Weekend Reading #60

 Some longer and more involved reading for the weekend:

•  First up, Greg Ellifritz's Weekend Knowledge Dump at his Active Response Training blog. Some of the articles Greg included that I thought might be useful or interesting:
• An article from The Armory Life on when is using your CCW a mistake? Basically telling you that you need to consider that the weapon is the tool of last resort and you should be avoiding or withdrawing from danger when possible.
• Recoil offers some tips for buying a firearm over Gun Broker.
• An article on selecting the best defensive weapon for your handgun, which can vary according to caliber, power, and velocity. I see a lot of tests of ammo that work fine out of a  longer barrel but lack the expansion due to lower velocity when shot from the shorter barrels of the compact and micro sized weapons. 
• An article from Skilled Survival on putting together a get-home bag and what to do if caught up in a riot. 
• Athlon Outdoors gives a basic overview of the primary models of AKs issued by the Soviet Union and, later, Russia. It doesn't address the variants (like the AK-74U) produced by the Soviets/Russians, nor the models produced by other countries. 
• Wideners tests shooting a tire and whether it can disable a car. Mythbusters did an episode on this that I would also recommend that you watch if you can locate it. Basically, shooting through the sidewall leaves too small of hole--but the Mythbusters had a spectacular result when a shot went through the tread and blew a chunk out of the barrel of the wheel.  But even with the tires flat, a car can still drive. 
• Pew Pew Tactical has some advice for concealed carry for big guys (i.e., husky, but not with a particularly big gut). Basically, it shows that even those guys can carry concealed if they have a large enough, loose enough, cover garment that they can wear untucked. 
• Gun Digest offers on what to do after a defensive shooting. The main takeaway is do not have a firearm in your hand when the police show up or you might not survive the encounter.
• An interesting article that Jon Low of Defensive Pistolcraft shared with me: "A Spelunker Thought She Found Trash in a Cave. It Was Actually Evidence of a Lost Civilization"--Popular Mechanics.  Jon knows I'm interested in archaeology. Anyway, an excerpt from the article:

    A mapping expedition in the Tlayócoc cave in Mexico led a professional cave explorer to a hidden chamber containing shocking evidence of an extinct civilization.

    Yekaterina Katiya Pavlova ventured to a community in the Sierra de Guerrero to further map the Tlayócoc cave. When Pavlova and local guide Adrián Beltrán Dimas reached the bottom of the cave, having already explored all that was mapped, they opted to head into an unknown passage through a submerged entrance. The effort paid off.

    The passage led to a previously unseen room in which two engraved shell bracelets sat atop stalagmites, likely as an offering, according to a translated statement from the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

    The explorers also found another bracelet, a giant snail shell, and pieces of black stone discs similar to pyrite mirrors—all of it dated to more than 500 years ago.

    Archaeologists then descended on the cave, uncovering 14 total objects—three shell bracelets, a bracelet fragment, the giant snail shell, a piece of burnt wood, and pieces of eight stone discs (two of which were complete). Each of the bracelets were made from snail shells—likely a marine species—and were engraved with anthropomorphic symbols and figures.

    The bracelets feature S-shaped symbols known as xonecuilli, zigzagging lines,a and circles to create human faces in profile. These designs could be meant to signify deities.

    The archaeologista estimate that the items were left in the cave during the Postclassic period between 950 and 1521 A.D.—a time when the area was known to be populated by the now-extinct Tlacotepehaus ethnic group. 

•  "The USB drive in your drawer is slowly losing your data right now"--MakeUseOf.com. If you are backing up important documents or data on USB drives, you might want to look at other options for long term storage. 
• "A de-extinction company has hatched live chicks from an artificial eggshell"--Associated Press. From the article:

    A biotech company that aims to resurrect lost creatures said Tuesday it has hatched live chicks in an artificial environment — a development that was met with mixed reviews from scientists and critics of its de-extinction mission.

    Twenty-six baby chickens — ranging from a few days to several months old — were born from a 3D printed lattice structure that mimics an eggshell, according to Colossal Biosciences.

    Colossal previously announced it had genetically engineered living animals to resemble extinct species, including mice with long hair like the woolly mammoth and wolf pups that take after dire wolves.

    Colossal’s CEO Ben Lamm said the artificial egg technology could one day be scaled up to genetically tweak living birds to resemble New Zealand’s extinct South Island giant moa, whose eggs are 80 times the size of a chicken’s and would be difficult for any modern bird to lay. 

•  "Davy Crockett and the Geopolitics of the Alamo"--Rob Martin. A review of Davy Crockett's career, that there were many Hispanics that supported Texas liberation from Mexico, and the long term geopolitical importance of the Alamo and Texas independence:

    Had Santa Anna taken New Orleans, he would have reversed Jefferson’s achievement in securing the Louisiana Purchase and accomplished what the British in 1815 could not: the reduction of the United States to a servile position. And with all commerce in the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi river basins bottled up at Santa Anna’s mercy, not only might America never have generated the capital, industrial strength and military might needed to become a great power, but an authoritarian Mexico might well have supplanted it, expanding throughout the West and the Caribbean Basin as well.

    But for Houston’s victory at San Jacinto — but for Davy Crockett’s martyr's death at the Alamo, enabling Houston’s triumph — the American experiment might well have come to nothing.  America might well have been recolonized in that era of global European expansion which saw India and China subjugated (as indeed Mexico was by France for a time, during the 1860s). And with the coming of the 20th Century, freedom might well have perished from the Earth.