Good times. Bad Movies.
The movie: Future War
Episode guest: Lauren Beukes
The Highlights: Robots with mustaches, The Beard of Alan Moore, Dinosaurs, Thumbs, Guns, Nuns, and Flannel. So much flannel.
gentusmaximus / collective / tags / war
Tagged with “war”
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Fresh Hell 4 — Future War
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Forgotten tragedy: The loss of HMT Lancastria | The National Archives
On 17 June 1940, HMT Lancastria was sunk by a German bomber while evacuating troops from St Nazaire; over 9,000 troops were packed on board. The exact number of soldiers who died that day will never be known, though even the lowest estimates rank this as the worst British maritime disaster in history, with losses exceeding those of the Titanic and Lusitania combined. This talk attempts to explain why so many who were lost will never be accounted for.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/podcasts/loss-of-lancastria.htm
Tagged with history lancastria ship disaster world war two
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Richard Rhodes: Twilight of the Bombs
The evening began with a short version of Isao Ishimoto’s animation of all the world’s atomic explosions in the period 1945 to 1998. The total is shocking to most people—-2,053. Rhodes commented that seeing the bomb tests on a world map over time shows how much they were a strange form of communication between nations. He also noted how the number of tests dropped from decades of intensity to near zero after 1993. In this century only North Korea has tested bombs, and those could be the last explosions.
Most Americans, he’s found, think that we don’t have nuclear weapons any more, and that may reflect a realistic perception that we no longer need them. But our government keeps looking for reasons to keep them, and maintaining the current much reduced arsenal still costs $50 billion a year.
How much did the Cold War cost everyone from 1948 to 1991, and how much of that was for nuclear weapons? The total cost has been estimated at $18.5 trillion, with $7.8 trillion for nuclear. At the peak the Soviet Union had 95,000 weapons and the US had 20 to 40,000. America’s current seriously degraded infrastructure would cost about $2.2 trillion to fix—-all the gas lines and water lines and schools and bridges. We spent that money on bombs we never intended to use—-all of the Cold War players, major and minor, told Rhodes that everyone knew that the bombs must not and could not be used. Much of the nuclear expansion was for domestic consumption: one must appear "ahead," even though numbers past a couple dozen warheads were functionally meaningless.
Rhodes noted that people fear the blast and radiation effects of atomic bombs, but it’s really the fires that are most destructive. The fireball ignites everything far beyond the blast effects. As a result, nuclear winter remains a threat. Former researchers of nuclear winter used sophisticated new climate models to assess what would happen if, say, there was an exchange of 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs (1.5 kilotons) between India and Pakistan. The smoke clouds would disrupt the weather long enough to collapse some agriculture, leading to starvation of as many as a billion people.
Serious efforts are underway to get the world’s nuclear weapons down toward zero. All weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) is being tallied and secured. Sophisticated, unrestrained inspection systems are gaining ever more access. In some cases, arsenals are being "virtualized"—-nuclear capability substitutes for weapons stockpiles. India and Pakistan, for instance, have disassembled their nuclear weapons into widely separated parts that would take considerable time and deliberation to reassemble.
In the course of his research, Rhodes shifted from opposition to nuclear power for electricity to becoming a strong proponent. Among its benefits is offering a way for the thousands of warheads to be converted into something useful when diluted into large quantities of reactor fuel. Also the international fuel banking proposed for bringing proliferation-free nuclear power to developing nations can help enable more thorough inspections of all fissile material.
At dinner Rhodes reflected that nuclear weapons may come to be seen as a strange fetishistic behavior by nations at a certain period in history. They were insanely expensive and thoroughly useless. Their only function was to keep a bizarre form of score.
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Black Zeppelin — Whole Lotta Sabbath
Black Sabbath’s War Pigs vs. Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love.
Ever wondered what might have happened if Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin got together for a studio session 37 odd years ago?
Wonder no more…
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The WASPs: Women Pilots of WWII
In the early 1940s, the US Airforce faced a dilemma. Thousands of new airplanes were coming off assembly lines and needed to be delivered to military bases nationwide, yet most of America’s pilots were overseas fighting the war. To deal with the backlog, the government launched an experimental program to train women pilots to fly military aircraft.
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The Human Button
"This story [of This American Life] includes excerpts from a radio documentary called "The Human Button", which originally aired on BBC Radio 4 in December, 2008. For more information visit www.bbc.co.uk/radio4."
Via This American Life 399: Contents Unknown, http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=399
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Sex, bombs and burgers
What forces are driving the rapid technological developments that shape our world? Well, according to today´s guest, Peter Nowak, it is a very un-holy trinity: the war, porn and fast food industries. In this talk, which was recorded at Gleebooks in Sydney, he brands the internet as ‘military made and porn perfected’ and explains his thesis by looking at how these industries drive technological change.
Tagged with book:author=peter nowak technology sex porn fast food innovation military darpa war
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Noam Chomsky: Philosophies of Language and Politics
Noam Chomsky, Professor, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT
Larry Bensky, Former National Affairs Correspondent, Pacifica Radio; Host, "Sunday Salon" KPFA; Professor at Stanford, California State University East Bay and Berkeley City College - Moderator
World-renowned intellectual Chomsky has been pushing change in language, politics and culture for decades.
This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California on October 6th, 2009.
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Scales by Alastair Reynolds
Fresh from signing a £1m deal with Gollancz, the science fiction author Alastair Reynolds has penned a story for the Guardian which follows a new recruit sent out to battle in an interstellar war.
Nineteen years after his first short story appeared, and nine years after the first of his eight novels was published, Scales is Reynolds’ first foray into militaristic SF. In it, he explores the transformations war imposes on soldiers as his hero Nico’s mission evolves into something stranger than he could have possibly imagined.
Reynolds is best-known for his mastery of space opera – the SF sub-genre in which the stakes are high and the aliens deadly – but, after 16 years working for the European Space Agency, he brings a scientist’s rigour to the genre’s high drama.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2009/jun/19/alastair-reynolds-scales-short-story
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Ben Franklin death day
From The Memory Palace, a podcast by public radio reporter, Nate DiMeo.
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