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Dear UPS,

I know you have a hard job. Moving all of those packages and getting them to their destination in a timely matter is no easy thing. I don’t mean to complain too much.

I lie. I mean to complain a lot. CAN YOUR EMPLOYEES NOT READ? The delivery guy did have the decency to look sheepish when he dropped off the package, though he didn’t tell us that we’d lost our right to refuse the package by opening it to check on its contents.

The reverse side can’t be as bad as the above, surely.

As regular readers know, I’ve been watching the CBS show “Jericho,” about the town of Jericho, Kansas and what happens after Denver vanishes in a nuclear conflagration. The drama has been so-so, but in the pilot I was hooked by the eerie and frightening sight of the mushroom cloud rising into the air.

So, into the second episode. We’re ticking along, the fine upstanding citizens of Jericho merrily worrying about the fallout that’s headed their way. Someone says that Denver was probably hit with a hydrogen bomb. “How are they different from nuclear bombs?” someone else asks. And the mysterious-stranger-with-a-secret ominously says, “They literally explode the air.”

He probably said something after that, but I couldn’t hear it over my choked-back cries of rage.

So: a short primer on nuclear weapons. I’m a physicist, so you know I’m right.

Fusion and Fission Weapons

Nuclear weapons fiddle with atoms’ nuclei to release a whomping huge amount of energy. They come in two flavors, depending on whether they use fission or fusion.

Fission bombs were the first kind created. When people talk about atomic bombs, this is usually what they mean. The idea is that you take an atom and, using neutrons, split it into smaller bits, plus neutrons and some leftover energy. If you get enough of the right kind of material smushed together, those extra neutrons from one atom splitting causes other atoms to split, and so on and so on. The result is a cascade of splitting atoms and a huge amount of energy released in a split-second. In other words: big boom. To smush the radioactive material together, you can shoot a bullet of the material into a target made of the same material, or you can surround a core of the material with normal explosives and squeeze it down like play-doh in your fist. Dangerous play-doh.

Fission bombs are okay, and they’re dead easy to make if you’ve got the right uranium or plutonium hanging about, but you run into a couple of problems with them. One, they can explode too early, before you’ve smushed all of your material into a compact-enough mass to make the fission reaction run away. Then you get a small boom and a lot of left-over radioactive material that gets spread around. Hello, dirty bomb! Two, at best you get an explosion that’s equivalent to around 700 to 750 kilotons (kt) of dynamite, because you can only use up so much of your radioactive fuel before it all goes kablooey. 750 kt is a lot, but you’ll want something bigger when your next-door neighbor drives up in his shiny new weapon of mass destruction.

Enter the fusion bomb. Instead of splitting atoms’ nuclei apart, fusion bombs smush nuclei together. You start with something like hydrogen (or, really, a version of it called tritium) and squeeze it together until you have helium and a whole bunch of energy. The hydrogen bit is why they’re sometimes called “hydrogen bombs.” In theory you could squeeze the tritium together with regular explosives. In practice, you do it with a separate fission bomb. Fusion bombs are really effective, using almost all of their nuclear fuel, so you can build bombs that are small enough to be delivered by rocket or whatever but still pack one hell of a wallop. How big? Megatons (Mt). The USSR detonated the world’s largest fusion bomb in 1961. It had a yield of 50 Mt.

Both fission and fusion bombs are nuclear bombs. And, he says, finally getting to the punchline, they do not literally explode the air. I mean, c’mon. The real difference is that hydrogen bombs are much more powerful and efficient.

(ETA: phanatic pointed out that, in effect, nuclear weapons do explode the air. The overpressure and shock wave aren’t caused by the bomb’s plasma ball, like I had thought, but by the gamma rays ionizing the air and causing ozone and other smog-like products, which is then heated by the bomb’s x-rays. The effect is common to both fusion and fission weapons. My only defense is that, as I say in the next paragraph, I thought they were referring to the concern that nuclear bombs would ignite the atmosphere.)

The only thing I can figure is that the writers remembered that the Manhattan Project scientists were afraid that a nuclear explosion would ignite the atmosphere. It doesn’t happen. Atmospheric nitrogen requires much higher temperatures to fuse than you get in the center of the nuclear fireball, which cools surprisingly quickly because the fireball is expanding so fast.

So, to sum up: hydrogen bombs are different because they’re super-powerful, requiring a fission bomb to set them off. They do not literally explode the air. While they sort-of explode the air, so do regular fission weapons.

Hey, that was kind of fun. While I’m on a roll, let’s discuss fallout!

Fallout

In the same episode, everyone’s afraid of the fallout coming from Denver. Run! Hide! Put plastic sheeting over your windows and doors to keep it out and you’ll be okay!

Er, no. Not even close. Here’s the thing: fallout is radioactive. When a nuclear bomb cranks up, it makes all kinds of nasty radioactive byproducts. Many of them tend to be unstable, which is both good and bad. Good: they decay rapidly. Bad: in decaying, they toss off beta and gamma radiation the way college students toss down tequila. All of that plastic sheeting will keep out the fallout particles themselves. The radiation that the particles are emitting? Ha ha, he laughs hollowly.

What you want is as much mass between you and the particles as possible. More mass means more radiation is absorbed by the stuff between you and the fallout and less is absorbed by you directly. The beta radiation isn’t so bad. It’s the gamma rays that’ll get you. They penetrate like crazy. Your best bet is to put a lot of earth between you and the fallout, so your basement is better than your attic. Just over three and a half inches of dirt will cut the gamma radiation flux in half. A reasonable rule of thumb is that you want five to ten times that thickness to give you really good protection, so you’re looking at one and a half feet to three feet of dirt for really good protection. If you’re lucky enough to use concrete instead, you can get by with one to two feet.

What about air? you ask. Won’t it bring in the nasty fallout particles? Yes, but most of the really dangerous stuff has the consistency of sand, so it’s not too hard to filter out.

But do not sit near your house’s entrance and listen to the probably-radioactive rain pattering down.

That’s enough for now. I’ll probably have more grumbles later, like people who think that drinking iodine is a good substitute for potassium iodide pills, and saying that storms travel from Denver to wherever Jericho is supposed to be in Kansas in two hours. What, they have 100-mile-an-hour winds to blow the storms the 200 miles from Denver to the Colorado-Kansas border?

I have joked from time to time about Eli reaching his terrible twos, but here lately we’ve been dealing with a whole range of behavior ranging from the annoying to the downright troublesome. He has moved from testing the limits to hurling his little body at the fences and trying to break through. This has culminated in him getting in trouble at school last week. Tuesday he was pushing other children, and when he was told to go sit in time out, he told the teachers, “No!” After a bit of that, he got to go to the office. That meant that Misty got to go to the office when she went to pick him up. Thursday there were more shennanigans, though thankfully the office was not involved.

I understand that this is just what toddlers do, honest. And I know that Eli is practically a saint compared to many other toddlers, capable of walking across a river of milk flowing from overturned sippy cups. That doesn’t keep me from becoming so annoyed that I don’t want to spend time with him, making me feel even worse when I calm down later.

This misbehavior comes in waves that last a few weeks at most, so I’m holding on and waiting for this to pass. Then again, a woman at church told me, “Oh, they don’t act better when they get older. They act differently.” She had this big grin on her face, the kind that is a neon advertisement for the “misery loves company” bromide.

So I pushed her down and then ran from the teacher.

I’ve been grooving on The Venture Brothers for a while now. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a 30-minute show on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block of programming. The Venture Brothers started out as a semi-parody of the old Johnny Quest series, but has since grown into its own twisted, hilarious thing.

Ben Edlund is friends of the show’s two creators. Edlund is the guy behind the Tick, and has worked on Firefly and Angel. If you saw the puppet episode of Angel, you’ve seen his work. He’s turned in a couple of scripts for The Venture Brothers, the most recent of which, “¡Viva los Muertos!”, played this week. The episode contained an off-kilter parody of the Scooby Doo gang in their later years. Fred was replaced by Ted, a bully who manipulated the others. Daphne had become Patty, compliant and beaten down by life. Velma was now Val, chain-smoking her way through the episode and explaining how the Y chromosome is an incomplete X chromosome and therefore men are but damaged women. Shaggy had become Sonny, drugged out and distraught that no one but he ever heard Scooby — pardon me, Groovy — talk, and Groovy kept telling him to kill prostitutes. Edlund had gone beyond the obvious “ha ha, they’re all stoner hippies” jokes and made them all disturbing psychopaths.

I didn’t realize it until a friend pointed it out to me, but they were all psychopaths because they were based on real-life crazy people from the 1960s and 1970s, the heyday of Scooby Doo. Ted is Ted Bundy, he of the charming personality and thirty deaths to his credit. Patty is Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped and brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Val is Valerie Solanas, who wrote the S.C.U.M. Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol. Sonny was David Berkowitz, better known as the Son of Sam, the serial killer who claimed that his neighbor’s dog told him to kill.

And that is how you turn a parody into something far more disturbing.

Bowling for Soup: 1985 (2004)

Robert Palmer girls. Aerosmith. 80s rappers. This video name-checks (and, er, sight-checks) so many elements of pop music from my youth, it’s crazy. Unfortunately, like Alien Ant Farm’s video for their cover of Smooth Criminal, if you don’t get the references, there’s not much else to the video.

Whitesnake: Here I Go Again (1987)

This video goes out to Jeff McClure.

I’ve had some four or five things I’ve wanted to post lately, but this week was quite possibly the worst one I’ve ever had in my professional career. It’s eaten my brain. With luck I’ll be back to posting in a while.

Peter will snicker when he reads this. He’s our friend, the Mathematician. When he talks about what he does, even Stephen’s eyes sometimes glaze over. He’s a smart man and I enjoy some personal nerdy one-upmanship simply because I call him my friend. So Peter, this post is for you…

On Wednesday afternoon, Eli and I decided that we would go around the corner to the church that has a pumpkin patch every year. When we hopped out of the car, two teen girls were manning (womaning?) the patch. We found out what the costs were for the various sizes and piles and then set out to spend the $11 I had on as many pumpkins as I could get.

Once our selection process was finished, Eli and I headed over to the girls with our pumpkins. I knew that I was close to the $11 limit but hadn’t yet calculated the exact change. Both girls had their homework spread out all over the card table and one of them had their math calculator. I told them what pumpkin price piles I had grabbed from and as I was doing that, I added up the amount in my head. It came to $10.75. The first girl tried to add it up on the calculator. She couldn’t make it work out correctly. So she handed the calculator off to the second girl. She couldn’t do it either. I said, “Ok, here’s a $4, 2 $2, that’s $8. Here’s 2 75¢ and a 50¢, that’s $2 for a total of $10 and then one more 75¢ is $10.75.”

There was a pause as both girls squinted up at me from their homework. The first one said with a bit of awe in her voice, “You are REALLY good at math.”

So there you are. I am a Math God. I know that it’s a surprise to those of you who thought all this time I was more of an artist type, but who can argue with a couple of teen girls minding a pumpkin patch. I know I felt good about it the rest of the day.

Yesterday there was a box on our front step. I brought it in and as soon as Eli saw it he said,

“We got a package!”

As if this were the holy grail just shipped from Amazon.

When I opened it, hundreds of peanuts escaped and like a maniacal monkey Eli started scooping them up off the floor. He had not yet seen the true wonder of what else the box contained.

Side note: Last Christmas we got a box just like this. It contained, what I thought was a gift for me and Stephen, a couple gift if you will, and a gift for Eli. The peanuts went straight to the garbage because there were many of them and I didn’t want to have to vacuum them up. A few days later we got a phone call from Sean in Arizona. He asked Stephen how he liked his new Playstation 2 game. Stephen’s reply, “What game?” Seems I had thrown the Gran Turismo 3 out with the bath water.

So this box, once opened and excavated, I left sitting in the floor of the office so Stephen could also paw through it and verify it contained no elusive Playstation loot. Fast forward to this morning…

Eli comes in from his morning diaper summit with Stephen and spies the box. In the box was a piece of bubble rap. This was the first view I had of my child this morning.

See the look of intense concentration. Once Stephen had shown him how to pop the bubbles he knew genetically to systematically go down the rows of bubbles checking for unpopped ones. Now see the look of sheer joy at finishing the project.

P.S. Kat and Sean, we loved our gifts. Thanks especially from Eli for the bubble rap.