Aerospace engineer, history enjoyer, Lutheran, avid board gamer, and all-around geek.
Way Out In The Desert, CA
Joined August 2009
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Pinned Tweet
Alright, I'm finally going to collect all of my military history book threads into one master thread-of-threads to pin for easy access...
Starting with, of course, the Franco-Prussian War.
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I rise once again to ask that the US Navy purchase three dozen US-2 seaplanes from Japan.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
When a young American sailor aboard the nuclear cruiser USS California was dying of a bursting appendix far out in the Pacific Ocean, he was hundreds of miles beyond the reach of any U.S. Navy helicopter.
Fire Controlman Third Class David Henderson needed surgery fast. A ruptured appendix in rough ocean swells can kill a young sailor long before a warship can steam back to port.
The U.S. Seventh Fleet called their allies in the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force. Within minutes, Japan scrambled four aircraft: a P-3C Orion, an HSS-2B helicopter, and two giant four-engine Shin Meiwa US-1A amphibious flying boats.
Standard military transports need a concrete runway. Japan's US-1A flying boat was engineered to land directly on open ocean waves up to ten feet high.
While the American nuclear cruiser held position in the swells, the orange-and-white Japanese seaplane dropped out of the sky, landed directly on the open Pacific, and taxied right up beside the USS California.
Crews transferred Petty Officer Henderson across the waves by boat into the Japanese seaplane. The Japanese pilots gunned all four turboprop engines, lifted off the water, and rushed him to Atsugi and U.S. Naval Hospital Yokosuka in time for surgery.
It was the first open-ocean seaplane transfer in U.S.-Japan history, all for one young American sailor.
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First, Chani is not just a passive character and it's dishonest to say otherwise. She has her own thoughts and beliefs and even goes against her heart by suggesting Paul receive an heir through Irulan.
Second, despite what Hollywood's been pushing for the last fifteen years, a character does not need to be a frontline fighter or be in command to have importance. This one particularly irks me because it denies the majority of roles people play in the universe, including the role of a royal family.
Third, it makes no cultural sense for a Fremen to even entertain this course of action based on their views on family. The book makes it clear that tradition still runs very deep for them.
Fourth, different does not mean better. It does not make sense to change the story by fundamentally altering her purpose and what she represents. Can Villeneuve pull it off? Maybe. But I don't want to see his story, I want to see Frank Herbert's. I severely doubt any modern director can match the depth of the source material.
Introduced the kids to Star Trek today. (TOS, of course)
The consensus was “that was weird”.
But nobody walked away.
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Absolutely incredible.
Amazing: journalist does journalism to discover something, and because everyone is so used to people living by press release, they literally can't believe the journalist found it out on their own.
holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2026/…
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how they mark the plates
Back in the '90s I dated a girl whose father used to work for Waffle House corporate.
He explained the system to me in detail and being that I ate there all the time, it was fascinating to watch it happen in real life.
And I'm not saying this to disparage Waffle House employees but this system was set up not only to be efficient but also to work well with the types of people who get jobs at Waffle House.
It's simple, effective, and results in very, very few mistakes.
It is quite ingenious.
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Back in the '90s I dated a girl whose father used to work for Waffle House corporate.
He explained the system to me in detail and being that I ate there all the time, it was fascinating to watch it happen in real life.
And I'm not saying this to disparage Waffle House employees but this system was set up not only to be efficient but also to work well with the types of people who get jobs at Waffle House.
It's simple, effective, and results in very, very few mistakes.
It is quite ingenious.
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The bomb that kill’s you isn’t the one that you see, it’s the one that you don’t.
I worked on an incredibly busy EOD team in Afghanistan. We would run multiple IEDs a day, often bouncing around our area of operations multiple times in a day.
You get to learn the land pretty well after a while and gain an understanding of what enemy cells own what area. For example, If we went east, it was command-detonated IEDs. If we went south it was pressure plates. If we went north it was cell phones, etc.
We had been to the same area multiple times for pressure plates, when we got a call about an unburied pressure plate on the road. Pretty uncommon, since the whole purpose is to hide the bomb from people so that they don’t see it.
When we got on scene, we parked in a new area. I could see where we had parked a couple of days prior, next to a steep embankment. After spending sometime on the suspect device with the robot, I put on the bombsuit and went down range. The pressure plate on top of the road wasn’t connected to anything.
We then investigated where we had parked a couple of days prior. Sure enough there was a large explosive charge in the ground…meant for me.
I leaned a lot that day. Mainly that I was being watched and had to continue to change up what I was doing; which I did.
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I've seen a lot of people drive right off the cliff rather than admit they were wrong, especially if they built a "brand" around it
This is very admirable
I've glorified poverty and dilapidation largely because I've always assumed I'd be poor forever regardless of what I did. I figured I might as well learn to get enthusiastic about poverty, dysfunction, and obscurity if it was inevitable.
Now that I've escaped it, I ask myself: "What the hell do I do now?"
What do I actually want?
After years of training myself to "want" a poor life on the distant (rural) margins, now that I no longer have to do that I have no idea what it is that I actually want. Always, I've let my blackpilled perspective on my own station interrupt my ability to want anything. If it wasn't ultra-cheap, I simply forced myself to not want it, period.
Now? I could realistically make it work almost anywhere with careful planning. Could get into all sorts of businesses, try anything, make any number of interesting or edifying gambles or ventures... this is solely because of careful, anxiety-inducing levels of fiscal caution and extreme frugality.
If you've ever wondered why it is that I seem "all over the place," it's this exact thing. It's this combined with becoming a father and realizing that the dilapidation and poverty I've forced myself to "want" isn't actually what I want to give my kids.
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Things were different when a huge portion of Western society had military experience.
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I want jail forever at minimum
This is my family. I refused warrantless entry because the Fourth Amendment still applies when CPS shows up with armed deputies. I offered a welfare check without police; they refused.
The next day they returned with emergency removal orders and took both of our daughters, including our one-month-old breastfeeding infant, and placed them in a foster home with a single father of 3 boys 😠. There was no criminal charge against us and no emergency. After an emergency hearing the court dismissed the removal order. Every major finding was later reversed as unfounded, and DFS abandoned its appeal. The damage—especially to a nursing mother and newborn—was already done.
I have since filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit (Yazdani v. Mieszala et al., EDVA 1:26-cv-03365) over separate LCSO misconduct. Accountability for the CPS side is next.
We are not the only Loudoun family to raise these issues. Sarah Legg (@sarahgracelegg) posted a detailed personal statement describing her own experience with the same worker: she alleges Kelli Hedrick abused her position, coordinated with law enforcement to have her arraigned while eight months pregnant (threatening jail, a fine, and re-education), and showed a pattern of manipulative conduct and poor judgment toward families. She specifically called out “deep concerns about Kelli Hedrick’s judgment, conduct, and influence on families and the local agencies of Loudoun County.”
Read her full statement here:
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Despite the furor, it was pretty obvious the suspects were placed on bail so they could be surveilled.
It appears that they, as expected, further incriminated themselves and potentially compromised more of Iran’s intelligence network in the UK.
UK Counter Terrorism Policing chief Laurence Taylor suggests the RAF Fairford suspects were released on bail as part of a tactical move by investigators to collect more evidence, which he says was successful
“We know that decisions made during our investigations can sometimes appear illogical to those on the outside, but I want to make it very clear, that there will always be good reason, or rationale behind them. We will always ensure that, should we identify any ongoing threat, we will manage that as part of the investigation.
“Like our adversaries, our tactics vary – and may not always be obvious.
“In this case, this decision-making has led to swifter progress, better evidence and ultimately us securing the charges I have announced today.
“In sensitive investigations like this, it can take time to convert intelligence, into evidence and that is what scores of my officers and staff have been doing over the last few weeks.”
Metal
a couple weeks ago I posted about how bone grows into titanium implants because cells can't find the boundary
turns out there's a catch engineers have been trying to solve for years:
titanium is too stiff (~110 GPa vs spongy bone's 0.02–3.7 GPa)
so the metal takes all the load, and the real bone around it actually weakens because physics says "why maintain structure that isn't carrying stress?" (stress shielding)
enter selective laser melted Zn-1Mg-0.1Sr gyroid scaffolds:
→ mathematically generated TPMS gyroid lattice (70% porous, 550 μm pores)
→ elastic modulus tuned right down to 2.3 GPa so it flexes like real cancellous bone
→ alloying zinc with 1% Mg + 0.1% Sr precipitates Mg2Zn11 & SrZn13 intermetallics, more than doubling strength over pure zinc (33.7 MPa)
→ degrades at 0.36 mm/year with zero hydrogen gas pockets
and the wildest part
as it dissolves, it turns its own surface into calcium-phosphate & zinc-phosphate minerals while feeding Zn2+ and Sr2+ ions that make bone-forming cells grow faster
titanium tricks the skeleton into adopting permanent metal
this thing holds the load, feeds the bone to rebuild itself, and vanishes when the job is done.
radical engineering.
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Today I bought a pack of washers, which were described with dimensions like “28mm × 32mm”, which was (A) perfectly comprehensible [inner diameter × outer diameter], (B) hilariously weird & (C) an unforgivable transgression against the sacred dictates of mathematics and geometry.
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During the first Gulf war my neighbor was in the Navy and deployed. My family sent him a care package and my contribution was sending him my miniature basketball hoop and ball that I won because I read the most books for the Pizza Hut reading challenge. I got that and a pizza.
Then I wrote a note that said I gave it to him because he was on a boat and boats are boring so here is a basketball.
It turns out boats ARE really boring and to this day he still remembers that.
By the time I got to the war, the infrastructure was such that while we loved the candy, razors etc. in the care packages, the real treats were these absolutely unhinged kids greeting cards. We used to sit around in the DFAC giving dramatic readings of them, totally out of love. They were so innocent and unintentionally hilarious, which was much needed.