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Collimatrix

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Everything posted by Collimatrix

  1. Collimatrix
    Watch some videos of riots in South Korea for a glimpse of what it looks like when the protesters and riot police alike go to classical-esque melee weapon formations. Videos of the South Korean riot police drilling look a lot like what I imagine the Roman legions to have looked like: Interesting note about West African barbed poison arrows. The Scythians used similar arrowheads. No, they didn't win. Not like how the insurgents won in Iraq. Did Dixie become an independent-in-all-but-name pseudo-state before finally actually breaking away when the yanks weren't looking? No, it became the armpit of America; a corrupt, backwards place with superb food and hospitality and hookworm. An armpit to be sure, but still firmly under the control of the Federal government. For example, when desegregation was mandated Federally, the South came along quietly, George Wallace's 1963 grandstanding notwithstanding. Did it take 100 years? Yes, but it's not like too many people in the North were agitating for racial integration in the 1860s, least of all President Lincoln. It's a mistake to see post-war Southern politics as a sub-rosa continuation of the antebellum order. It only looks that way from the remove of a century and a third because both orders were so terribly racist. Racist and not-racist aren't useful distinctions in 19th century politics; minus some tiny enclaves of New England Quakers and other marginal eccentrics, everyone hated black people. What you really want to know is whether they hated black people and thought they should all be hereditary slaves, along with lower-class whites (e.g. George Fitzhugh), whether they hated black people along with all the goddamn Irish, Germans and Catholics (e.g. the Know-Nothing Party), or other various varieties of hate.
  2. Collimatrix
    First, I would like to say that bringing a bow and arrows to a riot is fucking medieval. I especially like how the arrowhead is drawn on. Fletching looks solid though. The entire idea of civil disobedience comes from Henry David Thoreau, and I hate him because he was a hippie (just a hippie from the 19th century). Hippies have always been sub-human scum, and the Transcendentalists were no exception. It's also worth noting that non-violent protest basically doesn't ever work. It is, at most, the public face of a movement that's winning by other means, and the pretty, sanitized bit that you can point out to third graders in history class so their tender sensibilities aren't seared by the harsh reality that the best way to get people to do something is to threaten them with violence. Yes, I realize the article I just linked was written by hippies. However, I don't think violent protest and insurrection have a particularly more credible track record. It's popular to believe that a decentralized insurrection can, with time overcome the might of a centralized military. In America this is something basically everyone believes, and it is a part of the American national myth. The recent fiasco in Iraq is supposed to be a reminder of this "fact." Thing is, if a people's guerrilla movement can defeat a conventional military with its crafty tricks... why do conventional militaries exist at all? Various reasons have been proposed, such as giving young men something to do to keep out of trouble, giving arms manufacturers something to do, etc. The truth is, standing armies have stomped insurgencies six times out of ten, and a halfway decent army playing with full-contact rules against insurgents basically has no excuse for losing.
  3. Collimatrix
    I recall that Garand had some primer-actuated rifle prototypes, and these were ditched because the Army was going to move to staked primers that would not reliably actuate the action. I guess there was that weird SPIW design with the piston primer as well. Can't think of any other primer-actuated designs.
  4. Collimatrix
    Well, it's definitely not turbine-driven.
  5. Collimatrix
    Heh. Walter had come up with a theory that the rangefinder setup in the M47/T42 was based on the panther F or the late-war tiger II with a similar arrangement. Any sources that say yea or nay? It seems plausible to me, and would mark one of the few design features of the panther that anyone copied.
  6. Collimatrix
    Ray Troll is win.
  7. Collimatrix
    I thought about this recently, for some reason. The clip is from some made-for-peasants nature documentary, but ignore the narration because the footage is rather good. Antechinus is a reasonably diverse genus of dasyurid marsupials. Other dasyurids include quolls, tasmanian devils and the extinct thylacine. Antechinus is quite smaller than these, thus their common description as "marsupial mice" or "marsupial shrews." What really makes antechinus unusual among mammals is that all species with one exception are semelparous; that is, they reproduce once and then die. As the video explains in glorious, lurid detail, there is a two-week breeding season where the males' testosterone and cortisol levels skyrocket. They are compelled to seek out every female they can find, and forget to do little things like eat or drink water. Then they all die. The females live just long enough to wean the young (the litters usually have multiple paternity), and then they all die too. Hail Dionysus!
  8. Collimatrix
    Video on the innards of the Daewoo K2: One surprise here; that rebound spring thingie in the back of the receiver to boost rate of fire. I hadn't heard of that before in small arms, although a number of autocannons have similar devices. Oh, and if you look, you can see that the K2 has a Stoner/Johnson bolt and a fixed ejector, which is an unusual combination, but neither ingredient is rare on its own.
  9. Collimatrix
    We'll have this cult ship-shape in no time!
  10. Collimatrix
    Calorie consumption doesn't scale linearly with body mass. It's approximately a 3/4 exponential curve. From what I've read, very large animals like elephants are actually less prone to overheating than smaller ones in similar environments like gazelles because they have more thermal mass, and are generating less heat relative to that thermal mass. They've also got far less surface area for the sun to shine on relative to body mass, so that's less of a problem too. Of course, elephants cheat by having huge ears.
  11. Collimatrix
    i.e. at all. We're talking about that game that's like a fighting game, only for some unaccountable reason the developers said "hey, do you know what fighting games need to be? Even more spastic, unreadable and random! So let's add lots of explosions and guns and bombs falling from the sky, and the camera will zoom out unexpectedly, and there will be bright effects when anything at all happens! That sounds like fun! Possibly also an epileptic seizure!"
  12. Collimatrix
    It would be really weird for them to have insulation and lack an elevated metabolism. If you don't have a high enough metabolic rate to warm your own flesh up, what's the point of having insulative feathers? They'll just block the precious sunlight from warming your flesh!
  13. Collimatrix
    That XT-97 rifle does have one interesting feature: The receiver appears to be stamped sheet steel with rails welded RIVETED; I CAN TOTALLY TELL THE DIFFERENCE in, ala AKM. Most SCAR-clones are extruded aluminum. I'm also curious what that pin running through the side of the bolt carrier does.
  14. Collimatrix
    MANDATORY VIEWING:
  15. Collimatrix
    I can't have D.E. Watters, who is an actual researcher and stuff, reading my usual grade of gibberish and nonsense. Now I have to put actual effort into my posts. Everyone here knows how much I hate effort. This is terrible.
  16. Collimatrix
    That's an oddball for sure. I love the turn-of-the-century-style snakeoil salesman self-promotion.
  17. Collimatrix
    What's with the five round belts on the KPV-T? At some early point in its development, abrams was supposed to have a 25mm autocannon coax. Supposedly combat experience from the 1973 war showed that in the heat of combat, the crew inevitably shoots at anything tank-shaped with the main gun, even if it's a lesser vehicle like a BMP that could easily be swatted with an autocannon. How this was determined, I have no idea, since so far as I can tell the tanks used on both sides had rifle-caliber MGs. Soviet heavies IS-7, Ob 277, and Ob 770 had 14.5mm coax since 130mm ammo is gigantic and they didn't carry very much of it. Also, the 14.5 doubled as a ranging MG, since it had reasonably close trajectory to the 130. Tank coax strikes me as one of the few places where a blow-forward autocannon would really shine.
  18. Collimatrix
    The Apollo Moment:
  19. Collimatrix
    Being that the antipode of Harare is closer to me than the entire continent of Africa, I find it odd and amusing that there is a Zimbabwean sculpture park within a thirty minutes drive of my house. But the world is filled with such small wonders: It's quite a large establishment, twenty acres or so and filled with carved stone statues from various Zimbabwean artists. It's not a bad way to spend a sunny afternoon. The style of the carvings, to my eye, are deliberate callbacks to the soapstone birds of great Zimbabwe. The ruins of Great Zimbabwe are the remnants of the seat of power of an iron-age polity. During the period where the country was called Rhodesia, the official government line was that the ruins could not possibly have been constructed by blacks. Archaeologists were censored from pointing out that they obviously were. After Rhodesia became Zimbabwe the ruins and the soapstone bird carvings became a symbol of national identity. That's why there's a little bird thingie on the flag of Zimbabwe: All of this would be easier to celebrate if the leadership of Zimbabwe hadn't proven themselves such a pack of murderous swine.
  20. Collimatrix
    Yes, your point about gut flora is a good one. I'm afraid I have a pretty superficial understanding of the topic. Can someone give more details on the regulatory issues, efficacy in clinical trials, and any juicy stuff on the horizon?
  21. Collimatrix
    I'm beginning to think that the optimal planform for a stealth ship is something like... a submarine.
  22. Collimatrix
    Oh, so I did. Little underwing wingtip stations, kinda like a flanker. You know, if the Israelis had really wanted to give the Chinese a hand on the J-10, they should have seen about wrangling up a TDP on the PW1120 engine.
  23. Collimatrix
    My understanding is that phage therapy has a lot of potential, but some pretty severe limitations as well. A given phage will only attack a very narrow range of bacteria, whereas antibiotics will nuke a wide spectrum of bugs. This means that accurate diagnosis is crucial for phage therapy to be effective. Interestingly, animal mucus contains bacteriaphages.
  24. Collimatrix
    I cringe every time he picks up the thing by the muzzle end, but here is lifesizepotato's review of the Arsenal Strike One: It's certainly mechanically interesting, and he's right about Russian forces using 'em:
  25. Collimatrix
    You say that like there's something wrong with human sacrifice. God, if you use that standard then pro football is this horrible machine which tempts athletically gifted young men into a meatgrinder which will most likely maim them for life with promises of fleeting fame and glory.
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