I noted in GQ that the upper section of your sig is the physical notation for the reaction that occurred in Fat Boy as it detonated over Hiroshima.
I’m just curious - what about it appeals to you enough to feel you want to use it as part of your sig?
Olentzero, I thought it was “Little Boy” that was dropped on Hiroshima, and “Fatman” that was dropped on Nagasaki?
Anyway, I think the reaction, in itself, is a beautiful thing. Obviously I don’t think that about those particular instances.
I’m glad you asked, actually. That reaction describes the physical processes that went on at the exact instant humanity lost its innocence. Before Hiroshima, people thought of war as a method of public policy. They thought like Sherman did in his March to the Sea: ‘War is Hell’. They believed that total, all-out warfare is over quickly, sparing lives. After Hiroshima, total, all-out warfare could end the world. It also changed how we looked at warfare: You can see a million dead soldiers and be unmoved, but you can’t look long at an infant with horrendous flashburns and eyeballs that have melted. The Camps did this as well, but Hiroshima was devastated by one bomb, dropped by one plane, in a fraction of a second. ‘Total war’ in the post-Hiroshima age is untenable and, most likely, suicide. WWI ruined our image of ‘gentleman’s war’ with gas bombs falling on trenches. WWII ruined our image of ‘good war’ with emaciated Camp survivors and babies with flashburns doomed to die from radiation sickness. Before WWII, nobody in America believed that we could be beaten. After it, we had contingency plans for a conflict that would be over in a day and kill many more than half of us. ‘Victory’ is a dead concept now because of the weapons we have. That formula, that string of dry physical reactions, describes how it died.
Wow, that was impressive Derleth. Frankly, in your defense before, I expected nothing as deep as that. I myself am amazed and awed by just the physical aspect of the reaction. Your explanation made me question my own thoughts on the matter. I take humans for much too little sometimes and place my faith in physics anf other concrete subjetcs. Thanks for adding some humanity to my world.
Then again, that may be the screw drivers talking… 
Bows Some of the best things in life are unrehearsed. If I had agonized over that post with an editor’s blue pencil, I probably would have removed too much of the feeling and added too many facts and numbers. I’m glad you, if not enjoyed it, at least found it a starting point for thought processes. I don’t think I ever had occasion to be as deep as I have just been, so I’m not even surprised much by your comment on that topic. I hope you can avoid a hangover tomorrow, by the way.
Heheh thanks Derleth. I’m glad you left the feeling in. You seem to have a knack for it.
Ya know, Derleth, I gotta be honest. I fully expected to come back to this thread and lose some respect for you over this one. Color me very, very surprised to come out of this one with a ton more. Your explanation was excellent! I never would have thought you could read a ‘never again’ out of a simple chemical notation.
tips the pint glass
Ya know… that might make a really interesting leftie T-shirt.
awed
wanders away thought-struck
bows and blushes
Thank you, thank you all. I never would have written that if I hadn’t been a little tired and more emotional than rational. I never drink, but surfing tired can produce effects just as interesting. Knowledge is a double-edged sword, as I’m sure you know. Being able to “read a ‘never again’ out of a simple equation” is not always pleasant, especially if you know the physical effects just as well as the nuclear. At least I can see the beauty in fractals, the elegance of a polymer, and appreciate the simple laws of a well-made cellular automota.
Now, as for the rest of your sig. Come one now buddy! We all love Linux, or Unix, or whatever that is, but jeeez!
I just realized I have no idea what I’m talking about, so ignore that last post.
Derleth, I just wanted to let you know that I found that to be very poetic.
Derleth, I think you explained yourself very well both times. It’s a very abstract statement, to be sure, but it did its job - provoking thought and a couple questions.
I still think it would be a cool leftie T-shirt - white ‘chalkboard’-style writing on a black T-shirt, with the words NEVER AGAIN under it.
Olentzero:
I’d wear it.
SPOOFE:
Thank you.
Democritus:
That long block of code is an RSA encryption program written in the oh-so-comprehensible language of Perl. Hey, where else are you going to find a useful program of that length?
I can’t get your code to compile with Perl 5.005 on Windoze. Am I defective?
First, it doesn’t like
unpack(H.$w,$m \"\0"x$w);
It says ‘backslash found where operator expected’ at the
‘$m "’ part. I suspected that since the second argument to unpack should be an expression, that a ‘.’ operator is appropriate in there, so I changed it to
unpack(H.$w,$m.\"\0"x$w);
I still had a hard time understanding that construct because of mismatched quotes, though, so then I thought you meant this:
unpack(H.$w,"$m \"\0"x$w);
Anyway, no matter what I do the compiler also doesn’t like
pack('H*'$_)
and I don’t blame it. It seems odd to me to have a string and '_' butted up against one another like that, I don't know if you are trying to pack _ with ‘H*’ or if there is some other magic. If I put a comma in before $_, I can get it to run, but it gives “Out of memory!”
I thought I was the Larry Wall King,
but I just handed my Perl-fu crown to hiiimm.
Sorry, doug, but I honestly don’t understand it. Any of it. I’m not a perl coder, so don’t go handing your crown to me. I just did a cut-and-paste off of a site. The site I got it from is here. It’s been shrunk to two lines, and that version is also given. That site gives a link to a page that tells how it works. That site lists a pure perl version in five lines. You might have more luck with that.
The Solution:
unpack(H.$w,$m \"\0"x$w)
is bad, and becomes
unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w)
Also, adding the comma into “pack(‘H*’,$_)” is right. I haven’t tried to run it again, but I feel better already.
Thanks for the URL, Derleth!
Thanks. I’m gonna fix my sig now. I’ll give you credit for the insights.