Experience can be a valuable teacher and the Army leverages their experience. They have a significant incentive. The Middle East wars are no exception. John Spencer says The Most Effective Weapon On The Modern Battlefield Is Concrete and explains some of the lessons learned. It’s about modern fort building with some new ideas for population control and […]
‘Tis the season: range grass is drying out and fires are a concern. The latest fad is to blame such fires on those out target shooting. To support this, there is a Forest Service study of ignition by rifle bullets. It is interesting and has data and theory worth considering. Careful reading also provides insight […]
Luboš Motl takes off on Nautilus’ disillusioned ex-physicist. “Bob Henderson wrote an autobiography for Nautil.Us” and that provided the ammunition for a rant on Life’s Journey that any college freshman with ambition should read carefully. This is a sketch of the “path towards the deep laws of the Universe” that I already had in mind […]
Chronic unemployment and a life that degrades from something to nothing is a tragedy that is individual and social. It can be top down, as is being shown right now in Venezuela or it can be bottom up as seen in a series of personal essays in Vox Trending Topics. In thinking about these experiences, […]
The first question was what to do with this thing (the Raspberry Pi or just pi). The NOOBS (new out of box software) install process worked well and provided a multi-boot pi with Raspbian, LibreELEC, and OSMC. Nice. Worked. Made a nice media center for the RV. Now what? How about a web services host […]
Roadtreking waxes eloquent about the amazing lithium battery system in his RV. It is, perhaps, a better lesson on why snake oils sales so well rather than anything useful about RV battery systems. First problem is that he is amazed at the kind of power draw you can get from Li batteries rather than the […]
Two books on the web to get you up to speed. “Text-Book of Seamanship, 1891, is an updated age of sail textbook at the beginning of the true transition of warships from sail to steam power.” It is provided by the Historic Naval Ships Association. The other is provided by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. […]
The post is New Battery Charging Solutions for Li-ion Cells but it features an interesting table of battery parameters by battery type of a sort seldom seen. The parameters include such things as cycle life and energy density by both volume and weight. The battery types include all common ones from lead acid to lithium […]
Luboš Motl takes off on one of the computer scares: BadBIOS v2.0: contracting HIV from your digital camera “The people’s large holes in the knowledge and their gullibility is a much greater threat for the health of the mankind and the civilization than over 99% of the “declared threats” we are hearing about these days. […]
Gene says his well out in Elko is near 1000′ feet deep. That raises the question of how to get water up to the surface from that depth. Most of the domestic well information on the web calls the well deep if it is 300′ feet deep. A shallow well which can use a suction […]