It was shortly before my 30th birthday when I got fired from the plastic bag factory that it was time to pursue my dream of becoming a military linguist. I had spent the last year watching the rise of ISIS and all their atrocities. My goal was to join the Army, learn Arabic, and do what I could to defeat them. But first I had to lose 50 pounds. I moved back in with my parents and spent the next six months walking on a treadmill for four or five hours every day. Most days, I’d drink three or four beers to cope with the boredom and misery. Not smart, but I did achieve my goal. The Army recruiters I met with once a week said they had never seen anyone so determined.
I enlisted in August 2015 after getting a perfect score on the ASVAB, the military mental aptitude test. And I know I got a perfect score because the proctor told me moments after I submitted it. I didn’t get to pick my language, but I got the job I wanted and a $40,000 bonus when I completed training. I’ll always love the Army, I just got to the point when I didn’t want to be in it anymore. To paraphrase the great philosopher Homer Simpson, the Army looked deep inside my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined. After three employers in a row threw me in the trash, the Army gave me another chance. Same goes for the NSA, which I worked for under the Army’s auspices. It’s pretty hard to get a top-secret clearance and I’m grateful they took a chance on me.
The last thing my mom told me before I left for the Army:
Her: I’d tell you to give ’em hell, but I know you. Don’t give ’em anything! Just do what they tell you.
Basic training was easier and more fun than I expected. You know you’ve broken a drill sergeant’s spirit when they stop yelling at you and start saying ‘please’.
Once I had to wake up the guy on the next fire guard shift and despite increasing amounts of jostling, he stayed asleep. As I was desperate to return to my bunk, I pinched his nostrils shut for a few seconds until he woke with a start. We spent a lot of time standing next to each other because our last names are almost the same and were friends despite the incident.
As I was the shortest male, I often ended up at the front of the formation and so became the designated mailman. Once while waiting in line to throw practice grenades, I had the following conversation:
Him: Did you get the mail?
Me: Yes.
Him: Did you put it in the mailbox?
Me: Yes. That’s why when you asked me ‘did you get the mail?’, I said yes!
Well, that got the attention of the drill sergeant and my last line in the discussion I had with was: I haven’t called you anything except ‘drill sergeant’, drill sergeant.
My crowning achievement were the lines that got me banned from calling cadence. I began with the familiar formula: they say that in the Army, the training’s mighty fine. And I finished it with: SHARP and EO classes are not a waste of time!
I believe I got just about the whole battalion laughing at that moment.
SHARP and EO are the Army’s don’t be a rapist and don’t be a racist programs respectively. Soldiers must spend hours every year in refresher training despite the near total absence of rapists and racists in the Army. If I were a less scrupulously man, I would sell tiger-repelling rocks to the Army, as the logic is the same.
I was in a SHARP class once and the presenter said that victims of rape rarely lie about it. I was tempted to quote the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate to her. He said that if an accusation is all you need to condemn someone, who could be called innocent? Logic does not seem to be the main subject of gender studies majors.
Nonetheless, one drill sergeant said at graduation that I was very funny. She had previously treated me when the thumb clip of a practice grenade went through my thumb like a fishhook when I pushed on it with my thumb as I had been instructed. Murphy’s Law is never far off.
So off to the Defense Language Institute in scenic Monterey, California. I had a wonderful time there and was thankful for my luck in being assigned Levantine Arabic. I was a few steps closer to fighting ISIS. It was a bit disappointing that I was not picked for an overseas immersion despite my high grades, though the fact that I was able to learn Arabic in my 30s still gives me pride. My prior knowledge of Swahili made it easier as about 20% of Swahili words are from Arabic. The word Swahili itself is from the Arabic word for coast. Arabs and Africans met on the coast to trade and invented Swahili as a common language.
I lived in the barracks and had the room to myself for a time. Later, I got a room mate who barely spoke to me for the first month. I found out later that someone told him I had been a mercenary in Africa, hence my age and knowledge of Swahili. I never thought I’d need to tell someone that I was not a mercenary, alas such are the burdens of living an exotic life. It turns out he was assigned to my room because he was in danger of failing the course and it was thought that I could save him. I did my best to tutor him and he made it to the end of the course. He needed two tries to pass the final exam, but he did and when I checked with him later, he was doing well on mission. DLI flunks out more people than any school on the planet and my hat is off to anyone who even attempts it.
Dad was a mail clerk on a tiny island in the south Pacific with fewer than 100 billets; he spent 99% of his time skin-diving
All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but salutation “Dear Mary” from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, “I yearn for you tragically, A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.” A.T. Tappman was the group chaplain’s name.
I think the reason I never liked that book was because Yossarian showed himself to be such an asshole right out of the gate.
And yet, he was in the 90th percentile for non-assholedom compared to the other characters.
I think I read it maybe 5 or 10 times.
I love this story as the whole DI interaction parallels one mere hours ago between my wife and our 13 year old. She has discovered “what did I do???!?!”, expelled with feigned indignation as a defense tactic. As if she has no clue as to what happened a mere 8 seconds earlier.
“When I said don’t walk away, and you walked away, what did you think would happen?” was the last line of that portion of the conversation.
don’t walk away
One evening he felt the need for a live model and directed his wife to march around the room. “Naked?” she asked hopefully. Lieutenant Scheisskopf smacked his hands over his eyes in exasperation. It was the despair of Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s life to be chained to a woman who was incapable of looking beyond her own dirty, sexual desires to the titanic struggles for the unattainable in which noble man could become heroically engaged.
“Why don’t you ever whip me?” she pouted one night. “Because I haven’t the time,” he snapped at her impatiently. “I haven’t the time. Don’t you know there’s a parade going on?”
This sounds like the opposite of Trey and Marina.
perfect score on the ASVAB
yeah, Cat 1 here as well
I knew what a Mauser was in 1981, but I’m not sure that really proves anything
I knew what a Mauser was in 1981
A cat that’s a killing machine. 😉
it seems so arcane for a general population quiz; smart money says that wherever tiny technical advantage that accrues to one who knows what a Mauser is outweighed an order of magnitude by the likelihood that same person is some sort of sociopath with all kinds of unhealthy fantasies barely kept under wraps
The first time I watched Africa: Blood and Guts on YouTube, I was shown an ad warning that there is a list of people who watch such content, that they are flagged as potential psychopaths, and the list is circulated among large corporations. That was the weirdest ad I’ve ever seen on YouTube. The fact that I didn’t have to log in to watch it was also interesting. It was as if YouTube was saying “the fact that you know this movie exists is disturbing enough”.
but did the governor of Maine have the list
and did he do anything about it ?
Regarding my computer idea:
My dad’s been a software engineer for 40+ years. He said using generative AI and a supercomputer for chemistry research seems like a more promising idea than just the supercomputer itself. If I can’t find anyone else to vouch for my proposal, I suppose he can help, but I’d prefer to get someone unrelated to me.
I wrote a bit about using generative AI for chemistry research here:
https://platedlizard.blogspot.com/2023/10/a-periodic-table-for-molecules-using.html
Basically, I’d train the AI with a database of chemical compounds and their properties, then the program could generate novel compounds based on desired properties given by the user. With ChatGPT, you tell it to write a haiku, but with this, you could tell it “give me a molecule with thus and such molecular weight, boiling point, etc”. It would then return an empirical and/or structural formula of a new molecule.
if the value of a novel compound is in possessing properties that the components don’t posses, i’m not sure how a matching algorithm is going to discover any matches. Is your algorithm going to try to calculate macromolecular behavior from electron configurations and atomic distances? Even if it did, how many molecules empirically agree with what calculations say they should do? And even if that worked as desired, is your algorithm just going to combine every possible set of input compounds until it discovers a result with the properties provided by the user?
I’m sayin, it doesn’t sound that much more productive than tossing darts at a chemical supply catalog. The computer just tosses more darts per second.
boiling point
I love that no regression has been able to well and widely predict the vapor pressure of blends of organic liquids
Azeotropics? Yeah, but the makers (Dupont?) will sure as shooting hedge around it.
I’m thinking about simpler things like carbon-to-hydrogen ratios and molecular weights. Other tests could include the presence of rare elements.
So if we take medicine as an example, the algorithm could easily calculate the average and range of molecular weight for actual medicines. It could then use that to propose medicines that have never been formulated before.
Getting it to understand structural formulas is tricky because that overlaps with the image recognition problem. I’m pretty sure it could handle empirical formulas and IUPAC names easily.
There are probably many interesting relationships between the length and composition of IUPAC names and chemical/physical properties.
Not to be a total kill-joy, but your “supercomputer made of rasberry pi nodes” isn’t going to get an NSF grant – it’s something an undergrad CS major could bang out in a weekend. It’s an obvious-enough approach that, if it were tenable, it’d be a thing already.
Sorry, dude.
No worries. Constructive criticism like this will guide me towards something that is useful. Computer science isn’t my area of expertise.
Just FYI: Computational Chemistry is a thing. One of the people who shared my lab back in 1995 was doing her PhD in it.
“When a Mommy Mainframe and a Daddy Mainframe love each other very much…”
She was actually using a Macintosh — one that had the screen built into it. It was 1995 after all.
So, an iMac?
No, they didn’t come out until ’98.
Today I learned – Apple makes a cheese grater.
I once got 4 YouTube ads for living with schizophrenia in the same day. Not sure what I watched or searched that triggered that. At the time, I mostly watched cartoon clips and listened to the same songs over and over. Then there was a period when I got lots of veteran suicide prevention ads. It was weird.
for some reason YouTube thinks I want to look at guns and hot girls and hot girls with guns
When your viewing history consists of some variant of ASMR Girlfriend Calms You After a Hard Day and Hickok45 that’s what you’re going to get.
I recently spent a day or two watching The Critical Drinker and my ads went heavy to Epoch Times, Kevin Sorbo’s Nontoxic-Masculinity Childrens Literature, and Maxipads.
At least none of them were inexplicably in Spanish.
I get ads for adult diapers. Not sure which is worse.
https://news.yahoo.com/lifestyle/archaeologists-think-might-found-real-120000998.html
we had better bullshit in the 70s: ESP, boggy creeks, close encounters, and chain saws; Leonard Nimoy took care of the Ark and Nessie before Reagan saw his first astrologer
Odds that the author had to manually edit that URL stub to maintain the clickbait?
https://news.yahoo.com/france-armoured-vehicles-lebanese-army-102702129.html
grandson of André Maginot not available for comment
The latest rejection letter for my book:
***
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for sending this my way. It seems you do indeed have a lot of unusual and unique experiences in your life that could make a book. Unfortunately, you’ve written something so unusual that I wouldn’t know how to sell it. I think many people are looking for your more standard format memoir; if that’s not what you want to write then I’d suggest looking for more seasoned agents who might be able to best sell this, if they find it up their alley. I’ll be passing on this but wishing you the best of luck,
Elisa
***
If I had a nickel every time I heard that…
Sorry, dude. Rejections never get easier.
I only need to succeed once. I didn’t decide to pursue writing as a career until September. I’ve written more this year than any other year of my life, about 120,000 words.
I gave up on traditional publishing. I couldn’t figure out the Catch 22 of you need an agent to get published and need to be published to get an agent.
I’ve had agents. It doesn’t get any easier.
😞
@Count Potato, I’m a little confused as to why you think I don’t know what autogynephile means. I do. Now, while I didn’t read your linked article (it’s dense; I apologize; I’ve got some apathy and inertia going on), I don’t see that my usage of the word is wrong.
What I see in my twitter feed are dozens of examples of men tarted up in wigs and makeup (some not even shaved) who seem to be parading a fetish, which is to see himself and to be seen by others in women’s clothing. Not as women, but in women’s clothing.
Forgive me if I misunderstood what you were saying the other day, and/or how you differentiate autogynephile from transgender.
Lastly, while I don’t want to go into the whys too deeply, this topic hits close to home, which is why I believe I’m using the term correctly.
Actually, I wouldn’t mind chatting off-site, but only if you’re comfortable. moriah at moriahjovan dot com.
Moj, I didn’t have a chance to read your latest chapter. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the woods and am worn out when evening comes. I’ll catch up though.
I also still don’t understand what autogynephile is or means and I don’t care.
Thanks for being interested, Fourscore! Please don’t feel obliged. I’m just fillin’ up Friday evening. 😉
Oh, how I laughed:
the greatest rap song to ever exist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m6MFz4-LvE
My “perfect score on the ASVAB” story features a couple of recruiters trying to convince me to go recon because I can get lots of action and get fast promotions.
Dude with perfect ASVAB score understands that you want to be behind the big guns, not downrange near the target calling out hits and misses.
No, you want to be nowhere near the lines looking at the data to figure out what the enemy’s up to so the guys over there can thwart it.
I may not have had a perfect score, but it did say I was suited to Military Intelligence.
of course an oxymoron suits the gastronomer that disagrees with flavor.
I still can’t figure out where you people came up with that lie.
I vaguely remember you years ago denouncing some popular food or sauce and that’s when it started (the whole “UCS loves bland food” thing).
De gustibus non disputandam.
His eating gloves wick away all the flavor.
Don’t be silly, you use impermiable gloves for that, along with fork, knife, and spoon.
🍴🥄
I remember it being a more specific offshoot of “UnCiv hates fun.”
I still can’t figure out where you people came up with that lie.
Same bin Pie pulls his Americans Love Sugar remarks from.
Is the battery of tests gone? I took about a dozen different tests the first week of orientation. I did well enough on the ALAT (language test) to get to DLI (VN) as an officer 12 years later. As a draftee not much time was spent training us short timers ’cause we were only going to around for a couple years. I re-enlisted after my 2 years was up for an electronics school because my EL score was sufficiently high enough.
I took it in high school, so they may have left off modules.
There’s a mini test recruiters give that last 30 minutes. The full test is 3 hours if I remember correctly.
The one I took in 2015 had 10 sections: math, vocabulary, science, mechanical knowledge, electrical knowledge…I forget the rest.
DLAB is a separate language learning ability test. I got 132 out of 170 on that. 110 is the minimum needed for Arabic, Korean, Pashto, and Chinese.
I used this study guide: https://www.robins.af.mil/Portals/59/documents/Base%20Training/DLABPamphlet.pdf
Check out page 22 for one of the wackier questions.
Yeah, that’s the battery as I remember.
The ALAT used some sort of esperanto where we learned how verbs/adjectives,etc were made and then use them in a sentence. Something like that. I’m trying to remember 65 year old memories. A knowledge of English made a big difference in learning the test. It was all written.
Same ASBAB. There are something like 12 tests, which each service mixes together in their own way to get their own recipe of composite scores. The Army composite scores include GT (general technical) and ST (skilled technical) which tend to be used the most. AFQT is used by all the services I believe. That’s what your “ASVAB SCORE” is. It’s a mix of the “paragraph comprehension”, “word knowledge”, “math knowledge”, and “arithmetic reasoning” scores. I think, anyway. I haven’t been a recruiter for 20 years, so things tend to fade. I do remember that they sent me to Kennewick, WA to attend a course on ASVAB scoring, and they did put me up in a Holiday Inn Express. Maybe that explains it.
DLI requires passing the Defense Language Aptitude Battery. I also had to pass the Army Analysis Test to qualify for analyst school. Those were in addition to minimum ASVAB scores.
Most military intelligence specialties can be assigned to tactical units. I spent a year on a low-level voice intercept team often looking for a combat arms unit for protection.
What I thought was lame is that they herded some of us kids into classrooms to administer the PSAT on the same day as they herded other kids into other classrooms to take the ASVAB.
The PSAT was given only one day a year, same day nationwide, since it’s step 1 of the National Merit Scholarship. So kids who took the ASVAB at high school didn’t get a chance at the NMSQT, and kids who took the NMSQT didn’t get an AsVAB unless they went out of their way to sign up for it elsewhere.
I took ASVAB my sophomore year and don’t remember my score, but I do remember it said I had high aptitude for electrical stuff. As it turns out, they were correct.
Internet Historian put out another banger video today – sounds like a few more coming out in short order after this long dry spell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTKXnfHByX8&pp=ygUSaW50ZXJuZXQgaGlzdG9yaWFu
Watch out for the ghost hole!
I made myself my own cousin today. It was the only way to preserve the Firstline from the constant attack it takes from the seconds being generated at record paces.
It is all a bit complicated, but suffice to say I saved humanity.
Google made an AI gizmo called Coral. It has some interesting features.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOY_Dbyq6OY
I’m enjoying these stories. Thanks for sharing. But I can’t help but think of something my dad once told me. “Son, everyone likes a little ass, but nobody likes a little smartass.”
I’d rather be a smartass than a dumbass.
ahem…
https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/373024781619975068/
also relevant: the inventor of the improbability drive
***
“It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smartass.”
***
First 9 GHz CPU (overclocked Intel 13900K)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzAZxx_aLdo
It hits 230 degrees C and smokes. This is why oil cooling is important.
My bad. The smoke is from liquid nitrogen evaporating. Yeah, it’s cold, but it does not have good heat transfer properties.
***
Liquid nitrogen’s efficiency as a coolant is limited by the fact that it boils immediately on contact with a warmer object, enveloping the object in an insulating layer of nitrogen gas bubbles. This effect, known as the Leidenfrost effect, occurs when any liquid comes in contact with a surface which is significantly hotter than its boiling point.
***
Insulation is the opposite of what you want for heat transfer.
Since I’m still awake:
Will We Ever Finish the Periodic Table?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_GZzOJcWR4
There are 95 naturally occurring elements, though the last three (neptunium, plutonium, and technetium) exist only in trace amounts. Otherwise, uranium is the heaviest with 92 protons. Feynman calculated that the heaviest possible element would have 137 protons. More than that, and the orbiting electrons would need to move faster than the speed of light. The mistake in his calculation was to treat the nucleus as a point charge. Adjusting for nucleus volume, and the highest possible atomic number moves to 173. So far, the only stable artificially made elements are plutonium and technetium. Aside from technetium, all the other artificial elements decay within a year or less.
Tc is element 43.
Element 95 is Americium.
Even monkeys fall out of trees, as the Japanese say. Good catch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPp-U4QonnM
***
For helium-3 to form a superfluid, it must be cooled to a temperature of 0.0025 K, or almost a thousand times lower than helium-4 (2.17 K). This difference is explained by quantum statistics, since helium-3 atoms are fermions, while helium-4 atoms are bosons, which condense to a superfluid more easily.
***
A fluid with zero viscosity…intriguing.
***
The discovery of superfluidity in helium-3 was the basis for the award of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics.[1] This process is similar to the electron pairing in superconductivity.
***
Happy election day morning!
☕😒🎉
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XINAJ7jgg6Y
🎶🎶
Appropriate music.
The day when people who vote based on 30-second ads, campaign fliers, or just the letter next to a name elect people who only care about what they want regardless of how they get it.
I’m voting against a letter FWIW.
I hate commies so really, it is the only moral thing to do.
Good morning all!
Today, probably the most under-rated / overlooked keyboardist in rock. Also the man who named the band that consistently did the best covers of Bob Dylan songs. Glibs, I present Manfred Mann.
Waiter, There’s a Yawn in My Ear.
For You.
Share and enjoy!
Thanks, especially for that first one, Beau. Now I understand the album cover I saw so many years ago! 😄
You’re very welcome! That was an outstanding album, filled with greatness. But Manfred’s been around since the mid-60s, and last I heard is still touring. Wide and deep catalog of goodies.
I’ll be linking more of his stuff in days to come 😉
Covers of Dylan? I think you mean Springsteen.
I never mean Springsteen.
Worst election day shenanigans predictions?
Michigan?
Arizona?
Pennsylvania?
I think we’ve got a good shot.
There’s an election today? I think I’ll pass.
I had to at least try and vote no on the two “Bankrupt the localities” Propositions on the ballot.
They are trying to remove the constitutional limits on debts the localities can carry.
The shambles of disorder at my polling place told me the fix was in.
It won’t be high profile, no one’s going to look close enough to remark on it because efforts at honest elections have been dead for over two centuries in New York.
No statewide offices, as far as I know. Just a handful of very local races – township offices and school board in my precinct – and two state issues: abortion and marijuana. 🙄
State house and senate, county offices, county board (not in my district), school board (not in my district), “Soil and Water Conservation Director”. No ballot measures this year.
Arizona kills democracy in the kitchen with the candlestick and it’s already dead in Michigan.
Clean elections were definitively taken off the table last year when we elected Dems across the board for statewide offices. How the Repubs in this state manage to have such tiny dicks, and step on their own dicks, I’ll never understand.
Who run Arizona-town? Maricopa run Arizona-town!
Its on life support in Virginia.
Mornin’, reprobates!
Good morning, ‘patzie, Beau, Sean, and Roat! (Derpy, too, if you’re still around! With your “attitude problem,” I’m impressed you survived the army! 😉)
I finished all the training, got promoted to sergeant, and finished 5.5 years of a 6-year contract. Not bad considering how much of a long shot it was for me to get into the Army at all. It was the worst job I ever loved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCmONrFBTRY
Pretty amazing stuff, glad you lived to tell the tale.