Iain Houston

So, I published my first book. Set in Portpatrick, Vacancies is a story of loneliness, loss, and the struggle to grow up in a world that is slowly ending. You should buy it. You’ll definitely like it. amzn.eu/d/gwow3A0 #WritingCommunity

@FloatingSignifi @Scott_Wortley It doesn’t say!

Going to use this tweet in my interpretation class.

@Scott_Wortley Forgot about this one.

@Scott_Wortley This was from a while back.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. I’m hearing her great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather betrayed fellow Cossacks to the Russian Tsar prior to the battle of Poltava in 1709. Appalling. MI6 have questions to answer.

Hear me out, let’s drop molten depleted uranium on it so it dilutes the enriched uranium! We’ll call it Offensive Ballistic Downblending! By my calculations we’ll need about 5 tonnes to take the 60% enriched uranium down to 5%. A Mk 84 bomb carries about 400kg of explosive filler. Switch it out for molten depleted uranium…we need about a dozen. Air forces don’t mind carrying hot bombs on their aircraft, do they? Like the BLU-80 Bigeye?

@AndrewPerpetua I remembered this article from 2011. It was estimated that the US army fired around 250,000 bullets for each insurgent killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. 20% of drones hitting their target doesn’t sound that bad. m.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-new…

Wanna go by his numbers, I guess, so lets say 20% of your 90 drones hit. that's 18 wounded russians. Do you think your 12 artillery shells will get more than 18 russians? Probably unlikely.

The supreme stupidity. 20-30% success rate is bad?!? Since fucking when is 20% success rate bad? Since never. Since literally never has 20% success rate been bad. 20% success rate would be one of the most effective military weapons ever invented in human history.

In the case of 20%, or slightly higher, enriched uranium you could bring it to criticality. But you would not really have a real nuclear weapon. You would have to have high compression, use an implosion, avoid pre-detonation. The weapon would be enormous, the yield would be tiny, if it detonated at all. It wouldn’t be a nuclear weapon in any real sense. Just a massive lump of uranium that, technically, achieved criticality.

@HuginnOdinn @astraiaintel @noexpertreally if you say "to build an extremely advanced bomb to fit into a missile" maybe you're right.... but in that case we're also talking about thermonuclear bombs

20% and above is weapons grade.

@StandSure8 @MajorMajor99999 @astraiaintel I do not think you could build anything like a practical weapon with 20% enriched uranium. It would be enormous, use hundreds of kilos of uranium, and would likely not detonate properly.

@astraiaintel That is untrue. Can you provide a source for that? Here, for example, is a source which says weapons grade uranium is 93% or above. Could you have confused it with the definition of Highly Enriched Uranium? dfat.gov.au/sites/default/…

@astraiaintel A weapon using 60% uranium would be huge, low yield (if it worked at all) and almost certainly too heavy to fit on any Iranian missile. I don’t see how they could construct or deliver it.

I often think about this. I remember at school in the 80s/90s thinking about how the Second World War was something we collectively remembered and thought was important, but I wondered if one day it would become like the Boer War? Something that was far enough away we had all kind of forgotten it. Oddly I don’t think it’s quite like that with the Second World War because we focus on it so much, but I think wars since are being forgotten. If I mention Korea, the Falklands, or the Gulf War students now stare at me blankly. Even Iraq and Afghanistan to an extent. 9/11 was 24 years ago, but it seems like yesterday to me. I suppose that’s what the Second World War was like to older people when I was young. I find Rising Damp strange to watch now when it mentions Rigsby was at Anzio, and he’s not an old man. And in one episode he talks about getting into an argument with a German on holiday who had served in the Luftwaffe. So it was all “real” in the 70s in a way it isn’t now, and veterans at that time weren’t all old men. It’s the same with “The Germans” episode in Fawlty Towers. People remember the goose stepping and the Nazi salute but I always think about how upset the Germans were, presumably the idea was they had lost people in the war. I wonder how long it was before Waterloo was largely forgotten?

Ahem. Historical slippage and the Battle of Waterloo.

@bogumil_psikuta @DanKaszeta @historyinmemes @grok US war veteran suffering from PTSD in John Huston’s 1946 documentary, “Let There Be Light”. youtu.be/uiD6bnqpJDE?si…

@DanKaszeta @historyinmemes @grok If twitching is psychological we would see it in other places like Ukraine these days that’s why I think it’s not psychological

This is what post-trauma looked like after World War I (1914-1918)

@ConnieLingus123 It is fairly light before official sunrise. timeanddate.com/sun/ukraine/ke…

Dumfries wildlife: saw an otter down at the Nith!

@slantchev I got this!

I’m very upset by this. I’m not “new.”

@slantchev I often think of this Private Eye cover I saw in 1991

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Ultimatums, because Europeans and Americans need it: Step 1: Agree to do X if demand is not met Step 2: Announce demand and say you will do X unless it’s met [demand is not met] Step 3: Do X. Follow me for more professional lessons about foreign policy.

@MarkGaleotti This seems like the standard “bomber gap”, “missile gap” panic. I think Russia, and the Soviet Union before it, has always been less powerful than people assume.

If you are towing a trailer, make sure it has lights if it is obscuring your indicators. Otherwise this kind of thing can happen when someone tries to overtake. Luckily my brakes work.