The academic's lament: decompressing is hard! After a full sabbatical of work that amounted to much more than I usually do in a year, I'm home seven weeks now and supposedly it's summer break. So I'm still doing my best to relax and not do a huge amount. It's the first time in two decades I'm doing it, just taking care of house maintenance and a few things here and there, and it's actually really stressful because academics have the imperative drilled into us that we must work in certain ways at certain times or we're doomed. Passing tenure means the doom is eliminated, which is a relief to my doctor who felt my ongoing level of stress was absolutely harming my overall health. So this is in part a concession to my wife and my doctor, but I didn't expect it to be this stressful. I've taken to doing electrical work in the walls, fixing the sprinklers, updating the guts of antique light fixtures, repairing fences, painting siding, you name it. I've written a few things too (another review is coming out this week!) and I'm meeting with PhD students as well as helping to plan next year's lecture series,. but I'm trying to hold them at arm's length until September. The flying monkeys of service are circling!

Finally posted a blog post! More coming. The summer is paradoxically the time in which I can get things done, and the time in which I am most busy. Or maybe that isn't a paradox. I don't know.

Yesterday I gave a talk at the State Department's Timbie Forum on the history of the US nuclear triad — both as a technological arrangement (bombers, ICBMs, SLBMs), and as a concept. It was only a 20 minute talk so I just glossed over some of it, but it seemed to go over very well. I've written up a longer discussion of the same topic on the blog today: A brief history of the nuclear triad. Which like all "brief histories" is longer than it probably ought to be (obviously I call it "brief" because I am indicating that it could be much, much longer!).

I want to thank everyone who participated in our second round of the book club. Hopefully interest continues to grow and we get more discussion next time.

I've been doing a bit of research on the 34th Infantry Division ("Red Bull") during WWII to present to my grandfather (he served in the division during the early 1960s) Several official 34th Infantry Division and Iowa and Minnesota National Guard web sites, as well as other sites, give the division's total battle casualties during WWII as 21,362; 3,737 killed in action, 14,165 wounded in action, and 3,460 missing in action. I have been unable to track down an original (read: archive) source for it.

However, the government publication Army Battle Casualties and Nonbattle Deaths in World War II: Final Report (1953) which lists all Army casualties from December 7, 1941 to December 31, 1946 notes quite authoritatively that it supersedes any and all casualty reports of any sort published during the war or after it. The document, in a sense, is the final word on US Army casualty tallies for WWII.

The document says in the case of the 34th Infantry Division;

Total battle casualties

Total deaths among battle casualties

I also recently discovered the station list of the 34th Infantry Division before they converted from a square division to a triangular one, c. February 1941.

Looking for sources on Germanic tribes from point of contact with the romans onward. Is Tacitus the best option? Additionally modern research/papers on the same subject would be welcomed.

Watching The Last Kingdom on Netflix which is set during King Alfred's reign.

I realize it's a tv show but there are no archers in any faction. Is that even close to correct? If so when did the famous English longbow come into play?

Are meta-comments allowed?

Have you all considered setting up an admin bot to automatically leave a comment on all new posts for non-authority comments? I think that the way that r/writingprompts does this (example: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/4t1dvx/wp_its_halfway_through_2017_and_already_it_has/) is pretty interesting as it gives people the ability to post something that gets stuck in an automatically collapsed comment so it doesn't muck up the real answers, and it allows cover for even stricter policing of the real comments since everyone knows that non-authority posts are going to get pulled.

I know that there have been posts in the past that I've wanted to just chime in and say something like, "I've always wondered about this too, I heard about it in X book, Y podcast, or Z website". Stuff that isn't off-topic, also isn't an answer, but is more support for a conversation thread than just an upvote (which sometimes seems like farting in a windstorm).