Dan Brown is an idiot
Jeff Dege
I was unimpressed. It was plodding, mechanical, and contained factual
errors sufficient to make willful suspension of disbelief difficult.
Today I started reading his first book, Angels & Demons.
It's worse.
Through plot devices too absurd to complicate, we have the College of
Cardinals about to go into Conclave as a quarter gram of antimatter is
placed in a battery-powered containment device that will shut down in six
hours.
The Swiss Guard know that it's there because someone has stolen one of
their wireless surveillance cameras, hidden it with the containment
device, and they can see the image of the device, complete with LED
countdown timer.
Our protagonists are desperate to find it. The commander of the Swiss
Guard explains that if he can shut off all power in the Vatican, he might
be able to detect the magnetic fields that contain the antimatter. Our
spunky heroine in tight shorts is less than optimistic - the detection
range will be very short, and it might not be detectable at all if the
device is shielded in some way.
The gaping hole is that the camera is both broadcasting, and that
broadcast is being received. They _know_ that the camera is broadcasting
a detectable RF signal because they can see the broadcast at their
security console. It's 30 seconds work to do a network trace to identify
which wireless access point the camera is talking to. A couple of minutes
with some aluminum foil will tell them which direction it is from that
access point. I can't see it taking more than half-an-hour to locate the
camera.
His books seem to depend upon supposedly brilliant people being
surprisingly ignorant.
--
To be governed is to be watched, inspected, directed, indoctrinated,
numbered, estimated, regulated, commanded, controlled, law-driven,
preached at, spied upon, censured, checked, valued, enrolled, by creatures
who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.
-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Will Frank
Hash: SHA1
Also Sprach Jeff Dege:
> His books seem to depend upon supposedly brilliant people being
> surprisingly ignorant.
Well said...though _Angels & Demons_ (which was, I admit, my favorite of
his, but no thanks to him--John Langdon's ambigrams were cool, and I
like Illuminati stories, even misused ones) wasn't the worst example.
The absolute worst case, for my money, was the conclusion of _Digital
Fortress_. A roomful of computer scientists and applied (cryptographic)
mathematicians gets stumped by a rather simple physics question. I
suppose spoiler space is pointless...the question asks about the
"primary difference between the elements" of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
bombs, and despite knowing that one used U-235 and the other used 238,
they start looking for casualty counts or atomic weights or the like.
I'm glad the book was pretty much over by then, because that ruined it.
- --
Will "scifantasy" Frank - wmf...@stwing.org
"Lord Morrolan, of the House of the Dragon, was one of damn few nobles
who deserved the title. I have seen him show most of the attributes
one expects of a noble: courtesy, kindness, honor. I would also say
that he is one of the most bloodthirsty bastards I have ever met."
- --Vlad Taltos, _Jhereg_
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Robert A. Woodward
Will Frank <wmf...@stwing.org> wrote:
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> Also Sprach Jeff Dege:
>
> > His books seem to depend upon supposedly brilliant people being
> > surprisingly ignorant.
>
> Well said...though _Angels & Demons_ (which was, I admit, my favorite of
> his, but no thanks to him--John Langdon's ambigrams were cool, and I
> like Illuminati stories, even misused ones) wasn't the worst example.
>
> The absolute worst case, for my money, was the conclusion of _Digital
> Fortress_. A roomful of computer scientists and applied (cryptographic)
> mathematicians gets stumped by a rather simple physics question. I
> suppose spoiler space is pointless...the question asks about the
> "primary difference between the elements" of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
> bombs, and despite knowing that one used U-235 and the other used 238,
> they start looking for casualty counts or atomic weights or the like.
> I'm glad the book was pretty much over by then, because that ruined it.
>
Well, the difference between the Hiroshima bomb and the Nagasaki
bomb is that the first was a U-235 gun bomb and the 2nd was an
Plutonium implosion bomb (can't remember the atomic weight, but it
was either 239 or 240).
--
Robert Woodward <robe...@drizzle.com>
<http://www.drizzle.com/~robertaw>
Peter Bruells
> I read, some years ago, the Da Vinci Code.
>
> I was unimpressed. It was plodding, mechanical, and contained factual
> errors sufficient to make willful suspension of disbelief difficult.
I started "The Da Vinci Code" today and had the same impression after
a couple of pages. I dunno what grated me most - Europol having
direct access to Hotel registrations, the pointless French in the
French dialogue or master of symbology clever conluding, that the
"capitaine's" nickname is "the bull", because the French word
resembles Taurus and "the Zodiac is the same all over the world." Boy,
I hope he never opens a German horoscope page.
Stephen Dedalus
It was mostly 239 with ~ 1% 240, the presence of which made a gun type
Plutonium bomb impractical, hence the use of an implosion type.
Tapio Erola
> Well, the difference between the Hiroshima bomb and the Nagasaki
> bomb is that the first was a U-235 gun bomb and the 2nd was an
> Plutonium implosion bomb (can't remember the atomic weight, but it
> was either 239 or 240).
Pu-239. Pu-240 is a highly-undesirable contaminant in bomb applications.
--
Tapio Erola
"Being broke is a temporary situation. Being poor is a state of mind."
--Mike Todd
Daniel Silevitch
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> Also Sprach Jeff Dege:
>
>> His books seem to depend upon supposedly brilliant people being
>> surprisingly ignorant.
>
> Well said...though _Angels & Demons_ (which was, I admit, my favorite of
> his, but no thanks to him--John Langdon's ambigrams were cool, and I
> like Illuminati stories, even misused ones) wasn't the worst example.
>
> The absolute worst case, for my money, was the conclusion of _Digital
> Fortress_. A roomful of computer scientists and applied (cryptographic)
> mathematicians gets stumped by a rather simple physics question. I
> suppose spoiler space is pointless...the question asks about the
> "primary difference between the elements" of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
> bombs, and despite knowing that one used U-235 and the other used 238,
> they start looking for casualty counts or atomic weights or the like.
> I'm glad the book was pretty much over by then, because that ruined it.
I think you mean "One used uranium and the other used plutonium".
An alternate answer, using a different definition of element ("component
of the whole") is "one used a gun-target core, the other used an
implosion core".
-dms
Daniel Silevitch
> I read, some years ago, the Da Vinci Code.
>
> I was unimpressed. It was plodding, mechanical, and contained factual
> errors sufficient to make willful suspension of disbelief difficult.
My mom read the Da Vinci Code a couple of years ago, and did something
that's very unusual for her: She told me that I should absolutely avoid
reading it. Not for religious reasons (we're Reform Jewish), but because
it was the worst-written piece of garbage that she had slogged through
in the last decade or two.
-dms
Will Frank
Hash: SHA1
Also Sprach Daniel Silevitch:
>> "primary difference between the elements" of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
>> bombs, and despite knowing that one used U-235 and the other used 238,
>> they start looking for casualty counts or atomic weights or the like.
>> I'm glad the book was pretty much over by then, because that ruined it.
>
> I think you mean "One used uranium and the other used plutonium".
I actually don't. They find out that that's a misconception. I don't
know if it _was_ a misconception, but in that book it was.
- --
Will "scifantasy" Frank - wmf...@stwing.org
"Batman to all points. I could use some air support. Since I can't
fly. At all. Now would be good." --Batman (Bruce Wayne), /Dark Heart/
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Stephen Dedalus
Will Frank wrote:
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> Also Sprach Daniel Silevitch:
>
> >> "primary difference between the elements" of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
> >> bombs, and despite knowing that one used U-235 and the other used 238,
> >> they start looking for casualty counts or atomic weights or the like.
> >> I'm glad the book was pretty much over by then, because that ruined it.
> >
> > I think you mean "One used uranium and the other used plutonium".
>
> I actually don't. They find out that that's a misconception. I don't
> know if it _was_ a misconception, but in that book it was.
It's not a misconception. Sounds like a crappy book.
Stephen Dedalus
Tapio Erola wrote:
> "Robert A. Woodward" <robe...@drizzle.com> writes:
>
> > Well, the difference between the Hiroshima bomb and the Nagasaki
> > bomb is that the first was a U-235 gun bomb and the 2nd was an
> > Plutonium implosion bomb (can't remember the atomic weight, but it
> > was either 239 or 240).
>
> Pu-239. Pu-240 is a highly-undesirable contaminant in bomb applications.
Undesirable, but it's always going to be there in a certain
concentration, unless you stray into the realms of impracticality.
Anyway, it forced people to use the far safer but more complex
implosion type device in Plutonium bombs, which is a good thing.
100% pure Pu-239 could be used in a gun type bomb.
Jon Schild
He also thinks that cell phones get a dial tone. Several times in
Angels and Demons someone turns on a cell phone and listens for a dial
tome to see if service is available.
Peter Huebner
Fourcade...@gmail.com says...
>
> Anyway, it forced people to use the far safer but more complex
> implosion type device in Plutonium bombs, which is a good thing.
>
> 100% pure Pu-239 could be used in a gun type bomb.
>
The expression 'A Good Thing' simply does not apply in the context of plutonium
in any shape or form, but even less so when installed in a bomb.
-Peter
--
=========================================
firstname dot lastname at gmail fullstop com
Peter Huebner
>
> My mom read the Da Vinci Code a couple of years ago, and did something
> that's very unusual for her: She told me that I should absolutely avoid
> reading it. Not for religious reasons (we're Reform Jewish), but because
> it was the worst-written piece of garbage that she had slogged through
> in the last decade or two.
>
> -dms
I came to that conclusion some 30-50 pages into the book and decided not to
waste any more of my time: Claptrap. How the hell that book ever became such a
bestseller is utterly beyond my comprehension. I am glad a neighbour lent it to
my wife - we didn't add to Mr. Brown's undeserved riches <g>.
Daniel Silevitch
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> Also Sprach Daniel Silevitch:
>
>>> "primary difference between the elements" of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
>>> bombs, and despite knowing that one used U-235 and the other used 238,
>>> they start looking for casualty counts or atomic weights or the like.
>>> I'm glad the book was pretty much over by then, because that ruined it.
>>
>> I think you mean "One used uranium and the other used plutonium".
>
> I actually don't. They find out that that's a misconception. I don't
> know if it _was_ a misconception, but in that book it was.
Huh? Unless there's been some grand conspiracy to Hide The Truth, there
wasn't any uranium in the Nagasaki bomb. If Dan Brown is asserting that
Fat Man was a U-238 bomb, he's truly an idiot.
-dms
Sean O'Hara
>
> His books seem to depend upon supposedly brilliant people being
> surprisingly ignorant.
>
ITYM: His books depend upon his audience being ignorant enough to
not see the plot holes.
--
Sean O'Hara | http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com
Spike: Uh, listen Jet. You said bell peppers and beef. There's no
beef in here. So you wouldn't really call it bell peppers and beef,
now would you?
Jet: Yes, I would.
Spike: Well, it's not.
-Cowboy Bebop
Will Frank
Hash: SHA1
Also Sprach Daniel Silevitch:
>> I actually don't. They find out that that's a misconception. I don't
>> know if it _was_ a misconception, but in that book it was.
>
> Huh? Unless there's been some grand conspiracy to Hide The Truth, there
> wasn't any uranium in the Nagasaki bomb. If Dan Brown is asserting that
> Fat Man was a U-238 bomb, he's truly an idiot.
All I remember--all I wish to remember, really--is, the "prime
difference between the elements" of the two bombs is 3. As in, 238-235.
- --
Will "scifantasy" Frank - wmf...@stwing.org
"Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say yes!" --Winston
Zeddemore, /Ghostbusters/
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@hotmail.com.invalid Eric D. Berge
wrote:
>he absolute worst case, for my money, was the conclusion of _Digital
>Fortress_.
I read the first chapter of that one a while back; lost interest right
about the time the brilliant linguist impressed a bunch of NSA types
by informing them that Chinese ideograms can be used to write
Japanese, a fact of which they had previously been ignorant.
Mike Dworetsky
news:MPG.1ec0ddc37...@news.individual.net...
> In article <1146490061.2...@e56g2000cwe.googlegroups.com>,
> Fourcade...@gmail.com says...
> >
> > Anyway, it forced people to use the far safer but more complex
> > implosion type device in Plutonium bombs, which is a good thing.
> >
> > 100% pure Pu-239 could be used in a gun type bomb.
> >
>
> The expression 'A Good Thing' simply does not apply in the context of
plutonium
> in any shape or form, but even less so when installed in a bomb.
>
I suspect the mental context here was "A good thing this limitation due to
the detailed physics exists, as it requires a lot of technology to overcome;
otherwise any idiot dictator or terrorist could build one." Mind you, these
days the "secret" is so well known that the proviso no longer applies. It
is notable that countries like Iran go for the technically easier uranium
enrichment scenario, difficult as it is.
--
Mike Dworetsky
(Remove "pants" spamblock to send e-mail)
Lawrence Watt-Evans
wrote:
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>Also Sprach Daniel Silevitch:
>
>>> I actually don't. They find out that that's a misconception. I don't
>>> know if it _was_ a misconception, but in that book it was.
>>
>> Huh? Unless there's been some grand conspiracy to Hide The Truth, there
>> wasn't any uranium in the Nagasaki bomb. If Dan Brown is asserting that
>> Fat Man was a U-238 bomb, he's truly an idiot.
>
>All I remember--all I wish to remember, really--is, the "prime
>difference between the elements" of the two bombs is 3. As in, 238-235.
That's just flat-out false.
--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
Daniel Silevitch
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> Also Sprach Daniel Silevitch:
>
>>> I actually don't. They find out that that's a misconception. I don't
>>> know if it _was_ a misconception, but in that book it was.
>>
>> Huh? Unless there's been some grand conspiracy to Hide The Truth, there
>> wasn't any uranium in the Nagasaki bomb. If Dan Brown is asserting that
>> Fat Man was a U-238 bomb, he's truly an idiot.
>
> All I remember--all I wish to remember, really--is, the "prime
> difference between the elements" of the two bombs is 3. As in, 238-235.
That's wrong. The difference is either 2 (atomic number, 94-92) or 4
(atomic mass, 239-235).
-dms
Wayne Throop
: He also thinks that cell phones get a dial tone. Several times in
: tome to see if service is available.
Well, perhaps he meant that the address book on the phone
had a voice output mode. Though... it's not clear why the
dial tome wouldn't work when there was no service. Hm.
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
Wayne Throop
::: Nagasaki bombs, and despite knowing that one used U-235 and the
::: other used 238, they start looking for casualty counts or atomic
::: weights or the like. I'm glad the book was pretty much over by
::: then, because that ruined it.
:: I think you mean "One used uranium and the other used plutonium".
: I actually don't. They find out that that's a misconception. I don't
: know if it _was_ a misconception, but in that book it was.
It need not be a misconception. The plutonium *was* originally
u238 before transumation, so "used 238" might refer to that The raw
ingredients. One enriched u235, the other transumated u238. Not that
I think it does, especially if "used plutonium" was said to be a
"misconception", but still, it's arguable. Just barely.
Robert Sneddon
<plati...@pants.btinternet.com> writes
> It
>is notable that countries like Iran go for the technically easier uranium
>enrichment scenario, difficult as it is.
If they want to make uranium fuel for power reactors they're doing all
the right things. If they want to build nuclear weapons they're going at
it the long way round. The normal method (North Korea, frex) is to use
spent fuel from existing reactors, separate out the plutonium and build
nukes and eventually H-bombs that way. U-bombs are low-yield, big and
clumsy and pretty much impossible to fit on existing missiles or under
strike-bombers. They also radiate like crazy and are easy to detect in
shipping containers.
If Iran has uranium enrichment they can make their own fuel
off-the-books, build some crude breeder piles and start making their own
Pu also off the books. Keeping all this a secret over the years it would
take is going to be hard though.
The current induced panic about Iran's enrichment program by the US
government doesn't actually hold water when examined closely but close
examination is not something the US government is actually interested in
in this case. Fear is the key.
--
To reply, my gmail address is nojay1 Robert Sneddon
Wayne Throop
: All I remember--all I wish to remember, really--is, the "prime
: difference between the elements" of the two bombs is 3. As in, 238-235.
Note that "prime difference" is a huge hint,
but "primary difference" (per upthread post), not so much.
Not that I would have gotten it. Even if I caught the clue, I would think
"prime factors of (p)239 minus u(235). And I most likely wouldn't have
caught the clue without knowing the answer ahead of time. Or at the
very least, knowing/suspecting it was a trick question.
And therefore, unsurprisingly, I wouldn't find missing a trick question
a sign of lack of intelligence, or a case of "being stumped" in any
significant way. But maybe that's just sour grapes.
Jeff Dege
> In article <1146490061.2...@e56g2000cwe.googlegroups.com>,
> Fourcade...@gmail.com says...
>>
>> Anyway, it forced people to use the far safer but more complex
>> implosion type device in Plutonium bombs, which is a good thing.
>>
>> 100% pure Pu-239 could be used in a gun type bomb.
>
> The expression 'A Good Thing' simply does not apply in the context of plutonium
> in any shape or form, but even less so when installed in a bomb.
A good bomb goes off when you want it to and does not when you don't.
--
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he
is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not
make messes in the house.
- Robert Heinlein
Tapio Erola
> In article <1146490061.2...@e56g2000cwe.googlegroups.com>,
> Fourcade...@gmail.com says...
> >
> > Anyway, it forced people to use the far safer but more complex
> > implosion type device in Plutonium bombs, which is a good thing.
> >
> > 100% pure Pu-239 could be used in a gun type bomb.
> >
>
> The expression 'A Good Thing' simply does not apply in the context of plutonium
> in any shape or form, but even less so when installed in a bomb.
Gotta disagree. Pu-239 makes a wonderful reactor fuel that can be
"bred" from otherwise-useless U-238.
The stuff *is* somewhat troublesome to handle, though.
Justin Fang
Jeff Dege <jd...@jdege.visi.com> wrote:
>Today I started reading his first book, Angels & Demons.
>
>It's worse.
>Through plot devices too absurd to complicate, we have the College of
>Cardinals about to go into Conclave as a quarter gram of antimatter is
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
You didn't have to go any farther than this to prove the thesis in the
header. That's, what, about a hundred million times the current yearly
world production? (I'm assuming the book is not actually set on New
Rome in 3000 AD or something like that.)
--
Justin Fang (jus...@panix.com)
Tapio Erola
(Snippage about Pu-239 and fission weapon types)
> I suspect the mental context here was "A good thing this limitation due to
> the detailed physics exists, as it requires a lot of technology to overcome;
> otherwise any idiot dictator or terrorist could build one." Mind you, these
> days the "secret" is so well known that the proviso no longer applies. It
> is notable that countries like Iran go for the technically easier uranium
> enrichment scenario, difficult as it is.
Implosion design is far more effective than gun-type and developing it is
far easier than even simplest enrichment of Pu-239 or U-235. Any actor
producing either is most likely capable of developing appropriate designs.
The only potential users for gun-type design are smaller sub-state
actors who have somehow acquired sufficiently enriched U-235 via
clandestine means (ie. terrorists). Even then it would be probable for
such source to have ready-made devices available.
Nobody (outside apartheid S.Africa) has used gun-type designs after
Little Boy.
Btw, both U-235 and Pu-239 can be used in implosion designs. The main
advantage of Pu-239 in weapons applications is it's smaller critical
mass (16 kg vs. 50 kg; without neutron reflectors).
Mark_R...@hotmail.com
> The current induced panic about Iran's enrichment program by the US
> government doesn't actually hold water when examined closely but close
> examination is not something the US government is actually interested in
> in this case. Fear is the key.
As it has been since 9/11/2001. I forget whether you participated in
the 'What is the matter with Dan Simmons', but did you notice that the
usual suspects started right up carrying water for the the Bush
Administration on this matter?
Norville
>
> I was unimpressed. It was plodding, mechanical, and contained factual
> errors sufficient to make willful suspension of disbelief difficult.
>
>
> It's worse.
All four of his books so far are bad; I say this having had the tedious
experience of reading them all. Working in a bookstore, I couldn't exactly
avoid them, what with people gushing about them constantly and his being a
bestselling author. So, yeah, "peer pressure" caused me to read them. I'll
even read his next book whenever it comes out -- and I'll probably hate
it, too. <roll eyes>
--
"Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are:
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
<*> "Ulysses" by Tennyson <*>
Mark_R...@hotmail.com
> I read, some years ago, the Da Vinci Code.
Amazing how much Dan Brown and Doubleday, have made and Columbia
Pictures and Sony are going to make on the fantasies, the literal kind
not the literary kind, of Pierre Plantard:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/27/60minutes/main1552009.shtml
P.S. Since Colbert was also a subject of 60 Minutes Sunday, I just want
to pass this along:
One report on his appearance at the White House Correspondents dinner:
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002425363
Commentary on lack of coverage:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-daou/ignoring-colbert-a-small_b_20092.html
Happenings at the White House Correspondents dinner have been
considered news and have gotten wide coverage before.
Will Frank
Hash: SHA1
Also Sprach Wayne Throop:
> Note that "prime difference" is a huge hint,
> but "primary difference" (per upthread post), not so much.
Sorry, that was an oversight on my part.
I can sort of see your point, but...this wasn't a trick question, really.
- --
Will "scifantasy" Frank - wmf...@stwing.org
"We've got..."
"...business with your husband. What?
"John?"
"Hal Jordan. Another time shift. I'm up to speed, carry on."
"Okay, I'm starting to get a migraine."
- --Green Lantern (John Stewart), Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Static
(Virgil Hawkins), and Batman (Terry McGinnis), /Time, Warped/
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Aatu Koskensilta
> I read, some years ago, the Da Vinci Code.
>
> errors sufficient to make willful suspension of disbelief difficult.
>
> Today I started reading his first book, Angels & Demons.
>
> It's worse.
That depends on your point of view. Angels & Demons is so glaringly
absurd and idiotic that I've come to the conclusion that it has to be a
brilliant parody of, well, something. No one can write stuff that stupid
by accident.
> The gaping hole is that the camera is both broadcasting, and that
> broadcast is being received. They _know_ that the camera is broadcasting
> a detectable RF signal because they can see the broadcast at their
> security console. It's 30 seconds work to do a network trace to identify
> which wireless access point the camera is talking to. A couple of minutes
> with some aluminum foil will tell them which direction it is from that
> access point. I can't see it taking more than half-an-hour to locate the
> camera.
There was that. But I'd still like to know how the beautiful adopted
daughter of the Catholic priest scientist trying to prove Genesis
factually correct by experimenting with anti-matter proved one of
"Einstein's fundemental theories" wrong by observing a school of tuna
fish with atomically synchronised cameras. And then there was the
educational exchange between Kohler - whose hatred of religion is due to
his being paralyzed as the result of his religious parent's refusal to
allow doctors to do whatever it was necessary to avoid his becoming
paralyzed or dying - and Langdon. The influence Aztecs had on
Christianity was news to me, too. One could on and on, there's simply so
much great stuff in the book.
Seriously, I recommend the book to anyone who enjoys stupidity.
--
Aatu Koskensilta (aatu.kos...@xortec.fi)
"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
@hotmail.com.invalid Eric D. Berge
<fr...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> The current induced panic about Iran's enrichment program by the US
>government doesn't actually hold water when examined closely but close
>examination is not something the US government is actually interested in
>in this case. Fear is the key.
I thought Hexapodia was the key?
John Schilling
>
>In message <JsidnRp3Yeq...@bt.com>, Mike Dworetsky
><plati...@pants.btinternet.com> writes
>> It
>>is notable that countries like Iran go for the technically easier uranium
>>enrichment scenario, difficult as it is.
> If they want to make uranium fuel for power reactors they're doing all
>the right things. If they want to build nuclear weapons they're going at
>it the long way round. The normal method (North Korea, frex) is to use
>spent fuel from existing reactors, separate out the plutonium and build
>nukes and eventually H-bombs that way. U-bombs are low-yield, big and
>clumsy and pretty much impossible to fit on existing missiles or under
>strike-bombers. They also radiate like crazy and are easy to detect in
>shipping containers.
Oh, my. I think every single statement in this paragraph turns out to
be false.
It's kind of hard to say much about the "normal" method for developing
a nuclear weapons capability with so few data points, but the recent
entrants in the field have tended to go for uranium enrichment rather
than plutonium breeding. The North Koreans, frex, pretty much gave
up on reactors and plutonium over a decade ago, and while they are
not going to give up on the leftover capabilities (including half
a dozen or so bombs) from the old days, they are turning to uranium
enrichment for the future. The Pakistanis, use uranium enrichment
exclusively. The South Africans, before they gave up on nuclear
weapons entirely, used uranium enrichment exclusively.
Using spent reactor fuel was very much the 1970s approach to nuclear
proliferation, on account of either the French or the Russians or both
would surely sell you a plutonium breeder reactor if you asked nicely,
and the rest of the world would wink and nod and pretend to believe
you when you said "research purposes".
Now that even the French don't do that any more, wheras (open knowledge
of) gas centrifuge technology has advanced enormously since the 1970s,
the advantage of plutonium is gone. To the extent that these things
have market prices, the price of an A-bomb's worth of highly enriched
uranium is less than that of an A-bomb's worth of plutonium. The cost
of a modest uranium enrichment facility is less than the cost of a modest
plutonium breeder reactor and associated infrastructure. The uranium
enrichment facility can be more easily decentralized and/or hidden, and
the technologies needed to build it are less blatantly nuclear than those
for the reactor infrastructure.
You get more bombs for less money, with less international suspicion and
no place where a single JDAM can shut down your entire program, if you
build your bombs from uranium.
As for "big and clumsy and pretty much impossible to fit on existing
missiles", you seem to be assuming that Uranium can be used only in
gun-assembly bombs and that gun-assembly bombs are necessarily as
massive as "Little Boy". Neither of these is true. Gun-assembly
bombs can be lightweight, albeit inefficient, and Uranium can be
used just as readily as plutonium in lightweight, efficient, implosion
bombs.
The United States, for example, introduced a 15 kiloton Uranium bomb,
weighing 800 pounds, in 1952. That's a Hiroshima's worth of capability
that will fit on any ballistic missile or under any fighter-bomber on
Earth. The Chinese, in the 1980s, are believed to have sold to Pakistan
(and through A.Q. Khan to just about everyone else) detailed designs for
a 25 kiloton Uranium bomb weighing 400 pounds. If there's any doubt on
that point, it's only in whether or not the sale took place, *not* in
whether a Uranium bomb of such capability can be made and made by a
relatively low-tech nuclear power.
Oh, and Uranium bombs are the ones that *don't* radiate like crazy.
U-235 and U-238 have much longer half-lives than any plutonium isotope,
and what radiation they do produce consists almost entirely of alpha
particles, trivially stopped. Weapons-grade plutonium is much more
radioactive, and a much greater fraction of that radiation comes in
the form of high-energy gammas and neutrons.
If the Iranians want uranium fuel for power reactors, they're doing it
all *wrong*. The right way to get fuel for power reactors is to note
that there is a huge glut of uranium enrichment capability already and
no great concern over international commerce in low-enrichment uranium,
and to sign a long-term contract with an existing manufacturer with idle
uranium enrichment capability. Or, if you insist on autarky, to simply
build CANDU-style reactors that require no uranium enrichment at all.
You do need heavy water for those, but that's easier than any sort of
enriched uranium, and less likely to make people nervous.
If they're trying to build nuclear weapons, they're doing it the way
just about everyone else in the past twenty-odd years has. Only people
who still use plutonium, are the ones with sunk-cost plutonium capability
left over from the old days, and people trying to build very lightweight
thermonuclear weapons.
And, you know, none of this is the least bit obscure or esoteric. There's
an entire FAQ on the subjet, readily available on-line.
> If Iran has uranium enrichment they can make their own fuel off-the-books,
>build some crude breeder piles and start making their own Pu also off the
>books. Keeping all this a secret over the years it would take is going to
>be hard though.
If Iran has uranium enrichment they can just maike highly enriched uranium
and use that to make bombs directly. Not a trivial endeavour, but easier
to do and easier to conceal than the version that has the breeder reactors
stuck needlessly in the middle.
But keeping all this secret over the years is mostly irrelevant, because
as you might have noticed the Iranians aren't *trying* to keep it a secret.
They're issuing press releases bragging about it.
> The current induced panic about Iran's enrichment program by the US
>government doesn't actually hold water when examined closely but close
>examination is not something the US government is actually interested in
>in this case. Fear is the key.
The US government does not appear to be exhibiting any signs of panic, or
even great concern, in this matter. But yes, fear is the key. That is
why the Iranians are issuing the press releases.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
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Wayne Throop
: I can sort of see your point, but...this wasn't a trick question, really.
Hm. I still think it's a trick question (from your description second
hand). Leaving aside that 3 is a prime number (or course... so is 2
per my other interpretation, but leaving that aside as I say), having
"the difference between" mean literally a subtraction seems to be to
be a trick in the way the question is phrased, exploiting an ambiguity
to mislead. The difference-as-an-artifact between the two is that one
was an implosion device, the other shotgun. I'd count coming up with
the number "3" (or 2 indirectly via 4) to represent that and the various
reasons behind that, is both tricky, and shaky.
Or put simply, in setting out to answer, I wouldn't start looking
for a subtraction of two numbers; that was a bit of misdirection. IMO.
Well. Maybe Dan Brown, or the characters in the book,
didn't think it was a trick question. But I still do.
jtingle
wrote:
>In article <slrne5c0kh....@bardeen.local>, dms...@uchicago.edu says...
>>
>> My mom read the Da Vinci Code a couple of years ago, and did something
>> that's very unusual for her: She told me that I should absolutely avoid
>> reading it. Not for religious reasons (we're Reform Jewish), but because
>> it was the worst-written piece of garbage that she had slogged through
>> in the last decade or two.
>>
>> -dms
>
>I came to that conclusion some 30-50 pages into the book and decided not to
>waste any more of my time: Claptrap. How the hell that book ever became such a
>bestseller is utterly beyond my comprehension. I am glad a neighbour lent it to
>my wife - we didn't add to Mr. Brown's undeserved riches <g>.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who thought this. The _story_ was
tolerable. The writing sucked. "Angels and Demons" was better in this
respect. Of the four(?) books of his I've read, only A&D was really
worth reading. As the OP pointed out there were several
inconsistencies that could break your WSoD at any point, but it was,
on balance, readable. The others weren't.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
Mike Schilling
"John Schilling" <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote in message
news:e35u0...@drn.newsguy.com...
>
> The US government does not appear to be exhibiting any signs of panic, or
> even great concern, in this matter.
If true, this is as opposed to the right-wing punditocracy, which is trying
to make it *the* issue for 2006.
Robert Sneddon
<schi...@spock.usc.edu> writes
>In article <J2wPPAgA...@nospam.demon.co.uk>, Robert Sneddon says...
>>
>>In message <JsidnRp3Yeq...@bt.com>, Mike Dworetsky
>><plati...@pants.btinternet.com> writes
>>> It
>>>is notable that countries like Iran go for the technically easier uranium
>>>enrichment scenario, difficult as it is.
>
>> If they want to make uranium fuel for power reactors they're doing all
>>the right things. If they want to build nuclear weapons they're going at
>>it the long way round. The normal method (North Korea, frex) is to use
>>spent fuel from existing reactors, separate out the plutonium and build
>>nukes and eventually H-bombs that way. U-bombs are low-yield, big and
>>clumsy and pretty much impossible to fit on existing missiles or under
>>strike-bombers. They also radiate like crazy and are easy to detect in
>>shipping containers.
>
>Oh, my. I think every single statement in this paragraph turns out to
>be false.
>
>It's kind of hard to say much about the "normal" method for developing
>a nuclear weapons capability with so few data points, but the recent
>entrants in the field have tended to go for uranium enrichment rather
>than plutonium breeding. The North Koreans, frex, pretty much gave
>up on reactors and plutonium over a decade ago, and while they are
>not going to give up on the leftover capabilities (including half
>a dozen or so bombs) from the old days, they are turning to uranium
>enrichment for the future.
The existing reactors in North Korea are still in use, I understand,
and the spent fuel rods will continue to be a source of weapon Pu well
into the future. I've not heard of a specific uranium enrichment project
set up by the North Koreans but they may be hedging their bets.
> The Pakistanis, use uranium enrichment
>exclusively. The South Africans, before they gave up on nuclear
>weapons entirely, used uranium enrichment exclusively.
The SA government didn't have any sort of reactors to derive Pu from
but I thought they used gaseous diffusion rather than centrifuges. They
also never planned to have more than a handful of nukes as a deterrent
to the perceived threat of a black tide coming over their northern
borders and driving the whites into the sea. It was very much a
backs-to-the-wall mentality similar to Israel's at the time even though
the SA army was the most capable by far in the region and the "black
tides" spent most of their efforts in giving dictatorship and
kleptocracy a bad name between bouts of internecine warfare.
>Using spent reactor fuel was very much the 1970s approach to nuclear
>proliferation, on account of either the French or the Russians or both
>would surely sell you a plutonium breeder reactor if you asked nicely,
>and the rest of the world would wink and nod and pretend to believe
>you when you said "research purposes".
Or indeed the research reactor technology the Americans have just sold
to the Indian government nudge nudge wink wink.
All reactors breed Pu if they use enriched Uranium as fuel.
Purpose-built breeders are either military designs or prototypes for
fast breeders for a future generation of mixed-fuel power reactors that
nobody actually seems very interested in building, given the current low
cost of mined raw uranium. The only French research breeders I know of
are the Phenix and super-Phenix, both of which are one-off designs. The
prototype FBR at Dounreay in Scotland was shut down over a decade ago,
in part because its function was determined to be economically
pointless. The military reactors in the long-term nuclear powers have
also mostly been decommissioned since they are awash with Pu from
reduced warhead stocks and commercial reprocessing and don't need to
specifically breed any more.
>Now that even the French don't do that any more, wheras (open knowledge
>of) gas centrifuge technology has advanced enormously since the 1970s,
>the advantage of plutonium is gone. To the extent that these things
>have market prices, the price of an A-bomb's worth of highly enriched
>uranium is less than that of an A-bomb's worth of plutonium.
How do you get a uranium nuke's X-ray yield up high enough to make a
usable H-bomb though? That's where the bang-per-buck tops out. I'm
pretty sure the Pakistanis have H-bomb technology, but with exclusively
uranium initiators?
> The cost
>of a modest uranium enrichment facility is less than the cost of a modest
>plutonium breeder reactor and associated infrastructure. The uranium
>enrichment facility can be more easily decentralized and/or hidden, and
>the technologies needed to build it are less blatantly nuclear than those
>for the reactor infrastructure.
The enrichment facilities are still under the IAEA's control as long as
the country in question is a signatory to the NPT. The IAEA has seen no
evidence of enrichment or plans to enrich in Iran other than to
fuel-element levels (circa 6%).
>
>You get more bombs for less money, with less international suspicion and
>no place where a single JDAM can shut down your entire program, if you
>build your bombs from uranium.
Breeders don't have to be big unless you want them to be efficient. A
distributed Pu breeder program is also feasible if messy and expensive.
>As for "big and clumsy and pretty much impossible to fit on existing
>missiles", you seem to be assuming that Uranium can be used only in
>gun-assembly bombs and that gun-assembly bombs are necessarily as
>massive as "Little Boy". Neither of these is true. Gun-assembly
>bombs can be lightweight, albeit inefficient, and Uranium can be
>used just as readily as plutonium in lightweight, efficient, implosion
>bombs.
As long as the U-235 purity figures are very high. Gun-type bombs can
be made with very low purities as long as there is enough feedstock. I
can't recall the details precisely but Little Boy's fissile charge was a
mixture of materials from assorted pre-production and research projects
and wasn't much higher than 50% on average. High purity requires very
big cascades, as in Oak Ridge-sized plus some odd technologies for
handling very high purity material, neither of which Iran has or will
have in the forseeable future.
>
>The United States, for example, introduced a 15 kiloton Uranium bomb,
>weighing 800 pounds, in 1952.
> The Chinese, in the 1980s, are believed to have sold to Pakistan
>(and through A.Q. Khan to just about everyone else) detailed designs for
>a 25 kiloton Uranium bomb weighing 400 pounds.
>
>Oh, and Uranium bombs are the ones that *don't* radiate like crazy.
I'm thinking of the alpha source in gun-type bombs, mostly. It causes
higher-than-usual neutron fluxes in the U-235 at specific energies.
Compact designs based on high-purity Uranium also self-illuminate. It
can be shielded, of course, but the shielding itself would cause
interest in a container scanner.
>U-235 and U-238 have much longer half-lives than any plutonium isotope,
>and what radiation they do produce consists almost entirely of alpha
>particles, trivially stopped.
I was thinking more of the self-illuminated neutron flux from
concentrated U-235 and Pu-239.
>If the Iranians want uranium fuel for power reactors, they're doing it
>all *wrong*. The right way to get fuel for power reactors is to note
>that there is a huge glut of uranium enrichment capability already and
>no great concern over international commerce in low-enrichment uranium,
>and to sign a long-term contract with an existing manufacturer with idle
>uranium enrichment capability.
Basically the Iranians don't want people telling them what they can and
can't do, even when they stick to the IAEA rules and obey the NPT. It's
a bit like the Chinese Great Leap Forward in the 60s; it resulted in a
lot of stupidity and wastefulness but it indicated to the world that
China was not dependent on the West or the Soviet Union for its
technology. Independent capability means the people who sell you that
technology can't turn it off and leave you hanging.
>
>If Iran has uranium enrichment they can just maike highly enriched uranium
>and use that to make bombs directly.
Not without a lot more enrichment capability than they appear to have
right now, or not in any sort of reasonable timescale.
> Not a trivial endeavour, but easier
>to do and easier to conceal than the version that has the breeder reactors
>stuck needlessly in the middle.
>
>But keeping all this secret over the years is mostly irrelevant, because
>as you might have noticed the Iranians aren't *trying* to keep it a secret.
>They're issuing press releases bragging about it.
They want the warmongers in the White House to talk to them instead of
issuing threats all the time. They look over their western border at an
army of 130,000 Christian crusaders who have already subjugated and
enslaved a Muslim country and they don't want it to happen to them. As
far as they're concerned, Saddam's big mistake was not really having
nukes and being secretive about the projects he did have running in the
1980s. That's what got Iraq invaded by the Christians, they think, and
they don't want it to happen to them hence the very public rush to
enrichment.
They have the option of quitting the NPT and making a dash for nukes
once they have a suitable enrichment capability in place. That is still
a long way in the future.
>> The current induced panic about Iran's enrichment program by the US
>>government doesn't actually hold water when examined closely but close
>>examination is not something the US government is actually interested in
>>in this case. Fear is the key.
>
>The US government does not appear to be exhibiting any signs of panic, or
>even great concern, in this matter.
Military planning by the Pentagon for assorted contingencies involving
Iran is certainly going on, but that's not the panic I was referring to.
It's the fear induced in the population to later justify an attack that
is the key to such endeavours.
> But yes, fear is the key. That is
>why the Iranians are issuing the press releases.
I'm seeing editorials appearing in the Western press about Iran's
nuclear program and the irrationality of the senior figures in their
government. In some cases these editorials are written by people from
Iranian exile groups (read: ex-Shah supporters and their offspring)
which should strike a chord with anyone who studied the intelligence
failures during the run-up to the Iraq imbroglio.
Jeff Dege
No, that's the premise of the book. Our spunky heroine in tight shorts'
father invented a new way of creating anti-matter in vast quantities -
just before he was found murdered with "Illuminati" branded across his
chest. As a single point of departure, it's wsod-able.
That nobody in the Vatican knew what anti-matter was, though, is a hard
sell. And given that it's not at all necessary to the plot...
--
"When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter
society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread
children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay."
- Brian Aldiss
Jeff Dege
>
> The US government does not appear to be exhibiting any signs of panic, or
> even great concern, in this matter. But yes, fear is the key. That is
> why the Iranians are issuing the press releases.
My guess is the Iranians are trying to create sufficient concern to drive
up oil prices, hoping to influence US elections.
--
Soon or late the money to pay the State's mounting bills will have to
be found, and there is only one place to look for it. That is in the
pockets of persons who earn the communal income by doing some sort of
useful work. Politicians never earn it, and neither do the uplifters.
It must always come, in the last analysis, from men who go to work in
the morning and labor hard all day.
- H. L. Mencken
Jeff Dege
It's been in the news, repeatedly, because the Iranian government has been
issuing press releases, repeatedly.
The US Administration does not control the issuance of those press
releases. They may be taking advantage of them, but they aren't
responsible for them.
Mike Schilling
"Jeff Dege" <jd...@jdege.visi.com> wrote in message
news:pan.2006.05.02...@jdege.visi.com...
>
> No, that's the premise of the book. Our spunky heroine in tight shorts'
> father invented a new way of creating anti-matter in vast quantities -
> just before he was found murdered with "Illuminati" branded across his
> chest. As a single point of departure, it's wsod-able.
>
> That nobody in the Vatican knew what anti-matter was, though, is a hard
> sell.
The thing is, being mostly old and hard of hearing, they thought he'd
invented a new way to knit an antimacassar.
Jordan
> No, that's the premise of the book. Our spunky heroine in tight shorts' father ...
Ah, so she's the brilliant inventor's beautiful daughter? How original
...
> ... invented a new way of creating anti-matter in vast quantities - just before he was found murdered with "Illuminati" branded across his chest ... <
Wow, the Illuminati are really good at keeping their existence a secret
...
> That nobody in the Vatican knew what anti-matter was, though, is a hard sell. <
ROFLMAO!
Good God, the existence of antimatter is part of ordinary popular
culture these days! So Dan Brown thinks that the Roman Catholic Church
is ignorant or something? That's so damned silly ... in fact, the
Vatican is an international center of scholarship, and even some
science!
- Jordan
Robert Sneddon
<jd...@jdege.visi.com> writes
>The US Administration does not control the issuance of those press
>releases. They may be taking advantage of them, but they aren't
>responsible for them.
The US government has been pushing hard to have the matter of the
Iranian enrichment program taken out of the hands of the IAEA and have
it "dealt with" by the Security Council of the UN, which has no
jurisdiction or institutional experience with nuclear development
programs. The permanent members of the SC are looking rather askance at
the evidence presented by the US Administration, remembering the intel
garbage about WMDs they were fed by Powell and co. before the invasion
of Iraq.
The IAEA has inspectors in place in Iran who have confirmed that what
Iran has right now is not capable of making nuclear weapons in the
forseeable future and they are not (yet) in breach of the NPT. They have
done nothing illegal in international law. This has not been discussed
in any depth in the US press.
Peter Bruells
> He also thinks that cell phones get a dial tone. Several times in
> Angels and Demons someone turns on a cell phone and listens for a
> dial tome to see if service is available.
Something similar confused me in The da Vinci Code - the heroine
claims that her cellphone service doesn't cover translatlantic
charges. While this is technically possible, I wonder why would
anyone would order such a service.
I also liked the 1-litre-100km "SmartCar" - that's three times more
mileage out of a gallon than even the most ferverent greens aim for
these days.
Peter Bruells
>
> That nobody in the Vatican knew what anti-matter was, though, is a hard
> sell.
Isn't that the substance the Anti-Christ is made of?
Justin Fang
Jeff Dege <jd...@jdege.visi.com> wrote:
>On Mon, 01 May 2006 15:28:13 -0400, Justin Fang wrote:
>> In article <pan.2006.05.01....@jdege.visi.com>,
>> Jeff Dege <jd...@jdege.visi.com> wrote:
>>>Through plot devices too absurd to complicate, we have the College of
>>>Cardinals about to go into Conclave as a quarter gram of antimatter is
>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>
>> You didn't have to go any farther than this to prove the thesis in the
>> header. That's, what, about a hundred million times the current yearly
>No, that's the premise of the book. Our spunky heroine in tight shorts'
>father invented a new way of creating anti-matter in vast quantities -
>just before he was found murdered with "Illuminati" branded across his
>chest. As a single point of departure, it's wsod-able.
Your suspenders of disbelief are stronger than mine, then.
And the best thing the thieves can think of to do with it is threaten to
blow up the Vatican? What a criminal lack of imagination.
--
Justin Fang (jus...@panix.com)
Jaimie Vandenbergh
wrote:
>Something similar confused me in The da Vinci Code - the heroine
>claims that her cellphone service doesn't cover translatlantic
>charges. While this is technically possible, I wonder why would
>anyone would order such a service.
Not knowing the context in the book, but: UK pay-as-you-go mobile
phones don't do international roaming. There's no common mechanism for
making the PAYG bit working, apparently.
Is that different in mainland Europe?
Cheers - Jaimie
--
Women's breasts are like electric train sets. They're meant for kids,
but usually it's the fathers who wind up playing with them.
Michael S. Schiffer
news:m23bfsb...@rogue.ecce-terram.de:
>...
> Something similar confused me in The da Vinci Code - the heroine
> claims that her cellphone service doesn't cover translatlantic
> charges. While this is technically possible, I wonder why would
> anyone would order such a service.
I'm pretty sure that's the default for service in the US, at least
with some companies. I had to get "International Dialing" enabled
with Verizon, for example. (They don't charge extra to have it
enabled, though the calls themselves generally cost more than
domestic, and aren't included in standard bundles of minutes.) I
expect that the theory is that for that large majority of US users
who never make an international call, allowing them by default is
mostly an opportunity for a thief to rack up charges on their
account.
A decade ago, it was possible to get a cell phone with only local
calls enabled (long distance service was extra). I don't know if
that's possible these days, since the plans I'm familiar with treat
all domestic calls equally.
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
msch...@condor.depaul.edu
Jesper Lauridsen
> Jeff Dege wrote:
>> I read, some years ago, the Da Vinci Code.
>
> Amazing how much Dan Brown and Doubleday, have made and Columbia
> Pictures and Sony are going to make on the fantasies, the literal kind
> not the literary kind, of Pierre Plantard:
>
> http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/27/60minutes/main1552009.shtml
They reasoning of these treasure hunters escapes me. The story is that
a French priest spent a lot of money. Nobody knows where the money came
from, but a popular theory is that priest had found a great treasure.
So these treasure hunters are now trying to find it. What they seem to
forget is that if the story is true, the treasure has not only been found -
it has also been spent.
Btw, that report is a good argument in favour of a disclaimer on the movie.
Jesper Lauridsen
>
> They want the warmongers in the White House to talk to them instead of
> issuing threats all the time. They look over their western border at an
> army of 130,000 Christian crusaders who have already subjugated and
> enslaved a Muslim country and they don't want it to happen to them. As
> far as they're concerned, Saddam's big mistake was not really having
> nukes and being secretive about the projects he did have running in the
> 1980s. That's what got Iraq invaded by the Christians, they think, and
> they don't want it to happen to them hence the very public rush to
> enrichment.
Is this choice of words yours, or your interpretation of Iranian paranoia.
Dan Clore
I wrote about _Angels & Demons_ a while back:
Anyone else read this masterpiece by Dan Brown? I found it
appallingly bad. The plot is fairly clever and it should
provide a good deal of suspense for a reader who can suspend
their disbelief; but I fear that any minimally knowledgable
individual will find that their disbelief needs to be not so
much suspended as hanged, drawn, and quartered.
The plot centers on everyone's favorite hoary conspiracy,
the Illuminati, but Brown bases the book neither on
historical fact or any of the multitudinous conspiracy
theories about them, in favor of his own inventions. That's
fine in itself, though it might mean disappointment for
those interested in the subject.
I won't detail the action of the novel, rather I'll mention
a few points of fact I found rather incredible.
Start with a statement like the following. The sexy
super-scientist heroine explains that her father
"categorically proved the existence of an energy force that
unites us all. He actually demonstrated that we are all
physically connected . . . that the molecules in your body
are intertwined with the molecules in mine . . . that there
is a single force moving within all of us." (Ellipses in
original.)
This astounds the novel's protagonist, a Harvard professor.
But *gravity* would meet the description. (The heroine later
remembers telling her father, when she was a little girl,
that "Raindrops fall because *everything* falls!
*Everything* falls! Not just rain!" You might think she
would have remembered that later on.)
Then again, this genius of a protagonist not only lacks that
sort of knowledge, he knows many things that aren't so. He
translates _Novus Ordo Seclorum_ on the dollar bill as "New
Secular Order", specifying secular "as in _non_religious."
It actually means "A New Order of the Ages". (I.e., that
will last for ages.) He thinks of a couplet as "by
definition, having _two_ syllables." A couplet consists of a
pair of lines of verse, usually rhyming. (Like the one
attributed in the book to John Milton, though I can't
imagine Milton employing a false rhyme.) He recalls teaching
his students that "The practice of 'god-eating'--that is,
Holy Communion--was borrowed from the Aztecs." Christians
had practiced communion for over a thousand years before
their first contact with the Aztecs. In fact, many
considered the Aztecs' similar ritual a Satanic parody. It's
not that communion was original to Christianity--similar
rites were practiced by multitudinous religions and sects in
the area where Christianity arose--but the utter
backwardness of the claim that astounds.
Harvard isn't the only place in the book where people lack
basic knowledge. At the Vatican, the _camerlengo_--the
chamberlain temporarily in charge during the election of the
next Pope--doesn't know the difference between celibacy (no
marriage) and chastity (no sex). He doesn't know that the
Roman Catholic Church considers artificial insemination a
dire sin. He thinks (incorrectly) that it is not considered
an act of sexual intercourse.
Finally, most astounding of all, Brown tells us that the
creation of anti-matter in a particle accelerator somehow
proves that God exists and that He created the universe,
that it "prove[s] Genesis was possible." Now, even if we
eliminate all the obvious absurdities in Genesis, the
talking snake, angels having sex with humans and begetting
giants, the flood, a person turning into a pillar of salt,
and on and on, and confine the claim strictly to the account
of the creation of the universe, we strike against an
insurmountable obstacle: Genesis contains not one, but
*two*, contradictory, accounts of creation.
And there you have it.
*****
_The Da Vinci Code_ is full of similar factual inaccuracies,
but at least Brown has learned enough since writing _Angels
& Demons_ to (correctly) note that Christianity borrowed the
ritual of "god-eating" from other religions current in the
area, rather than from the Aztecs.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/1587154838/ref=nosim/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
Gene Ward Smith
Dan Clore wrote:
> Finally, most astounding of all, Brown tells us that the
> creation of anti-matter in a particle accelerator somehow
> proves that God exists and that He created the universe,
> that it "prove[s] Genesis was possible."
I thought it was pretty amazing that someone could figure out how to
manufacture and contain antimatter in industrial quantities and then
waste it blowing up the Vatican.
Will Frank
Hash: SHA1
Also Sprach Gene Ward Smith:
> I thought it was pretty amazing that someone could figure out how to
> manufacture and contain antimatter in industrial quantities and then
> waste it blowing up the Vatican.
Two different people. The scientist who made the antimatter is killed
and his product stolen.
- --
Will "scifantasy" Frank - wmf...@stwing.org
"Surprised to see me?"
"A little. I'm more surprised that I lived so long."
"Batman, Bruce Wayne. Bruce Wayne, Batman. Or...have you met?"
(simultaneous) "Not now!"
"Great. What did they use to call it? Stereo?"
- --Bruce Wayne (Old), Batman (Bruce Wayne), and Batman (Terry
McGinnis), "Time, Warped"
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Peter Bruells
> On 02 May 2006 14:19:45 +0200, Peter Bruells <p...@ecce-terram.de>
> wrote:
>
> >Something similar confused me in The da Vinci Code - the heroine
> >claims that her cellphone service doesn't cover translatlantic
> >charges. While this is technically possible, I wonder why would
> >anyone would order such a service.
>
> Not knowing the context in the book, but: UK pay-as-you-go mobile
> phones don't do international roaming. There's no common mechanism for
> making the PAYG bit working, apparently.
But "roaming" and "calling an internationa number" are two wildly
different things.
David Johnston
wrote:
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>Also Sprach Gene Ward Smith:
>
>> I thought it was pretty amazing that someone could figure out how to
>> manufacture and contain antimatter in industrial quantities and then
>> waste it blowing up the Vatican.
>
>Two different people. The scientist who made the antimatter is killed
>and his product stolen.
Even so.
Peter Bruells
> Peter Bruells <p...@ecce-terram.de> wrote in
> news:m23bfsb...@rogue.ecce-terram.de:
> >...
> > Something similar confused me in The da Vinci Code - the heroine
> > claims that her cellphone service doesn't cover translatlantic
> > charges. While this is technically possible, I wonder why would
> > anyone would order such a service.
>
> I'm pretty sure that's the default for service in the US, at least
> with some companies. I had to get "International Dialing" enabled
> with Verizon, for example. (They don't charge extra to have it
> enabled, though the calls themselves generally cost more than
> domestic, and aren't included in standard bundles of minutes.) I
> expect that the theory is that for that large majority of US users
> who never make an international call, allowing them by default is
> mostly an opportunity for a thief to rack up charges on their
> account.
Sure, I can understand that. But the heroine in question was French
and living in Paris, being a cryptographer of medium importance for
the government. He colleagues and friends are probably all over the
continent.
I got the impression that Dan Brown didn't do any real research, but
wrote about Paris (and Europe in general) the same way Karl May wrote
about Native Indians, complete with "Hugh!" and peace pipes.
Peter Bruells
>
> Start with a statement like the following. The sexy super-scientist
> heroine explains that her father "categorically proved the existence
> of an energy force that unites us all. He actually demonstrated that
> we are all physically connected . . . that the molecules in your
> body are intertwined with the molecules in mine . . . that there is
> a single force moving within all of us." (Ellipses in original.)
What I didn't: Wouldn't recreating the Big-Bang and explaining how it
works actually strengthen the case for there not being a creator?
Mike Schilling
"Peter Bruells" <p...@ecce-terram.de> wrote in message
news:m2ejzbi...@rogue.ecce-terram.de...
>
> I got the impression that Dan Brown didn't do any real research, but
> wrote about Paris (and Europe in general) the same way Karl May wrote
> about Native Indians, complete with "Hugh!" and peace pipes.
Who's Hugh? (Or is that the noise more commonly spelled "Ugh!"?)
Peter Bruells
"Hugh!" was indeed the way "Ugh!" was written in the Karl May
novels. Of course, none of us kids had any idea to pronounce it, along
with "Kiowa" (key-oh-wah) or "Apache".
Took me a couple of years to realize that virtually all kids in my
peer group had lied about seing "Krieg der Sterne", because none of
them pronounced "Chewbacca" correctly.
Jaimie Vandenbergh
wrote:
>Jaimie Vandenbergh <jai...@sometimes.sessile.org> writes:
>
>> On 02 May 2006 14:19:45 +0200, Peter Bruells <p...@ecce-terram.de>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >Something similar confused me in The da Vinci Code - the heroine
>> >claims that her cellphone service doesn't cover translatlantic
>> >charges. While this is technically possible, I wonder why would
>> >anyone would order such a service.
>>
>> Not knowing the context in the book, but: UK pay-as-you-go mobile
>> phones don't do international roaming. There's no common mechanism for
>> making the PAYG bit working, apparently.
>
>But "roaming" and "calling an internationa number" are two wildly
>different things.
Very true. I misunderstood your meaning as being physically
transatlantic from the home network, probably since I'm doing a fair
bit of pond-hopping at the moment.
Cheers - Jaimie
--
"Choose the Dark Side... now why would I do a thing like that?"
-- Obi-Wan Renton
Mark_R...@hotmail.com
> > Amazing how much Dan Brown and Doubleday, have made and Columbia
> > Pictures and Sony are going to make on the fantasies, the literal kind
> > not the literary kind, of Pierre Plantard:
> >
> > http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/27/60minutes/main1552009.shtml
>
> They reasoning of these treasure hunters escapes me. The story is that
> a French priest spent a lot of money. Nobody knows where the money came
> from, but a popular theory is that priest had found a great treasure.
> So these treasure hunters are now trying to find it. What they seem to
> forget is that if the story is true, the treasure has not only been found -
> it has also been spent.
History is littered with greedy people who never bothered to think
things through. It would sadden me a lot less if it was only
themselves that they hurt in the process.
Anyway, it takes a real non-history buff to not realize that a priest
has all sorts of ways to raise large sums of cash if he is simply
willing to abuse his office.
John Schilling
>In message <e35u0...@drn.newsguy.com>, John Schilling
[Iranian Nuclear Program]
>>> If they want to make uranium fuel for power reactors they're doing all
>>>the right things. If they want to build nuclear weapons they're going at
>>>it the long way round. The normal method (North Korea, frex) is to use
>>>spent fuel from existing reactors, separate out the plutonium and build
>>>nukes and eventually H-bombs that way. U-bombs are low-yield, big and
>>>clumsy and pretty much impossible to fit on existing missiles or under
>>>strike-bombers. They also radiate like crazy and are easy to detect in
>>>shipping containers.
>>Oh, my. I think every single statement in this paragraph turns out to
>>be false.
>>It's kind of hard to say much about the "normal" method for developing
>>a nuclear weapons capability with so few data points, but the recent
>>entrants in the field have tended to go for uranium enrichment rather
>>than plutonium breeding. The North Koreans, frex, pretty much gave
>>up on reactors and plutonium over a decade ago, and while they are
>>not going to give up on the leftover capabilities (including half
>>a dozen or so bombs) from the old days, they are turning to uranium
>>enrichment for the future.
> The existing reactors in North Korea are still in use, I understand,
You understand incorrectly. It is possible, but not likely, that the
existing reactor, singular, is *again* in use. It was shut down in
1994. The North Koreans claim to have restarted it in 2004, but that
claim was made for negotiating purposes and AFIK there is no evidence
supporting it.
The North Koreans *have* recently been reprocessing fuel elements that
were removed from the Yongbyon reactor in 1994 and stored since,
extracting from them plutonium suitable for building a handful of
nuclear weapons. Some reports of this activity are phrased vaguely
enough that they might be casually misread to indicate the Yongbyon
reactor is in current use as a plutonium breeder.
>and the spent fuel rods will continue to be a source of weapon Pu well
>into the future. I've not heard of a specific uranium enrichment project
>set up by the North Koreans but they may be hedging their bets.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/dprk/nuke-uranium.htm
The "specific uranium enrichment project" is what all the fuss the past
three or four years has been *about* Everybody knew that the North Koreans
had produced some plutonium before 1994 and probably had built a couple of
bombs with it, and nobody cared. Then, in 2002, the North Koreans went and
said, "we are enriching uranium for the purposes of supporting an ongoing
nuclear weapons manufacturing program". Everything since, follows from
that announcement and that program.
A uranium enrichment program, not a plutonium breeding program. And it's
not a hedged bet, it's North Korea's only serious effort at an ongoing
nuclear weapons manufacturing capability.
>> The Pakistanis, use uranium enrichment exclusively. The South Africans,
>> before they gave up on nuclear weapons entirely, used uranium enrichment
>> exclusively.
>
> The SA government didn't have any sort of reactors to derive Pu from
>but I thought they used gaseous diffusion rather than centrifuges.
Right. They got their start a bit earlier, and they had different tech
advisers, so they used a different uranium enrichment process than Khan
and his heirs.
>They also never planned to have more than a handful of nukes as a deterrent
>to the perceived threat of a black tide coming over their northern
>borders and driving the whites into the sea.
Which bit of targeting trivia doesn't change the technical side of things.
Starting with neither uranium enrichment nor plutonium breeding capability
and wanting a modest nuclear arsenal, the South Africans decided that the
technically preferable way to do this was to enrich uranium.
Again, the same technical decision that *everyone* in the past thirty years
had made. The only people who bother to breed plutonium, are the people
who have plutonium breeder reactors left over from before it was clear that
uranium enrichment was the technically preferable way of making bombs.
>>Using spent reactor fuel was very much the 1970s approach to nuclear
>>proliferation, on account of either the French or the Russians or both
>>would surely sell you a plutonium breeder reactor if you asked nicely,
>>and the rest of the world would wink and nod and pretend to believe
>>you when you said "research purposes".
> Or indeed the research reactor technology the Americans have just sold
>to the Indian government nudge nudge wink wink.
Or not. You can't breed plutonium with research reactor "technology",
you need an actual reactor. The United States has not sold any nuclear
reactors to the Indian government, and is not going to. The Indian
government already *has* plutonium breeder reactors, which it does not
even pretend are "research" reactors any more. And the United States
has AFIK not sold the Indian government any technology that would increase
the ability of its actual plutonium breeder reactors to breed plutonium.
On top of which, India's nuclear program has nothing to do with Iran's,
or with emerging nuclear powers generally. So, pretty lame attempt to
change the subject.
> All reactors breed Pu if they use enriched Uranium as fuel.
Just barely. Reactors using *highly* enriched Uranium fuel, and there
are quite a few, breed very little plutonium - not enough to be worth
the bother. Plutonium comes from neutrons hitting U-238, and U-238
is the isotope that uranium enrichment, *removes*.
For breeding plutonium, you want low-enriched uranium at most, and if
you can make a reactor that runs straight unenriched uranium that's
better still.
>Purpose-built breeders are either military designs or prototypes for
>fast breeders for a future generation of mixed-fuel power reactors that
>nobody actually seems very interested in building.
This, at least, is mostly right.
>The military reactors in the long-term nuclear powers have
>also mostly been decommissioned since they are awash with Pu from
>reduced warhead stocks and commercial reprocessing and don't need to
>specifically breed any more.
This also is mostly right. But note the implication: even established
nuclear powers, don't think that breeding plutonium is the way to go
any more. Some of them will keep their plutonium breeders running so
long as they remain in good repair, but other than that it's uranium
enrichment all the way.
>>Now that even the French don't do that any more, wheras (open knowledge
>>of) gas centrifuge technology has advanced enormously since the 1970s,
>>the advantage of plutonium is gone. To the extent that these things
>>have market prices, the price of an A-bomb's worth of highly enriched
>>uranium is less than that of an A-bomb's worth of plutonium.
> How do you get a uranium nuke's X-ray yield up high enough to make a
>usable H-bomb though? That's where the bang-per-buck tops out. I'm
>pretty sure the Pakistanis have H-bomb technology, but with exclusively
>uranium initiators?
Everybody who has been paying attention, is pretty sure the Pakistanis
do *not* have H-bomb technology, only A-bomb. H-bombs are for the United
States, Russia, Britain, France, China, and *maybe* India and Israel.
But, if you want an H-bomb, yes, you go ahead and use a uranium bomb
unless you've got a legacy stockpile of plutonium. And you get the
X-ray yield up high enough to make a usable H-bomb the usual way -
by detonating the bomb, plain and simple. A ten-kiloton uranium
bomb produces the same X-ray yield as a ten-kiloton plutonium bomb.
Where, exactly, did you *think* the energy from the uranium bomb
was going. Neutrinos?
>>The cost of a modest uranium enrichment facility is less than the cost
>>of a modest plutonium breeder reactor and associated infrastructure.
>>The uranium enrichment facility can be more easily decentralized and/or
>>hidden, and the technologies needed to build it are less blatantly nuclear
>>than those for the reactor infrastructure.
> The enrichment facilities are still under the IAEA's control as long as
>the country in question is a signatory to the NPT.
An honest signatory, that is. But the same is true of the plutonium
breeders. If you're going to build A-bombs, you have to be one of the
Big Five, you have to not be a party to the NPT, or you have to cheat
on the NPT. That's true whether you want to build a uranium bomb or
a plutonium bomb.
Only difference is, it's easier to get away with cheating with uranium.
>The IAEA has seen no evidence of enrichment or plans to enrich in Iran
>other than to fuel-element levels (circa 6%).
Why would you expect them to? The plans will fit in a small briefcase,
and the actual procedure is just plumbing. Set up your centrifuges in
parallel, get low-enrichment uranium. Set up your centrifuges in series,
get high-enrichment uranium. Set up your centrifuges in series and feed
them with a preexisting stockpile of low-enrichment uranium, and you get
high-enrichment uranium *fast*
There is no reason to expect any evidence of enrichment to other than
fuel-element levels, until a few months before weapons-grade uranium
starts coming off the production line. And even then, the "evidence"
will not be a matter of catching the Iranians (or whomever) actually
producing highly-enriched uranium, but of their evicting the IAEA
inspectors and cameras from the building that used to be full of
parallel centrifuges. Assuming they ever let the IAEA in to the
building in the first place.
The Iranians, evicted the IAEA inspectors and cameras from the building
that used to be full of parallel centrifuges, a month or two ago.
>>You get more bombs for less money, with less international suspicion and
>>no place where a single JDAM can shut down your entire program, if you
>>build your bombs from uranium.
> Breeders don't have to be big unless you want them to be efficient. A
>distributed Pu breeder program is also feasible if messy and expensive.
Whereas a distributed uranium enrichment program is *not* expensive.
Well, not significantly more expensive than a centralized one.
If you want quadruple redundancy in your breeder reactor program, you
need four breeder reactors. Four breeder reactors are four times as
expensive as one breeder reactor. Even if it's four quarter-sized
breeder reactors vs one big reactor, four reactors are about four
times as expensive as one.
If you want quadruple redundancy in your uranium enrichment program,
you take the hundreds of centrifuges you had in your one big building,
and split them among four buildings. Or forty or hundreds, for that
matter. Still connected in series and/or parallel, as you prefer, but
by courier rather than pipeline. A bit of overhead for the courier
network, but no new hardware required.
>>As for "big and clumsy and pretty much impossible to fit on existing
>>missiles", you seem to be assuming that Uranium can be used only in
>>gun-assembly bombs and that gun-assembly bombs are necessarily as
>>massive as "Little Boy". Neither of these is true. Gun-assembly
>>bombs can be lightweight, albeit inefficient, and Uranium can be
>>used just as readily as plutonium in lightweight, efficient, implosion
>>bombs.
> As long as the U-235 purity figures are very high. Gun-type bombs can
>be made with very low purities as long as there is enough feedstock.
So can implosion-type bombs.
You've got this one *completely* backwards. It is gun-assembly bombs,
*not* implosion bombs, that are particularly sensitive to impurities.
Gun-assembly bombs, take an inordinately long time (whole milliseconds)
to assemble the critical mass, and one stray neutron in the middle of
that process gives you a barely-critical fizzle. So you need to
ruthlessly exclude anything that might produce stray neutrons.
Implosion bombs complete their assembly in single-digit microseconds.
You're still screwed if you get a stray neutron at the wrong time, but
"wrong time" is a thousand times shorter and you can tolerate a
thousand times more neutron-spewing crap in your bomb material.
And it is plutonium, *not* uranium, that is prone to having all the
neutron-spewing crap in it in the first place. The primary impurity
in weapons-grade (or worse, reactor-grade) plutonium, is Pu-240.
Which is prone to spontaneous fission and neutron emission. The
primary impurity in enriched uranium, is U-238. Which, is just a
weak nuclear fuel. It won't sustain a chain reaction by itself,
but it will contribute a bit by fast-neutron fission and neutron
multiplication.
Impurities in plutonium, actively impede the operation of atomic
bombs. Impurities in uranium, are just inert diluents at worst
and weaker fuels at best. And implosion bombs, mostly don't care
so long as you give them enough of some sort of fuel.
>I can't recall the details precisely but Little Boy's fissile charge was a
>mixture of materials from assorted pre-production and research projects
>and wasn't much higher than 50% on average.
Little Boy's fissile charge was, on average, enriched to 80% U-235.
This was made by blending 50 kg of 89% enriched uranium with 14 kg of
50% enriched uranium, which is probably where you're misremembering
the "50%" figure from.
And it was understood at the time, verified in postwar tests, that
Little Boy's 64 kg of 80% enriched uranium could have been used,
straight up, to fuel four almost unmodified "Fat Man" implosion
bombs at full yield.
Uranium works in implosion bombs. Even with ~20% impurities, uranium
works in implosion bombs. Even with no particular effort at tinkering
with the bomb design, uranium with ~20% impurities works quite nicely
in implosion bombs. Even with no particular effort at tinkering with
the bomb design and with ~20% impurities, uranium implosion bombs work
quite nicely as triggers for H-bombs. Aside from some very specialized
applications of no particular relevance to emerging nuclear powers,
enriched uranium is the preferred material for nuclear bomb construction.
I am baffled as to how you "learned" otherwise.
>>The United States, for example, introduced a 15 kiloton Uranium bomb,
>>weighing 800 pounds, in 1952.
>> The Chinese, in the 1980s, are believed to have sold to Pakistan
>>(and through A.Q. Khan to just about everyone else) detailed designs for
>>a 25 kiloton Uranium bomb weighing 400 pounds.
>>Oh, and Uranium bombs are the ones that *don't* radiate like crazy.
>
> I'm thinking of the alpha source in gun-type bombs, mostly. It causes
>higher-than-usual neutron fluxes in the U-235 at specific energies.
>Compact designs based on high-purity Uranium also self-illuminate. It
>can be shielded, of course, but the shielding itself would cause
>interest in a container scanner.
*What* "aplha source in the gun-type bombs"?
There is *no* sort of nuclear weapon, that requires an *alpha* source.
*Some* nuclear weapons, require a *neutron* source. Gun-type bombs, are
the type that do *not* require even that much. Blind assembly, as used
on Little Boy, lets you lock the (tamped) critical assembly together and
let it wait however many milliseconds are required for a stray neutron
to slip in from the environment and start the reaction. No artificial
neutron source, no "alpha source", just uranium and steel.
Implosion bombs, are the ones that require a neutron source. The core
is assembled in microseconds, and will recoil and disassemble in the
same time if the chain reaction is not triggered by a precisely-timed
burst of neutrons.
Note, "precisely-timed burst". These are *pulsed* neutron sources.
Except at the moment of detonation, they don't emit neutrons, don't
produce any sort of detectable radiation signature.
And while pulsed neutron sources do usually incorporate alpha
emitters, either Po-210 in the antiques or tritium in anything
made (even in emerging powers) anywhere in the past fifty years,
they are *shielded* alpha emitters. It doesn't take much to
stop alpha particles, after all, and especially with the old
Po-210 models it was positively necessary to do so.
>>U-235 and U-238 have much longer half-lives than any plutonium isotope,
>>and what radiation they do produce consists almost entirely of alpha
>>particles, trivially stopped.
> I was thinking more of the self-illuminated neutron flux from
>concentrated U-235 and Pu-239.
"Self-illuminated"? Not sure what you mean by that.
But, of the isotopes named, U-235 is the one that does *not* produce
neutrons all by itself. So, again, it's not the uranium bombs that
produce highly detectable radiation signatures.
>>If the Iranians want uranium fuel for power reactors, they're doing it
>>all *wrong*. The right way to get fuel for power reactors is to note
>>that there is a huge glut of uranium enrichment capability already and
>>no great concern over international commerce in low-enrichment uranium,
>>and to sign a long-term contract with an existing manufacturer with idle
>>uranium enrichment capability.
> Basically the Iranians don't want people telling them what they can and
>can't do, even when they stick to the IAEA rules and obey the NPT.
Hence, the part of my post that began with, "If they insist on Autarky"...
I can see why you ignored and excised it; with a lead-in like that it
couldn't *possibly* have had anything to do with the policies of a nation
that wants to tell international agencies to butt out.
>>If Iran has uranium enrichment they can just maike highly enriched uranium
>>and use that to make bombs directly.
> Not without a lot more enrichment capability than they appear to have
>right now, or not in any sort of reasonable timescale.
Uranium enrichment capability is measured in units of kg-SWU, "Kilogram
Seperative Work Units".
Iran's current uranium enrichment capability, ~400 kg-SWU per year
Planned capacity of Natanaz uranium enrichment facility, ~25,000 kg-SWU/yr
Enrichment capacity for one 25-kt uranium implosion bomb, ~2,500 kg-SWU
Keeping a typical 1000 MWe nuclear powerplant in fuel: ~100,000 SWU per year
Iran will need more enrichment capability than it presently has, if it
wants to make atomic bombs. Yes.
Iran will need a *whole shitload more* enrichment capabiluty than it
presently has, if it wants to run a nuclear powerplant.
Even Iran's *planned* uranium enrichment capability, is inadequate for
any significant nuclear power program. But it would suffice to make
ten atomic bombs per year. Or ten A-bomb triggers for H-bombs, if it
comes to that.
It takes *more* uranium enrichment capability to support a nuclear power
program, than it does a nuclear weapons program. More, not less. There
is the serial/parallel issue, but that's trivia. Anyone with centrifuges,
will be able to build bombs long before they can generate electricity.
And anyone with enough centrifuges to generate electricity, can build
bombs on the side without anyone noticing unless they look *very* closely.
>> Not a trivial endeavour, but easier
>>to do and easier to conceal than the version that has the breeder reactors
>>stuck needlessly in the middle.
>>But keeping all this secret over the years is mostly irrelevant, because
>>as you might have noticed the Iranians aren't *trying* to keep it a secret.
>>They're issuing press releases bragging about it.
> They want the warmongers in the White House to talk to them instead of
>issuing threats all the time.
So, step one, arrange for some warmongers to be elected to the White House?
Because the current crop, seems to rarely if ever issue actual threats to
Iran. Well, unless you count "And Hans Blix will write a letter saying he
is very angry..." as a threat.
If the Iranians wanted atomic bombs, and/or to not be invaded, they'd
make their atomic bombs *secretly*, and once they actually *have* them,
go issue the press releases. Probably concurrent with a test explosion.
Issuing the press releases now, saying "we don't have atomic bombs now
but we will get them soon", both diminishes their chances of ever getting
atomic bombs and increases their chances of being invaded. Or bombed
or even nuked, for that matter.
The Iranians are nontheless issuing press releases now. Either they are
complete idiots, or they have other goals.
> They have the option of quitting the NPT and making a dash for nukes
>once they have a suitable enrichment capability in place. That is still
>a long way in the future.
Every nation that ever built an atomic bomb, on the day the first one
rolled out the factory the consensus opinion (even of the experts) was
"that is still a long way in the future".
I'm only an amateur, and I obviously don't have a consensus behind me,
but Iran is 1-2 years away from its first atomic bomb, and 2-3 years
from its first half-dozen A-bombs, if it continues its present work.
And, expert consensus or no, I'm right.
>>> The current induced panic about Iran's enrichment program by the US
>>>government doesn't actually hold water when examined closely but close
>>>examination is not something the US government is actually interested in
>>>in this case. Fear is the key.
>>The US government does not appear to be exhibiting any signs of panic, or
>>even great concern, in this matter.
> Military planning by the Pentagon for assorted contingencies involving
>Iran is certainly going on, but that's not the panic I was referring to.
Good, because it isn't a panic at all.
>It's the fear induced in the population to later justify an attack that
>is the key to such endeavours.
Fear in the population, is not being induced by the US government. Well,
barring conspiracy theories where everything that matters is really done
by the US Government.
Fear in the population, is being induced by the Iranian government, by
the mass media, and by a few congressmen without the official support
of even the minority party. The US government, in general, seems to
be trying to *reduce* popular concern, fear, and/or panic w/re Iran.
>> But yes, fear is the key. That is why the Iranians are issuing the
>> press releases.
> I'm seeing editorials appearing in the Western press about Iran's
>nuclear program and the irrationality of the senior figures in their
>government.
Yes. The Western press, which is not the United States Government.
It serves the interests of the Western press, and the Iranian government
and even as you note the Iranian exiles, to have such fear-mongering
going on in the Western press, so they all work to make that happen.
The United States Government, not so.
And for that matter, it doesn't *really* serve the interests of the
Iranian exiles. As with the Cuban exiles, the only thing that would
really serve their interests is to say, "fuck it - let's just go be
Americans, open convenience stores and manage hotels and whatnot,
secure best revenge against our old enemies". But, the ones unwilling
to make that leap, yes, their deluded perception of self-interest says
to do the fear-mongering thing.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
--
NewsGuy.Com 30Gb $9.95 Carry Forward and On Demand Bandwidth
Craig Richardson
<cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>Then again, this genius of a protagonist not only lacks that
>sort of knowledge, he knows many things that aren't so. He
>translates _Novus Ordo Seclorum_ on the dollar bill as "New
>Secular Order", specifying secular "as in _non_religious."
>It actually means "A New Order of the Ages". (I.e., that
>will last for ages.)
As You Know, Bob - this particular translation error has a long
history in Illuminati-lore, along with the associated rendering of
"Annuit Coeptis" as "The Year of the Beginning", rather than
"<Providence> Favors Our Undertaking".
In a sense, Brown is just keeping with tradition.
--Craig
--
"It's great to be known, but it's better to be known as strange."
- Chairman Kaga
Will Frank
Hash: SHA1
Also Sprach David Johnston:
>>> I thought it was pretty amazing that someone could figure out how to
>>> manufacture and contain antimatter in industrial quantities and then
>>> waste it blowing up the Vatican.
>> Two different people. The scientist who made the antimatter is killed
>> and his product stolen.
>
> Even so.
I'm not saying it makes more sense, but the creator didn't waste it. He
was wasted.
- --
Will "scifantasy" Frank - wmf...@stwing.org
"What's that about?"
"Oh, probably just another of the subpoenas I sent out."
"For what?"
"Donald Rumsfeld."
- --Elliot Stabler and Casey Novak, "Goliath"
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Mike Schilling
"Craig Richardson" <crichar...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:fgli52ltv12puovtm...@4ax.com...
> On Tue, 02 May 2006 20:47:53 -0700, Dan Clore
> <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>
>>Then again, this genius of a protagonist not only lacks that
>>sort of knowledge, he knows many things that aren't so. He
>>translates _Novus Ordo Seclorum_ on the dollar bill as "New
>>Secular Order", specifying secular "as in _non_religious."
>>It actually means "A New Order of the Ages". (I.e., that
>>will last for ages.)
>
> As You Know, Bob - this particular translation error has a long
> history in Illuminati-lore, along with the associated rendering of
> "Annuit Coeptis" as "The Year of the Beginning", rather than
> "<Providence> Favors Our Undertaking".
>
> In a sense, Brown is just keeping with tradition.
That is, he does research from secondary sources rather than primary ones,
and it shows.
Will Frank
Hash: SHA1
Also Sprach Mike Schilling:
> That is, he does research from secondary sources rather than primary ones,
> and it shows.
If I recall correctly, the courts ruled he doesn't do much research at
all...
- --
Will "scifantasy" Frank - wmf...@stwing.org
"Sometimes I'm an asshole."
"That's fine by me. The interesting people always are."
- --Mike Dowden and PeeJee Shou, "Something Positive"
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pacothru
Gene Ward Smith
Will Frank wrote:
> If I recall correctly, the courts ruled he doesn't do much research at
> all...
On the other hand his lawyer said no one thinks Dan Brown is an idiot.
pacothru
"history" parts, I mean. Not only have french courts and publications
ruled out his claim about any secret society he's based the story on
(it didnt and doesnt even exist), but he didnt even research. All the
so-called "historical" parts of his novel are proveably fictional. In
fact--if you really want facts--If you do an actual investigation into
old, recorded Christianity, you'll see that Brown is totally
unexplorative, even totally unfamiliar with documents. Aged voices of
the past record that Gnostic texts attempting to re-shape Christianty
eagerly came after accepted Christian texts. Marcion himself, of all
voices, unwittedly admits this in his work. The Gnostics were simply
trying to re-shape Christianity into another shelveable Gnostic sect.
It didnt work, Brown's sore, and wants to try all over again. What's
funny is you get this kind going very silent when the actual documents
and history accounts are looked into. So, his novels are definately
outrightly misconstruing history. Even history as unexpectably recorded
by his own sort in the past. The only "coded" message (Brown's, not "Da
Vinci's") in the novel is "O reader, can you see where I, Brown, didn't
research? Bet you can't. Hehehe." The joke's on the uneducated.
Mike Schilling
Sean O'Hara
> Oh yeah. They're finding out that he (Brown) made it all up. The
> "history" parts, I mean.
No he didn't. He copied them straight out of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
--
Sean O'Hara | http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com
I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was
more entertaining than "The Brown Bunny".
-Roger Ebert
Richard Eney
-- Dick Eney
OPERATION CRIFANAC PUBLICATIONS
http://www.crifanac.net/Index.htm
prozines and fanzines 'n' stuff
Richard Eney
Sean O'Hara <sean...@gmail.com> wrote:
>In the Year of the Dog, the Great and Powerful pacothru declared:
>> Oh yeah. They're finding out that he (Brown) made it all up. The
>> "history" parts, I mean.
>
>No he didn't. He copied them straight out of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
A court trial showed that he didn't. And "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" was not
"made up", either -- it simply took a lot of historical data that the
official Christian churches wanted to drop down the Memory Hole.
Dorothy J Heydt
>> Oh yeah. They're finding out that he (Brown) made it all up. The
>> "history" parts, I mean.
>
>No he didn't. He copied them straight out of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
some of them.
The authors of HBHG made some of the other parts up.
Some of them are legends dating back to the Renaissance (when
they were anxious to disassociate themselves from their medieval
ancestors, and coined the term "Dark Ages").
A few of them, like the Merovingens being descended from a
melusine, go back even further.
None of them were true.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
Gene Ward Smith
Richard Eney wrote:
> In article <4c3tukF...@individual.net>,
> Sean O'Hara <sean...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >No he didn't. He copied them straight out of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
>
> A court trial showed that he didn't.
In fact the trial established that he did get a lot of stuff from HBHG,
which was never in doubt. Since HBHG is purportedly non-fiction, that
shouldn't matter, and didn't.
And "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" was not
> "made up", either -- it simply took a lot of historical data that the
> official Christian churches wanted to drop down the Memory Hole.
What alternative universe did you come from? HBHG isn't a history book.
Gene Ward Smith
Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> The authors of HBHG made some of the other parts up.
To be fair, both the authors of HBHG and Dan Brown may have honestly
fallen for the Priory of Sion hoax. At least, they didn't make it up,
whether or not they really believe it. But the thing about hoaxes is, a
hoax is not history.
Mike Schilling
"Dorothy J Heydt" <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in message
news:Iyuru...@kithrup.com...
> A few of them, like the Merovingens being descended from a
> melusine, go back even further.
The Merovingian's were among the most incompetent and ineffectual ruling
houses ever, making the claim they're descended from Jesus quite odd. Or
maybe not.
"My kingdom is not of this world."
"You got that right."
John Halpenny
Gene Ward Smith wrote:
> Richard Eney wrote:
> > In article <4c3tukF...@individual.net>,
> > Sean O'Hara <sean...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >No he didn't. He copied them straight out of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
> >
> > A court trial showed that he didn't.
>
> In fact the trial established that he did get a lot of stuff from HBHG,
> which was never in doubt. Since HBHG is purportedly non-fiction, that
> shouldn't matter, and didn't.
>
>
there any copyright reason for not including those "facts" in your own
work? The actual text is protected, of course, but to say in your own
words "The Priory of Sion was....." is merely passing on what you claim
is the truth.
Of course, you can't write in your story " The Klingon Home World
was ....." without being sued, but suppose you were really gullible and
you claimed that you thought it was true?
John Halpenny
_ berge @hotmail.com.invalid Eric D. Berge
<mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>"Dorothy J Heydt" <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in message
>news:Iyuru...@kithrup.com...
>
>> A few of them, like the Merovingens being descended from a
>> melusine, go back even further.
>
>The Merovingian's were among the most incompetent and ineffectual ruling
>houses ever, making the claim they're descended from Jesus quite odd.
That's a bit unfair to Childeric I and his son Clovis, who by all
accounts were quite noteable war-leaders.
Dorothy J Heydt
Right. My son, who is (a) not a Christian and (b) a conoisseur
of conspiracy theories, considers HBHG/DVC examples of fun
mythology turned into dreary fiction.
Dorothy J Heydt
Mike Schilling <mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>"Dorothy J Heydt" <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in message
>news:Iyuru...@kithrup.com...
>
>> A few of them, like the Merovingens being descended from a
>> melusine, go back even further.
>
/shrug
They did all right for a while, or they never would've been
kings. After they ceased doing all right, they got replaced. I
am firmly convinced that they are no relation of Jesus whatever.
On the other hand, the legend that they're descended from a
melusine is at least interesting. During the time when the
Merovingians were on the throne, their chaplains and scholars
were quizzed repeatedly as to whether melusines, and their
relatives, had souls that could be saved. You can understand
their interest in this topic. A few centuries and a few
dynasties later, St. Thomas Aquinas remarked that the question
of whether fauns, satyrs, dryads, melusines, and so on had souls
could be tabled until we found out whether there were any. The
secular authorities were no longer pestering the clergy for a
definitive answer.
Terry Austin
news:1146935457.9...@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
Its author claims it is, though.
(And where he got his information from is well established, as is the fact
that said source did, in fact, make it all up, about 50 years ago.)
--
Terry Austin
Mike Schilling
"Eric D. Berge" <eric _ berge @ hotmail.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:l91r52pk7sfrbc5ls...@4ax.com...
Sure, but they're 2 of 40 or 50. Wasting all of your power and resources in
ciliv war, becoming puppets of your underlings, and eventaully being
replaced by them is pretty unimpressive. Perhaps you could argue that
Jesus's genes were thinning out...
Mike Schilling
"Terry Austin" <terry.nota...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:Xns97BBEAB6850...@216.168.3.64...
> "Gene Ward Smith" <genewa...@gmail.com> wrote in
> news:1146935457.9...@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
>>
>>
> Its author claims it is, though.
And claims that his "facts" are protected by copyright. Tricky, that..
_ berge @hotmail.com.invalid Eric D. Berge
<mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>The Merovingian's were among the most incompetent and ineffectual ruling
>>>houses ever, making the claim they're descended from Jesus quite odd.
>>
>> That's a bit unfair to Childeric I and his son Clovis, who by all
>> accounts were quite noteable war-leaders.
>
>Sure, but they're 2 of 40 or 50. Wasting all of your power and resources in
>ciliv war, becoming puppets of your underlings, and eventaully being
>replaced by them is pretty unimpressive.
Right - those darned Plantagenets.
>Perhaps you could argue that Jesus's genes were thinning out...
He should have taken them to the tailor's and had 'em patched, same as
I do.
Sean O'Hara
> In article <4c3tukF...@individual.net>, Sean O'Hara
> <sean...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> In the Year of the Dog, the Great and Powerful pacothru
>> declared:
>>
>>> Oh yeah. They're finding out that he (Brown) made it all up.
>>> The "history" parts, I mean.
>>
>> No he didn't. He copied them straight out of Holy Blood, Holy
>> Grail.
>
> A court trial showed that he didn't.
A) As Ambrose Bierce once pointed out, court trials have proved,
backed by eyewitness testimony and confessions, that a conspiracy of
witches and warlocks is trying to take over the world.
B) The outcome of the case in question wasn't that Brown didn't
copy, but that his copying didn't qualify as plagiarism.
--
Sean O'Hara | http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com
A celebrity is one known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
-H.L. Mencken
Richard Eney
from Holy, I mean whole, cloth. In the surviving writings from the
various Christian sects of the First and Second Centuries BCE, there are
several accounts of Jesus' special relationship with Mary of Magdala, who
was, BTW, not a reformed harlot -- the woman out of whom Jesus cast seven
devils was somebody else. There are, incidentally, also mentions (some of
which got into the current New Testament) of women who bankrolled the male
disciples and, depending on how you read it, accompanied them. (In a
separate group, no doubt.) Anyway, the idea that Jesus and Mary of
Magdala were an Item is testified to by documents which are every bit as
"historical" as the ones that got accepted into the New Testament. No
reputable scholar would consider them even as close to reliable as
Caesar's "Gallic War", but then no reputable scholar would consider any of
the early Christian documents that reliable. We use them as historical
sources because there just isn't anything better.
For various reasons, few of which would appeal to a cultured modern
person, certain of these documents were selected by the "early Church
Fathers" for incorporation into what we now call the New Testament. This
was long accepted, or else, as "the" history of Christianity, although it
was slanted in a rather gross way (and I won't go into patriarchalism,
misogyny, authoritarianism and other motives which have been denounced at,
to put it mildly, sufficiant length elsewhere). The distortions imposed
by the official Church were, however, so evidently the result of Special
Interests that during the Renaissance a number of them were attacked
successfully by scholars (even the [nonBiblical] "Donation of Constantine"
on which the Roman Church based its claim to political control) and at the
Reformation several canonical books of the Bible itself, such as Maccabees
and Susanna, were declared fraudulent ("apocryphal") by those who didn't
stay with the Roman Church and dropped. (You can still find them hawked
as "Lost Books of the Bible" in the ads in pulp-grade mags.)
The point of all this is that accounts of a special relationship between
Jesus and Mary of Magdala have been in existence, sometimes a covert or
even hunted existence, ever since there has been any historical record of
Christianity. These accounts have as much credibility as those which were
accepted into the New Testament, which I fear may be left-handed praise.
To that extent, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" is speculation based on
historical records. All clear?
Richard Eney
Sean O'Hara <sean...@gmail.com> wrote:
>In the Year of the Dog, the Great and Powerful Richard Eney declared:
>> In article <4c3tukF...@individual.net>, Sean O'Hara
>> <sean...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> In the Year of the Dog, the Great and Powerful pacothru
>>> declared:
>>>
>>>> Oh yeah. They're finding out that he (Brown) made it all up.
>>>> The "history" parts, I mean.
>>>
>>> No he didn't. He copied them straight out of Holy Blood, Holy
>>> Grail.
>>
>> A court trial showed that he didn't.
>
>A) As Ambrose Bierce once pointed out, court trials have proved,
>backed by eyewitness testimony and confessions, that a conspiracy of
>witches and warlocks is trying to take over the world.
IIRC what Bierce pointed out (in "The Devil's Dictionary") was that there
was no _evidence_ that Julius Caesar existed that a court would accept.
However, as the records of other court proceedings _were_ acceptable, it
could be proven that powerful witches and warlocks (had) existed. His
aim, however, was to prove the worthlessness of court records, not that
(in Henry Ford's words) "history is bunk".
>B) The outcome of the case in question wasn't that Brown didn't
>copy, but that his copying didn't qualify as plagiarism.
If he had literally copied, it would unquestionably have qualified as
plagiarism. The case established that his borrowing of ideas from HBHG
(as well as other sources) didn't qualify as plagiarism.
Richard Eney
Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>In article <4c3tukF...@individual.net>,
>Sean O'Hara <sean...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>In the Year of the Dog, the Great and Powerful pacothru declared:
>>> Oh yeah. They're finding out that he (Brown) made it all up. The
>>> "history" parts, I mean.
>>
>>No he didn't. He copied them straight out of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
> ^^^^
>some of them.
>
>The authors of HBHG made some of the other parts up.
>
>Some of them are legends dating back to the Renaissance (when
>they were anxious to disassociate themselves from their medieval
>ancestors, and coined the term "Dark Ages").
They date much further back than that, as I pointed out elsewhere. In
fact, they date back as far as anything in the New Testament, and are
certainly equally credible.
>A few of them, like the Merovingens being descended from a
>melusine, go back even further.
Melusine was the (were-serpent or mermaid -- stories differ) ancestress of
the Counts of Toulouse. The Merovingians, the legend ran, were descaended
from a Frankish queen who was raped by a sea monster.
That's certainly no worse than being raped by a Holy Ghost. Well, I
suppose it might be, to a Queen.
Dorothy J Heydt
Larry Caldwell
dhk...@msn.com (pacothru) says...
> Oh yeah. They're finding out that he (Brown) made it all up.
How is that different from any religion? They are all made up.
Henry
"Larry Caldwell" <firstnamel...@peaksky.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.1ec7cf4bb...@news.peaksky.com...
Perhaps the bible, the torah, and the koran should have similar disclaimers
regarding the historically questionable contents?
Jordan
> What alternative universe did you come from? HBHG isn't a history book. <
Well, to be precise ... like most books that allege vast Secret
Histories, it's _partially_ a history book, because its jumping-off
point is real history.
- Jordan
Jeff Dege
>>
> Let me rephrase that, then. "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" was not invented
> from Holy, I mean whole, cloth. In the surviving writings from the
> various Christian sects of the First and Second Centuries BCE, there are
> several accounts of Jesus' special relationship with Mary of Magdala, who
> was, BTW, not a reformed harlot -- the woman out of whom Jesus cast seven
> devils was somebody else. There are, incidentally, also mentions (some of
> which got into the current New Testament) of women who bankrolled the male
> disciples and, depending on how you read it, accompanied them. (In a
> separate group, no doubt.) Anyway, the idea that Jesus and Mary of
> Magdala were an Item is testified to by documents which are every bit as
> "historical" as the ones that got accepted into the New Testament. No
> reputable scholar would consider them even as close to reliable as
> Caesar's "Gallic War", but then no reputable scholar would consider any of
> the early Christian documents that reliable. We use them as historical
> sources because there just isn't anything better.
I don't agree that the gnostic writings were as "historical" as the
canonical gospels. They were written fifty-plus years later, and they
were intentionally revisionist.
> For various reasons, few of which would appeal to a cultured modern
> person, certain of these documents were selected by the "early Church
> Fathers" for incorporation into what we now call the New Testament.
And I disagree that the reasons the early church fathers rejected
gnosticism for reasons that would not appeal to a cultured modern person.
The primary problem with gnosticism was they're insistence that there was
some sort of hidden secret message, revealed only to a few, and that only
those select few to whom that secret was revealed were worthy of salvation.
The orthodox position was that Christ died for each and every one of us,
and that all of us can be saved if we accept him into our hearts.
It's not a message that appeals to those who have a desperate need to feel
superior to the mob, but it's far more appealing to a modern audience than
gnostic conspiratism.
--
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Mike Schilling
"Jordan" <JSBass...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1147026400.1...@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
And because inventing something truly unprecedented is hard. Exaggeration
is much simpler..
Mike Schilling
"Jordan" <JSBass...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1147026400.1...@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
You know, I'd love to see a Tim Powers-quality version of HBHG, with
thorough research and secret-history explanations of Merovingian history.
For instance, it's so obvious that the Pope conspired with the Mayors of the
Palace to overthrow the M's, and that Charlemagne's crowning as Roman
Emperor was a payoff. [1]
1. For all I know, that *was* in HBHG. I kept expecting it to come up in
TDVC, but it never did.
Tim McDaniel
Eric D. Berge <eric _ berge @ hotmail.com.invalid> wrote:
>On Sun, 07 May 2006 07:35:19 GMT, "Mike Schilling"
><mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>Sure, but they're 2 of 40 or 50. Wasting all of your power and
>>resources in ciliv war, becoming puppets of your underlings, and
>>eventaully being replaced by them is pretty unimpressive.
>
>Right - those darned Plantagenets.
? The Plantagenets were well after the Merovingians. Or if you mean
how the Plantagenets fell: the first Tudor was descended of the
Plantagenets and married the Yorkist heiress.
--
Tim McDaniel; Reply-To: tm...@panix.com