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Monday, September 25, 2017

September 25, 2017 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"The Top Priority in Combat"--Roland Warzecha (10 min.). Staying alive.


Firearms/Self-Defense/Prepping:
  • "Back to Basics: Gunpowder"--American Rifleman. A history of gun powder, including the development of smokeless powder, and discussion of when to use fast burning versus slow burning powders.
So-called faster powders like Hodgdon’s Titewad or Alliant’s Bullseye are fast burning powders with virtually no leftover residue. They achieve their maximum chamber pressure pretty quickly, and it decays just as quickly. These kinds of powders are useful for target shooting in pistols, where light recoil and consistent velocity contribute to accuracy. Moving down the scale to slower powders like Winchester 231, Accurate No. 5 and Ramshot Zip we find powders still useful to the handgunner who is looking for accuracy, perhaps a bit more velocity without undue recoil, as well as the clay bird shotgunner. Moving toward the slower powders Aliant’s Blue Dot, IMR 4227 or Winchester 296 is equally at home in a heavy 12-gauge field load as it is in a .357 Mag. or .44 Mag. revolver. Some of these powders can also be used in small rifle cases like the .22 Hornet or .30 Carbine. For the larger, magnum hunting cartridges, say, .30-06 and above, powders like IMR 4350, H1000 (Hodgdon), Ramshot Big Game or Hodgdon Retumbo is called for. These are among the slowest burning smokeless powders we have. They are designed to spread out the peak chamber pressure over a longer period to allow that pressure to push against the bullet’s base for a longer time and thereby increase its velocity. What I have explained here is the most basic overview of powder burn rates. An exhaustive chart covering some 267 different powders can be found here. 
        Most memory circuits operate according to what are called Hebbian precepts. It is a fancy way of saying most memory circuits get strong with use, and disappear with disuse. So if you exercise the circuit, it upregulates production of all the parts that make it strong, and it builds up like a muscle. Likewise, if you don’t use the circuit, a Hebbian synapse will waste away, and whatever it did will be lost.
             You see this effect in life. You learn calculus and get great at it by doing it every day. As you do, your calculus neurons grow strong and the synapses connecting the ideas fire off very powerfully. You become a machine at interweaving different equations. You see the graphs overlay and affect each other in your mind, you spot relationships between variables and the equations that relate them, and you can go effortlessly from position to velocity to acceleration all along the way. Integrals, derivatives, limits, it all flows out of your brain immediately as you do it repeatedly and exercise the neurons. Leave the field, and after ten years, you can barely do anything. All of the circuits have wasted away and their connections no longer fire strongly enough to pull out the memories of what to do.
              Likewise, you meet someone at a party, learn their name, and don’t see them for a few years, and good luck if you run into them on the street. It even manifests in the physical dexterity of musical instruments, and the reaction times of fighters. So the entire rest of the non-amygdala brain, and everything outside the spinal cord, operates based on a rule of use it or lose it.

       Other Stuff: 
                Fewer Americans are marrying over all, and whether they do so is more tied to socioeconomic status than ever before. In recent years, marriage has sharply declined among people without college degrees, while staying steady among college graduates with higher incomes.
                   Currently, 26 percent of poor adults, 39 percent of working-class adults and 56 percent of middle- and upper-class adults are married, according to a research brief published today from two think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and Opportunity America. In 1970, about 82 percent of adults were married, and in 1990, about two-thirds were, with little difference based on class and education.
                     A big reason for the decline: Unemployed men are less likely to be seen as marriage material.
                       “Women don’t want to take a risk on somebody who’s not going to be able to provide anything,” said Sharon Sassler, a sociologist at Cornell who published “Cohabitation Nation: Gender, Class, and the Remaking of Relationships” with Amanda Jayne Miller last month.
                        As marriage has declined, though, childbearing has not, which means that more children are living in families without two parents and the resources they bring.
                           “The sharpest distinction in American family life is between people with a bachelor’s or not,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins and author of “Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America.”
                              Just over half of adolescents in poor and working-class homes live with both their biological parents, compared with 77 percent in middle- and upper-class homes, according to the research brief, by W. Bradford Wilcox and Wendy Wang of the Institute for Family Studies. Thirty-six percent of children born to a working-class mother are born out of wedlock, versus 13 percent of those born to middle- and upper-class mothers.
                               The research brief defined “working class” as adults with an adjusted family income between the 20th and 50th percentiles, with high school diplomas but not bachelor’s degrees. Poor is defined as those below the 20th percentile or without high school diplomas, and the middle and upper class as those above the 50th percentile or with college degrees.
                                   Americans across the income spectrum still highly value marriage, sociologists have found. But while it used to be a marker of adulthood, now it is something more wait to do until the other pieces of adulthood are in place — especially financial stability. For people with less education and lower earnings, that might never happen.
                                    College graduates are more likely to plot their lives methodically — vetting people they date until they’re sure they want to move in with them, and using birth control to delay childbirth until their careers are underway.
                                      Less educated people are more likely to move in with boyfriends or girlfriends in a matter of months, and to get pregnant at a younger age and before marriage. This can make financial and family stability harder to achieve later on.
                                         “It starts with moving in together quickly, for economic exigency reasons as opposed to relationship reasons,” Ms. Sassler said. “Then struggling with making ends meet and trying to manage this with a partner just elevates the challenges.”
                                           Evidence shows that the struggles of men without college degrees in recent years have led to a decline in marriage. It has been particularly acute in regions where well-paying jobs in male-dominated fields have disappeared because of automation and trade.
                                            In a working paper published in July, three economists studied how the decline in manufacturing jobs from 1990 to 2014, across industries and regions, “contributed to the rapid, simultaneous decline of traditional household structures.”
                                             Labor market changes made men less marriageable, they concluded. There were fewer available men, because unemployment was associated with a rise in incarceration or mortality from drugs and alcohol. The men who were left were less desirable, because they lacked income and were more likely to drink to excess or use drugs.
                                                  Researchers found a corresponding increase in births to unmarried mothers. The decline in marriage was not offset by more couples living together.
                                        The article goes on to discuss that fixing the problem would not only requiring bringing back good paying jobs, but also repairing the social/cultural institutions that help support families and which likewise suffer during economic downturns. 
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