At Gunship Helicopters we offer:
- The only place in the world you can shoot full-auto belt fed from a helicopter as a civilian
- 71 acres of mountainside range space
- A truly authentic military experience
I was surprised that they have packages under $1000, but they get more expensive pretty quickly. But things like this make me proud to be American.
Two items of note here. First up, Baltic shipwreck champagne was destined for Tsar Alexander II:
Meticulous research into the bottles of champagne found in a shipwreck discovered in the Baltic sea south of the Swedish island of Öland in July 2024, has uncovered that they were destined for the table of Tsar Alexander II.
The well-preserved remains of the 19th century ship were found 190 feet deep by technical divers from the Baltictech Association. The ship stayed upright when it sank to the seabed, and the cold waters of the Baltic were ideal storage conditions for dozens of glass wine bottles and stoneware Selters mineral water bottles....
The team reached out to Louis Roederer to find out more about the bottles, perform chemical analyses of the liquid inside the bottle and advise them on recovering a few samples. As luck would have it, one of Roederer’s champagne experts, Peter Liem, is also an experienced technical diver, so he was able to go down to the wreck and point specific bottles to recover. One was tested in Sweden, and several sent to Louis Roederer ChampagMeticulous research into the bottles of champagne found in a shipwreck discovered in the Baltic sea south of the Swedish island of Öland in July 2024, has uncovered that they were destined for the table of Tsar Alexander II.
The well-preserved remains of the 19th century ship were found 190 feet deep by technical divers from the Baltictech Association. The ship stayed upright when it sank to the seabed, and the cold waters of the Baltic were ideal storage conditions for dozens of glass wine bottles and stoneware Selters mineral water bottles....
The team reached out to Louis Roederer to find out more about the bottles, perform chemical analyses of the liquid inside the bottle and advise them on recovering a few samples. As luck would have it, one of Roederer’s champagne experts, Peter Liem, is also an experienced technical diver, so he was able to go down to the wreck and point specific bottles to recover. One was tested in Sweden, and several sent to Louis Roederer Champagne House in Reims for analysis.
The champagne contains 110 grams of sugar per liter and 12% alcohol and it is not just still drinkable, according to Peter Liem, it is “glorious:”ne House in Reims for analysis.
The champagne contains 110 grams of sugar per liter and 12% alcohol and it is not just still drinkable, according to Peter Liem, it is “glorious:”
Actually, the floor of the Baltic Sea is likely to be an ideal storage environment to age Champagne. The temperature is just above freezing and doesn't change over the course of a year (or century).
Next up: Name of 8th c. Maya astronomer deciphered
A text of Maya glyphs painted on a Classic period (250–900 A.D.) building at the ancient site of Xultun, Guatemala, has been discovered to record an astronomical formula that concludes with the name of its author: “so says Sak Tahn Waax” (meaning White-Chested Fox). He is the first mathematician and astronomer in the Americas known by name.
The glyphs were in a hidden (lost?) room inside a pyramid. You have to wonder how much more hidden history is waiting discovery.
After a secret trip across the English Channel, the Bayeux Tapestry is back on English soil for the first time since it was made 900 years ago. It has been loaned to the British Museum by France after a major conservation project to stabilize the fragile textile
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The wool thread embroidery-on-linen tapestry created as a visual record of the William of Normandy’s invasion of England in 1066, was woven in the Canterbury area around 1077. It was commissioned by Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, William the Conqueror’s brother, so when it was complete, the tapestry moved to Normandy and has stayed there ever since.
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It will be exhibited at the British Museum from September 10, 2026, until July 2027. Pre-sales of tickets are already through the roof, with 100,000 sold since tickets for the first four months of the exhibition went on sale July 1.
In exchange for the loan of one of the greatest historic artifacts in French and English history, museums in Normandy will be loaned of the British Museum’s most famous objects, including pieces from the Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon ship burial and the Lewis Chessmen.
The tapestry is so famous that people make memes using it.
If you're planning a trip to London in the next year, this should be on your list to see. Or you can go see it in Bayeux in Normandy and see the D-Day beaches.
Big Country is doing a series of Lee-Enfield restorations which are well worth your time if you (like me) love old Mil-Surp bolties.
By accident I ran across one of Ian McCollum's Forgotten Weapons vids about how the British Army did a mod of the SMLE to make it a semi-automatic rifle. It's cool in a "hey, this really works!" kind of way. Total kludge, but really cool.
Wow:
A remotely operated vehicle exploration of the wreck of the USS Yorktown, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier sunk in the Battle of Midway, has found a 1940-41 Ford automobile on the aft hangar deck. This is remarkable for several reasons, first and foremost that it wasn’t thrown overboard in the crew’s attempts to save the ship after it was disabled by a torpedo attack on the battle’s first day, June 4th 1942. Also, motor vehicles were not typically kept aboard ships at sea, especially ones headed into battle. Furthermore, this was a full-featured Ford Super Deluxe Woody civilian model, not the pared-down military model of this Ford wagon, dubbed the C11, that you’d expect to see in active military use.
That engine will take a bit of work before it turns over ...
Lots of media huffing and puffing, but not much rain (especially when compared with Debbie last month) and not too bad for wind. Power stayed on the whole time, so yay.
So in lieu of other blog fodder, here's an insanely cool story about a guy who made Linux run on a 1971 Intel 4004 chip:
Hardware hacker Dmitry Grinberg recently achieved what might sound impossible: booting Linux on the Intel 4004, the world's first commercial microprocessor. With just 2,300 transistors and an original clock speed of 740 kHz, the 1971 CPU is incredibly primitive by modern standards. And it's slow—it takes about 4.76 days for the Linux kernel to boot.Linux on 50 year old hardware has got to be some sort of record.
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While it has no practical purpose, the Linux/4004 project demonstrates the flexibility of Linux and pushes emulation to its limits.
Now this is cool:
Newly deciphered passages from a papyrus scroll that was buried beneath layers of volcanic ash after the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius may have shed light on the final hours of Plato, a key figure in the history of western philosophy.
In a groundbreaking discovery, the ancient scroll was found to contain a previously unknown narrative detailing how the Greek philosopher spent his last evening, describing how he listened to music played on a flute by a Thracian slave girl.
What's even cooler is that this is one of the carbonized scrolls that people tried to unroll decades ago, causing enormous damage to the scroll. They were still able to scan it and put it back in order.
These guys are really good. This is great fun. I particularly like the Oscar Peterson version, and the Pete Townsend (Teenage Wasteland) one is a hoot.
It's not just carbonized scrolls, there is a whole set of wooden items that have been uncovered at Herculaneum, the Roman city which, with Pompeii, was buried by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. It's incredibly rare to have wooden items preserved for 2000 years, but there are a bunch.
When you consider that only a quarter of Herculaneum has been excavated, you have to wonder what else is waiting discovery.
A couple months ago I posted about efforts to read the carbonized scrolls excavated from Herculaneum. This is an update on that - progress is being made shockingly fast. First up, a video that gives an easily digestible introduction to the efforts being made.
Groundbreaking efforts by the University of Kentucky team, but there are a lot of teams working toward solving the Vesuvius Challenge Prize. This article highlights some of those efforts but essentially what has happened is that teams started with what was a brick of charcoal and found this:
There very well may be ancient lost texts that can be recovered here.
Eighty-seven years after the Titanic slipped below the waves, the horn blew again. This is the story of how that happened.
The crowd reaction on that day is really something.
This isn't quite the 21st Century I was promised, but this sounds like a very interesting idea:
Assuming the weather and engineering gods cooperate, a US government-funded satellite dubbed Moonlighter will launch at 1212 EDT (1612 UTC) on Sunday, hitching a ride on a SpaceX rocket before being releasing into Earth's orbit.
And in roughly two months, five teams of DEF CON hackers will do their best to successfully remotely infiltrate and hijack the satellite while it's in space. The idea being to try out offensive and defensive techniques and methods on actual in-orbit hardware and software, which we imagine could help improve our space systems.
Each year there is a security conference held in Las Vegas. The Black Hat Briefings are pretty corporate and button-down, but it's pretty much the high point of the security year. Black Hat's red headed stepchild is held immediately afterwards: DEFCON is where security folks let down their hair and let their freak flag fly. In may ways, it's more interesting than Black Hat.
For example, they set up a network where people play "capture the flag", computer security style. The attendees are also notoriously skeptical of the government, and have a "Spot The Fed" contest each year.
This is a very interesting approach taken by the Fed.Gov in that the visibility and coolness factor of hacking a satellite in orbit will totally overwhelm the natural tendency of the attendees to avoid all things Fed.
Interestingly, Dwight (your go-to guy for obituaries and which coaches have been fired) is also your go-to guy on DEFCON reporting.
Secure comms are an issue for any emergency/disaster/Zombie-apocalypse scenario. This looks like a pretty nifty solution for that problem.
There are plans to build a GPS and data network, and it no workee (very well) without a reference time. The Moon doesn't have that. Yet.
Time being one of the fundamental parts of determining position using satellites, interoperability standards had to be agreed upon after the launches of the various GNSS constellations.
That has meant making up for slight timing differences between GPS, Galileo and other GNSS systems by introducing fixed offsets – something that everyone involved would prefer to avoid in building out LunaNet and similar systems.
ESA navigation system engineer Pietro Giordano said a joint international effort to create some form of Lunar standard time began after a November meeting of ESA's Space Research and Technology Centre.
I must say, this is very much the 21st Century that I was promised.
The Costco parking lot got a pretty sweet visitor.
It seems that this is a thing, and has been for a couple decades:
Guedelon Castle in Burgundy, France, is built using only techniques and materials that were available in the Middle Ages. Michel Guyot and Maryline Martin started the project in 1997, and it has been nearing its inevitable completion ever since. Today, it has created over 55 jobs and draws more than 300,000 visitors every year.
It looks pretty cool:
Here's their web site, Building A Castle From Scratch. I'd go there, if I ever get the chance.
