It was a long day on the Job. From 8:15am to 6:15pm, we were stuck in one room for more or less the entire time. Now…. a quick guinness on the way back from dinner. Conversation about the private vs public forms of university, funding in science in general, dark energy and dark matter, Borat…. all the big topics of the day.
-cvj
Pingback: Random Travel Matters - Asymptotia
Howdy Clifford,
Borat has caused the UK government a lot of embarrassment lately, mainly because Kazakhstan does have a reputation for being a backward former USSR country. The main reason why I find Borat’s Kazakhstan a fascinating place is that the USSR tested live nuclear nuclear weapons over it in 1962, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_altitude_nuclear_explosion and my page http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/03/emp-radiation-from-nuclear-space.html
[…shortened by cvj… see above sites for the extracts quoted]
What interested me when I read declassified US reports about the USSR tests is that the power lines and phone lines were instrumented for damage effects before the detonation! (the US DOD gave Russian scientists about half a million dollars for the data in the early 1990s after the USSR collapsed). So they deliberately tested EMP effects on the civilian population! At least when the Americans exposed people to their tests (eg the Marshallese in 1954) it was just an accident due to a wind shift.
Best wishes,
nc