Let’s stop messing about for a minute and crunch some numbers, shall we?
The United States national debt is running at $16 trillion. That’s $51,000 per citizen; gross domestic product is $15.3 trillion, meaning a debt to GDP ratio of 104 per cent.
The US has 5,113 nuclear bombs at the moment, about 10 per cent of which are B61s. Now, the problem with B61s is that because their radars are built on valve technology – that’s how old they are – they require regular updating to keep them safe. Engineers either get these parts from other, non-operational B61s, buy them on eBay (yes, seriously) or even buy machines to produce the components in-house.
The renovation of the bombs to keep them active is $25 million per bomb. Given that there’s about 400 of the things, that comes to $10 billion; they’re probably, hopefully, never going to be used. But so rides the weird and devilish anti-logic of war and politics combined.
A full upgrade of the entire nuclear arsenal, plus its associated laboratories and stuff, is going to cost at least $352 billion, reckons the Stimson Center think tank. Sometimes, numbers make us very sad indeed.
From pig to man
At the end of Animal Farm by George Orwell there’s a scene in which the pig Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington argue drunk during a poker game and the rest of the animals can’t tell which is which anymore.
And whilst some lesser commentators postulate that the novel is an allegory about how communism was taken off track by Stalinism, following an inexorable and sadly oft-trudged road to corrupt totalitarianism, what Weekender prefers to infer is that Orwell was saying that the link between porkers and booze is a well-established one. Scientists are not averse to a bit of animal-bashing and their latest point-and-laugh trick was to feed a load of pigs not only a high fat diet, but also either red wine, vodka or no added alcohol.
After seven weeks, the red wine and vodka subsets both had increased blood flow to the heart and good cholesterol was also increased. Red wine was better than vodka, which was better than nothing at all. Seems all alcohols are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Better news for gerbils this week, after deaf ones responded very well to a special stem cell treatment. The extrapolation is that one day this could be extended to humans, but as ever these things are a long way off. A bit closer, according to Dr. Wamberto Casconcelos, is the possibility of human-computer interaction in certain systems.
The University of Aberdeen study notes that a human could quiz a robot about why it made a certain decision and to overrule if necessary. This could be used for deep sea or planetary research, reckon boffins, none of whom have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey recently.
Scientists are not averse to a bit of animal-bashing and the latest trick was to feed a load of pigs not only a high fat diet, but also either red wine, vodka or no added alcohol.
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