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zoux posted:Is the “extremely mean and brutal DI/boot camp” paradigm actually the most effective means to induct enlistees or is it more “that's how we did it in this man's army and By God” I don't know. There are plenty of arguments to be made on both sides. zoux posted:Hell, how much variation is there between the US branches Quite a bit. Here, compare these two videos. They cover the EXACT same thing, day one of what the USMC would call "Receiving" where any stuff you brought with you is checked for contraband (don't bring a joint to boot camp) and packed away for the duration of your time there. Here's the Army: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXphA_6szKs Here's the Marine Corps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnKPpNArrdg&t=41s Think there's a difference in intensity?
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Jun 4, 2019 18:34
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bewbies posted:I have absolutely no idea if their complaints are legitimate or if this was a bunch of old grumpy dudes bitching about kids these days, but they complained loudly enough that the army is re-redoing its initial training programs again in order to make new soldiers more disciplined and whatnot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SihQghhTg4
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Jun 4, 2019 18:37
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zoux posted:No less an authority than Enrico Fermi told Slotin he was going to kill himself if he kept loving around with the experiment. Feynman warned them they were "kicking the dragon's tail". Also the Demon Core is the most insanely cool name for, well anything ever. They referred to the experiments at Los Alamos as "tickling the dragon's tail". Despite the extremely dangerous nature of their experiments, they were surprisingly unprofessional in many ways and were lucky to have as few accidents as they did with their carelessness. Richard Feynman in particular was a notorious prankster who liked to break into locked rooms and cabinets to rearrange things or leave notes to freak people out. He stole a door at MIT and gladly admitted to it when asked, only to be brushed off as clearly joking.  How could any guy who posed for a picture like this be anything but a prankster?
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Jun 4, 2019 18:40
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Fangz posted:The idea of fiddling with a ball of radioactive material by hand is just so ridiculous to me. They paid unskilled laborers to stack the graphite blocks for CP-1 by hand, these dudes were unbelievably cavalier about radiation in the early days. I do wonder who's more right, them, or us with our paralyzing fear of anything nuclear.
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Jun 4, 2019 18:41
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Cessna posted:Here's the Marine Corps: This is why I could never be in the military. As soon as a guy with his hat brim pulled almost completely over his face runs up screaming gibberish I'd just be in hysterics the whole time.
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Jun 4, 2019 18:42
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zoux posted:No less an authority than Enrico Fermi told Slotin he was going to kill himself if he kept loving around with the experiment. Feynman warned them they were "kicking the dragon's tail". Also the Demon Core is the most insanely cool name for, well anything ever. They also used a device called Godiva, which was sort of similar in function to Little Boy. You'd have the subcritical core, and then another chunk of uranium that the device would swiftly insert and remove, hopefully leading to just a pulse of criticality. They had a few criticality accidents with those, too. A typical pulse would involve about 10^16 fissions, but for one particular experiment they were supposed to be irradiating a test mass of graphite and polyethylene, and it was placed just a bit too close to the assembly. So the yield was about 10 times normal. Here's a nice before/after a criticality excursion:  And that one I described sent some pieces flying off and almost melted the uranium: 
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Jun 4, 2019 18:42
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Lol, a bit. Also I thought it was illegal to call DIs "sir" chitoryu12 posted:They referred to the experiments at Los Alamos as "tickling the dragon's tail". Despite the extremely dangerous nature of their experiments, they were surprisingly unprofessional in many ways and were lucky to have as few accidents as they did with their carelessness. Lotta real characters in the Manhattan project. I believe Feynman's pranks made a bunch of security people worry the facility had been penetrated. Were there actually any attempted breaches discovered at Los Alamos? I know the dire state of German intelligence and I assume a Japanese guy wouldn't be able to get within 200 miles of the camp at the time. zoux fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Jun 4, 2019 |
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Jun 4, 2019 18:44
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zoux posted:They paid unskilled laborers to stack the graphite blocks for CP-1 by hand, these dudes were unbelievably cavalier about radiation in the early days. I do wonder who's more right, them, or us with our paralyzing fear of anything nuclear. Uh, us? Unless you really like to have your DNA rearranged?
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Jun 4, 2019 18:47
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chitoryu12 posted:This is why I could never be in the military. As soon as a guy with his hat brim pulled almost completely over his face runs up screaming gibberish I'd just be in hysterics the whole time. Maybe, maybe not. You'd be tired and sleep-deprived at that point, and changes are that if you've made it that far you'd probably be taking things seriously. If you DID repeatedly break up laughing you'd be sent for "incentive training" (misery) until you stopped, and if it kept up you'd be kicked out and sent home.
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Jun 4, 2019 18:47
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zoux posted:Lol, a bit. Also I thought it was illegal to call DIs "sir" Different services, different lingo and rules. In the USMC recruits call everyone who isn't a recruit "sir" or "ma'am."
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Jun 4, 2019 18:49
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The only thing I've taken away from seeing the occasional DI video on youtube is I have no loving idea how those guys have voices after like day 2. Does the voice just get used to that kind of stress after a while?
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Jun 4, 2019 18:49
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aphid_licker posted:Uh, us? Unless you really like to have your DNA rearranged? No, it's true that they were way way too reckless with this stuff, and a lot of them knew better. But look at today, where if you are even trying to locate a low-level radioactive containment zone for radiomedical waste and smoke detectors you get a million environmentalists protesting about concerns of some regressed hunt-gatherer society 10,000 years after the collapse of civilization stumbling across the site and wearing pellets of cobalt-60 as jewelry. I say, gently caress the Morlocks. Anyway, like quicksand, I think people's worries about the risk of them being exposed to deadly radiation tend to be wildly overestimated.
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Jun 4, 2019 18:51
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Cessna posted:Maybe, maybe not. You'd be tired and sleep-deprived at that point, and changes are that if you've made it that far you'd probably be taking things seriously. If you DID repeatedly break up laughing you'd be sent for "incentive training" (misery) until you stopped, and if it kept up you'd be kicked out and sent home. No see, that's the problem. I'm completely incapable of taking any kind of authority given to me in that way seriously. Unless we're in an emergency it just lights up the immediate "gently caress you" part of my brain. That's why I couldn't join. Being put through pointless bullshit or having people try to make me miserable on purpose to mold me into a new person just has me rolling my eyes. Ice Fist posted:The only thing I've taken away from seeing the occasional DI video on youtube is I have no loving idea how those guys have voices after like day 2. Does the voice just get used to that kind of stress after a while? I'm picturing DIs chugging tea with honey and lemon by the gallon and violently inhaling from aromatherapy candles as the veins bulge in their necks.
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Jun 4, 2019 18:51
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Ice Fist posted:The only thing I've taken away from seeing the occasional DI video on youtube is I have no loving idea how those guys have voices after like day 2. Does the voice just get used to that kind of stress after a while? Believe it or not, they are trained to yell in DI School. (Which is itself "boot camp for sergeants.") They learn vocal techniques to save their voice - which, well, after a few years of yelling all day I can't help but think that all of the technique in the world won't keep you from blowing out your vocal cords. In fact, in order to practice yelling without faltering or repeating themselves they are sometimes assigned to yell at inanimate objects for extended periods of time. One of my platoon sergeants was a former DI and he was a genuinely funny person. He used to crack us up by doing some of his rants, but yelling at things like pencils or empty coffee mugs.
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Jun 4, 2019 18:56
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chitoryu12 posted:Being put through pointless bullshit or having people try to make me miserable on purpose to mold me into a new person just has me rolling my eyes. Pointless? Sure, maybe. But at the same time sending untrained people to war has been proven to have really bad results. And, "mold you into a new person?" Don't believe it. They're teaching you how to do a job, not rearranging your personality.
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Jun 4, 2019 18:58
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zoux posted:No, it's true that they were way way too reckless with this stuff, and a lot of them knew better. But look at today, where if you are even trying to locate a low-level radioactive containment zone for radiomedical waste and smoke detectors you get a million environmentalists protesting about concerns of some regressed hunt-gatherer society 10,000 years after the collapse of civilization stumbling across the site and wearing pellets of cobalt-60 as jewelry. I say, gently caress the Morlocks. As with everything safety-related they're overestimated now because we instituted safer handling procedures after every time there was an incident
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Jun 4, 2019 18:59
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Cessna posted:Pointless? Sure, maybe. But at the same time sending untrained people to war has been proven to have really bad results. They also always say that they are trying to introduce the stress of combat into every day training. Is there any truth in that? Basically - are guys who are yelled at all the time during training better suited for situations where actual bullets are flying overhead and explosions going off in the vicinity?
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Jun 4, 2019 19:00
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zoux posted:Lotta real characters in the Manhattan project. I believe Feynman's pranks made a bunch of security people worry the facility had been penetrated. Um... Yeah, a big one. Feynman’s wife at the time was dying of tuberculosis and he’d regularly drive into town to visit her. Since he didn’t have a car, he’d borrow one from a coworker. That coworker was a guy named Klaus Fuchs.
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Jun 4, 2019 19:04
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What do we know about the induction methods for professional armies of the past? Did legionnaire recruits get roasted by centurion DIs? What about for things like peasant levies, was there any attempt to instill any discipline in those old conscript armies besides drilling maneuver?Phanatic posted:Um... Lol yikes e: he was a Soviet spy though?
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Jun 4, 2019 19:04
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Cessna posted:Pointless? Sure, maybe. But at the same time sending untrained people to war has been proven to have really bad results. I'm sure it works! It just doesn't work on me.
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Jun 4, 2019 19:07
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I really recommend "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". It's just a series of anecdotes from Richard Feynman's life, from chemistry magic tricks as a child to becoming the safecracker at Los Alamos after figuring out everybody's combinations in his free time (turns out scientists like to set numerical constants as their combinations). There was also a bit where he had to lobby government superiors to let him tell the people at the uranium refining facilities some of the physics involve so they wouldn't accidentally cause something to go critical or kill themselves from radiation or whatnot. It really demonstrated how being freer with information just helps everything run better. bewbies posted:There's probably some sort of optimal balance between discipline and creativity/independence but the army hasn't found it yet. I expect if there is, it's constantly moving.
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Jun 4, 2019 19:11
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SlothfulCobra posted:I expect if there is, it's constantly moving. And it is different for different people.
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Jun 4, 2019 19:17
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chitoryu12 posted:No see, that's the problem. I'm completely incapable of taking any kind of authority given to me in that way seriously. Unless we're in an emergency it just lights up the immediate "gently caress you" part of my brain. We were actually talking about this at work this morning...that moment you realized that basic training is just an elaborate kabuki dance, and the drill sergeants are all just performers in a show doing their best to teach you a shitload of stuff in only a few weeks. Basically, you eventually realize it isn't personal...these guys are doing a job, as they've been taught, and their only real concern is getting you graduated without getting in trouble along the way. To that end, good drill sergeants should be able to recognize who responds best to the yelling, who responds best to more careful one-on-one, rational instruction, and who responds to offers of more/better food, or the threat of less food, or the threat of more shittier work details (read: me). Drill sergeant teams should be built so that there's a variety of different instructor strengths within the group...the mean guy who yells a lot, the guy who can thoughtfully explain things, and the guy who will play and win mind games with the 17 year old local idiot (read: me). Youtubes/TV/etc tend to focus largely on the yelly guys a lot for obvious reasons.
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Jun 4, 2019 19:34
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zoux posted:e: he was a Soviet spy though? Soviet spying was in a whole different league from Axis spying. Stuff like "the guy teaching German spies to infiltrate the UK is actually a double agent." EDIT: There's a book that goes over what the German nuclear program guys knew based on secret wiretapping of their postwar accommodations. The long story short is that they knew nothing.
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Jun 4, 2019 19:39
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wdarkk posted:Soviet spying was in a whole different league from Axis spying. Stuff like "the guy teaching German spies to infiltrate the UK is actually a double agent." Oh I know Soviet espionage was very good it's just that we WERE ALLIES At what point did the USSR become aware of the Anglo/American and German bomb projects? Before Fuchs? Also were they running one of their own? wdarkk posted:The long story short is that they knew nothing. 
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Jun 4, 2019 19:44
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bewbies posted:We were actually talking about this at work this morning...that moment you realized that basic training is just an elaborate kabuki dance, and the drill sergeants are all just performers in a show doing their best to teach you a shitload of stuff in only a few weeks. Very much so. It's all theater, running to a script that they're run through time after time. bewbies posted:Drill sergeant teams should be built so that there's a variety of different instructor strengths within the group...the mean guy who yells a lot, the guy who can thoughtfully explain things, and the guy who will play and win mind games with the 17 year old local idiot (read: me). Youtubes/TV/etc tend to focus largely on the yelly guys a lot for obvious reasons. This is how the USMC has worked for decades. Each platoon gets a: - Senior DI (A.k.a., "black belt" as they wear a black leather belt instead of the green duty belt.): Generally an aspirational Dad-type figure who sets the example. - J-Hat (J for "junior"):They do most of the close order drill instruction and tend to be more of the disciplinary stuff. They're the ones who yell the most. - 3rd Hat: Does most of the "knowledge" (classroom) instruction and tend to be more approachable, relatively speaking. Not all platoons get a fourth DI; if they do they're often going to DI school themselves and are "apprenticing" to the Senior DI; they generally work around the edges and pick up strays. Cessna fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Jun 4, 2019 |
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Jun 4, 2019 19:55
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wdarkk posted:Soviet spying was in a whole different league from Axis spying. Stuff like "the guy teaching German spies to infiltrate the UK is actually a double agent." My Bond thread talked a lot about this, obviously, but especially Soviet spying incidents when From Russia With Love came up because so many different operations and agents get name dropped. On the one side, you have the slow reveal starting in 1945 that the Soviets had a ton of double-agents in the British, American, and Canadian governments that few or no people ever suspected. A big part of the Cold War starting was the growing distrust as it became apparent that the USSR was less of a friendly power and more of a hostile third party that just so happened to find itself on the right side of the biggest war on Earth. There were so many Soviet double-agents that they reached high levels of foreign intelligence agencies and were even assigned to investigate each other! One of the members of the Cambridge Five was someone Ian Fleming himself knew, though I don't know if he found out or reacted to it as it was publicized shortly before his death. On the other side, you have the Germans. Agents got caught in England because they rode bikes on the wrong side of the road and carried German sausages and hand cream when pulled over, or didn't know about rules against being served cider before lunch at a pub. A guy who tried to parachute in at night broke his ankle on landing and had to attract attention from farmers for help, resulting in his capture and execution. Werner von Janowski was caught 12 hours after landing in Quebec because he wore a foreign suit, didn't speak English very well, had been supplied with a bunch of money that was out of circulation and matches from occupied Belgium, and didn't even have a valid ID when he got questioned by the police so he immediately admitted to being a spy when they showed up. The "best spy" in Germany was Juan Pujol García, who responded to being rejected by British intelligence by getting himself into German intelligence specifically to become a double-agent and crafted an entire fictitious network of spies that kept the Nazis fooled until the end of the war, receiving an Iron Cross for his efforts. One attempt at fooling the Abwehr by feeding them obviously false information to make it look like an agent had been compromised didn't work because the Abwehr was so incompetent that they believed it. German intelligence in WW2 is probably the biggest joke after Italian tankettes. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Jun 4, 2019 |
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Jun 4, 2019 20:04
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chitoryu12 posted:Agents got caught in England because they rode bikes on the wrong side of the road and carried German sausages and hand cream when pulled over, ”Well,” Day Tripper said quietly to Mayhew, “see what happens if you jerk off?” (The only people will know where that is from are in this thread already.) I've always wondered how many false-positives they had. You hear those movie-cliche "how to identify an ally" stuff like "what was Babe Ruth's batting average in 1938" and, hell, I'd get shot for not knowing.
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Jun 4, 2019 20:08
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Cessna posted:”Well,” Day Tripper said quietly to Mayhew, “see what happens if you jerk off?” I mean, I assume those are more-or-less Voight-Kampff tests where you're looking for body language and for idiomatic response ("The gently caress should I know?" being such an idiomatic response) rather than a fact quiz.
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Jun 4, 2019 20:12
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*shows a picture of Hitler, watches their arm*
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Jun 4, 2019 20:16
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zoux posted:At what point did the USSR become aware of the Anglo/American and German bomb projects? Before Fuchs? Also were they running one of their own? pretty much everyone was aware of the rival bomb projects in theory at least, since all nuclear scientists conspicuously went silent worldwide around 1940 and the actual scientific part of making a bomb is easy, it's just the engineering and production of material that was a huge pain in the neck. really only the united states had the resources available to build a bomb in the 1940s. even japan had a bomb project, japanese nuclear scientists were pretty good most everyone put a low priority on their respective bomb projects though. japan's never progressed past the theory stage, the soviets considered it but backburnered the actual engineering part in favor of infiltrating the hell out of los alamos, germany included it as part of their wonder weapon idiocy but never pursued it with much urgency because it was projected the war would be well over before any bomb could be produced. also their math was all wrong. the united states (and the UK and canada) had the special combination of "oh poo poo" haste as well as effectively infinite resources which allowed them to actually build the bomb, and even then the bomb arguably came in too late to matter (though it came at the right time to dominate the politics of the next fifty years
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Jun 4, 2019 20:17
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Yes, that was exactly what I was thinking. chitoryu12 posted:My Bond thread talked a lot about this, obviously, but especially Soviet spying incidents when From Russia With Love came up because so many different operations and agents get name dropped. I realized I don't know much of anything about Italian and Japanese intelligence. IIRC for Japan they had some decent intelligence gathering but after the war had been going decision-making was so dysfunctional that they could be turning in satellite photos of the US fleet or pictures of their goatse reenactments and it wouldn't make a difference either way.
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Jun 4, 2019 20:20
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Schadenboner posted:I mean, I assume those are more-or-less Voight-Kampff tests where you're looking for body language and for idiomatic response ("The gently caress should I know?" being such an idiomatic response) rather than a fact quiz. Note to self: Teach future spies how to say "The gently caress should I know" in other languages.
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Jun 4, 2019 20:28
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zoux posted:e: he was a Soviet spy though? Sorry, I thought you were asking about security breaches in general, not specifically by the Axis powers. zoux posted:At what point did the USSR become aware of the Anglo/American and German bomb projects? Before Fuchs? Also were they running one of their own? Definitely. They'd already been working on nuclear fission research, like everyone else, and had previously set up a commission to try to get some uranium together to try to investigate a chain reaction, but the German invasion sort of put that on the back burner. Russian scientists noticed that all these Western science journals that they were reading suddenly stopped publishing anything about nuclear fission and one of them (Georgy Flyorov, the guy who discovered spontaneous fission) went "Hey....wait a minute..." and wrote a letter to Stalin in 1942 saying "You know, the fact that they all shut up means they're up to something, so we should do it too." They started going full-bore in 1943 and the fact that they had Los Alamos so thoroughly infiltrated meant that they were able to basically skip the early steps; their first nuclear reactor was basically a direct copy of the US's 4th nuclear reactor. Their first atomic bomb was a direct copy of Fat Man. Amusingly, also in 1943 they requested a few hundred pounds of uranium as part of Lend/Lease. Uranium had been embargoed, and Leslie Groves (who was in charge of all uranium in the country) overrode this and had them send the shipment anyway, on the grounds that if we rejected the request then we'd be giving the Soviets information that uranium was important. SlothfulCobra posted:I really recommend "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". I'd recommend James Gleick's Genius' The Surely... books are entertaining but Feynman was more than a bit of a self-promoter and skilled bullshitter (I mean that in the complimentary sense) and you've got to take everything in them as a bit of a "No poo poo, there I was" story. Genius does a good job of conveying just what an incredibly smart motherfucker that guy was, and it's also touching and sad. That's what infuriated me about that short-loved "Manhattan" series from a few years ago. You had this period of intense scientific discovery, sufficiently dangerous to be dramatic, involving real-life characters who'd be entertaining as hell presented in the right light, all set against the backdrop of an existential war that was killing thousands daily, and instead they portrayed Los Alamos as the jocks vs. the nerds and turned it boring as hell. chitoryu12 posted:One attempt at fooling the Abwehr by feeding them obviously false information to make it look like an agent had been compromised didn't work because the Abwehr was so incompetent that they believed it. In another case they captured real actual intelligence but refused to believe it because they knew they'd already been tricked that way once and said "Oh, we're not falling for this bullshit again!"
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Jun 4, 2019 20:28
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Perestroika posted:To put it another way: Your average Rapier, which many would consider a very nimble sword well-suited for fencing, would usually weigh in at about 1-1.2 kg. Meanwhile your average viking sword, including the famed Ulfberth ones, wound up weighing... about 1-1.5 kg. Now, the balance and centre of mass might be somewhat different (though probably not by as much as one might think), but the actual mass you're swinging around is not actually all that different.
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Jun 4, 2019 21:04
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I just finished reading making of the atomic bomb and apparently the one time the Los Alamos scientists decided to invite the construction workers and other assorted types to their square dancing party the "hillbillies" showed up wasted and started fights with the mps who were trying to remove them. I'm trying to picture how drunk you have to be to register as too drunk for a 40s middle of no where square dance.
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Jun 4, 2019 21:07
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zoux posted:No less an authority than Enrico Fermi told Slotin he was going to kill himself if he kept loving around with the experiment. Feynman warned them they were "kicking the dragon's tail". Also the Demon Core is the most insanely cool name for, well anything ever. it is but slotin pisses me off. the Demon Core is way cooler than the guy it killed
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Jun 4, 2019 21:13
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HEY GUNS posted:it is but slotin pisses me off. the Demon Core is way cooler than the guy it killed Slotin stripped down to his skivvies and jumped into the cooling pool of the X-10 reactor so he could make adjustments to his experiment at the bottom of it without them having to shut the reactor down first. That's pretty loving cool. Also crazy. But still cool.
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Jun 4, 2019 21:18
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Benagain posted:I'm trying to picture how drunk you have to be to register as too drunk for a 40s middle of no where square dance. I assume the level where you can still stand up but can't control the direction you move.
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Jun 4, 2019 21:21
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zoux posted:What do other militaries do? Ever read the book Black Edelweiss? It's a memoir by a guy who joined the Waffen SS in WWII. He's captured by the US Army and ditches his uniform before he was really processed as a POW, so he pulls the "I was regular army" lie. While still a POW he's assigned to help be a legal clerk for the army attorneys who are assigned to what will become the Nuremberg trials, where he gets to sift through the records of the Holocaust. Irony. But the relevant part here is his training. He was with a mountain division ("Nord") and a lot of his training was physically tough. Long marches, climbing at altitude, snow survival, that sort of thing. But what really struck me was how his trainers were pretty much the opposite of USMC DIs - they spent their time encouraging the recruits, giving them pep talks and atta-boys. They're described as running alongside them shouting inspiration like "Let's go, men, you can do it!" It really stood out; I wasn't expecting that.
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Jun 4, 2019 21:27
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