Info for US Xians

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Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on August 26, 2025 permalink Comments Email

Gamescom 2025

Tickets were 30 € on sunday, which I found overpriced. No pensioner rebates, in fact I might have been the only over-30 there ;-) It was mostly teens and twens.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on August 25, 2025 permalink Comments Email

Crashed WW2 bomber found.

Recently, the wreck was discovered over 12 feet deep at the edge of the open-strip-mining area, where archeologists were actually looking for Roman remains before the strip-miners dug up the area. The bones of the crew will be buried again in a military grave, Brit veterans organisations have been informed. The open-pit mining has now resumed.

If you came here looking for the old AC/DC song "Shot down in flames", sorry, but let me point you there instead.

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Chuck asked "Google found several instances, but not this one. Link?" No, just our local newspaper.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on August 20, 2025 permalink Comments Email

Hardly Ableson again

Here is an example of the sort of financial problem with which he will have to deal. In 2015 Harley announced their first electric bike, the LiveWire. It became available finally in 2019, priced at 33,500 Euros. And flopped, probably because of its short range, claimed 150 km (less than 100 miles) but often only 100kms. It sold like a lead balloon. So they had to drop the price in 2023 to 25,000 Euros. Still a flop. Now the price has dropped to 19,890 Euros. Still choking the dealer's floors. I wonder if they are making any profit on that? Shows you what the expected profit margin was in 2019 though.

Now he will have to deal with Trump's tariffs too. Not easy. I expect failure.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on August 19, 2025 permalink Comments Email

Little Boy vs. Fat Man

Fission weapons work by assembling a critical mass of the radioactive materials quickly. If you do it too slowly, you will just get a fizzle, so it has to be fast. The critical mass of a bare sphere of uranium-235 is 52kg, so a ball 17 cm in diameter. The critical mass can be greatly reduced by the use of a tamper (a neutron reflector) surrounding the pit. Tungsten carbide was initially used in the Little Boy, bringing the critical mass down to 11.3 kg. Beryllium oxide would bring it down to 8.6 kg. Those numbers are for spheres, but Little Boy was a gun design, so simple that they didn't even test it.

In Little Boy, rapid assembly was achieved by firing a piece of uranium (a 'doughnut') down a gun barrel onto another piece (a 'spike'). The gun gets the U235 bullet (the doughnut) up to between Mach 2 and Mach 3, so the bullet gets inside the target in microseconds, thus avoiding a fizzle. The yield of Little Boy was around 13.5 kilotons of TNT. Rewriting E=mc² as m=E/c² we can deduce that only 700 grams of the uranium was converted into energy. Highly inefficient!

Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9th. The name Fat Man refers to the wide, round shape. Fat Man was an implosion-type nuclear weapon with a solid plutonium core. Implosion-type bombs were determined (at Los Alamos) to be significantly more efficient in terms of explosive yield per unit mass of fissile material in the bomb. An exploding-bridgewire detonator simultaneously starts a detonation wave in each of the 32 tapered high-explosive columns (positioned around the explosive material at the face centres of a truncated icosahedron like the pattern on soccer balls). So the separate sub-critical pieces of plutonium-239 get pushed together quickly becoming critical. The result was the fission of about 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of the 6.19 kilograms (13.6 lb) of plutonium, but about 30% of the yield came from fission of the uranium tamper. Yield was about 21 kilotons of TNT. Watch the movie "Oppenheimer" for visuals of the Los Alamos work.

Further reading can be done in Wikipedia using the search words: critical mass, Little Boy, and Fat Man.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on August 9, 2025 permalink Comments Email

Tsutomu Yamaguchi remembered

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on August 6, 2025 permalink Comments Email

Mercedes Benz Pastiche

However, another favourite, whom I DID get to see live in Frankfurt on her european tour back in 1969, was Janis Joplin. I was living in Switzerland at the time, but visiting my employer's HQ in Frankfurt that weekend. She died in 1970, just a few days after recording her last song, Mercedes Benz, which she sang beautifully and a capella, later a favourite of mine.

Then in 2008 I was diagnosed with cancer, and while waiting for the (successful) operation, wrote new lyrics to the tune of Mercedes Benz. Yesterday I found an old video file of that pastiche in my archives, so here it is for you to watch. I will be the first to admit that I cannot sing for toffee, or indeed at all, but I still like the lyrics I wrote for this pastiche. Here is the video. (64MB playing time 1 minute).

Oh darn, for some reason the video will not play, probably too big. So here are my lyrics. Bear with me :-

Oh lord, won't you give me a longer life span.
My friends are all healthy, each one to the man,
I don't want to meet you, and less so Satan,
So lord, won't you give me a longer life span.

Oh lord, won't you spare me the pocketless gown,
this sickness, so sudden, is getting me down,
if I were a buddhist, I'd do the next round,
stead of pushing up grass on my own little mound.

You've gotta come with me the grim reaper said,
and Chaeron the ferryman wants to be paid,
two coins on your eyelids, the hell-hound has bayed,
Please lord, won't you grant me another decade?

Everybody...
So lord, won't you give me a longer life span,
fit as a fiddle or a black-belted Dan
Please don't you tell me, my race I have ran
Just give me some more time to do what I can.
That's it ;-)

Comments (3)
Billions of Versions... wrote " I could sing along with your words. They fit right in. You're probably in a diminishing group of people that saw Joplin live. Here's the link I see to the video. http://www.savory.de/stus_blog_pix_2025/mercedes_benz_pastiche.AVI It comes back '404 file not found'." Yeah, Mike, I get a 404 too :-(
Jenny (Ibiza) corrected me "You spelled Buddhist wrongly." Thanks. Corrected.
Paula (A) said "So I just learned a new word: Pastiche. Thanks. And I like your lyrics too." ThankYOU 2.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on August 1, 2025 permalink Comments Email