Category Archives: History

Explosive Projectile-laden Drones to Navigate Small Spaces

I’ll never forget being briefed by a US Army General about the redesign of South Korea in ways that would force invading Chinese tanks into tight “killing zones”.

The idea is not to stop invading forces entirely, but to slow down enemy tanks and other vehicles and buy critical minutes to retreat and defend. A U.S. Army veteran deployed in the area decades ago noted it was “a bit disconcerting being stationed on the north side of these barriers.”

Take the humans out of those tanks and you’ve got explosive projectile-laden drones on land (VBIED), similar to the evolution of torpedoes flying in water and smart bombs/missiles flying through the air (like Tarzan).

South Korean problem spaces, and whether walls ever work, certainly sat on my mind when I was working at NASA back in the early 2000s.

French leadership failed to notice something was not normal (enemy troops moving through the Ardennes Forest and violating neutral countries). And that is why Maginot’s expensive wall continues to be almost universally remembered as a huge failure.

Researchers and colleagues at NASA ostensibly were trying to find a way for large mechanized robot swarms to navigate complex valleys on Mars, where Mars very neutrally/scientifically clearly represented a lot of other problem spaces.

In 2014 I actually gave several talks (including a private one to the future head of Facebook security) revealing a bit of the state of art at that time on research in drone swarm countermeasures.

Numerous positions can be injected into swarms, or forced upon them, to cause them to freeze.

That’s why I was proposing swarm countermeasures way back then, much to the chagrin of lawyers who ALWAYS told me that anyone trying to stop an attacking drone would be charged with property damage. Ah, lawyers.

Anyway, fast forward to today and here are two important updates that we all should have seen coming:

First, “Agility of bees could inspire drones that squeeze through tight spaces

Second, “Taliban Rigging Drones to Drop Bombs, Afghan Spy Chief Says

Why Americans Celebrate Thanksgiving

I’ve written about Thanksgiving history here many times (2005, 2006, 2008, 2010) and this year it feels like time to write again.

It is clear that the holiday was created by President Lincoln after Civil War to bring the pro-slavery rebels back to the table with their American neighbors and family.

Don’t know if I can do the topic any more justice, however, than a 2019 New Yorker article citing historians. So here is the TL;DR

Fretting over late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigration, American mythmakers discovered that the Pilgrims, and New England as a whole, were perfectly cast as national founders: white, Protestant, democratic, and blessed with an American character centered on family, work, individualism, freedom, and faith.

The new story aligned neatly with the defeat of American Indian resistance in the West and the rising tide of celebratory regret that the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo [B.A. Harvard College, 1963; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1971] once called “imperialist nostalgia.” Glorifying the endurance of white Pilgrim founders diverted attention from the brutality of Jim Crow and racial violence, and downplayed the foundational role of African slavery. The fable also allowed its audience to avert its eyes from the marginalization of Asian and Latinx labor populations, the racialization of Southern European and Eastern European immigrants, and the rise of eugenics. At Thanksgiving, white New England cheerfully shoved the problematic South and West off to the side, and claimed America for itself.

Shocking reversal. Lincoln brought the pro-slavery forces back to the table and they pivoted on his gesture to a false cover-story while still enacting divisive racial violence.

Just days before this article appeared, professor of history David Silverman also gave an hour-long lecture called “This Land Is Their Land” to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which highlights how the myth of Thanksgiving was formulated in the 1840s as a white supremacist narrative:

I’m going to provide you with everything you need to ruin your family’s holiday. […] War is the most basic feature of the Wampanoag-English relationship that the Thanksgiving myth studiously ignores. […] English promises of mercy [turned into] terms harsher than colonial officials had pledged… surrendering natives learned too late that colonial authorities would not spare any Indians… Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Rhode Island held public executions through the summer of 1676, including 50 hangings on Boston Common alone. There is no memorial to this event by the way. I think there should be. The English even exacted retribution on the dead. […] From the late 1600s through the mid 1800s white merchant creditors, courts and government appointed guardians colluded to force the Wampanoags and their children into indentured servitude to white farmers, householders and whaling markets with the terms often lasting for decades. Such court ordered servitude — one historian favored the term “judicial enslavement” — made it nearly impossible for the Wampanoags to sustain their normal social patterns, including the process of raising children. […] Throughout the colonial era, Thanksgiving had no association whatsoever with pilgrims and Indians. None. The link between the holiday and the history appears to date to 1841. […] The pilgrim saga took hold because it had use in the nation’s culture wars… IT WAS NO COINCIDENCE THAT THE PILGRIMS EMERGED AS NATIONAL FOUNDERS AMID POPULAR ANXIETY THAT THE UNITED STATES WAS BEING OVERRUN BY CATHOLIC AND THEN JEWISH AND ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN IMMIGRANTS. SUPPOSEDLY UNAPPRECIATIVE OF THE COUNTRY DEMOCRATIC PROTESTANT ORIGINS AND VALUES. ADDITIONALLY, TREATING THE PILGRIMS AS THE EPITOME OF COLONIAL AMERICA SERVED TO MINIMIZE THE COUNTRY’S RECORD OF RACIAL OPPRESSION PAST AND PRESENT. BETTER TO HIGHLIGHT THE PILGRIMS RELIGIOUS AND DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES INSTEAD OF THE INDIAN WARS AND SLAVERY MORE TYPICAL OF COLONIES. INCLUDING THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES. THROUGH SUCH MEANS, NORTH EASTERNERS COULD REDEFINE THE SO-CALLED BLACK AND INDIAN PROBLEMS AS SOUTHERN AND WESTERN EXCEPTIONS TO AN OTHERWISE INSPIRING NATIONAL HERITAGE. SO THEY SANITIZE THE HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND AND THEN MAKE NEW ENGLAND THE MODEL FOR THE REST OF THE UNITED STATES.

Who Was The Pirate? Curious Case of Blackbeard’s Murder

A site called Coastal Review has a fascinating take on the events that led to Blackbeard’s untimely violent death.

Blackbeard did not prey on a single ship in the waters off the Outer Banks during his surprisingly brief 23-month career as a pirate. And, as previously stated, his pitiful camp at Ocracoke and pirate company of 15 men were hardly a threat to anyone.

[…]

Blackbeard and his friends from Bath, many of whom were killed, were unwitting pawns caught in the middle of what turned out to be a failed political coup.

Furthermore, Lt. Maynard’s 60 Royal Navy sailors acted as little more than pirates themselves.

Hao Projection: Chinese-Drawn World Map

Maps are political by nature of defining boundaries. Whoever has that authority to classify territory, gains a lot of power.

More interesting than just drawing the lines, however, is the graphical representation of 3D spaces in 2D. Many probably are familiar with the impact of the Gall-Peters map (by Arno Peters based on a 1885 James Gall paper) since the 1980s.

UNESCO promotes the use of the Gall-Peters projection, and this option is widely used in British schools. Boston became the first public school district in the United States to adopt this map as its standard in 2017.

(click to enlarge)

Lately it seems like the Gall-Peters projection opened the door to dynamic maps that try re-frame our understanding of reality in terms of coastline length.

Sailchecker, a charter company, offers us this warped view…

Speaking of coastlines, a report in 2010 by Linda Jakobson at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute called “China Prepares for an Ice-Free Arctic” shows China’s perspective on sailing through the Arctic.

(click to enlarge)

The captions label Shanghai, Rotterdam, New York, the ‘North East Sea Route’ (red) and the ‘North West Sea Route’ (blue).Source: Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration, ; map drawn by Hao Xiaoguang,

Then on 11 December 2013 the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced that the researcher (geophysicist) Hao Xiaoguang had drawn another new map of the world.

…with the authorization of National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation. Traditional word map is suitable for expressing the relationship of east and west hemisphere, it uses meridian to cut the global and should be called as merdian-wise world map. As contrary, the new version of world map uses prime vertical to cut the global and should be called as prime vertical-wise world map, consequently, it is suitable for expressing the relationship of north and south hemisphere. In order to express the geography relationship properly, the workshop had proposed the design scheme of series of word map since 2000 to 2002. In recent years, the new version of world map had been applied by many agencies for different scientific purpose, and the draft has been collected by State Museum, From now on, the new word map will be available in our daily life and will give us brand new geography idea.

Saying prime vertical-wise world map is a mouthful (maybe sounds better in Chinese?) and so the Hao Projection might be easier and make more sense.

(click to enlarge)

You can buy your own 1.1 meter sized relief version (3D凹凸地图 美观大方) of the Hao projection (ironically, shipping options are geographically limited) at the TMALL: