The Gentlemen: Season 2 - Netflix Series

The Gentlemen: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Epic. Cross of The Godfather and James Bond. Upper class British dude has built a cannabis empire that is raking in zillions of dollars but he wants more. To that end he wants parliament to pass a bill that will make Mary Jane legal. He reasons that, like in America, the legal business will bring in more revenue without significantly impacting the illegal business. This is because illegal marijuana will be cheaper than the legal stuff. However, his boss does not agree, arguing that while our boy Edouard might be a general in this sprawling criminal enterprise, the boss is a field marshal and so has to consider the bigger picture. Unfortunately, he doesn't explain what the bigger picture is. We'll have to wait for season 3 to find out just what that is.

We get to see what competent former soldiers can do when circumstance dictate. Gentlemen by all accounts during the day, but killers when the need arises. There are a couple of scenes when several bad guys are shot down without any warning. At least one situation was entirely warranted, but there were a couple that seemed unnecessary, but these guys are essentially operating on a war footing, so maybe it was a valid tactical decision.

Best show I've seen in a while. 6 stars out of 5.

Season one here.

The Whisper Man - Netflix Movie

The Whisper Man | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Creepy movie about child murderers. Michael Keaton plays a man who murdered five children. Robert De Niro is the cop who caught him 25 years ago. Adam Scott is De Niro's adult son. His kid has disappeared and he is understandably losing his mind. Owen Teague plays Keaton's adult son who is carrying on his father's tradition of killing kids. Hamish Linklater plays Norman Collins, an eccentric collector of murder memorabilia. 

Once again the cop on the spot, Amanda Beck, decides to charge ahead into danger without waiting for backup, and once again, we have the villain sneaking up behind her to stick a knife into her.

Murder mystery. All the pieces are there, someone just has to pick them up.

Cast

Actor		Role	Character
Robert	De Niro	Detective Inspector	Pete	Willis
Michelle	Monaghan	Detective	Amanda	Beck
Michael	Keaton	Villain	Frank	Carter
Adam	Scott	Father	Tom	Kennedy
Owen	Teaque	Villain redux	Frank	Carter Jr.
Hamish	Linklater	Collector	Norman	Collins

Graveyard: Season 3 - Netflix Series

Graveyard: Season 3 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

I've been trying to figure out what it is about a show the makes it enjoyable, and it's very difficult to describe. If I like a show, I'll dive in and become engrossed in the story line and won't notice anything about the production. If I don't like a show, I will sweep it from my mind, so describing what makes a show enthralling or excruciating is a bit difficult for me, but I'm gonna give it shot here.

It feels like they are trying very hard to make the show as much like a western show as possible, it feels a little rough around the edges. Most of it is very good but every so often something will happen that upsets the flow of show flowing into you. It's like a roller-coaster ride, where you are rushing by strange stuff and you are enjoying the thrill of the chase, but every so often something will happen, like your car hits bump and you say what was that? but you've already moved way beyond that so you let it slide.

What kind of things? A scene might be rushed, there is no lead in, we jump into the middle of a conversation, we hear a dozen words, and we are back out. It leaves one wondering what was that even about? Some of the bit players don't feel real, a little too wooden in movement and speech.

The entire show is basically about women's rights in half-moslem Turkey. The police have created a special unit to handle femicides and our girl has been assigned to lead it. This season has her gang fighting a well financed program of harassment and intimidation. There's also the usual family drama, I sleep through that, though in this show they are usually pretty short. In the end our girl catches the culprits and that's all that matters.

Season 2 here.

Blood Sacrifice - Netflix Series

Blood Sacrifice | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Another serial killer on the loose. This one is targeting the police. He kills six or seven before the cops finally catch up him. It's not too bad a show but it's not a great one either. The lead detective spends a lot of time dealing with his father, a former cop and a serious curmudgeon. It's not clear what their issue is, maybe it's a subtle language thing that didn't make it through translation, or maybe the old man is just a stinker.

It's got all the standard Netflix diversity stuff: the competent, immigrant, gay, cop; the hot chick playing second fiddle to our lead detective; women in high level positions, and a white male in charge who falsified records that pushed our killer over the edge.

The last episode was pretty bad. Alfred (the grandfather) meets the killer at the museum, gets in a car with him and rides away. You'd think he would be a little more circumspect. Things go from bad to worse and then his son shows up and things just get ridiculous.

Midvinterblot (1915) by Carl Larsson, which depicts the offering of king Domalde

The killer spends a lot of time at the museum looking at this painting. Grandpa notes the similarity between the contortions of the people on the ground the positions of the slain police officers when they were found. Note also the tree with skulls.

5 episodes

Mousetrap - Netflix Series

Mousetrap | Official Trailer | Netflix [ENG SUB]
Netflix K-Content

Excellent. Successful novelist has his identity stolen so completely that he is left homeless, broke and living on the street. Now a thug who has been searching for him for three years catches up with him demanding payment of an old debt. Our boy obviously can't pay so the thug beats the snot out of him. In between punches our boy manages to convince the thug that he will get paid if they can figure out who stole his identity, and they are off, racing around Seoul, chasing down clues all to a bangin' soundtrack.

Stealing identities is both an ongoing business and a problem. Unidentified bodies keep turning up and now it is beginning to look like these people can't be identified because their identity has been stolen and now all the government records of this identity now point to the person who bought the stolen identity.

It gets a little confusing because there are different gangs, or maybe just different factions of the same gang, all trying to collect the loot. Also, it begins to look like the identity thief might be the real guy and the real guy might be the fake. 

There are several brutal mass fighting scenes and one spectacular smash up of a bunch of police cars. 

Quantum Astronaut Sculpture

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The Girl from Oslo - Netflix Series

What Happened in Oslo (Bortført) - Trailer - Netflix
FanCat

Norwegian girl goes to Sinai for fun in the sun with a couple of Israeli friends and they all get kidnapped by ISIS terrorists. Chaos ensues.

The show is about evenly divided between what's going on with the kidnappers and what's going on on the home front, both is Oslo and Israel, which is mostly politics and emotional caterwauling. Israel won't take direct action because that would mean crossing the border into Egypt, and that would offend the Egyptians. That's weak (fuck the Egyptians), but we get to see drones and spy satellites at work trying to keep track of the kidnappers and their victims.

Some of the details are a little weak, and there is the usual Netflix claptrap, but overall the show does a good job of telling the story.

City of Gaza
Area shown is about five miles across.

Gaza is like a big city. ISIS and Hamas are bitter enemies and would love to kill each other.

CIA map of the Sinai Peninsula, 1992

The Sinai is a desert. The northern edge is on the Mediterranean Sea. The southeastern edge borders the Gulf of Aqaba. 

We prefer to watch shows in their native language with English subtitles, even when the show is in English. It doesn't work here because it only shows the subtitles when they are not speaking English, so to get subtitles all the time you have to switch to English, which means much of it is dubbed and the dubbing sucks.

Bortført translates as abducted.

Hyundai Ioniq 6

Colour Demonstration - Ultimate Red - Hyundai Ioniq 6
Brian Doolan at Fitzpatricks Garage Kildare

I saw one of these on the freeway the other day and the way it looked was like something from, I dunno, the 30s or the 50s. Nothing much happening in the 40s, so there was some wild stuff in the 30s and then they kind of went nuts in the 50s. Maybe because I saw some old car at the car wash earlier that day. We got a video 'cause we get to see the car from several angles. And the car I saw was red.

Operation Safed Sagar: The Untold Story of the Kargil War - Netflix Series

Operation Safed Sagar: The Untold Story of the Kargil War | Official Trailer | Netflix India
Netflix India

Pakistan and India have been fighting over Kashmir since forever. It's basically been a stalemate, but back in 1999 Pakistan got a bee in their bonnet and decided to push a little harder.

I was looking for a map of the area but I'm not finding anything that's making me happy, but then I noticed we've got the Indus River running through the area. This video lays essential ground work if you want to understand what's going on here:

Indus River explained in under 3 minutes
FactSpark

Kashmir is basically a bunch of snow covered mountains. Every spring the Indian and Pakistan armies advance into Kashmir and approach the Line of Control. In 1999 Pakistan decides to advance early and pushes past the Line of Control into territory normally held by India. Now things get hot and the Indian Army is having a tough time so the Indian Air Force gets called in to see if they can do something about it.

This show is basically an Indian version of Top Gun expanded into a series. It's pretty good. The shots of the jets are wonderful and the scenes of domestic life are not too tedious, so it's fine.

There are some very tense scenes of jet fighters zooming through canyons in the Himalayas. Sometimes these scenes get very intense, although if you look at it objectively the scenes are impossible. Jet fighters do not sideslip at 45 degrees when they are traveling at 500 knots, but the scenes are so well crafted that you get carried along emotionally. So now you are watching a scene that is simultaneously believable and unbelievable. Great stuff.

Indian Air Force MiG-21

The show focuses on the Golden Arrows squadron. They are flying MiG-21 jet fighter aircraft. They start off flying photo reconnaissance missions but because they are equipped with GPS they soon get tasked with bombing those dirty Pakistanis. It is an Indian movie after all. The show makes a big deal about altitude, and while the Himalayas are tall, the MiG can easily go much, much higher.

Specifications (MiG-21bis)
Length	50	feet
Wingspan	24	feet
Weight: 10 tons	19	tons
Maximum speed	1,350	mph
Landing speed	160	mph
Range	410	miles
Service ceiling	57,000	feet
Guns	1	internal 23 mm Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-23L autocannon with 200 rounds
Hardpoints	4	underwing
Hardpoints	1	ventral, reserved for fuel droptanks

Can't mention Kashmir without mentioning Led Zeppelin:

Led Zeppelin - Kashmir (Remaster) (Official Audio)
Led Zeppelin

Unforgotten - Amazon Prime Series

Unforgotten | Series 1 | ITV
ITV

The show starts off with visiting a number of apparently unrelated old people. This gets my curiousity going. Why are we visiting all these people? Turns out their names are all on a list found in a notebook that was found with the remains of a dead body, a body that died 40 years ago. Now we have a team of like six detectives investigating this death. So tell me, what police department has got the resources to put six detectives on investigating a 40 year old death? There isn't one, unless they've got their head screwed on backwards. However, this is England, and England seems terminally confused these days, so, if you are feeling vindictive about England this show might seem plausible. But it ain't, it's a fantasy. It is a pretty entertaining fantasy.

Until you get to the middle of the season and now we've got all these people losing their minds over what they think might have happened 40 years ago. I don't think I've ever run into a bigger bunch of weak minded people in my life. Of course, the circle of people I associate with is pretty small, so maybe there are hordes of morons out there running around loose.

Then we've got the coppers trying to piece together what happened from what people tell them of what they remember. Half of their memories are missing, and half of the people are lying, so if you are getting any kind of picture, it's going to be very patchy. Hard to imagine building any kind of case for murder.

There are a few bits of fancy forensics, but the lab techs who do this work are entirely too happy about it. Maybe they just wanted a change of pace from the standard dour old lab curmudgeon.

6 seasons, 6 episodes each. Probably finish this season but I don't think I'll watch any more.

P. S. The first season is free but after that you have to pay, even if you are an Amazon Prime subscriber. We're already paying for Netflix and Amazon Prime, I don't need to paying any surcharges.

Chief of Station - Netflix Movie

Chief of Station | Official Trailer (HD) | Vertical
Vertical

Okay action thriller. Lots of fisticuffs, lots of gunfire. There is a story, but it's pretty thin. The only people we care about here are Aaron Eckhart as Ben Malloy and Olga Kurylenko as Krystyna Kowerski. There are also a bunch of villains to hate.

Attila Boat Tour Budapest

The bad guys commandeered this boat which led to Krystyna killing most of them, all except the head villain. Isn't that the way it always goes?

P. S. Phil Hoad has a review of this movie on The Guardian

Spy Game - Netflix Movie

Spy Game (2001) - Official Trailer - Brad Pitt Movie HD
Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

Directed by Tony Scott famous for any number of films but I'll just mention Top Gun. He is also the younger brother of Ridley Scott famous for Alien.

The story recounts Nathan (Robert Redford) and Tom's (Brad Pitt) history of working together as spooks for the CIA. Now Tom has tried to pull off a stunt to rescue his girlfriend and gotten himself in a terrible jam. The big-shots at the CIA aren't willing to try and save him because reasons, so Nathan uses his retirement fund to engineer an op to rescue him. It's probably going to land Nathan in hot water, but he's a spook, he'll elude his pursuers. And Tom and his girlfriend will owe him.

Found a more complete synopsis here with the catchphrase: 

A thriller than seems more real than fiction

which is pretty accurate.

Can't tell who wrote it. It's a website with one review of this one movie. It uses the acronym MACV-SOG without defining it, so I asked Google:

MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group)

Espionage is a dirty business. Assets in the spy trade are people who can get the information about the enemy that the agents want. However, to spooks, assets aren't people, they are just objects to use to get what you want and as soon as they are no longer useful or you have gotten what you want, they get dropped. If they fall into a burning pile of shit, well too bad. Good agents are not going to waste any tears for them. No wonder the CIA is so popular.

Cast I recognized:

• Robert Redford as Nathan Muir
• Brad Pitt as Tom Bishop
• Catherine McCormack as Elizabeth Hadley
• Michael Paul Chan is familiar to us for his role as Lieutenant Michael Tao in The Closer
• Marianne Jean-Baptiste is familiar to us because we've seen her in like a zillion different shows.

Volga Hydrofoil 70
Wm Schimmel

Somewhere around the 1:10:00 mark, the Sheik catches a ride from Cyprus to Beirut, a distance of  maybe 120 miles, in speedboat equipped with hydrofoils. Never seen the like. Google thinks it might be a Volga, a Soviet boat.

Sonar

How the Navy Hears Subs 3,000 Miles Away. (It's Genius)
Second Order Science

Previous related posts:

• SOSUS - my run-in with SOSUS in college
• Star Trek Science - submarines so quiet they can't hear each other

Wikipedia:

• SOSUS
• SOFAR Channel

Relativity

Why Does Time Stop at the SPEED OF LIGHT? Feynman's Mind-Blowing Truth
Imagine the Physics

This video ties together time dialation, distance compression and time compression together. I've heard of all of these before but I don't think I've heard them all combined. Photons are weird.

Blood Coast Season 2 - Netflix Series

Blood Coast: Season 2 - Official Teaser Trailer | Netflix
MVSRS

Season 2 carries on from season 1. Early on our gang (the police narcotics unit) interrupts an altercation between a couple of thugs from rival gangs. One of the thugs is Mehdi who happens to be a childhood friend of Tatoo, one of the coppers. On account of this friendship Tattoo lets Mehdi go. The entire rest of the show has everyone regretting that, especially Tattoo. While Tattoo has grown up to be a law abiding citizen, Mehdi has grown up to be a wild man bent on gaining respect and he doesn't care how many people he kills to get it. He is a genuine, certified, piece of shit. You know early on that his behavior is going to result in him dying an early death. Unfortunately that doesn't happen, so you are going to have to wait for Season 3 to see him (a) shot down in a gun battle with the police, (b) shot down in a gun battle with a rival gang of thugs, or (c) his older brother Yassine finally gets tired of his shit and executes him. No sign of it yet, his brother is totally devoted, but even there are limits to what even the most devoted will tolerate.

6 episodes.

Programming

the true reason C++ always wins
LaurieWired

When I was in school umpteen years ago, I took a course about oddball programming languages. It was kind of like a survey course. We had to write simple programs in half a dozen weird languages. Lisp was one, I think Snobol may have been another. I remember I had a hard time coming to grips with Lisp. What I ended up doing when I was trying to write a program is - I would step through it mentally, paper and pencil.  There were like two operators, one was CAN and the other was, I dunno, CANT, maybe? Doesn't matter, what did matter was how many arguments there were. If there was only one argument, they did one thing, if there was more than one, they did something else, so in my head, I treated these operators as if statements. By walking through all the possibilities I could see what was going to happen and what went wrong and fix the problem. Seemed like a lot of extra mental effort for not much gain. Just use a normal language that has if statements so you can see the possibilities.

I suppose if you had immersed yourself in the Lisp religion you might learn to think in terms of CAN and CANT, but I wasn't having it.

P. S. The two Lisp operators are CONS and CAR

More Gold

The Real Reason We Left the Gold Standard
Maxinomics

I don't think he ever tells us what 'The Real Reason' is, but he does give us some history, past and current mining, and a look at the world view. Pretty cool.

Gold Rush South Africa/"Forgotten Fortunes: Chronicles of Gold and Glory"
Good Morning South Africa

I looked for a video about current deep (2 miles) mining being done, but I did not find anything I liked. I found a bunch of stuff I didn't like: AI slop, stuff in low resolution, and one long one by Simon Whistler, but I'm not in the mood to listen to Simon today. This video doesn't talk about mining so much as the political history, and that part was significant.

Witwatersrand Basin and major goldfields

Rivers of Fate - Netflix Series

Rivers of Fate - Official Trailer [English] | Netflix
MVSRS

Very good. The first and maybe the second episodes are nerve wracking. You know something bad is going to happen to our girl. I can't tell you just what techniques the show's makers used to induce this feeling, but it was very effective.

Our girl, Janalice, is a very attractive 16 year old girl whose teenage lust leads her to trust a boy that she shouldn't. She becomes a social pariah, so her parents send her to live with her Aunt in Belem and things go wrong. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

We also have a gang of teenage river pirates. They steal cargo from boats traveling on the river. The merchants file an insurance claim and then buy their goods back from pirate's fence for half price and everybody's happy. Well, except for the passengers who got robbed and the insurance company.

4 episodes 45 minutes each.

Ilha de Marajó
Breves at lower left, Belem at lower right

Ilha de Marajó is in the state of Para on the northeast coast of Brazil. It is in between the Amazon River, the Guajará Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. At Belem the bay is ten miles wide.

Belem from the bay

Satellite Thermal Image of the Mouths of the Amazon
Belem is small pink blob at lower right

Cast

Actor		Character	Role
Domithila	Cattete	Janalice	Our girl
Marleyda	Soto	Mariangel	A mother seeking revenge against a river gang that murdered her family. She is a former soldier. She & her husband ran a bar that floats in the middle of the river.
Luca	Dan	Guilherme	Mariangel's gay son.
Lucas	Galvino	Preá	River gang leader who becomes obsessed with Janalice
Claudio	Jaborandy	Zé Elídio	Whore monger
Ademara		Dionete	Crackhead who befriends Janalice
Welket	Bungué	Philippe Soutin	Whore monger and proprietor of Coq d'Or nightclub
Sandro	Guerra	Amadeu
Maycon	Douglas	Zé Do Boi
Felipe	Rocha	Jaime
Ricardo	Teodoro	Ramiro
Andrés	Castañeda	Cristobal
Fátima	Macedo	Daiane

Router Hacking

I Hacked This Amazon Router. What I Found Should be Illegal.
Low Level

I really enjoyed this video, not because I want to hack a router, but because this is exactly the kind of work I used to do when I worked iRMX support at Intel. It was like old home week. I haven't heard anybody talk nuts and bolts about computers for a long time. 

At Intel I was dealing with people (customers) who had bought a bunch of boards, stuffed them into card cages, connected them up to who knows what kind of industrial machinery, written a mountain of code, and then called us when it didn't work. Most problems that came to me I was able to sort out with what I could find at my desk, but the acute cases meant working with a crusty old electrical engineer and setting up a system with some kind of electronic test equipment so we could watch electrical signals on lines on the board. There were in-circuit emulators, which were cool, but we never really needed to go there. Look at the code in the debugger, set breakpoints, let it run and watch the lines. From that we had to deduce what the problem was. Learned a lot about computers back then.

Vampire Numbers

Vampire Numbers - Numberphile
Numberphile

Dennis sent me this video, the idea being that searching for Vampire Numbers might be a good use for the factoring scheme I'm working on.