scott_sanford

When I showed up for the first day of GameStorm I discovered that the prereg desk didn't have a badge waiting for me. This wasn't what I was hoping or expecting to hear; granted it's been a year since the last one but I was still about 90% sure I'd invested in a membership on Sunday afternoon. I didn't have enough cash for an at-the-door membership in my wallet right that instant but it left me considering my options with my wallet in hand, which led to me picking through the scrap paper accumulated there, and my faint hope was realized. I still had my receipt! Not only had I gotten a membership last year but I still had the proof on me! (Along with several other small and worn receipts.) I called this to the attention of the registration staff and correcting the problem went amazingly quickly and smoothly after that.

The moral appears to be to not clean out your wallet...

I've been using the classic Bic four-color pens for longer than I care to think about, but while one goes with me everywhere I go I don't lose them as fast as I once did. So today for the first time in a year or two I actually had to buy one. It wasn't until I actually opened the package that I saw the only design change I can remember in twenty years: the little round ball at the butt end had been modified into a fat ring, allowing a string or lanyard ring to be added. I've not tried adding anything yet, but this strikes me as a useful improvement.

I really shouldn't be talking about writing here, as my readers mostly aren't fiction writers and the exceptions have published novels and/or gotten nominated for Hugos, so I'm either talking to the wall or being the n00b who should STFU. ( Read more... )

As seen on Charles Stross's blog, it is now possible to run linux on (some) web browsers. Really: try it. There are of course technical notes on how Javascript pretends to be a 486 linux box.

Actual useful applications of this feat are still coming, but the immediate attraction is the coolness factor.

This article has much to say about how humans weigh evidence vs. beliefs, and the pitfalls of telling people what they don't want to hear.

The comments fell to ad hominim attacks surprisingly quickly.

So I'm wasting time on the net as usual when I run across an anecdote from Operation Plumbob, a nuke testing program back in the 1950s.

It seems that their point criticality tests led to some interesting learning experiences. Follow along: Pascal-A was supposed to check that a single faulty detonator could not actually set off the whole bomb (an implosion type design counts on having a bunch of carefully timed detonators to, well, implode). So the test unit is lowered down a 147 meter shaft and set off, which is when they discover that someone's slipped a decimal point somewhere - the yield is about 55 tons, or 50,000 times what they expected. Oops.

Witness Robert Campbell said, "Biggest damn Roman candle you ever saw! It was beautiful. Big blue glow in the sky..."

Right. After this little learning experience, they redesigned things a bit for the next test.

Pascal-B was a near duplicate of Pascal-A, but after the fireworks display last time, the scientists decided to put a cap on the hole. (The military has a very good understanding of "tube with explosives at one end.") Starting with a piece of four inch thick armor plate, a one-ton steel cap for the hole was made and lowered into place for the test.

Like the first time, this test was predicted to yield about as much force as 1-2lbs worth of TNT. Like the first time, this wasn't particularly accurate. Pascal-B went off at around 1/3 kiloton, or 600,000 times what it should have. Oops, again.

The surface high-speed camera caught exactly one frame of that one-ton steel plate as it left the ground, headed upwards at what was later estimated as six times Earth escape velocity, never to be seen again. A flying manhole cover moving face-on through the air is a spectacularly un-aerodynamic shape, and the best guess is that it vaporized long before it left the atmosphere.

While the cap was very, very gone it was not forgotten; this incident was brought up later in connection with the Project Orion concept. There's probably a moral in there somewhere.

Among james_nicoll's verbose postage was a link to a space warfare essay, Battle of the Spherical War Cows: Purple vs. Green. Well! How can you pass up a title like that?

But from there we link to the Atomic Rockets site, with...even more essays! I am doomed! DOOOOMED!

Come to think of it, this is every bit as informative as many other articles I've seen on nuclear power recently: U.S. Reactors Completely Safe Unless Something Bad Happens.

Possibly the best troll baiting headline of Pi Day: Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus.

There's a long history of saying outrageous things in order to get attention. Phil Zuckerman actually backs it up with something related, so good for him.

I stumbled across the factoid that there is only one British teddy bear manufacturer.
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