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.
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| 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.*
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
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| 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.
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| 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!
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