Index Arbitrage

Spread Networks

How One Guy Buried a $300 Million Cable to Save 3 Milliseconds and Sold It Back to Wall Street by Austin Liu

A stupid little video short got me started, so I did a little calculating. The cable runs from Chicago to New York or New Jersey, depending on who's telling the story. It's 700 miles as the crow flies, but that route would have to go under Lake Michigan, so it probably wasn't completely straight. Light travels slower in fiber optic cables, about two-thirds of the speed in air. To save 3 milliseconds, the route would need to be 372 miles shorter than a commercially available route. However, fiber optic lines need repeaters every so often to boost the signal. With a good cable you would need a repeater about every 80 miles, so for a 800 mile cable you would need about 10 repeaters. Good repeaters don't slow the signal down much, but who knows what kind of repeaters you would get on a commercial line.

A little more digging turned up this story from 2010:

Spread Networks Unveils Lowest Latency Ethernet Waves by Rob Powell

10 Short Videos #6170

10 Short Videos #6170

This is a Thornback ray and regular catch on the Bristol Channel. Their eye is one of my favourites.

🇦🇺 The Farmer Who Outsmarted Every Runner 🏃‍♂️⚡

This thing looks crazy but it's actually super cool!  - Respirator helmet with cooling fans

Engineer LOL 518 - Landslides

SpaceX Super Heavy Booster Landing Comparison

Tuna Boat Landing - Port side Approach Pilot POV - 2nd video because it's so cool

This Is What Subsonic Bullets Sound Like at 300 Yards

Wearing This Shirt Around Your Mom Is Crazy

That Custom Paint Job is Insane! 😱🔥 - Orangist truck in the world

This Test Determines the Fate of the Building - Pile driver performance

Funnies

Ilyushin Il-2

Ilyushin Il-2 - Romain Hugault
Romain Hugault is a comic book artist

Wikipedia - Production

In early 1941, the Il-2 was ordered into production at four factories, and was eventually produced in greater numbers than any other military aircraft in aviation history, but by the time Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, only State Aviation Factory No. 18 at Voronezh and Factory No. 381 at Leningrad had commenced production, with 249 having been built by the time of the German attack.

Production early in the war was slow because after the German invasion the aircraft factories near Moscow and other major cities in western Russia had to be moved east of the Ural Mountains. Ilyushin and his engineers had time to reconsider production methods, and two months after the move Il-2s were again being produced. The tempo was not to Premier Stalin's liking, however, and he issued the following telegram to Shenkman and Tretyakov:

You have let down our country and our Red Army. You have the nerve not to manufacture IL-2s until now. Our Red Army now needs IL-2 aircraft like the air it breathes, like the bread it eats. Shenkman produces one IL-2 a day, and Tretyakov builds one or two MiG-3s daily. It is a mockery of our country and the Red Army. I ask you not to try the government's patience, and demand that you manufacture more ILs. This is my final warning. — Stalin

As a result, "the production of Shturmoviks rapidly gained speed. Stalin's notion of the Il-2 being 'like bread' to the Red Army took hold in Ilyushin's aircraft plants, and the army soon had their Shturmoviks available in quantity."

Il-2 Destroys Bridge - The PIlot
Johnny's War Stories

I think the above video is from the movie The Pilot. A Battle for Survival. It was made in  Russia in 1980, so before the collapse of the Soviet Union, so it's basically a Soviet movie. Sounds like a good story though.

Ilyushin IL-2 Sturmovik | The Flying Tank | Armored Plane of soviet russia in WW2 #sturmovik #il2
Info Cafe

I suspect the audio on this video is artificial, but the script is pretty good: coherent and plausible. Maybe a little excessive boasting about killing German tanks at Kursk, I dunno. I know that Kursk was a big battle, but I never heard much about aircraft there.

Previous Il-2 post.

Supermarine Spitfire

Supermarine Spitfire Grey Nurse

Grey Nurse was a member of No. 457 Squadron RAAF that was transferred to Australia in 1942. It's now in the Temora Air Museum in Australia:

This aircraft was the last Spitfire acquired by the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) with the original Military serial number A58-758. It was built by Supermarine in England in 1944, test flown and then shipped to Australia. The Air Force took delivery of the aircraft in April 1945, and, with World War II drawing to a close, the aircraft was not required on active service and was instead placed into storage.

A few years ago the airplane was modified to add a second seat for a passenger and now is giving rides.

Royal Air Force:

The iconic Supermarine Spitfire was critical in defeating Luftwaffe air attacks during the Battle of Britain in 1940. More Spitfires were built than any other British combat aircraft before or since World War Two - 20,341 in total. There are five Spitfires on the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight.

SPITFIRE Mk. IXb - Flown as it should be! | Flying Legends
PaddyPatrone

SPITFIRE (2018) | Official Trailer | Altitude Films
Altitude Films Links:

Wikipedia page
Duck Me 2
Catapult to Oblivion

Disclosure Day - Movie Fox Tower

Disclosure Day | Official Trailer
Universal Pictures

It was a fine movie, plenty of mystery, appealing heroes, detestable villains, lots of bad guys chasing our heroes. And aliens, which are fine if that's what you want to believe. There are plenty of unexplained phenomena, and maybe they are caused by aliens, but I tend to think they are hallucinations, and if they are not, then the aliens are so far out of our league as not be worth worrying about. On the other hand, all these weird things that people see might just be a glitch in the matrix. That would be a more serious worry, but I'm not gonna worry about it on account of I'm fat, dumb and happy in this world that is filled with cheeseburgers, beer and girls.

You don't suppose Trump's releasing the UFO files was done to promote this movie, do you? It sure looks suspicious to me. I think somebody should investigate, and then we can make a movie about the investigation.

There is one clever scene where the good guys are holed up in a warehouse and the good guys come in the front door. Our girl gets ahold of the alien device which expands her mental powers. She sends something to the bad guys, negative waves, alien radiation, something, that convinces them the warehouse is empty. But something is off, so they halt, and they can hear the good guys running for the exits.

I loved Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It came out in 1977 which is like 50 years ago, and I've seen a lot of movies since then, so there wasn't anything really new in this movie. For someone who hasn't watched a zillion films, it will probably be pretty cool.

Virtual Piano

Virtual Piano

I wrote a little program in C the other day, and I thought it might be more useful if I rewrote it in Javascript, that way I could post it on the web. It's not a very useful program, more just messing about with numbers, but while I thinking about this it occurred to me that you could use your computer keyboard to play music like a piano. That sounds like a fun project. So yeah, I'm a little late to the party. Several other people have already done this.