Brian Hayes wrote, in American Scientist, in 2002, about Lewis Fry Richardson‘s book Statistics of Deadly Quarrels: An interesting lesson of Richardson’s exercise is just how difficult it can be to extract consistent and reliable quantitative information from the historical record. It seems easier to count inaccessible galaxies or invisible neutrinos than to count wars that […]
Tag: War
Hot potatoes to combat nuclear Armageddon
“Each message is regarded as a ‘hot potato’, and the nodes are not wearing gloves. Rather than hold the ‘hot potato’ the node tosses the message to its neighbor, who will now try to get rid of the message.” The paragraph above is describing aspects of the Hot Potato Algorithm, originally developed by (the late) […]
Russian tank invention: To lay waste upon the enemy
Aleksandr Georgievich Semenov patented an efficiently disgusting weapon system. Using his method, soldiers inside an armoured tank, under battle conditions, can dispose of their biological waste products in an unwasteful way: encasing those materials, together with explosives, in artillery shells that they then fire at the enemy. Semenov, residing in St Petersburg, can and does […]
How waiting in line is like war
A defense researcher analyzes (1) customer satisfaction in a shopping scenario and (2) the efficient use of warplanes in battle. He comes up with a mathematical model common to both—in which “[the] parameter of principal interest is the expected customer-survival rate.” Here’s his paper on how the two relate: “Queuing with Impatient Customers and Indifferent Clerks,” […]
