Donward

Dude, Don, you and I need to get together and shoot my .32 cal Remington 51. You'd shit yourself with joy, really.

It's professional if - at times - optimistic stuff. The Tellermines seemed to be a favorite of the Krauts at the early stages of the Eastern Front.
 
I find it interesting that they advocate using captured enemy automatic weapons which seems a rather blatant admission of the inadequate nature of German weaponry, particularly small arms.
 
 "incendiary bottles and Tellermines, TNT, automatic weapons (our own or captured), submachine guns, Very pistols, hand grenades, smoke bottles, and camouflage material, as well as hatchets, crowbars, etc."
 
The bit with "Very pistols" which I'm guessing to be flare guns is also innovative.
 
Also they are advocating using and redistributing any large number of captured Soviet Molotov cocktails with the self-igniting fuse which seem superior to the German variants.
 
Which, if the plan is "Alright lads, make sure you capture enough enemy kit because it is better than ours", I'm not sure how enthusiastic that would make me feel as a grunt shivering in the mud and snow in some miserable huddle of huts in a town I can't pronounce.

Could this be every flying P-38 in one shot?
 

"Oh no, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the exact circumstances the constitution provided for. What a monster!"

Longstreet was the best confederate.

This might be as good of time as any to have a repository for interesting photos and news about naval vessels which are retired, about to be scrapped, are museums or are residing in one of the many so-called Ghost Fleets across the world.
 
Living near Bremerton Naval Shipyard, I've had the pleasure since I was a kid of gawking at the pale grey figures of retired US Navy ships anchored in Puget Sound.
 
As for an interesting article, one of our state legislators in Washington state is proposing a study on whether two to three retired aircraft carriers at Bremerton, the USS Independence, The USS Constellation and the USS Kitty Hawk can be tethered together in order to create a floating bridge.
 
At first blush the proposal seems far-fetched. Although it would be an innovative way to quickly create a long floating bridge, a process in my state that can take a decade and cost billions of dollars.
 
Per the article.
 
"I know that people from around the world would come to drive across the deck of an aircraft carrier bridge, number one,” Young said. “Number two, it's the right thing to do from my standpoint because this is giving a testimony and a legacy memorial to our greatest generation."
 
The local NPR station article is here.
 
http://kuow.org/post/puget-sound-lawmaker-pitches-new-bridge-built-old-aircraft-carriers
 
The Washington Post article is here.
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/10/a-washington-state-representative-wants-to-build-a-bridge-out-of-retired-aircraft-carriers/
 

Of course the thing that really pisses me off is Libertarians and their ilk who try to paint Lincoln as a tyrant. I get a bit annoyed when I have to meet some smug Sovereign Citizen type with poor fashion choices who tries to spout off about Lincoln arresting eleventy jillion reporters and legislators.

Sadly. I don't have the time just at the moment to fully opine on this thread, which is a shame since the Civil War has always been more in my wheel house.
 
My main objections are viewing the incident and the causes leading up to it through the prism of modern politics. The second is assigning one-size-fits-all reasons for the war i.e "States Rights" or "Slavery". The conflict was complicated and multifaceted. When you have the brothers of the First Lady fighting on the side of the Rebels and Union Generals and an eventual Vice President coming from the South, things are complicated. Finally I object to the Confederacy being labeled as "Evil" and in the same vein as the Nazis which seems to be a fashionable thing to do these days with modern academics and media types resorting to this gimmick. The Confederacy and the Slavery were wrong. Very much so. We can go on at length about the ills of chattel slavery and the hypocrisy of Victorians and Christians in the South advocating for it. But equating them with Nazis seems more a tactic to discredit ones political opponents today who predominately come from a certain geographic region than honestly distilling the reasons for the war.

Yes, cetaceans, pinnipeds, sirenians, and desmostylians all evolved to become ocean-going, but they did so in different (albeit similar) ways by a different suit of analogous, but not homologous mutations.
 
It's an example of convergence, like how thylacines look like wolves, but aren't.  A seal and a whale are under similar selective pressures.  They both live in the water, so they both must be streamlined.  They both have to be able to steer themselves in water, so both of them have modified forelimbs that act as flippers.  Both of them have to be able to hold their breath, so they have similar (but not identical) mutations to their myoglobin, which allows them to store enormous amounts of oxygen in special muscle tissue.
 
But there are differences too.  Both whales and seals have to propel themselves in water, but where sea lions have four sets of propulsive flippers and seals can undulate their entire bodies for propulsion, whales have lost their rear set of legs entirely and have large, fleshy flukes growing from their elongated tails.  Baleen whales and crabeater seals both strain water for krill, but baleen whales use modified hair while crabeater seals have heavily modified teeth.
 
So, similar, analogous mutations can and do evolve all the time.  Homologous mutations basically don't ever evolve twice, unless the phenotype in question is something that can be achieved by a very simple mutation that is likely to happen more than once.  The capacity for parthenogenesis in cnemidophorus/aspidoscelis (lesbian clone lizards), for instance, appears to arise readily from hybridization.  In the wild, this probably happened more than once.
 
But changing a scale into a feather requires more than one mutation.  A feather is quite different from a scale, even though, ontologically speaking they spring from the same tissue and use a modified version of the scale-making molecular machinery.  That simply will not happen twice exactly the same way.
 
Now, it could be that the hollow, keratinous structures found in pterosaurs, sauriscian dinosaurs and ornithiscian dinosaurs aren't exactly the same, and fossilized remains are simply too crudely preserved for the very subtle differences that indicate that they were independent adaptations to show.  If feathers are synapomorphic for avemetatarsalia (and I think that's the most parsimonious explanation), then the feathers one would expect to see outside of the most derived theropods would be hard to tell apart if they are analogous but not homologous.  It would take some really exceptional specimens to tell for sure.  So, we're stuck with indirect evidence, which so far has kept pointing to these things being symplesiomorphic.  They've showed up not only in ornithiscians, but in two groups (one very derived and the other very basal), they've showed up across theropoda, and they've showed up in pterosaurs.  The only major group of dinosaurs that there's no direct evidence for integument in is sauropods, and they weren't exactly common around the environments that readily preserved feathers in fossils.
 
An extremely well-preserved prosauropod would be terribly helpful, but unfortunately, the Solnhofen and Jehol deposits are both too geologically late to have any prosauropods.

Ballistics wankery is boring, truth be told.
Hunting Wehraboos is where the real sport is.

I saw someone in Off Topic posted a link to National Review that had a photo montage of the Battle of Okinawa.
 
Sure enough, they included the photo of my great uncle "Bud" Hocking who is the tall and gangly BAR man on the left.
 
http://www.nationalreview.com/slideshows/battle-okinawa#3
 
And of course the Hocking cheekbones which all of the men in my family have.
 
Sadly, Uncle Bud didn't survive the battle and - according to family lore - was shot by a "sniper" at Shuri Castle. A few months earlier, Bud was detailed as one of the Marines in President Roosevelt's funeral train honor guard since he was so tall and looked handsome in his uniform. And it was all unfair considering the war was already lost to everyone except the madmen running Japan. His mother saw this photo in one of news magazines of the day (I can't remember which one) and it became a family heirloom since it was the last photo of her favorite son which she never really quite got over.
 
He's buried at Washelli Cemetary here in Seattle. We try to visit him on Memorial Day when he have the chance.

Yeah, well. That's all well and good until you start forcing Christian photographers to take pictures at human/arthropod weddings.
 
Remember. God created Adam and Eve. Not Adam and Stomatopoda!
 
...
 
Not that I have anything against Odontodactylus scyllarus. Why, I was just watching some videos about the mating habits of Mantis shrimp and... eh...
 
No Stomo!

Yeah, well. That's all well and good until you start forcing Christian photographers to take pictures at human/arthropod weddings.
 
Remember. God created Adam and Eve. Not Adam and Stomatopoda!
 
...
 
Not that I have anything against Odontodactylus scyllarus. Why, I was just watching some videos about the mating habits of Mantis shrimp and... eh...
 
No Stomo!

On the same vein as some of my earlier posts. I present to you Charley Pride.
 
His cover Kawligah is the best cover of the song (no offense to HW Sr.).

 
Ditto with Mountain of Love which brings a little bit of Soul to a rockabilly tune.

 
Obviously his signature tune.

 
 
 
 
Country and Western music can be good again. It just needs the right influx of talent.

I suspect that Oedipus isn't asking that question for scientific reasons at all. Not strictly speaking at least...

It also makes the "coolness" of smoking vanish because it looks so goofy. 

Need Lion King intro...

I recently found a really weird thing in the archives.
 

(click for bigger)
 
A few drawings of an honest-to-god aircraft carrier (although a tiny one) dated in May 1946. I have no idea how serious this proposal was, and I currently don't know any background information that could explain the existence of this project either. It's very detailed but I really can't figure out what they were thinking they'd do with it - projecting power in the Baltic sea really isn't that big of a deal.
 
Data as given in the drawing
Length overall: 148.2 m
Designed waterline length: 140 m
Greatest beam: 28.4 m
Beam at design waterline: 20 m
Design draft: 5.5 m
Displacement, standard: 7800 tonnes
Displacement, full load: 8100 tonnes
Speed at 28000 shaft horsepower: 25 knots
Aircraft carried: 20 de Havilland Sea Vampire
Artillery:
- eight 12 cm guns in twin turrets
- 16 40mm Bofors autocannons in both single and twin mountings
- 17 single-mount 25mm autocannons
Armor:
- 75 mm waterline belt plus 25 mm in "torpedo compartments" (?)
- 25 + 50 mm deck
Crew: 535 men
 
Side and top view:

 
 

Front section
 

Center section
 

Rear section
 
 
 
 
Cross sections and deck plans

 
Cross sections
 

Upper deck plans
 

Lower deck plans
 

Why build a post-WW2 carrier when you can buy surplus US escort or fleet carriers?

Just for the record guys. What the actual ramifications of all of this has been - so far - complaining about bad service delivered by florists and wedding cake designers. Which in all honesty... is kind of gay. Not exactly the stuff of Selma or Little Rock.

Stop making Boeing jets in a "Right to Work" state like South Carolina and bring the jobs back to Everett, Wash. with proper Boeing union employees!
 
Oh. You mean the game?
 
Errrr...

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/saudis-fear-iranian-control-of-yemen-due-to-this-strate-1694709328
 
 
Rundown of the strategic reasons why the Saudis are flipping out about Yemen.

I think there is room for positive discussion on it, but it is a VERY polarizing subject.  Again, I say that from a point of view from someone who may have to use force in their job and is trained to do so if needed.  But I'm also highly critical of abuse of power by the police.  Mainly because I am trained in the legal use of force model in use here in my province, and I understand when that has been exceeded.