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  • Those Pesky Estonians

    [Living under the armpit of Russia (czarist, communist, thugocracy), its perennial nemesis, Estonia is and has been an enthusiastic member of NATO.  As a small yet leading high-tech country it spends more than its required 2% of GDP on defense, and has been the first to respond with men and weapons in the fight against the traditional enemies of western culture.  Its latest venture has been to develop an AI-based family of combat drones that cost up to an order of magnitude less than those supplied by the big guys like the US et al.  The defense news periodical Defense One has published the following here.   gjr]

    How Estonia is becoming a hotbed for drone warfare

    Projects include experimental loitering munitions that cost a fraction of U.S. equivalents.

    Sam Skove

    Staff Writer

    JUNE 11, 2024 12:59 PM ET

    TALLINN—With a close eye on Ukraine’s use of drones, Estonians are fielding new kit, changing doctrine, and revamping training for unmanned systems in case they also have to repel a Russian invasion one day. 

    Estonia — a country with a population of just 1.3 million — is also being uniquely thrifty, working to field systems whose price is often orders of magnitude cheaper than similar U.S. systems. Defense One got a close-up look at these efforts on a trip funded by the Estonian ministry of defense. 

    At the center of many of these efforts is Aivar Hanniotti, the military’s point man for everything related to drone technology and development. He took the job in January, and is already well known in Estonia’s bustling drone industry. 

    Hanniotti’s team is working on a long list of updates to Estonia’s drone and counter-drone tools. Much of the work is done by members of Estonia’s Defense League, a part-time volunteer organization that serves as a military auxiliary force. Hanniotti himself is a member. 

    Estonian civil society is heavily engaged in supporting Ukraine, and many Estonian Defense League members help Ukrainian units by delivering supplies to them, like drones. This puts them in touch with Ukrainian troops, who pass on information, said Hanniotti, and this access to battlefield experience helps drive innovation.  

    Among the projects linked to Ukraine is the “Angry Hedgehog,” a plan to field a domestically produced short-range loitering munition similar to Ukraine’s first-person-view drones.

    The drones will have a custom warhead and a range of up to nine miles, said Hanniotti. They will be equipped with artificial intelligence to guide them the last mile to a target, an increasingly popular countermeasure against Russian jamming. 

    Hanniotti said the drone will cost under 1,000 euros, and use European-manufactured components. It will undergo further tests in June 2024, and Estonia also aims to deliver 1,000 of them to Ukraine to test their use in combat. Formal fielding may occur next year.

    The price is far less than similar short-range loitering munitions, like the $94,000 Rogue One. Hanniotti said the aim was to have a drone that was “good enough,” rather than one tricked out with the latest in tech. 

    Other projects include a Estonian-made hand-held drone detection system, which Hanniottii is working to field to every squad starting sometime next year, he said. Such systems are widely used in Ukraine, and are also coming to the U.S. Marine Corps. 

    Yet another project seeks to develop a cheap missile for taking out drones. One missile, which so far exists only as a concept, has a theoretical price of 2,000 euros. The price is one-tenth the cost of the APKWS missile, one of the cheapest anti-drone missiles. The planned missile, which is to rely on commercially available parts, will be tested at the end of this year, Hanniotti said. 

    Other projects are virtually free, such as an Estonian Defense League-designed tool that takes the inputs from passive radio-detection systems and plots them on a map to identify probable enemy locations. 

    The Estonian drone push isn’t all low-cost initiatives. Between 2024 and 2027, Estonia will spend 220 million euros (about $238 million) on loitering munitions, out of a total outlay of 529 million euros for indirect fire systems, according to a briefing by Oliver Tüür, director of the Defence Planning Department at the Estonian Defense Ministry.  

    Estonia is planning a special unit to operate loitering munitions, Maj. Andrei Šlabovitš told Defense One last year, in what may be the first dedicated loitering-munition unit fielded in a NATO army. 

    New technology brings new questions, from what tactics to use to what units should use them. Estonian infantry squads, for example, have begun experimenting with drone operators who scout ahead for hidden enemies. 

    The Estonian army is also testing how to use drones to support its artillery. Hanniotti said that they are experimenting with linking artillery fire control officers with drone units to reduce the time it takes to target enemy formations. Estonia’s dense forests, however, pose a problem by blocking drone signals, Hanniotti said. 

    Hanniotti said other experiments have included using the Android Tactical Awareness Kit to mark targets for artillery, but the system—like many sent to Ukraine—has proven vulnerable to GPS jamming. 

    Hanniotti is also involved in developing a designated unit for operating short-range surveillance and attack drones. Ukraine operates these types of units in large numbers, but the concept is still new for NATO militaries. The U.S. does not operate short-range drone units, although Army experiments have tested the concept informally. 

    New tech also needs new training, and Estonia plans to launch a drone training center this year. The center will also serve as a test range for new electronic warfare technologies. 

    Many U.S. efforts parallel Estonia’s, including an Army initiative that aims to  field a short-range loitering munition by 2026. U.S. plans, though, generally move slower than Estonia. The Army, for example, will allocate just ten hand-held drone detectors to a division, according to a 2025 budget request, while Estonia is aiming to give one to every squad. 

    One explanation may be the quasi-civilian nature of the Estonian Defense League, Hanniotti said. 

    “In the Defense League, we are used to getting by with small funding,” he said. “We are all motivated—and we would like to have fast results.” 

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  • Scattershots – 10jun24 (updated 20jun24)

    George Rebane

    Government inevitably corrupts and/or badly screws up the projects it initiates in the public sphere.  This thesis has been a common RR thread for years and forms a basic tenet of Rebane Doctrine.  The 9jun24 WSJ has a short and succinct column, ‘Your Government at Work’ by Andy Kessler that summarizes this ongoing process of ineptitude.  And, of course, our government is not the only one charged; it is a common trait of all large bureaucracies operating without proper incentives and feedback.

    Women’s basketball phenom Caitlin Clark didn’t make our Olympic team, it turns out, because she wasn’t diverse enough – i.e. white, straight, European, and all that.  The given bullshit reason was the claim that her fame would disrupt the historical somnolence with which women’s basketball has been received in the Olympics.  And all this in the face of multiple efforts to promote a more broad and enthusiastic reception of the sport’s distaff participation.  So now the public pushback has caused the sport’s political hacks to instate Clark as a first alternate in the event one of the twelve chosen can’t play.  Can you imagine the mentality of the jerks who made the decision to exclude her in the first place? (more here)

    [11jun24 update]  Pelosi pleads pretermission about J6 security preparations for the Capitol.  Finally, the former Speaker admits that a mass protest with unknown consequences was long anticipated at the Capitol by both the DHS and the FBI for the Senate’s 6jan21 electoral vote certification.  Neither agency issued a timely intelligence report on this, and “Congressional leaders, including Pelosi, chose not to deploy the National Guard early over concerns of ‘optics’ amid 2020’s Black Lives Matter riots, according to a 2022 GOP report.”  Meanwhile, everyone including then President Trump got blamed for the Capitol breach, even though he was perfectly in his rights to encourage his supporters to protest the certification – there is no evidence that he directed the demonstrators to enter the building or do anything illegal. (more here)

    [12jun24 update]  ‘Sports Should Unify, Not Divide Us’ writes Clay Travis in a compelling piece featured in the recent issue of Imprimis (here).  He again illustrates the deep evil that the woke Democrats have unleashed on the land – in this version another piece of established western culture targeted for destruction to achieve their dissolution of America.  And it boggles my mind to realize that these people walk and live among us as they do their dirty work while we remain ignorant and/or indifferent about the impact of their labors.

    [13jun24 update]  Ignorance on parade.  In a recent Union Jo Ann pointed out the asymmetric street level responses of the Left vs Right when addressing public policies they don’t like.  As evidence abounds, the Left likes to riot, burn things down, and in general favor violence instead of more peaceful means.  Local leftwing worthy Daryl Grigsby writes in today’s Union (here) that my sweetie is totally wrong in her observation.  His cutting response alleges equity in that conservatives are “silent as election workers are harassed and threatened, promote divisive language, and see anyone seeking basic human dignity as Marxists.”  And, of course, J6 “was an attempt to burn down democracy”.  His intellectual coup de grace was citing the 1921 Tulsa massacre when white Jim Crow Democrats “burned down 1400 black homes and businesses, murdered over 300 African-Americans, destroyed the black business district, …”  Reaching back over a century and then missing the politics of his own white racist forebears is the best counter he can offer?  Point, set, match!

    [20jun24 update]  Democracy on the block.  The Democrat sleazebags continue telling their know-nothing constituents that Trump and the Republicans will kill democracy in America if they get elected.  Meanwhile it's the progressives who now actively thwart democracy wherever they find it.  Check this that just came out of Sacramento.

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  • Sandbox – 2jun24

    [A Clarion Call for Rearmament – “Sen. Wicker, ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, rolled out a report detailing why America’s military budget is inadequate for the “world in which we find ourselves.” America’s military isn’t equipped to deal with potential wars on two continents at once, much less the new threats in space and from artificial intelligence. Mr. Wicker proposes an additional $55 billion for the Pentagon in 2025, a total of $950 billion, as part of a new ‘generational investment.’” (more here)]

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  • America’s Dystopia has Dawned

    Dystopia has dawned – Trump convicted on all counts.  The greatest American travesty has happened in my lifetime.  I have seen my country slide from its heights of glory to the now confirmed beginning of its dark age from which recovery to its former self is unlikely.  With evil and corruption now firmly ensconced in our government, it is doubtful that my children will ever again witness America in its full promise as the shining city on a hill. (more here and here)

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  • Terry McLaughlin: A better policy on homelessness

    [Ms Terry McLaughlin is a longtime regular columnist for The Union and contributes well researched and written reports on current issues and happenings (quite often vocally proscribed by our local liberal contingent).  Her columns are always factual exhibiting high journalistic standards now mostly lost from the industry.  Recently she attended an important town forum on the homelessness problem focused on Nevada County and contributed an excellent report to Barry Pruett’s Sierra Thread blog (here).  However, she seldom if ever injects her own opinions into her reporting.  As her friend I know that her perspectives are well thought out, and I requested she write a follow-on piece in which she would state her own perspectives on this important issue.  She kindly submitted the following.  gjr]

    Terry McLaughlin

    Despite enormous sums of tax money being provided to “solve the homeless problem”, the size of the unhoused population is only growing and increasing.  How that tax money is being spent and who is benefiting from it is an issue for another discussion, but it appears that we, as taxpayers, are not getting any “bang for our buck”, and those who are homeless are not getting the help they need.

    A very small subset of the homeless population is the “working poor” who have truly hit upon a serious economic problem, either because of employment layoffs, large unpaid medical bills that have saddled them with debt from which they cannot recover, or other similar experiences.  People in these situations, who do not suffer from mental illness or substance addiction, will most likely transition out of homelessness successfully, either because they were able to find new employment, family or friends offered temporary housing, government benefits allowed them to find reduced-rate housing, non-profit organizations came to the rescue with temporary aid, or other similar methods of assistance.   A very small number of those who are homeless fall into this category.

    As discussed by both Nevada City Police Chief Dan Foss and Grass Valley Police Chief Alex Gammelgard during the community forum sponsored by the Sierra College Foundation, the main causes of homelessness are mental illness and substance abuse and addiction, whether it be drugs or alcohol.   Both chiefs agreed that the problem of homelessness will never be solved until we deal with the underlying causes that created the situation in the first place.

    (more…)

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  • Memorial Day 2024

    MemorialDay2012

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  • Bayes and Monty Hall

    George Rebane

    From some reader comments it seems that there continues to be some confusion about how the 3-door Monty Hall relates to Bayes theorem, and how that relationship is different from some more usual applications of Bayes.  We have covered Bayesian probability extensively in these pages over the years (for example here).

    The fundamental takeaway in the use of Bayesian probability is that 1) all of our knowledge, compiled of countless propositions, is and can be formulated in terms of their probability of being true; and 2) knowledge (i.e. any given proposition) is most correctly updated with new information/data by combining its prior truth probability with the truth probability of the newly obtained info/data according to the Bayes formula (see above link).  The updated (posterior) probability of the proposition may be an increased or decreased value depending on the nature of what new stuff was learned.  All critters know how to do that instinctively with an evolved Bayes-like algo that has promoted their species’ survival.

    A more usual application of Bayes can be illustrated with a wet driveway which you discover when you awaken and look out the window.  Did it rain or did your neighbor again soak your driveway with his wayward lawn sprinkler.  You know that rain was predicted to start overnight with a 20% chance, and you also recall that your neighbor sets his sprinkler to do a predawn watering two or three times a week.  You decide to set that probability at 2.5/7 = 0.36.  Should you still carry an umbrella today?

    Now for Monty Hall.  I explain the solution to my students by upping the number of doors to a thousand behind one of which is a new care, each of the others hiding a smelly goat.  The contestant nominates a door to open.  It’s obvious that the probability of having a car behind it is 1/1000, and the probability that it’s behind one of the other unopened doors is 999/1000, almost certainty.  Now for the duration of the problem it is important to realize that no matter what happens before the prized door is opened, THESE TWO PROBABILITIES DON’T CHANGE.

    Monty knows the door with the car, and he won’t open it until the contestant makes the final pick of the door he wants opened.  So in the first version of our game Monte opens 998 doors with nothing but goats behind them.  Only two doors remain closed – one initially nominated by the contestant, and the other belonging to the set NOT nominated by the contestant.  Knowing that the probabilities have not changed, the contestant knows that he will almost certainly (999/1000) win the car by switching to the door Monty has left closed for it’s the only other door that could possibly hide the car.  The remaining unopened door will always have the complimentary probability (N-1)/N no matter the value of N representing the original number of closed doors.

    In the classic Monty Hall problem we had N = 3.  So, of course, it always paid the contestant to switch since his probability of winning doubled from 1/3 to 2/3.  In fact, no matter the value of N, it always pays for the contestant to switch after Monte has opened M doors where now M can range from one to N – 2.  This can be seen from our N = 1000 door problem even when Monte opens only one door.  Switching then will increase the contestant’s win probability from 0.00100000 to 0.00100200.  We see this by writing the formula for winning after switching to a door selected from the N – 1 – M remaining closed doors – i.e. the new evidence is opening M of N-1 prizeless doors.  In that case the win probability of switching is easily shown to be (1/(N-1-M))*(N-1)/N.  In our case of N = 1000 and M = 1 calculates to (1/998)*(999/1000) = 0.00100200.  And when we use Monte Hall’s N = 3, M = 1 we have (1/1)*(2/3) = 2/3, where switching doubles the probability of winning.

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  • Scattershots – 26may24 (updated 29may24)

    George Rebane

    Gracian (#261) speaks to Bumblebrain – Do not persist in folly.  Some make a duty of failure and having started down the wrong road, think it a badge of character to continue; they accuse themselves of error before the bar of their inner selves but before the bar of the outer world they excuse themselves, to the end that if at the start of their unwisdom they were marked imprudent, in its prosecution they are marked fools; neither rash promise, nor wrong resolve lays obligation upon any man; and yet some will on this account continue in their sulkiness, and carry on in their contrariness, wishing to be known as constant in their idiocies.

    Reasonable fear of Islam.  If Islamophobia is the “unreasonable fear” of Islam, then what is the term for a reasonable fear of Islam?  I am among those who identify with such a reasonable fear the evidence for which abounds as proclaimed by both Muslim intellectuals and the Muslim street.  As an example, consider the opening comment to the 7may24 Sandbox (here).

    [29may24 update]  The New York judicial system is rotten to the core as demonstrated by the Trump hush money trial judge’s instructions to the jury.  He never told them what was the specific crime that Trump was supposed to have committed when his financial records showed the $130K payment to Cohen as a ‘legal expense’ (which it was).  Instead he invited each juror to come to their own conclusion on whatever crime suited each the best, and the court would still accept that as a ‘unanimous’ judgement.  So now the precedent is set that New York (and other?) juries can be exhorted to convict the defendant on whatever crime each juror would gin up – no agreement or cohesive thought needed.  That’s one way to  avoid hung juries and nail whoever the trial judge does not like.

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  • Was that really (famous person)?

    George Rebane

    The ethics of AI is currently a hotly debated topic.  The high tech companies are congratulating each other about practicing ‘high standards’ in that arena.  Today’s little ethics dust devil involves Scarlett Johansson in which she “rebukes OpenAI over ‘eerily similar’ ChatGPT voice”. (here and here)  The real problems in the use of such audios and videos, which can easily recognized to be like, similar to, or the same as known public personages will not involve ethics so much as questions of what exactly is considered as the intellectual property (IP) of an individual whose videos and speech are available every day in the public domain.

    OpenAI asked for and did not receive permission to use Ms Johansson’s voice in their new AI assistant, but went ahead and lifted her ‘voice’ (actually her unique formants or frequency dependent speech building blocks) from available videos and films.  These were slightly modified, but not enough for the human ear to be confused and not recognize the speaker.  Ms Johansson objected and lawyered up; OpenAI pulled her voice from their product.

    Similar things are happening in videos in which publicly recognized characters can be inserted into scenes which are slightly modified, but still recognizable as the intended person.  So the big questions going forward will be 1) what really are the IP boundaries of a person whose unique ‘persona parameters’ are captured and/or displayed daily in the public media, and 2) what are the sufficient metrics that characterize modifications so that the purveyor of such products can remain ‘litigation proof’.

    Successfully answering these questions will open up new business and revenue possibilities for both producers of entertainment and advertising media as well as for those fortunates whose likenesses still have value or can be resurrected.  Nevertheless, today’s actors are already signing agreements that anticipate the use of their likenesses after their current job is over or after they die. (more here)  Of course, in this coming brave new world the opportunities for fraud will be endless, and launch yet another age of full employment for lawyers.

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  • ‘The End is Near’

    George Rebane

    Were we to discuss really serious topics beyond Trump’s trials and Biden’s lies, I can think of one no more important than that brought up by Victor Davis Hanson in a recent interview (here).  We have extensively covered the various national and geo-strategic factors that portend to end America’s run as the world’s leading democratic republic, economy, and white hat world hegemon.  However, most of our neighbors neither care nor are aware of what’s happening.  As witnessed on these pages, if anything, they are more interested in Stormy Daniel’s testimony and various topical policy atrocities launched by our doddering idiot for president and Democrats at all levels of government (especially California).

    This is not to say that there is no traction to the warnings issued by our more thoughtful political leaders and commentators (e.g. here) – so far, a sparsely populated bunch.  Today more people are starting to take notice that there is now in the offing a likely “extinction” of the United States we have known.  Letter writers (here) to serious publications like the WSJ acknowledge the current deterioration of America’s defense posture and industrial might, and are showing concern.

    Material arguments summarize as follows –

    • The US industrial base to make things from ships to medicines to machine tools is essentially gone.
    • Our military is tragically under-manned and woke-corrupted with traditional cadres of enlistees no longer willing to join, let alone make military their career. Our country can no longer find enough people willing to fight for it.
    • Our unimaginable national debt and reckless social spending programs are destroying the dollar and unseating it as the preferred currency for international commerce.
    • Our open borders and illegal alien import policies are destroying the remnants of America’s public cultural cohesion with new levels of unassimilating multi-culturality never before witnessed in a sustainable and geographically compact jurisdiction.
    • Our traditional allies in Europe and Asia are aware of America’s weak (non-existent?) leadership and feckless foreign policy, and are seeking alternative geo-strategic relationships that serve their national interests.
    • Our electorate is split and largely ignorant of the issues facing the nation; and are in no shape to unify and support reasonably coherent policies to attempt a return to a usefully educated, economically healthy, fiscally sound, geographically secure, and culturally unified sovereign nation-state. Over half of us don’t care and want an autocratic global government run by elites, and the remainder want to return to a liberal constitutional government based on free-market capitalism.
    • By passing laws, regulations, and prohibitive tax rates in a transforming neo-Marxist society, we no longer educate a sufficient cadre of high-end (STEM) workers with needed skillsets or provide them the means to produce wealth in an open-market capitalist economy.

    So instead –

    DeflectedDialogue3
       

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