I have previously written about Winter’s Easy Company assault at Brecourt Manor. The article got a bit of notoriety on the internet since it capture the diagrams and battle flow when other sites went dark.
The attack has been studied for years as a ‘textbook’ example of how to attack a fortified position. Video games have even re-created it.
So, does it hold up today? How about an assault on a near identical situation in the Ukrainian war. While the technology and exact approach changed a bit, the assault was actually similar in the use of forked approaches and distraction.
This video takes the same Adele vocal track and seamlessly converts it to different harmonic scales.
Besides listening to some of the different scale systems, this video shows how far we’ve come in our ability to isolate and change singers voices to just about anything we want.
Torque Test Channel does a great job comparing different impact wrenches with independent torque testing to verify the accuracy of manufacturer claims.
It’s interesting how much the battery charge and quality matters to the performance of these devices. Almost all of them only reach their stated numbers with absolutely fully charged batteries – and lower capacity or lower charged batteries can have quite noticeably lower performance.
How much torque do I need for a particular repair job
In physics, we have to be operational. That means we don’t ask ‘What is the essence of time?’ because that’s what philosophers argue over coffee. We [physicists] simply ask ‘How do we measure it?’
This is a great quote that is at the core of why people misunderstand the teleology, or goal, of science. Science does not explain WHY, it only explains HOW. This distinction has largely been lost by modern thinkers. Many think because we know how something works that it implies we should or should not do something. This is wrong. Science does not tell us if something is good or bad. It just tells us how it works.
This distinction is the major split that happened in the time of Newton when he described gravity in simple mathematical terms. Before then, physics, or when it was called metaphysics, sought to understand the underlying MEANING of the world. Both why and how. But Newton simplified science to just a description of HOW something works – mechanically, mathematically. It took all moral and ethical principles out of the equation. Forces act on things. It’s unimportant why.
This simplified understanding, the understanding that was clearly known by all people who were pioneers of science, is why they could all still say they believe in science and God at the same time. In fact, most of the major scientific breakthroughs like genetics (the Catholic friar Gregory Mendel) and Newton and even the Big Bang by Fr. George Lemaitre, and countless others, could be firm believers in God and in science.
The Newtonian view is the belief time goes on even if nothing is there. That has been proven wrong. Time is a dimension of the stuff in the universe. Since light moves, well, at the speed of light – it experiences no time. It simply exists then is absorbed.
So, if you push the universe all the way back to when it was hotter and hotter, smaller and smaller until you reach the Big Bang – does it even make sense to ask what happened before that? This is the ultimate test of your new definition of time. If time is just a way of ordering events, asking what happened before the universe might be as nonsensical as asking what is north of the North Pole.
I find many people that claim they only believe in science actually have a very hard time believing the difficult realities that science actually tells us we must believe. As Feynman points out, the data we know about time tells us that there are messy, counter-intuitive truths in which our intuition about time is completely wrong. He suggests some things may not even be possible for us to conceive.
What’s interesting is that beliefs in heaven and God infer heavily that God likely exists outside of time. Many scoff at this saying that’s not possible, but here, even one of the foremost scientist of the century, tells us asking some questions like ‘What was before the universe’ might not even make sense. This isn’t meant to be proof of God – but to tell us that even the reality we understand today tells us that sometimes ‘intuitive’ lines of investigation may not even be asking valid questions.
A good scientist, like Feynman, is very open about the limitations of our knowledge in a way that I find armchair science believers with signs in their yard are not. Scientists understand more than others the entire realm of what we know is completely bound in fuzzy edges and darkness of what we still don’t know. Even ‘decided’ science is not immune from serious crisis as we see coming out of the Webb Telescope in 2025. This is not to say we should not trust science – it’s the best we have. Planes fly every day due to the physics and engineering based on it. But engineering does still fail us at times, and no real scientist would be so arrogant to ignore they are just one discovery away from learning what we believed could be wrong. In fact, scientists are most excited when they find something that isn’t jiving because it means they’re about to get what they get into the field for: to learn something new and exciting.
It’s why many science lovers, like myself, are drawn to it for a lifetime. I have watch our understanding of cosmology and the planets completely change in just 40 years. Things we thought were true about the planets have been proven false, true, and more often than not shocked us with things we never dreamed of.
So, I offer a suggestion. Do not be so self-assured, like a bad scientist, to discount something like God just because you don’t have concrete evidence of it. We’ve found time and again things hinted in signs have been true far more often than not. Give God a chance to convince you.
Simon Sinek claims that people don’t buy what you make/do, they buy why you are making it. He further claims you are not trying to align yourself with everyone, you’re trying to align yourself to the people who believe what you believe.
I would qualify his takes as marketing methodology that can work in the right conditions. For example, if Apple couldn’t actually make/deliver products that are good, this wouldn’t work. You can believe building a flying machine will change the world – without being able to technically do it.
I do agree if you just tell people what you have – it won’t be enough. If you tell people why you’re making the product and why you built it – it will be much more effective marketing.
In his point about Martin Luther King – he points out a truth for all Christians. We have seen people that spend all their time reposting their doom-scrolling and pointing out the bad in the world. In the end, it just focus them and others on hate, anger, frustration, and lashing out. A trap we see many fall into.
A much more profound method is to do exactly what Jesus did – preach the Truth. That elevates and points people in a direction and vision of how things should, and will, be. It also requires much more from the person doing it – a personal understanding, and relationship, with Jesus in which you learn these things. Hate and anger are cheap and easy – Truth is hard.
Patrick Boyle is a hedge fund manager, university professor, and former investment banker that continues his deadpan roasting of current business trends with this report on ridiculous actual tech inventions of things that already exist or are just beyond ridiculous.
It reminds me of the Smart Pipe – a parody video that came out over a decade ago and proves we’ve learned nothing.
We’re still celebrating the 12 days of Christmas (until Epiphany) and I’ll confess Advent/Christmas is my favorite season in the Church. Yes, Easter is when the full saving power of God comes to us in Christ who dies for us and we are given the Eucharist at the last supper. Christmas, however, is when God shows us exactly how He is used to working in the world. That is a source of real hope for the whole of our lives. Especially when everything looks like it has gone wrong and there is little hope.
The coming of Jesus the messiah is foretold for hundreds of years by the prophets and foreshadowing of the Old Testament. It’s not hard to understand people were expecting another Moses or David who overthrew enemy armies and freed them from slavery – giving them a promised land to live on and freeing them from slavery to other nations.
Instead Jesus came to free us in a very different and much better way. Jesus didn’t come into the world as the kind of conqueror or revolutionary activist that anyone expected. We see people clamoring for, and even starting, revolts against the Roman occupation. Even Jesus own disciples keep asking when Jesus will overthrow the Romans (Acts 1:6-7). But Jesus again and again points them back to the true nature of freedom.
Instead, He established a new kingdom – not based on land or borders, but a promised land of freedom in our hearts where the true king, Jesus, would dwell every day with you. It would be a profound intimacy in which the full presence of God’s three persons will dwell in us, love us, and show us how to love others in our own hearts. That love and real living in Truth in our very being frees us from the futile things that actually enslave us and destroy our world: greed, hatred, unforgiveness, hurt, violence, and hopelessness.
But just like the earliest disciples, we can absolutely miss Jesus’ arrival if we aren’t aware of how God likes to comes into our lives.
When God, who created the entire universe and all of us, wants to send a savior to us – he doesn’t appear magically and just wipe away our problems like a lottery ticket. Instead, he decides to come in full human form – starting as a single cell embryo in his mother’s womb, being carried through a normal pregnancy, and born just like us. He enters creation as it is – and not in a palace or by magically changing how things are. This in itself is a powerful message of just how much he loves us and all He has created.
He is born to an unwed mother – who’s betrothed fiance nearly abandons her when faced with an unexpected pregnancy he knew wasn’t his. Jesus is born on the road in a city Mary may never have been too. The whole reason for the trip was due to a census required by the occupying Roman military force.
There was no reservations at a hospital or hotel – He is born in a barn that was likely just an open-air covering next to an existing house or part of a cave. There were no doctors/midwives, no anesthesia, no preparation, no family or friends – just her and her husband in an animal barn that likely smelled and was filthy. This means He is easy to miss if we are looking in flashy presentations, in wealth, or in big signs or wonders.
Joseph was a blue-collar worker of humble means. In Greek, Joseph is described as a τέκτων – tekton – a craftsman or builder of stone/wood/etc. Joseph would likely be a construction worker or bricklayer of today. Certainly not a social media, Hollywood, or political star. When Jesus is brought to the temple his parents could only offer a pair of turtledoves/pigeons – which was what the poorest families offered. It means they could not even afford a whole lamb.
They quickly needed to flee to Egypt to escape the persecutions of Herod. They lived as political refugees in Egypt for years – likely struggling to make ends meet, faced prejudices, and likely had no friends or family to help raise their child. They likely didn’t even have a temple or place to worship and connect with other Jews.
When they returned, they settled in Nazareth in Galilee – an area considered to be the ‘hick’ area of Israel. People recognize the disciples as being from the area by the way they speak – probably much like people recognize Southern accents. When Jesus calls his first disciples, even Nathaniel scoffs at Nazareth as a nothing backwater (“Nathan′a-el said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see”. (John 1:46)).
All this is to say this is how God likes to answers our prayers and come into our lives. Jesus’ life was the meanest start with no power, no money, no status. Instead, He comes anonymously, quietly – in a barn full of stench and disarray.
And that’s often just what our lives are like when we need Him most.
We often fill our hearts with all kinds of similar things. We may be in an ugly structure of a life leaning against or built on professional pride or greed for money, houses, or power and positions at work. We are filled with the dirty straw and broken furniture of family members estranged by neglect or hurtful words/actions, marriages that lack love and charity, or ignoring the needy all around us, foreigners, or people we disagree with politically or in our workplace. We may even have the most base filth of ourselves as well: sins of adultery, substance abuse, pornography, and passions we are slaves too.
But this is just the place that Jesus is used to coming into. If he can come into the world in a barn of the meanest sort, He is showing us He will come into our lives – no matter what is going on.
Evil (pride, ego, and guilt) wants you to be embarrassed and hide these things from Him or even let others tell you that these things are all fine (when we know in our hearts they are not). They want to tell Him there is no room in your inn and push Him down the road. But Jesus is ready to be born not just at an inn, but in the worst, most filthy barns of our lives. Christmas is celebrated in the shortest, darkest days of winter because He wants to come exactly when we need Him in our hearts the most.
It is sometimes hard to invite Jesus into these nasty and hurt corners of our life. Especially during the holidays with family. Sometimes we don’t feel worthy or feel too broken to want to accept His presence and love. Sometimes we’re unable to get things out of our lives like addictions – which might need both God and medical help. As creations of spirit and physical body – sometimes we need care for both at the same time.
It might also be because we don’t want to give up our pain or hurts. Ironically, we sometimes like to hold onto those things that are killing us. Hate is often more fun to hold onto than the work of relationships. Sometimes we avoid it out of fear of what our lives would look like if we started living freely without that pain. Others are simply not interested in reconciliation and are happy to hurt or ignore others.
Many today think they’re doing just fine on their own and don’t need Jesus – despite the growing scientific proof about the increasing emptiness and hopelessness we feel.
But it’s not just the things in our hearts – these push outwards into our lives. Maybe we recognize the work we’re doing is immoral or hurting people. Is Jesus a part of our work day in both the business decisions and how coworkers are treated? Perhaps we’re in a relationship we should not be in for our state in life, or is based on using someone to get what we want. Have we invited Jesus into our sexual lives fully?
Do we invite Christ to come into our hearts all day when making work choices or deciding how to respond to others? Do we invite Jesus to help us when faced with a tough choice – or what to say when someone cuts you off in traffic?
All of these things are an opportunity for Christmas – to invite Jesus into your world. No matter how unsightly it is. Trust me – as he showed with his own birth – He is used to it. It is an excellent challenge to think of something you are struggling with or an old hurt – and purposefully invite Jesus to come into that part. His coming will likely not be a huge, magical fix- but a quiet arrival that slowly changes our world. If we stay committed to it.
Christ is used to coming into the meanest and most difficult parts of our lives and world. Invite Him into just one new area of yours – and experience Christmas all year.
