Wapsi Square Forum

For your nightmare forming enjoyment I present:
Winkers: The Pants with Eyes


Make sure to keep a cup of eye bleach ready.

The NORAD thing is a valid point. What happened to the final stage of the rocket and what is in it?

Sidhekin wrote:My double-take of the day:

"NORAD? What's the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation to do with this?"

Google tells me it's also North American Aerospace Defense Command. Makes better sense.

Aside: English acronyms of Norwegian institutions are a story to themselves. Like the Norwegian University of Technology and Science (they've changed it since).

Personally I spent a year at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. The joke was to avoid running that acronym through a spellchecker.

The acronym for Eastern Michigan University is the same for a bird that has infamously terrible memory retention to those in the know, but just don't tell the wrong people, they may take it personally. Even if the shoe fits. Especially if the shoe fits.

It wasn't till i had posted this on several fora (and looked again at the accompanying covershot) that it hit me that it sorta fits in with today's comic.

Especially given Atsali and her clothing's relationship.

captnq wrote:For your nightmare forming enjoyment I present:
Winkers: The Pants with Eyes


Make sure to keep a cup of eye bleach ready.

Aaaaagggghhhhhh!!!! My eyes!

illiad wrote: You have remember toon physics! this comic is NOT reality, please do not overthink, it is **fantasy**...

If we stopped overthinking the comic, then what would we be posting in this forum? We'd be reduced to dubious limericks and discussing how old we all are.

I suppose we could also endless recycle the argument of "These characters are minors!" vs "These characters are fictional so their age is completely arbitrary!" too.

Still, not being able to nitpick the comic takes away almost all of the fun of being here. And *SPOILER ALERT!* all of us actually know that it is all fantasy. No reminders necessary.

[quote="Thor We'd be reduced to dubious limericks and discussing how old we all are. quote]


... my second will contact you on this matter... SAH!

Suspending Occam's Razor for a bit...

What I'm troubled by is how the lava was formed. Is it the pre-existing rock around the complex that has simply been melted by the heat of the antimatter bomb? If that's the case, something very weird happened. From what I understand, antimatter goes BOOM very fast. Like a super-high-explosive. Faster than C-4. A sufficiently large amount of it would ahnnilate with the energy of a nuclear bomb...
But even nuclear bombs are slow compared to antimatter. Nuclear bombs are the result of a fission chain reaction. Antimatter just... Happens. Pretty much all at once.
Even a slower explosion, like that of ANFO or black powder wouldn't melt rock, it'd just shatter it.
The sites of some underground nuclear tests in New Mexico and even meteor crater in Arizona illustrate this: the bedrock was cracked and overturned, shattered, even aerosolized, but it wasn't melted. There isn't any igneous rock there.

The other option is far more terrifying. The antimatter bomb was powerful enough to blow a hole so deep in the earth's continental crust that it exposed the underlying magma.
That takes a truly staggering amount of energy. The earthquakes would seriously mess up several surrounding cities. I don't know if the magma under Mapimi (or however it's spelled) is under high pressure, but seeing as a large continent is sitting on top of it, I'd guess it is. If it is pressurized, our girls just made a volcano.

GlytchMeister wrote:From what I understand, antimatter goes BOOM very fast. Like a super-high-explosive. Faster than C-4. A sufficiently large amount of it would annihilate with the energy of a nuclear bomb...
But even nuclear bombs are slow compared to antimatter. Nuclear bombs are the result of a fission chain reaction. Antimatter just... Happens. Pretty much all at once.

I think that the two are of roughly comparable speeds, all things considered.

The fission reaction in an "atomic" bomb is quite fast... I was surprised when I first read the figures. Physicists tend to talk about the timing in terms of "shakes" (as in, "two shakes of a lamb's tail", i.e. really fast) with one shake being ten nanoseconds, or 10^-8 seconds. This is roughly the amount of time needed for one "generation" of the fission reaction (i.e. a neutron hits a fissile nucleus, the nucleus fissions and emits several neutrons, and those neutrons reach other fissile nuclei). The whole fission sequence usually involves about 50 generations, or about half a microsecond. You get several times more fission events (and several times more energy) from each subsequent generation. Almost of the energy from a fission reaction is released in the last 7 generations... call it 7 shakes, or 70 nanoseconds, or 7% of a millionth of a second. That's roughly the distance that light (or gamma rays from the fission) can travel in 70 feet.

A thermonuclear weapon takes a bit longer, but not much.

An antimatter bomb isn't going to be a lot faster than this. It might even be slower, if you simply "drop the containment field" and let the antimatter start coming into contact with normal matter. Although each individual annihilation event will be effectively instantaneous, it will require time for matter and antimatter to mix and trigger the annihilation events. If you have solid antimatter, then the first outside matter (e.g. air) which contacts it is going to release a lot of energy (as gammas and X-rays), heating everything nearby... this might very well explode the outside air away from the antimatter, and cause the inner core of antimatter to implode towards its center, away from nearby matter.

The only way I could see to get a matter/antimatter bomb to go off "all at once" (within a few nanoseconds) would be to accelerate the antimatter to a very high speed (a goodly fraction of the speed of light) and slam it into matter. And, if you can accelerate a few grams of anything to that speed, you don't really need antimatter to make a humongous boom.

Thor wrote:

illiad wrote: You have remember toon physics! this comic is NOT reality, please do not overthink, it is **fantasy**...

If we stopped overthinking the comic, then what would we be posting in this forum? We'd be reduced to dubious limericks and discussing how old we all are.

I suppose we could also endless recycle the argument of "These characters are minors!" vs "These characters are fictional so their age is completely arbitrary!" too.

Still, not being able to nitpick the comic takes away almost all of the fun of being here. And *SPOILER ALERT!* all of us actually know that it is all fantasy. No reminders necessary.

er, the overthinking I am talking about is
"why has she not broken all her bones by that action??"
"she cannot possibly fly, she is not 'aerodynamic"

Please lets not turn this forum into nitpicking what is 'possible' etc... keep it 'canon' the same way StarTrek does, in the manual..

love it or hate it, you dont see people saying "Warp is impossible", just like they said about 'man flying' centuries ago....


.. and lets get back to proper discussions of 'hammer space' and what not...

Oh, and 50 years ago, who would have thought that 10 year old minors would show us how easy it is to use computers????

GlytchMeister wrote:Suspending Occam's Razor for a bit...

What I'm troubled by is how the lava was formed. Is it the pre-existing rock around the complex that has simply been melted by the heat of the antimatter bomb? If that's the case, something very weird happened. From what I understand, antimatter goes BOOM very fast. Like a super-high-explosive. Faster than C-4. A sufficiently large amount of it would ahnnilate with the energy of a nuclear bomb...
But even nuclear bombs are slow compared to antimatter. Nuclear bombs are the result of a fission chain reaction. Antimatter just... Happens. Pretty much all at once.
Even a slower explosion, like that of ANFO or black powder wouldn't melt rock, it'd just shatter it.
The sites of some underground nuclear tests in New Mexico and even meteor crater in Arizona illustrate this: the bedrock was cracked and overturned, shattered, even aerosolized, but it wasn't melted. There isn't any igneous rock there.

The other option is far more terrifying. The antimatter bomb was powerful enough to blow a hole so deep in the earth's continental crust that it exposed the underlying magma.
That takes a truly staggering amount of energy. The earthquakes would seriously mess up several surrounding cities. I don't know if the magma under Mapimi (or however it's spelled) is under high pressure, but seeing as a large continent is sitting on top of it, I'd guess it is. If it is pressurized, our girls just made a volcano.

You have a couple of mistakes and misunderstandings. First the time scale, they all take time but it is on the micro scale measure in less that nanoseconds. Nothing just happens. Second, nuclear bombs are the result of fission or fusion or combinations of these processes. Lastly, the temperature of a nuclear explosion can exceed 100,000,000°C. This is about ten times the temperature of the surface of the Sun! This results in a substance being stripped of all its electrons and existing as an ionized plasma. The heat from a thermonuclear blast can vaporize objects and living things over great distances. Depending on what sort of objects are in its path, a blast can even result in a firestorm of around 1000°C that can melt glass and several metals. This sort of fiery explosion on a Hiroshima-sized scale would scorch everything within a 1.2-mile radius. You also might want to look up this study "Iron reduction in silicate glass produced during the 1945 nuclear test at the Trinity site (Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA)". So yes Lava is not only possible but probable. Due to the job i had in the USAF my Uncle Sam wanted me to have a more than passing knowledge of nuclear weapons.

Thor wrote:Also, this is the 2nd strip named "Glowing". Can you remember what the previous one was about before you check the link?

Yep, I was right.Shel & Whatshername outside Tina's shop.

illiad wrote:Oh, and 50 years ago, who would have thought that 10 year old minors would show us how easy it is to use computers????

Hmmm. What's the first date on which it became apparent that you need to have a 12-year-old in the household, to make the VCR stop blinking 12:00 12:00 12:00 ...

Dave wrote:What's the first date on which it became apparent that you need to have a 12-year-old in the household, to make the VCR stop blinking 12:00 12:00 12:00 ...

'70s VCR programming kit: roll of electrical tape and razor blade. Cut length of tape slightly longer than clock display and affix to bezel.

AmriloJim wrote:

Dave wrote:What's the first date on which it became apparent that you need to have a 12-year-old in the household, to make the VCR stop blinking 12:00 12:00 12:00 ...

'70s VCR programming kit: roll of electrical tape and razor blade. Cut length of tape slightly longer than clock display and affix to bezel.

Also works great on "check engine" lights.

@ Dave and oldmanmickey:

I have been soundly out-nerded, and respect your research and experience. As far as the antimatter speed, I was thinking of how small an amount of antimatter would be required to produce a nuclear-level explosion, and how quickly those antiparticles would find things to annihilate. Especially since antiparticles tend to have a charge opposite of their pair.
I did not take into account the exponential nature of the nuclear chain reaction. That shortens my estimate of the time required to complete the reaction quite a bit.

However, a part of me still doesn't think this smells right. Glassing a swath of desert is different than melting a quantity of bedrock large enough to remain molten for minutes, possibly longer. Yeah, a nuke is stupidly hot, but I don't think that "hot as the sun" heat doesn't last nearly long enough to melt a cubic decameter or kilometer of (mostly) solid rock. That sort of thing takes time. Like trying to melt a big block of ice with a flamethrower. You'd think it'd be fast, but it can really take hours.

It just seems fishy. Heat doesn't propagate through rock like that fast enough for all of it to melt so quickly, all at once. Nuclear test sites have plenty of fused sand and glass and shock Quartz, but I've never heard of them melting bedrock.

And finally, yeah, a nuke can make a firestorm. And I know those aren't to be messed with either. A city-sized bonfire that makes its own weather to support itself? I scoff not at thee. But this is in a desert. Not much fuel. New Mexico didn't have firestorm problems, from what I remember.

Again, I'm operating on a passing knowledge of nuclear explosions and the aftermath, thermodynamics, thermal conductivity of rocks, etc.

GlytchMeister wrote:@ Dave and oldmanmickey:

I have been soundly out-nerded, and respect your research and experience. As far as the antimatter speed, I was thinking of how small an amount of antimatter would be required to produce a nuclear-level explosion, and how quickly those antiparticles would find things to annihilate. Especially since antiparticles tend to have a charge opposite of their pair.
I did not take into account the exponential nature of the nuclear chain reaction. That shortens my estimate of the time required to complete the reaction quite a bit.

However, a part of me still doesn't think this smells right. Glassing a swath of desert is different than melting a quantity of bedrock large enough to remain molten for minutes, possibly longer. Yeah, a nuke is stupidly hot, but I don't think that "hot as the sun" heat doesn't last nearly long enough to melt a cubic decameter or kilometer of (mostly) solid rock. That sort of thing takes time. Like trying to melt a big block of ice with a flamethrower. You'd think it'd be fast, but it can really take hours.

It just seems fishy. Heat doesn't propagate through rock like that fast enough for all of it to melt so quickly, all at once. Nuclear test sites have plenty of fused sand and glass and shock Quartz, but I've never heard of them melting bedrock.

And finally, yeah, a nuke can make a firestorm. And I know those aren't to be messed with either. A city-sized bonfire that makes its own weather to support itself? I scoff not at thee. But this is in a desert. Not much fuel. New Mexico didn't have firestorm problems, from what I remember.

Again, I'm operating on a passing knowledge of nuclear explosions and the aftermath, thermodynamics, thermal conductivity of rocks, etc.

since i have no desire to try and turn this forum into physics 101 i will just say pm me if you want to discuss it further.

GlytchMeister wrote:Suspending Occam's Razor for a bit...

What I'm troubled by is how the lava was formed. Is it the pre-existing rock around the complex that has simply been melted by the heat of the antimatter bomb? If that's the case, something very weird happened. From what I understand, antimatter goes BOOM very fast. Like a super-high-explosive. Faster than C-4. A sufficiently large amount of it would ahnnilate with the energy of a nuclear bomb...
But even nuclear bombs are slow compared to antimatter. Nuclear bombs are the result of a fission chain reaction. Antimatter just... Happens. Pretty much all at once.
Even a slower explosion, like that of ANFO or black powder wouldn't melt rock, it'd just shatter it.
The sites of some underground nuclear tests in New Mexico and even meteor crater in Arizona illustrate this: the bedrock was cracked and overturned, shattered, even aerosolized, but it wasn't melted. There isn't any igneous rock there.

The other option is far more terrifying. The antimatter bomb was powerful enough to blow a hole so deep in the earth's continental crust that it exposed the underlying magma.
That takes a truly staggering amount of energy. The earthquakes would seriously mess up several surrounding cities. I don't know if the magma under Mapimi (or however it's spelled) is under high pressure, but seeing as a large continent is sitting on top of it, I'd guess it is. If it is pressurized, our girls just made a volcano.

The explosive force, sometimes described as ‘heave’, that you are referring is generated by expanding gasses. In a chemical explosion these gasses are generated by the extremely rapid combustion of the explosive process. In a nuclear (including antimatter) reaction the gasses are generated by the heating and vaporization of the surrounding materials due to radiant energy (x-rays from fission and fusion, hard gamma rays from antimatter). Naturally while some material is vaporized more is simply melted.

Secondly, most the nuclear explosions you are probably familiar with are air bursts, this was a subsurface detonation that expelled the overlying material. See Operation Plowshare for more examples. The higher penetration of the gamma radiation from an antimatter explosion would enhance production of molten material.

GlytchMeister wrote:However, a part of me still doesn't think this smells right. Glassing a swath of desert is different than melting a quantity of bedrock large enough to remain molten for minutes, possibly longer. Yeah, a nuke is stupidly hot, but I don't think that "hot as the sun" heat doesn't last nearly long enough to melt a cubic decameter or kilometer of (mostly) solid rock. That sort of thing takes time. Like trying to melt a big block of ice with a flamethrower. You'd think it'd be fast, but it can really take hours.

It just seems fishy. Heat doesn't propagate through rock like that fast enough for all of it to melt so quickly, all at once. Nuclear test sites have plenty of fused sand and glass and shock Quartz, but I've never heard of them melting bedrock.

It isn't normal heat deposited on the surface, it is energy deposited by gamma rays throughout the depth of the material. Yes, it can melt large amounts of rock. Again, see Project Plowshare for details.

@ My2Cents

Aahhh, THAT'S the key to it. I hadn't thought of how the heat is conveyed differently.
Huh.
I no longer smell any fishyness. Thanks. That would have bothered me for a while.

And Plowshare was what I was thinking of along with air bursts, but I know much less about subsurface detonations except they crack and overturn bedrock a lot like a meteor impact. Something I learned on the History Channel before that network went all goofy.

(Sorry if I sounded argumentative or anything. I just wanted to learn)

Anytime you can learn something new its a good day, please my freind never stop learning