strangelove or loose nukes tour

Yesterday, Barack Hussein Obama III and Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev had a summit in Prague to renew their joint pledges for nuclear disarmament and to promote an environment free of household atomics.  Next, Obama turned his attention toward immergent but no longer classed rogue states on the cusps of going nuclear, significantly increasing the stakes with rhetoric of sanctions against Iran and Syria.  Though the physics and technological threshhold underpinning a nuclear reation is accessible to all-comers and no secret, esoteric knowledge or even priracy of anything proprietary, I believe the so-called nuclear club is a good measure of kiss-and-tell talk.

It turned out that Iraqi claims of menacing arsenals of weapons of mass destruction were just that.  Naturally the old guard of that country would want to appear as strong as possible to its aggressors who were escalating the matter in the first place by dictating that membership in the club was exclusive and had a grandfather-clause.  Baghdad's posteuring was a necessary deterant and probably a policy to match the Soviet's and the US' mutually assured destruction, had the US invasion and occupation not forced Iraq to show its hand.  Maybe Iran, Syria and all the rest are exaggerating their endowments too.

unikat

Friday afternoons are usually conducive to a bit of aimless browsing about.  Sometimes it seems that it takes people the whole work week to puzzle out a disaster of significant immediacy to spring from the end of the day on Friday.  Other times, especially during fairer weather, it seems those same dilemma-rousers can't be bothered for their keen sense of time.  While checking what was out-and-about for the weekend, I stumbled across this wonderful gallery of fashion, taken ad hoc on streets in Köln by a photographer very adept at capturing portraits of individual senses of style.  Yesterday, a coworker's husband, at a ceremony at the culmination of a big project, said that perhaps now with this over, we could enjoy a quiet and relaxed Friday.  I replied that we probably wouldn't recognize it if it came along.  Though it is a shame that one needs reminding--others seem to never forget--there is virtue in sometimes slacking off, confident that at least the immediate has been addressed and bedded.  It is a little like these expressive faces and unique costumes that don't seem so remarkable and photo-worthy in one's own eyes but brilliant through the eyes of another.  Sometimes, on a quiet afternoon, with the weather holding up, we are only tethered to our desks, passively on strike, to notice and celebrate such things.

billions and billions

While I am sure that some one could counter this with a statistical anomaly to explain this spate of occurences, it does seem that there have been quite a few earthquakes lately--or at least what's been deemed worthy for copy-cat reporting: Haiti, Chile, Turkey, Mexico and Indonesia.  I wonder if this uptick has any thing to do, as some would repute, with the CERN LHC coming back on-line and evaporating microscopic black holes destabilizing the earth's crust and mantle and magma being coaxed closer to the surface and causing seismic activity.

Carl Sagan, years ago, speculated that perhaps what accounts for the dearth of intelligent alien life, lack of encounters, is due to advancement to one critical point in technological progress, wherein the species either figures out how to safely harness the new power or ends up destroying itself with it.  Sagan thought that nuclear weapons were the dark test, but maybe it's in cellular phones and electro-smog or in courting the Higgs-Boson particle.

and tang was a spinoff from the space race

Egyptologists at universities in Switzerland and Germany (including my former home at the foot of the campus in the fair city of Würzburg) are finding a novel use for the latest reactionary technology meant to keep us safe: the full body scanner, surplus I suppose that officials are loath to install at European airport, are very adept at penetrating mummy wrappings.

The scanners can take good photographs of the mummified innards without being terribly invasive--at least the ancient Egyptians do not feel their privacy violated when they are being screened for contraband and fairy dust.