The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Tsar Bomba

Sixty years ago yesterday, on 30 October 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the most destructive bomb ever designed:

The bhangmeter results and other data suggested the bomb yielded around 58 Mt (243 PJ),[13] which was the accepted yield in technical literature until 1991, when Soviet scientists revealed that their instruments indicated a yield of 50 Mt (209 PJ).[4] As they had the instrumental data and access to the test site, their yield figure has been accepted as more accurate.[4][12] In theory, the bomb would have had a yield in excess of 100 Mt (418 PJ) if it had included the uranium-238[14] fusion tamper which figured in the design but which was omitted in the test to reduce radioactive fallout.[14][15] Because only one bomb was built to completion, that capability has never been demonstrated.[14] The remaining bomb casings are located at the Russian Atomic Weapon Museum in Sarov and the Museum of Nuclear Weapons, All-Russian Scientific Research Institute Of Technical Physics, in Snezhinsk.

In the summer of 2020, Russia declassified a 40-minute documentary film about the explosion, which you can watch here:

It's fascinating, not only for its direct content, but also for the historical fun of trying to figure out which parts are total lies and which parts are merely whitewashing. (When they start talking about the lack of significant explosion effects on nearby settlements, that game gets more interesting.)

Nice bit of news from the UK

The Department of Health and Social Care now allows visitors to the UK to satisfy their testing requirement with a £22 lateral-flow test, rather than the more expensive (and invasive) PCR test:

Eligible fully vaccinated passengers arriving in England from countries not on the UK’s red list can take a cheaper lateral flow test instead of a PCR from today (24 October 2021).

Lateral flow tests must be taken as soon as possible on the day of arrival in England or at the latest before the end of a passenger’s second day and can now be purchased from the list of private providers on GOV.UK from as little as £22 – significantly cheaper than PCR tests.

Anyone testing positive will need to isolate and take a confirmatory PCR test, at no additional cost to the traveller, which can be genomically sequenced to help identify new variants. PCR tests can be accessed free of charge by ordering in the usual way through NHS Test and Trace – via nhs.uk/coronavirus or by calling 119.  Test providers will be expected to advise people to self-isolate and direct people towards the NHS Test and Trace booking page.

This also means I can pick up a test from a provider and take it back in my hotel room, rather than schedule an hour-long interruption in my day.

Weekend reading

As the last workday in October draws to a close, in all its rainy gloominess, I have once again spent all day working on actually coding stuff and not reading these articles:

Finally, a 97-year-old billionaire has given $240 million to UC Santa Barbara on the condition they build a 4500-room dormitory so awful (think Geidi Prime) the school's consulting architect resigned.

Unexpected measurement

About a month ago I bought a Netatmo Smart Weather Station, which has both indoor and outdoor Internet-connected sensor arrays. The indoor array includes a CO2 gauge, which taught me last night that my gas oven produces lot of carbon dioxide:

 

Now, 1360 ppm doesn't pose a serious health risk, but you can see how quickly the CO2 shot up when I turned the oven on and how slowly it dissipated.

The other thing I've learned is how stable my indoor temperature is when the weather is cool but not cold. The outside temperature has stayed within the range 8°C to 13°C for the past week, and my indoor temperature hasn't budged from 19°C by more than one degree. We'll see what happens Wednesday when the outside temperature goes below freezing.

Stupid request limits

I had to pause the really tricky refactoring I worked on yesterday because we discovered a new performance issue that obscured an old throttling issue. It took me most of the morning to find the performance bottleneck, but after removing it a process went from 270 seconds to 80. Then I started looking into getting the 80 down to, say, 0.8, and discovered that because we're using an API limit with a request limit (180 requests in 15 minutes), I put in a 5-second delay between requests.

Sigh.

So now I've got all this to read...someday:

Finally, the economics of workers vs employers has taken an odd turn as job applicants have started simply ghosting interviewers. But, as Slate says, "employers have been doing this to workers for years, and their hand-wringing didn’t start until the tables were turned."

How is it 9pm already?

Quick hit list of stuff I didn't find time to read:

Finally, Alexandra Petri guesses about the books that Republican candidate for Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin might put on your kid's AP curriculum.

Catastrophe?

I said before lunch I wouldn't post barring catastrophe. This may qualify:

Over the weekend in California, a storm system dropped to a barometric pressure of 945.2 mB, making it the strongest storm to affect the Pacific Northwest on record. For perspective, this is equivalent to the central pressure you would see with a strong hurricane.

For Sacramento, the stats are even more startling. Sacramento picked up 5.44 inches of rain Sunday, making it their wettest day in history (or any calendar month). Making this even more remarkable is that this came on the heels of a record dry streak of 212 days in a row with no measurable rain. That just ended on Oct. 18.

This example of drought to deluge, also known as precipitation volatility, is exactly what's expected to occur more frequently in California with climate change, where a moisture-loaded Pacific storm system brings a brief period of record rainfall in the middle of an extreme drought exacerbated by record high temperatures.

I mean, wow. And right now, the storm that battered Chicago this morning will head east on a trajectory to give the East Coast a hell of a Nor'easter tomorrow and Wednesday.

But by all means, let's forget about climate legislation to save the last 36 coal jobs in West Virginia, shall we?

Not the day I'd hoped for

My day started before dawn waiting (unsuccessfully) for Cassie to pee in a howling rain storm, and will end late tonight after our penultimate rehearsal before our November 7th concert. So unless something truly catastrophic happens, no real post today.

Tomorrow I'll have something about the book I just finished.

You wanted rain, California?

A collection of weather phenomena off the west coast of North America, including a bomb cyclone, will give northern California record rainfall over the next day and a half:

Amid an exceptional drought that has wrought havoc on California for years, a Level 5 out of 5 atmospheric river is soaking the region, dumping double-digit rainfall totals and up to six feet of mountain snow. This heavy precipitation will help ease the drought but produce dangerous mudslides and debris flows in areas recently devastated by fires.

Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow swaths of exceptionally moist air, sometimes sourced from the tropics, that can produce excessive amounts of precipitation.

“It will be a wild 24 to 36 hours across northern California as we will see an extreme and possible historic atmospheric river push through the region,” wrote the National Weather Service in Sacramento, calling it a “dangerous, high-impact weather system.”

Flash flood watches are up for most of Central and Northern California, blanketing some of the same areas that went upward of six months without a stitch of measurable rain. Sacramento recorded its first 0.01 inches of rain last week since March 19, capping off a record-setting 222 days without precipitation. Now it is bracing for more than half a foot of rain and flooding.

The storm offshore of the Pacific Northwest driving this atmospheric river into the coastline rapidly intensified at a staggering rate. Meteorologists refer to a storm as a “bomb” if its minimum central air pressure drops by 24 millibars or more in 24 hours, signifying intense and speedy “deepening.” That sucks in more air and allows the storm to intensify.

This particular storm strengthened at twice that rate as a “double bomb” with its pressure tanking to 943 millibars, which, according to the Weather Service, would make it “the strongest known system for the area.”

Over the mainland United States, such low atmospheric pressure is practically unheard of. Even on the East Coast, where cyclones regularly strengthen into massive nor’easters, pressures seldom fall this low. The powerful March 1993 “superstorm,” among the most intense and damaging storms ever to strike the United States, bottomed out at “only” 960 millibars.

Welcome to climate change: seven months without rain, then nothing but rain for two days. Fun.

Here in Chicago we just have a normal gray rainy October afternoon. I'm glad we don't have to worry about 150 mm of rain in the next four hours.