text:
RAC Presents "Soley Schubert," with Tomas Cotik, violin and Tao Lin, piano
With insight from writing a dissertation on Schubert, Tomas Cotik joined with Tao Lin to record a CD that became the 2013 MusicWeb International's Recording of the Year. Join us for two days of historical musical insight and virtuosity with Schubert's complete works for violin and piano. "Urgently recommended," by Fanfare magazine, and described as "duet playing at a very high level. Not once to Cotik and Lin fall into the trap of becoming soloist and accompanist. Instead, they treat us to an equally weighted partnership that glories in changing colorations and shared emphasis." Hailed by Michael Tilson Thomas as an "excellent violinist," this will prove to be an incredible and enriching weekend.
Tomas Cotik, violin and Tao Lin, piano started performing as a duo in 2011 through a shared passion, devotion and commitment to chamber music. The first volume or their complete works of Schubert for Violin and Piano was released in 2012 on Centaur Records to rave reviews. Fanfare magazine calls the program of their debut album "outstanding" and praises the performance for its "genialitybrilliancepure toneprofound scholarshiplofty musicianshipboldness of gesture subtlety rich timbral nuance." This recording was also nominated on MusicwebInternational as "Recording of the year".
In 2013 NAXOS released their album "Tango Nuevo" with music by Astor Piazzolla for violin and piano described by the critics as "among the very best" Piazzolla albums. 2014 sees the release of Schubert's Sonatinas on Centaur Records and numerous live performances around the country. Tomas Cotik and Tao Lin have just signed a long-term contract with Centaur Record to record four albums with Mozart's complete Sonatas for violin and piano.
Occidental Center for the Arts (View)
3850 Doris Murphy Court (Graton Rd & Bohemian Hwy)
Occidental, CA 95465
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|Wheelchair Accessible: Yes!|


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10th Feb 2011, 22:23
Bought my 4th Ranger in 2004, all of which had over 200K at on point in my ownership...
The current is a 2000 XLT 4x4 4.0L. It currently has 223,500 miles on it, and is driven every day. It was used for the first 5 years I owned it as my personal vehicle while on a local fire department, so it was driven hard and put away wet on many occasions.
At around 120K I lost reverse in the tranny. Had it rebuilt by a local shop, they found the reverse band had broken and punched a hole in the casing. He patched it together, and I got about 10K on that rebuild until it totally went. Got a replacement tranny out of a 2000 Windstar, and it shifts better than the original!
Normal replacement items other than that, brakes, tires, etc. etc... It now has a few problems, ABS sensor and such, and it is just now starting to burn oil, about 1 quart every 5K miles. I get roughly 17 MPG out of every tank with regular, not-so-cheap gas.
My second Ranger was a 1994, which my dad is still driving with almost 300K on it! It's a 2x4 3.0L extended cab. Body is rusting out, but motor and tranny (both original) still work like the day it was made!
I've always been a Ford man, and will continue to be a Ford person. After all, every once in a while you'll get a "lemon", don't let that fool ya though!
4th Aug 2011, 19:54
I had the same problem on and off, but now for the last year it's fine. What was wrong with yours?
4th Jan 2012, 17:31
Agreed! I have a 2000 XLT, 5 speed manual,
2.5 cyl.. Other than a bad TPS wire (caused engine surging), and a bad blend door actuator, no problems.
19th Feb 2012, 13:01
I too have had the same happen to my Ranger. OD light flashing, speedometer not working, shifting hard, and not at all at times.
I always thought it was something electrical, because it did shift to all the gears, but not at the right time. Very erratic!!!
After hours of trying different stuff, I found that there was water in a wiring connection under the truck. The connection that is right under the driver's seat that feeds the whole cab. Blew the water out, a little WD 40, and the truck drives like it was new.
Hope this helps somebody, and saves a lot of money. Good luck!
2nd Jul 2012, 11:08
We are also experiencing a similar situation. Just purchased a 2000 Ford Ranger XLT 4x4 with 140,000 miles on it. Need to pass emissions in Georgia, misfire on 4, 5 & 6. Took it for a diagnostic test. Cracked head that somebody put Bar's leak in and removed the thermostat to prevent it from overheating. We are told we need a new engine, because they do not recommend rebuilding a head on an engine that already has over 100,000 miles. Any comments? Anyone? Help!!!
3rd Mar 2013, 18:08
Water in the wiring harness connector was a great call. Drove thru a puddle and symptoms started within a mile. Thanks a ton for the outstanding suggestion!
10th Apr 2013, 19:54
The actual clunk you're hearing in the back is something that Ford put in the smaller trucks, so that the rear end has some flex in it, so that whenever you get stuck or something and spin the tires, all of the stress won't break the rear axle; it just has a joint that allows it flex forward, then rock back whenever you come to a stop.
6th Apr 2014, 16:35
My OD light would come on and do almost the same as what you said. I changed a part on the diff in the rear end. I found it on YouTube. Changed it for less than 25 dollars. OD light would flash.


Walter live tweets the SOTU via Jeff Dunham, throws shade on MSNBC
‘Another win for Bing’: Google blows off Flag Day, Army’s birthday with World Cup doodle [pics]
‘She was NO hero!’ Thatcher-haters loathe inclusion of Iron Lady in ‘great women’ ad [video]
‘A Tale of Two Search Engines’: Bing honors Flag Day; Google blows it off again
Bing vs. Google: Which search engine did a better job honoring Memorial Day?
Boston Marathon bombing
Wow: Google, Bing show clear view of boat where Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is hiding [pics]
While Google honors Cesar Chavez, Bing delivers Easter eggs [correction added]
Bing puts up wonderful 9/11 tribute; Google also remembers, Yahoo ignores
Google celebrates Independence Day with communism
Google ignores Flag Day, U.S. Army’s birthday; Bing flies flag proudly
CBS paid actress Eliza Dushku millions in secret #MeToo settlement
Jeff Flake asks ‘The Daily Show’ how he can get one of these blankets made out of his ‘meaningless tweets’
Hey, who wants to read Jeff Flake’s farewell address to Congress?
‘Put the beer goggles down’: Chris Cillizza says Chuck and Nancy beat Trump at his own game
Islamic State claims Strasbourg gunman, killed in shootout with police, as a ‘soldier’
Ross Douthat asks who the conservative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is, gets his answer
Attention ladies, it’s time again to heal from your toxic whiteness (for a fee)
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text:
In which country CA is highly paid?
Average Salary – US$113,000 According to a survey by CPA Canada, a CPA with over 15 years experience makes an average of CA$150,000 annually.
The top paying industries are holding conglomerate, mining and oil & gas.
CPAs located in Calgary, Toronto and Edmonton are the highest paid in the country..
Who Earns More CA or MBBS?
An average CA will earn more than an average doctor. I am a 25 year old CA and my father is a MBBS doctor. … CA earns more not only from doctors but also from CS,CMA.
Is CPA better than CA?
CPA vs CA Career Path Differences Both types of accountants can work in the public and private sectors. … Chartered accountants typically work outside the United States, while CPAs drastically outnumber CAs in the United States’ workforce. If you want to work in the US, you will most likely want to become a CPA.
Is CA globally recognized?
CA is one of the most recognized and high yielding courses in India but globally it is not that much recognized. … Whereas if you are a CA, you are geographically limited as most part of your job will be based around the Indian Accounting Standards.
What is the salary of CA in abroad?
6-7 lakhs is the average salary offered to a Chartered Accountant in India. Packages outside India are much higher upto 75 lakhs. Every year, ICAI conduct campus placement and according to the last year stats average salary of CAs in India is 7.36 lakhs.
Can a CA work abroad?
Indian Chartered Accountants can only have jobs in foreign where Indian operations are involved or else you need to pursue the locally recognized course in that country, check what exemptions you get because of your Indian education and pursue that course to do practice in both – Foreign Operations and Indian …
Can a CA earn in crores?
All friends: There is only one option and that is someone give that money to us otherwise, in this life it’s not possible to earn 1 crores, forget crores.. Yes, this conversation is a extract of Chartered Accountant fraternity members…
Is Indian CA degree valid in USA?
Just like Chartered Accountants (CA’s) are granted a license to practice the profession of Accountancy & Taxation in India, similarly Certified Public Accountants (CPA) are granted the license to practice in US.
What is CA called in USA?
chartered accountantA chartered accountant (CA) is an international accounting designation granted to accounting professionals in many countries around the world, aside from the United States. In the United States, the equivalent to the CA designation is a certified public accountant (CPA).
How much do CA earn in USA?
A person working as a Chartered Accountant in United States typically earns around 90,400 USD per year. Salaries range from 48,800 USD (lowest) to 136,000 USD (highest). This is the average yearly salary including housing, transport, and other benefits.
Which country CA is best?
Switzerland. As one of the most important financial locations in the world, it’s little surprise that Switzerland is ranked so highly on this list. With an economy that is built upon finance, banking and professional services, Switzerland is one of the most highly sought-after destinations for accountants.
Is CPA easy than CA?
Are CPA Exams Tougher than CA in India? (CA vs CPA Course Difficulty) No, CA is the course which is intense and lengthy because of its holistic approach and diversified and sectoral economy of India. whereas CPA is totally focused on giving taxation and accounting knowledge of US.
Is CA a government job?
Can Chartered Accountants have a government job? The answer to the question invariably is Yes. Chartered Accountants and especially experienced ones can get a government job along with good salary packages.
Is CA better than IAS?
IAS officers are highly respected people, better than CA’s but CA’s are highly regarded. More than Money I would suggest you to choose a career where in you can put in your interest so as to clear the exam. Both the exams are highly competitive, require long hours of efforts to clear.
Who is the richest CA in India?
Kumar Mangalam BirlaKumar Mangalam Birla stands out as one of the most famous Chartered Accountants in India as well as the richest CA that the country boasts of today. He runs a business empire with a market value of over $40 billion.
Which country pays highest salary?
Top 10 Countries with the Highest Salary for WorkersLuxembourg. Luxembourg is a small country situated in western Europe.United States. The United States accounts for approximately 25% of the global GDP. … Switzerland. Switzerland is famous for its watches, chocolates, and of course, the Alps. … Norway. … Netherlands. … Australia. … Denmark. … Canada. … More items…
Can a CA become CEO?
In India, Chartered Accountancy (CA) is one of the most sought-after career options. … A career in accountancy is also considered one of the best routes to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) role.
Who is the best CA of India?
Few Know That These 11 Highly Successful Indians Are CAs By QualificationMotilal Oswal. … Piyush Goyal. … TN Manoharan. … Aditya Puri. … Rakesh Jhunjhunwala. … TV Mohandas Pai. … K Rahman Khan. … S Gurumurthy. S Gurumurthy is a well known journalist and a successful Chartered Accountant.More items…•

domain: geography


New Braunfels City Council
On Monday, New Braunfels City Council selected resident Wanda Sandlin to serve as board member for the local housing authority. Except, Sandlin is dead.
According to KSAT, New Braunfels City Council announced that Sandlin would fill the open position only to be informed that she had died in August
Mayor Barron Casteel told KSAT that the board usually calls applicants
before voting on the appointment, which was on Monday evening's agenda
. Casteel said "someone called Sandlin," but admitted to KSAT that Sandlin didn't answer. Thus, her name was left on the list of applicants
One of the city council members, Wayne Peters, told KSAT that the board will "most likely" ask the City of New Braunfels to reevaluate the selection process
According to KENS, the city is also looking for someone to replace Sandlin
, though she was never really in the position.
RIP Wanda Sandlin.


|Topic Review (Newest First)|
|03-16-2019 11:44 PM|
|DevilDog6154||lol. so i went with the alt that was in the truck. after weeks of my truck sitting i finally got to start her man i tell ya the excitement and happiness that i'm feeling right now, its like the day i first set eyes on it. now just have to find a clutch hose and she will be drive able.|
|03-16-2019 07:35 PM|
Originally Posted by ArcticDriver View Post
|03-16-2019 05:50 PM|
|ArcticDriver||You would have to find the grumpy old grey haired senior mechanic to remember working on that vintage of truck.|
|03-15-2019 11:58 PM|
|DevilDog6154||yea seems everyone i call to work on these trucks or get advice from them they laugh at me and tell me they dont work on them much anymore and the parts are hard to find.|
|03-15-2019 12:54 AM|
|8gitmusik1||Using a reputable local rebuilder for your starter or alternator will give you the best quality, and is probably your best option but these shops are getting harder to find, as the few old, established and good guys that have the experience at least, in my area, have retired, or passed. Or new, from Oreillys or Napa, AZone, even if the parts are from asia, they can last a good while. Good luck with your fix.|
|03-15-2019 12:50 AM|
|03-14-2019 12:07 AM|
Originally Posted by DevilDog6154 View Post
Check out DB ELECTRICAL
I think this starter will work for your 7.3-nt-idi not 100% sure if is this one for you but, go to their website and enter your vehicle info to be sure.
Item Description 7.3L Ford Diesel Gear Reduction Starter 85-94 Model years
Part number - SND0027
STARTER NOT OEM
$94.28Total *Free Shipping
Customer Service # 1-800-753-2242
Its a Nippo clone but as aGR starter its a decent design and better starting than stock.
They also have ALTERNATORS for your vehicle and may have the 3G higher capacity (if your looking to do the conversion and go serpentine belt )
They also have v-belt alternators that would go on your 1990 if your seeking now. They can be had at a good price and they have a fair return 1-year no questions warranty.
I used the GR starter above and have nothing bad to say and they shipped it and I recieved it in 24 hours with no upcharge for receiving it that quickly.
Hope this helps you.
And, just for the record, no I dont work for them or have any interest with them, just used their product.
Btw, if ya need glow plug harness or push button glow plug complete new wiring harness and update to stancor/white rodgers contactor conversion, PM me and I'll give ya a great recommendation on doing that.
Good luck DD ... hope things work out.
|03-12-2019 06:51 PM|
|DevilDog6154||big update i finally got time to take things off and look at them, the alternator is bad and starter and i found that the big wire from the battery to the starter rubbed a hole in the cover and grounded out by the oil pan so i think that was the cause. so replacing the alternator i was thinking since i have emergency lights and a few more then most lights, would i be able to put a bigger on that puts out more amps or would that just mess things up? my truck does not have ambulance package.|
|01-30-2019 09:12 AM|
|01-30-2019 01:38 AM|
|DevilDog6154||so i got my truck back, now i need a new wiring harness for it. does anyone know where i might find one?|
|01-13-2019 10:29 AM|
|DevilDog6154||yea i will soon as i know.|
|01-12-2019 04:12 AM|
|ArcticDriver||I hope you will let us know the results.|
|01-12-2019 12:12 AM|
|DevilDog6154||The motor was running when it happen even after the power loss. The only reason the motor shut off was cause my foot come off the clutch pedal. No I haven't check anything it's at a friend's shop so he can do the assessment for the insurance.|
|01-11-2019 06:10 AM|
Originally Posted by DevilDog6154 View Post
Did the engine actually start when the fire occurred?
Have you inspected the batteries and checked their voltage?
Have you inspected and improved the ground connections yet to both the frame and the starter that were damaged?
Have you attempted to start the truck since this happened? I am not suggesting you attempt to start it, I just wonder if you have tried. I would inspect the starter before attempting to supply power to it again.
I hate to speculate without you first doing a further visual inspection of the starter but my dad reminded me of a starter on an old tractor that failed to disengage many years ago and the engine rpm kept rotating the starter and it burned up. He remembers the starter actually became a generator and produced current. This back amperage then started burning up wiring. (Fortunately there is not much wiring on those... Lol
It was an old WD45 with its original 6v converted to a 12v but the problem was it was a push button type starter. The push button had either corroded or maybe had ice build up and remained pushed in rather than springing back out once the engine turned over.
I guess it would be possible for this to have happened with your starter if the solenoid stayed engaged.
|01-11-2019 12:23 AM|
|DevilDog6154||Thank you all for your help. The starter was acting up the day before and day the fire happen so does that mean it caused it?|
|This thread has more than 15 replies. Click here to review the whole thread.|


text:
There are a lot of misconceptions and stereotypes about mental health and mental illness in our society. One example is intrusive thoughts, which you might not know by name, but have likely seen represented in the media. What are intrusive thoughts? Probably not what you think. While many people erroneously associate intrusive, repeated thoughts with a sign that someone is "evil" or "fixated" on causing harm to themselves or others — or worse, that someone's thoughts or obsessions reveal their true, "evil" nature or humanity — the reality is very different. What we think about is often outside of our conscious control; indeed, for anyone who suffers from anxiety, we all know first hand how very true that is if we could turn our thoughts off, we would.
Although not recognized as a diagnosis of their own in the DSM-5 (basically the Gray's Anatomy of psychology), intrusive thoughts as a symptom correlate with many anxiety-based conditions, such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). As explained by the National Institute of Mental Health, people who experience unwanted thoughts can fixate on any number of things, including "fear of germs, dirt, or intruders; acts of violence; hurting loved ones; sexual acts; conflicts with religious beliefs; or being overly tidy." While intrusive thoughts are often associated with trauma or phobias, they can develop about anything, and are not the same for everybody.
Find five key things to know about intrusive thoughts below. If some of these ring true for you, don't hesitate to talk to a mental health professional; your mental health always matters.
Intrusive Thoughts Can Happen At Any Age
Intrusive thoughts can impact people of any age. The NIMH explains that many anxiety disorders and symptoms manifest before the age of 19, including intrusive thoughts and/or OCD, but they still can develop at other times in life, too. It's normal for intrusive thoughts to fluctuate based on other issues, like your stress level, throughout your life as well.
Having Intrusive Thoughts Is Not The Same As Acting On Them
As Robert L. Leahy, Ph.D., points out at Psychology Today, having intrusive thoughts does not necessarily mean that will you act on these thoughts. Writes Leahy, "People with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder think, 'If I think I will lose control, I will' or 'If I think that Satan might possess me, he will,'" but the truth is that having these thoughts does not mean they are reality. In fact, Leahy says, allowing yourself to think your thoughts and not suppress them is actually healthier than trying to bury them entirely.
Intrusive Thoughts Can Be Debilitating
For people who experience intrusive thoughts, it can feel debilitating. As explained at OCD information and support project IntrusiveThoughts.org, some people who experience intrusive thoughts end up having elaborate rituals, checks, or repeated conversations as a means of dealing with their unwanted thoughts. These can have a huge impact on your work, social life, and personal happiness when these things become obsessions or take up dramatic amounts of time or energy.
Intrusive Thoughts Happen To Everybody
As Hannah Reese, Ph.D., explains at Psychology Today, everyone experiences intrusive thoughts at some point or another. She uses her example of being a mother and at points having horrible images of her child being injured. While certainly upsetting, these intrusive thoughts are not necessarily "abnormal" or unusual in themselves.
There Are Ways To Get Help
Like with many mental health issues, people who suffer from intrusive thoughts often feel very alone and misunderstood. Luckily, as the NIMH explains, there are ways to get help. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy tends to be particularly useful as it helps break behaviors and rituals associated with intrusive thoughts, as well as healthy coping skills. Some people also take medication to help with symptoms. The point is, this isn't something you need to live with alone.
Images: Lourdes Balduque/Moment/Getty Images; Giphy

domain: psychology


text:
ADRIAN — More security cameras for public places, such as the city’s skate park, is dead for the time being.
The City Commission gave Adrian Police Department the go-ahead to apply for the Firehouse Subs Public Safety grant in August.
The grant could have netted the city up to $25,000 of additional funding with the goal of establishing “a camera system within the city that will feed monitors at the police station,” chief Vince Emrick had said.
Emrick said Monday the department did not receive the grant.
“There are some other opportunities we are looking into, but no new applications at present,” he said in an email.
Parks and busy intersections were intended locations with the additional cameras. Watching in real time from an office and recorded footage of an incident were hopes for the camera system.
Vandalism and damage at the city skate park was one issue raised by commissioners last year that could be deterred with additional cameras.
Though the Firehouse grant did not come through, the city and APD were successful in another grant from last year.
Two handheld narcotics analyzers were obtained with the grant.
Thermofisher Scientific TruNarc devices operate by using a laser that is directed through clear plastic or glass packaging at the substance without taking the substance out of the package. It uses Raman spectroscopy to identify and display the illicit substance, as well as common materials used to “cut” drugs, on its screen.
The drug scanners can detect 450 substances in the field without requiring officers to take substances out of packaging.
The devices will be used by both APD and the Lenawee County Sheriff’s Office.

domain: news


text:
Yogi Ramacharaka, William Walker Atkinson
The Hindu-Yogi Science of Breath
CHAPTER I. SALAAM.
The Western student is apt to be somewhat confused in his ideas regarding the Yogis and their philosophy and practice. Travelers to India have written great tales about the hordes of fakirs, mendicants and mountebanks who infest the great roads of India and the streets of its cities, and who impudently claim the title "Yogi." The Western student is scarcely to be blamed for thinking of the typical Yogi as an emaciated, fanatical, dirty, ignorant Hindu, who either sits in a fixed posture until his body becomes ossified, or else holds his arm up in the air until it becomes stiff and withered and forever after remains in that position, or perhaps clenches his fist and holds it tight until his fingernails grow through the palms of his hands. That these people exist is true, but their claim to the title "Yogi" seems as absurd to the true Yogi as does the claim to the title "Doctor" on the part of the man who pares one's corns seem to the eminent surgeon, or as does the title of "Professor," as assumed by the street corner vendor of worm medicine, seem to the President of Harvard or Yale.
There have been for ages past in India and other Oriental countries men who devoted their time and attention to the development of Man, physically, mentally and spiritually. The experience of generations of earnest seekers has been handed down for centuries from teacher to pupil, and gradually a definite Yogi science was built up. To these investigations and teachings was finally applied the term "Yogi," from the Sanscrit word "Yug," meaning "to join." From the same source comes the English word "yoke," with a similar meaning. Its use in connection with these teachings is difficult to trace, different authorities giving different explanations, but probably the most ingenious is that which holds that it is intended as the Hindu equivalent for the idea conveyed by the English phrase, "getting into harness," or "yoking up," as the Yogi undoubtedly "gets into harness" in his work of controlling the body and mind by the Will.
Yoga is divided into several branches, ranging from that which teaches the control of the body, to that which teaches the attainment of the highest spiritual development. In the work we will not go into the higher phases of the subject, except when the "Science of Breath" touches upon the same. The "Science of Breath" touches Yoga at many points, and although chiefly concerned with the development and control of the physical, has also its psychic side, and even enters the field of spiritual development.
In India there are great schools of Yoga, comprising thousands of the leading minds of that great country. The Yoga philosophy is the rule of life for many people. The pure Yogi teachings, however, are given only to the few, the masses being satisfied with the crumbs which fall from the tables of the educated classes, the Oriental custom in this respect being opposed to that of the Western world. But Western ideas are beginning to have their effect even in the Orient, and teachings which were once given only to the few are now freely offered to any who are ready to receive them. The East and the West are growing closer together, and both are profiting by the close contact, each influencing the other.
The Hindu Yogis have always paid great attention to the Science of Breath, for reasons which will be apparent to the student who reads this book. Many Western writers have touched upon this phase of the Yogi teachings, but we believe that it has been reserved for the writer of this work to give to the Western student, in concise form and simple language, the underlying principles of the Yogi Science of Breath, together with many of the favorite Yogi breathing exercises and methods. We have given the Western idea as well as the Oriental, showing how one dovetails into the other. We have used the ordinary English terms, almost entirely, avoiding the Sanscrit terms, so confusing to the average Western reader.
The first part of the book is devoted to the physical phase of the Science of Breath; then the psychic and mental sides are considered, and finally the spiritual side is touched upon.
We may be pardoned if we express ourselves as pleased with our success in condensing so much Yogi lore into so few pages, and by the use of words and terms which may be understood by anyone. Our only fear is that its very simplicity may cause some to pass it by as unworthy of attention, while they pass on their way searching for something "deep," mysterious and non-understandable. However, the Western mind is eminently practical, and we know that it is only a question of a short time before it will recognize the practicability of this work.
We greet our students, with our most profound salaam, and bid them be seated for their first lessons in the Yogi Science of Breath.
CHAPTER II. "BREATH IS LIFE."
Life is absolutely dependent upon the act of breathing. "Breath is
Differ as they may upon details of theory and terminology, the
Oriental and the Occidental agree upon these fundamental principles.
To breathe is to live, and without breath there is no life. Not only are the higher animals dependent upon breath for life and health, but even the lower forms of animal life must breathe to live, and plant life is likewise dependent upon the air for continued existence.
The infant draws in a long, deep breath, retains it for a moment to extract from it its life-giving properties, and then exhales it in a long wail, and lo! its life upon earth has begun. The old man gives a faint gasp, ceases to breathe, and life is over. From the first faint breath of the infant to the last gasp of the dying man, it is one long story of continued breathing. Life is but a series of breaths.
Breathing may be considered the most important of all of the functions of the body, for, indeed, all the other functions depend upon it. Man may exist some time without eating; a shorter time without drinking; but without breathing his existence may be measured by a few minutes.
And not only is Man dependent upon Breath for life, but he is largely dependent upon correct habits of breathing for continued vitality and freedom from disease. An intelligent control of our breathing power will lengthen our days upon earth by giving us increased vitality and powers of resistance, and, on the other hand, unintelligent and careless breathing will tend to shorten our days, by decreasing our vitality and laying us open to disease.
Man in his normal state had no need of instruction in breathing. Like the lower animal and the child, he breathed naturally and properly, as nature intended him to do, but civilization has changed him in this and other respects. He has contracted improper methods and attitudes of walking, standing and sitting, which have robbed him of his birthright of natural and correct breathing. He has paid a high price for civilization. The savage, to-day, breathes naturally, unless he has been contaminated by the habits of civilized man.
The percentage of civilized men who breathe correctly is quite small, and the result is shown in contracted chests and stooping shoulders, and the terrible increase in diseases of the respiratory organs, including that dread monster, Consumption, "the white scourge." Eminent authorities have stated that one generation of correct breathers would regenerate the race, and disease would be so rare as to be looked upon as a curiosity. Whether looked at from the standpoint of the Oriental or Occidental, the connection between correct breathing and health is readily seen and explained.
The Occidental teachings show that the physical health depends very materially upon correct breathing. The Oriental teachers not only admit that their Occidental brothers are right, but say that in addition to the physical benefit derived from correct habits of breathing, Man's mental power, happiness, self-control, clear-sightedness, morals, and even his spiritual growth may be increased by an understanding of the "Science of Breath." Whole schools of Oriental Philosophy have been founded upon this science, and this knowledge when grasped by the Western races, and by them put to the practical use which is their strong point, will work wonders among them. The theory of the East, wedded to the practice of the West, will produce worthy offspring.

domain: literature


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Learning to Efficiently Sample from
Diffusion Probabilistic Models
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have emerged as a powerful family of generative models that can yield high-fidelity samples and competitive log-likelihoods across a range of domains, including image and speech synthesis. Key advantages of DDPMs include ease of training, in contrast to generative adversarial networks, and speed of generation, in contrast to autoregressive models. However, DDPMs typically require hundreds-to-thousands of steps to generate a high fidelity sample, making them prohibitively expensive for high dimensional problems. Fortunately, DDPMs allow trading generation speed for sample quality through adjusting the number of refinement steps as a post process. Prior work has been successful in improving generation speed through handcrafting the time schedule by trial and error. We instead view the selection of the inference time schedules as an optimization problem, and introduce an exact dynamic programming algorithm that finds the optimal discrete time schedules for any pre-trained DDPM. Our method exploits the fact that ELBO can be decomposed into separate KL terms, and given any computation budget, discovers the time schedule that maximizes the training ELBO exactly. Our method is efficient, has no hyper-parameters of its own, and can be applied to any pre-trained DDPM with no retraining. We discover inference time schedules requiring as few as 32 refinement steps, while sacrificing less than 0.1 bits per dimension compared to the default 4,000 steps used on ImageNet 64x64 (Ho et al., 2020; Nichol and Dhariwal, 2021).
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) (Sohl-Dickstein et al., 2015; Ho et al., 2020) have emerged as a powerful class of generative models, which model the data distribution through an iterative denoising process. DDPMs have been applied successfully to a variety of applications, including unconditional image generation (Song and Ermon, 2019; Ho et al., 2020; Song et al., 2021; Nichol and Dhariwal, 2021), shape generation (Cai et al., 2020), text-to-speech (Chen et al., 2021; Kong et al., 2020) and single image super-resolution (Saharia et al., 2021; Li et al., 2021).
DDPMs are easy to train, featuring a simple denoising objective (Ho et al., 2020) with noise schedules that successfully transfer across different models and datasets. This contrasts to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) (Goodfellow et al., 2014), which require an inner-outer loop optimization procedure that often entails instability and requires careful hyperparameter tuning. DDPMs also admit a simple non-autoregressive inference process; this contrasts to autoregressive models with often prohibitive computational costs on high dimensional data. The DDPM inference process starts with samples from the corresponding prior noise distribution (e.g., standard Gaussian), and iteratively denoises the samples under the fixed noise schedule. However, DDPMs often need hundreds-to-thousands of denoising steps (each involving a feedforward pass of a large neural network) to achieve strong results. While this process is still much faster than autoregressive models, this is still often computationally prohibitive, especially when modeling high dimensional data.
There has been much recent work focused on improving the sampling speed of DDPMs. WaveGrad (Chen et al., 2021) introduced a manually crafted schedule requiring only 6 refinement steps; however, this schedule seems to be only applicable to the vocoding task where there is a very strong conditioning signal. Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIMs) (Song et al., 2020a) accelerate sampling from pre-trained DDPMs by relying on a family of non-Markovian processes. They accelerate the generative process through taking multiple steps in the diffusion process. However, DDIMs sacrifice the ability to compute log-likelihoods. Nichol and Dhariwal (2021) also explored the use of ancestral sampling with a subsequence of the original denoising steps, trying both a uniform stride and other hand-crafted strides. San-Roman et al. (2021) improve few-step sampling further by training a separate model after training a DDPM to estimate the level of noise, and modifying inference to dynamically adjust the noise schedule at every step to match the predicted noise level.
All these fast-sampling techniques rely on a key property of DDPMs – there is a decoupling between the training and inference schedule. The training schedule need not be the same as the inference schedule, e.g., a diffusion model trained to use 1000 steps may actually use only 10 steps during inference. This decoupling characteristic is typically not found in other generative models. In past work, the choice of inference schedule was often considered a hyperpameter selection problem, and often selected via intuition or extensive hyperparmeter exploration (Chen et al., 2021). In this work, we view the choice of inference schedule path as an independent optimization problem, wherein we attempt to learn the best schedule. Our approach relies on a dynamic programming algorithm, where given a fixed budget of refinement steps and a pre-trained DDPM, we find the set of timesteps that maximizes the corresponding evidence lower bound (ELBO). As an optimization objective, the ELBO has a key decomposability property: the total ELBO is the sum of individual KL terms, and for any two inference paths, if the timesteps contiguously occur in both, they share a common KL term, therefore admitting memoization.
Our main contributions are the following:
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We introduce a dynamic programming algorithm that finds the optimal inference paths based on the ELBO for all possible computation budgets of refinement steps. The algorithm searches over timesteps, only requiring neural network forward passes. It only needs to be applied once to a pre-trained DDPM, does not require training or retraining a DDPM, and is applicable to both time-discrete and time-continuous DDPMs.
We experiment with DDPM models from prior work. On both CIFAR10 and ImageNet 64x64, we discover schedules which require only 32 refinement steps, yet sacrifice only 0.1 bits per dimension compared to their original counterparts with 1,000 and 4,000 steps, respectively.
2 Background on Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) (Ho et al., 2020; Sohl-Dickstein et al., 2015) are defined in terms of a forward Markovian diffusion process and a learned reverse process . The forward diffusion process gradually adds Gaussian noise to a data point through iterations,
where the scalar parameters determine the variance of the noise added at each diffusion step, subject to . The learned reverse process aims to model by inverting the forward process, gradually removing noise from signal starting from pure Gaussian noise ,
The parameters of the reverse process can be optimized by maximizing the following variational lower bound on the training set,
where . Nichol and Dhariwal (2021) have demonstrated that training DDPMs by maximizing the ELBO yields competitive log-likelihood scores on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet achieving and bits per dimension respectively.
Two notable properties of Gaussian diffusion process that help formulate DDPMs tractably and efficiently include:
Given the marginal distribution of given in (7), one can sample from the independently for different and perform SGD on a randomly chosen KL term in (6). Furthermore, given that the posterior distribution of given and is Gaussian, one can compute each KL term in (6) between two Gaussians in closed form and avoid high variance Monte Carlo estimation.
3 Linking DDPMs to Continuous Time Affine Diffusion Processes
Before describing our approach to efficiently sampling from DDPMs, it is helpful to link DDPMs to continuous time affine diffusion processes, as it shows the compatibility of our approach to both time-discrete and time-continuous DDPMs. Let denote a data point drawn from the empirical distribution of interest and let denote a stochastic process for defined through an affine diffusion process through the following stochastic differential equation (SDE):
where are integrable functions satisfying and .
Following Särkkä and Solin (2019) (section 6.1), we can compute the exact marginals for any . This differs from Ho et al. (2020), where their marginals are those of the discretized diffusion via Euler-Maruyama, where it is not possible to compute marginals outside the discretization since they are formulated as cumulative products. We get:
where . Since these integrals are difficult to work with, we instead propose to define the marginals directly as
where are differentiable, monotonic functions satisfying . Then, by implicit differentiation it follows that the corresponding diffusion is
To complete our formulation, let and . Then, it follows that for any we have that
Note that (13) and (14) can be thought of as generalizations of (7) and (8) to continuous time diffusion, i.e., this formulation not only includes that of Ho et al. (2020) as a special case, but also allows training DDPMs by sampling like Song et al. (2021), and is compatible with any choice of SDE (as opposed to Song et al. (2021) where one is limited to marginals and posteriors where the integrals in Equation 10 can be solved analytically). More importantly, we can also perform inference with any ancestral sampling path (i.e., the timesteps can attain continuous values) by formulating the reverse process in terms of the posterior distribution as
justifying the compatibility of our main approach with time-continuous DDPMs. We note that this reverse process is also mathematically equivalent to a reverse process based on a time-discrete DDPM derived from a subsequence of the original timesteps as done by Song et al. (2020a); Nichol and Dhariwal (2021).
For the case of in the reverse process, we follow the parametrization of Ho et al. (2020) to obtain discretized log likelihoods and compare our log likelihoods fairly with prior work.
4 Learning to Efficiently Sample from DDPMs
We now introduce our dynamic programming (DP) approach. In general, after training a DDPM, there is a decoupling between training and inference schedules. One can use a different inference schedule compared to training. Additionally, we can optimize a loss or reward function with respect to the timesteps themselves (after the DDPM is trained). In this paper, we use the ELBO as our objective, however we note that it is possible to directly optimize the timesteps with other metrics.
4.1 Optimizing the ELBO
In our work, we choose to optimize ELBO as our objective. We rely on one key property of ELBO, its decomposability. We first make a few observations. The DDPM models the transition probability , or the cost to move from . Given a pretrained DDPM, one can construct any valid ELBO path through it as long as two properties hold:
The path starts at and ends at .
The path is contiguously connected without breaks.
We can construct an ELBO path that entails refinement steps. I.e., for any , and any given path of inference timesteps , one can derive a corresponding ELBO
In other words, the ELBO is a sum of individual ELBO terms that are functions of contiguous timesteps . Now the question remains, given a fixed budget steps, what is the optimal ELBO path?
First, we observe that any two paths that share a transition will share a common term. We exploit this property in our dynamic programming algorithm. When given a grid of timesteps with , it is possible to efficiently find the exact optimum (i.e., finding with the best ELBO) by memoizing all the individual ELBO terms for with . We can then solve the canonical least-cost-path problem on a directed graph where are nodes and the edge connecting them has cost .
For time-continuous DDPMs, the choice of grid (i.e., the ) can be arbitrary. For models trained with discrete timesteps, the grid must be a subset of (or the full) original steps used during training, unless the model was regularized during training with methods such as the sampling procedure proposed by Chen et al. (2021).
4.2 Dynamic Programming Algorithm
We now outline our methodology to solve the least-cost-path problem. Our solution is similar to Dijkstra’s algorithm, but it differs to the classical least-cost-path problem where the latter is typically used, as our problem has additional constraints: we restrict our search to paths of exactly nodes, and the start and end nodes are fixed.
Let and be matrices. will be the total cost of the least-cost-path of length from to 0. will be filled with the timesteps corresponding to such paths; i.e., will be the timestep immediately previous to for the optimal -step path (assuming is also part of such path).
We initialize and all the other to (the are irrelevant, but for ease of index notation we keep them in this section). Then, for each from 1 to , we iteratively set, for each ,
where is the cost to transition from to (see Equation 17). For all , we set (e.g., we only move backwards in the diffusion process). This procedure captures the shortest path cost in and the shortest path itself in .
We further observe that running the DP algorithm for each from 1 to (instead of ), we can extract the optimal paths for all possible budgets . Algorithm 1 illustrates a vectorized version of the procedure we have outlined in this section, while Algorithm 2 shows how to explicitly extract the optimal paths from .
4.3 Efficient Memoization
A priori, our dynamic programming approach appears to be inefficient because it requires computing terms (recall, as we rely on all the terms which depend on a neural network forward pass). We however observe that a single forward pass of the DDPM can be used to compute all the terms. This holds true even in the case where the pre-trained DDPM learns the variances. For example, in Nichol and Dhariwal (2021) instead of fixing them to as we outlined in the previous section, the forward pass itself still only depends on and not , and the variance of is obtained by interpolating the forward pass’s output logits with . Thus, computing the table of all the ELBO terms only requires forward passes.
We apply our method on a wide variety of pre-trained DDPMs from prior work. This emphasizes the fact that our method is applicable to any pre-trained DDPM model. In particular, we rely the CIFAR10 model checkpoints released by Nichol and Dhariwal (2021) on both their and objectives. We also showcase results on CIFAR10 (Krizhevsky et al., 2009) with the exact configuration used by Ho et al. (2020), which we denote as , as well as on ImageNet 64x64 (Deng et al., 2009) following Nichol and Dhariwal (2021), training these last two models ourselves for 800K and 3M steps, respectively, but otherwise using the exact same configurations as the authors.
|Model # refinement steps||8||16||32||64||128||256||All|
|DistAug Transformer (Jun et al., 2020)||–||–||–||–||–||–||2.53|
|DDPM++ (deep, sub-VP) (Song et al., 2021)||–||–||–||–||–||–||2.99|
|Model # refinement steps||8||16||32||64||128||256||4000|
|Routing Transformer (Roy et al., 2021)||–||–||–||–||–||–||3.43|
|(Nichol and Dhariwal, 2021)||–||–||–||–||–||–||3.53|
In our experiments, we always search over a grid that includes all the timesteps used to train the model, i.e., . For our CIFAR10 results, we computed the memoization tables with Monte Carlo estimates over the full training dataset, while on ImageNet 64x64 we limited the number of datapoints in the Monte Carlo estimates to 16,384 images on the training dataset.
For each pre-trained model, we compare the negative log likelihoods (estimated using the full heldout dataset) of the strides discovered by our dynamic programming algorithm against even and quadratic strides, following Song et al. (2020a). We find that our dynamic programming algorithm discovers strides resulting in much better log likelihoods than the hand-crafted strides used in prior work, particularly in the few-step regime. We provide a visualization of the log likelihood curves as a function of computation budget in Figure 1 for CIFAR10 and ImageNet 64x64 (Deng et al., 2009), a full list of the scores in the few-step regime in Table 1, and a visualization of the discovered steps themselves in Figure 2.
5.1 Comparison with FID
We further evaluate our discovered strides by reporting FID scores (Heusel et al., 2017) on 50,000 model samples against the same number of samples from the training dataset, as is standard in the literature. We find that, although our strides are yield much better log likelihoods, such optimization does not necessarily translate to also improving the FID scores. Results are included in Figure 3. This weakened correlation between log-likehoods and FID is consistent with observations in prior work (Ho et al., 2020; Nichol and Dhariwal, 2021).
5.2 Monte Carlo Ablation
To investigate the feasibility of our approach using minimal computation, we experimented with setting the number of Monte Carlo datapoints used to compute the dynamic programming table of negative log likelihood terms to 128 samples (i.e., easily fit into a single batch of GPU memory). We find that, for CIFAR10, the difference in log likelihoods is negligible, while on ImageNet 64x64 there is a visible yet slight improvement in negative log likelihood when filling the table with more samples. We hypothesize that this is due to the higher diversity of ImageNet. Nevertheless, we highlight that our procedure can be applied very quickly (i.e., with just forward passes of a neural network when using a single batch, as opposed to a running average over batches), even for large models, to significantly improve log their likelihoods in the few-step regime.
6 Related Work
DDPMs (Ho et al., 2020) have recently shown results that are competitive with GANs (Goodfellow et al., 2014), and they can be traced back to the work of Sohl-Dickstein et al. (2015) as a restricted family of deep latent variable models. Dhariwal and Nichol (2021) have more recently shown that DDPMs can outperform GANs in FID scores (Heusel et al., 2017). Song and Ermon (2019) have also linked DDPMs to denoising score matching (Vincent et al., 2008, 2010), which is crucial to the continuous-time formulation (Song et al., 2021). This connection to score matching has been explored further by Song and Kingma (2021), where other score-matching techniques (e.g., sliced score matching, Song et al. (2020b)) have been shown to be valid DDPM objectives and DDPMs are linked to energy-based models. More recent work on the few-step regime of DDPMs (Song et al., 2020a; Chen et al., 2021; Nichol and Dhariwal, 2021; San-Roman et al., 2021; Kong and Ping, 2021; Jolicoeur-Martineau et al., 2021) has also guided our research efforts. DDPMs are also very closely related to variational autoencoders (Kingma and Welling, 2013), where more recent work has shown that, with many stochastic layers, they can also attain competitive negative log likelihoods in unconditional image generation (Child, 2020). Also very closely related to DDPMs, there has also been work on non-autoregressive modeling of text sequences that can be regarded as discrete-space DDPMs with a forward process that masks or remove tokens (Lee et al., 2018; Gu et al., 2019; Stern et al., 2019; Chan et al., 2020; Saharia et al., 2020). The UNet architecture (Ronneberger et al., 2015) has been key to the recent success of DDPMs, and as shown by Ho et al. (2020); Nichol and Dhariwal (2021), augmenting UNet with self-attention (Shaw et al., 2018) in scales where attention is computationally feasible has helped bring DDPMs closer to the current state-of-the-art autoregressive generative models (Child et al., 2019; Jun et al., 2020; Roy et al., 2021).
7 Conclusion and Discussion
By regarding the selection of the inference schedule as an optimization problem, we present a novel and efficient dynamic programming algorithm to discover the optimal inference schedule for a pre-trained DDPM. Our DP algorithm finds an optimal inference schedule based on the ELBO given a fixed computation budget. Our method need only be applied once to discover the schedule, and does not require training or re-training the DPPM. In the few-step regime, we discover schedules on CIFAR10 and ImageNet 64x64 that require only 32 steps, yet sacrifice bits per dimension compared to state-of-the-art DDPMs using hundreds-to-thousands of refinement steps. Our approach only needs forward passes of the DDPM neural network to fill the dynamic programming table of terms, and we show that we can fill the dynamic programming table with just forward passes. Moreover, we show that we can estimate the table using only 128 Monte Carlo samples, finding this to be sufficient even for datasets such as ImageNet with high diversity. Our method achieves strong likelihoods with very few refinement steps, outperforming prior work utilizing hand-crafted strides (Ho et al., 2020; Nichol and Dhariwal, 2021).
Despite very strong log-likelihood results, especially in the few step regime, we observe limitations to our method. There is a disconnect between log-likehoods and FID scores, where improvements in log-likelihoods do not necessarily translate to improvements in FID scores. This is consistent with prior work, showing that the correlation between log likelihood and FID can be mismatched (Ho et al., 2020; Nichol and Dhariwal, 2021). We hope our work will encourage future research exploiting our general framework of optimization post-training in DDPMs, potentially utilizing gradient-based optimization over not only the ELBO, but also other, non-decomposable metrics. We particularly note that other sampling steps such as MCMC corrector steps or alternative predictor steps (e.g., following the reverse SDE) (Song et al., 2021) can also be incorporated into computation budget, and general learning frameworks like reinforcement learning are well-suited to explore this space as well as non-differentiable learning signals.
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Appendix A Appendix
a.1 Proof for Equation 12
From Equation 10, we get by implicit differentiation that
Similarly as above and also using the fact that ,
The mean of is given by the Gaussian conjugate prior formula (where all the distributions are conditioned on ). Let , so we have a prior over given by
and a likelihood with mean
Then it follows by the formula that has variance


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Leila Mottley w/ Monica West – Nightcrawling
July 18, 2022 @ 1:00 pm - 2:30 pmFree
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system — the debut of a blazingly original voice and “a soul-searching portrait of survival and hope” (Oprah Winfrey)
Rich with raw beauty, electrifying intensity, and piercing vulnerability, Nightcrawling, by Leila Mottley, marks the stunning arrival of a voice unlike any we have heard before.
In conversation with Monica West author of Revival Season a transporting coming-of-age novel explores complicated family and what it means to live among the community of the faithful.
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A narrow dirt road, a soft road shoulder, a 10,5-cm leichte Feldhaubitze 18 weighing some two tons ends up in the ditch. No way the 17 soldiers will get the howitzer back on its wheels and hitched to the limber again. They’ll have to wait for a half-tracked tractor to pull it right. The body language of the artillerymen tells that they realise that there isn’t much they can do. Or is it? We will never know how they got the gun back on the road. One or two of the men in the photo might still be alive. They’ve seen things ordinary people wouldn’t believe. Tanks on fire in the fields near Kursk. They’ve watched tracers glitter in the dark in the Korsun Pocket. All those moments will be lost in time, like snow in the spring. Too few are still alive.
A serene scene, a column of 9.7 ton Sd.Kfz. 7 artillery tractors towing 15-cm schwere Feldhaubitze sFH 18 howitzers through a fir forest, the boughs laden with snow. One can almost hear the idling engines, muffled by the trees. But there’s a hidden danger… The sign warns of Glatteis – black ice – which the tracked vehicles don’t have any greater problem negotiating, but which the towed guns might have. Without snow chains, the hard rubber tires might skid if there’s a sharp turn, and 5.3 tons of hardware could end up in a ditch… What would that look like? See tomorrow’s post.
Two second lieutenants practicing with a Maschinengewehr 34 light machine gun, the two junior officers having the dubious pleasure of lying down in the snow. The weapon isn’t loaded yet; the loader rests his arms on two ammo drum carriers, each holding a pair of drums with a 75-round belt each. The drums were used while assaulting, whereas an ammo can with 250 belted rounds was used for more sustained fire. The loader holds a pair of Zeiss 6×30 binoculars for observation of the target.
The development of the MG 34 began in 1930, as there was a need for a machine gun that was lighter than e.g. the MG 08/15. While named “MG 34”, the weapon wasn’t adopted by the Wehrmacht until January 1939. It was a multi-purpose MG, which could be used with the integral bipod in the light mode, or with a sturdy tripod in the heavy mode. There was also a tripod for anti-aircraft use, and it was the standard machine gun for the majority of the armored vehicles
The MG 34 weighed 12.1 kg with its bipod, with a fire rate of 900 rounds per minute, using the standard 7.92 x 57 mm rifle round. The practical rate of fire was 300-400 rounds per minute, as the barrel would get too hot otherwise. The barrel could be changed in seconds, though. The effective range of the weapon was 2,000 m, but in theory it could be used for indirect fire at up to 3,500 meters. Germany entered the war in 1939 with 84,078 MG 34, and it remained the principal MG until 1943.
The problem with the MG 34 was that it was too well made. In the harsh winters on the Eastern Front, the finely machined parts were susceptible to jamming if the temperature got too low. Dirt and mud were other causes of jamming. The production of the weapon used a lot of raw materials (49 kg), and it took 150 hours to make. The Army saw the need for an MG that was cheaper and easier to produce (using stamped metal parts), and with tolerances that allowed for greater reliability in battlefield conditions. The answer was the iconic MG 42, which used 27.5 kilos of raw materials and took 75 hours to produce. This increased the output from 3,000 MGs per month in the fall of 1941 to 24,000 MGs in early 1944.
The MG 42 is still used in many armies of the world, only marginally updated, while the MG 34 is found in museums. Well, perhaps not just museums… Next time you watch a Star Wars movie, you can see that the DLT-19 heavy blaster rifles used by the Imperial stormtroopers are modified MG 34s.
The crew of a 10,5-cm leichte Feldhaubitze 18 (10.5 cm light field howitzer), Eastern Front, probably late winter, 1942. As I wrote in a previous post, the gun was primarily a howitzer, but it was also used as a stop-gap solution to the lack of anti-tank guns powerful enough to take on Soviet armor. The 7.5 cm PaK 40 AT gun was introduced later in 1942, and until then, the leFH 18 filled the role as best as it could.
On this day in 1941, the temperature on the Moscow front fell to −37° C (−31° F), further inhibiting the German advance. Weapons and vehicles didn’t work, supplies couldn’t be brought forward, and soldiers froze to death in their summer uniforms. In their arrogance, the planners of Operation Barbarossa thought that the campaign would be over before the advent of winter. They had underestimated the number of Red Army divisions, were unaware of the new, superior Soviet tanks, and calculated that the supply situation would be solved through living off the land. The latter meant that there were no food set aside for prisoners of war, and that soldiers had to plunder food from Soviet peasants, resulting in the starvation and death of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens. When the gamble didn’t pay off, the Germans were stuck with a war they couldn’t win.
A group of Gebirgsjäger looking at a 7,5-cm-Gebirgsgeschütz 36 L/19,3. The elite mountain rangers were rated as light infantry, as they couldn’t bring heavy vehicles or weapons with them in the mountains. What couldn’t be carried by the men had to be carried by mules, and that meant that heavier weapons must be able to be broken down in smaller loads. The 7.5-cm mountain gun 36 L/19.3 was developed between 1935 and 1938 by the arms manufacturer Rheinmetall, and introduced in 1940/41. It was a welcome addition to the arsenal of the Gebirgsjäger units, as it provided firepower in places where every advantage was needed and regular artillery couldn’t reach.
The 7,5-cm-Gebirgsgeschütz 36 soon became the standard weapon of the mountain artillery due to its good ballistic properties in both low and high trajectories, and was used by light mountain batteries until the end of the war. The 750 kg gun could be pulled by a couple of mules, or broken up in eight loads weighing 80-116 kilograms to be carried by mules with special pack saddles. It was served by a crew of five, and could fire six to eight 6 kg shells a minute up to 9.250 meters. The guns were used in batteries of four guns each.
German troops trudging through driving snow, protected by Zeltbahn shelter halves worn as ponchos. The soldier in the middle is carrying a Panzerbüchse 39 (PzB 39), an anti-tank rifle used to knock out armored vehicles. Several countries used AT rifles, but as their principal targets became increasingly heavier armored, they were of limited use. The concept of AT rifles originated during World War 1, and as long as tanks and other armored vehicles sported thin armor, the idea was valid. A 1939 German rifle company was equipped with three PzB 39, at least in theory; shortages in production meant that only 568 PzB 39 were used by the German army in the invasion of Poland.
Two years later, at the beginning of the war against the USSR, 25,298 PzB 39 were in use by German troops. They could take on light tanks like T-26s and BT-7s, but KV-85s and T-34s (which the Germans didn’t know existed) were tougher nuts to crack… Total production from March 1940 to the cessation of production in November 1941 was 39,232 rifles.
The overall length was 162 cm, and the weight was 12.6 kg. It fired a 7.92 mm armor-piercing round. 25mm armor penetration was effective out to 300 meters. To increase the practical rate of fire, two cases containing 10 rounds each could be attached to the sides of the weapon, closer to hand for the gunner. A fold-out bipod steadied the weapon. The PzB 39 remained in use until 1944, by which time it had become hopelessly inadequate against all but the lightest armored vehicles.
A group of lieutenants going through orders. Platoon commanders in what appears to be a mounted unit – reconaissance, most likely – (riding breeches, boots and spurs hint at that), there’s little that gives any hint about time or location, The lack of medals makes me think it’s during the initial phases of Operation Barbarossa, though. The second guy from the right carries a captured Soviet PPD-40 submachine gun.
The PPD (Pistolet-Pulemyot Degtyarova) was developed in 1934. It was adopted by the Red Army in 1935 and entered production as the PPD-34. Made in small numbers, it was mostly issued to the NKVD, foremost to border guards. Slightly modified in 1938, it was re-designed after the Winter War with Finland (1939-40), adopting a copy of the Finnish 70-round drum magazine (71 rounds in the Soviet version), thus becoming the PPD-40. After the German invasion in 1941, it was soon discovered that the PPD-40 was less than ideal for wartime production, so it was quickly replaced by the more inexpensive and easier to produce PPSh-41, the iconic SMG of the Red Army. The PPD-40 was a first generation submachine gun, and an indifferent weapon useful mainly for the large magazine capacity.
It was rather common among troops to use captured enemy weapons, as long as there was access to captured ammunition stocks. The officer to right in the photo carries the MP-40 (or MP-38) he was issued. One advantage of using a captured weapon is that it doesn’t give away the shooter as an enemy due to the sound, which might give an element of surprise. On the other hand, it might also confuse friendly troops…