UPDATE 2/24/12: Commenter Chew Bird notes that some scientists commenting at The Atlantic and Wellestein's own blog strongly disagree with him. They argue that a nuclear detonation is a reasonable measurement of energy output.
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Last week, a meteor exploded over Russia with, according to some press descriptions "the force of 30 Hiroshima bombs." These were references to the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan on 6 August 1945. Atomic historian Alex Wellerstein says that the analogy makes little sense:
"In general," he added, "What I don't like is ... the idea that kiloton or a megaton is just an energy unit, that it's equivalent to so many joules or something. Because you could do that. You could claim that your house runs so many tons of TNT worth of electricity per year, but it sort of trivializes the notion." [...]
But nuclear weapons deliver more than just sheer force; there's also incredible heat, orders of magnitude hotter than a meteor's explosion, (most of the people who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Wellerstein says, died of fire), and, of course, the radiation. The radiation brings sickness, makes land uninhabitable in the long term, and can have residual genetic effects that long outlast the bomb's immediate destruction. "It's sort of the sum of these effects that we think of when we think of what's the problem with nuclear weapons," he says. To only think of an atomic weapon in terms of the kilotons of energy released glosses over the totality of the terror these bombs bring.
It's one thing to use an atomic explosion as a unit for describing a meteor's explosion -- the two are similar in that much of their energy is released as a blast wave -- but the comparison is even worse when applied to other sorts of disasters, Wellerstein contends. "My least favorite is when this sort of thing is applied to literally non-explosive phenomena: tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes. These are sometimes talked about in terms of their energy release. And you can always quantify an energy release -- you can just do the conversion to nuclear units and say, 'Oh my God look how much energy this is!' But, you know: An earthquake is a very different release of energy; a tsunami is a very different release of energy. The effects are just not comparable. They're nothing like nuclear weapons."
Link | Photo: US Department of Energy
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John laughed and told him "The line is 'I can't hide'."
"But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed."
And almost as if designed to blow up the thesis, of Seth’s Rogovoy’s book, "Bob Dylan Prophet, Mystic, Poet," where he tries to show Dylan has returned to Judaism after a brief "Christian Period." This book came out in the fall of 2009, Dylan releases a Christmas album! That really had to hurt. And then when several reviewers of the Christmas album notice that Dylan is singing the Christian Hymns in complete seriousness like “O Little Town of Bethlehem” they are prompted to ask Dylan if he is signing these Hymns as a true believer in the Christian gospel (the Christian gospel is the good news described in the hymn as “the hopes and fears of all the years”). To which Dylan replies in a promotional piece for public consumption, “I am a true believer.” Then add to this that Dylan is at this same time beginning to open his fall tours with the song "Change my way of Thinkin’" where he is proclaiming in very clear, and not to be misunderstood language: “Jesus is Coming, Coming back to gather his Jewels.” This is certainly not anything your typical Jewish believer would ever be willing to confess. To proclaim this message one has to have gone over… to have done the unspeakable…..to have become…and he remains a Christian.