Toxicity

As noted in the previous section, the toxicity of chemical agents generally falls somewhere in-between that of the more deadly biological agents and that of conventional weapons, or at the lower end of the scale for weapons of mass destruction. For example, Kupperman and Trent estimate that, based on "the weight required to produce heavy casualties within a square-mile area under idealized conditions," fuel-air explosives require 320 million grams; fragmentation cluster bombs, 32 million; hydrocyanic acid, 32 million; mustard gas, 3.2 million; GB nerve gas, 800,000; a "crude" nuclear weapon (in terms of fissionable material only), 5,000; Type A botulinal toxin, 80; and anthrax spores, 8 (Kupperman and Trent 1979: 57). Similarly, it has been estimated that it would take 100 grams of the "V" nerve agent, or almost 40 pounds of potassium cyanide, to have an effect on a water supply equivalent to just one gram of typhoid culture (SCJ 1990: 3-4). Put another way, to incapacitate or kill a person drinking less than half a cup of untreated water from a 5 million-liter reservoir would require no less than 10 tons of potassium cyanide, compared to just 1/2 kg of Salmonella typhi (OTA 1991: 52).

United Way of America

United Way of America: turning American pot smokers into call center cattle!

HEATENS

Little Brother's Eye Blog

We are expecting big things from this blog...stay tuned.

US Oil Reserve

"Also, the U.S. stocks are up more than 15 million barrels over last year to 333.7 million barrels, up from 318 million barrels – so we believe it is safe to say that there will not be any gasoline shortages in the West." -Samuel Bodman
Secretary of Energy August 8, 2006

333.7
------- = 16.09 days @ full capacity
20.73


Oil - consumption: 20.73 million bbl/day (2004 est.)

Public debt: 64.7% of GDP (2005 est.)

Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/us.html

CrossHairs Darpa anti-sniper suit

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a38_1189521672

The Long Now Project clock details...

Time calculations

Options considered for the part of the clock that converts time source (for example, a pendulum) to display units (for example, clock hands) include electronics, hydraulics, fluidics, and mechanics.

A problem with using a conventional gear train (which has been the standard mechanism for the past millennium) is that gears necessarily require a ratio relationship between the timing source and the display. The required accuracy of the ratio required increases with the amount of time. (For instance, for a short period of time the count of 29.5 days per lunar month may suffice, but over 10,000 years the number 29.5305882 is a much more accurate choice.)

Achieving such precise ratios with gears is possible, but awkward; similarly, gears degrade over time in accuracy and efficiency due to the deleterious effects of friction (which is to say, they get smaller. Smaller gears move faster, throwing precise calculations seriously out of joint). Instead, the clock uses binary digital logic, implemented mechanically in a sequence of stacked binary adders (or as Hillis, their inventor calls them, serial bit-adders). In effect, the conversion logic is a simple digital computer (more specifically, a digital differential analyser), implemented with mechanical wheels and levers instead of typical electronics. The computer uses a 28-bit number representation, with each bit represented by a mechanical lever or pin that can be in one of two positions. This binary logic can only keep track of absolute time, like a stopwatch; to convert from absolute to local solar time (that is, time of day), a cam subtracts (or adds) from the cam slider, which the adders move.

Another advantage of the digital computer over the gear train is that it is more evolvable. For instance, the ratio of day to years depends on Earth's rotation, which is slowing at a noticeable but not very predictable rate. This could be enough to throw the phase of the Moon, for example, off by a few days over 10,000 years. The digital scheme allows that conversion ratio to be adjusted, without stopping the clock, if the length of the day changes in a different way than expected.