STUB High Explosive vs Fertilizer Explosions

As imagery from the Beirut blast came in, I ventured:

    oxygen deficient nitrate blast
    I bet on a kt range fertilizer load
    not high explosive

> Psychic? 2.75 kt....

Actually simple eyeballing.

• Orange smoke is a dead giveaway. I may be quite wrong about the exact chemistry... TNT and other common nitrogen + hydrocarbon stuffs are carbon rich, and produce gases that instantly collapse into more or less carbon black - black smoke. You can still get black blasting AN with 8% fuel oil, diesel or heating are fine. I think it was used in WTC 1, Oslo, and it's common in mining. But no one mixes oil and AN and stores it...

• For scale one needs fairly high humidity. In the trailing edge of the shockwave, pressure drops to a small fraction of a bar. Like sometimes happens on the trailing edge of a plane wing, humidity condenses into fog long enough to be visible, maybe few /100 of a sec. So you literally see the tail of the main shockwave expanding.The shockwave travels at 3s/km, so in a moving image you don't need any scale reference to eyeball the size of the blast. You could see shockwaves in the Eyjafjallajökull eruption. With a tele lens and nothing human for scale, they still looked S L O W , therefore huge. There's a ton of explosion porn out there, incl. some large chemical blasts made on purpose to calibrate for nuclear tests. I think even Sweden once blew up maybe 100t TNT to assess the effects.

My 1st estimate was 100t range just from damage vs distance from port cranes.

When I saw the steam ball expanding I reckoned 1kt.

2kt of AN is NOT a lot for a Lebanon sized agriculture. It's a lot to store in one point. We'll see if all of it went off or not. It often doesn't. Also, pure AN not mixed with other fertilizers that make it harmless is illegal or tightly controlled in much of the world. I think Brevik was registered as a farmer.

There's a parallel between the aftermath of the blast and Italy in 1940. Italy was totally dependent on energy imports coming by sea, both oil and coal. A sea blockade caused a bottleneck so severe that even theoretically saturating the 5 railway lines through the Alps with northern coal couldn't make up for the shortfall. The structure next to the blast was a set of grains silos. It's quite possible that this will strangle the food supply, both human and livestock. Not unlike Yemen. A very common situation in our highly optimized world, but it's as old as China and the Roman empire. Former UK First Sea Lord J. Band called underestimating the issue "sea blindness".

STUB Complex narratives are bad for your health.

W. M. Nolte comparing Edward Snowden and John Brown (he of the Harper's Ferry raid of 1859). 20 seconds' watching is enough. Nobody can be you cognisant. "To be" is intransitive. Dedicated to my all dear friends right across the multidimensional political spectrum who are openly proud of not knowing, not seeing, not considering something or other that's right under their noses just because they don't like it, and point out that I'm probably unhappy thinking about it. Of course! While I get a sour stomach, you jump back and forth between "it's not true" (no alternative evidence) / "it does not matter, no need to explain why" (opinion invariance, the hallmark of faulty logic) / "I don't want to know" (that will surely preserve your mental balance and serve your cause sooo well)
Re. keeping sanity, does this require faith in one's side? "My tips are based on my time as a CIA military analyst in which I dealt daily with disturbing content."  https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1012488916178436096.htmlUna delle mie innumerevoli cause di mal di stomaco. In fondo è roba che osservo dal 1974 (sul serio). 
Esiste moltissimo leakage propagandistico. Un sacco di robaccia destinata a russi, neocon, bible belt, arabo-islamici, ecc. che fuisce anche a gente fuori target. Nel caso di Soros il grosso è ben incapsulato nella reazione del governo russo alle sue iniziative veramente chiamate open society, che poi sono indistinguibii dalle varie iniziative delle fondazioni dei partiti tedeschi che insieme hanno preparato in segreto le classi dirigenti dei partiti democratici spagnoli verso la fine del franchismo (lasciando a bocca aperta gli osservatori politici sordo-cieco-inebetiti italiani del tempo). Raccomando a tutti di non credersi intellettualmente superiori solo perché per puro caso hanno idee diverse. Di merda ce n'è in abbondanza e non ne trovo uno che non ci caschi. Sono appena stato arrostito da qualcuno borghese e tutto sommato conservatore che non voleva credere alla realtà della gigantesca (e secondo me ampiamente insostenibile) riduzione della povertà nel mondo negli ultimi 30 anni perché cocciava con la loro vulgata del sempre-più-poveri-ha-ragione-il-papa priva di qualsiiasi evidenza statistica. Oh, btw, negavano la importanza della statistica.Ovvero, uno ha ragione o torto su un argomento a prescindere dalla realtà. E poi uno si scoccia degli hegeliani.
Filippo Carlo Cattaneo Non dico che sia la origine ultima, ma una ottima fonte è Sputnik - RT, l'organizzazione che ha sostitutito (tutto ufficiale, potrei tirare fuori i provvedimenti con data e numero) TASS, RIA-Novosti, e Radio Mosca / Radio Mayak / Voce della Russia. Ottima nel senso che in modo molto professionale dicono quello che effettivamente vogliono dire, invece di cose a cazzo di cane, semidigerite e non controllate, e soprattutto -se false- indirizzate ad altri.  

STUB Heroism and transcendence

2012
Real and present phenomena.
Self transcendence it at the core of heroism / terrorism. http://is.gd/VPCH4x vid http://is.gd/49GudT
Mythopoeia is great for ideological, product, and personal promotion, but hard to follow up with fact. Reaction times can be long. http://is.gd/yX3AM0 http://is.gd/Lagref http://is.gd/CItWbr
tag

STUB The less fashionable neighborhoods in the radio spectrum.

So the HF spectrum is still worth something. Not the junk RF dumping ground you've been told.

HF trading links are easy to encrypt, impossible to decrypt or MITM, but rather trivial to DOS. I'd love to know if there's contingency planning for deliberate jamming. A theoretical analysis of the economics of such distruption would be fascinating. E. g. does distruption need to be protracted to have a material impact? Would trading strategies degrade gracefully or fail catastrophically

The US Military is studying full spectrum processing as a backup for satellite based GPS. This includes LF and VLF, already used for DGPS and an evergreen technology in talking one way to submarines at sea.

STUB Banned code, ignored news, digital autocracy.

STUB Credit as a strategic weapon.

In 1939 Nazi Germany was months away from a massive currency and external debt crisis. Paul Kennedy remarks that credit was the nr. 1 factor in the British victory against Napoleon and of the WW2 allies against Hitler, and trumps any strictly military, logistics, industrial consideration. High government debt in peacetime is a strategic weakness. Some idiots in Italy propose to seek credit from China or Russia to lower the interest rate premium the country pays over the German federal government.

STUB The M87* saga and the end of science.

The M87* picture saga points to several subtle but serious problems with our current civilization. Connected to bitcoin mining, the recent statement by Benedict XVI on "1968", the auditing profession, Max Müller and the Hindu scriptures, Putin & Trump, reproducibility, Bayesian statistics, political positions on immigration & climate change, and even good manners. It will take me a while to write it all up (if I ever manage to).

Scientific progress isn't going to continue forever. Nothing does. In HEP both theory and money can be brick walls. In the case of money, it's not that hard to conceive a rough order-of-magnitude hard limit based on clearly unsustainable economic growth vs. exponential experimental cost growth. That limit is much farther than the likely political limit. For an example of how hard things can get, look at decarbonization vs. yellow vests. Decarbonization is an experiment most people agree in principle must be tried, but its implementation is  more than sufficient to put an end to democracy. It can still turn out that democracy isn't really conceivable without a new, unused continent every 10-20 generations. On the theory side, there is no fundamental natural law saying humanity can progress forever either. What we take for granted is a 2500 year run at historical speed, which would likely compress to not more than maybe 10 lifetimes if we project back the speed physics sustained from 1890 to 1970.