Monday 1 February 2016

Rant 1223 / It's Alive! It's Alive!

27 Nov 2015

So whatever happened to the shield wall tactic?

This tactic is probably pretty well-known, in which a group of soldiers would have their front rank hold up a large shield so that they form a wall. I thought only the Romans used it but apparently, it was used by the Persians and Greeks too, among others.

Anyway, how did battle tactics become what we have today from there?

Just guns? No, that's too simple.

So I went to read about it on Wikipedia, and this is my summary of a few pages of Wiki articles:

First, people innovated with this tactic. What did they attack enemies with from behind their shields? Swords and polearms. Eventually, they settled on pikes, it seems. Probably because with that polearm, even the guys behind the shield-holders can attack.

On a side note, one major issue with this tactic is that if a shield falls, morale falls rapidly unless the men were well-trained.

Moving on.

From the pike, they slowly realized that heavier pikes are even more awesome. At some point, they decided they could just use both hands to grab the pike instead of holding a shield at all.

That's when the norm went from shield walls to pike squares. Well one can still call the later shield walls a square of pikes with shields on, but pike squares mean just pikes and no shield.

Then guns arrived at the scene. Those early guns were the arquebus and the later musket. At first, they surrounded pike squares with a thin layer of gun-users, but later realized guns were even more awesome than heavy pikes, so they added more and more till the formation was a square of pikes surrounded by a layer of guns plus another square of guns at each corner. That was the tercio.


That was followed by the realization that with the range of guns, you don't need to focus so many guys in one place anymore, so they shrank the formation and split everyone up. With many smaller squares, the troops were more mobile than the gigantic 3000-men tercio formation, and as we have seen time and again in history, speed is a great advantage in battle.

Soon, however, guns got better - the flintlock came about and guns got a lot closer to what we have today; pikes became pointless when reloading and firing got so much easier. You don't need such a great aim anymore when you can fire so much faster than the arquebusiers.

So pikes were out, everyone got a gun, and here we are.































07 Jan 2016

Just watched 15 minutes of The 100, a TV show set in a post-apocalyptic Earth where people have been living on a gigantic space station for a century and they sent 100 "expendable" teens to Earth to check out the environment.

Maybe it's just me, but the fact that half the teens didn't care about reaching the mountain base they were supposed to go irked me to no end because it was supposed to be stocked with 300 years worth of supplies.

These kids were born in a space station and their ancestors were too for at least 4 generations. Logic says 99% of them are lacking in any basic survival training. Yet they don't want to go to the only place they know of with any degree of certainty that can provide food, water and shelter. Even if they can identify plants that grew in their greenhouses in the space station, wild plants can be incredibly different from their cultivated counterparts despite being the same species, with one example being bananas - wild bananas are huge and have seeds.

Even if they can get food, I find it hard to believe they have the skills to build shelters and fires.

...

Turns out they could. Weird.













Shit. My miles are getting spread out. Although the majority is still in CX, it's only 80% of my total excluding the miles I can buy with my credit card points. Moreover, I'm not taking many long haul CX flights this year. In fact, among all my upcoming trips, only one will be on CX and that's to Seoul. The furthest destination will be Toronto and that will be on Eva Air because it's S$500 cheaper, although I can't upgrade to Business which I would do if it was CX. 

After a total of six long haul flights of 9-13 hours in the last 3 months, I've become quite tired of taking them on economy.  However, for the trip to Toronto, I'll have to consider my girlfriend's limited budget so I'll just have to suck it up and do it.  According to Seatguru, Eva has wider Economy seats with better pitch than those of BA, so hopefully it will be nice. Fingers crossed.


















11 Jan 2016

So according to my estimates, I had probably spent about 10k SGD during my trip to Europe last month and earlier this month.

That's slightly lower than my expected budget overall, given the fact that my shorter trip to NZ cost about the same last year.


























15 Jan 2016

So I think the flu that has lasted almost a month so far is no longer a flu. I tried wearing an N95 mask for most of the evening yesterday and my nose stayed clear for most of the night with almost no coughing, runny nose and phlegm. The sore throat seemed to be almost gone too.

Then I slept with the mask off, and everything's back. BUT I'm not sure about this and will try again later when I get home.






























01 Feb 2016


This is the longest post in terms of the amount of real time it spans.

Much has happened. As for the flu mentioned above, it's really my dust mite allergy that got ignited by the flu. The thing about flu is that my sinus gets swollen, allowing mucus to accumulate. Mucus/phlegm is like a piece of tissue paper - you have to keep it moving. If you leave it stuck on some dirt, it just lets bacteria fester since it doesn't have any inherent antiseptic properties.

So when my sinus got inflamed from the flu (yes there was fever on the second night I had it during the trip), it allowed mucus to stay there and hence dust mites or bits of dust mites or dust mite shit got stuck on it too, causing it to stay swollen.

It's still swollen today but it's better now. I just have to keep rinsing with my saline spray, clearing my nose and stay hydrated (to keep the mucus watery and hence easier to blow out).








Much has happened, like I said. The Europe trip was crazy and my Seoul trip just happened to hit the cold wave at its coldest point - Seoul, at -18 degrees Celsius. Bad luck, seriously. Even with my thermal, t-shirt, ski jacket, wool beanie, ski gloves and nylon scarf, it was not enough at all. At most, I could stay warm for a minute or two, then the cold hits me.

It was worse for a friend of mine who wasn't prepared for this sort of cold at all just like me and was suffering from a flu even before flying over. She refused to get out at night and for one of the days, she had to stay in the hotel. Throughout the stay, she was coughing out phlegm that had to visit the bathroom often or leave a huge stack of gross tissue papers next to her.

I feel kinda bad right now.






Soon I'm flying again, this time to visit my aunt in NZ and then explore Sydney for a few days for Chinese New Year. My girlfriend is mad and I don't blame her. When I postponed the flight, I did ask her if those dates were ok, but the both of us are just as absent-minded sometimes, so she said yes without realizing, just like me, that I was returning to Singapore in the evening of Valentine's Day. Yes it's pretty bad and I'll have to make it up to her somehow.















My halfbike has arrived and I still haven't really tried it yet. I did try it a little in my home but there's just insufficient space to get started.

























So I had a thought this morning while coming back from the market. To make your country wealthier, you have to look outward. You cannot target solely your domestic market and expect your country to benefit much from your wealth. It's kinda a zero-sum game when it's all internal. Hence, all the wealthiest countries have had some kind of income from overseas, and it used to be foreign colonies while it is now international corporations.

And this is where patriotism comes in - you have to be willing to do to foreigners what you cannot do to your fellow countrymen.