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One of the two best versions of this song, from 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQnmLT1KbQo

The other great version, from 1978: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngm_5PNSP00

Article from the History News Network (HNN) on the recently released movie Dunkirk: How Accurate is Dunkirk

We don’t do movie reviews here, but I have seen the film. All characters and their personal stories are fictional. The movie is notable in that there are no American characters in a Hollywood blockbuster.

The article from HNN is more of a history of the battle than it is a movie review.

When I was watching the first round of the Stanley Cup play-offs (Capitals versus Maple Leafs) and they posted a stat that when the seven-game play-off rounds are scored three won games to two, then the leading team wins the round 78% of the time. Mathematically, if the teams were equal, then it would be 75% of the time (same chance as with two coin tosses). See previous post: Hockey Play-off Games 6 & 7

Right now, all four match-ups in the second round of the Stanley Cup play-offs are split 3 to 2 (Nashville over St. Louis, Anaheim over Edmonton, Ottawa over New York and Pittsburgh over Washington). Now, if the teams are roughly equal to each other and with average luck, then three of the leading teams will win and there will be one upset. Hoping it will be the Washington Capitals.

I was watching the first round of the Stanley Cup play-offs tonight (Capitals versus Maple Leafs) and they posted a stat that when the seven-game play-off rounds are scored three won games to two, then the leading team wins 78% of the time.

This really is not all that surprising. To win four games out of the seven, the team trailing must win the next two games. If the two teams were even in ability, then the odds of trailing team winning both games would be 0.50 (50 percent) times 0.50 or 0.25 (25%). So if the score is 3-2 and both teams were equal in ability, then the odds the leading team will win the play-off round is 75%. This is not that far from the 78% they quoted. To get to the 78% they quoted, then the difference in winning ability between the teams would be very slight, 53% for the leading team vice 47% for the trailing team.

Not sure how this translates into anything useful, but at least the Capitals won the fifth game.

Again, totally unrelated to anything we usually blog about (and I am not quite ready to create an “alien life” category for the blog), but in 1939 Winston Churchill wrote a never published essay on intelligent life in the universe. Winston-Churchills-aliens-essay

At the time, the accepted theory in science was that planets formed when two stars passed closely to each other, creating a stream of gas that then formed the Solar System. The interesting argument Churchill presents is: “But this speculation depends upon the hypothesis that planets were formed in this way. Perhaps they were not,” wrote Churchill. “We know there are millions of double stars, and if they could be formed, why not planetary systems?”

and

“I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time,” he wrote.

This post is totally unrelated to any legitimate national security concerns, but I think it is damn interesting anyway. In Canada they found a fossil of bacteria that is 3.77 to 4.30 billion years old. Now the earth is 4.54 +/- 0.05 billion years. So this would indicate that life, at least in the form of bacteria and being created around hot jets in water, formed within hundreds of thousands years after the earth formed. Added to that we have found dozens of planets within the habitable zones of many stars out there, including three new ones last week around one star less than 40 light-years away. Pretty hard to imagine that there is not life out there, at least in the form of bacteria.

A few links:

worlds-oldest-fossils-discovered-Canada

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth

earth-size-planets-found-orbiting-star-could-hold-life

By the way, the blog is now a year old, with our first posts having been made on December 27, 2015. In this last year we made 259 posts and received 104 comments that we posted.

Going forward, we would like to tell you about all the new great new things we are going to do with the blog, but in fact, right now we have no plans to do anything different. Our focus is going to remain on quantitative analysis of warfare, we are going to avoid being a daily news blog (because they are several blogs that already do this and also it takes a lot of time), and we will continue to discuss whatever strikes our fancy. We do try to stay away from politics, but there is a point when it crosses over with policy, so hard to avoid entirely.

The one thing that is missing is “guest bloggers.” We only had one such blog post this last year. We hope to have a few more this year, but have not aggressively sought it out. We would like to invite any of our erudite readers out there to contact us if they have something they feel is worth posting.

This blog is supposed to be a “not to interfere” effort, in that we have various writing, marketing and analytical efforts on-going, and the blog is not supposed to subtract any significant time from those efforts. These other efforts are our primary focus. This blog is something that we are supposed to be doing in our “quiet moments.”

Anyhow, wish you all a happy New Year and hope that 2017 will be a good year for you all.

The AIDS epidemic has always held my attention because it is a modern disease that was recently spread. Serves as a warning as to how difficult it is to respond to a new disease or a new variant of a disease. One can certainly imagine a number of biological war scenarios, or something like a new Spanish Flu epidemic like happened 1918-1920. Disease and plague have certainly played their part in history.

Anyhow, spotted an article that indicates that the AIDS virus came into the United States from the Caribbean to New York in the 1970s. This makes a certain amount of sense. As the virus does take time before it shows symptoms, it was clearly around for a while before the doctors first spotted it in California in 1981.

gene-study-clears-patient-zero-as-cause-of-us-hiv-epidemic

There is a more detailed article in Nature that I have not pulled up.