Herman Kahn Is Not Amused

Though I Am, In An Ironic Way
Here I expect I'm going to have to lay out the background for you, before we reach the meat of the matter <sighs in martyred fashion>.
     Ol' Hermie was a physicist by education and trade, who worked with and rubbed shoulders also with some of the big names in the South Canadian nuclear weapons programs; people like Edward Teller (he of the sinister Mittel European accent) and Hans Bethe. Art?

The splendidly-hirsute Hermie

     Then, as if to compensate for helping create the problem, Ol' Hermie tried to suggest various solutions to the enormous number of nuclear weapons a-swilling about, most notably in "On Thermonuclear War", which Your Humble Scribe is annotating at a painfully slow rate.
     One theoretical solution was to connect a nation's nuclear arsenal to a central computing device that acted as a "Doomsday Machine": said machine would monitor the external environment and, if the Bad Guys tried anything smart, Whoosh - every silo gets emptied.  End of life in Northern Hemisphere, Hom. Sap. placed in peril of extinction, nuclear autumn, no more Werner's Butterscotch Toffees, that sort of thing.
     HOWEVER!  as Ol' Hermie himself pointed out, Hom. Sap. would never be daft enough to actually construct such a mechanism nor put it into operation, since it takes ultimate control out of the hands of you us humans.

No, I'm not going  to enlarge it, due to cleavage issues

     It is correspondingly hard to find an image of a Doomsday Machine that isn't from that excellent, if obscure, sci-fi series "Star Trek".
     Film-makers have made several productions which imagine that such a weapon has been constructed, notably "Doctor Strangelove" (Ol' Hermie apparently being one of the inspirations for the character) and the "Terminator" franchise, in which nothing ends well.
     Also, "Wargames" in the classic 1983 iteration (which Ol' Hermie might have seen before he coughed it), where the beast in question is "W.O.P.R."
     Let us now change course abruptly and whiz on over to Youtube and the highly entertaining channel "Experts React", specifically the one featuring Kristin Lennox, an AI specialist.  The notion is that an expert views films or television episodes in their own field, and react to judge how realistic or not they are.  Art?

The good Doctor.  Yes, she is a woman.  Ten out of ten for noticing that.

     The last film she assesses on her channel postingis "Wargames" and she makes the first proviso that chimes with Ol' Hermie's: putting an AI in charge of your nuclear arsenal is an extremely BAD idea.  Hence today's title.
     Going rather beyond that concept, she rates the film's treatment of AI as "A+", because here is an AI attempting to solve a problem - winning a global thermonuclear war - by entirely logical means, and doing it with the least amount of damage to South Canada as possible.  In doing this it is merely executing it's program, diligently but without any hostility, which is great!  As long as you're not a glowing radioactive cinder afterwards.  If you are a glowing radioactive cinder, blame the programmers for being sloppy with their algorithms.*

Like this one.  I mean - come on, just look at it!

     Now to play Hunt-the-motley with paintball guns!  Where the paintballs have had neurotoxins injected into them.

Having To Have A Holiday
I have alluded to this a few times on Facebook, so in the interests of padding things out a bit/keeping you in the loop/boring the few remaining readers (delete where applicable), I shall explicate.
     There I was mid-Tuesday afternoon, hammering away on the keyboard and generally administering the heck out of endless e-mails, when Tom, Head Honcho, showed up at my  elbow.
     "Rob,"** he quoth.  "You've got ten days leave left to take, and there are only eight days left until the end of the leave year."

Conrad on leave a few years back

     Oo-err.  Conrad had no idea what holidays he'd taken, nor how many he had left, so this was a bit of a surprise.  What could the outcome possibly be?
     "You'll have to take leave as of tomorrow and not come back until March 11th," instructed Tom.
     So I have done.
     Suprise holidays: the best kind.

Your Humble Scribe looking happy and relaxed.

     Don't expect two posts per day though. That would be greedy.

"The Umbrella Academy" - A Netflix Original
Just so you don't confuse it with the comic book.  Conrad was aware of the comic as Darling Daughter bought it whilst she was in her "I love My Chemical Romance" period, since Gerard Way of that very same band wrote the comic.  And that was just about that, since she took it with her when flying the nest.  Normally it was the other way round; I bought the trade paperback and she read them after me.  Art?

No sign of rain

     Thus I knew nothing about the comic, and began watching the Netflix series with an open mind.  Said mind naturally being pedantic, hair-splitting and able to spot patterns, the declaration that Sir Rodger Hargreeves had 'bought' 7 special babies clashed rather with the introduction of only 5 of them.
     This was resolved later, to my satisfaction.  I still get props for noticing the absence, right?

Numbers 1 to 7, apart from Number 6.  Number 6 is not merely a number, he is a fre - Oops!  Wrong series.

Finally -
I see our Great British Weather is back to normal, being overcast, damp and rather chilly, which is a refreshing change from all that horrid sunshine and blue skies.  Expect more of this normal weather until September, when our Great British Summer, all four days of it, will be spread randomly around the month.

What we have to look forward to

     You can imagine the Roman legionaries garrisoned here two thousand years ago.
     "Remind me again, why did we invade this island?"




*  This will make you feel so much better.
**  My common-or-garden name

More Of Missiles!

For Yes, We Are Back On E.R.A.S.M.U.S.

Or, for those who were not paying attention yesterday (which will be noted down and avenged in future) "Enhanced Retaliatory Survivable Missile Station", a stealth-enabled orbital platform for raining down destruction on the Bad Guys.

     I had to duck out of this subject yesterday, because the roving snooper-bots of MI5 and the FSB were getting a bit too close for comfort.  Hopefully a day away will have put them off.

FSB HQ - quick - look away now!

     Now, you will recall yesterday that the core of ERASMUS were it's antimatter warhead missiles; admittedly a tad speculative today, but let us not fool ourselves that it's not achievable in the near future.  The creation of a magnetic containment bottle is possibly only just around the corner, in which case World Watch Out -

Watch out, world.

     You see, given the inevitable march of technology, magnetic bottles will get more effective and thus smaller and smaller, meaning that the anti-matter missile warheads, which are already small (given that there's only 8 grams of antimatter in there) will also get smaller.  Thus they are harder to detect (especially if coated with stealth ceramics) and intercept, and don't forget, if you do manage to intercept an E.R.A.S.M.U.S. warhead, it WILL detonate.  None of that bother with elaborate fusing mechanisms to generate a fission or fusion reaction here; once that magnetic bottle breaks and the anti-matter hits matter, a 350 kiloton detonation occurs.  If you happen to be toward the receiving end this is a Very Bad Thing.

The reason why.

     Potentially, this is a most worrying development for all you us Hom. Sap. because you can extrapolate those warheads getting smaller still, down to the size of an RPG warhead with 0.1 grams of antimatter, yet a yield of 4 kilotons.  Less a suitcase nuke than a handbag one...

     Food for thought indeed - and since those snooping virtual spybots are now circling I shall promptly end this Intro.

     Oh - don't worry, we already strapped the motley onto that rocket sled and lit the fuse.*

The sled in question.  Oo-er, motley!

Gutta Percha

Another of those words that popped up in Your Humble Scribe's mind, for no good reason.  I knew it was a thing, except not what that thing was, which I took in context from literature.  So - a little Google-fu reveals that it's a latex, the sap of a Malayan plant, Palanquium Gutta.  The Malay term "Getah Percha" is where we get the Western equivalent.  Art?

The stuff itself.

     It was widely used as insulation because it is non-conductive and thus coated many an undersea cable.  GP's glory days were in the Victorian era, before it got displaced by Bakelite and other early plastics.  Nowadays plastics have taken over this role pretty completely, and instead the main use of gutta percha is in dentistry.  But it did have it's glory days.

       

Conrad: A Terrible Person

Although we knew that already.  I discovered an interesting Youtube channel yesterday, entitled "Legal Eagle" which - you're doubtless ahead of me here - is fronted by a South Canadian lawyer.  He analyses various courtroom dramas and points out how inaccurate they are; entertaining, to be sure, which is entirely the point, yet very wide of the mark.

     What he focussed on last night was a fillum called "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate  Factory", by seeing how many laws Willy breaks and the economic and judicial consequences.

The villain of the piece and his hapless victims

     Conrad laughed himself almost sick every few minutes, at the pedantic and scholarly analysis of the choclatier's countless crimes - for they are numerous and display both negligence and basic evil.

     The total span of years that Willy can expect to languish in a supermax for comes to at least 80, possibly as many as 120.    His fines would total a minimum of $235 million, which is a tidy chunk of change.

It's a trap, alright - a DEATH TRAP!

     The punchline is that Charlie ends up getting possession of Willy Wonka's estate, which is a very unfortunate thing indeed, because Legal Eagle warns that Chas is going to be hit for an immense total of taxes.  In fact, he will have to sell off most if not all the factory to settle taxes.  Ho ho ho!

The Tax Scorpion at work

     I should also explain that Darling Daughter is up to visit today, and thanks to my hamster technicians still not being able to upload photographs (the dirty curs!) I cannot show you her latest appearance nor the Betty Crocker gluten-free chocolate cake I baked earlier.

An earlier iteration of DD
(with chip not chocolate)

     Hmmm.  There's a group of large, muscular men getting out of a group of black saloons that have grouped outside The Mansion.  I'd better go see what they're after, hadn't I?

*  Tee-hee!