Coconut Monkey Cornerclub

[ZedClampet]

When people ask for book recommendations over on the sports site, they want non-fiction military history. That's pretty much all most of them ever read

 

[Brian Boru]

non-fiction military history

Oh is there such a thing these days? About time it changed.

"History is written by the victors"
—Churchill

"History is a set of lies agreed upon"
—Napoleon

Nice that there's a non-fiction variant now.

 

[ZedClampet]

Oh is there such a thing these days? About time it changed.

"History is written by the victors"
—Churchill

"History is a set of lies agreed upon"
—Napoleon

Nice that there's a non-fiction variant now.

To be fair to military historians, Churchill and Napoleon are talking about something more immediate than a 21st century history professor writing about a 500 year old war on another continent. It's true that surviving period documents have been compromised to a degree, but historians often use parallel comparisons to other conflicts to point out potential biases in the subject information. We know, for example, that ancient historians greatly inflated the number of combatants and casualties.

We know that the Spartans were outnumbered at the Battle of Thermopylae. for instance, but it's very unlikely that there were hundreds of thousands of Persians.

 

[ZedClampet]

My wife has started making omelets in the waffle iron. She just dumps her ingredients in and closes the lid for 3 minutes, and they come out great.

Also related to breakfast, for some reason whenever she cooks bacon she makes the entire package. We always end up with a plate covered with bacon that just sits in the kitchen until I give it to the dog.

 

[Zloth]

Also related to breakfast, for some reason whenever she cooks bacon she makes the entire package. We always end up with a plate covered with bacon that just sits in the kitchen until I give it to the dog.

First somebody who played both Atari ST and Amiga games enough to play some twice, now a man who wastes bacon!? I may need to take Monday off to deal with the culture shock.

 

[Hveðrungr]

To be fair to military historians, Churchill and Napoleon are talking about something more immediate than a 21st century history professor writing about a 500 year old war on another continent. It's true that surviving period documents have been compromised to a degree, but historians often use parallel comparisons to other conflicts to point out potential biases in the subject information.

Also there are lots of cases where history was verifiably written by the loser. Winners are often too busy winning to waste time writing history. This is an interesting little essay on that premise:

History is Written by the Losers

This post was originally published as part of the Thucydides Roundtable project over at Zenpundit. I encourage you to read all of the posts in the roundtable.Meet Sima Qian. I hold him in high rega…

scholars-stage.org

 

[BeardyHat]

When people ask for book recommendations over on the sports site, they want non-fiction military history. That's pretty much all most of them ever read

Do you think they actually read it or just collect books on various topics? Much as I like historical wargames and listening to history podcasts, military history books tend to be so damned dry, I can't penetrate far into them.

As mentioned in the General Discussion thread, I ended-up with a lot of time to myself yesterday, which was great. Did a lot, but my main focus ended-up being painting this tank. Initially I had only planned to base coat it, but I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I just kept taking the next step and before I knew it, I had a fully painted tank by the afternoon. I call this one a big win for me, as I haven't painted anything since March (I'm pretty sure), since I was feeling pretty burnt out after painting something like 150-models of various sizes between December and then.

At any rate, this thing was just a lot of fun to paint and historical tanks are so satisfying because they come together very quickly. I'm particularly proud of how the rust came out on it, which may be challenging to see, as it ended-up very subtle and towards the bottom of the track covers mostly.

https://imgur.com/a/duFSiC7

It looks a little different in scheme from the other vehicles I painted previously, which is because I tried to do it slightly differently with a darker base coat first and less overall rustiness.

 

[BeardyHat]

LASTLY (I think, until I have more thoughts), I reached a major milestone last weekend in my 5-year project to rebuild the engine in my project car. It's largely together, with the tedious parts, which is all the measuring, behind me. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that I was missing a bolt for the lifter retainer, so I need to go see if I can purchase some more for this 26 year old vehicle. Once I have that, the rest should go together rather quickly, though I do need to buy some new parts to resolve a design flaw in the engine itself.

https://imgur.com/a/t49yAdD

The other major victory I had in this project is that I found a vacuum tube that broke off in the firewall 5-years ago just before I started this rebuild. This vacuum tube controls the functioning of the vents, so essentially I only had Defrost anymore. At any rate, before the engine goes back in in the next few months, I finally climbed into my empty engine bay and found the end of this tube that broke and I should be able to repair it with some new ABS tubing and heat shrink. I'm a little concerned the tubing I bought won't hold up to the heat of the engine bay, but I suppose there's no way I'll be able to find that out unless I do the fix.

This is a victory because I was pretty sure I was going to need to tear out the entire dash to get access to this vacuum tube, which is an enormous project I didn't want to tackle.

 

[ZedClampet]

Do you think they actually read it or just collect books on various topics?

No way of knowing, but they do discuss military history quite a bit and seem to know what they are talking about.

LASTLY (I think, until I have more thoughts), I reached a major milestone last weekend in my 5-year project to rebuild the engine in my project car.

Because I liked the previous picture so much. I skipped down to the picture in this post before reading and thought, "Wow, he's putting together a model of an engine on a model of an engine stand."

 

[BeardyHat]

Because I liked the previous picture so much. I skipped down to the picture in this post before reading and thought, "Wow, he's putting together a model of an engine on a model of an engine stand."

That would have been so much easier.

 

[ZedClampet]

I've just ordered my daughter to stay in college for as long as it takes her to figure out what she wants to do. She's decided she's no longer interested in either law or medicine. I told her just walking out with dual degrees in biology and Spanish and seeing what happens is unacceptable. I told her to see a career advisor and keep trying.

 

[BeardyHat]

I've just ordered my daughter to stay in college for as long as it takes her to figure out what she wants to do. She's decided she's no longer interested in either law or medicine. I told her just walking out with dual degrees in biology and Spanish and seeing what happens is unacceptable. I told her to see a career advisor and keep trying.

Gonna go against the grain here Zed and say let her quit. Of course, I don't know you or your daughter or your personalities, but:

I got pushed into college right after High School and floundered. Managed to get about 4 or so semesters under my belt before finally getting kicked out for my terrible grades; I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't want to be there, so I didn't attend class and when I did, I didn't pay attention or take any of it seriously. I halfheartedly selected a Major, but it wasn't really something I cared about or was interested in.

Fast forward, a year or two after flunking out, I'm working a crap Loss Prevention job (though I get to add "Loss Prevention Detective" to my resume now), getting taken advantage of with my awful hourly wage and then insulted further with a wonderful 9-cent raise come evaluation time and I realize I need to get my ass back to school so I can actually do something other than work in this garbage "industry" or some other service job.

So, I went back to school of my own volition, picked a Major/Minor I was truly interested in and proceeded to succeed the rest of my time in college; I never flunked another class and had a 3.8GPA for awhile, which unfortunately dropped to a 3.3 during a bad semester after being dumped, but I managed to claw it back to a 3.5 before graduation. Oh also, the few classes I did pass were able to be transferred over to my new school, so I didn't have to retake everything, which allowed me to jump into my Major sooner.

I didn't graduate until 2011, a full 8 years after high school, but I immediately jumped into my career in IT, which I wouldn't have been able to ply my way into without the skills I learned from the prior years. Also want to mention that I don't think choice of Major is all that important unless you're pursuing a higher degree; the important bit is that you have the piece of paper and can tell people you managed to stick to this thing for a number of years and see it through. My Major and Minor have absolutely nothing to do with my career field, yet taught me strong critical thinking skills and how to relate to people, which is a boon in the IT industry, I find.

Like I said, I don't know you guys, but I wanted to share how I felt after being pushed into school by my parents. It wasn't something I was ready for and while failing so hard helped me build some character, it has also made me realize that college isn't necessarily right for everyone or necessarily something that needs to be done immediately after high school. 18 year olds, hell 22 year olds are still kids and still don't really have a solid idea of self or what they really want their future to look like.

Just wanted to share my experience.

 

[Zloth]

Ummm... found this at the Albuquerque airport on Bing Maps.

You think maybe they might be using some AI to make these images?

 

[ZedClampet]

Gonna go against the grain here Zed and say let her quit. Of course, I don't know you or your daughter or your personalities, but:

I got pushed into college right after High School and floundered. Managed to get about 4 or so semesters under my belt before finally getting kicked out for my terrible grades; I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't want to be there, so I didn't attend class and when I did, I didn't pay attention or take any of it seriously. I halfheartedly selected a Major, but it wasn't really something I cared about or was interested in.

Fast forward, a year or two after flunking out, I'm working a crap Loss Prevention job (though I get to add "Loss Prevention Detective" to my resume now), getting taken advantage of with my awful hourly wage and then insulted further with a wonderful 9-cent raise come evaluation time and I realize I need to get my ass back to school so I can actually do something other than work in this garbage "industry" or some other service job.

So, I went back to school of my own volition, picked a Major/Minor I was truly interested in and proceeded to succeed the rest of my time in college; I never flunked another class and had a 3.8GPA for awhile, which unfortunately dropped to a 3.3 during a bad semester after being dumped, but I managed to claw it back to a 3.5 before graduation. Oh also, the few classes I did pass were able to be transferred over to my new school, so I didn't have to retake everything, which allowed me to jump into my Major sooner.

I didn't graduate until 2011, a full 8 years after high school, but I immediately jumped into my career in IT, which I wouldn't have been able to ply my way into without the skills I learned from the prior years. Also want to mention that I don't think choice of Major is all that important unless you're pursuing a higher degree; the important bit is that you have the piece of paper and can tell people you managed to stick to this thing for a number of years and see it through. My Major and Minor have absolutely nothing to do with my career field, yet taught me strong critical thinking skills and how to relate to people, which is a boon in the IT industry, I find.

Like I said, I don't know you guys, but I wanted to share how I felt after being pushed into school by my parents. It wasn't something I was ready for and while failing so hard helped me build some character, it has also made me realize that college isn't necessarily right for everyone or necessarily something that needs to be done immediately after high school. 18 year olds, hell 22 year olds are still kids and still don't really have a solid idea of self or what they really want their future to look like.

Just wanted to share my experience.

Thanks for sharing. I appreciate all the advice I can get. I just reread my post, and I made myself sound about 500 percent more authoritarian than I was in reality.

There are some differences in her story. She joined the Marine Corps out of high school. She was in for less than a year before she was honorably discharged due to a serious injury she got from a third round of combat training while waiting to become a code breaker. She thus went to college knowing how bad things can really get. Loss prevention is bad, but it's not Marine Corps bad, where they very literally came within inches of killing her while forcing her to redo combat training, over and over, including a 48 hour death march, because the code breaking school was running 8 weeks behind. A couple of weeks after her incident, they succeeded in killing a recruit.

Back to modern times, she loves college and has a 4.0 average and she sits on the student counsel. She's only planning on leaving because she thinks her time is up, like this is high school where they kick you out after 4 years. If she told me she was burned out, I wouldn't hesitate to tell her to take a break, but she's not. She might could hide this from me, but she couldn't hide it from her roommate--Guido. I have eyes on the ground, so to speak. Plus, she wouldn't hide that from me, anyway, and she sounded genuinely relieved to have her clock reset by the person who's agreeing to pay her bills while she figures it out.

She says she will schedule career counseling as soon as school opens back up.

 

[Zloth]

She got a BS in Biology and a BA in Spanish in just four years, with a 4.0?? Wow.

 

[ZedClampet]

Ummm... found this at the Albuquerque airport on Bing Maps.

You think maybe they might be using some AI to make these images?

What they are probably doing is having AI clean up actual satellite pictures that are impossible to decipher, and AI just does the best it can. In this case, two planes waiting their turn were probably too close together for the pixilated satellite picture.

If you let AI just make these pictures from nothing it would be infinitely worse.

 

[ZedClampet]

She got a BS in Biology and a BA in Spanish in just four years, with a 4.0?? Wow.

Sort of. She hasn't got either yet. this is her senior year. And she had a lot of college credits, including for Spanish, from high school.

 

[Zloth]

I doubt it. What they are probably doing is having AI clean up actual satellite pictures that are impossible to decipher, and AI just does the best it can. In this case, two planes waiting their turn were probably to close together for the pixilated satellite picture

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, too. They probably are using it to try and remove clouds and such.

 

[ZedClampet]

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, too. They probably are using it to try and remove clouds and such.

Sorry. Sometimes I don't read too well. I went back and edited out the "I doubt it" because I realized you didn't mean that they were created from scratch, but you were too fast for me and saw my error before I fixed it

 

[ZedClampet]

Ummm... found this at the Albuquerque airport on Bing Maps.

You think maybe they might be using some AI to make these images?

I showed this to my wife. She didn't care. Just wanted you to experience a little of my world.

 

[Brian Boru]

the important bit is that you have the piece of paper and can tell people you managed to stick to this thing for a number of years and see it through

Yep, that's what I heard from various HR people. The subject is relatively unimportant cos many people change careers a number of times.

Spanish + Biology = move to Mexico and have babies, make Señor Zed a grandad!

But yeah, her job is not to make you happy about her choice.

 

[Hveðrungr]

I don't think choice of Major is all that important unless you're pursuing a higher degree

I agree with this bit.

 

[Alm]

I didn't start learning my current profession until I was in my late 20s. Plus, I dropped out of University twice (for mental health reasons). Not that that helps but I had no clue what to do as a job until I tried CAD.

 

[ZedClampet]

There's a guy on the sports forum who trolls every few months about a smoking section being added to the football stadium. This time the title was, "New Captain D's Smoking Section. I saw this coming"

He then posts a diagram of the stadium and circles the new "Captain D's Smoking Section". There are so many users and so many new users that he always gets a few outraged responses. People who know what he's doing usually play along. haha

Another longstanding troll is the email newsletter (which doesn't exist) but apparently contains the most remarkable insider information.

 

[ZedClampet]

regarding my tactics with my daughter: I'll keep an eye on it. I appreciate everyone's perspectives and advice. I'm going to tell her that taking a break from school is also an option, knowing that she can always return whenever she likes. (edited the last part in as I thought about it some more)