Wasteland wrap-up #79

Some good professional news, photos of a hot dog, bomber arithmetic, 2000 days of Duolingo, a recent horror film...

I mentioned a little while back that I was appointed to the role of Senior Fellow at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This was done with the hope, by Bulletin CEO and President Alexandra Bell and I, that we could get it funded and thus make it more than just a nice affiliation. I am very pleased to say that thanks to help from Longview Philanthropy, we did find a philanthropic funder for the position and our plan for it.

So what that means, practically, are several things. For one thing, it means I have an actual salary for the next couple of years, which is a positive development to say the least. That, plus the fact that my wife also found gainful employment this year, means the whole “France experiment” is going as positively as one could possibly hope for, so far.

The last week was a heat wave over all of Europe, including here in France, where the temperatures were over 90ºF/32ºC. Which isn’t so terrible, except that there’s no air conditioning, so it got a little oppressive. Here is Lyndon being a hot dog in one of the parks we go to regularly. I brought a water bottle for him on all of our walks this week.

The other is that it gives my activities over the next few years a lot more form and structure, since the position comes with many obligations (that I myself largely came up with). This means writing quite a few articles/columns for the Bulletin (which will be cross-posted on Doomsday Machines) on both historical and contemporary issues, getting the video essay series I’ve been working on for awhile off the ground, developing a number of interactive web tools/datasets/etc. for the Bulletin, and working with a podcast company to develop a limited podcast series about the history (and future?) of the Doomsday Clock.

So that’s a lot! Ridiculously ambitious, even! But it’s also all stuff that sounds quite fun to me, and includes some things (like the video essays) that I’ve been really wanting/needing to get done anyway, and who knows what it will all lead to in the long run.

Lyndon keeping cool in the shade in the Jardin du Luxembourg. His forlorn expression is due to a particularly fat pigeon not walking up closer to him.

In other news, it has been a heat wave for the last two weeks in Europe. I’m pretty good with dry heat, being a native Californian, but boy, I had not realized how much my being “pretty good” with it depended on having air conditioning as a respite from it. Temperatures were generally above 90ºF/32ºC, even at night, and while I don’t mind being in that heat generally, being steeped in it, day after day, with no relief, got pretty tiresome by the end of it.

The French believe that air conditioning is not just an environmental drag (debatable) but that it is actually bad for your health to be at what we consider to be a comfortable temperature (e.g. 60-70ºF/16-21ºC), and so even businesses that do have air conditioning keep themselves pretty warm. Pretty much no homes have them (including ours). We have a few fans (two of these if you are curious), which helped (especially at night), but it still felt hot.

The lycée where my wife teaches went remote on Friday because it was just too hot in the classrooms (which also do not have air conditioning), and I’m not really sure how that helped anything because if it’s too hot to learn in a classroom, it’s also too hot to learn over Zoom, and it wasn’t like it was much cooler in anyone’s homes.

Yesterday, the day before heat wave abated, I took Lyndon on a walk around the block and he noticed that an appliance store had very good air conditioning. He firmly but politely insisted we take a look inside. As they had a sign that explicitly allowed dogs, I obliged. He was perfectly happy to just sit there like this for awhile.

Well, the heat wave ended yesterday, finally, and today it is much more comfortable — all the more so by comparison to the past week. We are enjoying that the sun is not even starting to set until 9:45pm these days — it makes the days feel gloriously long.

For Doomsday Machines this week I posted about a fascinating document from February 1957 about the “arithmetic” used by Strategic Air Command in the 1950s:

As with so many other things, I had (several) copies of this on my computer, and stumbled across them again while looking for something else, and got absorbed in it. I find “insider” accounts of nuclear targeting methodology and philosophy both fascinating and chilling, and the fact that the author of this one (a Navy advisor to the Atomic Energy Commission who had previously been head of SACEUR’s nuclear targeting and would play a role in shifting Eisenhower-era nuclear policy) both knew what he was talking about and was quite critical was quite unusual.

I got absorbed in it, as I often do, thought, “well, I should just write this up, since I find it so interesting.” I am sure that “read a document with me” is probably not everyone’s favorite cup of tea, but a) I do think giving documents careful attention is a core historical competency, and so maybe that is interesting-enough to see done, b) I try only to pick extremely interesting documents that are also not very well-known, and c) they’re easier to write than many of the other kinds of posts, so it is helpful to do them for weeks where I am feeling crunched for time (which I was this week, owing to a deadline I had on Friday).

As always I have several posts on “the back burner”… we’ll see what ends up moving me for next week… there are a few of my planned posts that I am probably going to convert to articles for the Bulletin, because they align well (and are worth the extra time I would put into them for that), but I am thinking of writing something on one of the stranger and more obscure post-nuclear war fiction books I’ve read… but it might also be zombies, who knows?