Silicon Valley Redneck

So, naturally, we need another round...

...of restrictions on guns, reloading materials, and any sort of identifiable chemicals.  (Because chemicals!)

The Al-Quaedish instructions for making crude bombs?  Call for using match heads and sugar.  Not commercial gunpowder, whether black or smokeless.  'Cause, you know, in most places where these guys operate you can't just walk into the neighborhood sporting-goods store and buy a can of powder for your smokepole.

I'm reminded that the last round of restrictions on the sale of blackpowder, back in the 60s or some such, was driven by a Dick Tracy story line.  ZOMG a bad guy in t3h funny papers is using blackpowder in a highly-contrived arson scheme!  We gots to ban itz!

And, should matches not be available?  Why, the good folks at the Frankford Arsenal addressed that one long ago (and in more practical fashion than the Rocket City Rednecks).  Look up TM 31-210.  Got salt, water, electricity, sugar, and time on your hands?

Update: and if we're looking at deflagrating compositions, I stumbled across a doozy back in high school*.  Two ingredients**; one easily found, while the other took a bit of looking for.  Part 'A' remains as easy as ever.  Part 'B'... well... I haven't looked for it in stores in a great long time now, but it's probably there if you look in the right places, and I just discovered that it's unexpectedly easily bought on line***.  Maybe even without getting on any (more) watch lists.

* I was trying to make pretty colored fire. What I got was quite an impressive bang, from a small amount of the mixture with very light confinement.  Thanks to the very light confinement, the fragments thrown around by the blast were bits of paper, and didn't go too far.

** Two ingredients, considered at the retail level.  At least one of them has several different chemicals in it.

*** Oh, and it can also be made at home, without too much effort, from materials which are and will surely remain ubiquitous.

Alarming new discovery!

It's possible to make U-233 from thorium!

Uh, guys?  I found that bit of enlightenment in the open literature quite some time ago.

Like, when I was a senior in high school.

And we walked fifty stadia to school every morning, keeping watch for saber-toothed tigers.  That's how long ago it was!

Oh, noes! Another privacy threat!

Latest fearsome news making the rounds: Android malware by name of PlaceRaider, which runs quietly in the background taking pictures at random and transmitting the picture along with location and orientation data!

So, were it to infest my camera, it would get basically three kinds of pictures:

• The inside of my shirt pocket
• My left forefinger
• The shelf where I keep it at night while it charges

If I had a newer model with a front-facing camera, it could transmit even more damaging images:

• An index card
• My left ear
• My face
• The underside of a shelf

And I'll have you know I don't share images of my left ear with just anyone!

Means, end, what's the difference?

So there's this thing making the rounds about lines of scientific endeavor which have the potential for both great benefit and great harm.

One of the lines selected for its dire potential is geoengineering.  Well, the potential upside is obvious.  The risk?  There's some muttering about unintended consequences, unpredictable changes to weather patterns, and the like - you know, the sort of thing you can get from biofuel plantations, wind farms, and large solar installations - but the really big danger is this: geoengineering might solve the climate-change problem and render the entire current climate-change political agenda irrelevant.

Yup.  The activists are fully invested in a specific agenda for addressing climate change (one which even their advocates admit won't solve the problem), and can't accept the idea that the goal of preventing catastrophic anthropogenic global warming might be achieved in some other way.

Isn't there some proverb to the effect that the means should be justified by the end?

Terrorist EMP menace!

Well... that's the buzz, anyway.

Suppose Iran, or some non-state actor, got hold of a nuke and a way of lofting it?  All it takes is one little nuke in the upper atmosphere to knock out everything electrical in the U.S., right?

Um.  Let's take a look at an actual EMP event, shall we?  Starfish Prime caused significant disruption (not total destruction) of electrical and electronic systems 900 miles away.

And that was a 1.4 MT bomb.  Not a 14 KT fission bomb; a bloody great fusion bomb.

So... to create widespread destruction... our hypothetical enemy needs to use his hypothetical fission bomb that any serious industrial power ought to be able to build (but many seem to struggle with)... and use it to light off a megaton-range H-bomb, which is not widely regarded as being an easily-built item even given the fission trigger.

And then they need a missile capable of delivering that H-bomb (close to a ton, for a well-evolved design in 1958; likely much more for a first try) around 250 miles above the middle of the U.S.  And, if it doesn't have the range to do that from their own territory, they'll need a place to launch it from - maybe a cargo ship; I don't think Cuba would want to play that game this year.

And, looking at the effects described for Starfish Prime, just one of those bombs would create a Big Annoying Inconvenience.  What did the feller say about striking at a king?  We'd have plenty of resources left to track down the perpetrator and retaliate memorably.  A successful, properly crippling attack would need several H-bombs, and several missiles, and... well, basically, we're looking at Russia, or China, or just maybe France or England being able to pull it off.

And, somehow, I don't think anyone's been testing H-bombs without us and the Russians noticing - nor the big missiles, for that matter.  So, the sneak attack by a new Power would involve a bunch of untested hardware.  How good do we think their mathematicians and rocket plumbers are?

Gee, ya think?

(Starting over after the Monkeysphere mishap.)

According to this article, "markets" dominated by high-speed automated trading can - surprise! - exhibit wild behavior.

Quotable:

These kinds of trades appear to generate emergent behaviour that has nothing to do with the actual value of a company. Instead, these events are unavoidable properties of the system itself.

Like I said: school of anchovies.

As Joy likes to point out: "The trend is your friend, until it ends."  The objective of these super-fast trading algorithms is to be the fastest lemming in the swarm, and to turn aside just before the cliff.

Thing is, even if you are the lead lemming, it's a little tricky to spot the cliff in time to turn aside.

And, if you're not the lead lemming, there's no way you can see what the swarm is responding to.  You may be offered an explanation at 11, on The News for Lemmings, but the commentator really knows little more about it than you; he saw which way the swarm moved, and may have heard some rumors as to the reason, but the reality is probably that someone tripped, or was startled by a grasshopper, creating a minor perturbation that the swarm amplified.

Ah, so that's where he's spending his summer vacation.

Apparently, there's a HUGE CYLINDRICAL ALIEN SPACESHIP right near Mercury, revealed by a recent coronal mass ejection.

Except that the spaceship itself need not be huge, nor cylindrical; that could just as well be the shadow of the protective field of a much smaller craft.  Say, something the size of a police box.

Yeah, it's just the TARDIS, right where the Doctor parked it on April 22.  Another fortnight or so, and he'll get bored and go find another adventure, just wait and see.

Or, wait: does Mercury have a magnetic field?  That hole in the CME doesn't look quite right for a planetary magnetic field (though I'm not sure of the perspective), but a big black magnetic anomaly (like the one We Weren't Told About a decade ago) lying on the surface might just do the trick.