explosions – Haibane.info

Dennou Coil 12: A Space Odyssey

This episode was largely tangential, but it was a blast. I mean that literally:

In a nutshell, Yasako becomes a God, literally. She communicates to her People, but they do not understand…

and they reject her counsel and engage in ultimate folly:

But ultimately they realize the error of their ways and embark upon a new age of enlightenment:

This episode paid homage to grand epic science fiction and philosophical themes rather than trying to actively explore them in any depth. It was a lot of fun as an interlude – not much in way of the larger plot was advanced. I just had a big goofy grin on my face the entire time.

hydrazine, huh?

As I mentioned to Steven in comments to the previous post about the pending satellite shoot-em-up, I don’t buy the argument that the hydrazine in the fuel tanks is a real threat. The Cassini-Huygens probe carried plutonium aboard as a fuel source and I recall the crazies all worried it would somehow contaminate the earth if it crashed or failed on liftoff; why would hydrazine be such a big deal? A satellite coming uncontrolled down from space has only 30% chance of hitting land to begin with, and the actual populated areas of Earth where you might conceivably land on someone (ie, dense urban areas, not suburbs, farmland, desert, jungle, etc) are an even smaller target. The risk has to be infinitesimal.

So i am not surprised at all to see that there might be an ulterior motive – to show the Chinese we can.

totally awesome!

The US military is going to blast a failing spy satellite out of the sky using sea-based missiles launched from a Navy cruiser. No, not Michael Bay’s next movie plot; this is actually real.

Question for the US Intelligence Agencies: if the thing is so sensitive and loaded with secrets that you have to try and shoot it down rather than let it fall into Russian/Chinese hands, why didn’t you just put a self-destruct on it? Duh.