Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Don't get conned by Shell's immersion cooling oil for computers
Regular mineral oil works just fine and is much cheaper and safer. Don't be a sucker and fall for a fancy label. I used it on my experimental computer. If I remember right, I overclocked it to 5 GHz.
In 2021, I was handcuffed and interrogated by NSA special agents. But that was for something else.
I'd love to make a Beowulf cluster like this and see what it could do:
Use coconut water as a substitute for plasma or IV fluid?
There are stories from WW2 in the Pacific that American and British medics sometimes used coconut water when IV bags or plasma were scarce.
Coconut water is similar to blood plasma, but instead of being high sodium and low in potassium, it's the opposite. So it was better than nothing, but not ideal. It'd be easy enough to blend coconut water with something else to get the right concentrations.
Coconut water IV plus some salt tablets would work for patients able to swallow. A low potassium diet would also help until the patient recovers.
Tuesday, November 4, 2025
Jolly Roger
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The Floppotron: Pirates of the Caribbean - He's a Pirate - YouTube
The Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) Conundrum
Most if not all plants contain Vitamin C even though it serves no purpose in their survival or reproduction. Of the animals that eat plants and spread the seeds, all of them except two (guinea pigs and humans) make Vitamin C as a byproduct of their own metabolism. Incidentally, this is the reason why guinea pigs are used to test if experimental drugs are safe for people.
Given that guinea pigs branched off from the rest of mammals eons ago and all other primates do not need to consume ascorbic acid, the mutation that affects humans must have been fairly recent since homo sapiens have only been around for about 300,000 years.
Guinea pigs adjusted to living in jungles to compensate and humans must have been spurred to horticulture and agriculture to harvest enough of this key nutrient. Early humans lived in areas where it was easy to gather plants much like the way the Shoshone, Dorobo, Yanomami and other hunter-gatherer groups do today.
Long story short, if humans had the same metabolism as other apes, civilization would have never begun.
In a similar way, without ascorbic acid from limes or sauerkraut, the age of exploration would have never begun. Or we'd be stuck with animal sources of ascorbic acid like the Inuit. Without the need for it, humans would have never spread to polar or tundra habitats.
Isn't fascinating how one simple organic chemical can have such incredible effects?
If you enjoy my take on this subject, I strongly recommend reading Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches. It's probably the most entertaining anthropology book ever written. If you're pressed for time, the film Dead Birds is worth watching.
Monday, November 3, 2025
Vietnam War video quartet
Bamiba
Animated Soviet Propaganda - American Imperialist: Ave Maria
Bamoyba = 33, a common brand of Vietnamese beer during the war
Quốc tế ca - L'Internationale, The Internationale (Vietnamese Lyrics, Version & English Translation)
Sunday, November 2, 2025
Chris Hedges, your Arabic sucks
Just shut the hell up until you actually learn some. And stop making shit up about your Middle Eastern adventures.
The only people I hate more than cowards are liars.
Brainy the Pooh & Pinklet Meet Algore & Bee Arthur
Here's my suggested reading to you and every other wannabe orientalist:
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
The Koran
The 1,001 Nights
The Prophet
Wanna prove I'm lying? Take a DLPT and see if you can score 2/2 or above.
Hell, if you're pressed for time, just watch Disney's Aladdin in Spanish, another language you don't speak.
Saturday, November 1, 2025
A primer on USMC and Army rivalry
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A. Scott Piraino
The United States has two armies. Today we take this for granted, and don’t question the reasons for funding both the United States Army, and the United States Marine Corps. But it wasn’t always this way.
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Across the board cuts are the only way to settle the argument about how to balance the budget.
Thursday, October 30, 2025
A primer on Chinese military thought
guanxi = closed system (you scratch my back, I scratch yours, acceptable corruption).
cha bu duo = difference not much (close enough for government work)
face = reputation
The Good Earth
Dao de Jing
I Ching
Analects of Confucius
I touched the hero stone on the Great Wall of China:
Hegseth's speech
His remarks in full:
Some thoughts on it and related things:
Right off the bat, all hands meetings are dumb, just send an email instead of tormenting a captive audience. That's the sort of attention whoring I expect from ex-journalists and career bureaucrats.
His fixation on things that are irrelevant to modern warfare like grooming and waistlines was painful to watch. There were plenty of hairy soldiers and generals in the US Civil War. Very few were obese because they spent a few years walking everywhere with around 40 pounds of gear. Everything else was transported by mules, and it was a mistake to get rid of them later.
Army Special Forces and suchlike were meant to tip the scales of proxy wars in America's favor. That goal has yet to be achieved for various naive reasons. The US military held the line in South Korea before Special Forces was at its present size (it was founded during the Korean War in 1952).
It's a bad idea to publicly criticize the organization you're in charge of, and not just for strategic or propaganda reasons. Announcing to the world that our military sucks will not bring about positive change. In any case, the real problem is smart troops get out of the military as quickly as possible once they get fed up with all the reindeer games.
From a more practical perspective, the USMC has never missed its recruiting goal, probably because they have a macho appeal that isn't found in the other branches. That's fine and dandy, but it's the Army that has always struggled to recruit and retain enough people. There's a widespread belief that soldiers must be trim athletes. But physical fitness stopped being an issue for all militaries during WW1 when machine guns and long-range artillery became the norm.
Hegseth is tired of seeing fat soldiers and generals? I'm tired of seeing flag-draped coffins coming back from wars we didn't need to fight in the first place. If I had a magic wand, we'd never go to war unless at least 10% of our troops, generals, admirals, etc. can speak the language of the enemy military. Not true fluency, but enough to get by, kind of like what the French Foreign Legion requires.
We tend to romanticize the infantry even though more than 80% of the casualties in modern warfare are from things like landmines, artillery, mortars, etc. Most soldiers kill and get killed by people they never even see.
I have other material here and elsewhere on this topic. Here is my suggested reading list:
The Anatomy of Courage
The Science of Victory by Suvorov
Never fight if you don't have to.
Never fight alone.
Never fight for long.
extra strength hole puncher
Keep your booger hooks off the bang switch until you're ready to rock and roll.
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Ukraine needs Shmels, not F-16s, Abrams, Bradleys, or drones
This video speaks for itself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV3l_6tXb6Y
As far as artillery goes, Ukraine needs Grad launchers and other unguided rocket artillery.
50 cal machine guns and the Russian versions of such are also needed.
Monday, October 27, 2025
The Goldbach Conjecture and Dirichlet's Theorem
The Goldbach Conjecture says any even number greater than 2 can be written as the sum of 2 primes.
Dirichlet's Theorem says that there are infinitely many primes of the form n*a + b, where a and b are coprime (have no factors in common) and n is any positive integer.
Some examples:
17 + 3 = 20
2*2 + 3 = 7
2*991 + 977 = 2819
991, 997, and 2819 are all prime, and 991 and 977 are coprime.
Primes of arbitrary size can be made by using the conjecture and theorem together.
Dirichlet's Theorem is the key to solving the integer factorization problem in my opinion.
hard truths about publishing
spirals, primes, conjectures, and theorems
I'm not sure how all these pieces fit together but it seems like they do. More on that here:
Sunday, October 26, 2025
Saturday, October 25, 2025
flags and the sincerest form of flattery
Great minds think alike.
Liberia
Malaysia
UK
Russia
USA
Cuba
North Korea
France
Cambodia
Thailand
Norway
Army of Tennessee battle flag
Friday, October 24, 2025
how to support me
If you enjoy my content and live close to a Western Union, you can send me money that way.
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Donors will be anonymous unless they specify otherwise. Also, I'll take suggestions from donors about content (articles, illustrations, etc.).
My email is: harty.thomas@gmail.com
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Important Russian concepts: vranyo, lozh, muzhik, kormushka, nichevo
I'd translate vranyo as either a tall tale or bullshit. Vranyo are obvious lies to both the speaker and the listener, but which serve the purpose of building or maintaining a relationship.
Lozh just means lies, same as English. It's similar to how pravda just means truth.
Muzhik means peasant or serf. In modern Russian slang, it means a tough guy or a real man. Chuck Norris is the ultimate muzhik.
Kormushka means a feeding trough and has a similar meaning to English. It represents public wealth to which the connected get what they want and everyone else gets what's left.
Nichevo means nothing, but as a phrase, it means something like "who cares?" or "no sweat" or "meh".
At my NSA job, I taught myself some Russian while listening to Arabic comms. It's good to keep your brain flexible with multilingualism.
In Russia, they say only idiots and rich people smile in public, and rich people don't walk the streets.
Ukraine can use landmines and grenades to halt Russia
It takes two to tango, and the Russians have been mining for the same reason anyway. Once Ukrainian troops are safely outside the range of Russian artillery, they can focus on air defense. Any Russian troops who make it through the minefields will have a hell of a time advancing or retreating into their own minefields.
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The GATOR mine system is a United States military system of air-dropped anti-tank and anti-personnel mines developed in the 1980s to be compatible with existing cluster dispensers. It is used with two dispenser systems—the Navy 230 kg (500 lb) CBU-78/B and the Air Force 450 kg (1,000 lb) CBU-89/B. Additionally the mines are used with the land- and helicopter-based Volcano mine system.
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The M136 Volcano Vehicle-Launched Scatterable Mine System is an automated mine delivery system developed by the United States Army in the 1980s. The system uses prepackaged mine canisters which contain multiple anti-personnel (AP) and/or anti-tank (AT) mines which are dispersed over a wide area when ejected from the canister. The system, commonly referred to as Volcano, is also used by other armies around the world.[1]
***
Thoroughly mine the whole front line then pull back 5 km. If the Russians are dumb enough to advance, they'll have to deal with landmines and Ukrainian artillery simultaneously.
I like Russia, but they are in the wrong in this war.
On a related note, Ukraine is using the wrong kind of hand grenade. They should be using one with a handle and save the rest for use by drones.
Take one of these and duct tape some nails or ball bearings on it for shrapnel:
how to think like robot/computer/machine
Play the music in one tab and minimize it. Then make 2 tabs for the videos below with each video taking up half the screen. Loop the 3 videos.
Derpetology: Solving the Bongard Problem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6VJQZxeWNY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkQ2pXkYjRM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRA0W1kECg
I'm convinced that machines and the so-called mentally ill think in pictures.
Also, read this book:
America has better computers, but Russia has better computer scientists. Hence the technological superiority of Google over Facebook.
Another deep thought song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xUEi7Sd9bE
does not compute; GOTO 10
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Boris (Boaz) Abramovich Trakhtenbrot was a Russian-Israeli mathematician in logic, algorithms, theory of computation, and cybernetics.
***
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UZeHJyiMG8
It is not necessary to find room temperature superconductors if the computer is immersed in mineral oil.
If you build something like this, expect a visit from the FBI or whatever your country's secret police is.
overcoming death anxiety
On a side note, if you've ever beaten a video game, you know more about computers than about 90% of people alive today. Yay us!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy4HA3vUv2c
Food for thought:
1) The worst-case scenario is that death is just a dreamless sleep. Most people would pick hell over oblivion. Some would even pick hell over heaven.
2) Realize that death is inevitable. It is the price we pay for the gift of life.
3) Imagine you could build an afterlife that would maximize happiness. You'd need to be flexible about your beliefs of heaven and hell because everybody dies and thus must all go to the same place.
4) Your afterlife needs dogs, because all dogs go to heaven or something.
5) Your afterlife needs to fair to kids somehow. Kids die early sometimes and have to go somewhere.
6) Your afterlife has to punish the right people somehow. And remember that kids will be around to see it.
7) Did I say dogs already? "Most dogs go to heaven" is unappealing for some reason.
8) Ask yourself how your afterlife would handle people with serious injuries or disabilities.
9) Does your afterlife allow the dead to communicate with the living? If so, how?
10) What is approximate location, temperature, season, and time of day for your afterlife? Is everybody there going to be OK with it?
might get your creative juices flowing. Even an extra strong marijuana edible might work. Be warned about this method. It can land you in a psychiatric hospital for days or weeks.
Some other suggested reading:
Some more suggested music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUQiUFZ5RDw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2msh0jut2Y
More thoughts on the war in Ukraine
I've been monitoring livemap for a while now.
https://liveuamap.com/
Ukraine is holding the line, but they can't do it forever without more soldiers, money, and weapons. Note that Ukraine is not on the offensive anywhere.
The Russians switched to a Fabian strategy early on. It's basically the same strategy the Taliban used against the US for 20 years.
The fighting won't stop until:
1) Ukraine gets security guarantees from Russia and NATO.
2) Ukraine formally cedes the territory already occupied by Russia.
3) Ukraine agrees not to join the European Union or NATO
It's basically Finlandization.
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Finlandization (Finnish: suomettuminen) is the process by which one powerful country makes a smaller neighboring country refrain from opposing the former's foreign policy rules, while allowing it to keep its nominal independence and its own political system. The term means "to become like Finland", referring to the influence of the Soviet Union on Finland's policies during the Cold War.
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This is what happens when Sweden and Finland joined NATO.
Here are visual aids I made to explain Russia's mood:
And here it is in the form of song:
Fun fact, I listened to that song so many times as a teen my parents thought I'd been brainwashed into being a communist. Whoever did my background check for NSA evidently never found out about it. Also, I'm not a communist. Or a Russian spy, etc.
I volunteered for the Ukrainian International Legion in 2022 but never got a response. My own sister pressured me to join because of my combat training, language skills, and experiences in Africa.
Respect makes empires fall. It's not my fault that Ukraine and its allies stocked up on drones instead of rocket artillery and cannon shells.
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