war
Last year, retired war correspondent Patrick Graham was listening to news of the Libyan revolution over the radio. He ended up mocking the guy on the radio, saying, “For fuck’s sake, at least get to Benghazi!” His wife responded with, “Well, why don’t you go?” A few days later, he … Read More
Skill-testing question: Who invented the airplane? If you are thinking the Wright brothers, you are wrong. At least partially. Bringing new meaning to “ahead of his time,” Leonardo da Vinci conceptualized the airplane in his Codex of Flight, where he studied the flight of birds and used his findings to … Read More
WAR: What is it good for? Well, for starters, WAR (wins above replacement) is an immensely useful baseball stat that allows you to compare the value of players based on how many wins they generated for their team above that of a freely-available “replacement-level” triple-A player. As you may have … Read More
If you can’t fire a 23-pound projectile from your 32 megajoule electromagnetic rail gun at a Libyan despot, at whom can you fire a 23-pound projectile from your 32 megajoule electromagnetic rail gun? This isn’t a scenario from a Quake or Halo mod: The U.S. Navy has the gun, and … Read More
When the green shoots of the “Arab Spring” first sprouted in Tunisia (in late 2010, despite the media-embraced “Spring” descriptor) and quickly spread to Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen, scattering seeds across the entirety of North Africa and the Middle East, one of the favourite games of international observers was to … Read More
