Traveling Waves, the Royal Thai Navy, and "The Final Countdown"

The video below shows members of the Royal Thai Navy demonstrating traveling waves (and other wave phenomena) to the glorious sounds of "The Final Countdown" being played by a band!

I think my head just exploded.

amazing parademuhteşem bir geçit töreni

Posted by Mavi Kocaeli on Monday, April 6, 2015

(Tip of the cap to Improbable Research.)

Betweenness Centrality and the Military

Network methods are a major object of study in the military, and concepts such as betweenness centrality are actually being employed in practice in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, betweenness centrality is severely non-robust with respect to false positives and false negatives.

Multislicing the War

I'll be telling you more about "multislice networks" soon enough, but in the meantime, in this New York Times article, you can see an example of a multislice network. There is also a priceless of hopelessly naive quote from General Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of the American effort in Afghanistan: When we understand this slide, we’ll have won the war.

Comment: Um, no. But this is excellent fodder for the seminar that I am giving on multislice networks tomorrow!


If you are curious and want to see how my collaborators and I use the term "multislice network", you can look at the paper that we posted on the arXiv. I postpone further details until the published version comes out.

(Tip of the cap to Philip Maini.)

The Gay Bomb

Last night, Lemming mentioned that a gay bomb was proposed by the U.S. military back in 1994. The gist is that the enemy soldiers who were hit by this would be given homosexual desires along with a major dose of aphrodisiac and would then be more interested in boinking their fellow soldiers than in fighting. Wow. You can read some more details here.

When Lemming first brought it up, I had assumed he was talking about a parody story. I did a double-take. (I was also playing Guitar Hero at the time, so I couldn't completely divert my attention to him.