Month: October 2003

Fire

ash_carwindow.jpg The smoke from the various Los Angeles fires blew over Long Beach all day today making it feel like a volcano was going off. Enough ash had rained down to collect on parked cars, pile up on my staircase, and turn the sky yellow. Perversely, the Halloween Dog Parade was going on in Belmont Shore making the whole day seem like a Fellini movie.

Accidental Orion

Last week I took a tour of the Nevada Test Site and while I’ll get to a full description of that shortly, this thread in sci.space.tech was too good to not mention.

A 1957 atomic test called Pascal-B set off a small nuclear explosion in a 500 foot shaft that was covered by a metal lid. A quick thumbnail estimate of the shockwave effect on the metal lid gave a resulting velocity of six times the earth’s escape velocity and thus the legend of the “manhole cover in space” is born. One of the project scientists comments on the whole thing.