Yet Another Housing Update and Links

[chris_gerrib]

We (my realtor and I) placed an offer on the Willowbrook townhouse last night. I eagerly await the seller's response. If it goes through, I'll still have a two-week period of homelessness, which I'll probably solve by getting an extended-stay hotel room.

Moving on from "all homes all the time" here, have some links.

A) I've been following Jim Fallow's writings on a peculiar set of American police-state actions. Basically, pilots of private planes find themselves detained at gunpoint for several hours by heavily-armed police for no apparent reason. Today's article brings interesting theories as to why.

B) Via jaylake, an interesting article comparing China's cyberwar on the US to Elizabethan England's pirate wars against Spain.

C) The title oversells the article a bit by claiming This experiment proved that anyone could design a nuclear weapon . Still, it apparently isn't as hard as you'd think.

D) From Tobias Buckell, an interesting article on survivorship bias. Basically, to get a full understanding of success, one needs to focus not just on those who succeed, but those who fail.

Comments

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Well, if you remember, the “Little Boy” device wasn't even tested - they knew it would work, even if its efficiency from an engineering standpoint was horrocious gharstly. Half critical mass, meet half critical mass, and away we go!

Even Trinity was an implosion-squeeze device. That's what they wanted, but for the war a “rough draft” weapon was needed now. Yah, okay, here ya go…

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Well, it's a little more complex than that. They had tested bits to ensure they didn't have a complete cock up. Shaping the explosives was harder then and they needed to make sure that they'd slam them together in the right way to get a critical reaction rather than a hot mess.

Plus the bit that is, as I understand it, an utter pig, is the properties of Uranium as a metal when you're forming it are just nasty, so you need to have continuously variable speeds and cooling rates on the shaping machine you're using, unlike, say, steel where you can pretty much make a single assumption.

The design isn't a problem, but building one is still less than straight forward.

[itsroach.livejournal.com]

The first theory in The Atlantic article is fantastic fodder for all sorts of espionage related writing.