Most warships in the age of sail used long guns as chase guns; they weren't unique to the British and Americans. And a long nine-pounder was only a modest-sized gun, like you might find on a frigate. The heart of the fleet, the ships of the line, would have 24-pounder or 32-pounder long guns for the broadside battery. (During the Napoleonic Wars at the end of the 18th century, short-barreled "carronades" became much more popular, replacing many of the smaller long guns.)

Actually, this is the exact opposite of the strategy preferred by the British. It's true that back in the days of the Spanish Armada in the late 16th century, they preferred to hit at a distance with longer-ranged guns, but this approach didn't work out as well as hoped; the guns' accuracy and energy fell off much too quickly with range. By the height of the age of sail in the late 18th century, British ships preferred to close to point-blank range (one reason why short-range carronades became so popular). The keys to their naval superiority were better seamanship (leading to more efficient and effective ship handling), aggressive tactics (take the fight to the enemy whenever you could), and better gunnery, which for the British meant that their gun crews could pump out more shots more accurately than their adversaries could. The British believed that in a close-range fight, their ships could be relied on to deal much more damage more quickly than their enemy, to the point that they could board or otherwise force the enemy to surrender, and that any damage their own ships suffered could be handled and patched by their well-trained crews. It was a belief often confirmed in practice.

In this style of fighting, the main role of chase guns was either to slow down a fleeing adversary enough to allow the British ship to close for a short-range battle, or if pursued by a clearly superior enemy, to slow him enough to allow you to escape.

The British kept to this approach until the development of accurate long-range rifled guns forced them to abandon it.

Heh, nice one, but alas that joke seems to be meaningless for modern airliners. It comes from the days of piston-engined airliners, because only piston engines "miss" (misfire in one or more cylinders).

Considering his body was found by a fishing boat on the same day he went missing, and that he would now be 88 if he were still alive, the "living in hiding" supposition seems rather far fetched. :)

Probably blew up all his SAM batteries.

Actually, some very big bull elephants have reached up to around 12 tons. But that's a minor point, because you're comparing apples and oranges.

"Only" 9 tons...for a flesh-eating biped. Think about that for a bit. No other land-dwelling meat-eater has ever come close to the size of the largest predatory dinosaurs. And all those dinosaurs were bipeds.

Elephants are herbivores, and they are strictly quadrupeds with columnar legs. The dinosaur analog for elephants are the sauropods, the largest of which reached up to 10 times the weight of the biggest elephants.

Yeah, but I wasn't trying to imply something like that. It's only a weak analogy. We humans don't tend to let our bodies pile up in places where we happen to drop dead. :D

Glad to be of help.

The biggest problem with his claim isn't octopus intelligence, which is definitely quite remarkable. (Still, making self-portraits would still count as extraordinary behavior for any animal, since it implies a particular arsenal of especially complex mental capabilities, and remember this is back in the Triassic, over 200 million years ago, when basic vertebrate brains, and presumably cephalopod brains as well, were still being refined.)

One big problems is that he has taken a site widely accepted as one which has preserved animals that died of various causes and decided that it's actually a predator's killing ground. That's a bit like claiming that bodies in a cemetary are actually a serial killer's victims.

Second is that these victims aren't just any prehistoric sea reptiles--they're shonisaurs, the giants of the ichthyosaurs. These were approaching the size of sperm whales and were arguably among the biggest ocean vertebrates that ever lived before today's great whales evolved. He's imagining that there's some gigantic cephalopod hunting these things, when no cephalopod, living or fossil, has ever been found even approaching such a size. Giant squid are big, yeah, but nowhere near big enough to take on and eat a sperm whale.

Third, he has no clear evidence backing these extraordinary claims--no body parts of the supposed predator, no clear marks of predation on the bones, no candidate animals to fill the role, no real trace fossils, nothing except suppositions about patterns he sees in the bone arrangements. But humans are good at finding patterns even when they don't actually mean anything.

Some other, rather more reliable indications that this guy may indeed be full of crap:

Brian Switek's commentary on the story on his Laelaps palaeontology blog

P. Z. Myers' view of the story on his Pharyngula blog

Discussion of the story on an archive of geologists' conversations on Twitter

The professor's own profile page, which shows he has quite a history of making far-reaching claims.

Whatever you think of this professor's hypothesis, that note was added just hours ago by an anonymous IP editor, without any references. It has since been removed, rightly so.

That's because he copied his points from this paper without giving credit. The paper makes much better reading than his post.

An English speaker (and for that matter a speaker of any other non-East Asian language) is likely to find Chinese harder to learn than any other reasonably common language, except possibly Japanese. David Moser's paper "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" may provide a useful reality check. He wrote it in 1990 while he was a student of Chinese. (He later got his doctorate in Chinese Studies and is currently Academic Director of the Chinese Studies staff at CET Academic Programs, an American study-abroad organization with a strong Chinese focus. He lives in Beijing with his Chinese wife.)

Looks like both bitsavers and classiccmp are back. I can't see any obvious signs that the classiccmp lists ever discussed a bitsavers outage over the past two weeks, so whatever the problem was, they never noticed it.

I have no idea on the cause for this outage, but Al Kossow, who founded and still runs bitsavers, is also the software curator for the Computer History Museum. Given their purpose, I'd imagine that any problem with bitsavers would be a high priority for them. I found a brief posting he made today on ba.broadcast.moderated, so it's not like he's out of commission or anything. Most likely it's just a technical problem which will eventually be cleared up.

I tried checking the classiccmp mailing list, which would be the most obvious place to discuss any bitsavers outage, but their site is currently down too. *headdesk*

Well, DEC's PDP-1 sales literature (such as the PDP-1 Handbook scans available here) seems to always list the display among the optional equipment, though it was probably a popular option. The only standard I/O equipment (not counting the front panel) was the console typewriter and the paper tape reader and punch. Seems reasonable, since I'm sure there were some customers who had no need for a CRT.

However, I overstated things when I said the display "would have added quite a bit to the cost". It only seems to have increased the cost by around 15% or so.

It didn't. The display was a point-plotting CRT which had to be dynamically refreshed by the CPU.