Category: Uncategorized

Last week, no parties. Week before that, no parties.

Saturday. 4 parties (excluding one I just said ‘no, sorry, already overcommited’ to). Spacing & timing, people, c’mon.

Anyway, here they are.

way over done internal debate

We discussed the various different sorts of fusion (deuterium/tritium, and deuterium/deuterium), the radioactivity that results from fusion, the power output of fusion, the activation mechanisms for fatman, little boy, and their modern descendents. The practicality of fusion vs biomass, specifically with regard to renewability. The possibilites and consequences of pure fusion weapons.

power output of fusion is staggering. A single pair of D-T fusion supposedly results in energy output equivalent to the average energy consumption of your typical American consumer (mostly in the form of neutron velocity (when we did the math it came out to more like .06J or something, nowhere near 10 seconds of lightbulb, let alone that claim, but still, from a single pair. D-D reactions are significantly less exciting). Otoh, it needs a hell of a lot of heat to work.

I found out that the intranuclear bonds of the strong(?) nuclear force which are the source of the energy from nuclear reactions, have mass. Welcome to advanced particle physics.

The only possible source of radiation badness from fusion reactions is the freed neutron, which goes zinging away with much energy. Odds of it creating lingering badness are apparently somewhere between slim and nonexistant, though I don’t entirely understand the whys and wherefores.

Fatman and littleboy had different activation mechanisms. One of them had a wedge and slot thing, that when brought together made critical mass (think pacman + wedge gag). Apparently an altimeter tied to explosives, blew the two sub-critical components together to make it go boom at the right height. I forget the other mechanism.

Plutonium doesn’t automatically react at critical mass. Explosives in a balanced ‘soccerball’ outside it, blow up and compress the plutonium, which then goes boom. Thermonuclear bombs (H-bombs, fission/fusion bombs), have a layer of explosives around a layer of uranium/plutonium around a layer of fusionable material, to do an additional stage to reach fusion heat. then boom.

Fusion is pretty sustainable because the sun is continually blowing lots of hydrogen our way. It depends on the gain of the reaction we would harness for power. Biomass is probably more immediately practical.

Pure fusion weapons have no fallout. We also have no clue how to make them work.

Do you feel better now? 😉

So, I’m using mozilla (pity about galeon’s os specificity), putty, emacs, trillian (which is mysteriously barfing on aim, and is fully up to date), gayboi (actual program name, I swear), winscp, and gimp.

I really freaking need to just get freebsd working and forget about this operating system. If only I could get it to acknowledge the existence of my wireless card. I think I need to actually set aside some time to play with it until it’s happy.

sparing you the inanity

Since Tom was in town, I’ve been giving lj short shrift. I’ve been busy with volunteering (school, clinic, food-not-bombs), traveling (Arcosanti, for a week, by way of santa monica), working (helped Ro with a presentation he’s giving to the military people funding this little gig on wed), screwing off (mario sunshine, wc3, super monkey ball, lost cities, carcassonne), screwing around (largely by way of gay.com, which I’m swearing off again), researching (intentional community stuff), working out (approx 3x/week, lifty + aerobics), marching in peace demonstrations, reading (Elvenborn, Dragon Weather, What should I do with my Life, graded go exercises, the unschooled mind, and more) and constructing a bike from donated bits and pieces (in progress).

in short, my usual, semi-eventful, but ultimately kinda boring life.

Things I haven’t done include laundry, reading lj, brushing my teeth (well, some, but not enough), and finding more ideal employment.

Dropping gay.com, picking up lj again. May look into other geekwork. Have plans to start doing more academically related research (ie, finishing up my outstanding paper, so that I can get the ‘I’ off my transcript and apply with one less worry) and finish a volunteer thing with a database for the aclu in pittsburgh.

Joy.

It’s amazing what you learn about how a system works by breaking it. For instance, say you’ve neglected your friends list for over two weeks then try to go back to it. LJ doesn’t go back more than two weeks in the friends list. I bet they have these round robin indexes built up on a per-user basis. How fascinating.

What fascinating stuff did I miss from y’all? 😉