I Didn't See This Until Today

 Obviously, I'm a couple of days late. 

The photo of the year for America's 250th birthday

Photo via The Silicon Graybeard.

Sure, NASA spends taxpayer money like a drunken sailor.  Sure, Congress is using this program to throw taxpayer money at favored corporations.

But today, no other country can do what we are doing, just like what Old America did half a century ago.  And no other country has a SpaceX waiting in the wings to drop mission cost by a factor of 40. 

Considering the epic amount of fraud from California's (and other states) Medicare programs (not to mention Learing Centers), all I can say is that this is waste I can get behind.

OPSEC

The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, the only nuclear powered carrier outside the U.S. Navy, is en route to the Mid-East as part of the French response to recent events in the region. As it is sailing into harm's way, security would understandably be high. The exact location of the ship would be classified.

Strava is a fitness app athletes use to record their activities running or cycling. It's very popular and can be used to allow athletes on training equipment paired with the app to compete with one another or share their individual results with friends or interested fans. Results can be published in near realtime.

The French officer that was getting in a 7 kilometer run on the deck of the ship is  was a Strava user. The GPS coordinates of his run pinpointed the location of the flagship in real time. The location was confirmed with publicly available satellite photos.

A French armed forces spokesman said the reported incident did "not comply with the current instructions" and appropriate measures would be taken.

 

 

 

Hector Berlioz - "Resurrexit" from Messe Solennelle

Holy Week calls for the Big Guns of classical music.  Hector Berlioz was one of these, and his Messe Solennelle is one of the great works of religious music.  Astonishingly, Berlioz was only twenty years old when he wrote this, and then destroyed the music for Messe Solennelle (except for the Resurrexit portion).

A copy of the entire work was discovered in 1991. 

LOL

I never looked at it that way. 

Apple's iPhones and iPads are now certified for NATO classified data

Wow.  And just plain-jane iOS, too.  Out of the box. 

As someone who ran across (into?) "Secure Operating Systems" more than once, this is a big deal. 

Chuck Norris - The Eyes of the Ranger Are Upon You

Rest in peach, sir. 

The Eyes of the Ranger Are Upon You (Songwriter: Tirk Wilder)

In the Eyes of a Ranger, the unsuspecting Stranger, 
had better know the truth of wrong from night
Cause the rule of law and order starts at the Texas border, 
with the lone Star of the Ranger shining bright. 

For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you;
Any wrong you do, he's gonna see.
When you're in Texas look behind you; 
for that's where the Ranger's gonna be.

In the Heart of a Ranger he'll never know the danger; 
from desperate men with nothing left to lose, 
the Ranger keeps on coming; so there ain't no sense in running, 
cause he's bound and sure to make you pay your dues.

For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you;
Any wrong you do, he's gonna see.
When you're in Texas look behind you; 
for that's where the Ranger's gonna be.

When a Ranger's on your Trail, he won't know how to fail, 
and you can't buy him off at any price; 
so if you decide to ramble, and with your life you'd gamble, 
know where you are before you roll the dice.

For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you;
Any wrong you do, he's gonna see.
When you're in Texas look behind you; for
that's where the Ranger's gonna be.

If you see him coming' round the outskirts of town, 
never take that Ranger for a ride.
For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you;
Any wrong you do, he's gonna see.
When you're in Texas look behind you; for
that's where the Ranger's gonna be. 

Yes, that's sung by Chuck himself.

But this is the song that I associate the most with him.  R.I.P. 

GPS jamming in the straight of Hormuz

This is not surprising, but it is pretty interesting, especially the guy in Dubai where Google Maps puts him in the middle of the straight. The discussion about why the Iranians probably have not mined the straight is also pretty interesting.

Update on the Herculaneum scrolls

As background, I've posted several times on the Herculaneum scrolls, here here and here.  That last link in particular is a fairly pain-free Youtube video about what the Big Deal is.

And a Big Deal it certainly is.  In short: when Mt. Vesuvius buried the Roman town of Pompeii in 79 AD, it also buried it's more prosperous neighbor Herculaneum.  One of the (very) rich Romans who lived in Herculaneum was likely the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, and had one of the biggest libraries in the Empire.  The extreme heat of the lava flow carbonized the scrolls (books).  Researchers have been using CAT scans to image the carbonized rolls and have been applying AI to "unroll" the scrolls virtually and distinguish between carbon-based ink and just plain old scroll carbon.  They are starting to read scrolls that have been lost for 2000 years.

 Like I said, this is a Big Damn Deal.

If this interests you, there is a must read essay on what's been happening over the previous 18 months, the progress that's being made, and the challenges that are still present.  This part is really, really interesting:

So the central question has shifted from whether text could be recovered at all to whether it could be done routinely. At the current pace, processing the full Herculaneum library would take several years. The Vesuvius Challenge Master Plan, published in July 2025, outlines a series of steps intended to compress that timeline. These include improved surface extraction, deeper automation, and tools designed to reduce manual intervention at every stage.

According to Schilling, the problem is not that current methods fail outright, but that they require too much human steering.

“It’s not as fast or effective or cheap as it should be,” he told me. “Right now, we have solutions that work but that require human input.” What researchers want instead is a “global optimal solution” — a system that can isolate papyrus surfaces, unwrap them, and detect ink reliably across many scrolls without constant correction.

We're not there yet, but people are starting to figure out how to get there.  And it looks like there are a bunch of scrolls that were entirely lost over time that we will be able to read:

These scrolls are believed to contain Greek prose that largely vanished elsewhere, including philosophical works from the Epicurean tradition that were rarely recopied because they conflicted with Christian doctrine.

Very, very cool

 

An Open Source Intelligence assessment of the Iran war

Via a link from HMS Defiant (who is on quite a roll lately), this is a very interesting analysis of the war from Open Source Intelligence sources (i.e. non-classified published sources).  Very, very interesting indeed.