Bill Sakovich, an English teacher in Japan who blogged on all things Japanese at the informative and enjoyable Ampontan blog has passed away.  According to one of his neighbors, he died on December 21 after going into the hospital for what he thought was an ulcer, but turned out to be late stage cancer. Eerily, his last post was January 1. It turns out that his last several posts were pre-written and set to auto-post as he expected to be home by the first of the year.

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Looking over the two most recent fusillades of spam comments, I've come to the conclusion that spammers really like Kannagi.

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...between cute and terrifying.
...between Kawaii and Kowai.

Don continues to ask the important questions.
Now he needs your help as he ponders these things.

UPDATE: That first video over there actually precipitated a nightmare. Use caution.

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Sharon "Christa" McAuliffe, Payload Specialist, Gregory Jarvis, Mission Specialist, Judy Resnik, Commander Dick Scobee. Mission Specialist, Ronald McNair, Pilot, Michael Smith and Mission Specialist, Ellison Onizuka smile for one of the last photos taken of them as they head to board United States Orbital Vehicle 099...better known as Challenger.

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Apollo 1.

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Aieee! Break out the aerosani!

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Thus there really is only one thing to watch.

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  This is Southeastern Virginia. That is, counting the width of Virginia itself,  two states south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Tonight's predicted low temperature is 18 degrees. Obviously this is indicative of an error on your part.

Also: With today's high in the vicinity of 44 degrees (Fahrenheit) mosquitoes should not be about. Be advised that they are. (I expect that this will be rectified by tonight's aforementioned error but it bears mentioning. )

Finally regards precipitation: The drought was in fact unwelcome and we do greatly apreciate the efforts put into correcting that misallocation of hydraulic rescources. However, there is such a thing as a "happy medium" . That is, I should not sink up to my ankles in mud as I walk to my car, the end of the road should not be submerged and the back yard should not have 2 inches of standing water on a sunny day.

Please rectify these oversights ASAP.

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  I'd done a review of episode 1 of Usagi Drop some years ago and liked what little I'd seen at the time, so I was quite pleasantly surprised to learn recently that all 11 episodes are currently streaming on Cruchyroll.

 Despite being one of the most low key shows in recent memory, this very short series ranks among the most compelling bits of television I've ever seen.

The art direction and animation are interesting. This looks VASTLY different from most Studio IG shows. Bunny Drop has very minimalist animation and often gives the impression of an animated watercolor. The detail varies with what needs to be expressed ranging from near portraits to caricatures and yet somehow the show manages to not feel at all "artsy".  This is a major achievement and really conveys the moods of the story quite well.

 A 30 something bachelor rescuing his 6 year old aunt and raising her could be the set-up for a wacky screwball comedy. Thankfully, it is not.

In fact, I don't think I've ever seen anything passing itself as entertainment that talked so candidly about the sacrifices required to raise a child and the social stigmas against those who make those choices.

Daikichi starts out as a well regarded and quite well compensated salesman. Within a few episodes however, he realizes that retaining his job is untenable if he is to raise Rin. Soon, he decides to take a demotion and work in the warehouse so he can have a set schedule. In passing it is also mentioned that several other parents he encounters made similar choices, including a former male model who took a much less prestigious job in order to spend time with his child.

One surprising decision was having Rin's mother figure in the story. The show takes an unusual tack with her. The writer makes Rin's mom a driven, almost tragic figure but manages to do so without having her be the least bit sympathetic. The fact that Yumi Unita had the character be a borderline autistic mangaka was certainly interesting. The mother's decision is the flip side of Daikichi's. The lifestyles that society values are simply incompatible with children.

I suppose this can be read as a propaganda piece discussing the root causes of Japan'e demographic collapse. If so it's very nicely done.

********************************

I did like the fact that Daikichi's mom came around and was quite grandmotherly to her...um...sister. The flip side of that of course is the very profound SHAME that the rest of the family feels towards this little girl.

I would hope that Daikichi and Yukari eventually got together, though to explore that at any length would shift the focus and make it a rather different sort of show.



In spite of the dark places this show ventures into,  it never actually gets grim. In fact it manages to be an exceedingly upbeat show.  It's not exactly funny as such, but it's cute and uplifting like few shows I've seen. It highlights some of the worst as well as the very best humanity has to offer and it does so very well.




Shorter Review:
It was all that and a bowl of grits.

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Though classes started on Monday, the first day I've actually been able to attend class was today. I also returned to work this morning so it was a full day. my last class gets out at 7PM and on the way home I dropped by the house of occasional commenter Dalek Hal (link NSFW). We decided to hit a local Italian restaurant to kibitz.
more...

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Bunnyroll is on Cruncydrop!

...or something....

I've only seen episode one of this inspiring little show.

 

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Crunchyroll reports on the effects of a snowstorm in and around Electric Town. Naturally, a tank battle resulted.

^{RX-79 Arctic Warfare Model}

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Of this asshattery...

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It sucks.

Yes, I got a flu shot this season and I can still barely sit up.


(picture unrelated)

Update: Released from Hospital at 2 this morning with a diagnosis of Flu, Bronchitis and Inner Ear Infection and most importantly, documentation for work and school. The flu-shot either did NO good this year or without it I'd be dead. I haven't had the flu this bad in 25 years or more.
I'm getting better though. I can walk all the way to the bathroom without resting now, I can drink fluids without going into cough spasms and I've held down solid food for 4 hours. I've been in bed over 40 hours of the last 48.

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Deep sea cameras have caught the first pictures of a giant squid in it's natural habitat doing normal squid things.

Here is a short video.

Oops...she's neither giant nor in her natural habitat nor doing normal squid things. Lets try again...

..and a couple of pictures...

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The USN has a crying need for a low end patrol vessel.

Numbers are necessary because, despite advances in technology. A ship can only be in one place at once. It might be able to use aircraft and small boats to expand its immediate area of influence, but this does not actually reduce the need for numbers ships to be in disparate locations at the same time in order to do the various low end things that navy's and coast guards do.

Showing the flag, hunting pirates, intel gathering, Search and Rescue, disaster relief law enforcement do not require Aegis Destroyers or Cruisers and it is a waste of those valuable resources to dedicate them to such missions, and in any event sufficient numbers of such capital ships cannot be afforded.

Lots of low end ships are needed and the LCS is far too expensive to buy in numbers, particularly in the current financial crisis.

Meanwhile, in France.

DCN has come up with a family of warships called the GOWIND.

The baseline vessel is an  OPV. One prototype, the FS Adroit, has been built and has been extensively tested by the French Navy. Adroit is a very austere vessel of 800 tons but it has some interesting features.

It it currently only armed with a 20mm cannon, but it has hard points for an OTO Melera Super Rapid 76mm gun, 8 Exocet SSMs and a 12 cell (Wikipedia says 16 cell) launcher for ASTER 15 point defense missiles.

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Quick!

Go to Boviate's and read to the end of this short post.

Then congratulate them!

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The Tsar Bomb, a weapon tested by the U.S.S.R. in 1961 was the penultimate in things designed and built to go "BOOM!"

It's fairly well, known and its effects are described here and here.

The ground surface of the island has been levelled, swept and licked so that it looks like a skating rink. The same goes for rocks. The snow has melted and their sides and edges are shiny. There is not a trace of unevenness in the ground... Everything in this area has been swept clean, scoured, melted and blown away.

The nightmare facilitator helpfully color-codes the blast. Going outward from the hypocenter: the yellow  in the center is a deep crater of fuzed glass. This is the extent of the fireball itself and EVERYTHING here is utterly gone.  The green area has an instant death rate of 50-100 percent due to radiation. This is included in the simulator because it's important for smaller bombs but its really redundant here because the much larger red area overlaps it and experiences instant overpressures of 20PSI and above. Red is going to see the utter destruction of even many steel reinforced concrete buildings. The grey area, which will have overpressure down to 4,6 PSI will  see most structures destroyed except for the very strongest steel and concrete structures, which will be damaged. The death rate in the red and grey zones is going to be close to 100% even if NO radiation was present. Overlapping all of these zones,  and extending well beyond them the is orange area . Outside the grey area it will still experience some blast damage but the orange zone mainly experiences thermal effects. Any exposed skin gets 3rd degree burns and most everything flammable or combustible burst into flames. This will likely result in a firestorm stretching from Trenton NJ to Brentwood, to Fairfield CT and north almost to West Point. Note that this is a very simplistic map and takes into account dissipation of the blast and the curvature of the earth, but it does not take into account terrain or atmospheric conditions. For instance the facing slopes of hills might get higher level effects than their distance would indicate and info from the actual Tsar Bomba test indicates that scattered fires might be started in the Adirondacks

This blast does not have the vast range of the 1961 test because it is assumed to be a ground burst. Of course a ground burst is a VERY dirty explosion. The harbor is unusable for decades and very likely isn't a harbor any more.

Lets pull back a bit...

The major US harbors would have been destroyed and since the seismic effects would have been greater than 8.0,  there would have been earthquake-like damage up and down the eastern seaboard, which transmits seismic waves very efficiently. Remember each 100 MT bomb is roughly half a Krakatoa. Worse, radioactive tsunamis might have done additional damage. The bomb itself, wouldn't cause a real tsunami, but the vertical shaking the concussion would have caused could have precipitated avalanches in the undersea canyons outside many east coast ports. This could conceivably trigger tsunamis.

Note that those 'splody circles are the actual blast fields...to scale.

DC, Philadelphia and Baltimore as torpedo targets are a bit far fetched. One would have to assume torpedoes powered by RTGs or something so the Sub doesn't have to enter the Chesapeake or Delaware Bays. Chicago and Sacramento are rather unlikely targets for a torpedo.

However, the above simulation was done with a slightly different scenario in mind.

The weapon, as big as it was, was not as big as one might think. If you removed the fins, it could fit in an ISO shipping container. It was also not all that advanced in reality. The Soviet engineers designed it very quickly and it was reportedly a straightforward and very conservative scale-up from the U.S.S.R.s early hydrogen weapons. The Soviet engineers did not seem to find it terribly challenging. This means that once anyone gets the ability to produce hydrogen bombs, something like this weapon is a straightforward development, probably only a decade or so down the road.  (the Russians did it rather quicker in what by today's standards are primitive conditions, but they are very good at engineering)

Barring a catastrophic screw-up resulting in a nuclear exchange, the current nuclear threat is, at the very most, something along the scale of "Little Boy" (a firecracker by comparison). However, there is no more potent terror weapon than the 'King of Bombs' and the ability to do damage on that scale is demonstrably attainable. That such large weapons are wasteful and poisonous enough to cause massive contamination is of little deterrent to those who covet nukes for terror purposes. Fortunately, no one likely to try and sneak one of these things into the country will be able to develop or obtain them...for at least 10 or 12 years. 

UPDATE: Edited for clarity.

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So today I had to update my passwords and re-sign all of my security agreements to retain access to the ODU computer system, access to which is required for most classes.

It included a training course.

The first bit is just normal IT security stuff and of no interest at all.  However, the last part is mildly amusing for two reasons.

1: Privacy and Security don't mean what they think it does.
2: Remember, all students are required to know and comply with ODU's IT Security Related Standards with penalties for non-compliance being up-to and including expulsion.



Anyway, the last part is below the fold.

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Girls Und Panzer ended the season unfinished, so caption this.

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