Quotulatiousness

February 17, 2019

Finland’s Desperate Fight – WW2 – 025 – February 16 1940

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published on 16 Feb 2019

After more than a week of preliminary bombardments and attacks, the Red Army finally attacks the Finnish defensive positions on the Karelian Isthmus en masse. They throw thousands of troops at the Finns at the entire width of their lines, even exceeding them. The Finns defend the best as they can, but their winning streak seems to come to an end.

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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
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Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
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Colorizations by Norman Stewart.
Thumbnail Colorization by Julius Jääskeläinen: https://www.flickr.com/photos/juliusjaa/

Photos of the Winter War are mostly from the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive (SA-Kuva).

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From the comments:

World War Two
2 days ago

Major developments in the Winter War this week! The thumbnail (colorized by JuliusJaa – https://www.flickr.com/photos/juliusjaa/) depicts Aarne Juutilainen or the “The Terror of Morocco”. This particular photo was taken earlier in December 1939 during the battle of Kollaa, where he acquired a hero status. He owed his name to his service in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco, where he served from 1930 to 1935. By 1940, he commanded his own ‘Moroccan company’, a unit made out of decorated soldiers known for their superior skills.

We sincerely hope that you enjoy the videos we put out for you all! As Indy notes at the end of the video, especially important for today’s episode (there are 14 maps in this) is Eastory, who researches and animates our maps for us. Check out his channel as well! It’s really good -> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCElybFZ60Hk1NSjgCf7I2sg

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Cheers,
Joram

When Trump gets serious with Canada about defence spending

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell notes that, despite all the nay-saying, President Trump appears to be getting results with US allies on defence issues. That being the case, he’s wondering when Prime Minister Trudeau will get the message:

A right rear view of a Canadian army Cougar wheeled fire support vehicle being used as an observation post by soldiers standing watch during the combined U.S./Canadian NATO Exercise Rendezvous ’83. Location: Camp Wainright, AB

I was commenting on this before president Trump was elected; and shortly after his 2016 election victory I said that

    “Prime Minister Trudeau and most European presidents and prime ministers will have to face a newly elected US president who wants them to pay for a bigger and bigger slice of their own defence. Real leaders would do well to recognize that the Americans have a valid point … some, probably many of them, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, may try to pretend that it doesn’t matter; they will be wrong.”

I was impressed, then, with how deeply many, many Americans felt about Donald Trump’s campaign message which said that allies were “freeloading,” and taking unfair advantage of America’s innate generosity … I was very, very conscious of the fact that, when I was a young man, a junior officer in Canada’s tough, superbly disciplined, well trained, trained, nuclear armed “vest pocket army” (as more than one allied general called us) brigade group in Germany, Canada used to pay its full and fair share … but we stopped, in the late summer of 1969, when Pierre Trudeau tried to totally withdraw from NATO and, indeed, from the world.

I wonder when President Trump will send someone like Timothy Betts, the Deputy Assistant Secretary and Senior Advisor for Security negotiations and Armaments in the US State Department, to Ottawa to demand that Canada should pay up after a half century of “freeloading” on the US taxpayers’ goodwill. That will come as a nasty shock to Team Trudeau and, indeed, to a majority of Canadians who have gotten used to the notion that the Americans will defend us out of the kindness of their hearts. I’m not sure that Canada is next in line, but I suspect we’re on his short list.

Project Lightening Episode 02: 100 Yard Test

Filed under: History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

C&Rsenal
Published on 14 Feb 2019

Project Lightening is the first collaborative project between C&Rsenal and Forgotten Weapons. It features SEVEN World War One light machine guns put head to head to see which is the best!

We’re releasing two episode a week but you can get them all at once over at C&Rsenal AND support both shows at the same time!

http://candrsenal.com/product/lightening

Lyndon LaRouche, RIP

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When I was first active in the Ontario and federal Libertarian parties in the mid-1970s, I’d sometimes get accused of being a follower of Lyndon LaRouche. Not by fellow Libertarians, I hasten to add, but by random members of the public. At that time I’d never heard of LaRouche, and I have no idea why some Canadians thought he had anything at all to do with libertarian philosophy or politics. He was, as Jesse Walker points out, pretty much the definition of an ANTI-libertarian in US politics:

Ordinarily I’m fond of cranks, maybe excessively so. You say extremist; I say charmingly kooky freethinker. You say cult; I say fascinating young religion. You say lunatic conspiracy theory; I say spooky new addition to America’s homegrown mythology. But even my tolerance has its limits, and one of those limits is Lyndon LaRouche.

LaRouche, who died Tuesday at age 96, was a despicable old fraud, and the warmest feeling I’ve ever been able to conjure for his devotees is pity. Fiercely authoritarian in both his political ideals and his personal life, LaRouche fed his followers a stream of lies, psychological abuse, and paranoid fantasies. Those fantasies featured a big cast of villains, from the queen of England to Aristotle to “Dope, Inc.” to gay people, not to mention whichever follower or ex-follower was the designated scapegoat of the moment. One such scapegoat, Ken Kronberg, committed suicide after the denunciations turned his way.

LaRouche didn’t limit his abuse to the people who chose to cast their lot with him. He aimed it outwards too — most infamously during “Operation Mop-Up,” when his followers in several cities used fists, bats, chains, and nunchuks to attack members of the Communist Party and other leftist groups. When those assaults began in 1973, LaRouche considered himself a part of the radical left; Operation Mop-Up, he hoped, would establish his “hegemony” over the competition. But a few years later he was aligning himself with Klansmen and the far-right Liberty Lobby. He had a habit of flipping positions like that.

He also had a habit of running for president — first as the 1976 nominee of the U.S. Labor Party, then as a recurring contender for the Democratic nomination. His biggest successes came in the North Dakota primary of 1992 and the Michigan primary of 2000, when he managed to outpoll everyone else on the ballot. This sounds less impressive when you learn that (a) in both cases, for quirky reasons, none of the major candidates were actually on the ballot, and (b) LaRouche still managed to lose both primaries. In North Dakota he was beaten handily by some write-in votes for Ross Perot, and in Michigan he was outvoted by “uncommitted.”

Most people’s direct encounters with LaRouchism came in one of two ways. The first was to stumble on one of the candidate’s prime-time infomercials, in which he’d inform viewers that Walter Mondale is a Soviet agent, that the government should “quarantine” people with AIDS, or whatever other idea had caught his fancy at the moment. (LaRouche pushed his AIDS idea with a front group called — I swear I am not making this up — PANIC, for the Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee.) The second was to run into his followers as they handed out literature in public places. My most memorable encounter with LaRouchie leafletters was in Ann Arbor in the early ’90s, where they had made a big sign that said “EATING ARAB BABIES ISN’T KOSHER.” (I’ve heard people call LaRouche a “coded” anti-Semite. In that case you didn’t have to work hard to crack the code.)

So, LaRouche’s ideas were all over the authoritarian map, but he must have been a really dynamic, engaging speaker to fascinate so many different people for so many years, right? One of those orators that just grabs the attention and plays on it like a fine musical instrument?

There are LaRouche TV specials that consist of nothing but LaRouche himself talking, but I didn’t want to inflict one of those on you. You know why? Because when he’s not saying something utterly crazy, the man is boring. Lyndon LaRouche was a child of the American Weird, but he was too dull to excel even at raving like a lunatic.

Tank Chats #42 Elefant | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published on 18 Aug 2017

Originally known as the Ferdinand, then later renamed Elefant, 90 of this heavily armed and armoured vehicle were built, seeing service in the Soviet Union, Italy and Germany.

Although deployed as a tank destroyer, the Elefant had its origins in Ferdinand Porsche’s attempt to build what became the Tiger tank.

This particular Elefant is part of The Tiger Collection at The Tank Museum, Bovington, on loan from the US Army Ordnance Training and Heritage Center, VA.

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QotD: Nanotechnology and quantum computing

Filed under: Education, Quotations, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I say Quantum Computing is a bullshit field, I don’t mean everything in the field is bullshit, though to first order, this appears to be approximately true. I don’t have a mathematical proof that Quantum Computing isn’t at least theoretically possible. I also do not have a mathematical proof that we can make the artificial bacteria of K. Eric Drexler’s nanotech fantasies. Yet, I know both fields are bullshit. Both fields involve forming new kinds of matter that we haven’t the slightest idea how to construct. Neither field has a sane ‘first step’ to make their large claims true.

Drexler and the “nanotechnologists” who followed him, they assume because we know about the Schroedinger equation we can make artificial forms of life out of arbitrary forms of matter. This is nonsense; nobody understands enough about matter in detail or life in particular to do this. There are also reasonable thermodynamic, chemical and physical arguments against this sort of thing. I have opined on this at length, and at this point, I am so obviously correct on the nanotech front, there is nobody left to argue with me. A generation of people who probably would have made first rate chemists or materials scientists wasted their early, creative careers following this over hyped and completely worthless woo. Billions of dollars squandered down a rat hole of rubbish and wishful thinking. Legal wankers wrote legal reviews of regulatory regimes to protect us from this nonexistent technology. We even had congressional hearings on this nonsense topic back in 2003 and again in 2005 (and probably some other times I forgot about). Russians built a nanotech park to cash in on the nanopocalyptic trillion dollar nanotech economy which was supposed to happen by now.

Similarly, “quantum computing” enthusiasts expect you to overlook the fact that they haven’t a clue as to how to build and manipulate quantum coherent forms of matter necessary to achieve quantum computation. A quantum computer capable of truly factoring the number 21 is missing in action. In fact, the factoring of the number 15 into 3 and 5 is a bit of a parlour trick, as they design the experiment while knowing the answer, thus leaving out the gates required if we didn’t know how to factor 15. The actual number of gates needed to factor a n-bit number is 72 * n^3; so for 15, it’s 4 bits, 4608 gates; not happening any time soon.

It’s been almost 25 years since Peter Shor had his big idea, and we are no closer to factoring large numbers than we were … 15 years ago when we were also able to kinda sorta vaguely factor the number 15 using NMR ‘quantum computers.’

I had this conversation talking with a pal at … a nice restaurant near one of America’s great centers of learning. Our waiter was amazed and shared with us the fact that he had done a Ph.D. thesis on the subject of quantum computing. My pal was convinced by this that my skepticism is justified; in fact he accused me of arranging this. I didn’t, but am motivated to write to prevent future Ivy League Ph.D. level talent having to make a living by bringing a couple of finance nerds their steaks.

Scott Locklin, “Quantum computing as a field is obvious bullshit”, Locklin on Science, 2019-01-15.

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