Ah, I remember it like it was yesterday.
Shouting at my parents about how unfair it was that they insist I be home for tea, home again to go to bed, brush my teeth, turn my lights out and go to sleep, get up for school, do my homework and blah blah blah.
Their list of stupid pointless rules was bloody endless – it became perfectly obvious to me around the age of fourteen that no intelligent person should be forced to endure this draconian regime, and I let the intellectual homunculi know so in no uncertain terms.
And the lofty and pompous arrogance with which these dreary praetorians informed me, ME!, that “while I lived under their roof, I would have to live by their rules“!
I seemingly had no rights at all. I was not free.
The horror.
I resolved then and there to move out as soon as I could.
Which turned out to be about five years later, but still …
My word, how I despised them and their byzantine rules. I yearned to breathe free air and not remain beleaguered in their stale and oppressive Gulag of The Mind. I was an adult dammit, and not some little kid, to be told what I can and cannot do.
Ahem.
Funnily enough, when I returned home many years later, I was amazed to discover how much more reasonable they had become in my absence – I felt like they had really grown … spiritually (h/t Samuel Clemens)
Alex Noble, “Progressive Millennials. While We Live Under Their Roof, We Should Abide By Their Rules.”, Continental Telegraph, 2020-09-01.
December 2, 2020
QotD: Old Sam Clemens, he understood
December 1, 2020
Pattern 14 MKI W (T) – The Best Sniper Rifle of World War One
Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Aug 2017When World War One began, the British did not have a formal sniping program, and by 1915 the British found themselves thoroughly outclassed by the Germans in this area. They responded by developing tactics and equipment for sniping, and by mid 1916 they had really outclassed the Germans. However, the mid-war British sniping rifles really left a lot to be desired, even if they were being used effectively in the field. There was no single military optic, instead a wide variety of commercial scopes were rounded up and put into use. The mounts for these scopes were offset to the left side of the rifles to allow for continued use of stripper clips. Clips were arguably not really necessary on these rifles, and the offset scopes led to substantial headaches in use, as they required calculating windage as well as elevation adjustments depending on range.
Through 1918, though, the British developed one of the best sniping rifles of the war, although it would be introduced too late to see virtually any front line service. This new rifle was a Winchester-made Pattern 1914 Enfield with a center-mounted optic, and was designated the P14 MkI W(T). The P14 rifles were more accurate than the SMLE, and the centrally mounted optic made for much simpler shooting. These rifles were deemed to be mechanically capable of 1.5 MOA shooting, with the practical expected group size being 3 MOA.
Three thousand of these P14 snipers’ rifles were assembled and kept in service after the end of the war, but in the mid 1930s a small additional batch of 79 were made for the Irish Free State by BSA. These were all eventually surplussed to the US, and the rifle in this video is one of those late-production guns.
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QotD: Elon Musk as a real life Delos D. Harriman
The shock of recognition will, I promise, flip your lid. The story is, inarguably, Musk’s playbook. Its protagonist, the idealistic business tycoon D.D. Harriman, is what Musk sees when he looks in the mirror.
“The Man Who Sold The Moon” is the story of how Harriman makes the first moon landing happen. Engineers and astronauts are present as peripheral characters, but it is a business romance. Harriman is a sophisticated sort of “Mary Sue” — an older chap whose backstory encompasses the youthful interests of the creators of classic pulp science fiction, but who is given a great fortune, built on terrestrial transport and housing, for the purposes of the story.
Our hero has no interest in the money for its own sake: in late life he liquidates to fund a moon rocket, intending to take the first trip himself, because he is convinced the future of humanity depends on extraterrestrial expansion of the human species. (Also, the guy just really loves the moon.)
The actual stuff of the story consists of the financial and promotional chicanery that Harriman uses to leverage his personal investment. Harriman uses sharp dealing with governments, broadcasters, political groups: he plants fake news about diamonds on the moon to blackmail (a disguised version of) the de Beers cartel, and terrorizes companies with the threat of using the moon to advertise for competitors. He is, in short, not afraid to use questionable means to achieve a worthwhile higher end, and does not — Musk haters take note! — recoil from actual fraud.
Heinlein didn’t provide for live broadcasting of his imagined lunar mission, which is almost an afterthought in his Great Man business yarn. TV cameras were, like computers, one of his blind spots. But if he had thought to make Harriman the owner of a fancy-sportscar manufacturing concern, and if he had thought to have Harriman put a car in solar (trans-Martian!) orbit as one of his publicity stunts, that would have been there in “The Man Who Sold The Moon.” Selling the moon is just what Musk is doing. Except the moon is a tad worked-over as a piece of intangible property, so we get Mars instead.
Colby Cosh, “Heinlein’s monster? The literary key to Elon Musk’s sales technique”, National Post, 2018-02-12.
