The last WWI vet (again)

It seems that Claude Choules (b. 3 March 1901) has passed away, on May fifth. He could give an eyewitness account of Scapa Flow. He served in both World Wars. He was Australian. And, it seems at the moment, the last World War I veteran alive anywhere.

We've lost the last German Hun, the last American Doughboy, the last British Tommy, and the last Canadian veteran already. This appears to be the whole set, alas.

Nuclear weaponry video

Somehow I've managed to miss this until now. It's a video by Isao Hashimoto illustrating all 2053 nuclear explosions from 1945 until 1988.

Several things come to mind watching this, like the odd musical track made by the 'ping' sound effect when a nuke goes off. Testing tended to run in clusters, so you get interesting emergent music - like birdsong, only with radioactivity. Also, the US has maintained its head start in nuking things pretty well; about half of all mushroom clouds were ours.

The most important point is of course that 2051 nukes were popped off essentially to see what would happen. After the second and third units, nobody anywhere ever actually used any of them on somebody else. Good for you, humanity.