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Friday, March 16, 2018

March 16, 2018 -- A Quick Run Around The Web

"Shotgun or Sidearm" (14-1/2 min.) This is a police training video from 1976 which I believe I posted before. I bring it up because of the articles I linked to recently on ricochets. Started at the 6:40 mark (my links should start at the correct point), the video briefly discusses ricochet and gives a real world demonstration of ricocheting buckshot under a car without any of the pellets striking the underside of the car.

  • Greg Ellifritz has posted this week's Weekend Knowledge Dump. He has links to articles and videos on strength training, the smart way to engage an active shooter, scams common to third world countries, and more. Check it out.
       Ellifritz's comments on one article particularly struck me because it is something that I've noted before in the context of post-SHTF militia or self-defense groups: the importance of certification over skill. Ellifritz writes:
A university professor explains how the entire educational system is rigged to value credentials over actual skills and experience.  I see the exact same thing in the firearms training industry.  The “credential” of simply being a police officer  or in the military has more value to prospective students than any “civilian” who has spent thousands of hours studying, training, and perfecting his craft.  You can also see this playing out with some of the crappy NRA “instructors” teaching CCW classes.  They have the “instructor” credential, but they have none of the skills to do the job well.
  • Grant Cunningham offers up some sage advice to those of us that carry weapons for purposes of protecting ourselves and loved ones: "You don’t need to win. You need to survive." He notes that your basic goal is to "get safe and stay safe." He adds:
    Here’s the thing: I don’t need to dominate my opponent to do that. I don’t need to ‘win’; I simply need to do whatever is necessary to get to safety. That might entail doing damage to my attacker, perhaps even lethal damage, in order to get there — and I certainly accept that — but I never lose sight of my goal to get to safety.
      For the past few months, I’ve been starting all of my live fire range sessions with drills that are designed as tests. I make a point of shooting the drill or test cold. I do this to realistically track my performance. As Robert pointed out in a recent article, you don’t get to choose when trouble finds you and you don’t get to wait until your feeling tip top. You may be called upon to use your gun when you’re tired, sick, cold, hungry, angry, or frustrated. No matter how you feel, you have to be prepared to flip the switch and make it happen. That’s why I try to test myself every range session with some sort of metric that I can track.
      • "IFAK- Can You Save Your Own Life?"--AZ Rifleman. As a shooter or hunter, your individual first aid kit needs to be able to stop major bleeding, and should include a tourniquet, hemostatic gauze, gauze pads, a pressure bandage (such as the Israeli bandage), and a chest seal. You can keep bandaids, burn cream, etc., in a larger general purpose first aid kit.
      • "Shotgun Emergency/Port Load"--Priority Performance. As most of you know, if your shotgun runs dry, you can pop a shell into the open port, close the bolt, and fire off another round. This article discusses the basic techniques needed, as well as the pros and cons of finer details such as whether to reach over the top of your shotgun to retrieve and load the shell, or come up from underneath.
      • "How To Concealed Carry In Summer"--Alien Gear Holsters. We are close to that time of year again, and this article has some good advice on the topic. One piece of advice is that you might just need to move to a smaller pistol. While there are many instructors who advocate carrying the same rig and same set up all year round, my opinion (which I've expressed before) is that it will be unrealistic for most people to do so. Anyway, read the article and see what you think.
      • "3V Gear OUTLAW II"--New Rifleman. There is a fairly significant school of thought among long distance shooters and hunters that recommend using a shooting bag over a bipod for steadying a rifle. However, even if you don't ascribe to that thought, you still need something to carry your range gear. The author here reviews a sling bag (i.e., a single padded sling for carrying rather than two as in a standard backpack) that is reasonably priced and has served him well for the last several months.
      • "What no politician wants to admit about gun control"--Vox. The author writes: "Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners." Of course, there is no evidence to support even that argument, but it does show us that the liberals final goal is mass confiscation. 
      • "The Population Bomb Has Been Defused"--Bloomberg. The author is only a couple decades behind the times: most nations have fallen to or below replacement level fertility rates. This article does have some updated information on Africa, however, which has lagged behind. However, some sub-Saharan nations are beginning to see fertility rates begin to fall below 5 children per woman. As I noted a few days ago, Africa will soon emerge as the major source of immigration for Europe and North America because of the large number of young men.
      • "Chinese Commandos Deploy with QTS-11 Integrated Combat System"--The Firearm Blog. The system combines the QBZ-03 5.8×42mm assault rifle (a standard layout rifle rather than a bullpup) with a 20mm grenade launcher. The system is not light, however: 15.4 lbs. 
      • Pat Buchanan writes at The American Conservative: "Globalists vs. Nationalists: Who Owns the Future?" Our greatest president, George Washington, observed that for reasons of national security, a nation needed to be able to manufacture or produce all necessary goods. A lesson ignored by those who believe that nations are passe and people are fungible. But Buchanan notes that public support for globalism has waned throughout the West:
      To rising millions in the West, the open borders and free trade globalism they cherish and champion is not a glorious future, but an existential threat to the sovereignty, independence and identity of the countries they love. And they will not go gentle into that good night.
      • Why do progressives hate poor people? "How Trade Deals and Immigration Laws Hurt Workers—Mexican Workers"--The New Republic. The New Republic is a leftist magazine that feigns being conservative, so one would not expect them to be concerned about American workers. However, in this piece, the author notes how open borders and free trade has even hurt Mexican farmers and workers, as well as the financial stability of the country. One example:
                Even more important is the story of Mexican corn. Maize was first domesticated in what is today Mexico, spreading across the Americas as the core staple crop of thousands of indigenous civilizations. It remains the core food staple of Mexicans. NAFTA flooded the Mexican market with American corn, driving Mexican farmers using pre-industrial methods out of the market. It was cheaper to import the American corn—or at least it was before corn gained other industrial applications.
                  I was in Mexico in January 2007 when formerly cheap American corn became expensive after American agribusiness began using it to make ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, and other industrial products. Tortilla prices tripled in some parts of Mexico in 2006. The average Mexican family consumes one kilogram of tortillas a day. So when prices rose to as high as $1.81 for that kilogram in a nation with a minimum wage of $4.60 a day, the protests in Mexico created a brief but major political crisis. It was not only a crisis of the food supply, but a crisis of national identity. If Mexico could not feed itself on its national crop, what did that mean for the security of the nation and Mexico’s place in the global economy? This is NAFTA’s legacy as much as unemployed steel workers in the United States.  
          • "Ben Shapiro defends free trade"--Vox Day. Free trade within a nation is a boon. Free trade between nations is much more problematic, not the least of the problems being that most nations cheat. The reason that is important is because free trade is premised on the concept of comparative advantage, which is that a nation (or region) should concentrate on areas of production where it is most efficient, all other things being equal. However, when a country--say, China or Japan--subsidize their industries or refuse to allow imports of goods from other nations, then the market is distorted so it is no longer being driven by comparative advantage. Free trade arguments also ignore labor (because considering it shows up some of the major flaws). In any event, Vox Day discusses some of the flaws to the free trade arguments in the article cited above.
                    ... [D]oes immigration make Americans as opposed to America richer?
                       In 2017, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released the most detailed study on the economics of immigration in America to date. It runs more than 600 pages, and was authored by an interdisciplinary team—it is the “gold standard” of academic papers on the subject.  The report found a number of interesting data. For example, the researchers found that around 100 percent of immigration-driven economic growth accrued to the immigrants themselves—not to American citizens. Immigration grew the economic pie, but did nothing to grow the slices served up to Americans. That answers that, but there’s more.
                        The researchers also found immigration contributes to wage stagnation for American workers.  This point should be obvious to anyone familiar with the law of supply and demand: a relatively bigger labor supply means lower wages, just as a relatively large supply of apples means cheaper apples.  This is consistent with another study conducted by the Center for Immigration Studies, which found that mass immigration is one of the primary reasons wages for black Americans have stagnated over the last few decades.
                           Most importantly, the Academies’ research found that the economic impact of immigrants follows a non-linear distribution.  A few hyper-productive immigrants generate most of the economic growth, while the majority of immigrants break even, or are actually a net drain on the U.S. economy. Roughly 47 percent of immigrants, in fact, are a net drain on public revenue—they consume more in government services than they contribute in taxes.  The study pegs their net present value cost at $170,000.
                            But while resistors have been miniaturized with, for example, the development of the surface mount resistor, and capacitors have given way to supercapacitor materials that approach the theoretical limit, the basic design of inductors has remained the same throughout the centuries. Despite being invented way back in 1831, nothing about their basic design has changed in nearly 200 years. They function on the principle of magnetic inductance, where a current, a coil of wire, and a core of magnetizable material are used in tandem.
                               But there is another approach, in theory, that inductors can take. There's also a phenomenon known as kinetic inductance, where instead of a changing magnetic field inducing an opposing current as in magnetic inductance, it's the inertia of the particles that carry the electric current themselves — such as electrons — that oppose a change in their motion.
                                 If you envision an electric current as a series of charge carriers (like electrons) all moving steadily, in a row, and at a constant speed, you can imagine what it would take to change that current: an additional force of some type. Each of those particles would need a force to act on them, causing them to accelerate or decelerate. The same principle that creates Newton's most famous law of motion, F = ma, tells us that if we want to change the motions of these charged particles, we need to exert a force on them. In this equation, it's their masses, or the m in the equation, that resists that change in motion. That's where kinetic inductance comes from. Functionally, it's indistinguishable from magnetic inductance, it's just that kinetic inductance has only ever been practically large under extreme conditions: either in superconductors or in extremely high-frequency circuits.

                          * * *

                                   That's where the work of Banerjee's Nanoelectronics Research Lab and their collaborators comes in. By exploiting the phenomenon of kinetic inductance, they were able to, for the first time, demonstrate the effectiveness a fundamentally different kind of inductor that didn't rely on Faraday's magnetic inductance. Instead of using conventional metal inductors, they used graphene — carbon bonded together into an ultra-hard, highly-conductive configuration that also has a large kinetic inductance — to make the highest inductance-density material ever created. In a paper last month published in Nature Electronics, the group demonstrated that if you inserted bromine atoms between various layers of graphene, in a process known as intercalation, you could finally create a material where the kinetic inductance exceeded the theoretical limit of a traditional Faraday inductor.
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