I'm not sure how I came upon it, but I finished Ken Follett's Lie Down With Lions. It's an interesting book, if a bit shallow. Follett is pretty good at creating a compelling setting, and has a knack for the details that make it interesting (although, he gives a bibliography, so there's the possibility it's redigested works of others). Unfortunately, he doesn't so much write characters as flesh out clichés. It's also kind of strange that there seems to be a recurring theme of a breastfeeding fetish (in a book about Afghanistan, no less). Either he's just had a child and is, shall we say, acquainted with the process, or it's something in the author. I'm not sure I care which it is.
At any rate, he manages to come up with a couple points in the book which are clearly his own narrative (rather than, say, something reasonable to come out of one of his characters), but are nonetheless close to profound (although, again, something of a cliché).
"The Agency is not supposed to do assassinations," he said.
"But it does."
"There's a lunatic element that gives us a bad name. Unfortunately, presidents can't resist the temptation to play secret-agent games, and that encourages the nutcase faction."
"Why don't you turn your back on them all and join the human race?"
"Look. America is full of people who believe that other countries as well as their own have a right to be free–but they're the type of people who turn their backs and join the human race. In consequence, the Agency employes too many psychopaths and too few decent, compassionate citizens. Then, when the Agency brings down a foreign government at the whim of a president, they all ask how this kind of thing can possibly happen. The answer is because they let it. My country is a democracy, so there's nobody to blame but me when things are wrong; and if things are to be put right, I have to do it, because it's my responsibility."
I regularly converse with somebody who says she can't read more than a couple books by the same author because she gets too stuck "in the author's head." I couldn't get more than half-way through the 300pp book without getting tired of being there. Perhaps the most compelling (although coincidental and inadvertent) facet of the book is the fact it was written in 1986 and reads more or less like the reverse of the position we're in presently in Afghanistan.
I know we were going to go hunting this fall, so I figured I'd come up with a list of toys we'll need to do that. Please be aware that I've faxed you a copy of my affidavit of niceness, and sent along the original via FedEx. I am sure the included references will vouch for my not being naughty, too.
Santa, I realize that you don't always have $4,200 sitting around for me to make a rifle (and this doesn't even include the gunsmithing!), but it's my hope that we can come to an agreement on the simple fact that for hunting the elusive Iraqi Meerkat, nothing but the best will do.
The Chief Veterinary Officer, Nigel Gibbens, has today confirmed Avian Influenza in chickens on premises near Banbury in Oxfordshire after preliminary tests were positive for the H7 strain. All birds on the premises will be slaughtered as a precautionary measure.
Laboratory testing continues and results which will allow confirmation of whether the strain is high or low pathogenicity will follow. A detailed epidemiological investigation to better understand the origin and development of the disease is underway.
A Temporary Control Zone with a 3km inner zone and a 10km outer zone is being established around the Infected Premises. A number of measures apply. All birds must be housed or otherwise isolated from contact with wild birds in the inner zone. Bird gatherings are banned and all other movements of birds and some products are banned in the whole of the Temporary Control Zone. Defra is urgently considering whether any wider measures may be needed.
First, I'm not going to include the .50 BMG in this document because the guns are very expensive, the ammunition is very expensive, there are very few places to actually shoot them, and lastly, they're actually illegal in a lot of places.
So let me define "the problem": I have a .22-250 Rem 700, and while I've been getting it comfortably out to 600 yards, it starts to have real problems out past 600 with windage and bullet drop, and out to 1,000 yards, it's difficult to get it on the paper, let alone into a tight group. I've been trying to figure out the best rifle to replace (really, to augment) my current one.
I have a friend who presents this argument:
Basically, I trust four rounds: 9mm, .223, .308, and .50 BMG. My main weapon is my M4, my backup is my M9, and for intermediate range, what the M4 can't hit, the .308 can. Anything further than that, or for anti-materiel, there's no point in going smaller than a .50.
It's well thought-out, and I can completely understand why an operator would think that way. First off, you're not going to find much 300 Win in a firefight other than what you brought with you, and you're not going to have a firefight out at 1500 yds. Furthermore, it bears mentioning that your average operator is not going to be buying their kit: if somebody gives you an XM-107 or a MacBros Tac-50, by all means take it! For the rest of us, it's just not worth it.
Let's start with some ballistics. I'll attach the excel sheet and a pdf at the bottom.
At first, the muzzle velocity is misleading. In general we equate muzzle velocity with a "flat-shooting" round, with a great point-blank range (which is to say, it's going to be at roughly the same place at 100, 200, 300 yards; the 22-250 does more or less accomplish this). However, we see, when looking at the full range of data that the .338 Lapua (an incredibly powerful round, and substantially slower than the .22-250) has almost exactly the same ballistics out to 700 yards. The question of ballistics is very important for a benchrest shooter. I'm not really going to spend any time hunting hajis, so I don't really need to worry about "terminal ballistics" or the amount of energy delivered to the target (I'll address it a little more in a bit).
So I was very surprised to see that there's only a 33.6% spread between the worst drop (.308 Win, 387.5") and the best drop (.300 Wby, 225.4"). This sounds like a big difference, but if we consider the 308 Winchester has a 30 foot drop, and the 300 Weatherby has a 20 foot drop, it hardly matters; you're not going to just guess your shot placement. If you see a silhouette in your mildot, and you're estimating 6' height, and he takes up two miliradians, you can guess that it's a thousand yards.
Okay, here's the math (imagine this in your head, as you're trying to place a shot on target about half a mile away): he's 6' tall, and he occupies 2 "dots." If you're using a 308 Win, you've got to aim "up" ten dots (or so, right – at this point, you're hoping to "get rounds on paper," not necessarily hit "center mass"), and that's not counting for windage at 1000 yds. But the guy only occupies two dots, and you've essentially placed him at the bottom of the reticle and the crosshairs substantially above him.
Chances are, if you just go with elevation, you're going to miss at least once, and your estimation of windage is going to be approximate since you can't really estimate the windage a thousand yards from where you are (let alone further) as the atmosphere does not provide homogenous flows. Even the much-vaunted world-record shot by Rob Furlong (2,430 meters/2,657 yards) was after two previous misses. How long is it going to take you to make the adjustments to the follow-on shot? Is your spotter that good? And before somebody mentions laser rangefinders, while the operators out there have much better equipment than your average benchrester, there's a limit to what the area surrounding your target can reflect (which is why rangefinders list a maximum effective range for "deer" and "reflective" targets).
Now, if you've been paying attention, at this point the .300 Weatherby Magnum and the .30-378 Weatherby Magnum are very interesting rounds, in that they have both nearly identical ballistics and a very flat trajectory. The primary difference between the two is going to be delivered energy, as the .30-378 sends a 168 grain (~11 grams) faster than the .300 Wby sends a 150 grain bullet (again, to almost exactly the same point). They're both noticeably better than the .300 Win, which is sometimes considered a step up from the .308 Win in tactical situations (before rounds like the .408 Chey-Tac and the .338 Lapua became popular), but not so much so that one could really justify the dramatically increased cost of the rounds and (especially in the case of the .30-378) the equally dramatically reduced barrel life.
Here's the full chart:
It really looks to me like the .300 Weatherby Magnum is the way to go, of all these rounds. If we look at the .338 Lapua, it's clearly a fierce round, but at 1000 yards, you're still going to have a flatter trajectory with the 300 Wby, and if you're not overly concerned with energy delivered to a target, it's pretty hard to deny the reduced cost of the 300 Wby ammunition and especially the rifles.
Another thing to consider, especially in the case of the .30-378 Weatherby and the Lapua is the recoil of both rifles. The 308 Win is pretty tame, the .22-250 and .25-06 are both pretty tame (depending on the rifle) and both 300 mags are pretty stout. I'm told (but haven't verified...) that the difference between the .300 Wby and the .30-378 Wby is an entire powder charge for a .30-06. That's just absurd. There's a crowd out there that are really into the enormous muzzle blast and scaring the neighbors, but it's pretty hard to deny that with such a tremendous bite, most shooters won't be as accurate, as they develop a flinch.
You could even go as far as to say that muzzle brakes for the BMG crowd are more effective than those given to the "smaller" ultra-mag rounds (like the 30-378, 300/338/378 Remington Ultra Mag, and the 338 Lapua) simply because the rifles would be unusable without said brakes.
Basically, a .300 Wby is just about the most rifle most people need (and one could say that a .300 Win is actually a better idea given cost and recoil) for targets at a thousand yards.
Also worth mentioning is that the .22-250, which I shoot a lot, has very reasonable drop ballistics. I don't have any equations for windage, but I suspect, upon looking at this, that windage is my primary problem at 600 yards.
So, a brief discussion of terminal energy is also necessary. For hunting small North American game, a ballistic tip ("pointy" vs "round" as you'd see in the case of a .458 Win or a .577 Tyr) motivated by any of the "magnum" rounds (with possibly the exception of the .308 Win, primarily due to its extreme bullet drop) is going to be effective out to 700 yards, give or take. The 300 Win Mag has 1200 ft-lbs of energy at 700 yards and 662 at 1000 yards. The 300 Weatherby Mag has 937 ft-lbs at 900 yards, and "only" 770 ft-lbs at 1000 yards.
Taking 650-750 ft-lbs of energy from a bullet with a cross-section of .308 is going to ruin anyone's day. It's probably irresponsible to engage larger targets (white tail deer and larger) with these rounds, at this range, but for tactical purposes, it's probably sufficient. The SEALs consider the .308 Win to be effective out to 1,500 yards, and I'm not sure it's going to have more than a few hundred ft-lbs at that range (for comparison, the .45 ACP +P rounds I prefer have about 400 ft-lbs at 100 yards, and 450 ft-lbs at the muzzle; using a long-distance tactical rifle to put handgun hits on somebody at 1,500 yards seems kind of feeble to me, but then I've never been into combat).
So what does all this actually mean, now that you've rambled on interminably about this?
Well, basically, I had been considering a .30-378 Weatherby Mag. I'd been considering it primarily because I wanted an ultra-mag, and I wanted to be more effective at 1,000 yards. It would seem that my .22-250 is having windage problems, my math isn't as bad as I thought it to be, and I really don't need the .30-378; the .300 Win or .300 Wby will work fine.
If I ever decide I need to go hunting for two-legged or four-legged beasties, it makes a lot more sense to just bump up to the .338 Lapua than getting a hopped-up .308 bullet, and for dangerous game, the .50 is most likely the way to go.
In the next episode of blabber with Alex, we'll compare and contrast ultra-ultra mags like the .338, .408 CT, .50 BMG, and the other wildcats out there (.300 Peg?). Until then, paper targets beware!
So I find myself at the office at 0430, and I'm looking across the lobby at the other dozen or so sysadmins here at this hour. We don't have much to do, really, except make sure things are okay when the power goes out, and when it comes back on. All the users are home in bed, and it appears the rest of us wish we were too, but it's somehow reassuring to see people just like me, working for other organizations, doing the same thing, at the same time, at the same place.
Or maybe it's just really fucking early and I've had no sleep.
(short: my life with kde4 and after office politics holocaust)
A few tricks of fate have conspired to place a large office, two fairly powerful (a dual P4 and a dual Xeon, so both i386 and x64) machines, and four flat panels (two per each; castoff from other people upgrading) in my hands. I've got a desktop of something like 7000x1100 resolution. It's running Kubuntu Hardy, with the KDE4 goodness attached to it. Never really guessed I'd wind up with such a nice environment. I'm generally the park-it-in-the-datacenter type, and I'm happy to poke away at my laptop rather than bask in wall-to-wall displays (Steve, if you read this, they asked that I move in, it wasn't something I asked for...). But, with the machines and the displays, I can get a whole lot done and monitor a lot of different systems at the same time. Stuff I don't trust to the GUI I can just run in screen.
As for the GUI, there are a few tiny bits and pieces that are broken. Scrolling seems to have its fair share of issues, and it's exploded once in the last two weeks of usage. I also had an issue for a little while when KDE3 parts were running in the KDE4 environment (I added KDE4 after a vanilla Kubuntu Hardy install — to both machines). But in general, it's stable enough for normal usage, and because there's "really" Unix under there, all the stuff I usually ask MacOS to do (and am pleasantly surprised when it does...), it does without complaining, and even generally the way I expect it to.
I said previously that it was close to as pretty as MacOS. I think that's misleading. It's got that very "robust" look that Unix window managers have always had (going way back to IRIX and the early CDE displays and forward to black/open/fluxbox), only there's a fairly nice shine on it. It's not prettier, but in its own way, it's not less appealing, either. It's just different. And, frankly, if this where they are now, Apple should keep its eyes on these folks, because the next few bumps are going to be really nice.
Ready for the desktop? No. I spend a fair amount of time in #kubuntu answering questions, and while I mostly remember asking these questions myself ten years ago, the fact that people are still asking the same questions, today, is an indicator that where it counts — the stuff you don't see — is still a large pain in the ass. Stuff like sound configuration, the fact that your window manager is actually composed of lots of little packages, that it's not really clear (to a newbie) what the difference between "Xorg" and "startx" are, or even when they're in a terminal window in X or whether they're attached to the (k)onsole. Will it ever be ready for that crowd? I'm not sure it will be. It's my hope that there are enough people out there like myself, who drive a need for a Linux (well, a Unix anyways, I'm sorta ambivalent about Linux as a whole, but I gots my preferences) on the desktop, and that there are people out there developing this resource. I'm not sure what's in it for them, other than they like writing software that people use (that's one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done for a living; however, generally my end of the bargain is backend and infrastructure rather than interfaces — other than APIs — and user-facing stuff).
Today, P ow er set is excited to announce that the rubber has hit the road, the switch has flipped, and all systems are go. Whatever your favorite metaphor is, [we are] now freely available to everyone at [our website].
[our] first product reinvents the search and discovery experience for Wikipedia articles. Instead of being limited to keywords, [our product] allows you to enter keywords, phrases, or questions. Instead of just showing you a list of blue link results, [the product] gives you more accurate search results, often answering questions directly, and aggregates information from across multiple articles. Finally, instead of leaving you at the search page, [our] technology follows you into enhanced Wikipedia articles, giving you a better way to digest and navigate content quickly.
You have to be an incredibly bad source for even 4chan to shun your usage, but that's exactly where Wikipedia finds itself. Zillions of brainwashed almost-finished-7th-graders now have access to a repository of knowledge that means they don't have to know anything. Many have lamented, oi, but I would love having wikipedia on my mobile device.Or the ever popular, nobody would know that I actually know nothing about Loop Quantum Gravity at the next Oprah's Book Club meeting! How many people use Wikipedia as a crutch, saving them from the awful labor that is learning something? And of those idiots, those absolute fools, how many of them decide they actually know enough and go contributing on these subjects?
The answer is lots, of course. Take your average USENET discussion or IRC channel. How long will it be before somebody spews off some "fact" they've just "verified" by trawling Wikipedia? Strangely, it never occurs to somebody that somebody else, as ignorant as they are, may have actually written the article they're reading as fact.
Now, for those people just too busy to invent some intellectual façade, there's a fucking search engine that employs some super advanced ultra sophisticated natural language parsingutterly run of the mill text searching to pull data out of Wikipedia that, well, looks like AskJeeves did, oh, ten years ago. The major difference between this idiocy and the relative innovation of a language-based search engine ten years ago is now there's a revenue stream generated. It truly is the idiots being taxed for their idiocy, and all that idiot capital is flowing into the coffers of one pornsalesman and general slimebag, and all that, tax-free, courtesy of you.
I wish I could say that I was surprised there are idiots who think they can get away with this, or surprised that there are idiots who will drive revenue in this transaction, or that there were idiots who were stupid enough and ignorant enough to think they should write an encyclopedia, but, well, I'm not.
And, for those of you who must know more, I am sure katie would love to hear from you.
