Technological advances: the rifled musket.

 Some things move slowly.  The British Army issued a smooth bore flintlock musket, Brown Bess it was called, for nearly 100 years.  Infantry tactics were worked out.  You have your men load their muskets and fix bayonets.  You close with the enemy, very close.  Don't fire until you can see the whites of their eyes was the order given at Bunker Hill.  That's probably 20 feet, so close you cannot miss even with a smooth bore.  After firing on the enemy  you went at them with bayonet and gun butt.  Nobody got a chance to reload.  This state of affairs lasted up thru the Napoleonic wars.

   Come forward to the American Civil War.  All the new Army officers, recently pulled from civilian life, are furiously reading Jomini, Napoleon's biographer/historian.  Both Civil War armies, Union and Confederate figured Napoleon knew land warfare, he won a number of striking victories.  The Americans figured if it worked for Napoleon it ought to work for them.

There had been one important technological change since Napoleon's time.  The muskets were now rifled. The troops could open fire at 200 yards (600 feet) and get hits.  Rifling had been around for a couple of hundred years, problem was, using a round ball in a muzzle loader, it was quite difficult to force the ball down the barrel.  The ball had to be big enough to take the rifling, which meant the rifling had to cut grooves in the lead ball.  So, rifled guns were made, were used, but they were so slow to load that armies issued faster loading smooth bores.  

   The French solved the problem with the invention of the Minie ball, a lead slug with a hollow at the back.  The explosion of the gunpowder forced the hollow rear end of the bullet to expand and take the rifling.  The Minie balls were cast small enough to just drop down the muzzle, just like a smooth bore.  So now we have a rifled musket, that loads as fast as the old Brown Bess smooth bore.  And it is in mass production, issued to most of the troops at the start of the Civil War and issued to all troops by the end of the Civil War. 

    So now we consider the effect on infantry tactics.  The defender, standing his ground, can open fire when the attackers are 200 yards away.  By the time the attacker has charged 200 yards, the defenders have time to reload, at least once, and give 'em another volley.  The defenders get at least two shots for each man.  The attackers only get one.  Muzzle loaders cannot be reloaded on the run, you have to stop, stand still, to get the powder, the Minie ball, and the wad down the barrel, to say nothing of getting the percussion cap on right.

   That's what happened to Pickett's Charge.  Union infantry shot Pickett's men down before they got close enough to use the bayonet.  And something similar happened at all the Civil War battles.  Defenders always defeated attackers.  This was not supposed to happen if you had read your Jomini.

Malwarebytes vs Word vs Win 10

 

Word for Windows choked up when I tried to print. Drew an error message from malwarebytes about an exploit. Uninstalled malwarebytes and Word can print again.

Death and Taxes

 My telephone bill, just plain old telephone service, was $26.95.  Of this, $15.30, better than half, was federal tax.  It's not one tax, it is seven different taxes, designed to disguise how much Uncle is nailing me for. 

Movie the Golden Compass. 2007

 Based on a fantasy trilogy by Phillip Pullman, The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass,  The books were good, they are young adult (YA) which I read as more interesting and better written than Adult Fiction.  The movie was pretty good.  Dakota Blue Richards does a fine job of playing Lyra, the main protagonist, even though she was only 13 years old at the time.  I thought she did more for the movie than Nicole Kidman or Daniel Craig.

   It is too bad that they never made movies from the other two books of the trilogy.  It could have been mediocre earnings from the Golden Compass.  From a budget if $180 million, they only made $70 million in the US and Canada.  Worldwide earnings were better, $370 million, so they should have made a fair amount of money on the Golden Compass. 

Abolition:

 Way back when, long before the US Civil War of 1860, slavery was confined to the Southern colonies which would form the confederacy for the Civil War.  The North was into small farms owned and operated by free men.  The big slave worked plantations were a Southern phenomenon.  And the two systems did not interact much. 

   Starting back in the early 1700’s a feeling began to grow in the North that slavery was unfair, cruel, and close to a mortal sin.  Abolition it was called later.  For the Revolution, this feeling was submerged, all hands North and South, understood that to beat the Redcoats we Americans needed unity in the face of the enemy and we could not afford the political strains that abolition would bring, at least not until we had won the Revolution. 

After the Revolution abolition grew apace.  A lot of protestant preachers spoke in favor.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe became a best seller, selling nearly as many copies as the Bible.  The Republican Party was created to push abolition.  When the Republicans elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the Southern states seceded from the Union.  When the South fired upon Fort Sumter the Civil War was on.  If the south had just let Major Andersen’s Fort Sumter garrison continue manning their guns, the North might well have let the South secede in peace.  But after the South fired on the Union flag, the North sprang to arms,  It took 600,000 casualties, more that all we suffered in all the other wars we ever fought to win the Civil War and free all the slaves. 

   We didn't fight the Civil War for white supremacy.  We fought it for freedom and liberty. 

DISH. Slow and a little flaky

 I got tired of Spectrum's endless price hiking and switched to DISH.  DISH works, most of the time.  The data rate is plenty fast enough for me.  What is slow is switching from one web site to another.  I fear this works by your system transmitting a request for change up to the satellite, and waiting for the satellite to respond.  Since every DISH owner in North America is transmitting requests up to the poor over burdened satellites, it is not surprising that some of the requests get lost and have to be re-transmitted.  When two requests to the satellite arrive at the same time, they jam each other and other requests must be re-transmitted.  Net result, it takes DISH noticeable longer to switch to a new web site than cable modem Spectrum.  

Disk comes with a massive video box which has instructions so complex I have not mastered them yet.  And the video box ("Hopper") occasionally dies.  If I cycle power and wait long enough (several hours last night) the video comes back.  

Is a Lush Beard a Signal of Having More Testosterone?

 Title of a piece on the Web.  Actually since many (most?) guys shave their faces every morning, it is hard to believe that a beard is attractive to chicks, or anyone else.  If they were, more guys would grow beards. Or that a beard is a mark of better genes or more testosterone or anything else other than being a guy.  And I have never heard a Darwinian (or any other science based argument) about why guys grow beards and chicks don't.