Endings or Beginnings?
As I review some of what came through the feeds this week, I have noted a theme, presumably accidental, of endings that inherently relate to beginnings.
The first is a pictorial of Nike sites. [Link] These are old air defense missile sites that were strategically located in urban areas like San Francisco and Philadelphia to provide the population with warm and fuzzy feelings. In a sense they were (relatively) modern day (1950’s CE) recaptures of Coastal Artillery installations, with the notable differences that they were armed with missiles instead of guns, intended to engage aircraft instead of ships, and effectively useless.
The idea was that these sites would ostensibly protect these urban concentrations of population from enemy (read dirty, heathen, filthy, more epithets communists) air craft should war come. The armament of these sites were two versions of Nike, the fat boy Hercules that was so inaccurate against air targets as to require a nuclear warhead bigger than those used against Japan in the Great Patriotic War, and the skinny kid Ajax that was a bit more accurate and might hit a bomber putzing along at airliner speeds. Oh, and by the way, if they had fired one of those Hercules it would have fried every electronic device in the city limits – except those running the missile sites. Which philosophy gives us all sorts of insight into the origins of the Vietnam era concept of destroying villages to save them?
Anyway, the confrontation with the adversary passed without revealing the absurdity of such defenses, the logic of air warfare being that one masses sufficient force once to pound the target into rubble, over and above any losses inflicted by the defenses and then moves on to the next target. Now any shulboy can do the maths of how many missiles are there, and how many airplanes an enemy will send in a raid, and figure out that enough get through to remove the city from the map for a few thousand years. Hence the blue serge suit aspect of almost all modern air defense components; the Russian Soviets came the closest to actually having a meaningful air defense component and it was always getting in the way of their ideas of maneuver warfare.
These sites are museum pieces these days, but memorable to me for having friends and relatives who worked on the birds. I know that things like this are essentially irrelevant to most folks these days, but here in the hinterland of Greater Metropolitan Arab we see things differently than our urbanite fellow citizens; we recognize the importance of doing things that we know are destined to be failures – like politicians.
Another such thing to get excited about failing are supernovae – exploding stars. It seems that this week researchers at the Yankee republic’s National AViation and Space Agency, which has a fair sized component in Greater Metropolitan Huntsville on the Yankee army installation there, actually saw the start of a supernova. [link] Now it is sometimes hard to sort pony from pile with NASA, half of their annual budget is spent on publicity stuff, and they keep the Huntsville public and politicians deluded that the Yankee army installation is really a NASA installation – NASA accounts for less than 0.17 of the cash flow on that installation – but this looks like a real Boo Yah for them. If nothing else this is an amazing stochastic event; the actual supernova occurred something like 90 MYA but the NASA guys were actually looking in the right place at the right time, apparently by accident while looking at another supernova in the same neighborhood.
And the reason this is exciting is because we got to see the starting part of the supernova. We have lots of theory about such but very little actual observational data of the initial phases. So in this case it is good to be in on the beginning of the end.
And the other neat thing is making a liar of corporate Amerikan oligarchs as well as helping us live on Tellus. It seems that a sharp Canadian teenager has figured out how to determine the microbes that digest plastic. [Link] So those Britta cimmercials about water bottles in waste dumps “forever” are now demonstarted as bunk, mere prevarications of corporate oligarchs trying to seperate us from our treasured art collections of portraits of dead politicians.
Now polymers are wonderful things, three dimensional molecules of amazing extent, hyrdocarbons crosslinked into marvelous material properties. But they do not deteriorate rapidly under most trash dump conditions, hence the environmental assessment of “forever”. And what makes this exciting is that now we have a way of really “recycling” plastic under controllable conditions that are based on existing biology. This is important because the recycling programs of most communities, including and especially Greater Metropolitan Arab, are absolute farces. The only materials recycled are those that the recycling vendor can profitably recycle. The whole recycling apparat is based on profitability and not possibility or sustainability. The happy consequence here is that what is possible and profitable has been expanded so we don’t have to change the system.
But the interesting question that arises is why it took a sixteen year old to do this? May we expect some five year old to bring us data on proton decay next month?
