Mr. Tea's Top 10 Badass Phenomena

alex

Do not read this.
Oh I can get lost in Nuclear Testing for hours & hours, I think the thing that makes it so interesting is that they have now banned atmospheric & exoatmospheric (and underwater?) testing, so there isnt a possibility of ever seeing one in this lifetime.

Yes, have watched the video, although it always baffles me that they could develop (and detonate) the most powerful weapon aquired by humanity, yet couldnt get HD video of that shit. If it's the video where you see if from the drop plane that your on abotu then ive seen that, there is also one from the vantage point from the drop zone.

I have found some really great shots of the test from Nevada & Johnson aswell.
 

alex

Do not read this.
Also re: Tsar, interesting that the extra 50tn was meant to be what the casing around warhead was, instead of that it was incased in lead.

What do you think would of happened if they had detonated the 100tn?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
They used lead for the tamper instead of uranium. Still part of the 'physics package', or warhead, but yeah, it formed a jacket around the fusion fuel. If they'd used U the fallout would have been horrific, too much even for the Soviet government to countenance. As it was I think it was ironically the 'cleanest' test ever, in terms of lowest ratio of fallout to yield.

Compare that to the Ivy Mike test, by far America's worst ever radiological disaster.
 
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alex

Do not read this.
Agree, however the tests that were conducted by the Russian's had a percentage of fallout that crept over a civillian area, that's pretty fucked.

The Bluegill Prime test @ Johnson Island was a real disaster aswell and the way the americans treated the locals on the island (however 'willing' some reports suggest they were) was atrocious imo
 

alex

Do not read this.
tsar_bomba.jpg
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
A bit misleading as the size of the mushroom cloud doesn't scale linearly with yield:

800px-Nukecloud.png


(1 = Fat Man, 2 = Castle Bravo)

The page on the Tsar Bomba says its mushroom cloud reached a height of 64km, about ten times the height of the Little Boy/Fat Man clouds.

During the tiny fraction of a second in which the fusion reaction occurred, the Tsar Bomba's power output was 1.4% of the Sun's. :confused:

Edit: as interesting as this is, the thread was intended to be about natural phenomena - OK, so the Chernobyl fungi aren't exactly 'natural', but they've arisen naturally in a man-made (and, er, man-destroyed) environment.
 
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nomos

Administrator
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michael

Bring out the vacuum

....edit - oh yeah, slothrop. - still cool though.

Yeah plus I don't think that video has been posted and it's pretty great! The montage of all the different species that have been killed and fungi-fied is awesome. Well, not awesome = great, but awesome = fills me with awe.
 

you

Well-known member
Yeah plus I don't think that video has been posted and it's pretty great! The montage of all the different species that have been killed and fungi-fied is awesome. Well, not awesome = great, but awesome = fills me with awe.

Thats a word I use a lot and always have to put ( literally ) in brackets afterwards. Used correctly it's a great word to use to describe things you have seen.

BBC wind me up. "that high octane shot off of off of the cushion must have felt awesome, he'll deserve to medal" - aggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
 

BareBones

wheezy
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this is good but nowhere near as the goat that sounds like usher....

 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
On a (superfically) related, but less gruesome - though still badass - note, I give you: 'intelligent' slime moulds!

slime.jpg

Slime 'moulds' aren't fungi, they form a distinct group (in fact several separate groups) by themselves. Most don't even have proper cells, consisting instead of a naked blob of protoplasm dotten with nuclei. Despite this, they can move, communicate and even find the shortest route through a maze in order to "maximise foraging efficiency":

Slime moulds are made up of a mass of protoplasm embedded with multiple nuclei, but no individual cell walls. The adult, feeding stage, called a plasmodium, is a glistening mass of mucus which swarms over and engulfs its food.

The maze was created by laying a maze template down onto a plate of agar. In the first part of the experiment, pieces of slime mould Physarum polycephalum were placed throughout the 3x3cm maze. To grow, the slime mould throws out tube-like structures called pseudopodia, and it soon filled the entire maze.

The maze had four routes through, to get from one exit to the other. Food was placed at both exits, and after eight hours, the slime mould had shrunk back so that its 'body' filled only the parts of the maze that were the shortest route from one piece of food to the other.

The researchers suggest that as the parts of the plasmodium come into contact with food, they start to contract more frequently. This sends out waves to other parts of its body which tell give feedback signals as to whether to grow further or contract. Ultimately, to maximise foraging efficiency, the plasmodium contracts into one thick tube, running through the maze.
 
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you

Well-known member
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physarum_polycephalum#Maze-solving

scary.

Tea - this wiki text : In a 2010 paper, oatflakes were dispersed to represent Tokyo and 36 surrounding towns.[3][4] P. polycephalum created a network similar to the existing subway system, and "with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost". This could be used to develop new ways of designing such networks.

Really reminds me of your urban oncology text from your blog.....

http://dointhelambethwarp.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/urbanoncolog/

"Seen from the air, any sufficiently large city bears a startling resemblance to a great tumour, inexorably spreading through its host tissues."

Really inspired alot of my texts on Pyrrhic Victories.....

More on radiotrophic fungi : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus

Moving away from mould but not the weird I've always had a soft spot for abyssal gigantism,

I will give you giant squid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_squid

.......ill see your giant squid and raise you a colossal squid!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Squid

pictures online somewhere show some great shots of the hooks on the tentacles - top stuff.

Ball lightening is also cool ( well, doubt it )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightening

agh, and now we are one wikilink away from Hitodama that I mentioned in my last post about hashimoto's sobering 1945-1998 video.....
http://notesfromthevomitorium.blogspot.com/2010/08/1945-1998-isao-hashimoto.html
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
I will give you giant squid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_squid

.......ill see your giant squid and raise you a colossal squid!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Squid

pictures online somewhere show some great shots of the hooks on the tentacles - top stuff.

I was working at New Zealand's national museum when scientists there defrosted a colossal squid and dissected a giant one. Someone had the idea to set up webcams and it absolutely exploded... um, web coverage, not the squid. :) Incredibly popular for what I thought was a very slow-moving and fairly gross event.

The colossal squid's on display at the museum in a tank, but they reckon it lost about a third of its size in the freezing process so it's not nearly so goddamn huge as people generally hope. It'd be a completely different kettle of ... if you saw the thing in the water, I reckon.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Tea - this wiki text : In a 2010 paper, oatflakes were dispersed to represent Tokyo and 36 surrounding towns.[3][4] P. polycephalum created a network similar to the existing subway system, and "with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost". This could be used to develop new ways of designing such networks.

Brilliant. And could any city have been more fitting than Tokyo, given its proverbial propensity to be spectacularly destroyed in dystopian sci-fi? :D Christ, they even called the damn stuff 'many-headed'. :eek:

Really reminds me of your urban oncology text from your blog.....

http://dointhelambethwarp.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/urbanoncolog/

"Seen from the air, any sufficiently large city bears a startling resemblance to a great tumour, inexorably spreading through its host tissues."

http://notesfromthevomitorium.blogspot.com/2010/08/1945-1998-isao-hashimoto.html

Thanks for the props, that's cool - there's been nothing new up there for a while I'm afraid, but if yours is still active I'll have a look and see what's new.

Great video, too - surely no coincidence at all it looks and sounds like an '80s arcade game!

Edit: BTW, John Eden is the absolude don of blogging about giant/collossal squid - take a look at his Uncarved site, the damn things have even got their own section.
 
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you

Well-known member
Sadly i'm not too active now on Pyrrhic Victories, ought to start posting more on there but other blogs take up my time more now.

Really reminded me of those scenes and pictures in Akira where-by the tentacles grow over the computers and then the roads and buildings.

Will have to check out John Edens blog.... squids is cool innit.....

I just had a very weird idea! Would it be possible to make condoms with a tentacular sucker pattern on them? - Im sure they would sell......
 
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