See Cocks

NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK!

No, Dougal, we are not talking about the variety that struts and crows around the farmyard.  Be patient, we'll get there.

     Okay, first of all Conrad was idly wondering about that archetypal sci-fi trope, the 'Self Destruct Mechanism', which you are probably familiar with thanks to obscure cult television programs and the odd film or two.  Art!

Perhaps "Starry Treks" silliest protagonists

     Here you see the 'Enterprise's Master Computer taking coded input from Captain Kirk, Commander Spock and Chief Engineer Scott, triggering the Self Destruct Sequence in order to - er - prevent it being double-parked?

     That's the thing about a Self Destruct Mechanism/Sequence; it has to come with pretty strict safeguarding protocols or you risk accidental catastrophe.  Which is why this sequence requires three separate inputs from three separate (different) people, who have to be identified and validated by the MC.  Your SDM/S cannot be too cumbersome either.  Imagine if they needed the input of 37 different people, and one of them had been left behind at Starbase Six.  Embarrassed faces all round.  Art!

     Here's a similar scene from "Starry Treks: The New Iteration", although they call it an "Auto-Destruct Sequence", which I'm going to take as it's close enough.  Note that there are two people here, who need to both agree to blow up their starship, in order to - prevent it being repossessed?  So no lone nutjob can destroy what surely commands a substantial dollar valuation.  Both Piker and Ricard here need to physically place their hands on the ADS console for their commands to work.  Art!

     This is from "Alien", a cult classic released in 1979, notable for the production design.  Here we see Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley remove a cover panel in order to get access to release levers, which she really has to strain to move; that may be acting or she may have had to work against an extremely stiff mechanism, because once again - no accidental use wanted.  Art!

     I know, I know, but "Emergency Destruction System" still falls under our purview.  It blows stuff up, right?  Also, you have a window of 300 seconds to change your mind.  Art!

     Command sequence has to be input to ensure you really, really want to blow up your M-Class Star Freighter.  Then Elle has to screw in a rod, lift up each of those columns and flick them to "BLOW SHIZZLE UP" mode.  Phew!  Good job it didn't require two people activating separate remote stations to achieve anything.  Like this.  Art!

     The herd of elephants in the room here is why you would need a Self Destruct/Auto-Destruct/Emergency Destruction System in the first place?  

     O I thought you'd never ask!

     Because a lot of the literary DNA of anything involving spaceships harks back to the ships that transit the oceans of Earth, especially naval ones.  If you look like losing a major asset such as a battleship, then it's naval tradition, if not necessarily good practice, to scuttle said ship in deep water.  

     Why deep water?  So the triumphant enemy cannot salvage the ship, raise it and make it theirs.  Art!

     Gentle reader, welcome to a Kingston Valve.  Nothing to do with Jamaica, it was invented by a Mister Kingston.  These are a variety of sea cock, built into the hull of warships in order to allow the ingress of seawater once the wheel atop the valve has been spun.  In both instances above, water enters at the bottom, for cooling or ballast purposes, or just for washing dishes.

     The reason you don't see these cocks is because they exist below the waterline.  If the Captain gives an order to scuttle, flood parties will go below decks and open these sea cocks, causing the ship to flood and sink.  Of course - obviously! - they then have a race to get above decks.  Art!

     Scuttling in the depths of the briny deeps puts a ship beyond reach - so what happens if a fleet is surprised in harbour, as the Vichy French Fleet was at Toulon on 27th November 1942, when the Teutons turned up to capture it?

     Not only do you open the sea cocks, you remove the wheels that opened them and throw them overboard.  You plant demolition charges in magazines and gun turrets and blow enormous holes in ships.  Teuton soldiers trying to prevent French submarines from sinking suddenly found themselves at risk of drowning and scarpered pronto, as was the case on all the modern French ships.

     Ooops.

     What you might call a double-edged destruction due to dynamite, because if the ships had merely been flooded, then they could most certainly have been salvaged in the shallow, well-plotted and sheltered waters of a harbour.  Art!

     Herr Schickelgruber shrugged his shoulders and continued to concentrate on the Sinister Union.  The person most unhappy about the mass scuttling was Mussolini, who had fondly dreamed of acquiring the French fleet.  Sorry, cock.

THIS IS HOW IT BEGINS!

Conrad is always cautioning Hom. Sap. about letting AI take over, because a proliferating cluster of self-seeking software may have different priorities than squishy human meatbags.  Art!

     How is this AI 'out of control'?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Instead of summarising and notifying users of news stories, it has been manufacturing them out of whole cloth.  The BBC - the font of all the news that's fit to be writ - complained that Apple had summarised one of their news stories as Luigi Mangione shooting himself.  However much you might want this to be true, it is utter tosh.

     Conrad is minded of that legal story we covered last year, where an attorney used Chat GPT to source cases, trusting that it would be honest and accurate.  Surprise! it wasn't.  He got censured by the judge.  Art!

The AI Art Generator's take of "Evil AI"

More Mechanical Misery In Modern-day Mordor

Here's another sequence taken from the "Heavy Machinery And Industrial Mistakes Caught On Camera" Youtube vlog that I've been sourcing of late.  One of the problems is that there's so little data on what is going on, on what date and where it's located, the poster instead coming up with an asinine commentary.  Art!

     This one is in Ruffia, because that's Cyrllic and it's "Aleksei Leonov", whom was one of the original Sinister cosmonauts.

     I think the second word here is "Aviatsinii", implying that it's to do with aviation, and since they have a Mig-21 out front, that's a pretty fair guess.

     What can possibly go wrong?  Art!

This.  The cable snapped.

"Aircraft now entering level flight"

     Two chaps there now need clean underwear.  It's not clear what they were doing there since the cables were attached on the other side of the fuselage.  Art!

     Another Ooops moment.  Don't worry, chaps, simply insist that the Auto-Destruct Mechanism must have been accidentally tripped.

Be A Record-Breaker!

Just not in a good way.  Art!

     Donold Judas Trump has been desperately trying to have this sentencing pushed back beyond his inauguration, because otherwise he's going to be the first criminally-indicted Prez to enter office, which must stick great big pins in his ego.  Not his sense of shame, because he hasn't got any.  However - hello my favourite word! - he's not going to get prison time, fines or any real punishment, so he's kind of gotten away with it.  If only there were some meddling kids on the scene.

 

Finally -

'Twas a dull afternoon today indeed, as our IT was up the spout from 11:00 onwards.  Since it might reanimate at any minute, one could not step away from the laptop, which was a bit of a pain.  Swings and roundabouts: now up to Page 452 of Prof. Peter Caddick-Adams "1945 Victory In The West".  Art!

     We shall see what IT 'challenges' tomorrow brings.