spontaneous civic spontaneity, much like the Tea Party was, some years ago. The Canadian trucker protest has that in common with the Tea Party protesters but the difference might be that the independent trucker community is a smaller, a more cohesive and even more media-savvy and self-disciplined party. The various Tea Party protests were more general, cut across class lines (at least the urban-focused one that I was involved in was, no matter what the establishment national media might insist) and focused more upon voting in various political races then upcoming, and protesting the general monetary incompetence of the Obama Administration.

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Gallipoli, China, and the Snapping Shrimp

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An article in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute says that a major factor in the Gallipoli disaster of WWI was the great effectiveness of the Turkish minefields, which checkmated the power of the Allied (British, French, and Russian) navies and prohibited a seapower-only passage through the Strait of Dardanelles.  The authors argue that China’s intensive production of naval mines could result in a similar strategically-critical threat in a future conflict.

Several approaches to reduce the minefield threat are discussed…one rather surprising angle is to exploit the characteristics of the snapping shrimp…these crustaceans generate extremely loud sounds when they close their claws, and American submarine commanders in WWII would sometimes hide in snapping shrimp colonies to mask their acoustic signatures from enemy hydrophones.  These creatures are especially and conveniently dense, it seems, in the East and South China Seas, and it is suggested that arrays of sensors, backed by considerable computing power, could process the returns from the noise generated by the shrimp and hence locate the enemy mines.

Stranger things have happened…I guess.

Extremely Cool

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Here’s a 22-year-old who builds microchips in his parents’ garage.   His most recent production contains 1200 transistors, he made a 6-transistor version when he was a senior in high school.   The famous Intel 4004 microprocessor contained 2300 transistors, and he’s hoping to get to that level soon.

The article also mentions Jeri Ellsworth…in 2002, she created a system to emulate the old Commodore 64 computer, and also other systems of that period, so that she and other people could play old games that had been developed for them.   This led to Mammoth Toys hiring her to create a computer on a chip for the C64 Direct-to-TV joystick…it sold over half a million units.

Haven’t watched it yet, but she describes her own adventures in making microchips at home in the YouTube series Cooking with Jeri.

Great to see this kind of spirit!