North Korea
gregladen | September 26, 2017https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/911789314169823232?ref_src=t…
A pair of American B-1 Lancer bombers is flying north northeast along the border of North Korean air space. Accompanying the bombers is a squadron of F-15C Eagle fighter jets. The crews are aware of the fact that North Korea may have a policy of shoot first and ask questions later, as a response to a tweet by the Russian-installed president of the United States, in which he threatened to kill the psychopathic leader of North Korea.
(I fear for a big drop in Tom Clancy novels, as they are no longer challenging or…
gregladen | April 20, 2017On September 11th, 1640, a Dutch armada preparing to attack the New World Spanish settlements was lost to a storm, thus changing the course of Dutch, Spanish, and New World history.
On January 2nd, 1678, an entire fleet of French naval ships was lost off the Venezuelan coat, changing forever the history of France. And Venezuela. *
On or about April 19th, 2017, the United States lost the battle group running with the USS Carl Vinson, somewhere in the Pacific. This altered forever the credibility of the American Military around the world.
eklemetti | July 9, 2010Quick hits to wrap up the week:
Looking into a skylight at Kilauea. Image taken July 8, 2010, courtesy of HVO/USGS.
Following up some news about Changbaishan/Changbai caldera in North Korea, Yang Qingfu, director of earthquake and volcano analysis and forecast center with the seismology bureau of northeast China's Jilin Province, says that the volcano appears to be quiet and that there are no signs of an impending eruption - at least not in the next dozen years. The bigger news (in my mind) is that China will be installing full monitoring (gravity, deformation, electromagnetics, fluid…
eklemetti | June 18, 2010This week went fast, didn't it?
The Baekdu caldera along the North Korean/Chinese border.
The NASA Earth Observatory have been giving us a steady diet of volcanic plumes over the last week, including PNG's Ulawun, Russia's Sarychev Peak (a very faint plume), both an ASTER and Terra image of the summit region at Kliuchevskoi and finally a mix of plume and clouds over PNG's Manam volcano.
I wanted to also mention a brief article I ran into on the Changbaishan/Baekdu caldera along the Chinese and North Korean border. Although short on specifics, this article mentions a number of interesting (…
cevans | April 23, 2010
The North Korean government has made an operating system called "Red Star."
Despite the fact that very few North Koreans have a computer, let alone Internet access, Red Star is designed to provide a safe operating environment in line with North Korean political philosophy of "juche," or self-reliance (as well as, admittedly, monitor user activity).
The Red Star O.S. takes fifteen minutes to install, uses a popular Korean folk song as its start-up music and features a calendar which starts counting time from the birth of Kim Il-sung, making 2010 the year 99. Amazingly, it's Linux-based, with…
purepedantry | October 23, 2006News@Nature has another fabulous North Korea science update:
What more have we learned about last week's North Korean test?
Scientists have been able to confirm that it was indeed a nuclear weapon. US intelligence is reporting that the explosive force of the bomb was less than a kiloton of TNT, and used plutonium as opposed to uranium.
How do we know all that?
The first clues came from seismic data immediately after the blast. A sharp pulse of seismic waves meant it was a man-made explosion and the size suggested it was too big to be a conventional weapon but too small to be a successful…
purepedantry | October 13, 2006Chris from Highly Allochthonous -- say that five times fast -- has a great post summarizing the geological issues of the North Korean nuclear test (how deep? how do we know that? etc.) Check it out.
purepedantry | October 13, 2006I expressed a certain level of skepticism about North Korea's nuclear test this week because of the low estimated yield and the failure of the earlier test of their Taepodong-2 missile. Basically, I question the ability of North Korea to make a nuclear weapon that will actually work, given the strict controls on their society and the limited ability to innovate. I think that we need to factor into our strategic calculations in dealing with North Korea -- serious as they are -- the possibility that they may not have the beef.
Now it would appear that North Korea's nuclear test -- in…