I came across this little gem of a Web site today.

It's called Ground Zero, and it combines Google Maps with data regarding the yield of nuclear weapons. All you need to do is give it an address and select a specific type of nuclear weapon and it will display the destruction such a nuke would do.

I spent a good portion of my afternoon nuking a whole bunch of major cities across the country. If I have learned one thing today it is that although all nukes are truly terrifying, they are not created equal. There is a big difference between dropping a Hiroshima or Nagasaki-sized nuke on a city and the worst that humanity could do.

The above image is what would happen if a Fat Man, the 21 kiloton bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, went off next to the Space Needle. There are no buildings standing within the inner-most circle. Everything out to the second circle is on fire if it is still standing. The next two circles represent areas of declining structural damage to buildings and severe burns to people who happen to not be wearing all white today.

Not fun, but Fat Man is an air bubble in an uncovered bowl of chili in the microwave compared to what we can do with today's arsenal.

Above is the remains of Seattle after a B61, a smallish modern American H-bomb weighing in at 340 kt, went off. The destruction goes as far away as the U-district and West Seattle. According to the source of all lies, this is the most common nuclear weapon in the American arsenal.

Lets just go completely nuts...

Tsar Bomba was the largest nuke ever detonated. Although no one actually has anything that big in their arsenal these days (its easier to use like ten smaller nukes than one big one) it gives a sense of the destruction we are capable of. Destruction reigns from Tacoma to Everett, and from North Bend to the Olympics. This one nuke could kill almost half of the population of Washington.

Consider this my holiday gift to you.

Via Wired

I was just reading wikipedia's "Did you know" section and found myself horribly confused.

Did you know...

... that Australian cricketer Arthur Morris (pictured) was the batsman at the other end when Don Bradman was bowled for a duck in his last Test innings?

I've never been more confused by a sentence in my life. All of those words make no sense next to each other.

Thankfully Wikipedia includes all those useful links in the text, so I was able to glean what this meant.

First of all, cricket appears to be the bastard child of bowling and baseball. You have one guy, the bowler, (the equivalent of a pitcher) trying to knock over a set of pins by throwing a ball at them while a guy on the other team is defending the pins with a flat bat. There are two of these "batsmen" on the field, one on either side of the pitcher and they score runs by hitting the ball and running between the two sets of pins.

To be "bowled" means the bowler managed to actually hit the pins, meaning the batsman is "dismissed", ie. "out".

To be "bowled for a duck" is to be dismissed before you manage to score any runs.

So basically this sentence means "Arthur Morris was sitting on the other side of the field while his teammate, Don Bradman, got owned. And there was nothing he could do about it... because Don Bradman sucks at cricket."

I learned something today!