| 21/1/02: Oppenheimer: (looking up at the Trinity explosion, the first nuclear explosion). "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Director of testing: (looking up at the Trinity explosion). Yeah now we're all s.o.b.'s. Yeah this is the famous quote by Oppenheimer, the man behind the Manhattan project which blasted the first nuclear weapon. It's some quote from some ancient Hindu text (Ramayana?). What is much less known is the quote after that, at least so I heard. Less elegant and refined, it carries more or less the same message. Well maybe they're right since we can all relate nukes to weapons of mass destruction. But that wasn't always the case. NASA once designed and almost built a rocket that used nukes to blow it into space (project cancelled no thanks to that no-nukes-in-space treaty). You can also use nukes in civil engineering. There's actually a college textbook publishing in the US titled something like "The Peaceful Use of Nuclear Explosives in Civil Engineering", and the Russians could've already used nukes to make tunnels. Yeah! To make Kilimanjaro the world's highest peak, just nuke the top off Everest!! Wait, is Kilimanjaro the world's second highest peak?? Doesn't matter, there's probably more nukes in the world than peaks. Note to anti-nuke pacifists: no, I'm not really advocating the use of nukes. Only losers prefer a quick and firey end to their puny lives. Winners face death in the face by slow and painful deaths like food poisonings. |
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| 22/1/02: "E Pluribus Unum." - ummm ... my high school U.S. history teacher? I know what it means (Latin for "from many comes one"), I know it's etched in all US dollar coins and bills (that's how it's stuck to my head), but I've no idea who first said it ... until now!! No it's not some great American fore-father in wigs over 200 years ago. The quote actually comes from an ancient Roman poem for a salad recipe. No I kid you not! The author's name is Virgil, and the poem's name is "Moretum". It's about some poor farmer waking up in the morning and making some moretum (some sort of ancient salad) for breakfast. When mixing the veggies and ancient dressings, he's like, "Oh look! All the colors are blending into one!" And voila! You get the American motto. Oh well, I know it's some pretty useless knowledge. That's why I put it here. Haha! |
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| 23/1/02 "To hell with humanity! We're designing engines!!" - some engineer at a wind tunnel testing facility. I walked by KFC today, and suddenly thought of this article I read somewhere. It's about some engineer's experience with "chicken cannon." The research group basically had to shoot chickens (or birds) at a jet engine at 500mph (normal cruising speed for airliner). The reason: birds striking engines are known to have brought down big airliners. If you look closely around airport runways, you can see people running/driving around chasing away birds. Serious! Anyway they wanted to test engines' resistance to bird attacks. I think they actually build a cannon to shoot birds. The article talked about the project's funny aspects including aiming the birds at the engine and having to clean up the bloody mess when they missed. It's hilarious even for non-engineers. In any case, apparently they got ducks from a local farm and gassed them before the ordeal, just to be humane. But the chief engineer thought that's pointless and wanted to shoot them live. And that's his quote above. I don't have much thoughts about animal rights, but from humanity perspective, death by engine blades is probably the quickest and most painless way to die. You just get chopped up into a billion pieces in microseconds (step aside guillotine!!), unless you missed which happened quite often. But then you end up hitting the wall at jet speed, which I presume is still much more painless and thus humane than whatever chicken/duck-massacre machine in use today. |