Doomsday Machines

Doomsday Machines

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Doomsday Machines
Doomsday Machines
Wasteland Wrap-up #34
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Weekly Wasteland Wrap-up

Wasteland Wrap-up #34

An unusual monument, a true member of the nuclear priesthood, and an unglamorous programming problem...

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Alex Wellerstein
Apr 20, 2025
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Doomsday Machines
Doomsday Machines
Wasteland Wrap-up #34
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So I just realized that I’ve been titling these weekly “wrap-up” posts completely inconsistently — drifting between “Wasteland Wrap-up” to “Weekly Wrap-up” and even “Weekly Wrap-up Post.” How strange. At some point I will re-name the old ones more consistently. Funny how such things can happen without one really noticing…

Lyndon strikes a bold pose on a windy day in Hoboken.

The weather has been occasionally quite nice the last week, and was over 80ºF yesterday. The dog of course is a big fan of such things, as he is not really built for cold weather. The New Jersey spring weather this year is still all over the place, though, from the cold to the hot, the calm and the windy, the nice and the rainy.

Lyndon enjoys a warm sunbeam after a long walk.

I had a number of things vying for my attention this week, so I didn’t get the next Doomsday Machines post out the door, but good things come to those who wait, I guess. I am close to wrapping up the semester and so that always brings a lot of things, but I attended an interesting workshop in NYC last Wednesday, which I’ll describe a bit below the fold here. I have a few posts I am trying to get out the door, but it’s just a matter of having enough un-allocated time to do it, and I’m not sure that’ll happen next week, either… but we’ll see!

I will pass on one other photograph. In Exchange Place, in downtown Jersey City, there is a statue known as the Katyń Memorial. It’s a rather intense statue on the whole, especially for its location — I don’t know what the area was like when it erected (late 1980s, by the look of it), but it’s an extremely “boujee” part of the city now, and so having an extremely violent and explicitly anti-Communist statue of a Polish soldier being impaled from the back by a Soviet bayonet feels a little intense for something that is next to a Starbucks. Affixed to statue is the most over-the-top 9/11 plaque I have ever seen:

I’ll just pass that on without any comment other than “wow.” The statue in the lower foreground is the aforementioned Katyń Memorial, adding a sort of Drost effect to the whole thing.

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