(Cross posted from the BBTI blog.)
One year ago this evening, we sent out the preliminary version of Ballistics By The Inch to a few friends. That day we had a total of 146 hits to the site. Within days, we were getting tens of thousands of hits.
And since then, we’ve had a total of 1,572,698.
When we first started talking about doing this, Jim Kasper had a hard time believing that more than a few thousand people would be interested in our project. I figured that it would be popular, but I never really expected this level of interest. And I would like to say thanks to everyone who has posted on their favorite gun forum about our project, or sent a note to a friend about it, and thereby helped to spread the word. We’ve had some good press along the way: Dark Roasted Blend gave us a link the first week the site was up, The Firearm Blog not only did a post in those first few days, but Steve graciously covered our “2.0” version earlier this year when we added three more calibers and a bunch of real world guns. In April 2009 Concealed Carry Magazine had a nice piece about the project. Ammoland covered it in June. Just recently I had a great interview with Doc Wesson at the Gun Nation Podcast.
We’ve been Stumbled Upon, discussed on The High Road and The Firing Line, chatted about in the Defensive Carry forum, talked about on Glock Talk, referenced on the Survival Blog, cited on AR15.com, and occasionally found to be Something Awful.
In all honesty, it is no longer possible for me to keep track of all of the places where BBTI has been mentioned around the globe, or even keep tally on the languages used to discuss our project. And I can only imagine how it will continue to propagate. Particularly since we’re not stopping here.
What do I mean? Well, plans are already underway for new tests in the coming year, and we’ve begun to discuss amongst ourselves what else we would like to try to tackle in the future. First, what is already well in the planning & preparation stage:
Announcing the Cylinder Gap Test!
We’ve had a Single Action Army clone in .357 magnum modified to allow for adjusting the barrel position from a standard 0.006″ to 0.001″ to no gap (barrel snug against the cylinder). We have a dozen or so different ammunition loads in .38/.357, and we’ll be essentially repeating the BBTI procedure for each of these, with the normal gap then the minimum gap then without any gap, starting with an 18″ barrel and going down in increments of one inch to just 1″ . Actually, one slight difference – to make sure we get a better statistical sample, we’ll be firing 10 (ten) rounds of each type of ammunition at each point rather than just 3 (three) as we did with the BBTI tests. Because we are limiting this test to just one caliber, we thought this was a reasonable step to take. We hope that this will allow us to conclude with some actual data what the effect of having a cylinder gap in a revolver actually amounts to.
We’ll probably be conducting these tests in the spring of 2010, and if past experience is any guide will have the new data sets available on the BBTI site sometime a couple of months later. We’ll keep you posted!
Other testing ideas for further down the line include an interest in obtaining objective measurements (using equipment and protocols which anyone can repeat fairly easily) for both muzzle flash and ‘felt recoil’. And, of course, we’ve also discussed expanding our standard BBTI tests to include rifle cartridges and rimfire cartridges, since these questions come up all the time. But we’ll see what the future holds.
Again, thanks to one and all who helped make the Ballistics By The Inch project a phenomenal success over the past year. Hard to believe we’ve gone as far as we have.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Feedback, General Musings, James Burke, Phil Plait, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Space
Happy Thanksgiving, to my American friends.
Perhaps thinking about giving thanks, and the question of my perspective from this vantage point in life, is what made this post from the Bad Astronomer pop out in my reading this morning. It’s about a scale model of the solar system hosted on the web. From the site:
This page shows a scale model of the solar system, shrunken down to the point where the Sun, normally more than eight hundred thousand miles across, is the size you see it here. The planets are shown in corresponding scale. Unlike most models, which are compressed for viewing convenience, the planets here are also shown at their true-to-scale average distances from the Sun. That makes this page rather large – on an ordinary 72 dpi monitor it’s just over half a mile wide, making it possibly one of the largest pages on the web.
Just for reference, the image of the Sun on my monitor is about 6″ diameter. Yeah, Pluto is a speck about 6,000x the diameter of the Sun away.
I love these sorts of things which convey the notion of deep distance (similar to the concept of deep time). One of these days I’d like to make it to Sweden to see the Sweden Solar System, which uses the Globe arena to represent the Sun, with Pluto a sphere about 5″ in diameter almost 200 miles away.
This question of scale – of the deep distance from one planet to another here in our solar system – is one which I tried to deal with honestly in writing Communion of Dreams. It’s why it takes over a week for the researchers sent out from Earth to reach Saturn (Well, Titan, actually) even using a constant thrust of about one-third gravity, and why there is a time-lag in radio communications of about 90 minutes (yeah, I researched not just the average distances between the planets, but where they would be in their respective orbits on the dates in the book – as well as what the intermediate time lag would be en route at various points). Which presented a problem in the writing – what to do with the characters in the book during this period? Which, in turn, is what I think made the readers at the publisher feel that the book moved too slowly in the first half.
Well, I still haven’t heard back from the publisher about the revisions I sent (and I didn’t expect to yet), so I don’t know whether I was able to address this concern adequately with the changes I made. And once I do hear, I expect that my perspective on the matter will change – as it always does, after the fact. Such is life. Such is the universe.*
Again, Happy Thanksgiving.
Jim Downey
Filed under: ACLU, Civil Rights, Government, NPR, Politics, Predictions, Privacy, Science, Society, tech
And the march of progress continues:
‘Insecurity Cameras’ To Track All Of Town’s Traffic
A little town in California has a big and controversial idea: It wants to install security cameras on roads leading into town so that it can screen and record every license plate that comes inside city limits. The plan could effectively turn Tiburon into perhaps the nation’s first public gated community.
* * *
“Tiburon is unusual because there are only two roads going in and out of the town,” says Mayor Alice Fredericks.
It’s quite easy, she says, to keep track of every car along those two roads. Last week, the Town Council decided to spend $200,000 to place six security cameras at strategic points along the road. For now, the plan is to make sure none of the cars coming into town are stolen. Crime statistics are low in Tiburon, but in a small town, Fredericks says, even a few crimes make an impact.
* * *
Police run license-plate checks all the time, says Jennifer King, an expert in technology and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Tiburon’s plan is to just run many plate checks. The problem, she says, is that once the equipment is installed, safeguards to protect privacy can change. For instance, the license plate information is supposed to be purged after eight hours, but what if a crime occurs and suddenly that information becomes more important?
“They may start today by keeping it eight hours, but I’ll almost bet you that what they’ll find is that somebody will come back and go, ‘If only we had the data from those cameras,'” she says. “We call it ‘scope creep’ in the technology world. That scope can really crawl, really grow very quickly.”
Nah, that’d never happen, would it? I mean, the police would never seek to use the collected data in an inappropriate or unethical fashion, would they?
Police routinely arresting people to get DNA, inquiry claims
Police officers are now routinely arresting people in order to add their DNA sample to the national police database, an inquiry will allege tomorrow.
The review of the national DNA database by the government’s human genetics commission also raises the possibility that the DNA profiles of three-quarters of young black males, aged 18 to 35, are now on the database.
* * *
The crime and security bill published last week by the home secretary, Alan Johnson, proposes to keep DNA profiles of people arrested but not convicted of any offence on the database for six years. This follows a landmark European court judgment last December, ruling illegal the current blanket policy of indefinite retention of DNA profiles whether or not the person has been convicted of an offence.
It adds that parliament never formally debated the establishment of the DNA database. Its evolution involved a “function creep” from being used to confirm police suspicions to identifying suspects. This resulted in the addition of more and more profiles without being clearly matched by an improvement in convictions.
Gods, what are people thinking? In my own hometown there is once again an effort to put “security cameras” in place in our downtown area, a subject I have written about previously. Last spring our City Council decided to put a stop to it, but proponents have gathered enough signatures to now have the matter put on the ballot for a special election next year. It’s like the damned “red light cameras” which cost more than they’re worth, do not lead to improved safety at intersections, and just decrease everyone’s privacy.
But hey, they make people feel good, right? And all that matters is good security theatre, not actual security. Don’t scare the sheep, or they’ll panic and run.
Jim Downey
PS: since I’ve been told that sometimes I need to be less subtle, let me be bloody obvious – I chose the title intentionally. Yes, I think that religion and the perceived need for security theatre come from the same source: that reassurance that someone else is watching over you to make sure you are safe. What else is the Abrahamic God but a paranormal surveillance system?
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech, TED
Ah, yes, the first step into an integrated “expert” technology such as I envisioned for CoD:
Fascinating. And just about right on time.
Jim Downey
(Via BB.)
. . . this would make for a fascinating take-off point:
Largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure found in UK
LONDON – An amateur treasure hunter prowling English farmland with a metal detector stumbled upon the largest Anglo-Saxon treasure ever discovered, a massive seventh-century hoard of gold and silver sword decorations, crosses and other items, British archaeologists said Thursday.
One expert said the treasure would revolutionize understanding of the Anglo-Saxons, a Germanic people who ruled England from the fifth century until the Norman conquest in 1066. Another said the find would rank among Britain’s best-known historic treasures.
* * *
“It looks like a collection of trophies, but it is impossible to say if the hoard was the spoils from a single battle or a long and highly successful military career,” he said. “We also cannot say who the original, or the final, owners were, who took it from them, why they buried it or when. It will be debated for decades.”
You can see images, and get more information, from The Staffordshire Hoard (I’m impressed that they got a nice website up and running in time for the news of this to break.)
Jim Downey
Filed under: Comics, Failure, Fermi's Paradox, Humor, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Space, tech
Ah, yes, xkcd gets the point across perfectly, once again:
Editing continues to go well with CoD, though this week has been slow due to other demands. Now done with Chapter 7, have trimmed a total of 11,086 words.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 