Wasteland Wrap-up #59

Our crazy times, nuclear sponges, "Bombshell," and "The Arab of the Future"...

It’s another week in the wasteland…

Lyndon and I went on a grand walk to the Bois de Boulogne, which is in the west of Paris. There was lots to explore and inspect — and many birds to stare at — so he was very happy.

I had planned to get a post for Doomsday Machines out the door at the end of the last week, but I have to admit that the US news was just… too much. It’s not so much that I can’t get things done under such conditions, where everything seems to be going off the rails at once, although I sometimes struggle to find my focus. It’s that it’s hard to feel like writing something about “Survivalists” in the 1980s feels totally insubstantial, silly, and almost like I am willfully ignoring the world around me. Which is part of the difficulty of these “interesting times,” isn’t it? If you’re not talking about them, then what are you doing?

And of course, we can’t all talk about them all the time, and may not want to talk about them at all, at least publicly. It’s a no-win situation. It’s exactly what one would expect from this kind of chaos, though. I know that many have suggested that it’s the point of such chaos, but I don’t know if it’s really all that willful or not. It doesn’t matter either way.

While I posed Lyndon for a few photos at the Arc de Triomphe, several tourists from Asia also wanted to photograph him there. It was pretty cute.

I will have a post out next week, though, whatever else happens in the world. I have been writing up a discussion of one of the oddest “Survivalist” novels from the early 1980s, Dean Ing’s Pulling Through, which also happens to have the most amazing (not necessarily a positive term, here) post-apocalyptic cover art of all time. You might recognize it from some of the banner art for Doomsday Machines, because I’ve been enthralled with it since I first saw it. A man. A gun. A cheetah. A (flying!!!) race car. San Francisco. A mushroom cloud. It’s got everything. And more. So that’s for next week. Watch for it.

The weather has (finally?) given us some snow here in Paris, although it melted in a couple of days and has started warming up a bit. So far my assessment as “basically the same weather as NYC, although maybe not quite as wet” has held up. Not a bad winter by any means. We’ve even had a few days here where I haven’t forced Lyndon to wear his jaunty little sweater, which he loathes, so he has been happy with that.

Lyndon at the Bois de Boulogne, watching for birds and other dogs of interest.

I had a couple of projects come to fruition last week. First, I have mentioned on here a project regarding nuclear fallout, and that came out, finally. This was a collaboration with the reporter Davis Winkie, funded by the Outrider Foundation, and the graphics team at USA Today (Ramon Padilla, Stephen Beard, Karina Zaiets and Carlie Procell), to model scenarios regarding a Russian nuclear attack against American ICBM bases in the midwest (the “nuclear sponge”). If you are in the USA you can view it here; if you are in Europe, their website basically breaks itself unless you use a VPN, for reasons that are unclear to me.

A screenshot from part of the article.

My role in this was to build the underlying software that implemented the fallout model (WSEG-10) and make it so that it could export visualizations, animations, etc. based on whatever parameters were input into it. I will eventually be releasing a version of this to the public (and on Github), so people can play with their own scenarios. None of this modeling is definitive or predictive; it is meant to be evocative. The upshot of my software is that it is very easy to use and it is very fast (at the sacrifice, perhaps, of some predictive fidelity). Anyway, I am happy with how it looks.

The other thing that came out is a documentary I was involved with several years ago, on PBS’s American Experience, called Bombshell:

I admit I haven’t had the time to watch the whole thing yet, and I am somewhat loathe to watch things I appear in (for a variety of reasons), but the basic approach is looking at the ways in which the “narrative” of the atomic bombs was consciously shaped by the people involved in using it, and how it was pushed back upon by various journalistic accounts, particularly with regard to radiation effects.

Anyway, I’m in it a lot, and a lot of the positions I give it in are similar to the ones I talk about in the new book, so if that is interesting to you… check it out! And it has been amusing to get e-mails from viewers of it over the last week that are along the lines of “what evidence to you have of X?” and I can say, I’ve actually written a book on it, with lots of citations, so you can check that out! A difficulty with doing a documentary is that you usually can’t give good evidence for controversial claims, but hey, it helps to have a book to point to, I guess.

Optimistic graffiti spotted while walking Lyndon in the 14th arrondissement: “Elle m’a dit les fleurs repoussent” — she told me that the flowers are growing back.

So that’s last week, I think. I also gave a guest lecture (3 hours!) to graduate students at the École Polytechnique on Friday, which was fun. We went over NUKEMAP for part of it, and the rest was about the how-and-why of the making of the atomic bomb in World War II (and a little bit about the decision to use it, but it turns out that 3 hours is not quite enough time for me to do all of those things in one lecture).

Oh, and I recorded a podcast with Cheryl Rofer and Rob Farley for their blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money, about the new book. So that’s out there, too, if you want to listen to it. Until next week…