Wasteland wrap-up #76

Grades are due, plans for the summer, mega-death testimony from the 1950s, re-reading Terry Pratchett's novel about war...

Grades are due tomorrow and a number of other things are due this upcoming week, so I am running around like the proverbial chicken sans tête trying to get things done. But there is the sweet, sweet promise of, well, more things to do once I get these particular tasks done. That’s life!

I was posing Lyndon for a photograph near Les Invalides when these two other dogs ran up to him before I really realized it. He started wagging his tail but stayed in place, like the good boy that he is.

I mentioned last time that I had some good news on various fronts that I could not yet announce, and I can still not quite announce it, but it should be announced in the next week or so. So that is good. I am looking forward to a very busy summer and a very busy next year, but it’s in principle going to be busy in interesting ways.

An interesting tunnel with murals and LED lighting where Boulevard de Port-Royal crosses over Rue Broca. I will note that the street names here are very amusing for historians of science — lots of familiar names!

Along with other things, I have assembled a team of Stevens students to work on Oregon Road ‘83 this summer. We are making a big push towards the public beta… I think it is within reach! I have not been working on it much the last year, just because I’ve been swamped with other things. Moving to another country, at least under our circumstances, is not as hard as people sometimes think it is — it is doable, you have probably done harder things — but it does sap one’s time. But I’m very excited at being able to turn back to it for a few months.

The team I’ve assembled is a good one, I think, although smaller than in previous years. This isn’t because of any lack of interest (I had about 50 students who wanted to work on the project), but because the program that pays the students put limits in place (boo) on how many students any given mentor could have (only 10).

Did the fact that a few professors (me and at least one other) having huge teams of eager students working for them shape that result? Maybe, maybe. There may also have been other (e.g. financial) considerations. Anyway, it was a real bear trying to narrow it down, as I hate having to say no to eager (and generally very good!) students.

Lyndon seems quite amused by this Lyonnese graffiti (“69 La Trik” is some kind of Lyonnese clothing brand that is, if their own website is to be credited, deeply associated with being from Lyon). Is Lyndon a member of Antifa? Probably.

Back in January of this year, I filmed an interview about nuclear weapons “basics” for a media company that normally did Francophone content but has been branching out into English-language stuff. It released in March on YouTube with the title of “Why it’s so difficult to build a nuclear bomb.”

Last week, they had me come in to do another session (they are helpfully located in Paris), this time having me react to various depictions of nuclear weapons (and some just about radioactivity) in films and television shows. Which was a fun thing to do. I am not sure when they will finalize it, but I’ll post it here when they do.

I tried to take a photo of Lyndon hanging out at Le Café des Beaux Arts but only got this, but it’s a good rendering. He is a very good café dog, willing to hang out and check out the scene for hours, particularly if the waiters opt to bring him some water (which, whatever their occasional rudeness to humans, the French waiters seem pretty fond of nice dogs).

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote up the transcript of formerly Top Secret testimony to a Congressional committee from 1956 about the “psychological and political aspects of thermonuclear war,” in which an Army general describes how the US strategic nuclear war plan was expected to kill over 300 million people, including 2 million American allies:

I stumbled across this while looking for something else, which is how I find a lot of my research interests — serendipity matters! It’s a gobsmacking bit of testimony. What is also historically fascinating about it, I think, is that this classified presentation about how vast and horrible thermonuclear war would be is done in the service of requesting over 100,000 tactical nuclear weapons, so that some other kind of nuclear option is available as well.

Next week, I will probably do something about a movie… maybe something non-nuclear, just to have a bit of a shift… we’ll see…!