For many years — until some kind of mandated clean-up removed all unauthorized postings — I kept a poster on my office door titled "Understanding nuclear weapons," from the webcomic Subnormality. Here's why I love it: doomsdaymachines.net/p/understand...

I've been thinking a lot about this comic lately, especially its take on "institutions." It goes both ways: the oppressive institutions are often more brittle than they look, but so also are the ones you rely on for safety, health, stability, job security, etc. www.viruscomix.com/page528.html

"We want to change the perception of journalists away from the elitist East Coast Democrat of yesteryear to the rabid logical fallacy machine of tomorrow. And at the Times, that dream isn’t too far in the future."

This technology is so clearly designed to profit off cheating and struggling students--its insidious. And yet universities keep announcing how they're allowing this company into its midst, to exploit and incapacitate our students even more

I was an exhibit a few weeks back on atomic age posters — some pro, some anti — at Poster House in NYC... some thoughts on nuclear posters that work: doomsdaymachines.net/p/critical-m...

The Atlantic and NYT lost their minds if there was so much as a trigger warning in classes. Now, professors and Deans are being fired for a class that discussed the existence of trans people and those same publications are quiet. It was never about free speech. www.texastribune.org/2025/09/08/t...

I received a pair of interesting documents last week from a FOIA request, wherein Los Alamos scientists in 1947 and 1949 tried to answer the question: “How many nukes would it take to make the atmosphere dangerously radioactive?” You can read the reports here: doomsdaymachines.net/p/irradiatin...

I received a pair of interesting documents last week from a FOIA request, wherein Los Alamos scientists in 1947 and 1949 tried to answer the question: “How many nukes would it take to make the atmosphere dangerously radioactive?” You can read the reports here: doomsdaymachines.net/p/irradiatin...

one of the most insufferable things the NYT does is run a story and then spend half of the page talking about itself and its reporters

What words can one have for this? I knew at least three of the people who lost their jobs last week — all them had been there for years and were important. I do not think the average American quite yet grasps the scope of the sabotage being enacted on US higher education. patch.com/new-jersey/h...

I had a dream last night that seamlessly transitioned into an ad for a VPN service. I think I may be watching too many YouTube video essays.

dubious dog is dubious

Last week I got two documents from the NNSA, via a FOIA request that I filed 2 years ago, involving early (1947 and 1949) estimates by scientists at Los Alamos (incl. Stevens alum Frederick Reines) trying to estimate how many nuclear bombs it would take to radioactively contaminate the planet.

We Have AI Now www.youtube.com/shorts/8-lgJ...

I have found some real head-scratching #nukesky deep lore. At some point between 1942 and 1944, the Manhattan Project plutonium chemists at the Chicago Met Lab were bored enough to invent an alchemical symbol for plutonium. They chose...this emoji 😐 wearing an eye patch? I want to know why.

There will be many casualties from UChicago ending ('pausing') PhD admissions in Humantities, but one which I am keenly aware of: this is close to a death sentence for teaching cuneiform in the United States (esp. Sumerian, Hittite, Elamite, Eblaite, Luwian) and it will affect the whole world.

We've launched our first-ever short fiction contest! Entries can be of any genre, as long as they have some connection to (avoiding) the apocalypse. The first-place wins $3,000, with $500 each to four runners-up. The deadline for submissions is September 30, 2025. thebulletin.org/write-before...

I haven't posted anything about it on here yet, because it's been a long time coming, but this week I, um, moved to Paris. I will be a visiting researcher at Sciences Po for the next year. And after that... who knows?

Turn off AI in search results. I just did this in Chrome and it works. tenbluelinks.org#chrome-windows

We brought in Alex Wellerstein, historian and creator of the site NUKEMAP nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ to answer common questions from the internet about the history of Nuclear weapons. www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJTA...

This was even worse than I expected it to be. For a moment I wondered, what self-respecting person could write up such odious, evil guidelines for a product they were putting out? And then it occurred to me that it was just as likely that they had an AI write them... www.reuters.com/investigates...

Carl's post inspired me to see how well the current free version of ChatGPT did when asked to draw basic nuclear weapons schematics and the answer is "impressively bad" given the amount of source imagery it has to work with.

One of the things that has pretty annoying is that if you have any kind of bullshit meter, if you have anything inside of yourself that doesn’t enjoy being lied to, the last couple of years of almost every area of public life have been driving you up a fucking wall

Hello! I have written a short article about the atomic bombings, and the anniversary that I think gets overlooked — when Truman *stopped* further atomic bombing, and why he did so. thebulletin.org/2025/08/trum...

Well, everyone, I've found it: the academic paper with the worst pun title possible. The search can finally end. This cannot be beat.

Was talking with a colleague yesterday about grading policies and came up with the Inverse Turing Test: if your paper is indistinguishable from AI slop, then it will be treated as AI slop.

This is a stabilized version of the only actual footage of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, recorded by Harold Agnew.

That fine line between listening to a song several times because you're enjoying it, and listening to it so many times that it starts to run on a loop in your head all night long... sigh...

Learn more from this 2024 video, "How many people were killed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?" by @erik-english.bsky.social.

Field Orders, Special Bombing Mission Number 13, Twentieth Air Force. Issued 2 August 1945 for first atomic bombing mission on 6 August 1945. Primary target: HIROSHIMA INDUSTRIAL AREA. Secondary target: KOKURA ARSENAL AND CITY. Tertiary target: NAGASAKI URBAN AREA.

There are a lot of horrifying photographs of the damage and human toll at Hiroshima. But it's still this one that sticks in my mind the most. Noboricho Elementary School, about 1 km from ground zero. School children were an important source of data about the bomb's mortality. 98% fatalities.

High on up on my "list of things that should be easy but are in fact Sisyphean for no good reason in 2025" is "transferring a lot of photos from my phone to a PC." One would think this is a, you know, doable task. But no.

Aside from the silliness of the meme, and the *gestures* problematic nature of this game, I have always thought the overhead map aspect of Police Quest (1987) to be an amazing bit of gameplay for an adventure game.

Academics on August 1st, when they realize their summer is 2/3rds over:

I grew up on these streets.

So I feel like it should be obvious why naming a public software release after a raw material is a bad idea on a number of levels... "Today, CISA, in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories, announced the public availability of Thorium." www.cisa.gov/resources-to...

The only thing to be really afraid of in NYC are the rents.

If you use NUKEMAP regularly (you know who you are) I hope you notice that it starts up faster now, and the starting location is more likely to be "the biggest city near where you are." I updated the underlying database that determines where to start it and it is much faster than it was before.

RIP Tom Lehrer. This continues to be my favorite of all of his many wonderful songs: www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAE...

Panels from "How to Live With Atom," 1947. "Big mood," as the kids say (or used to say, I don't know anymore)...

In other FOIA news... in 2012 I filed a FOIA request with NNSA for reports relating to their work on the GNOMON, a gigaton-range weapon concept from the 1950s. In 2015, they gave me a response where they redacted everything, including the names of the report authors, on the grounds of "privacy."

Got a response today from the State Department for a FOIA request that I filed 15 years ago (!), telling me that they think the files are just in their online database... I mean, I guess that's convenient, except for the timing...

Mildly interesting: I found a demographic dataset that looked very granular, but after running a transformation of it (basically adding up a bunch of the data and then dividing it by an underlying population estimate) it has become very clear that its granularity is pretty inconsistent!

Two amusing things re: OpenStreetMap's most recent data: 1. Hell's Kitchen has been given the ID of 666, and 2. All NYC neighborhoods are tagged as "suburbs" — playing with fire, there!!!

Actually after trying to do a very simple operation to merge data from two GeoTIFF files I now understand why Oppenheimer is involved with this. It is a cautionary tale...!!!

I was looking for a decent GeoTIFF viewer and suddenly there's a random photo of J. Robert Oppenheimer on my screen. What does J. Robert Oppenheimer have to do with GIS mapping? I am become GeoTIFF, destroyer of worlds? IDK. Very strange.

One of the things I did last week was perform a spoken-word reading of General Lee Butler's 1999 speech about the US nuclear war plan to a packed concert hall, featuring several Nobel Prize winners in the audience, while the Kronos Quartet played music. ...I know, right? Life is strange.

wondering what the Polymarket spread would have been on incineration of the atmosphere during the Trinity test if it had existed at the time?

For this 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, I was able to get a much higher-resolution version of the map that was created of the test's fallout contours, on July 21, 1945. For full resolution (20MB): files.nuclearsecrecy.com/1945-07-21-t...