At sunset on October 30, 1917, on the dusty outskirts of present-day Beersheba, more than 500 cavaliers from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACS) charged in what trooper Eric Elliot called “the bravest, most awe-inspiring sight” he’d ever witnessed: the 4th Australian Light Horse regiment overtaking the Turkish trenches and seizing Beersheba.
The victory, later known as the Third Battle of Gaza, took place the “very day the British War Cabinet agreed to the Balfour Declaration,” Australian historian and author Kelvin Crombie told The Jerusalem Post in 2003.
Ninety years after the military triumph, 70 Aussies have returned to Israel to commemorate the Light Horsemen’s success. The highlight of their visit will be the “In the Steps of the Light Horse” three-day trek through the Negev on the same route the original regiment took from Shellal to Beersheba. The group will reenact the charge – one of the last successful mounted charges in Western warfare – on the same ground on Wednesday.
One of my Grandpa’s favorite movies was based on that charge. I watched the movie with him more then once. Rereading accounts of that battle I am struck by how closely my memories of the movie follow what really happened. I guess the story was gripping enough they did not feel the need to embellish it much.
Hysteria is not called for. It too hard to sustain and this does not look like the end of the world as we know it yet. But the problem is getting worse. This quote is from the Houston Chronicles…
Based on data from 2005, the agency estimated that about 94,400 patients nationwide suffer an invasive MRSA infection each year. And in the vast majority of cases, the infections originated in health care settings.
“This is an alarming number of infections and a very significant number of deaths,” said Dr. Monina Klevens, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC. “This is really a call to action for health care facilities to do a better job at preventing MRSA.”
The once-rare, drug-resistant germ causes more than half of all skin infections treated in U.S. emergency rooms, the CDC reported last year. But until now, there was no solid data on the number of cases nationwide to serve as a benchmark.
The federal study tracked only the most serious type of MRSA, the potentially fatal infection that can cause pneumonia, bloodstream infections and surgical wound infections. Staph infections on skin, which look like pimples or boils, are more common and easier to treat. Both spread by person-to-person contact and are resistant to certain antibiotics.
The study referenced in the article also estimate that 18,700 had died from drug resistant infections. If this estimate is accurate, then more people are dying because of drug resistant bacteria than are dying because of aids. And most of the people who are dying because of the drug resistant bacteria are getting these infections simply by being hospitalized. But there is real danger that locker rooms, prisons, and public rest rooms could start spreading these infections.
The steady growth of drug resistant bacteria has got people thinking about what the future of infection fighting is going to look like. Derek Lowe suggests that it may look a lot like the fight against cancer now. As he puts it…
It struck me the other day that antiinfectives, as a drug research field, might be moving toward a similar spot to oncology. In both cases, you have a problem with rapidly multiplying cells, giving you a serious medical outcome – often in cancer, and increasingly with infections. The average tumor is a lot more worrisome than the average infection, of course, but that’s something we can only say with confidence in the industrialized world, and we’ve only been able to say it for the last sixty or seventy years. As cancer gradually becomes more manageable and infections gradually become less so, the two might eventually meet – or even switch places, which would be bad news indeed. (In some genetically bottlenecked species, in fact, the two problems can overlap, which is fortunately extremely unlikely in humans).
There are, of course, a lot of differences between the two fields, not least of which is that you’re fighting human cells in one case and prokaryotes (or worse, viruses) in the other. But many of those differences actually come out making infectious diseases look worse. The transmissibility of bacteria and viruses make them serious contenders for causing havoc, as they have innumerable times in human history, and they can grow more quickly in vivo than any cancer.
Technically, we’ve been in at least a moderate drought for more than a year. In August, the drought was upgraded to a D4, or exceptional, level. That’s the top of the drought scale, the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane. And based on global weather patterns, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects below-average rainfall for at least another year.
Suddenly, you can almost feel a bit of panic ripple through official circles. If the drought doesn’t break, there’s now talk of reservoirs eventually running dry, of drinking water supplies possibly endangered. And last week, the state banned all outside residential watering in the metro area, as it should. But it’s late in the game, and we should have done a lot more a long time ago.
This is going to become an increasingly big issue. Everyone wants to move south because they love the weather. But somehow, they just magically expect the drinking water to follow them from the North. To make matters worst, they waste tons of water keeping their lawns a northern shade of green even in high summer.
They just don’t get it. In the north the grass has to die in winter. In the south, it has to die in the summer. Fighting this is a fool’s game that you are going to lose in the long run.
This week’s essay of the week is shorter then most, but it should please the nerds in the audience. The essay is called How to Take Down the Power Grid. The author is a white hat hacker (they called him an analyst, but it is obvious that the dude hacked things) who used to work for the National Security Agency.
I am no expert, but the essay rings true to me. Especially since someone who works as a programmer at a large utility told me that a lot of critical data was being outsourced to Russia companies.
Unless you are a real military nerd, you probably have never heard of the Su-30 family of warplanes (the number of variants in this family of fighters can get confusing, but they are all pretty similar). But if an American fighter plane is ever shot down by a hostile jet in the near future, it will probably be a Su variant that does it.
THE SCENARIO in which the Su-30 “always” beats the F-15 involves the Sukhoi taking a shot with a BVR missile (like the AA-12 Adder) and then “turning into the clutter notch of the F-15’s radar,” the Air Force official said. Getting into the clutter notch where the Doppler radar is ineffective involves making a descending, right-angle turn to drop below the approaching F-15 while reducing the Su-30’s relative forward speed close to zero. This is a 20-year-old air combat tactic, but the Russian fighter’s maneuverability, ability to dump speed quickly and then rapidly regain acceleration allow it to execute the tactic with great effectiveness, observers said.
If the maneuver is flown correctly, the Su-30 is invisible to the F-15’s Doppler radar–which depends on movement of its targets–until the U.S. fighter gets to within range of the AA-11 Archer infrared missile. The AA-11 has a high-off-boresight capability and is used in combination with a helmet-mounted sight and a modern high-speed processor that rapidly spits out the target solution.
Positioned below the F-15, the Su-30 then uses its passive infrared sensor to frame the U.S. fighter against the sky with no background clutter. The Russian fighter then takes its second shot, this time with the IR missile, and accelerates out of danger.
“It works in the simulator every time,” the Air Force official said. However, he did point out that U.S. pilots are flying both aircraft in the tests. Few countries maintain a pilot corps with the air-to-air combat skills needed to fly these scenarios, said an aerospace industry official involved in stealth fighter programs.
Computer simulations are not the only thing that leads people to believe that Su-30’s could shoot down current American war planes. Recent exercises against the India’s Air Forces have lead to the same conclusion. From an article in Inside the Air Force…
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i>Although service officials have been reluctant to detail how the Indians performed against the six F-15Cs from the 3rd Wing that participated in Cope India, Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) said in a Feb. 26 House Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing that U.S. F-15Cs were defeated more than 90 percent of the time in direct combat exercises against the IAF.
Officials from the 3rd Wing at Elmendorf did not provide specifics about how their aircraft fared, but said the experience is causing the service to reevaluate the way it trains its pilots for air-to-air operations.
“What happened to us was it looks like our red air training might not be as good because the adversaries are better than we thought,” Snodgrass said. “And in the case of the Indian Air Force both their training and some of their equipment was better than we anticipated.”
“Red air” refers to the way the Air Force simulates enemy capability in air combat training. Because the service has assumed for years that its fighters are more capable than enemy aircraft, the U.S. pilots that simulate the enemy, known as “red” forces, in air combat training are required to operate under rules that constrain their combat capability.
“We have always believed that our technology was superior to everyone else’s technology, that we would fight a somewhat inferior adversary, so we have had to supply a simulated adversary from our own resources; we call that ‘red air,’” Snodgrass said.
The key to the Su-30 family’s success has been Mikhail Simonov’s focus on super maneuverability. To learn about this concept you should read this interview with Mr. Simonov. Since he is in charge of the Su program, you can’t expect him to be objective. But given the success of his planes, it is worth reading. In the interview Simonov explains such things as how super maneuverability can make a plan invisible to radar for a short space of time and how super maneuverability helps with getting into firing position.
Why is it worth learning about the Su-30 family of fighters?
i>On 30 July 2007 the Jerusalem Post reported that Iran was negotiating with Russia to buy 250 Sukhoi Su-30 “Flanker” fighter-bombers. Israeli defense officials were investigating the potential Iran-Russia deal, in which Iran would pay $1 billion a dozen squadrons’ worth of the jets. Iran would also buy 20 Ilyushin Il-78 Midas tankers that could extend the fighters’ range as part of the deal. The move was seen as a response to the new American plans to sell billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to potential Iranian adversaries in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel. This report came soon after other deals to sell advanced Su-27 and Su-30 combat fighters to Indonesia, Malaysia and Venezuela.
And of course, India (which puts Israeli electronics in their Su -30s), China (which makes them under licenses), Algeria, and a number of states that use to be part of the former Soviet Union also fly these planes. The fact that an increasing number of countries are flying the Su-30s is one of the main reasons that US Air force feels that the F-22 is so critical to future America air superiority. I imagine that some time in the future we will find out if the F-22 has any greater success against the Su-30 family then the F-15 has had. After all, the developers of the Su-30 are not sitting on their hands.
If you are the type of person who prefers visual information to the written word, watch the u-tube clip below of a Venezuelan Su-30 going through its paces. Without doing at least some reading on the SU-30 family, I don’t think that you will recognize the maneuvers that you are seeing (especially since the camera zooms in so much that it is hard to keep your sense of perspective). But it should still give you some idea of why the Su-30 family are the most maneuverable fighter planes in the world.
Edit: Old clip was taken down by whoever put it up. Below are two new clips.
The Cobra maneuver from far enough back that can see what it looks like.
and a longer clip showing all the same maneuvers as the old clip except that that camera is zoomed in so much it is harder to understand what the plane is doing.
If you don’t already know about Storm, you should educate yourself by reading this blog post. Between the information contained in the post and all the links that it has you should have a pretty good idea of why “Storm” worries people.
We are talking about a virus that is so scary some people are talking about it being the creation of some government or other. I don’t buy that theory at all. Lately, who ever controls Storm has been using it to attack anti-fraud sites. That seems like a pretty petty occupation for a government.
But the fact that Strom was not cooked up by some government should scare people more then any conspiracy theory. Cyber gangs are staring to get sophisticated enough that they are becoming truly dangerous.
These links are pretty serious and they have a lot of eye candy. So don’t bother looking at them unless you have some time to blow.
We will start you off easy with a post from Andrew Cusack’s excellent blog on the rebuilding of a historical church in Maryland. Being the committed and historically minded Click Here to continue reading.
