You are right that when people say "Scotland Yard" they do frequently mean the whole Metropolitan Police. And you are also right that there is no other police entity (that I know of) which would be associated with that name.
But also, "Scotland Yard" was just the address of the original headquarters of the Metropolitan Police. Even then it wasn't the whole organisation, just the address of one of the buildings. Then they got a new headquarters and called it "New Scotland Yard". And to confuse matters further they repeated this multiple times. Which means there are 3 buildings which were called "New Scotland Yard" at various points in time.
And today of course the MET occupies far more real estate than just the famous "Scotland Yard". For example if you look at this FOI request[1] you can see that there were 226 other buildings the Metropolitan Police used in 2023. (Not counting covert/sensitive estate).
Generally we don’t construct and maintain expensive scientific equipment just for the fun of it. There usually is some question or debate we expect them to answer or settle.
I’m all for stomping out bait and switch, but "SAR imagery from the world's largest SAR satellite constellation" does not imply that you will get all the imagery they have. Same as if i describe a liquid as “water from the Atlantic” it need not be a particularly impressive amount of water.
> Either way, something doesn't add up.
They are in the business of selling a particular type of data. They are not incentivised to give away their product for free. What you see here is the “first hit is free” kind of sample.
Not sure what you are asking. The stone age way of making paint is to find some place where the ground has a weird colour, dig it up, clean it and you have a pigment.
Even to this day many of our paint pigments are mined this way. Red/yellow ochre, umber, sienna.
If what you are asking is the dirt in question geologically speaking a soil? Sometimes, sometimes not. It can be a sediment or a regolith too. But in the more general laymen sense callig any dirt from the ground a soil is not too mistaken.
Okay, but user070223 is talking about watercolour paints as an alternative use of gum arabic.
Now i’m just recognising this might be a language issue: watercolour paints are a type of paint to paint with on paper using a brush dipped in water. If you ever seen kids paint with brushes and paper most likely they were using watercolour paint.
Technically this is not incompatible with the title. Just uses “can” in a different sense. The title would be using “can” in the “has the skill already”, while you use “can” in the “able to acquire the skill” sense.
It is not hard to imagine that most people when asked the question “can you juggle?” would answer in the negative. That’s what the article’s title describes. And then if those people, given sufficient motivation can learn to juggle that leads to your sentence. And they both can be true at the same time.
I agree that it would be nice to provide source for the claim though.
I would say no to currently being able to juggle, but that's because I don't consider one ball to count as juggling.
If you specifically asked if I could juggle one ball, I'd say sure. And I just checked, one ball goes fine. And I've never practiced juggling. I'm pretty skeptical about that ability being the minority.
I am not fully certain but juggling is moving objects in a predictable path so as to repeat without dropping.
In my understanding of the OP, juggling 'one' is being able to throw an object consistently to another hand without handing it. This is an intentional throw of the ball from one hand to another without "moving" the other hand to compensate.
Throwing from one hand to another, either directly or in an arc, requires the motorskills to move an object consistently while understanding the speed, trajectory, and then moving the other hand to receive (not catch) it as expected.
There are multiple elements at play with 3 object juggling. One must throw an arc toss to the other hand, while holding an object, then throwing the object in said hand to free the hand to catch. In reality you are holding two objects with one in motion - until you get the double arc which is now technically juggling.
Three bodies in motion, two hands that are each making circular or figure eight motions, while maintaining a consistent arc and speed (XY (no Z) + T = arc) where the mind either tracks or forgets allowing the predictable movements work themselves into only tracking one object at a time - by setting it's path and then shifting focus or attention to the next.
One thing is that “underground” is not a homogenous single thing. Sometimes it is loose water logged sand, or clay, or gravel, sometimes it is solid hard rock, sometimes it is large very hard pieces of fractured hard rock forming a loose rubble. Which kind of obstacle are you thinking when you are thinking of your method of digging? Based on your method description it sounds like you are thinking of loose soil with a few big rocks?
> The silicon arms would be full of actuators that measured their resistance in terms of the momentum they want plus the gravity weight of any nodes after them.
That sounds very complicated. Actuators are expensive. Actuators which are strong enough to drill through stone are even more so. Having many of them per arm and many arms per machine sounds very expensive and also a maintenance nightmare. Look at a real world tunnel boring machine: they have a cutting head rotated around by a single electric motor and hydraulic jacks to keep the cutting head pressed against the formation. It is conceptually simple, even though of course real world constraints make it complicated in practice. You are proposing to replace that conceptual simplicity with something much much more complicated. It is not clear what benefit you are hoping to achieve with the complexity you are thinking of.
> tunnels in every city on earth so we didn't have to destroy woodland to build suburban cities at such a gorgeous rate
How would that work in practice? Would people live in tunnels under a pristine forests? I’m not sure i understand your concept.
> what if the Army could cut and cover 100 meters of precast tunnel segments in a day
If you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide?
Also how would you protect your construction crew and construction supply chain as they are slowly plodding along 100m a day?
Once built, could this cut and cover tunnel be disabled by hitting it anywhere along its length with a “bunker buster” amunition? Or a backpack full of explosives and a shovel? Or a few cans of fuel down the ventillation and a lit rag?
And if the answer is that you will patrol the topside to prevent such meddling, how do you protect your patrols? And if you can protect them why don’t you do the same for your logistics?
That cover dirt materially adds to the resistance of the structure.
This is why even above-ground bunkers are almost always buried underneath a giant mound of dirt instead of being bare concrete. It is a cheap structural multiplier that greatly increases the amount of explosive required to damage the insides. It is also very cheap. A bunker buster is a very heavy and specialized munition which limits its scope of practicality.
There are entire civil engineering textbooks that focus exclusively on the types of scenario you are alluding to. It is a very mature discipline and almost all of it has been tested empirically.
I used to have a civil engineering textbook that was solely about the design of structures to resist the myriad effects of nuclear weapons. It was actually pretty damn interesting. Civil engineers have contemplated at length just about every structural scenario you can imagine.
> Civil engineers have contemplated at length just about every structural scenario you can imagine.
I bet. Do they recommend cut and cover highways in contested environments? Or do they recommend shooting back until the area is no longer contested? (Which you practically have to do anyway to build the cut and cover tunnel in the first place.)
I don’t doubt that it is a good idea to cover with earth C&C bunkers and launchers and such. But those are point installations. Miles and miles of tunnels used for logistics are lines. They scale very differently.
> If you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide?
I have no opinion on this, but TFA makes it pretty clear: visibility and susceptibility to attack.
TFA also makes it clear that cutting and covering is weak sauce compared with actual tunnels "30-40 feet below the surface".
Use your mind and develop an opinion. I read the article too, i’m just disagreeing with it.
> visibility
There are two kinds of visibility to be had. Not knowing where the tunnel is, and not knowing who and when passes in it.
Cut and cover doesn’t help with the first kind of visibility. Disturbed vegetation and soil will reveal your tunnel’s path to even a senile adversary. One who somehow missed your whole construction. If you just want to hide your movements and somehow you have the budget for hundreds of miles of prefab concrete tunnel you can hide inside it without it being burried.
> susceptibility to attack
Undoubtedly burrying the precast concrete segments under dirt makes it harder to attack, but it won’t make it impenetrable. And once the enemy cracked it the whole tunnel becomes useless for transportation. On the surface you can just buldozer a way around the damage and keep on trucking. Underground you need to excavate, re-line with precast concrete and cover again, under enemy fire.
> TFA also makes it clear that cutting and covering is weak sauce
I think they could have just left the mention of cut and cover out and the article would have been stronger for it.
> Use your mind and develop an opinion. I read the article too, i’m just disagreeing with it.
I have no particular interest or knowledge of military tactics, and no desire to expand it. I do, however, recall what is written in an article that I've just read, particularly when it already answers, all by itself, questions that people are asking about it.
The suggestion from the author sounds like someone early in WWI suggesting the problem with the war effort was a lack of entrenchments to conduct infantry charges from
It sounds more like somebody from WWI suggesting the entrenchments absolutely _needed_ to be staggered and zig-zagged so that artillery blast shock waves don't kill everbody.
Which was a solid observation.
Now the solid advice is to leave _nothing_ above ground and parked for very long - roll everything .. including radar .. in and out of bunkers to protect assests when wave upon wave of wooden cheap arse semi smart bombs come in on the back of Chinese / Russian / Indian / US satellite targeting.
> Idk what to tell you, but any target that seems to get marked in Iran blows the fuck up.
I’m sure that is true. And yet, the oil is not flowing. We keep “winning” like this for a few more weeks/months and we lose. Not because we sudenly stop “blowing targets the fuck up”, but because we cripple our economies.
The flowing of oil is not of primary importance to the US in this conflict. The oil was already flowing. So I think we can reasonably rule that out as an objective.
> The flowing of oil is not of primary importance to the US in this conflict.
You think so? Then why did the US make it the condition of cease fire? Why did the US even agree to a cease fire? It is not like Iran is hurting the US mainland kinetically.
> The oil was already flowing. So I think we can reasonably rule that out as an objective.
Sometimes you have a thing and you don’t appreciate how important it is for you until you don’t have it anymore.
Because having air frames constantly cycling in the air for six weeks straight is hard on both soldiers and air frames, so having a breather for maintenance and recovery is crucial.
And Oil is not crucial for the US at all, it is hitting Europe and poor countries the most by far.
> When the choice is "let Iran have nukes" or "bomb Iran", you bomb Iran every time.
There was also the choice of “Iran let us verify that they are not making nukes, and in return we remove economic sanctions from them”. It was called the JCPOA, and according to non-proliferation experts it worked. And then on the 8th of May 2018 Trump unilaterally withdrew from it.
Let’s not pretend that there were no other options.
Unilateraly on the level of countries. The other signatories (China, France, Russia, the U.K., Germany and the EU) believed that the deal was good and Iran was holding up their end of the bargain at that time.
If the USA government had credible evidence that it is not so, they could have picked up the phone and presented their case to the other signatories. Or at least to their allies. Then once those countries were convinced that something is off they could have withdrawn together from the agreement. Would have less of a terrible optics than how it went down.
I seek only to point out that we, the United States, have a constitutionally-outlined treaty-making process which involves Senate ratification, and that in the case of the JCPOA, the Senate did not ratify.
Re international agreements: yes, the idea is that _broad support_ is required for binding international agreements. Senate ratification represents broad support.
> It would be very surprising if at least the United States and Russia didn't have orbital weapons. They've been in sending large stuff to space for decades.
Depends on what you mean by “orbital weapons”. I assume you are not thinking of the sidearms of astronauts, or anti-satelite satelites.
If you are thinking about nukes pre-positioned in space then the 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the stationing of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in outer space. And this is not just paper prohibition. The reality of space based nukes is that the time between deorbiting and touch-down is so short that nuclear armed states would treat their launch (the time when they are placed into orbit) as an attack and launch in retaliation against the launching country.
Basically if you try to sneak them into orbit and the enemy finds out about them you will be anihilated. This is just simple MAD doctrine. So the strategic balance which is preventing you from launching your ground based warheads is the same which is preventing you from launching your future space based warheads into orbit.
> Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.
I wouldn’t assume that you or me would learn about it. But it is almost given that the peer nations would figure it out. They spend considerable resources trying to figure out if you are doing this. And then they get MAD and your country is no more.
It is not? But also it is.
You are right that when people say "Scotland Yard" they do frequently mean the whole Metropolitan Police. And you are also right that there is no other police entity (that I know of) which would be associated with that name.
But also, "Scotland Yard" was just the address of the original headquarters of the Metropolitan Police. Even then it wasn't the whole organisation, just the address of one of the buildings. Then they got a new headquarters and called it "New Scotland Yard". And to confuse matters further they repeated this multiple times. Which means there are 3 buildings which were called "New Scotland Yard" at various points in time.
And today of course the MET occupies far more real estate than just the famous "Scotland Yard". For example if you look at this FOI request[1] you can see that there were 226 other buildings the Metropolitan Police used in 2023. (Not counting covert/sensitive estate).
1: https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclos...
Scotland Yard was originally the name of the street in which headquaters of the Metropolitan Police.
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