Weekend Reading #80

Some longer or more involved reading:

• First up is this weekend's Weekend Knowledge Dump from Greg Ellifritz. Some of the links that I thought more notable:
• "Feels like old times again here in the future" from Bendigo Strange notes that a foreign adversary no longer needs an EMP to take down infrastructure, but can do it via hacking (something that has only become easier with the help of AI). And I found this point to be interesting:

... The United States has a GDP (gross national product of nearly $33 trillion dollars. The next nearest is China at $21 trillion and that is optimistic at best. China has long been suspected of being deceitful about their population being 1.4 billon with some open source intelligence numbers claiming their population being as low as 500 million. Despite what Beijing claims nearly every economic intelligence analyst agrees China’s economy is no longer merely slowing it is actively collapsing.  

• An article warning of phishing attacks using texts about packages not being able to be delivered and requesting a whole bunch of personal information.
• An article where the author describes the 5 things he has learned shooting shotguns. Pay particular attention to the sections on accessories and batteries. Shotguns beat things up.
• A look at the advantages of a revolver over a semiauto for deep concealment.
• A link to a video from Gun Sam Revolver Ballistics testing Federal Train & Protect in .380 ACP. This is something I watched earlier this week, and the results from the ammunition from both a short barrelled pocket pistol and larger firearm were both excellent for .380 providing both good penetration and good expansion. I'm going to try this out. I have been getting the HST, but it is expensive. This looks like it works just as well and is probably a lot less expensive.
• Eleven people describe what it was like getting shot. 
• Greg links to a website allowing you to compare the performance of various weapon mounted lights or tactical flashlights from various manufacturers. I have several Olight products, so I was glad to see that the Olight brand was included.
• An article entitled "Burn Casualty Resuscitation: When IV Fluids Run Out" which goes over the research on using oral hydration methods to treat burn casualty victims. The primary advantage, noted in the article, is not necessarily to replace IV fluids when they run out, but conserve IV fluid for those suffering the most severe burns who really need it. 
• Finally, Greg links to a piece listing the "50 Best Books for Boys and Young Men." I've read most of the books on the list and would generally concur with the list. The author recommends the Hardy Boys series, but only the ones published between 1927 and 1959 before they publisher started reworking the stories into the blue spine versions, which I wholeheartedly agree with. If you can't find print editions, I recently linked to a site that has many of these original ones that can be downloaded in epub format or PDFs to read on an electronic device. 

However, there are a few books on the list that I would suggest be avoided. First is The Lord Of The Flies. There is nothing redeeming about this book (the author's primary motivation for writing it was because he hated the other kids at his boarding school) and it is completely backwards of what actually happened when a bunch of boys were marooned on an desert island (see my post "The Real 'Lord of the Flies'").  If surviving being marooned on an island is of interest, then substitute in Robinson Crusoe or The Swiss Family Robinson. 

 

The author also includes Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. While I haven't read this particular book, given the scandals that have arisen over Neil Gaiman, I would advise against letting your kids read anything by Gaiman. The author of this article suggested Gaiman's book as a substitute for Kipling's The Jungle Book. But why? Just let them read Kipling's work. 

 

The author also lists The Red Badge Of Courage, a favorite of English teachers everywhere (which is in itself a warning) but not of mine. The article does not include Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, which I thought was strange. I would substitute Huckleberry Finn for The Red Badge Of Courage, mostly because Huckleberry Finn teaches about actual courage.

 

I was disappointed that other than a comic-book version of the Odyssey, there were no classics included in the list. 

 

And a final thought: don't forget short stories and novella. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is a classic for a reason, and some of the works of Poe should interest boys (e.g., his story "The Gold Bug" is a straight up treasure hunt/mystery). And there are many more from other authors. 

• "Historians Say They’ve Solved the Mystery of a Curious 100-Year-Old Contraption Discovered in Storage"--Smithsonian Magazine (Nov. 2024). From the article:

    The saga began late last month, when the Dorchester County Historical Society posted photos of the machine on its Facebook page. In the post, the society asked followers if they had any idea what the device was or what industry it was used for.

    The device sits on a ceramic countertop and features two elongated metal cylinders that sit parallel to one another. The bottom cylinder is smooth, like a rolling pin, while the top cylinder is dotted with protruding hexagonal nubs.

    The gadget has a relatively modern motor, but all of the other pieces are around 100 years old. It’s been sitting in storage since the 1990s. Records suggest that another historical society in Delaware donated a similar machine, but they do not offer any other insights about the donation.

And what was it? "The strange artifact is a mechanical 'beaten biscuit' maker, used to make a type of dense baked good that was historically popular in the American South."

• "Ha Long Bay, an ancient cradle of mankind"--Saigon News (2018). An excerpt:

    Until five or six thousand years ago, the Red River flowed through Ha Long Bay, which was then dry land, and down through a vast fertile plain that ended near the tip of what is now Hainan Island. Most of this plain is now buried under the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.
In those ancient times, the river flowed into a sea that was about 120 metres below its present level, like most seas and oceans around the world.

    However, as the earth began warming 27,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, seas around the world began rising gradually until they reached their present levels about 5,000 years ago.

    The inundation, part of a world event referred to in ancient Mesopotamian texts and the Bible, swamped a vast area of coastline around the world, particularly in South-east Asia and Australia to the South. This gave birth to oral histories still repeated by native people in Australia and New Guinea – and by all ethnic groups throughout Vietnam. An article on the subject by the late ethnologist Dang Nghiem Van, The Flood Myth and Origin of Ethnic Groups in South-east Asia, was published in 1993.

    Vạn, director of the Center for Study of Religion and former vice-director of the Institute of Ethnology in Hà Nội, collected 300 stories of an ancient flood in his travels throughout Vietnam. They were published by the American Folklore Society in its journal. Vạn, Vietnam’s prominent historian and ethnologist, died in 2016.

    Geologists today refer to the two pre-flood land masses as Sundaland (Southeast Asia) and Sahul (Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea).

    Southeast Asia was then basically one large land mass stretching like a giant udder from what is now Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam to embrace Malaysia, Sumatra and most of the islands as far as Java.

    It was a vast, fertile region fed by silt from rivers flowing for millenia from the slowly rising Himalayas – including the Red River and the Mekong. The rich plains, including what is today the Gulf of Tonkin, now home to Ha Long Bay, are believed to have held a large population of Austronesian speaking people, including the small, dark Negritos who still remain in pockets throughout former Sundaland – and once even as far as the rainforests of northern Australia and Tasmania. 

• "Why haven't we found intelligent alien civilizations? There may be a 'universal limit to technological development’"--Space.com. Rather than a great filter which weeds out or kills off technologically advanced civilizations, the theory discussed in this article suggests that there may be limits to technology that limit the ability of an intelligent species to expand throughout the galaxy. An excerpt:

    Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said, "What I cannot create, I do not understand." The most straightforward interpretation of this is that our technology — what we can create — is constrained by our knowledge. 

    There are, of course, natural limits to human technology. We can't travel in a straight line faster than the speed of light, for example. There may also be natural barriers to human knowledge — facts about the universe that are forever inaccessible to us due to the configuration of our biology. Sure, we have created technology that scaffolds our senses and cognition: Microscopes let us peer into the world of the small, telescopes provide a window into the world of the big, and computers crunch numbers and data that our individual minds are incapable of processing. 

    However, the technologies and experiments that allow us to expand our knowledge are coming at an ever-increasing price. Projects like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN ($4.75 billion to construct and $286 million annually), the International Space Station ($3 billion per year), and the international effort to achieve nuclear fusion at ITER (an estimated $18 billion to $20 billion for construction) show that human efforts to probe our scientific horizons require increasing energy and resources. 

    "If we are candid about it, the fact is that the last major fundamental advances in the science of the universe (macro- and micro-realms, cosmology and quantum mechanics) are almost a hundred years old," Gelis-Filho said. 

• "The Two Empires We Must Defeat" by Daniel Greenfield (2014). Greenfield begins:

    There is a thread that connects many of our conflicts, whether it's the one against terrorism or the one between the Republican establishment and its conservative insurgency. To win a war, we have to understand the nature of the conflict and how we got there. And that's often the missing piece.

    The left blames imperialism for our conflict with terrorists. And it's right. Just not in the way that it thinks.

    Empires may be expansionist, but they're also tolerant and multicultural. They have to be, since out of their initial phase they have to enlist the cooperation and services of subjects from a variety of cultures and religions. An empire may initially be fueled by the talents and skills of a core nation, but as it reaches its next phase, it begins sacrificing their interests to the larger structure of empire.

    The argument between the establishments of the right and the left is over two different kinds of empires. The Republican establishment in America and its various center-right counterparts abroad have attached themselves to the liberal vision of a transnational empire of international law so much that they have forgotten that this vision came from the left, rather than from the right.

    This Empire of International Law proved to have some uses for global trade and security, particularly during the Cold War. These practical arrangements however are overshadowed by the fact that it, like every empire, sacrifices the interests of its peoples to its own structure. This is true of the structure at every level, from the EU to the Federal structure of the United States. The system has displaced the people. And the system runs on principles that require cheap labor leading to policies like amnesty.

    The Empire of International Law needs Muslim immigrants even if its people don't, because it envisions integrating them and their countries into this arrangement and rejects national interests as narrow-minded and nativist.

    This formerly liberal vision now embraced largely by centrists is the left's vision, which includes today's liberals, is of a completely transnational ideological empire in which there are no borders, but there are countless activists, in which everything and everyone are controlled by the state.

    Like the more conventional imperial vision, the left's red Empire of Ideology depends on enlisting Muslims and Muslim countries into its ranks. This is the basis of the Red-Green alliance.

    These two types of imperialists are incapable of representing native workers or communities because they are transnationalists. Their vision is cosmopolitan, rather than representative. They are entranced with a byzantine international arrangement and uninterested in the lives of the people they are ruining.

    This Imperial blindness is why the West is falling so swiftly to Islam. It's why the pockets of resistance are coming from nations outside the imperial sphere.