thankfully cold movies

The weather services claim it's getting warmer, close to 0 degrees C. Thus, yesterday I went without the longjohns and -shirt. Big mistake! I haven't been that cold all winter! So today it was back with the silk underwear, and they really are the most amazingly good things to wear. Cool yet not cold. Wow. Thanks therru for pointing them out!

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It's been a while, but right now I've gone berserk on amazon again. Mmm, all those old Sherlock Holmes movies I've been meaning to get but haven't gotten around to until now... All of it non-Doyle stuff too. Plus "The Web of Fear" again -- let's hope this time I actually get the Dr Who soundtrack and not something else like last time I ordered it and got... "Gone With the Wind" soundtrack. O_o how did they figure that?

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The danger of watching all of "Black Books": when it's over I want to start over again right away. It's addictive! Got to get myself a Fran icon, she's brilliant. Or rather, Tamsin Greig is brilliant. Heart!

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And all of this feels pretty lame and mean when the news shows the devastation in Haiti. Boy am I glad I don't live there! Or at any other place that isn't middle-class Sweden. I've got a job that is actually rewarding, not just money-wise; I've got a flat (although it's tiny) and enough money to buy all the food I need; I'm completely normal and average, no one is persecuting me; my society is one of the best-functioning ones in the world; climate and tectonics are mild and still. Thank the maker!

ancient engineers rule

Oh and...

All these science shows, on SVT Kunskapskanalen (The Knowledge Channel), put me in total awe of pre-colombian South American engineering. I don't suppose the Incas suddenly developed the fully-fledged amazing engineering skillz that these science shows purport, but that it's a long, well-established tradition that with the Incas is put into systematic use. (I really must read more about this, it's fascinating.)

It's a stone-to-bronze age culture, in a landscape with extreme terrain, sometimes frightful weather, humongous erosion, plus earthquakes, mudslides and volcanoes. And they made structures that _last_! Wow. Not just the stupendous rock walls with slabs of stone so perfectly molded and assembled you can't push a knife-blade between them, no, I'm thinking about the roads. Built along almost sheer cliffs 500 years ago, and they still exist. And I'm thinking about the cultivation terraces, painstakingly crafted onto and out of the living rock (as Tolkien would say). The irrigation canals. The... well all of it!

And the science shows make it out like it just suddenly appeared, and no big deal. Sheesh. I'm in total awe of all the ancient engineers, all over the world. Unsung heroes of humanity indeed. Rock works rule!

the end is nigh

egghunter and I talked about cobalt bombs at the latest Club Cosmos pub night, and about radioactive isotopes of gold. Yes, it's all fun and laughs at those events! Lots of interesting things to read about doomsday devices, like this.

I'm organising the office library (again), and their is one book about mining, from the mid-1970s. Once when I was bored I looked through it, and there actually is a chapter on nuclear exccavation of mines and other structures. For realz! Operation Plowshare here we come!

And by a strange coincidence, now on SVT Kunskapskanalen: the Hiroshima bomb.