I think I'd go with a manual in that situation, since electromechanical typewriters and teletypes have their own problems.
There was a lot of shielding and filtering put into crypto systems that used teletypes to avoid leaking information out the power leads, or radiating it directly.
I recall there being tempest rated versions of electric typewriters to avoid this. But a manual typewriter is an easy way around it.
I know someone who changes the channel or switches stations when either a Jane Fonda movie or a Barbara Streisand song comes on.
I think it's silly.
Guess what I think of this?
So, the Scientologists think gays are low toned. So, I should not watch anything with Kisty Alley, John Travolata, or Tom Cruise in it?
Sorry, but even though Yusuf Islam made some less than stellar statements about Salman Rushdie (and then backtracked, apparently) , I still listen to my Cat Stevens albums.
This certainly doesn't mean authors/actors/performers can't be strongly criticized for what they say. And things like The Turner Diaries are certainly worth criticizing as heavily as possible. But boycotts aren't on my list for creative works that themselves aren't hateful.
And it often hits others involved who haven't really done anything.
I'm sure boycotting Ender's Game will really show that darn Ben Kingsley.
"If we were supposed to have wild cats the size of a house cat, they would exist"
Housecats are pretty hard to distinguish from the African wildcats (Felis silvestris lybica) that they came from. At best, you're dealing with only the advantages and disadvantages that an invasive species would have in a new environment rather than major form changes. In North America you have a colder climate that may favor a different body size to some extent and existing predators filling the niche they take. The European wildcat at a similar latitude (Felis silvestris silvestris) is larger than the Arabian one as well.
Some of the animal rights groups like to put forward the meme that the housecat is but a pale shadow of the wild form, but it's just not true. It's very close to the original type (including size) and interbreeds freely.
The wild form is common from Africa to Arabia and across a wide part of southern Asia.
All large predators tend to be fairly rare, and the larger, the rarer.
We have a surfeit of feral cats due to them leaving domestic life. In fact, they have an impact on things like foxes in the urban edge environments due to competing for food like mice and such.
Now that they're here, and in very large numbers with a changed environment (farms rather than forest for example), you can't say for sure that the original balance would return. There's been too much disruption.
"It's similar to why adult domestic house cats are pretty much adult kittens who would die in the wild."
Nonsense. I've seen far too many of them go feral and survive long enough to have offspring afterwards (in the case they weren't neutered before going feral). And it's not just because someone is feeding them.
Some of them have trouble as they weren't taught effective hunting by their mothers, but lots of them can and do fend for themselves just fine. Yes, they get picked off by coyotes (or coy-dogs) and such, but so do a lot of wild small predators.
"16 nukes wouldn't do much, but a large number of nukes could cause a nuclear winter."
I quite agree. The problem I had was with the small size of the trigger, and the outsize prediction of the effect.
We aren't certain of the whole effect and how big, but unleashing thousands to tens of thousands of them in a superpower exchange could easily have long lasting and devastating climate consequences. (Letting alone the utter horror of everything else from it.)
I think we can all agree that neither the small or large versions are experiments we want to try.:)
I'm well aware that volcanoes don't have consciousness. *sheesh*
And you had the world in a major cooling period (the little ice age) that was probably due to a solar minimum and other things that we may not know about as global record keeping and observation wasn't very good.
Amount of heat from the sun IS an energy flow that is big on nature's scale. As you point out, it took an already major downturn before hand.
And, look at what the OP was saying. Decades of devastation. Not a couple years of agricultural downturn. but devastation.
"I do not think 16 bombs would be enough. But arguing that because more than 16 have been detonated over the course of half a century, the result would be the same as blasting them all simultaneously is pretty stupid"
Which is why I very much didn't say that. If you note, I even mention that nuclear weapons get a lot of their devastation from FAST emission of that energy. And where did I mention the previous nuclear testing? Others did. You read that into it. I compared it to things that happen regularly in nature. Not just during the eyeblink of human history but throughout long periods of time.
I'm pointing out the need for highly dubious assumptions in the OP's statement for anything like the impact said for such a small initiator.
As you yourself said, 20 or so volcanoes are erupting. Sometimes large eruptions happen simultaneously. If what the OP said was true (decades of devastation fromsuch a small trigger) we should have seen repeated cases of massive impact both in history and in the time which we have fairly good climatic data for.
Several of the replies (Not as much yours. It stays more on target.) Seem to be making the leap that I was saying that we should blow off 16 nukes to do the test, or that I'm saying nuclear war is anything less than devastating, and declaring it a minor little thing like a sunburn.
Uh... Poppycock. Nuclear exchanges would be horrific (how can I amplify that enough for you to know that I think it's a Bad Thing(tm)).
You just get around to pointing out the stupidity of things I did not say.;)
I'm quite familiar with Tamboura and the year without a summer. It was not only the volcano, but probably a solar minimum as well and perhaps some other things we don't know about as record keeping and observation were more limited in that time.
The reduction of energy arriving from the sun due to the minimum is an effect that DOES deal with large energy flows on the scale of nature.
The OP was saying that 16 nukes set off would have global devastating consequences for decades. Pretty dubious. Completely dubious unless you throw in some unlikely other effects like uncontrolled mass fire storms (with only sixteen ignition areas, that would require no humans around to take any action to limit spread and an utterly perfect storm of no barriers to spreading. A nuclear fire ignition radius is limited in size. The earth is quite a big place.), or a solar minimum or something else that already put the earth at risk for a smaller effect to be amplified.
Even worst case, two years with low agriculture aren't anything like the scale claimed: devastation, for decades.
At that low a trigger level for mass global consequences, we should have seen coincidences in volcanic activity to have led to that repeatedly over history, and the time length that we have fairly good climate data.
What gives you the idea that pointing out something is orders of magnitude off from reality hardly means saying it's what you think should happen?
Superpower nuclear war isn't horrible enough for your argument to work without massive inflation of the effects?
I'd have thought that the hundreds of millions killed initially, the devastation through starvation through food distribution collapse, the ongoing radiological deaths and disease, etc, would be plenty. Those aren't speculation, or theory that require mass fire storms to be ignited and the coupling to the atmosphere to be much more effective than what we already see from carbon particulate. They are direct consequences.
OP was saying that a few megatons of nukes within presumably a few hours would induce catastrophic global climate change. This is the kind of argument that quickly gets shot down, and undermines the person making it. It's a very different claim than saying that could happen in an all out superpower exchange.
It's also completely separate from whether someone is arguing for or against them.
It's an illustration of a common fallacy in argument: The idea that disagreeing with one small area in a contentious issue, is the same as saying all areas are invalid.
The jump to implying that I'm arguing for setting off 16 nuclear weapons for experimental verification is laughable.
Isn't that just the sort of poor reasoning that you'd pounce on if someone tried it with you?
Either Mt. Pinatubo or Mt. St. Helens were far larger than that in terms of energy and vastly more effective at coupling the debris into the upper atmosphere. Add to that the large amounts of sulfur compounds they emitted.
So, where was the massive weather disruption or global cooling (or warming for that matter)?
It didn't happen. It hasn't happened then or even with Krakatoa or other massive eruptions of less than Yellowstone or Mt. Toba scale.
16 nukes are an eyeblink compared to the sort of energy flows that Mom Nature has going on all the time. The big thing about nuclear weapons is they emit the energy very very fast and in ways that couple well to destroying buildings, and living things nearby.
As a comparison, (yes, I did the calculation):
The detonation of all the worlds nuclear weapons at the point in time when the arsenals were the greatest (and vastly overestimating by assuming they were on average 1 megaton rather than 100 kiloton range or less) in the ocean, assuming all the energy stays in the water, would raise the temperature of the worlds oceans less than one hundredth of a degree C.
That was in repsonse to someone who assured me that he had it on good authority that it would boil the oceans dry. Unfortunately for him, I paid attention in all those physics classes I took.
It's easy to explain cloud privacy issues. We'll do it in terms of purses and wallets as those are common items of value that people understand can contain very private information:
Someone is doing the digital equivalent of asking you to keep your purse (or wallet) securely and have it available at all times for you. They won't try to steal the money or credit cards, etc in it (or whatever else of value if you choose to store it). Yes, there may be a security breach, but it's less likely than you dropping or forgetting your purse or wallet.
On the other hand, it means that if you put them in your purse (or wallet) they know how many birth control pills or condoms you kept in it and by when you used them what part of your menstrual cycle you're on or when you had a hot date that turned into an all night.
Now, extend that to your son or daughter that will have records on them from the time they enter grade school until, well... forever.
(In some ways it's not a big deal, but in some ways it is, and that rather graphic example gets across the level of info that can be mined from long term records.)
They were looking for someone with enough common sense to not bother solving it and just look up the recruiter's number in the phone book or on the web.
Don't worry. It evens out. They may not want you there either.;)
I've lived in a fair number of places including Texas. In all of them, most of the people are fine. They may be different than you in some ways, but that's what diversity is all about.
And, everywhere I've lived has had at least a sprinkling of assholes. It's not a function of the place so much as a function of there being humans in it.
Cities are great for those who like them, but they seem an endless expanse of concrete canyons and people to me. (Yes, I've lived there.)
Like many others, I suspect that it's the younger types that are more up for central city life. When they have a family, more opt for the burbs or even farther out in the rural to quasi rural areas. This isn't very surprising as their needs have changed.
One item that's lacking here is good mass transit. For those who can afford cars, that's a cost or an inconvenience, but for the young or not so well off that can't, it sorta traps them here in a little burg of 1300.
Strangely enough, mass transit used to be here in the early 1900s. There was an interurban electric train system that linked the small towns to the larger ones. (About 20 miles to each of the two in the area.)
Actually, I just walk across the street and talk to Bill (I moved back to the house I grew up in.). The rest have moved or are long since passed away.
Sadly, Bill has Alzheimers and it's taken a toll. Kind of hard to see him that way, but we've all got it (or something) coming, I guess. He sure helped get a number of us started in ham radio and auto work.
Indeed. There have been ad hoc (and not so ad hoc, like American Assn. of Woodturners) craft and diy clubs for some time. ABANA and others have been teaching blacksmithing for a good while under this sort of model. 4H used to organize training of this type for kids when I was a younger.
The only difference is it's using the methods and technologies of today. Just like the old ones used the methods and technologies of that time.
I'm glad that it's currently catching on again. Hopefully the liability issues can be handled.
Starting up a shared interest organization is easy. Making it last a long time is a lot harder.
"It's different from a workshop in that it's also a community"
And Twin City Amateur Radio Club somehow wasn't a community? Sure looked like it with the older hams teaching the younger ones (including kids).
When someone had a tower to put up, you'd get a bunch of people to come over and bring the djin pole and other tools with them.
Sure wasn't limited to just electronics and radio, either. They were (and still are, even though some are in their 80s now) the general purpose geeks of that time.
People have been doing this sort of ground up small group cooperation and creativity for as long as there have been people.
And regular vertical mills or such 40 years ago somehow weren't technology? And green sand casting wasn't either?
And the amateur radio clubs were somehow not self run communities?
And the plans published in Radio Electronics, Home Shop Machinist and other such magazines weren't "open source" enough somehow?
It's interesting, it's great that it's getting the fix it or modify it yourself idea out to some people who might not otherwise have it, but it's not new.
I grew up in a neighborhood with multiple "makerspaces". They were Bill's amateur radio workbench where he built his own gear. Freddie's workshop where he built his own grinder and other power tools. Donald Vern's shop where he built midget cars to race. And Danner's auto upholstery shop where he did the interiors for his show cars.
And that was just within half a block of my house.
As I said, wonderful to be teaching people this, but it's not new or revolutionary.
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I think I'd go with a manual in that situation, since electromechanical typewriters and teletypes have their own problems.
There was a lot of shielding and filtering put into crypto systems that used teletypes to avoid leaking information out the power leads, or radiating it directly.
I recall there being tempest rated versions of electric typewriters to avoid this. But a manual typewriter is an easy way around it.
Darn. There goes my chance to get rich. All 3 of mine are Royal typewriters.
How nice of you. I'll take a large capacity SSD. In the local machine not in the cloud, thank you.
I know someone who changes the channel or switches stations when either a Jane Fonda movie or a Barbara Streisand song comes on.
I think it's silly.
Guess what I think of this?
So, the Scientologists think gays are low toned. So, I should not watch anything with Kisty Alley, John Travolata, or Tom Cruise in it?
Sorry, but even though Yusuf Islam made some less than stellar statements about Salman Rushdie (and then backtracked, apparently) , I still listen to my Cat Stevens albums.
This certainly doesn't mean authors/actors/performers can't be strongly criticized for what they say. And things like The Turner Diaries are certainly worth criticizing as heavily as possible. But boycotts aren't on my list for creative works that themselves aren't hateful.
And it often hits others involved who haven't really done anything.
I'm sure boycotting Ender's Game will really show that darn Ben Kingsley.
"If we were supposed to have wild cats the size of a house cat, they would exist"
Housecats are pretty hard to distinguish from the African wildcats (Felis silvestris lybica) that they came from. At best, you're dealing with only the advantages and disadvantages that an invasive species would have in a new environment rather than major form changes. In North America you have a colder climate that may favor a different body size to some extent and existing predators filling the niche they take. The European wildcat at a similar latitude (Felis silvestris silvestris) is larger than the Arabian one as well.
Some of the animal rights groups like to put forward the meme that the housecat is but a pale shadow of the wild form, but it's just not true. It's very close to the original type (including size) and interbreeds freely.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_wildcat
The wild form is common from Africa to Arabia and across a wide part of southern Asia.
All large predators tend to be fairly rare, and the larger, the rarer.
We have a surfeit of feral cats due to them leaving domestic life. In fact, they have an impact on things like foxes in the urban edge environments due to competing for food like mice and such.
Now that they're here, and in very large numbers with a changed environment (farms rather than forest for example), you can't say for sure that the original balance would return. There's been too much disruption.
"It's similar to why adult domestic house cats are pretty much adult kittens who would die in the wild."
Nonsense. I've seen far too many of them go feral and survive long enough to have offspring afterwards (in the case they weren't neutered before going feral). And it's not just because someone is feeding them.
Some of them have trouble as they weren't taught effective hunting by their mothers, but lots of them can and do fend for themselves just fine. Yes, they get picked off by coyotes (or coy-dogs) and such, but so do a lot of wild small predators.
And especially the French representatives were shocked, SHOCKED, that the US is conducting spying operations against allies.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/14/news/14iht-spy_.html
Why, it's almost as unbelievable as if Israel was conducting spying operations against the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard
To put this in perspective, note that the resolution that was passed is a non-binding one. "Twiddle, diddle and resolve"
So, you're saying you live in North Korea? ...
"16 nukes wouldn't do much, but a large number of nukes could cause a nuclear winter."
I quite agree. The problem I had was with the small size of the trigger, and the outsize prediction of the effect.
We aren't certain of the whole effect and how big, but unleashing thousands to tens of thousands of them in a superpower exchange could easily have long lasting and devastating climate consequences. (Letting alone the utter horror of everything else from it.)
I think we can all agree that neither the small or large versions are experiments we want to try. :)
I'm well aware that volcanoes don't have consciousness. *sheesh*
And you had the world in a major cooling period (the little ice age) that was probably due to a solar minimum and other things that we may not know about as global record keeping and observation wasn't very good.
Amount of heat from the sun IS an energy flow that is big on nature's scale. As you point out, it took an already major downturn before hand.
And, look at what the OP was saying. Decades of devastation. Not a couple years of agricultural downturn. but devastation.
"I do not think 16 bombs would be enough. But arguing that because more than 16 have been detonated over the course of half a century, the result would be the same as blasting them all simultaneously is pretty stupid"
Which is why I very much didn't say that. If you note, I even mention that nuclear weapons get a lot of their devastation from FAST emission of that energy. And where did I mention the previous nuclear testing? Others did. You read that into it. I compared it to things that happen regularly in nature. Not just during the eyeblink of human history but throughout long periods of time.
I'm pointing out the need for highly dubious assumptions in the OP's statement for anything like the impact said for such a small initiator.
As you yourself said, 20 or so volcanoes are erupting. Sometimes large eruptions happen simultaneously. If what the OP said was true (decades of devastation fromsuch a small trigger) we should have seen repeated cases of massive impact both in history and in the time which we have fairly good climatic data for.
Several of the replies (Not as much yours. It stays more on target.) Seem to be making the leap that I was saying that we should blow off 16 nukes to do the test, or that I'm saying nuclear war is anything less than devastating, and declaring it a minor little thing like a sunburn.
Uh... Poppycock. Nuclear exchanges would be horrific (how can I amplify that enough for you to know that I think it's a Bad Thing(tm)).
You just get around to pointing out the stupidity of things I did not say. ;)
I'm quite familiar with Tamboura and the year without a summer. It was not only the volcano, but probably a solar minimum as well and perhaps some other things we don't know about as record keeping and observation were more limited in that time.
The reduction of energy arriving from the sun due to the minimum is an effect that DOES deal with large energy flows on the scale of nature.
The OP was saying that 16 nukes set off would have global devastating consequences for decades. Pretty dubious. Completely dubious unless you throw in some unlikely other effects like uncontrolled mass fire storms (with only sixteen ignition areas, that would require no humans around to take any action to limit spread and an utterly perfect storm of no barriers to spreading. A nuclear fire ignition radius is limited in size. The earth is quite a big place.), or a solar minimum or something else that already put the earth at risk for a smaller effect to be amplified.
Even worst case, two years with low agriculture aren't anything like the scale claimed: devastation, for decades.
At that low a trigger level for mass global consequences, we should have seen coincidences in volcanic activity to have led to that repeatedly over history, and the time length that we have fairly good climate data.
You're missing some pretty obvious things.
What gives you the idea that pointing out something is orders of magnitude off from reality hardly means saying it's what you think should happen?
Superpower nuclear war isn't horrible enough for your argument to work without massive inflation of the effects?
I'd have thought that the hundreds of millions killed initially, the devastation through starvation through food distribution collapse, the ongoing radiological deaths and disease, etc, would be plenty. Those aren't speculation, or theory that require mass fire storms to be ignited and the coupling to the atmosphere to be much more effective than what we already see from carbon particulate. They are direct consequences.
OP was saying that a few megatons of nukes within presumably a few hours would induce catastrophic global climate change. This is the kind of argument that quickly gets shot down, and undermines the person making it. It's a very different claim than saying that could happen in an all out superpower exchange.
It's also completely separate from whether someone is arguing for or against them.
It's an illustration of a common fallacy in argument: The idea that disagreeing with one small area in a contentious issue, is the same as saying all areas are invalid.
The jump to implying that I'm arguing for setting off 16 nuclear weapons for experimental verification is laughable.
Isn't that just the sort of poor reasoning that you'd pounce on if someone tried it with you?
What planet are you on?
Someone posted a wildly inaccurate claim just as wrong as saying hurricane Katrina would destroy the whole earth.
And where in hell did you get the idea that anyone is saying that nuclear war is anything but devastating?
Do you mean that saying that Katrina wouldn't destroy the whole earth means advocating for repeated hits by it since it's just "misinformation"?
In the words of Monty Python: "That's a very silly line. Sit down."
No. Not maybe, but no.
Either Mt. Pinatubo or Mt. St. Helens were far larger than that in terms of energy and vastly more effective at coupling the debris into the upper atmosphere. Add to that the large amounts of sulfur compounds they emitted.
So, where was the massive weather disruption or global cooling (or warming for that matter)?
It didn't happen. It hasn't happened then or even with Krakatoa or other massive eruptions of less than Yellowstone or Mt. Toba scale.
16 nukes are an eyeblink compared to the sort of energy flows that Mom Nature has going on all the time. The big thing about nuclear weapons is they emit the energy very very fast and in ways that couple well to destroying buildings, and living things nearby.
As a comparison, (yes, I did the calculation):
The detonation of all the worlds nuclear weapons at the point in time when the arsenals were the greatest (and vastly overestimating by assuming they were on average 1 megaton rather than 100 kiloton range or less) in the ocean, assuming all the energy stays in the water, would raise the temperature of the worlds oceans less than one hundredth of a degree C.
That was in repsonse to someone who assured me that he had it on good authority that it would boil the oceans dry. Unfortunately for him, I paid attention in all those physics classes I took.
It's easy to explain cloud privacy issues. We'll do it in terms of purses and wallets as those are common items of value that people understand can contain very private information:
Someone is doing the digital equivalent of asking you to keep your purse (or wallet) securely and have it available at all times for you. They won't try to steal the money or credit cards, etc in it (or whatever else of value if you choose to store it). Yes, there may be a security breach, but it's less likely than you dropping or forgetting your purse or wallet.
On the other hand, it means that if you put them in your purse (or wallet) they know how many birth control pills or condoms you kept in it and by when you used them what part of your menstrual cycle you're on or when you had a hot date that turned into an all night.
Now, extend that to your son or daughter that will have records on them from the time they enter grade school until, well... forever.
(In some ways it's not a big deal, but in some ways it is, and that rather graphic example gets across the level of info that can be mined from long term records.)
They were looking for someone with enough common sense to not bother solving it and just look up the recruiter's number in the phone book or on the web.
Don't worry. It evens out. They may not want you there either. ;)
I've lived in a fair number of places including Texas. In all of them, most of the people are fine. They may be different than you in some ways, but that's what diversity is all about.
And, everywhere I've lived has had at least a sprinkling of assholes. It's not a function of the place so much as a function of there being humans in it.
I'll take my small rural town in the Midwest.
Cities are great for those who like them, but they seem an endless expanse of concrete canyons and people to me. (Yes, I've lived there.)
Like many others, I suspect that it's the younger types that are more up for central city life. When they have a family, more opt for the burbs or even farther out in the rural to quasi rural areas. This isn't very surprising as their needs have changed.
One item that's lacking here is good mass transit. For those who can afford cars, that's a cost or an inconvenience, but for the young or not so well off that can't, it sorta traps them here in a little burg of 1300.
Strangely enough, mass transit used to be here in the early 1900s. There was an interurban electric train system that linked the small towns to the larger ones. (About 20 miles to each of the two in the area.)
We seem to be in violent agreement. ;)
Actually, I just walk across the street and talk to Bill (I moved back to the house I grew up in.). The rest have moved or are long since passed away.
Sadly, Bill has Alzheimers and it's taken a toll. Kind of hard to see him that way, but we've all got it (or something) coming, I guess. He sure helped get a number of us started in ham radio and auto work.
I probably read too much into your words.
Some of the other responders have taken more of the view that this is new and revolutionary in some way.
Indeed. There have been ad hoc (and not so ad hoc, like American Assn. of Woodturners) craft and diy clubs for some time. ABANA and others have been teaching blacksmithing for a good while under this sort of model. 4H used to organize training of this type for kids when I was a younger.
The only difference is it's using the methods and technologies of today. Just like the old ones used the methods and technologies of that time.
I'm glad that it's currently catching on again. Hopefully the liability issues can be handled.
Starting up a shared interest organization is easy. Making it last a long time is a lot harder.
Ok, I'll bite, Billy. What do you think I'm so totally missing about this that makes it all new and revolutionary?
If it really is going to Change The World (tm). I'd love to understand it.
"It's different from a workshop in that it's also a community"
And Twin City Amateur Radio Club somehow wasn't a community? Sure looked like it with the older hams teaching the younger ones (including kids).
When someone had a tower to put up, you'd get a bunch of people to come over and bring the djin pole and other tools with them.
Sure wasn't limited to just electronics and radio, either. They were (and still are, even though some are in their 80s now) the general purpose geeks of that time.
People have been doing this sort of ground up small group cooperation and creativity for as long as there have been people.
And regular vertical mills or such 40 years ago somehow weren't technology? And green sand casting wasn't either?
And the amateur radio clubs were somehow not self run communities?
And the plans published in Radio Electronics, Home Shop Machinist and other such magazines weren't "open source" enough somehow?
It's interesting, it's great that it's getting the fix it or modify it yourself idea out to some people who might not otherwise have it, but it's not new.
I grew up in a neighborhood with multiple "makerspaces". They were Bill's amateur radio workbench where he built his own gear. Freddie's workshop where he built his own grinder and other power tools. Donald Vern's shop where he built midget cars to race. And Danner's auto upholstery shop where he did the interiors for his show cars.
And that was just within half a block of my house.
As I said, wonderful to be teaching people this, but it's not new or revolutionary.
Google's new storage service: MINE!!!!!
Mine!
Mine!
Mine!
Unless it violates the law. Then it's yours and we'll tell the FBI about it.