Possible, but I don't really think so. I think that the Medical minds of the time thought that physical shock, pressure waves from bombing etc. as you described, were a (or perhaps THE) primary cause of the psychological problems of returning soldiers. So the name "shell shock" came from there, but the symptoms that it was describing were psychological and, I think precisely equal to modern PTSD. Basically, "shell shock" became a polite euphemism for "soldier that got mentally messed up in the war and is having difficulty returning to civilian life".

My grandfather was an Army Air Corps armorer during WWII. He went through basic training, but his primary job was loading ammunition, bombs, external gas tanks, etc. onto P-47 airplanes. He was never in a direct combat situation, as I would describe it. He was never shot at, never in the shockwave radius of explosions, etc. But after the war he was described as having mild "shell shock", manifested by being withdrawn, not wanting to talk about the war, and occasionally prone to angry outbursts over seemingly trivial things. Eventually, he started talking about the war in his mid 80's, and here's a few relevant (perhaps) stories of his:

He joined the European theater a couple days after D-Day. Came to shore on a Normandy beach in the same sort of landing craft seen in Saving Private Ryan, etc. Even though it was days later, there were still LOTS of bodies on the beach, and thick smell of death. Welcome to the war!

His fighter group took over a French farm house adjacent to a dirt landing strip / runway. They put up a barbed wire perimeter with a gate on the road. In one of the only times I heard of him having a firearm and being expected to potentially use it, he pulled guard duty at that gate one evening. His commanding officer gave him orders to shoot anyone that couldn't provide identification on sight. While he was standing guard, a woman in her 20's rolled up on a bicycle, somewhat distraught. She spoke no English, only French. She clearly wanted to get in, and even tried to push past my grandfather. By the letter of his orders, he was "supposed" to shoot her. Instead, he knocked her off her bike when she tried to ride past after getting nowhere verbally and physically restrained her. At gunpoint! When someone that spoke French got there, it turned out that she was the daughter of the family that lived in the farm house. They had no food, and she was coming back to get some potatoes they had left in the larder.

Riding trains was a common way to get air corps support staff up to near the front, and also to get everybody back to transport ships at the end of the war. On one of those journeys later in the war, my grandfather was riding in an open train car with a bunch of his buddies. They were all given meals at the start of the trip. A short while later, the track went through a French town. A bunch of civilians were waiting around the tracks begging for food. I'll never forgot my grandfather describing that scene. It was tough for him to get out, and then all he managed was "they was starvin'!" He later explained that he and his buddies all gave up the food that they had to those people in the first town -- only to have none left to give as they rolled past similar scenes in each town on down the line.

When my mother was growing up, she and her brothers learned that they'd better not leave any food on their plates to go to waste. She has said that the angriest she ever saw her dad was when her brothers got into a food fight one time, and my grandfather went ballistic. They couldn't really figure out what the big deal was, until years later when my grandfather started telling his war stories and suddenly things made more sense.


A lot of guys had a much rougher war than my grandfather. Way more direct combat. Saw stuff much worse -- and had to DO things that were hard to live with. I think the psychological fallout of stuff like that explains the vast majority of "shell shock", without the addition of CTE-like physical head trauma. I'd wager that when the docs said Stewart's father's shell shock was a reaction to aerial bombardment, that was really just a face-saving measure to try to explain away the perceived "weakness" of his condition.

Well said. I'm fairly comfortably in "weasel" territory, and I don't bitch about it. Too much. Any more.

Actually, in all seriousness, while I am one of those cynical beaten-down types in terms of how much I care about corporate / management expectations, I do take pride in holding myself to rather higher standards than those external ones. That's a good thing, and it means that I can look myself in the mirror and honestly feel like I'm contributing something real, even if the machine that I'm in is apathetic, highly inefficient, and moderately pointless to begin with.

As (the great) Kurt Vonnegut said, "so it goes."

@newtboy -
I like / agree with your take on each of the 4 issues, but 4 really is easier said than done.

Having skills and making yourself invaluable happens quite slowly over time, and only if the arbiter correctly recognizes that value. I think capitalism has such a stranglehold on modern life that minor variations in short term profit/loss potential get overvalued while major intangible things (or at least, less tangible in quarterly reports) get ignored.

And just in general, everybody needs a job or purpose, but we can't ALL stand out and be invaluable. Eagles may soar to great heights, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines. Sometimes steady adequacy is, well, adequate.

Thinking that the world owes us happiness is a character flaw, but "checking out" by half-assing or phoning it in is a fairly rational response to a system that doesn't give a fuck about us as individuals, even those that DO go the extra mile. Fix the system (to the extent that it can be), and better results would follow.

That was quite good.

But man, that 4th issue is a doozy. Learning that "hard work pays off" is difficult when it just really doesn't, at least not anymore. Massive income inequality, zero class mobility, and on and on. We feel like relatively easily replaceable cogs in a relatively pointless machine because WE ARE.

We hear lots of stories about people that manage to buy in, feel like they are doing something important and making a real impact, enjoy some period of good job satisfaction...

...and then all too often, they end up looking like saps when the company that they work for gets bought out by some massive faceless corporation that doesn't value their years of loyal service at all, at which point they get replaced by A) a robot, B) an outsourced sweatshop laborer in a 3rd world country that can be payed a fraction of the local rate, C) a younger and more compliant hire that will inevitably have a massive turnover rate, but who cares because there are plenty more where that came from, or D) the cokehead nephew of the new CEO that needs a job to keep him out of trouble, and hey, might as well keep things in the family, right?

Maybe I'm just a bitter, late Gen-X'er.

Somehow, I've made it to 36 years old without ever having this test done.

I remember grade and high school classmates talking a lot about it, but that was usually in conjunction with going out for some team sport, which I never did. Sometimes a sudden cough gives me a bit of a twinge in the groin, so I've wondered if that is a potential symptom of the hernia, but I've never had any serious issues, so "meh" I guess.

My brother (adopted, so different genetics in case this runs in families) DID have this sort of hernia though, and had it surgically corrected. He came through with no ill effects, and I think that his was actually an extreme enough case that it was probably worth correcting and rolling the dice on the adverse side effects. Sucks that that was NOT the case for you guys, @newtboy and @Fairbs -- definitely good that it sounds like they are trying to just keep an eye on minor cases rather than immediately opting for surgery now, not that it does you guys any good...

The video is right that pretty much the number one most important question is the weight of the truck (basically tare weight, which is actually the tractor plus empty trailer). When I watched the announcement, I thought Musk was slightly cagey about that, but I thought that he said that it would be in the ballpark of a normal ICE semi. Guess I should watch again.

I think Musk made some semi-optimistic predictions about battery tech improvement and economy of scale. Frankly, I think he's earned the right to be semi-bold with his predictions, given his and Tesla's track record (paying off govt. loan very early, single handedly pushing forward battery tech and production, etc. etc.). His optimistic predictions have a tendency of panning out.

The average American is never going to switch to an electric car purely or even largely for "green conscious" reasons. The switch will happen when the electric car is better than the ICE alternatives in concrete metrics like performance, reliability, and operating cost. Musk is pushing that date forward at an incredible pace. Arguably it is already true for many use-cases at the high price-point range of the Model S, but that price point limits the scope of the impact quite a bit. He knows that to really shake things up, he's got to get that price point down, and he knows that to do that he's got to improve the economy of scale on battery tech. Which he's doing by expanding it into adjacent markets like home batteries, etc.

I think he deserves a lot of credit for "walking the walk" when it comes to working hard to protect/improve the environment, as opposed to Al Gore et al. "talking the talk".

Was just watching the old Mythbusters where they took an actual driving road test while intoxicated or talking on a cell phone. But, being actual driving, they legally had to stay under the .08 BAC limit even though it was on a closed course.

Really cool to see this place, where they can test things at mild/moderate/high levels of impairment, other types of intoxication, etc.

However, I did have one minor complaint, sort of the same as in the Mythbusters episode: it would be nice to see additional tests where the driver isn't ever expected to look at a video camera and/or respond correctly to questions. Ie., what if you're talking to somebody on the phone hands free, or talking to a passenger in the car, but you're not expected to devote a lot of attention to that ALL the time. In a real scenario, you can keep your eyes on the road and pay attention to driving while also listening to someone or even talking to them a little bit. If you see something in the road that requires your full attention, it seems like your brain should be able to do a reasonable job of prioritizing the driving (more important) over paying attention to the conversation (less important).

I'd wager that on average, people in that sort of scenario are slightly impaired compared to drivers putting 100% of their attention on driving, but not by a big margin. Probably lower than a lot of other distractions, some of which we deem acceptable (hard to legislate things like "driving while preoccupied" angry/sad/whatever).

This is why engineers need to interface with somebody that straddles both worlds instead of talking directly to builders, customers, etc. Gotta have somebody that can properly translate nerd-speak into blue-collar / civilian.

@drradon -- It was cool to compare this with the limited stuff I can remember from taking an intro to fencing (foil) class in college.

There was a different parry for incoming attacks to each quarter of your body facing the opponent (top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right). And that's just for 2 opponents both using the same general stance and weapon. I'd guess these guys would have different counters for each combination of stance/style, weapon of their opponent, and target area. That's a lot to remember -- although a lot would be relatively consistent across different combos.

I liked the high guard styles (two named "guard of the lady" stood out), because they seemed to pair nicely with "beat attacks" -- where you attack and swing to hit the opponent's weapon rather than their body. Gets their weapon out of position and leaves you in better position to make a second attack that they can't easily parry.

I wasn't very good at fencing. Bad footwork, not good form, and pretty slow on parries. But the one thing that let me win matches was aggression and beat attacks. The instructors and more skilled people could see it coming and dodge or otherwise counter it (especially after they figured out that was the one reliable tool in my box), but it was a fun technique to use for me. Cool to see these guys do pretty much the same thing, but just as a small part of a much bigger bag of tricks than I had.

No Netflix for me, and no luck on a quick search of torrents, but I'll keep my eye out for that show/series.

Many metrics to compare. Ecologically, that system sounds great for static locations with enough of an elevation gradient and reservoir areas to make it work. On the other hand it seems like the ecological damage done by constructing batteries, factories, and disposing of them is likely quite small compared to many other alternatives, particularly fossil fuels (which also have long-term scarcity concerns on top of plenty of other issues).

A major advantage of battery tech over hydro storage would be mobility. If the thing consuming energy doesn't sit in one place, hydro storage won't work. Another somewhat less significant advantage is the ability to install anywhere -- a battery farm recharged by mains and/or a solar/wind farm could be installed in places where hydro storage couldn't. And for one more item in favor of batteries, I'd wager that the land area footprint required for batteries is much smaller per kWH stored, although that might be wrong for extremely large reservoirs (ie. a hydroelectric dam, pretty much). But by the time you're getting to that large scale, the location requirements and ecological disruption are also much more extreme.

Anyway, I don't mean to pooh-pooh the idea of hydro storage -- it really does seem like a very good and ingenious idea where it would be applicable. But there's certainly room for improved battery tech, too. I don't think that we're going to get fully or even significantly weaned off of fossil fuels quite as fast as the video would have us hope for, either. Fossil fuels were the primary tool in our toolbox for a LONG time. And as the saying goes, since all we've had is that "hammer", we've started to think of everything as a nail.

Hadn't heard of that, but I get the concept. Cool idea.

Off the top of my head, I'm concerned about pump and generator efficiency. You're going to use some amount more energy to pump a volume of water up to the high basin than you will get back by gravity feeding it through generators. To be fair, efficiency is a problem with using and recharging chemical batteries as well, but the limited amount that I remember from college engineering courses tells me that efficiency in the electrical / solid state world tends to be more easily obtained than in the mechanical world.

And as another "to be fair", efficiency is a bigger concern for things like fossil fuels, where burning one unit of fuel produces a set amount of energy and you have to improve efficiency to get the most value out of that energy. With things like solar and wind being "free" energy when active but requiring storage for when the source is inactive (night / calm winds), efficiency still certainly matters, but not as much as with a scarce / non-renewable source of energy.

Anyway, I'd like to see concrete numbers comparing the utility and efficiency (in various metrics) of your hydro storage vs battery storage.

Really cool. I remember a CS class I took talking about frequency tables for longer chains (ala .zip as he mentioned), but I don't remember the same class mentioning Huffman trees first, which seems like it would clearly be a better way to explain.

Maybe I was out to lunch that day.

I'd wager that a reasonable percentage of the lucky guys that survived a full tour of duty wouldn't agree with the assessment of flak jackets being essentially "unstylish 40 pound vests".

Also, the video makes it sound like the success rate of coming back from a single mission was 25-33%. I think those numbers are more accurate for the rate of completing a full tour of 25 missions (before being rotated out). The number I recall is about a 4% loss rate on a single mission:
100%-4% = 96%
.96^25 = 36%

If the chances of coming back from a single mission were 33%:
.33^25 = (pretty much zero).

I wouldn't want to chance my life on a roll of the dice where I die unless I roll a 5 or a 6, but that's pretty close to accurate...


Those nitpicks aside, still a great video that gets the newer generations that are too young to either have a grandfather from the war or to have watched Memphis Belle a bit of a sense of what those guys went through.

As someone who went through 2 rounds of sex ed -- through my family's church (better than you think, but not by much), and public school (worse than you think; mostly consisting of "here's a picture of a dick with gonorrhea, LOOK AT IT"), it seems like videos like this available through YouTube are likely to be a massive improvement on practical sex ed. So kudos to the consistently awesome Green brothers for figuring that out and doing something about it!

However, I would point out a misleading bit in the YT text:
"Probabilities eventually collapse into reality, and then that couple no longer has a 2% chance of probability, they have a 100% chance, because they're pregnant, and everyone else has a 0% chance."

...Yeah, not really. That couple is still subject to the 2% probability, they just happen to be one of the statistically (mildly) unlikely examples that make the chance 2% instead of 0. And much more importantly, everyone else still has a 2% chance, not a 0% chance.

Misunderstanding statistics / probability in that way leads to all kinds of erroneous assumptions and behavior. Like putting a huge bet on red + even in roulette because the past 5 hits have been black + odd and red + even is "due". Or driving around with no seat belt because someone you know was just in an accident, thereby biting the "statistical bullet" and making everybody else safe for a while. Every roll of the dice is a new event with the same odds as the roll before it.

In the US, I believe that component in CRTs is called a "horizontal oscillator" instead of a "flyback transformer" (but could be that they are distinct yet related things). I've always been easily able to hear those, but am not usually bothered by them anymore since CRTs are fairly rare at this point. But this video proves that my 36 year old ears can still pick it up.

I feel like my hearing is bad -- I always want TVs louder than other people so I can make out what is being said, and in normal conversation it always seems like people are mumbling if there is any background noise at all. And I'm one of those annoying loud-talking Americans, especially if I'm talking on the phone (fortunately I don't get/answer many phone calls when I'm in public). But my hearing range pitch-wise seems to be exceptionally high, and not diminishing much with age (yet).

There's a fun easter egg for people like me at the end of that video. He put pulses of that CRT horizontal oscillator pitch where you can see the "Things You Might Know" text on the red background. I recognized it as Morse code, but couldn't decipher it even though I have an Amateur Radio license (I don't do code). In the comments at YT, people are claiming that the code translates to "never gonna give you up" -- so I guess he's Rickrolling people who both A) still have young enough ears to hear that 15kHz range *and* B) are old school enough to know / recognize Morse code. That's a pretty small target audience for an easter egg!