Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

New York City's office of Emergency Management has issued a surreal and brainless PSA about what to do if a nuclear bomb goes off in the city. Let's try a youtube embed:



Set aside the chirpy presenter and the outlandish assumption that there will still be broadcasts/phone service or internet for people to stay tuned to after a bomb goes off.

If there was an actual nuclear war, either NYC would not be targeted at all (because Russia would instead be using its nukes against naval bases, air bases, missile silos, and military command centres), or it would get one bomb, which would destroy essentially the entire city, and there wouldn't be much of anyone left alive to worry about how they were supposed to tune in (Check out the map halfway down this page, showing the area of a firestorm after a standards size Russian nuke going off above Manhattan).

The PSA seems to instead be contemplating a terrorist nuclear attack using a regular A-bomb instead of an H-bomb. Fearmongers ^H^H^H security "experts" have been beating the drum about how terrorists would love to obtain a nuke and set it off in a major american city for 20 years now. My library card let me look at this paper from 2009, written by one of those "experts," which cites 2007 congressional testimony by Richard Garwin, a "true genius" who thought there was a "20 percent per year probability of a nuclear explosion with American cities and European cities included," and also cites Matthew Bunn, who estimated in 2006 "the probability of a nuclear terrorist attack over a 10-year period to be 29 percent." That means over 10 years, the first expert thinks there is a 90% probability that terrorists will blow up a city, and in the two decades since 2001, the second guy thinks the odds of a city being nuked are around 50% (see formula note below). Something seems wrong with their figures. Could it be that they don't actually have any idea of the risk and are making up high numbers in order to make things sound more scary so they can continue to make money beating the drum over nuclear terrorism? Nah, couldn't be.

Regardless, I got some maps for the destruction from a very basic nuclear bomb - the Little Boy a-bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which shot a chunk of purified U235 into a cavity in another chunk of U235. The simplicity of the design was such that the Manhattan project scientists never bothered to test it - they were certain it would work. It's possible to make a much smaller bomb (eg, the minimum yield on dial-a-yield H-bomb used in most American nukes), but that involves using more advanced techniques. For a bomb built in a garage by people without decades of expertise in bomb making to draw on, we can expect your basic Hiroshima or Nagasaki H-bomb of 15 or 20 kilotons. Here's the area destroyed by fire at Hiroshima. And here's a nukemap projection of the result of setting off the same bomb at the ground level of the Empire State Building. The 50% chance of 3rd degree burns circle there (1.8 km) is the same radius as the "2000 yard" circle in the Hiroshima map.

Basically, assuming the same size firestorm, a terrorist nuke set off in the street outside the Empire State Building would cause the entire width of Manhattan Island from 5th to 55th street to be destroyed by fire. And the staggering scale of that - from the most basic bomb that could plausibly be made in a garage by terrorists - is why all those "experts" have been so wrong for so many years. Because despite what American terrorism "experts" think, terrorists are not monsters intent on killing as many people as possible. They are politically savvy people using acts of violence to create a political effect. Terrorism is, basically, propaganda through violence. And even if they could get their hands on some plutonium or pure U235 (which would not be an easy or cheap undertaking), they know better than to do so. They know that the propaganda effect of setting off a nuke in a city would not help their cause. So they haven't tried.

But, the fearmongers continue to beat their drums, the Biden administration has not reversed course on Trump's baseless scapegoating if Iran, and the NYC office of emergency management has turned out a tone deaf and ludicrous PSA.

(Footnote: to calculate the odds of something with a per year chance happening over several years, this page says for the probability p, (1-p) to the N = the chance of it not happening at all over N years. The chance of it happening at least once is the inverse (subtract that result from 1 again). So, convert annual percent chance to decimal, subtract that decimal from 1, then raise that to the power of the number of years, then subtract from 1 to get the chance of it happening over the longer time interval.

I see so many people on Facebook buying awful laptops, or asking for help with choosing a new laptop.

Laptop makers produce two very different kinds of laptops. They have lines of laptops intended for consumers, which are made to look pretty and cost as little as possible. Consumer laptops are *not durable* - they're made to outlive a one year warranty, and no longer. They have tons of promotional crapware preloaded on them - software that the manufacturer is paid to put on the computer (not the other way round), which is poor quality and makes money for the developer through ads, popups demanding that you upgrade, or actual user tracking and spying. And they are *not* designed to be easy to repair or upgrade.

And then there are lines of laptops intended for businesses and corporations. Which are usually not loaded with crapware (or not as much), which are designed to outlive a three or four year corporate replacement schedule, and which are often quite durable. And they can be easily repaired, because the corporate buyer gets them with a multi-year maintenance contract on them. They cost more, often significantly more. But they are worth it - a good corporate-grade laptop will last until it becomes obsolete, and will be more likely to survive accidents.

Understandably, most people are reluctant to pay over a thousand dollars for a laptop when they can get one for less than five hundred. But the best part about corporate laptops is that the companies that buy them replace them long before they cease to be useful, so there are tons of "off lease" laptops available for about the same or only a little more than a new consumer laptop from Best Buy. And despite not having a manufactuerer's warranty, those used business class laptops are a far better value.

And now, because I had to hunt this information down: For the top five manufacturers, the lines of laptop that are business class instead of consumer class are:

Lenovo Thinkpad, especially the T (general) and X (ultralight) series.
HP Probook (general business) or Elitebook (high end workstations)
Dell Latitude (general) or Precision (high end)
Acer Travelmate
AsusPro.

I prefer Thinkpads, but Dell and HP also make good notebooks. I've no experience with Acer or Asus.

Robert Heinlein is one of those authors who is sadly not being allowed to die - his estate keeps digging up old manuscripts out of the extensive archives he donated to UC Santa Cruz and publishing them. Some of the results have been interesting (pieces that had never been reprinted since their original magazine publication, like "A Tenderfoot in Space"), and some have been, well, unfortunate.

The most recent revivified Heinlein is Spider Robinson's 2006 novel, Variable Star, which was based on a story outline by Heinlein.

Be warned: despite the claims on the cover, which gives Heinlein top billing, Variable Star is a Spider Robinson novel through and through. Robinson, for those who haven't read him before, is a very distinct writer with a limited range -- all of his work is more or less similar in style and tone, so if you like what he does in one book, you will enjoy his other books; if you don't, you won't. And if you're like me, you'll start out enjoying his stories and then, after a while, start to find his writerly tics (which don't really vary) grating and irritating.

Rather than review Variable Star, I want to talk about the original story outline (working title "The Star Clock") by Heinlein which Robinson used. The outline is available in PDF from the Heinlein Archives for $2. It is bundled with a bunch of other stuff in the collection called "Story Ideas, part 1", file number WRTG201a-01.*

While Heinlein never turned the outline into a novel himself, he did did not abandon it as the marketing for Variable Star would imply. Rather, he took one core idea (near-light speed travel as a form of time travel into the future) and used it as the basis for Time For the Stars. Then he took the other core idea (poor boy suddenly finds himself dealing with a family more wealthy and powerful than most governments) and incorporated it into Citizen of the Galaxy. Finally he took the last idea from the outline (boy and girl seemingly separated by one-way time travel into the future discover that their ages are not incompatible after all because they've both traveled forward), and used it in The Door Into Summer.

Robinson talks in the afterword to Variable Star that the outline he had to work with was only seven pages long, with page 8 missing. The version in the archive is complete, so the last page must have gone astray somewhere between UCSC and Robinson's desk.

Extensive Googling has not turned up anyone else talking about this outline in specific terms, so here goes. ( Cut for length and boringness to those who don't care about Heinlein )

For those curious, Robinson's novel is extremely faithful to the first five pages of the outline (up to the point where Joel leaves on the starship). He used few of the brainstorming ideas Heinlein put in page 6 (the trip), and ignored page 7 (Joel's return to Earth) completely (and he didn't have page 8, as explained in his afterword).

Sadly, by staying so faithful to the initial outline, then diverging so widely from it, Robinson ended up with a book that egregiously violates the Chekov's Gun rule - the ending of Variable Star comes from nowhere, with no buildup or foreshadowing, while the beginning of it puts a good many plot threads in motion that are discarded abruptly without resolution to make way for the ending.

* If you buy this collection, you get the following in addition to the Star Clock outline: Numerous newspaper and magazine clippings that Heinlein evidently found evocative; two articles by Jerry Pournelle (one MS, one journal reprint); some handwritten pages that I did not try to decipher; 19 pages of worldbuilding notes for "A Martian named Smith" aka Stranger in a Strange Land from 1949; two typed letters, one to "Sarge" (dec 1963), and one (missing the first page, probably mid 60's also) to "Buz," both talking about race relations.