Brian Hayes wrote, in American Scientist, in 2002, about Lewis Fry Richardson‘s book Statistics of Deadly Quarrels: An interesting lesson of Richardson’s exercise is just how difficult it can be to extract consistent and reliable quantitative information from the historical record. It seems easier to count inaccessible galaxies or invisible neutrinos than to count wars that […]
Tag: War
Hot potatoes to combat nuclear Armageddon
“Each message is regarded as a ‘hot potato’, and the nodes are not wearing gloves. Rather than hold the ‘hot potato’ the node tosses the message to its neighbor, who will now try to get rid of the message.” The paragraph above is describing aspects of the Hot Potato Algorithm, originally developed by (the late) […]
Russian tank invention: To lay waste upon the enemy
Aleksandr Georgievich Semenov patented an efficiently disgusting weapon system. Using his method, soldiers inside an armoured tank, under battle conditions, can dispose of their biological waste products in an unwasteful way: encasing those materials, together with explosives, in artillery shells that they then fire at the enemy. Semenov, residing in St Petersburg, can and does […]
How waiting in line is like war
A defense researcher analyzes (1) customer satisfaction in a shopping scenario and (2) the efficient use of warplanes in battle. He comes up with a mathematical model common to both—in which “[the] parameter of principal interest is the expected customer-survival rate.” Here’s his paper on how the two relate: “Queuing with Impatient Customers and Indifferent Clerks,” […]
Copious Deaths, and the Greatness of Presidents
Large numbers of deaths may be good for an American president’s reputation, suggests this new study: “War and Presidential Greatness,” David R. Henderson (Naval Postgraduate School) and Zachary Gochenour [pictured here] (George Mason University), SSRN working paper #2029774, March 27, 2012. The authors explain: “Historians and journalists commonly survey other historians on the relative ‘greatness’ […]
War today in the future
War today, as prognosticated by T. Baron Russell in 1906 in his book A Hundred Years Hence: we may take it as quite certain that war as an institution will be as obsolete as gladiators in the year 2000. Even if the increasing amenity of the human race did not abolish war, two other things […]
Consultants’ triumph (2): War plans
Here’s another example of how successful consultants can take anything — no matter how complex — and make it simple to understand. London-based PA Consulting Group, master analysts of the zombie economy, reportedly produced the diagram shown below [click on it to see an enlarged version]. MSNBC says: “This unclassified document from the Office of […]
History of warfare, told with food
Food Fight is an abridged history of war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression. That is the claim — and yes, it’s an accurate claim — by the […]