I just finished reading The Great Naval Race by Peter Padfield, an engaging grand-strategy-level overview of the naval arms race between Great Britain and Germany in the years leading up to the First World War.

Interestingly, the book offers little detail about the revolution in battleship design that took place at the turn of the last century. Instead, Padfield highlights the efforts of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz to achieve his twin goals of deterrence and prestige, contrasting it with British attempts to maintain the Royal Navy’s quantitative (and qualitative) edge.

Germany’s breakneck naval construction campaign fueled an unwinnable arms race abroad while enabling forces at home to start the very war Tirpitz hoped to delay or avoid altogether. Any prestige left for the High Seas Fleet after Jutland rests to this day at the bottom of Scapa Flow.

Naval arms races are particularly capital intensive, given the size and complexity of modern warships. Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku would argue in favor of continued Japanese compliance with the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty by observing:

Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.

That treaty (and its successors, the London Naval Treaties of 1930 and 1936) softened and postponed, but did not prevent the massive Japanese naval build-up prior to the Pacific conflict in World War II. Isolationism at home prevented the US from matching the Japanese construction pace, even after the war in Europe began in 1939.

With the Two Ocean Navy Act of 1940, the US Navy was finally authorized to more than double in size over the next five years. The fleet that won the war was ordered and building nearly 18 months before our entry into that conflict. But even a century ago, large naval vessels took 2-3 years to build.

As a result, the US Navy’s first year of the Second World War was fought (and the tide turned) with largely inferior and obsolescent vessels, aircraft, and munitions.

A century later, in very nearly the same part of the world, the situation looks in some ways similar, and in other ways very different:

Somehow I missed this dramatic video of the Artemis I Orion spacecraft reentering the atmosphere after its uncrewed trip around the moon.

I hadn’t really processed the tremendous speeds involved in the spacecraft’s return from the moon until I watched the following animations tracing its flight path using inertial and rotating reference frames.

The spacecraft was traveling nearly 40,000 km/h (25,000 mph) when it first entered the upper atmosphere. After using a skip-style non-ballistic reentry to bleed off excess speed (the two deceleration phases are quite apparent in the video) the spacecraft deployed its parachutes for a successful splashdown.

Artemis II is scheduled to take four astronauts back to the moon sometime after September 2025.

For some reason Universal Control wouldn’t allow me to capitalize letters on the iPad Pro that’s connected to my MacBook Air unless I used Caps Lock or let it do auto-capitalization.

The behavior was so strange I thought I was taking crazy pills for a while, but Universal Control is too handy to give up. Thankfully, user _infinideas_ on Apple Discussions had the answer:

On Your iPad:

Go to SETTINGS > Accessibility > Keyboards > HARDWARE KEYBOARDS > turn Full Keyboard Access to ON

** Also (on the same page), SOFTWARE KEYBOARD > toggle Show Lowercase Keys to ON

While the answer was directed at macOS Monterey, the fix (and the glitch) applies to Sonoma as well. It seems like this quirk only affects users of 3rd party Bluetooth keyboards and mice (I’m currently using a clicky Logitech MX Mechanical and MX Anywhere 2S).

As a long-time Synergy (and more recent Logitech Flow) user with a multi-device multi-platform multi-tasking habit, I appreciate just how simple Universal Control is to use, particulary with iPad (since there’s no other option).

Multiple keyboards are a pain, and Universal Control (now) makes it better.

It’s early and my dog and I are the only ones up so far, since my wife likes to sleep in on the weekends these days. We’ve been out for an early morning walk (with too much barking when a neighbor opened their door) the dog has been fed, the coffee has been made (hazelnut light roast) and the fire is lit and burning on its own.

The sky is white now and getting lighter by the minute, although it was dark enough on our walk for me to still make out Antares and a few of the other stars of the Scorpion through the dawn glow.

I’m still trying to figure out how to make my cobbled together paper and digital personal knowledge house-of-cards into a system that will actually work for me in the long run, and frankly I’m stumped. There are so many options, but also it seems that whenever I start using one, a notification pops up on my constellation of devices and I’m suddenly distracted and lose the thread. This is how these devices are designed of course, and they have to be tended like a garden to prevent that from happening again and again.

Paper gives me the opposite of this, at the cost of connectivity and easy search, or at least the promise of those things. It lacks the easy templating available on a computer. Writing is slower than typing by far, and errors are forever. Editing is difficult if not nonexistent.

The longer I struggle with how to solve this dilemma the more I feel that a true solution is impossible. This unsolvable koan has been burning in my life now for a decade or more, and the only solution that keeps coming up is that the answer is whatever you’re using right now. There is nothing else, nothing more, nothing better, nothing worse, just this note, in this medium, again and again, forever.

Perhaps the endless seeking is the poison and simply ending the search – no matter what the choice – is the cure.

My good friend Potatowire has relaunched his blog This Will Be Hard. I’m glad he did. The world needs more voices like his – calm, reasoned, and open-minded.

Here’s a great example, from Routine:

When I kicked this project off, I had time to write late in the day, but it quickly became evident (by two days in row of bad work) that late-day creative energy was too rare for me to rely on. So, instead I started writing in the morning, after my hard reading was complete.

This seemed like it would work well, until I noticed (as in my wife told me) that I was a bit of a jerk to my family throughout the rest of the day. Writing and finalizing the posts first-thing was the only common thread in two days of bad behavior, and I think maintaining my focus while my family vied for it was too great a strain. I chose poorly in letting the writing win-out.

I’ve had this exact experience, and it’s not something I’ve yet found a way to overcome. Having a train of thought derailed is extremely frustrating, and unfortunately my only solution has been not writing (at least here). That’s not the answer, but being a jerk to the people around me isn’t either.

In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to more of This Will Be Hard. Check it out, and if you like it as much as I do, be sure to let him know.

I’ve been rereading Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 and was struck again by his prescience. It took nearly a half-century, but everything in this passage has come true (except the moon shuttle, of course).

There was plenty to occupy his time, even if he did nothing but sit and read. When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-size Newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.

Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the everchanging flow of information from the news satellites. It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg. There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic headlines often invoked. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials—these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.