j9461701

> Alexander has a lot of failings, and we’re going to get to them. But he was unnaturally composed and at least when it came to doing violence (and getting others to do violence effectively) he was highly competent, almost absurdly so.

I suppose my question is: How do you know this? Alexander was surrounded by hand-picked men his father had groomed for decades in some cases. Offering council on every part of war fighting, from tactics to strategy to logistics. Isn't it entirely possible Alexander simply went with the flow of wiser, more experienced men telling him what to do?

Earlier in the article the author mentions alexander's perfect track record of logistical balancing. Surely that, if nothing else, is far better attributed to his officer corps then him? They'd been doing this successfully for 20 years before he took over, they had lots of practice at it and all Alexander had to do was not upset the apple cart.

Or another example - one man cannot organize a cavalry detachment mid-battle and send it to aid a failing flank. That takes the work of many dozens of officers, and well trained soldiers drilled to follow orders even under intense stress.

Of course this is all speculation on my part, as we simply can't know due to the mythologizing of the man and his life. But it's a question I find interesting to ponder.

I find myself in an odd position - I am pro-Anthropocene but I find this reasoning suspect:

> But the Anthropocene’s future as an informal time period is assured. It’s too apt—and too important—a term to be abandoned. As Paul Crutzen pointed out in 2002, barring a “meteorite impact, a world war or a pandemic,” humans “will remain a major environmental force for many millennia.” Science recently summed up the situation this way: “the anthropocene is dead. long live the anthropocene.”

If this was all the justification I would be against the anthropocene being accepted. As the anti-anthro crowd says, geology is not the study of "maybes" or "if this trend continues".

Instead I am pro-anthropocene because even if humanity died today, there would still be an extremely weird layer of rock that would need to be explained and the existing human impacts on the enviroment would still take millions of years to dissipate. Further, '1952' is in the past. It's very recent, but it is in the past. Stratigraphy is the study of layers, and humanity has undeniably created a clear and very odd layer in the rock. Therefore, a new age is justified to me.

That's actually one of my issues with atomic rockets, some of its conclusions are a bit....massaged to ensure the end result it wants in terms of space combat even if it doesn't super make sense. As an example, even as an undergrad in physics the definitiveness of 'no stealth in space' struck me as implausible given what I knew about long range detection mechanisms.

http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-hydrogen-steamer-ste...

Very straight forward solution one person came up with, I'm sure there are dozens of other approaches to achieve the same result. Especially if you put military level budgets into figuring this out.

The most logical form of space combat is, as boring as it sounds, undetectable suicide drones. Space battleships are both super cool sounding and also alas probably utterly impractical.

Edit:

"In terms of military tactics, introducing stealth ships is the equivalent of punching a hornet's nest. The standard fare of bright, bold warships pumping out gigawatts without care, streaking across the Solar System laden with weapons, are forced to become meek and paranoid affairs, as a stealth ship can dump a thousand tons of weapons out of nowhere, at any time."

As an aside, this is something I wish scifi writers understood - don't include stealth ships in your stories without recognizing how they change the mechanics of war completely.

Something that blew my mind long ago was learning the scottish highlands used to be a massive forest. Ancient humans clear cut the entire landscape and it still hasn't recovered. That sort of broke the illusion of there being some forgotten past of arcadian perfection, where we lived in one and balance with nature. Humans have always been humans. Exploitative, expansionist, perfectly willing to destroy our long term prospects for short term gain. At least in modern western societies we have the power to recognize this part of ourselves, and put aside areas like national parks free from our grasping fingers.

This was a fun rabbit hole to go down. Magnesium does not seem to be present in radioactive fallout, there is more Manganese than magnesium from the data I was able to find online. Further NOX, the chemical combination of oxygen and nitrogen is a serious pollutant by-product of nuclear explosions indicating nitrogen seems to remain largely elementally unmolested by the blast. Finally, looking at the calculations it seems to fuse nitrogen nuclei in any kind of meaningful number would require atomic detonations with heat in excess of tens of billions of degree, while real contemporary explosions produce only hundreds of millions of degrees.

> McCarthy shares none of these inclinations. His characters ride aimlessly through the desert and kill for what seems like no reason at all. Blood Meridian is a book that reflects a particular moment in history, but his characters have no sense of that history, are otherwise immune to time, and seem oblivious to the forces ordering their world.

This is my biggest issue with all McCarthy's works. They feel like pointless exercises in sadism and cruelty, where the forces of evil are literally superhumanly powerful (like the judge) and nihilistic misanthropy is the only sensible philosophy.

But, in the novel's defense, I grew up after the myth of the west was dead. I have only ever thought the frontier was a miserable, lawless place full of bandits. So perhaps if the novel's goal was to 'bust the western myth', that's why it failed to engage me in any way except utter disgust.

A nuclear chain reaction takes place roughly over a single microsecond. To travel the ~11 inches of a bomb, in ideal circumstances, a high explosive needs roughly 200 microseconds. It is not impossible that the exact right stuff could happen to trigger the bomb, but it is extremely unlikely - it took the smartest minds in america working together for 3 years to figure out the exact precise timing to prevent a nuclear fizzle and achieve a true atomic explosion. It is, contrary to pop culture, near-impossible to pull off by dumb luck. Mostly you'll just make a radioactive mess.

A sympathetic detonation is very unlikely for a nuclear weapon. They have to detonate in an extremely specific way, such that the explosion compresses the fissile material from all sides at once. A random off-center explosion hitting a nuclear bomb would likely cause the explosives in the bomb to detonate off their very specific timing and fail to cause a nuclear detonation.

This was actually a safety design feature:

> Walske also stipulated that all nuclear weapons in the stockpile must be “one-point safe;” that is,the weapon must have a probability of less than one in one million of producing a nuclear detonation if a detonation of the high explosives originates from a single point

In fact this entire article seems to not recognize this fact. Even if one of the bombs detonated, it was always going to be bad for the people near it but not catastrophic or anything. It would almost certainly not have been nuclear.

> People who raise hell with OSHA because the CEO is a heavy smoker: jerks.

That doesn't seem jerkish. Second hand smoke in the work place is bad for everyone.

what about dogs? They can cover nearly 1,000 miles of rough winter terrain in under 2 weeks, as seen in the iditarod. Or if we're looking at long distance travel in hot environments what about camels? I think this "humans can run down any animal with our endurance" stuff is vastly overblown. We're above average, but hardly the best on earth.

> You could tell them that disease is caused by tiny animals, and that the earth is a sphere that orbits the sun, but getting them to believe you is a another thing.

I can find a cholera outbreak, and tell whoever will listen to stop drinking water from the local wells and eating from the local markets. Go to another part of the city for water and food. Those who listen, even if only one, will be my proof. I can also do a cool science experiment with seaweed agar, silver and bacterial growth but that's not as dramatic.

The earth being a sphere that orbits the sun can't be proved without a telescope, but I can propose a vastly simpler and just as accurate approach using kepler's laws. If I was paying attention in high school physics, I can even do cool stuff with Newton's laws of gravitation to show that "As above, so below" (the planets obey the same law of gravity that we earthlings do).

Yes people might still not believe you, as we can be a stubborn and prideful species, but you know the 'why' of many things and so can keep making correct predictions based on that.

> You won't introduce quarantine just because of germ theory: book of Leviticus already has a version of quarantine, "the law of the plague" well before germ theory.

The bible simply lists procedures, it doesn't explain why you do these things or allow you to extrapolate to other situations and scenarios. By contrast, simply by knowing the "why" of infectious diseases, a smart person or government could isolate the cause of - for example - the black death fairly rapidly (rats w/ fleas) and begin taking steps to solve the issue.

A modern person has a head full of correct answers for questions people 2,3,4000 years ago have yet to even ask. That's powerful stuff, and once they've proved their credentials in some way the books they write will advance humanity by millenia.

I feel like the pendulum has swing too far in the other direction on this topic, actually. Yes people in the past weren't dumb, and shouldn't be under-estimated, but even a normal person could provide huge gains to any pre-modern society. Their understanding of mathematics, biology, evolution, medicine, astronomy, economics, reading+writing, organization, etc. are immeasurably valuable. I don't think people appreciate how much "ideas" are, in some sense, a kind of technology in themselves. Yes you probably couldn't make yourself a queen of the land with your advanced knowledge, but you could massively improve this society in fundamental ways. Like get infected with cowpox if you want to get vaccinated (a term meaning of or from cows btw!) against small pox.

>It's likely that ancient humans were adept at many of these things, like salt preservation, warm clothing, contraception, spun fibers, and boats. Many of the others (agriculture, wheels, etc) simply wouldn't make sense outside their native cultural contexts.

For people this primitive, even elementary metalworking would be revolutionary. Yes you'd have to do a bit of tinkering to work out the kinks, but iron ore pre-modern-extraction was everywhere, and once you have the foreknowledge that heat special rock -> smash into shape -> better-than-rock tool it's not hard to figure your way to something groundbreaking.

I do think you'd be limited in how much you could change things by how far back you go, but mostly due to human life span. The more new technologies you need to personally 'invent' the longer this stuff takes, as you'd need to experiment with on-the-ground resources and techniques until you can successfully realize your conceptual understanding. I know what a blast furnace is, and because I have the key concepts I can eventually build one with some trial and error. But it would take years if I had to start from just sticks and sand.

The medical field could really use an overall authority that can force them to adopt safe practices. We treat truckers getting enough sleep as a higher priority, as a society, than surgeons.

Another thing is hospitals adopting air industry style checklists, which doctors fought tooth and nail as 'insulting'. Despite every ounce of evidence massively pointing toward this saving lives.

In Starcraft, you get a curious phenomena with regards to how good people think they are based on the league they're in:

Bronze league players (lowest) know they're bad and that they don't understand the game.

Silver and Gold league players (2nd and 3rd lowest) think they're better and are really starting to get a grasp on how Starcraft operates

Platinum league players think they basically know everything and just need to work on a few minor issues

Diamond league players begins to realize there is so much more depth than they imagined, and those 'minor issues' are actually oceans of complexity and depth

Master league players fully comprehend the depths of their own ignorance and lack of skill, as they are now finally able to look at the professionals and grasp the massive gulf between themselves and the pros.

Reddit has bronze league understanding of physics, HN has platinum level understanding.

Here is an article on this topic that goes heavily in depth on the topic:

http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2018/04/permanent-and-perfect-st...

Note that this is for strategic level stealth, which is to say your enemy doesn't even know you're in system. Tactical level stealth is vastly easier, and can be as simple as launching several hundred thousand heated decoys into system before entering yourself - one of these is the attacker, can you find which?

This last strategy is actually what we'd implement if ever anyone tried to seriously develop anti-ICBM technology.

The person who wrote the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual mentioned this, and how - as described in the show - it's probably killing you and building a clone with your memories instead of transporting you. He thought about tweaking the lore so it didn't do that, using wormholes or the like, but decided to stay true to the show's established canon.

I know personally, if I had the opportunity, I would gladly spent time bringing someone frozen back to life. I don't gain anything, but I also don't gain anything when I donate to charity either. The simple chance to do something good in the world is all the motivation I need.

If it was such an obvious boondoggle why did Russia steal the design and make their own?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)

In retrospect I think it's pretty obvious the actual point of the space shuttle was national prestige. Studies done at the time pointed out it would take something like 60 launches a year for a reusable system to beat the cost of expendable rockets with available (1970s) technology, and yet the project was pursued regardless. Because the real, actual, honest reason we went with the STS was simply - the shuttle was a space ship, like in sci-fi, and was therefore cool and therefore a public darling. Even if it made no financial sense, people still loved it.

It's similar to the USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin serving in the Gulf War. Made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and was a total waste of money and time. But battle wagons are cool, and therefore people bent over backwards trying to justify it. They even invented "armored" pods for the tomahawks going on the Iowas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armored_Box_Launcher

To try and pretend there was some kind of operational point to using thickly armored battleships instead of something more modern.

Rule of cool is strangely powerful in real life in turns out.

You're totally correct. It was 4 reactor buildings feeding one turbine house, but the house contained two turbo generators. Thanks for the correction!

Achieving fusion would be a god-send, but aneutronic fusion - which is generally considered 'the next step' - would be utterly spectacular.

First, it would save you having to build very expense and complex steam turbines. Like Chernobyl had 4 nuclear reactors powering 1 steam turbine, because the engineering required to build a high quality high capacity one is super expensive. With aneutronic fusion you could just use the energy from the generated charged particles and directly turn that into juice.

The huge, huge, huge thing though would be no more neutron radiation. It would vastly simplify reactor construction, reactor cleanup, biological shielding, etc. etc.

Aneutronic fusion would also us to just spam power plants, safely and cheaply, in a way that's difficult for modern society to even understand. Assuming the aneutronic reactor itself isn't mega expense of course.

The physical theories that prevent the EmDrive (conservation of momentum) are centuries old, and utterly fundamental to our university of reality on every scale from black holes merging to atoms radiating. A violation of this principle would involve radically altering the very foundations of modern physics, on a level more profound than anything that has ever happened in the history of the field.

>Wouldn't most GEV be able to temporarily "jump" out of ground effect for emergencies like that, or at least wouldn't require much change to gain that capability? But that ability wouldn't really make a difference, not without solving all the other issues as well.

Consider these vehicles can travel up to 500 km/h and operate very near to the ground, meaning

1) Vision-obscuring weather like fog or rain

2) A plethora of objects to smack into

3) Very low time to react due to high speed

This is why we generally avoid flying planes this low, unless forced to by circumstances. An example of such circumstances is found in military aviation, in which military aircraft fly very low to the earth to avoid detection (a strategy rendered somewhat less effective modernly due to the invention of light-weight Pulse-Doppler radar). In this case the danger from crashing the plane is judged less than the danger from enemy missiles.

GEVs take this already challenging and dangerous task, which the military only does because they are being shot at, and then make everything that much more difficult by having the vehicle control like a cow.

Theoretically you could fly over most waves, as some designs allow fleet height equal to 1/2 wingspan - so dozens of meters of height. The issues with ground effect vehicles are several:

A plane takes advantage of the much thinner atmosphere higher up to go farther easier, while an ekranoplan has to plum along under an ocean of air sapping its fuel efficiency. No GEV design I'm aware of (feel free to correct!) could make it across any ocean without stopping for refueling, and many can't even island-hop across the ocean. You'd need to construct refueling stations in the middle of the ocean.

GEVs need calm, flat water to take off. This makes the above refueling stations even more challenging, as any vehicle that lands to top up may not be able to get airborne again. This seems a minor point, but it's why we abandoned seaplanes - it's just not worth the effort of waiting for the seas to calm when a plane on an asphalt runway is always ready to go.

GEVs are awkward to maneuver and very slow to turn, so if a pilot does happen to see a rogue 30 meter wave up ahead he has very little he can do to avoid it. Everyone just dies.

Taking off in light wind is difficult, as wave direction is inconsistent. Taking off in heavy wind is a miserable, bumpy experience for the passangers. Sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

I do think there might be something to GEVs, but it would require someone to invent a design that combined 1) 30+ meter flight height with 2) 3000 km range on one fuel tank. The ability to hop from bay to bay is critical to the design becoming practical.

I'm reminded of the novel The Golden Globe, by john varley. In that novel very powerful AI handle most day to day operations of society, and it is mentioned by one of them that - technologically speaking - they could create the single most despotic and privacy-eliminating regime in human history. A place where even an individual's thoughts and emotions are no longer secret, let alone snooping on every word they ever speak. The AI then says it could do this, but it will not, and has intentionally blinded itself to all such data streams. The central intelligence refuses to examine the incoming data as it believes doing so would violate its subjects human rights. In-novel this is why the AI doesn't just tell our protagonist where the big bad is, but I've found it an interesting possible trajectory for the future. Where every word we say is monitored, but it is strictly illegal to view said monitoring.

I wonder if that is the most realistic version of a future were we still have private lives.

It's also the fact that you're in a new sleeping enviroment. People tend not to sleep well in novel environments, called the 'first night effect', until they become comfortable to their new surroundings. So even if the athletes did custom-tailor their sleeping situation to be just like at home, ti still probably won't be good enough to give them a home-field level of sleep quality.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)...

There is a Star Trek voyager episode based on this premise. "Distant Origin", in which an intelligent race of hardrosaurs survived the asteroid impact and eventually evolved into a space faring civilization.

I'm not someone who has a problem with older games - I've gone back and had a blast with System Shock 2, Baldur's Gate, Mechwarriors 2/3/4, Thief, Planescape Torment, etc. relatively recently.

But Deus Ex is one of the few classics that I just can't get to click. It just feels too clunky and ugly, with a lot of the mechanics coming across as ...not to my preferences let's say. Even after I've completed the whole campaign two times over I still just don't "get it". As for the plot getting timelier, to be honest it still just came across as conspiracy gibberish to my ear. I dunno, maybe I'm just not smart enough for it.

Which is, in turn, merely an abstraction over the actual quantum physics that governs what's really happening on the silicon. And quantum physics might itself one day may be found to be a higher level abstraction of what's really really going on, as happened with Newtonian physics before it.

It's abstractions all the way down. I don't know why they're so maligned by programmers, they're the only way any work gets done.

>Sure, but an equivalent conventional high explosive would have likely killed all those 1,000 people, wouldn't it have?

Looking it up on wikipedia, most suicide bomber vests weigh roughly as much (5 kg) or up to 4 times as much (20 kg) as all the sarin used in this attack (5.45 kg). I've never heard of a single suicide bomber, using a vest, injuring 1,000 people. So I am inclined to think the chemical approach is more efficacious.

In fact that's another little nitpick I have with the article - it's high explosives that heavily benefit from tightly packed situations, as they're a one-and-done sort of deal. The sarin gas though was able to be spread all along a tube system, and cause problems for huge amounts of people.

I find myself mostly agreeing with this article, although I think it over-states its case slightly and this section highlights why.

Chemical weapons are not very useful on a tactical level, and modernly nuclear weapons are superior on the strategic level. But for a brief period between 1915 and 1945, they were an attractive solution for mass death on a strategic level. A 1,000 pound explosive bomb, with WW2 level targeting, is very unlikely to hit its target and will likely explode some random unpopulated building. A 1,000 ton mustard gas bomb, though it won't hit its target (because WW2 era bombing accuracy), will still have its payload disperse over a wide area and is utterly horrific to deal with. As the article notes, the 1995 sarin attack in Japan injured over 1,000 people. Chemical weapons may not be good for winning a battle, but they're perfect as a terror weapon meant to go after civilians.

In a sense, chemical weapons are a kind of 'poor man's nuke'. Russia and America are standing down their chemical weapons because they have actual nukes, and don't need to also have 2nd rate knock offs.

The article tries to point to WW2 as an example of nations being in existential peril, and still not using chemical weapons, and concluding this means they were ineffective even as terror weapons. But I think that doesn't hold water upon closer analysis - the moment a single German soldier's boot stepped foot on the British isles, which is to say the UK actually faced imminent threat of conquest, Churchill planned to quote "drench [Germany] in gas".

Later on in the war chemical weapons were avoided not for fear of retaliation in itself, but for fear of how one's own people would respond to said retaliation. If you are Great Britain, and public morale for the war is hanging on by a thread, do you want to roll the dice and gas attack Germany - thereby causing Germany to gas attack your civilians - and risk support for the war collapsing? In 1944 Churchill asked for a 'cold blooded analysis' about gassing Germany, and the response that came back was basically "We're already winning the war, and mass gas deployment would be needlessly taking chances. Do not do it!". Churchill famously disagreed with this analysis, but didn't push the matter any further.