So what important announcement do I have? Why I have knitting pictures! What could be more important than that!
I am actually making progress on my Daily Sweater. I have been plugging away on it while I watch TV and I gotten to the part where I have created the split at the bottom. I am almost done with the back ribbing. I do not have a photo of that, but I do have a photo of the body of the sweater.
This photo is a lot closer to the actual color. I have been trying it on as I go (I really like knitting from the top down) and it is fitting really well. I am very proud.
Since I have so many things on my needles, I decided to start another! I started working on the Great Goatsby kit I bought at Shepherd’s Harvest.
I know, socks, I am so terrible at finishing socks. And I have my superbad socks almost done and I have not worked on them in more than a year. Why would I start another pair of socks? Well, because these are so darn cute and they are called Great Goatsby! Who doesn’t what socks with goats on them, especially if they have a clever literary title?
Here is my progress so far…
Okay, I am actually farther along then this, but this is how far I was when I took the picture. I am at the body of the goat
And here is a close up of the pattern…
It is from Blackberry Ridge. I bought the Sheep Tea Cozy kit from them and was very pleased with the yarn and the pattern. I am enjoying this one as well. I love this yarn as well. It is a wool silk blend. If I finish the socks and they fit, I think they will be quite nice to wear. I am concerned about them fitting because I have really big calves. I did the large size, so we will see.
Also, I promised a picture of the Briar Rose yarn I bought.
Isn’t it delicious? I have 3 skeins of it, which works out to 1950 yds. I should be able to make something with that amount.
Movie UPDATE
We went to see Star Trek again this week. I want to make a small correction to my movie review. Spock does mention that Vulcans and Romulans share a common ancestry. Not sure how I missed it the first time, but there you go. I loved it just as much the second time around. I think I might try to see it one more time in the theatres before it is gone. If you have not seen it yet, what are you waiting for, go to your local cinema right now!
Dammit, I Am A Buyer Not A Physicist!
But luckily, my FIL is a physicist and I was able to ask him some questions regarding the Lost finale. I know you are wondering why I am still prattling on about that, but I love Lost so you will have to bear with me.
In regards to the size of the core: my FIL could not give me details as to what the size would actually be (due to it being classified), but he said if you can accept the rip in the time space continuum caused by time travel, you could accept that the core would fit into a backpack. My FIL has a very good sense of humor! However, he said it would be really heavy so carrying it around on your back would be unlikely.
He then explained that by taking the core out of the hydrogen bomb would mean that it would no longer be a hydrogen bomb, rather a standard atomic bomb. Basically, an atomic bomb using fission and a hydrogen bomb uses fusion. Here is a direct quote from my FIL: Fission works by chain reaction. If you put too much plutonium in one place, it will spontaneously fission and melt down. So there's a limit on how much nuclear fuel you can pack into a fission bomb (not to mention the cost of making it). Fusion only works if the hydrogen isotopes are really, really hot, and under a lot of pressure (think the solar interior). The result is that there is no serious limit on how much fusion fuel you can use, and you can achieve tremendous yields, like tens of megatons. The trick is to set it off. You have to use a fission (plutonium) explosion to do it. It's what puts the "thermo" in "thermonuclear." So a hydrogen bomb has two parts: a plutonium primary and a hydrogen-fuel secondary. So what the Losties are carrying around is no longer a hydrogen bomb, rather it is an atomic bomb, which is still pretty bad.
I also asked if you could rig the bomb to explode on impact. He said that bombs built in the USA since the 1940s have been built specifically NOT to explode upon impact because they did not want them to go off in a plane crash. However, if was poorly designed, it is a possibility, but it would not be as big of an explosion.
Which brings us to what would happen, explosion wise?
Again a direct quote: Since you didn't set it off properly, you would only get a fraction of the design yield. Maybe a few hundred tons of TNT equivalent. But that would still be about a hundred times the power of the biggest (4 ton) conventional bombs dropped from an aircraft. How much effect that would have depends on the setting. Out in the open air, it would be pretty impressive (a kiloton of ordinary chemical explosive makes a nice mushroom cloud), but far underground, it wouldn't do much. (I was part of a chemical kiloton underground test in the early '90s, and there was very little effect at the surface). However, if I were dropping this thing down an open shaft, I would want to stand clear!
I do not think there would be much left of Dharmaville or the Others.
There has been some discussion out there that the bomb going off caused the Incident. Or that the electromagnetic field is holding the blast in the hole. And that the button being pushed is releasing the atomic blast in bits. Okay, my FIL said an atomic blast would destroy any electromagnetic field, (his exact words regarding containment were “Not bloody likely!”), and so Faraday actually did get that right. FIL said that to contain an atomic blast with an electromagnetic field, you would need the pressure you would find in a black hole or the center of a star, not in hole near the surface of the Earth.
He also said: The second reason that the explosion would not be contained is the same reason why we don't yet have a working fusion reactor. Since around 1950 people (myself included) have been trying to confine very dilute thermonuclear reactions with specially designed magnetic fields in the laboratory. This has proved to be extremely difficult, because the hot plasma keeps leaking out. It's rather like trying to pressurize Jell-O by squeezing it with your bare hands. So if the guys in the movie have solved that problem, I wish they would tell the rest of us the answer.
I just love that last line, so I had to include in my synopsis. He has never heard of Lost so he did not realize it was a TV show rather than a movie.
I want to thank my FIL for all of his help. He really is the smartest person I know so I was pleased he was willing to help me out with this nonsense.
Overall, I think this all supports my idea that there was not an explosion, rather it was some other flash (a time flash IMHO) and that is what caused the bright white light.
We will have to see.
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