May 27th, Irvine CA 

(Post delayed from last bit of traveling)

This evening S and I went to the Irvine SSC meetup. We got dinner on the way at In-N-Out Burger (which I largely chose because there were two In-N-Out Burger places within a couple of blocks, and I have heard that humans tend to prefer the better of two similar options over a different option, and I am a human, and I am otherwise unsure what to eat, but I do know that I mildly prefer doing things for which I have silly made up explanations). 

S’s recent interest in Hungarian Martians got us to the topic of Leo Szilard. I have a problem with Leo Szilard: if I start talking about him, then I become embarrassingly interested in continuing to talk about him. My alliance with my friends feels strained as they continue to strive for happy and virtuous lives filled with meaning and moderation and such, while I am gripped and led away by the unholy urge to say more Leo Szilard facts. 

I decided to just tell S this, in not so many words. He said it was ok, there would be someone at the meetup who wanted to talk about battleships and worked on this particular battleship that was involved in the Japanese surrender at the end of WWII, and if you can’t segue that into a conversation about Leo Szilard, what can you segue into a conversation about Leo Szilard?

When we got to the meetup, I found myself pretty near someone who was evidently a battleship expert. And in a few minutes the six-or-so-person conversation around me had somehow moved to the history of nuclear weapons production. And if you can’t segue that into a conversation about Leo Szilard, it’s probably just because it doesn’t even count as a segue, or because you have fallen over at the astonishing coincidence. But I totally failed! We briefly discussed definitive authors on the nontechnical side of nuclear weapons development history, and moved on to other topics.

The main other topic was airplane safety. In honor of going on a plane tomorrow, here are some interesting things I was told (that I haven’t checked at all):

1. The safety stuff at the start of plane flights is a mixture of ‘things that have helped literally nobody ever’ and ‘things that might genuinely matter a lot if your plane crashes’. 
   
2. Oxygen masks haven’t saved anyone, and they have killed some people one time when transporting such systems caused a lot of oxygen to be in a place whose not being on fire was based on not being full of oxygen.
   
3. Something else—maybe underseat floatation devices?—aren’t dangerous, but also don’t actually ever help anyone.
4. Wearing seat belts on a plane is actually super useful in a lot of bad situations. Often the plane doesn’t plough into the ground, but merely lands kind of badly and is on fire or something. In these cases, it is very useful to be able to get out of the plane. Most people who die in such cases do so from smoke inhalation, and would have been ok if they had moved to somewhere that wasn’t a burning plane, which they often could have done if they hadn’t broken their bones being thrown around the cabin. And seatbelts are pretty helpful for that.
5. Knowing how to get out of the plane is also useful, for the same reason. This means for instance knowing where the doors are, and does not mean having some kind of Houdini-level plane escape skills.
6. Planes always have lots of cracks in them, but everything is ok and under control.
7. Pilots are very not allowed to be that drunk. In particular, they may not be more drunk than they manage to be after some specific number of hours of not drinking.
8. Some places have a giant community of piloting enthusiasts, and others don’t. Companies that hire from the former have better pilots.  
9. Different plane makers and plane-related authorities produce perceptibly different levels of plane safety, though it probably varies by less than a factor of two between airlines in the US, say. The most dangerous airline according to someone who rates these things is one that flies into North Korea.

The battleship discussion was also interesting, though I couldn’t hear it well. Apparently the guy is writing a battleship blog in the comments of SSC.

I was looking for anything surprising about Yeovil.

“Folly” is an architectural term which means much the same as the usual term, except constrained to a specific kind of architectural foolishness, instead of the whole range. A ‘folly’ is the thing you have if you make your structure not just mostly functionless and ornamental, but ornamental to a point considered too pointlessly ornamental for even best practice ornamentation. 

Yeovil seems to like follies. Exactly how many of their buildings are overly ornamental is a matter of opinion (complicated by the issue of whether they get credit for all the ones that are underly ornamental) but there are at least four publicly agreed follies nearby. I like this one:

(Rose Tower, Yeovil)

I’m not sure that my investigation into from whence I came yielded much in the way of useful insight. Everyone’s youth has follies. I suppose if you want to recover from those follies, it is helpful to know that some of them are about poor architectural judgment. 

Though I actually pretty much guessed that I needed better architectural judgment when in playing Minecraft recently I nearly finished this tall domed pink tower, with silver streaks circling down it and a wide rounded base—climbing as I built—then stepped away to look at it (see far below). I am not sure what the architectural jargon name is for this kind of foolishness, but there is apparently a world class instance of it very near where I am currently staying:

“Ypsilanti Water Tower in Ypsilanti, Michigan, winner of the “Most Phallic Building contest” (by Dwight Burdette - Own work, CC BY 3.0)

A monument to my own romantic obliviousness perhaps, for which a 25m high stone penis outside my door is arguably apt. 

“…don’t forget from whence you came, and the world’s going to know your name…”

There are only so many times I can hear lines like this before it comes to my attention that I don’t actually know where I literally came from except that it is called ‘Yeovil’ and is somewhere in England. That number is probably in the thousands, but I reached it, and on the off chance it really is good to know from whence one came, I consulted Google.

As far as I can tell it is basically a smallish English city with the usual Englishy things like rows of brick houses and green glens and manors and bureaucrats who are very excited about opening a new parking lot. According to the local historical society, the most exciting things to happen this century are two different football wins and the completion of the ‘Yeo Leisure Park’. The latter sounded interesting, but it turns out to just be another name for what Americans call a very small mall.

This is the kind of place you can live if you have $2M to spend on it:

(Ashington Manor)