NASA metal tires allegedly never get flat or… tired
A couple of the awards at this year’s CES mentioned a metal mesh tire, based on NASA research and missions.
Originally developed by NASA and now commercialized for terrestrial use by The SMART Tire Company, these superelastic tires are airless, durable and will never go flat. Made from a special advanced material, NiTinol+ (nickel titanium), a shape memory alloy (SMA) that’s elastic like rubber, yet strong like titanium.
Priced at only $100 it seems too good to be true.
Its primary claim is durability, since the metal lasts far longer than rubber and is puncture proof. This is huge news for military applications (such as this or this), not to mention other forms of disaster response.
Swiss book about a century of bikes used in war, which gets far less attention than it should.This is the U.S. Army bike used in the 1890s to literally invent mountain biking by riding through the Rockies without roads. Source: Online Bicycle Museum
Makes sense I guess for anyone commuting on the surface of the moon, or a Google campus.
However, for the rest of us the tire seems to lack traction and performance data. NASA missions don’t typically deal with the environments and behaviors found on Earth. And what do they sound like, tank treads on pavement like the Battle of Singapore bikes?
Nowhere did Adolf Hitler spend as much time during the Second World War — the dictator passed around 830 days in the bunkers at Wolf’s Lair. […] Hitler lived in this tomb, he worked and slept there. “It seemed as if the seven-meter-thick concrete walls that surrounded him figuratively, separated him from the outside world and imprisoned him in his madness,” said Polubinski. …where Hitler, his generals and marshals not only planned campaigns but also discussed the genocide of the Jews in detail.
The highest and most sensitive Nazi communication ran on Lorenz, a cipher machine broken so badly that Allied intelligence built a 1943 map of the entire command structure heirarchy. Source: GCHQ
On the very far left is Rommel’s HQ (Army Group B), for example, which communicated through layers to Army HQ in the center-right.
The British labeled Lorenz machine communication channels as “fish”, which you can see here in detail.
Decryption of the Nazi Army leadership allegedly was like shooting “fish” in a barrel.
After the war the Polish turned the Nazi HQ buildings at the heart of this map into a strangely “grotesque Disneyland” where locals would admire the concrete, fire toy German guns and play… things you rarely hear about.
All food for thought to those who ask me 1) can Putin avoid assassination and 2) when will he quit. The bigger question is how many generations will be lost for each month his delusions run in front of watchful eyes.
It’s no coincidence the extremist militant criminal partner of the Russian Army has been genocidally kidnapping children from occupied territory for indoctrination and servitude, after naming itself for the infamous Nazi “Wagner“.
…Wagner was the deputy commandant of the Sobibor extermination camp in eastern Poland. It was not a conventional concentration camp, because there was no work for those who arrived.
Sobibor was a killing center. Its production line was as sophisticated as a complex modern factory. In just 15 months, 250,000 men, women and children stepped off the train in the morning, were gassed by lunchtime and their corpses burnt before dawn the next day. By then their luggage had been sorted and packed for shipment to Germany. […]
He didn’t kill the same way as the other Germans. He didn’t shoot, he tortured…when he killed he smiled. Murdering was his pleasure — you could see it in his face. He didn’t consider it a duty, it was more his private matter.
Basically the Nazi children (Hitler jugend) were indoctrinated with fear and hate. Then they were forced into the unjust war their fathers already had lost, told they would be killed if they refused or surrendered.
If you didn’t know, now you do.
Delays in stopping a dictatorship’s known war crimes and ignoring ethnic cleansing has a clear precedent.
I’ve seen several people make comparison between current Russian military tactics and WWI. Here’s a new one.
Waves of young under-equipped Russian soldiers were driven to their death in barren battlefields devoid of life or purpose.
…the total number of deaths since February 24, when Russia launched its invasion, [increased] to 116,950. If these figures are accurate, Russia has now lost more troops in Ukraine than the U.S. lost during its involvement in World War I.
Three differences.
One: America in WWI saw a casualty rate of approximately 10%, and many of its dead were not from combat (e.g. disease). Russia at the same time, however, recorded a whopping 1,700,000 dead and a casualty rate closer to 80%. That alone should put any American perspective in different context.
Two: The article goes on to say that Russian propaganda today blames all deaths on the soldiers themselves, or their targets. There’s no discussion allowed in Russia of its leaders failing at invasion, because there is only lies about defending something, anything. That really changes the framing for dying in a war. Ethnic cleansing and genocide of Ukrainians has been couched in bogus language of “defense”, which intends to mobilize every Russian into dying starved and alone in a muddy trench.
Three: Many Russian casualties are from shooting each other to achieve some criminal form of power, avoid accountability, and force direction… within a flaccid masculinity system that runs on graft and corruption. Russian cemeteries quickly are filling up today from a 20th century suicidal grind, by design.
Those three big points make it hard to say the historic American WWI experience or perspective, let alone 100K dead, are going to motivate anyone in Russia to listen. It’s perhaps safe to say instead that Russia is engaged in antiquated/primitive strategies of mass mobilization, leaning on heavy artillery and human waves of frontal assaults to reduce target areas into rubble without any meaningful gains (huge waste, which leads to weakness and then destabilization). That’s the better comparison to WWI.
Update January 25: Estimates for Russian soldiers killed are already much higher, closer to 200K.
The era of the telegram came to an end in Germany with a final flourish of thousands of the once-popular message service, the country’s main postal service, Deutsche Post, said Wednesday.
Deutsche Post said that 3,228 telegrams were dispatched on the final day of service on New Year’s Eve.
Kinda curious if the last word someone paid to send was “stop”? The cost of operating and using it had gotten quite high.
The canonical example is when German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent the following encrypted text to Germany’s minister in Mexico on January 16, 1917.
Encrypted left. Decryption work right. Click to enlarge.
You may notice the telegram says “via Galveston” (Texas) but more importantly it routed through England. The British at the start of WWI severed cables connecting Germany to the world in order to intercept all its telegrams.
WWI map of global telegram cables. Source: BBC
The British delivered a decrypted version of Zimmerman’s telegram to the U.S. government on February 24. The text also was exposed by the press on March 1, raising public anger immediately about a German military alliance with Mexico and Japan carrying threats of invasion.
Public knowledge of these secret German plans was how the British government helped American public opinion overcome powerful leaders trying to aid Germany (i.e. Henry Ford) and shift the balance of power to better men.
Most notable, perhaps, was that former President Theodore Roosevelt along with the U.S. Army Chief of Staff (former commanding officer of the famous “Rough Riders”) had heavily promoted active response to aggression. Roosevelt objected since the start of WWI to America being passively in alignment with Germany, and objected even more in 1915 when “America First” became Wilson’s racist campaign for re-election (including a restart of the KKK).
Roosevelt instead campaigned for a civilian Preparedness Movement to ready America for defense of freedom.
1915 film “The Battle Cry of Peace” promoted by U.S. Army General Leonard Wood and former President Theodore Roosevelt
Basically, in the two years before the Zimmerman telegram exposed Wilson’s treachery, Americans had watched their President fraudulently blame “leftists” and “labor” for a growing “holocaust” of German attacks bombing cities, burning factories and sinking ships.
When a Preparedness Day parade was bombed by German military intelligence, for example, Wilson had for years before secretly been advised of this and related plots. On July 22, 1916 (just eight days before the infamous Black Tom explosion in NYC) a massive explosion rocked downtown San Francisco and killed 10 people.
Source: SFGate
Authorities under Wilson, despite strong counter intelligence, intentionally ignored their known and obvious German suspects and instead falsely used the violence as pretense to target “leftist organizers”. Today it’s known as a “one of America’s darkest miscarriages of justice”.
Think about the outrage then if Wilson had been caught enabling a foreign military to kill Americans so he could win elections (e.g. what Richard Nixon also did).
If that sounds like something the GOP still would do today, you know now exactly why Donald Trump calls himself America First when he invites Russian attacks and divisively blames “leftists” for everything. Separatist movements in 2016 America driven by foreign adversaries? Sounds like a memo straight out of 1916 Germany.
Public knowledge of secret German military plans abruptly destroyed best attempts by Henry Ford and Woodrow Wilson to side with the enemy of America. Note how California was labeled as property of Japan, an often overlooked detail that foreshadowed internment camps 30 years later.
After the British vociferously exposed the public to German secret communications, Wilson no longer could sustain such devious German alignment meant to fraudulently blame foreign military attacks killing Americans on domestic political opponents.
In April 1917 the unpopular U.S. President finally had his hands tied and Americans very quickly joined the war against Germany, with thanks to the leadership of Roosevelt and England, not to mention poets such as Alan Seeger (American soldier in Foreign Legion of France) who in 1916 wrote “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”.
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear …
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Powerful stuff, and Roosevelt was a legend (pumping out preparedness books, movies, speeches), but nothing overcame Wilson’s secret executive alliances and elevated American public sentiment into active defense like that decrypted Zimmerman telegram.
Well done England.
Another interesting footnote is that the KKK had pushed for suffrage (white women voting) as a means to dilute Black votes, especially in “young” states like Montana.
This effect was seen clearly in 1917, after Germany had bombed major American cities, when Jeannette Rankin of Montana (first woman elected to Congress in her first term) voted against war authorization. Again in 1941, after Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, Rankin voted against war (placing the only no vote). She expected America could align itself with Nazi Germany and Hitler.
Historians recently have pointed out something to better frame Rankin’s hard edge politics; “anti-labor” actions in 1917 were in fact planned attempts at ethnic cleansing or even genocide.
…after all of this research, the deportation was not a response to a labor action. It was that to a limited extent, but it was also in the nature of an ethnic cleansing.
Obviously she did not in any way represent Americans who weren’t white. She was especially toxic to Black women who had been rebuffed by racism of most white women’s organizations including Rankin’s suffrage groups.
Black women by comparison famously supported the war efforts and many served with distinction, despite attempts by Rankin’s carefully crafted role to erase them and their communities. This divide is what led into the tragic Red Summer and Wilson sending troops to massacre non-white Americans who had supported the war and even served in it.
Thus, one decrypted telegram from Germany also changed entirely the course of Civil Rights in America. Who knows what damage Rankin might have done if she hadn’t been exposed as part of American systemic racism.
The toxic America First platform in both WWI and WWII, a barely concealed front for the KKK, actively manipulated sentiment using highly targeted propaganda pushing white women to make their sons serve German interests instead. Obviously those efforts failed under the reality of German aggression that grew after WWI (modeling itself on Wilson and Ford), such that by WWII any mention of America First was labeled seditious.
Perhaps, with great subtlety, the fizzle and end of the historic German telegram thus signals something wider: the long overdue end to Wilson’s racist America First platform as well.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
