Memes that made me laugh 332

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

Here are a couple of traditional Chinese instruments, and an ancient and two modern settings for them.  First, the guzheng.

The zheng or guzheng is a Chinese plucked zither. The modern guzheng commonly has 21, 25, or 26 strings, is 64 inches (1.6 m; 5 ft 4 in) long, and is tuned in a major pentatonic scale. It has a large, resonant soundboard made from Paulownia wood. Other components are often made from other woods for structural or decorative reasons. Guzheng players often wear a fingerpick made from materials such as plastic, resin, tortoiseshell, or ivory on one or both hands.

It can have nylon, steel, or silk strings depending on the genre.

Next, a very similar instrument, the guqin.

The guqin is a plucked seven-string Chinese musical instrument. It has been played since ancient times, and has traditionally been favoured by scholars and literati as an instrument of great subtlety and refinement, as highlighted by the quote "a gentleman does not part with his qin or se without good reason," as well as being associated with the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius. It is sometimes referred to by the Chinese as "the father of Chinese music" or "the instrument of the sages". The guqin is not to be confused with the guzheng, another Chinese long stringed instrument also without frets, but with moveable bridges under each string.

There's quite a lot of music on YouTube featuring both instruments.  Here's a traditional Chinese piece for the guqin called "Flowing Water" or "Running Water".  The video description states:

In the first paragraph, the whole song starts to flow, which vaguely implies the theme tone of the whole song. 2、 The third paragraph uses overtone to write all kinds of spring sounds of mountains, streams and waterfalls. 4、 The fifth section shows that the spring of thousands of gullies flows out of the mountain and into the flood, and gradually has a turbulent trend. Since the sixth section, the water flows into the vast ocean, and the rapids cross the gorge and beach, forming a momentum of rough waves and surging unstoppable, conveying the character of fearing difficulties and dangers and forging ahead bravely. 7、 The eighth segment is the afterwave after the climax, which is slow and urgent, released and closed from time to time, and gradually calmed down. The ninth paragraph is the finale of the passing weather. This piano song is full of the harmony between man and nature, and exudes the atmosphere of the harmony of nature, earth and people. This song has both lyricism and simulation, the combination of virtual and real, the integration of scenes and the lofty atmosphere.

A copy of this piece was launched into space aboard Voyager 1 in 1977, to be found by any race or entity that might one day intercept that spacecraft.

In lighter vein, I found some modern songs that have been rescored for the guzheng.  First, Hotel California by The Eagles.

And finally, Thunderstruck from AC/DC.

An interesting contrast between ancient and modern, and between two very similar instruments.  Explore both of them on YouTube.

Peter

How do you persuade a fanatical fighter that it's not his duty to die?

 

During World War II almost all Japanese military servicemen died in action, refusing to surrender.  They regarded it as their sacred duty to the Emperor of Japan, whom they regarded as having divine origins and authority.  However, in the Marianas campaign, one Marine, Guy Gabaldon, began to go out beyond friendly lines and persuade Japanese soldiers and civilians to surrender rather than fight to the death.  His efforts were extremely successful, and led to anything between 1,000 and 1,500 Japanese surrenders (the exact figure is disputed).  He was awarded a Silver Star in recognition of his efforts, which I think was to undervalue them significantly.  The Marines clearly felt the same, because some years later his award was upgraded to a Navy Cross:  and now, after his death, there are proposals to upgrade it further, to the Medal of Honor.

This twenty-minute TV documentary examines his activities and achievements, as well as how other service personnel began to take the idea further.  I'm told that after the Marianas campaign, when the war moved on to the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, such tactics were more widely used, but I haven't been able to confirm that.

If you're interested in World War II, and the Pacific War in particular, this documentary is a must-see.

That's an episode of World War II combat history of which I'd never heard before.

Peter

Musical notation as a tool of espionage?

 

It sounds weird, but it actually happened in the 1980's.

Imagine this as the scenario for a thriller. Four folk musicians with a social conscience decide on a daring humanitarian mission. They'll visit a country famous for its cruel repression, and risk arrest and imprisonment by secretly meeting with persecuted individuals to smuggle out vital information about them disguised as musical notation.

It seems too outlandish even for a film. Yet it actually happened. Forty years ago, in 1985, when the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was still freezing, and no one suspected the Soviet system would collapse within four years, a quartet of American Jewish musicians visited the Soviet Union. Their aim was to help some of the millions of Jewish people who wanted to leave but were being denied the necessary exit visas. One of the four was Merryl Goldberg, who in the mid 1980s was a keen student of the saxophone and passionate about a form of Jewish folk music called klezmer.

Now she's co-authored a book, Notes of Deception, that describes those extraordinary few days when she and her fellow musicians defied the might of the Soviet Union.

But how would the information be smuggled out under the noses of the KGB officers, who would be sure to confiscate anything they deemed suspicious? The answer was: convert the names, addresses, telephone numbers and other information into musical notation, via a secret code. Goldberg admits it wasn't complex. "The important thing was it just looks like music, though anyone who read music would see it's kind of strange. It sounds like bad Schoenberg."

Vince Houghton, whose expertise in the history of spying and espionage made him an ideal co-author for the book, says there are two reasons it worked. "One is that hopefully there would be no KGB officer who was a professional musician who might realise that this is just garbage. The other is that the people using it were musicians. The code was actually a form of steganography, which means something that hides in plain sight, that no one would ever think was code. So it didn't need to be complex. I asked a cryptologist colleague how long it would take him to crack it, and he said he could do it over lunch."

There's more at the link.

The full article makes a fascinating read, and includes an example of the musical code.  I love the ingenuity of mind that could think of musical notation as a hidden-in-plain-sight form of cryptography, one that the most draconian of security states in the world at the time would be unlikely to detect.  That's really thinking outside the (music) box!

Peter

Two interesting bits of news, and a question for my readers

 

Two news reports caught my eye, both illustrating how dependent we've become on technology rather than older, mature methods.

Fridges in French supermarkets hit by cyber attack

Hundreds of French supermarkets have been hit by a cyber attack that caused their fridges and freezers to heat up, spoiling fresh and frozen food estimated to be worth millions of euros.

Hackers gained control of the software that regulates the temperatures of the refrigeration units, forcing some to warm to 50C (120F) overnight, according to one supermarket chain affected.

The chief executive of Coopérative U said several of its supermarkets had been hit by the "extremely serious and unprecedented" attack.

More than 100 of the chain's supermarkets were targeted, while 180 stores from Intermarché and its Netto brand were affected, with a spokesman saying that another 100 shops were urgently disconnected from the internet to prevent the same thing happening to them.

Britain urges ships to prepare for life without reliable GPS

Britain has warned shipowners that satellite navigation can no longer be taken for granted in some of the world’s busiest shipping regions, urging crews to practise navigating without GPS as jamming and spoofing become increasingly widespread ... interference across the Baltic, Black Sea, Middle East Gulf and parts of East Asia means satellite-derived positioning, navigation and timing information can no longer be relied upon everywhere.

The warning extends well beyond electronic charts. The agency identifies a long list of potentially vulnerable equipment, including ECDIS, AIS, autopilots, dynamic positioning systems, radar, gyrocompasses and GMDSS communications equipment. Ashore, vessel traffic services, pilotage systems, port management platforms and automated logistics systems are also exposed.

That navigation warning applies to any and every form of transport, of course, not just ships.  Some airlines now routinely double-check at least two, if not more, global navigation satellite systems such as GPS, GLONASS, BDS and Galileo against each other while in flight.  If too many of the systems show errors, they go back to taking star sights and navigating by what they can see on the ground.

As for the Internet-linked refrigerators . . . I can see that a large commercial enterprise might want to monitor its refrigerators and freezers in real time, so that repairs can be ordered immediately if something goes wrong.  However, what about security?  Isn't a major business vulnerability like that something that should have attracted serious attention long ago?  I'm sure it will get that attention now, but it's too late to avoid substantial losses.

I'm not by any means opposed to technology, provided it remains a reliable servant.  If it becomes a master instead of a servant, or if it can be corrupted and misused by criminals or other hostile actors, its usefulness has to be reassessed.  I can remember being taught navigation off the coast of South Africa back in the '70's, using compass bearings on shore objects, sextants, star sights, and the good old Decca Navigator system, first used to mark and sweep German minefields off Normandy prior to D-Day in 1944.  Decca has long gone now, of course, but there may come a time when something old but reliable like that will be sorely missed.

FIREARMS QUESTION

With the recent relaxation of regulations for the purchase and use of suppressors, I'm considering getting one or two of them to safeguard what's left of my hearing.  However, I note that most .30-caliber suppressors list their bore diameter as .308-inch.  That works fine for standard American ammunition, but several overseas equivalents (including the British .303-inch and the Soviet 7.62x39mm) are sized to .311-inch.  Can anyone tell me whether American .30-caliber suppressors have sufficient "safety margin" in their bores to allow their use with .311-inch bullets?  If not, do you think US manufacturers could supply their models slightly "bored-out" as a special order?  Alternatively, if one went up a bore size in the suppressor, what alternatives are there?  I don't know if suppressors are made for (say) the 8mm Mauser round, which would be .323-inch bullet diameter, and I'm not sure what the barrel threading would be.  What others might be suitable?

Peter