Scott Siskind reviews a biography of Vladimir Putin; and very interesting highlights from the comments.
Suffragette card game from 1909 found in a British cupboard.
One theory about the coup in Niger is that the generals had been caught stealing millions from the defense budget and decided to strike first before they could be prosecuted.
Nice array of nature photos from yet another contest.
Key sentence from a detailed study of senior officers in the Royal Navy, extracted by Tyler Cowen: "Findings suggest differences in motivation are more important than differences in general intelligence, or personality traits, in predicting assessed performance, potential within, and actual rate of advancement to, senior leadership positions."
Obscene Russian folk tales.
Kenneth Roggoff says AI has made human chess more interesting, and he also notes that public interest in human chess seems to have risen since AI got better than the best humans, so maybe AI won't be as bad as people think. Maybe an AI poet could help save contemporary poetry?
The technology behind trying to scan and read the papyri from the Villa of the Papyri; more a software problem than hardware.
Producing synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air, carbon neutral. Isn't "synthetic natural gas" a great term? Incidentally it was first called "natural gas" to distinguish it from coal gas, which is methane made from coal.
Hoard of Celtic gold coins found on the Isle of Anglesey in Wales.
Major cuts at West Virginia University: 169 faculty (7%), 32 of 388 majors. Driven by declining enrollment, from 31,000 in 2014 to 26,000 in 2023, projected to fall to 21,000 by 2030.
The FBI warns that people who lose money in cryptocurrency scams are then being scammed again by people who say they can trace and recover lost cryptocurrency assets.
Richly decorated synagogue from the 1st century AD found in Kuban, Russia.
Professor flunks all his students after ChatGPT falsely claims it wrote their papers.
The mystery of two not-quite-identical photographs of what is said to be the world's first rooftop solar panels.
This week's random past post is What Childhood Should Be, 2010.
"A new study by scientists from Oberlin College and NASA suggests that electron transport chains—a metabolism system that creates usable energy—could have been present in Earth’s prebiotic minerals and sea water."
Just a note that perusing old British Ordnance Survey maps online I found a hamlet called Moon Foot, which is within the Vale of Nightshade.
Ukraine Links
Fed up with corruption in their military recruitment, Ukraine announces they are firing the heads of all their regional recruitment centers and replacing them with soldiers disabled in the war.
Ukrainian soldiers have absorbed one key element of NATO doctrine, rapid counter-battery fire: "As soon as they notice a worthy Rus target from a Fury-type drone, they try to hit it with Excalibur or Himars rockets." Every second shaved off the time from discovering an artillery piece to attacking it increases the deadliness of the attack.
Amazing drone videos show Russian troops fleeing from the southern village of Urozhaine and getting slaughtered by Ukrainian artillery. Obviously they were held in place for too long, with no withdrawal plan or even vehicles, and Russian bloggers are letting the commanders have it for sacrificing these men.
Russian account of a small battle near Kherson in which drones played a leading role; seems there were about as many drones in this fight as men.
From War Translated, Russian accounts of how hard it is all along the front. Russians are getting very nervous about a possible southern breakthrough.
The old tanks (T-55, T-62) Russia has been pulling out of storage are certainly useful, but they are not equivalent to modern tanks, as you can see in this short video of a Bradley APC that is struck by a Russian tank round but seems perfectly fine. I doubt that would be the case with a modern round fired by a T-90.
American military blogger Def Mon endorses an interesting Russian account of the fighting near Robotyne.
Alleged high-level Russian memo laying out major problems in the army.
Using drones with thermal optics to find Russian mines after sunset, because they stay warm longer than the surrounding dirt and grass.
2 comments:
Sign at Russian recruiting center asking Russian men to help restore the empire, with a very expansive map.
This is textbook Russian insanity. *chef's kiss*
Let's see here... they want all of the Eastern Bloc back, of course...
...they also want Tsarist era holdings like Finland, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Mongolia...
...they apparently changed their mind about selling Alaska, and want that back... (I wonder if they'll make an offer to refund the $7.2 million purchase price - adjusted for inflation, that's a mere $150 billion, which is quite the steal for them, at about 42¢ per acre)...
...they also want Greece, for some reason? Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure Greece has never been under Russian control. I'm assuming they're drawing from the Greek Civil War, which... the Communist Forces lost? It's quite strange either way...
...oh, and of course, while they're happy to point to Tsarist era borders where it gains them territory, I note they don't seem keen to do the same when it would take land away from them, as in the case of the southern half of Sakhalin, which should be Japanese by that logic...
All together, they are openly declaring they want to invade and annex (either wholly or in part) ~eighteen~ different NATO countries.
They are also stating their intent to absorb numerous of their own closest allies and trade partners, specifically every single member state of the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), many of whom are also members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
They likewise are declaring their desire to remove a whole slew of buffer states and push their borders directly into contact with those of Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Sweden, Norway, and Austria; to expand China's border with Russia by at least 5000 miles; to repartition Germany, etc.
...and then, WEIRDLY, they've included the Ribbon of Saint George, as a bit of propagandic symbolism... but gotten the color wrong? Maybe it's something to do with the color keying of the image itself, but the ribbon is supposed to be orange and black, not yellow and black.
...oh, and judging from the coloration present on the map, they intend to entirely fill in The Gulf of Riga and turn it into dry land... but then, strangely, not also annex that newly created land for themselves...
The old tanks (T-55, T-62) Russia has been pulling out of storage are certainly useful, but they are not equivalent to modern tanks, as you can see in this short video of a Bradley APC that is struck by a Russian tank round but seems perfectly fine. I doubt that would be the case with a modern round fired by a T-90.
This is a case where I have substantial doubts as to what is being claimed to be shown in the video.
A T-54/T-55 mounts a D-10 tank gun, which was first fielded in 1944. This is a 100mm caliber weapon, designed originally for tank destroyers of WWII, and using ammunition of that era it is capable of penetrating 160+ mm of steel plate at a range of 1000 meters.
In the 1960s, they developed Armor Piercing Discarding Sabot rounds for the gun, allowing it to penetrate 290+ mm of steel plate at a range of 2000 meters (or 145mm of sloped armor at 60 degrees). And there have been other improvements of various sorts since.
An M2 Bradley has only 14.5mm of armor. And that armor is made of aluminum, not steel. In the same way that certain "bulletproof vests" are only designed to stop pistol rounds rather than rifle rounds, the armor of the an M2 Bradley was only ever intended to stop small arms fire, not resist shells from a 100mm tank gun.
Now, that said - the M2 was the original version which rolled out in 1981. Within only seven years, they were retrofitting the Bradley to mount explosive reactive armor, allowing it to resist RPGs and small caliber APDS rounds. In this case, "small caliber" means 30mm - not a whopping 100mm gun. And while, over the decades, they've managed to refine the armor further, it hasn't been improved all that much.
Now, the video clearly shows something setting off the explosive reactive armor. It could have been a tank gun shell, perhaps... but it also could have been an RPG, or a stray 30mm cannon round, or anything else with sufficient force to set off a section of the explosive reactive armor.
Now, a 100mm shell is a beast of a thing - 30 pounds traveling at 900 meters per second, with a kinetic energy of over 6 million joules. That's a lot of energy to redirect.
Particularly if we're talking about remotely modern shells from the D-10 tank gun. Even if they're actually resorting to using literally 50+ year old ammunition (which is a terrifying thought) as opposed to old shells designs manufactured more recently than that... so long as it's a solid hit from an APDS round, I would expect it to be too much inertia for the reactive armor to overcome, and then it would tear through the very thin aluminum armor of the Bradley like it wasn't there.
Now, a glancing hit? A strike from a very steep angle? That's where explosive reactive armor shines, because the vectors work out much more in its favor, and I could absolutely see it deflecting with no real damage (except needing to replace the explosive armor packs). Likewise, if it's a HEAT round rather than APDS, then it's almost certainly not getting through, even on a solid hit at a good angle.
But if we're comparing the T-55 and T-62 to the T-90, the reality is that while the main gun of the T-90 is more powerful, it's not that much better equipped to defeat explosive reactive armor. It fields the 2A46 125mm gun, designed in 1970. Some of the more modern APDS rounds it can fire are able to penetrate substantially thicker armor, because it's firing a 40 pound shell at 1800 meters per second - but they still require a solid hit and a good angle, and will be deflected fairly reliably by reactive armor on a glancing blow.
So ultimately, my suspicion is that even if this is a shell from a tank gun, it likely wasn't a solid hit, and would have deflected no matter what kind of tank it came from.
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