btcooper.bsky.social
Senior data officer at Dogs Trust Research. All about R, data viz, stats, and a whole host of other nerdy pursuits!
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Still up in the air whether this beats the end of the Mordin-Krogan-genophage arc, but both are incredibly well-done payoffs. It's frustrating that ME3 is like, 85% excellent...
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Imagining the look on people’s faces if these women had marched into a Games Workshop and beat seven shades of shit out of the local tabletop gaming nerds might give us some insight into how Admiral Horton might have felt upon being beaten 5 to nothing by Janel Okell.
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As far as I can tell, none of them survive to this day, with most having died in the early 2000s. But I can pretty confidently say - I bet they would have absolutely loved Warhammer 40k.
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But absolutely none of this would have been possible without the dedicated group of tacticians, mathematicians, modellers and plotters who were *exclusively* women, and who could outmaneuver even the most experienced of captains.
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After the war, Captain Roberts visited the Kriegsmarine’s headquarters, where they had a picture of him on the wall with the caption “This is your enemy” underneath it, which tells you how critical WATU was.
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WATU remained active throughout the war, developing new tactics, including plans for defending the Allied landings on D-day.
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Over the course of the war, the women at WATU trained over 5,000 officers. And in just over a year, German Admiral Karl Doenitz officially withdrew U-boats from the Atlantic, meaning WATU had achieved the mission they set out on!
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To his credit, Admiral Horton responded by both strongly endorsing the new tactics with the admiralty, and insisting that as many officers as possible took the course at WATU (this included Prince Phillip, future Duke of Edinburgh).
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So he asked to be introduced to his opponent. Imagine his shock upon meeting 20-year old Janet Okell, who had never even been to sea.
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And it must be stressed that this wasn’t some blustering Admiral going “But how could *I* lose?!”. His opponent was using novel tactics that he simply, with all his experience, could not beat.
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He played 3 times, and was sunk in all three. Shocked, he checked all the wargame logs to make sure there was no cheating, switched up his tactics, and tried again. Two more losses.
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Then one day, shortly after proposing a new maneuver called Beta Search, they were visited by Britain’s most senior and experienced submarine commander - Admiral Sir Max Horton, who wanted to see how it all worked. So he went through the wargames, playing to his strengths as the u-boat commander.
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But WATU had two missions - first, to develop these tactics, and second, to teach them to as many naval officers as possible. This was done primarily through examples in wargames, and the Wrens correspondingly got bloody good at these tactics.
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And it worked amazingly well in real life. Over time, the Kriegsmarine developed countermeasures, and WATU developed counter-countermeasures. And named them after fruit too. I shit you not - Pineapple, Strawberry and Banana were all real.
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The first thing they figured out is that standard naval doctrine in response to u-boat attacks was pretty ineffectual. So what *would* work? After a few weeks they came up with a protocol, which team member Jean Laidlaw named “raspberry”, as in “blowing a raspberry at Hitler". Incredible.
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They took over a floor of an office in Liverpool, cleared everything away, and spent hours at a time drawing maps and plans on the floor in chalk, moving model ships around, and taking turns commanding either the destroyers, or their u-boat targets, and trying to devise new approaches and tactics.
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But crucially, they had logic, time, and a ton of data coming in every day from ship radios. So what they did is decide to “wargame” everything.
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In total, 66 women served in what became known as the Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU), picked for their skill in logic, mathematics and strategy, not (and I can’t stress this enough) their naval skill. Many had never even _been_ on a ship.
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And since all experienced (read: male) sailors were deployed, he had to pick his team from the Women’s Royal Navy Service, commonly called the Wrens.
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All able-bodied men were basically already committed to the war, so tasked with finding a way to stop this was Captain Gilbert Roberts, whose tuberculosis prevented him from going to sea.
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Our story begins in the Atlantic during World War 2, against the backdrop of German U-boats decimating convoys of merchant shipping crucial to the British war effort.
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I also blame the Iron Man movie and Robert Downey Jnr for a lot of the bullshit modern tech bro billionaires get up to.
He made Tony Stark cool, whereas the comics had landed on him as a well-meaning but dangerous sociopath.
Every tech bro thinks they're Downey's Iron Man. Not the comics version.
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My advice would be to be wary of anyone who clearly is trying to fit "their standard install" to your house, rather than work out what your house actually needs. These things basically have to be bespoke. And splashing out for a larger/more efficient unit is usually worth it.
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Is it still the same "character" of an organist?
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I am exactly the same as this, which can be an issue when working with statistics. I don't have the same trouble when its expressed as code and variable though, so I guess that' counts as "longer" notation?
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A previously unpopular opinion that is (slowly) gaining traction is "actually starting all axes at 0 can be equally misleading"
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The skorpekh lord remains one of my absolute favourite 40k models