American General In Syria Confirms US Forces Killed Hundreds Of Russians In Massive Battle – The Drive

Remember that rumor of a Russian attack on U.S. forces in Syria? Apparently it’s more than a rumor.

I’m not sure what Putin was thinking here. Did he think he could get away with it?

A senior U.S. general appears to have confirmed that hundreds of Russians fought – and died – in a major battle against American forces and their local counterparts in Syria. More importantly, U.S. Army Brigadier General Jonathan Braga, director of operations for the main U.S. military task force in charge of operations in Iraq and Syria, said he feared the situation could have escalated into an all-out conflict with Russia, something we at The War Zone have warned repeatedly is becoming a worryingly realistic possibility.

Braga gave the surprisingly candid account of what had happened to NBC’s Richard Engel, who traveled with the general to visit the exact site of the incident in Syria and to see what the U.S. military was doing to improve its defensive posture.

Source: American General In Syria Confirms US Forces Killed Hundreds Of Russians In Massive Battle – The Drive

Ex-Russian Chemical Weapons Specialist: Moscow Was Sure No One Would Find Poison

Vil Mirzayanov is a Russian emigre to the U.S. and chemical weapons specialist who helped develop the poison believed to have been used in the attack in Britain on Sergei Skripal, a former colonel in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, and his daughter Yulia.

Mirzayanov spoke with VOA’s Russian service.

Q: You were involved in the development of unique Soviet chemical toxic substances of nerve agent, “Substance 33,” “A-232” and “?-234,” known today as “Novichok” (Newcomer). At the same time, you claim that no other country in the world except Russia has ever had such weapons. How were British investigators able to establish what kind of substance was used to poison Sergei Skripal?

Mirzayanov: To establish which chemical agent was used in this case, you need to have access to a powerful high-resolution mass spectrometer, in the library of which are the spectra of all known compounds. The sample taken is compared with those already known, and the computer indicates a spectrum with a 96 percent probability. That is, there can be no error here.

Source: Ex-Russian Chemical Weapons Specialist: Moscow Was Sure No One Would Find Poison

Ominous biosecurity trends under Putin

Regimes of all types throughout history have sought to harness science for war. As a result, otherwise beneficial technology can become ‘dual-use’. Biological weapons are among the starker examples: research meant to save lives is used to take them. Now, in the run up to elections in Russia, and with concerns mounting about the nation’s role globally, biological-weapons specialists Raymond Zilinskas and Philippe Mauger deliver Biosecurity in Putin’s Russia.

Bioweapons research in Russia and its environs extends back as far as 1928. It took off in the 1970s, for example through the infamous clandestine Biopreparat network. There, the Soviets weaponized pathogens including the smallpox and Marburg viruses and the anthrax bacterium Bacillus anthracis. Zilinskas and Mauger focus on the years 2012–16, when political tensions between Russia and the West intensified markedly. Concerned by apparent shifts in Russia’s pronouncements and actions regarding dual-use activities related to biosecurity, Zilinskas and Mauger write that they wish to “move the discussion over Russian compliance concerns to the public sphere”, where an evaluation based on evidence becomes possible.

Source: Ominous biosecurity trends under Putin

How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service | Ars Technica

When you live somewhere with slow and unreliable Internet access, it usually seems like there’s nothing to do but complain. And that’s exactly what residents of Orcas Island, one of the San Juan Islands in Washington state, were doing in late 2013. Faced with CenturyLink service that was slow and outage-prone, residents gathered at a community potluck and lamented their current connectivity.

“Everyone was asking, ‘what can we do?’” resident Chris Brems recalls. “Then [Chris] Sutton stands up and says, ‘Well, we can do it ourselves.’”

Doe Bay is a rural environment. It’s a place where people judge others by “what you can do,” according to Brems. The area’s residents, many farmers or ranchers, are largely accustomed to doing things for themselves. Sutton’s idea struck a chord. “A bunch of us finally just got fed up with waiting for CenturyLink or anybody else to come to our rescue,” Sutton told Ars.Around that time, CenturyLink service went out for 10 days, a problem caused by a severed underwater fiber cable. Outages lasting a day or two were also common, Sutton said.Faced with a local ISP that couldn’t provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by Sutton, Brems, and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It’s a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington.

Source: How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service | Ars Technica

Amazon built its hyper efficient warehouses by embracing chaos — Quartz

Good look at how Amazon takes advantage of randomness in its warehouses.

Amazon has completely redefined warehouse efficiency and customer convenience. Through its Prime membership, it has promised tens of millions of customers free two-day shipping on more than 100 million products, and, last year, it shipped 5 billion items to them. “That was the major innovation,” says Daniel Theobald, who cofounded a warehouse robotics company called Vecna in 1998 and counts major retailers and logistics companies as clients. “As soon as people realized, you can order something and get it tomorrow, that turned the industry upside down.”

The core of this disruptive efficiency, though, is not Amazon’s automated shelf-moving warehouse robots, which is the innovation that gets the most attention. And it isn’t, on its surface, something that you would associate with a well-oiled machine. It’s not even a breakthrough technology. In fact, some version of it was already in place when Alperson worked in Amazon’s early warehouses.

What makes Amazon’s warehouse work is the way they organize inventory: with complete randomness.

Source: Amazon built its hyper efficient warehouses by embracing chaos — Quartz

U.S. Has Been Secretly Watching Russia’s Nuclear-Powered Cruise Missiles Crash and Burn – The Drive

Good luck with that, Pootie-Poot.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin publicly announced the as yet unnamed missile in an annual speech on March 1, 2018. The Kremlin says it successfully tested one of the weapons near the end of 2017 and released video footage claiming to show the launch and it in flight. So far, Russian authorities have not released any other significant details about the weapon’s configuration or capabilities, though Putin implied that the final design would be broadly similar in size and shape to the existing, conventionally-powered Kh-101 cruise missile.

At the most basic conceptual level, the weapon could conceivably reach supersonic speeds, fly at very low altitudes, and have effectively unlimited range thanks to its nuclear powerplant, allowing it to hit targets anywhere in the world with little warning and dodge anti-missile defenses.

But shortly after Putin’s address, CNN, in a story citing an anonymous U.S. government official, cast doubt on the possibility that this weapon was anywhere near operational. That individual added that the “United States had observed a small number of Russian tests of its nuclear-powered cruise missile and seen them all crash.” Fox News said its own sources indicated the same thing, that the weapon was in the research and development phase and that at least one had crashed during testing in the arctic.

Source: U.S. Has Been Secretly Watching Russia’s Nuclear-Powered Cruise Missiles Crash and Burn – The Drive

‘A Total F***-up’: Russian Mercenaries in Syria Lament U.S. Strike That Killed Dozens

Russian mercenaries in Syria tried to attack Americans. The U.S. Army kicked their asses. Putin talks a good game but when push comes to shove we win.

Recordings have emerged in which Russian mercenaries subjected to a joint U.S. strike that killed dozens of their comrades describe the incident as “a total fuck-up.”

Polygraph.info, a Voice of America project, published three recordings, which it received from a source close to the Kremlin. The source said that the recorded phone calls were made by personnel from CHVK Wagner, a Russian private military company.

The incident in question occurred on the night and early morning of Feb. 7-8, when Syrian government forces—backed by Russian mercenaries employed by CHVK Wagner—attempted to capture an oil refinery near the Syrian city of Deir Ezzor. After Russian personnel came into contact with American troops stationed there, the U.S. forces responded with artillery and air strikes.

Source: ‘A Total F***-up’: Russian Mercenaries in Syria Lament U.S. Strike That Killed Dozens

Back Pain May Be The Result Of Bending Over At The Waist Instead Of The Hips : Shots – Health News : NPR

It seems that Americans bend over all wrong. Learn how to hip-hinge, a more natural way to bend. Fascinating!

To see if you’re bending correctly, try a simple experiment.

“Stand up and put your hands on your waist,” says Jean Couch, who has been helping people get out of back pain for 25 years at her studio in Palo Alto, Calif.

“Now imagine I’ve dropped a feather in front of your feet and asked to pick it up,” Couch says. “Usually everybody immediately moves their heads and looks down.”

That little look down bends your spine and triggers your stomach to do a little crunch. “You’ve already started to bend incorrectly — at your waist,” Couch says. “Almost everyone in the U.S. bends at the stomach.”

In the process, our backs curve into the letter “C” — or, as Couch says, “We all look like really folded cashews.”

In other words, when we bend over in the U.S., most of us look like nuts!But in many parts of the world, people don’t look like cashews when they bend over. Instead, you see something very different.

Source: Back Pain May Be The Result Of Bending Over At The Waist Instead Of The Hips : Shots – Health News : NPR

The Deep State Takes Out the White House’s Dark Clown Prince

If you’ve ever filled out a form SF-86 for a U.S. government security clearance, you’ll know the hassle of dealing with the sheer volume of information it entails. Listing contacts, personal, financial, and travel information in enormous, painstaking detail isn’t trivial, and even small errors will get the form kicked back to you or your clearance rejected. Applicants are required to spell out in great detail the specifics of foreign travel and overseas contacts. Investigators need to know where you’ve made your money and to whom you have debts.

I did it in my early twenties when my life was relatively uncomplicated, and it was still a pain in the ass. It’s not easy, and it’s not supposed to be.

It’s even harder when you’re a corrupt, entitled snake who repeatedly lies about your finances to federal investigators and serves as a living, breathing poster child for privileged venality. It’s even harder when you’ve rather clumsily attempted to use both your familial relationship and proximity to the president of the United States to save your family’s failing real-estate empire.

All of which helps explain Jared Kushner’s very bad day on Tuesday. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a man who has compromised himself and his supposed values to accommodate and indulge President Trumphausen’s various whims, impulses, urges, feuds, and paranoid episodes, finally drew the line and busted Kushner’s security clearance down from TS/SCI to Walmart Greeter Background Check (Provisional).

Source: The Deep State Takes Out the White House’s Dark Clown Prince

There’s a better way to use a standing desk | Popular Science

I’m a little skeptical that a standing desk could be worse for you than sitting on your ass all day. I’m certainly not going to take as gospel a study with a mere 20 participants in it. As for the Canadian study, I have my doubts, too, but need to delve further into the science.

Often I think these studies are driven by the disdain that Sitters often show towards Standers. Desk discrimination is what it is.

There’s always that one person in the office—you know the one. The one with the standing desk. Whenever you happen to pass their cube you think, wow, there’s a person being proactive about their health. There’s someone fighting the good fight against modern society’s unavoidably sedentary lifestyle. Good on them, bad on me.

But is that really true? A growing body of evidence suggests that yes, sitting for long periods of time can have a detrimental effect on your health. But unfortunately, standing for large spans of the day isn’t that great either. And a recent study adds to this pile. This month in the journal Ergonomics, researchers report that when they had 20 participants stand for two hours at a time, subjects showed an apparent increase in lower limb swelling and decreased mental state.

Source: There’s a better way to use a standing desk | Popular Science