Published on 19 Oct 2015
Armoured cars had proved so successful in India during the First World War, that shortly after its end the Indian Government ordered 16 Rolls-Royce cars. However, these proved so expensive that subsequent orders were placed with Crossley Motors in Manchester who made a tough but cheap 50hp IAG1 chassis. Substantial numbers of these cars were supplied between 1923 and 1925.
The car shown in this film was presented to The Tank Museum by the Government of Pakistan in 1951.
June 12, 2017
Tank Chats #10 Crossley Chevrolet Armoured Car
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Richard Hammond’s latest close call
The BBC is reporting on an accident involving an electric supercar:
Former Top Gear host Richard Hammond has been flown to hospital after a crash while filming in Switzerland.
The 47-year-old was on a practice run for a race in an electric car for Amazon Prime show The Grand Tour.
Mr Hammond “climbed out of the car himself before the vehicle burst into flames”, the show said in a statement.
Co-host Jeremy Clarkson tweeted that it was the “most frightening” accident he had ever seen but said Mr Hammond, who fractured a knee, was “mostly OK”.
The show’s statement said Mr Hammond had been involved in a “serious crash” after completing the Hemberg Hill Climb in Switzerland, where a race takes place on Sunday.
He had been driving a “Rimac Concept One, an electric super car built in Croatia, during filming for The Grand Tour Season 2 on Amazon Prime, but very fortunately suffered no serious injury”.
Some video footage was released on the DriveTribe site:
And Hammond himself was able to speak from his hospital bed on Sunday:
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How to Make a Dovetail Template | Paul Sellers
Published on 2 Jun 2017
Paul introduces the dovetail template that he has been making and using for over 50 years. It helps you to efficiently mark out the dovetail angle. Making it requires a high degree of accuracy and attention to detail, in order for it to be used as a reference.
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June 10, 2017
Could a Tankgewehr Really Take Out a British MkIV Tank?
Published on 6 May 2017
The Tankgewehr antitank rifle was developed by the Mauser company and adopted by the Imperial German military as an emergency measure to counter the introduction of tanks to the WW1 battlefield. The question is, did they really work? Could a 13.2mm AP bullet from a Tankgewehr really perforate the armor of a British tank? Well today we find out!
The armor on a British tank was steel plate of 6mm, 8mm, and 12mm thickness, through-hardened to Brinell 440-480. We have replicated this with a plate of AR450 (ie, Brinell 450) armor, which we will be shooting at a distance of 50 yards. The ammunition we are using is original 1918 production German AP, and the rifle is a Tankgewehr captured by Allied troops late in the war and brought home as a souvenir.
This video was only made possible with help from three very helpful folks:
MOA Targets provided the steel (and on short notice!): https://www.moatargets.com
Mike Carrick of Arms Heritage Magazine provided use of the T-Gewehr: https://armsheritagemagazine.com
Hayes Otoupalik provided the original ammunition: http://www.hayesotoupalik.com
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June 9, 2017
QotD: The post-war world and (relative) peace
Between 1945 and about 1965, atom bombs and then hydrogen bombs were devised and demonstrated by the two biggest Great Powers, and then manufactured and attached to rockets in sufficient numbers to cause any all-out war between these two superpowers very probably to be a catastrophic defeat for both, to say nothing of being a similar catastrophe for all other humans, within a few hours. This new kind of destructive power also spread to a small club of lesser Great Powers.
This did not happen overnight. It didn’t all come about in 1945. But it happened pretty quickly, historically in the blink of an eye. It changed the world from a place in which Great Wars between Great Powers had to be prepared for, at all costs, to a place in which Great Wars between Great Powers had to be avoided, again, at all costs. That is a very big change.
I do not assert that all wars have ended. Clearly they have not, as one glance through a newspaper or news website will tell you. Small powers still have small wars, and Great Powers regularly join in, in small ways. Sometimes, Great Powers start small wars, like the one in the Ukraine now. But even these small wars have been getting less numerous and smaller in recent decades. Small wars can get big, so even small wars are now discouraged by Great Powers.
Nor do I assert that all preparations for war by Great Powers have ceased, or that they should. But more than ever, the purpose of such preparations is to enable mere confrontations to be emerged from victoriously or failing that satisfactorily, rather than for such preparations — such weapons — constantly to be “used”, in the sense of being fired, fought with, and so on. The purpose of weapons is to scare, as well as to win fights, and they are being “used” whenever anyone is scared by them. Great Powers will still spend lots of money on weaponry.
But what has not happened, for many decades now, and what still shows no sign of happening despite all kinds of diplomatic, ideological and financial turbulence, is an all-out fire-every-weapon-we-have war involving two or more Great — by which I of course mean nuclear — Powers. In this sense, countries like mine, and almost certainly yours too given that you are reading this, have become peaceful in a way that they have never experienced before in all of human history before 1945.
Brian Micklethwait, “From the Great Peace … to the ordeal of Adam Lyth at the Oval cricket ground”, Samizdata, 2015-08-20.
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June 7, 2017
“Hey, Joey, ‘splain me public key cryptography!”
Joey deVilla explains public key cryptography for non-geeks:
Have you ever tried to explain public-key cryptography (a.k.a. asymmetric cryptography) or the concept of public and private keys and what they’re for to non-techies? It’s tough, and I’ve spent the last little while trying to come up with an analogy that’s layperson-friendly and memorable.
It turns out that it already exists, and Panayotis Vryonis […], came up with it. Go over to his blog and check out the article titled Public-key cryptography for non-geeks. Whenever I have to explain what private keys and public keys are for to someone who’s new to cryptography, I use Vryonis’ “box with special lock and special keys” analogy. Not only does the explanation work, but it’s so good that the people I’ve used it on have used it themselves to explain public-key crypto to others.
I’ve recently used Vryonis’ analogy in a couple of presentations and thought I’d share images from my slides. Enjoy!
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June 2, 2017
Ethiopia goes offline
Cory Doctorow on Ethiopia’s decision to shut down access to the internet “to prevent exam cheating”:
The entire nation of Ethiopia — a corrupt, oligarchic state with the distinction of being “the world’s first turnkey surveillance state” where spy technology from the “free world” is used to spy on the whole country — just dropped off the internet.
The ruling clique says it turned off the country’s internet to prevent Ethiopian students from accessing final exam questions via Facebook groups run by the global Ethiopian diaspora, and indeed, last year’s exams were spoiled by early-circulated exam questions.
But Ethiopia routinely disappears from the world’s internet in response to dissent and protest, and these are never far from the surface in Ethiopia, so the exams might just be a convenient excuse.
It’s an interesting counter to the idea that even authoritarian regimes struggle to turn off their national internet systems, because these are vital to maintaining the elites’ business interests, as well as extractive industries like oil, or other industries like tourism. In Burma and Egypt, totalitarian regimes have wrestled with the question of when and whether to shut down the internet, often pulling the switch after it was too late (for them).
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May 31, 2017
The Wood Whisperer 269 – Pet Steps
Published on 16 Sep 2016
For FREE plans and additional details, head to http://www.thewoodwhisperer.com/videos/pet-steps/
Welcome to the Honda Ridgeline Saturday Project series produced in partnership with Honda. Each project is designed to be approachable using basic tools and materials. And to show you how versatile the all-new 2017 Honda Ridgeline can be, we’ll build each project right in the bed of the truck!
Sometimes our pets need a little help getting to high places like the family bed or the inside of a vehicle. This easy-to-build set of Pet Steps can also serve as a ramp and even stores flat when not in use. Made with simple materials and basic tools, anyone can knock this project out in a weekend. The inspiration for this design came from various sources on the web and was brought to life by my buddy Scott Seganti.
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May 29, 2017
May 28, 2017
How to make a Half-lap Dovetail | Paul Sellers
Published on 18 May 2017
The half-lap dovetail is possibly the most common of all the dovetails used today. It is used for the front corners of drawers, and anywhere where you want to use a dovetail which is not visible from a certain viewpoint. Paul has developed a method which includes a small rebate, that helps in aligning the components to achieve the crisp definition of quality half lapped dovetails.
For more information on these topics, see https://paulsellers.com or https://woodworkingmasterclasses.com
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May 26, 2017
QotD: The coming of the sexbots
Recently I saw online a documentary on sex robots. The reporteress, a short-haired woman seething with quiet indignation, Viewed With Alarm the very idea. Progress is rapid on these love assistants, she said. They move. Some do, anyway. They talk, but not too much. Before long they will have skin-temperature silicone. Today we have all those deplorable men sitting home, lonely and isolated, choking their chickens and pondering suicide. Soon they will instead be rocking and rolling with Robo-Barbie. This worried her. She said.
If this be true, then why, one wonders, do men want sexbots? Aren’t there already women all over the place at skin temperature? Sez me, it’s because women have lived too long in a monopoly economy and so let down quality. It used to be that men had jobs and money, and women had that, so they married to let each get some of what the other had. The woman had to be agreeable as a selling point. Now women have jobs and don’t need men, or to be pleasant. Some are nice anyway, but it’s no longer a design feature. Of course they often end up old and alone with a cat somewhere on upper Connecticut Avenue, but they don’t figure this out until too late. Anyway, they stopped being agreeable. They learned from feminists that everything wrong in their lives was the fault of men.
It is a real problem: American women are inoculated from birth with angry misandry insisting that men are dolts, loutish, irresponsible, and only want sex. (To which a response might be, “Uh…What else have you got?”)
[…]
OK, back to sexbots. The short-aired reporteress wondered why men could be interested in such confections instead of real women, the tone being one of elevated moralism and horror. Beneath the usual factitious objectivity one could hear, “How could…what is wrong with….?” and so on.
In the documentary, the short-haired reporteress talked to an ugly anti-sexbot crusader woman who said testily that using sexbots “objectified women.” (To me it sounded more like womanizing objects, but never mind.) These two dragons continued to the effect that sex was about intimacy and closeness and bonding. I wondered how they knew. But understand: They weren’t worried about competition. Oh no. They wanted to preserve intimacy and bonding. They were worried about those poor miserable men.
Uh…yeah.
In modern America I see no sign that women are concerned about masculine misery, and indeed that most of them rather like the idea.
Fred Reed, “Sally Cone Hits the Dating Scene”, The Unz Review, 2017-05-11.
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May 25, 2017
How Does Glue Work? (feat. VSauce) – James May’s Q&A (Ep 9) – Head Squeeze
Published on 28 Feb 2013
Michael Stevens from Vsauce makes a guest appearance with James May to discuss how glue actually works.
James May’s Q&A:
With his own unique spin, James May asks and answers the oddball questions we’ve all wondered about from ‘What Exactly Is One Second?’ to ‘Is Invisibility Possible?’A handy site if you’re unsure which glue to use on a particular surface: http://www.thistothat.com/
Glue Strength Test: http://www.honortronics.com/superglueandepoxytest.html
History of Glue: http://inventors.about.com/od/gstartinventions/a/glue.html
How to make homemade glue: http://sustainableecho.com/homemade-natural-glue/
5 Best uses for Superglue: http://www.doityourself.com/stry/5-best-uses-for-super-glue
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May 24, 2017
Vintage Style Storage Boxes w/ Splines
Published on 7 Dec 2015
I wanted to make really nice storage boxes to organize my art supplies so I went with cedar and maple splines.
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May 20, 2017
Net Neutrality Nixed: Why John Oliver is Wrong
Published on 19 May 2017
Progressives are freaking out now that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is beginning the repeal of Net Neutrality regulations, which give the government the right to regulate Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
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The main arguments in favor of Net Neutrality are really arguments guarding against hypotheticals: that ISPs could otherwise block and censor content (they never have) or that they’ll run their operations like shakedowns, requiring content providers to pay up or slow their traffic to molasses. The main documented instance of an ISP favoring one content provider over others wasn’t sinister collusion. Metro PCS offered unlimited YouTube in a budget data plan but not unlimited Hulu and Netflix, because YouTube had a compression system that could be adapted to the carrier’s low-bandwidth network. In a different context, critics might have applauded Metro PCS, since bought by T-Mobile, for bringing more options to lower-income customers.Net Neutrality is a proxy battle over what type of internet we want to have — one characterized by technocratic regulations or one based on innovation and emergent order. Progessives are generally suspicious of complex systems existing without powerful regulators present and accounted for. Small-government folks are repulsed by bureaucrats in general, and think the internet will fair better in a state of benign neglect. The FCC has come down on the side of an organic internet, instead of treating the internet more like a public utility.
We don’t know how the internet is going to evolve over time, but neither do the government administrators trying to rein it in. But given the record of free-market innovation vs. government-regulated services, the odds are with market forces and entrepreneurs.
Written and performed by Andrew Heaton, with writing assistance from Sarah Rose Siskind and David Fried.
Edited by Austin Bragg and Siskind.
Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Theme Song: Frozen by Surfer Blood.
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May 17, 2017
The Only 3 Sandpapers You Really Need | SANDING BASICS
Published on 20 May 2016
Sanding can be time-consuming, tedious and one of the dustiest, messiest, most boring tasks in woodworking. But it’s also something that you’ll have to do in just about every single project. I hope to minimize the monotony in this Sanding Basics video. Please read the full article: http://bit.ly/WWMMsanding
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