A half-year retrospective.

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Hello to all my readers new and old. It’s December, which of course marks six months of this blog (there’s some sort of midwinter celebration around the corner too, I’m told, but that’s much less important than my thing).

So huzzah and bully to me. On a less smug note, however, I managed to go nearly six months with my home page advertising my status as a “pendant” rather than a “pedant” until someone finally pointed it out. That’s the great thing about the internet: there’s always a bigger “pendant” out there. Thank you sir—you know who you are.

As promised last week, I’m going to do a little bit of a retrospective today. I’ll start with some analytics: which posts and topics have done well, which less so. Then I’ll pick up on three specific topics from before in light of my most recent thoughts. I’ll finish up with a poll so that you guys can let me know what you’d like to see more of and less of.

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What’s hot and what’s not?

My EOD critique of The Hurt Locker was by some distance the most popular post of the year, with over four times the median share of views:

It’s not an entirely fair comparison because I boosted its chances with a post on LinkedIn and via WordPress (along with #2 and #3). Still, there’s clearly a winning strategy there: dump on a beloved film and actually write about something I know a little bit about. Watch this space, there will be more like this to follow in the new year.

On the other end of the scale, my weakest posts got only around half the median views:

Some consolation for these poor li’l guys is that their performance was much closer to the median than were the most popular posts. In other words, most articles get the same level of popularity, with a few high flyers. I got thinking and wondered whether longevity had any part to play, i.e. how long the post has been published (excluding the “boosted” posts, so as to get a proper comparison):

There is only a very slight correlation between time online and number of views. In other words, the website gets some, but not much, traffic from people going through the archives.

Finally, let’s see what effect word count has on popularity (again, excluding the “boosted” posts to get a decent comparison):

Not a very strong trend, but the direction is negative, which is what you’d expect. Shorter is better, so I’d better not go on too long. Let’s move on to the next section. One of the most popular posts was my “Film fashion faux pas” article on bad berets (2,554 words), which we’ll discuss next.

Bad berets follow me around

My “bad berets” piece was unlike many of my other rants considered arguments, and perhaps this is why it was popular. It’s also the one that keeps coming back to me. I always noticed a bad beret, but I can’t get away from them now. Here are some which have worked their way into my consciousness since I wrote about the topic.

The first is a record sleeve for the album “Ballads of the Green Berets” which includes the track “The Ballad of the Green Berets”, because that’s not confusing at all:

This next one comes from a fellow blogger The 1919 Review, who recently wrote a very entertaining piece about Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun as part of their “Games That Warped My Young Mind” series. I highly recommend! I had to include it because of one truly awful beret in a cutscene

This next one caught my eye in a story about Uganda’s music star turned opposition leader Bobi Wine, who was injured in a clash with police recently. I’ll cut him some slack because he’s a victim of political violence, but since he uses the beret as a symbol of resistance, I think we need to apply proper military standards, of which he is found sorely lacking:

Finally, and I referred to this in my biological weapons article, but there’s Captain Darrow’s execrable beret in The Rock:

There’s no real mystery around bad berets, except how costume designers keep getting away with it. Where there is mystery is around the destruction of Alderaan from the original Star Wars, which I wrote about in my Lasers chapter of the science fiction weapons series: let’s talk about that next.

The destruction of Alderaan won’t let go

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about the power of the Death Star laser which destroyed Alderaan. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last half century, here’s the famous scene:

My rough calculations in the article (actually they were buried in a footnote in the above link) were to find the power of the laser required to obliterate the planet, and I think they’re still valid. Recall that we said the laser’s power output was 2.4 x 10³² Watts and this was enough to raise the planet core temperature by 10,000 degrees Celsius (about 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit). So far, so good. Two more effects I didn’t consider though. The first was explained Randall Munroe at XKCD in a What If blog post and video:

In short, the hypothetical super-laser described by Munroe causes the planet to accelerate away by vaporising the surface layer facing the laser and heating it until it becomes, in essence, a rocket engine for the whole planet. So maybe this is a more realistic fate for Alderaan from the Death Star superlaser?

An important point to note is that the extremely (ludicrously, to be frank) powerful laser in Munroe’s scenario (2500 billion terawatts, or 2.5 x 10²⁴ Watts) is still eight orders of magnitude weaker than the Death Star’s laser: a hundred million times weaker! So the Death Star could lose 99.999999% of its power and still be strong enough to obliterate Alderaan. It seems to me that they might have over-spec’d it a little bit. Maybe a smaller power requirement would have avoided the need for a fatally exposed exhaust port. But hey, what do I know? We must trust in the wisdom of the Imperial commanders:

A commentator suggested that I look at gravitational binding energy, which I hadn’t thought about on my last back-of-the-envelope. This is the minimum amount of energy needed to overcome the force of gravity on the total amount of matter bound up in the planet. The gravitational binding energy of the Earth is 2.2 x 10³² J (from Wikipedia), which (in one second¹) is conveniently close to the power estimate of the Death Star superlaser. In fact, I suspect that’s where they got the number for the power estimate in the first place. I’m also happy enough that my guesstimate of 10,000°C was close enough² to the temperature implied by the binding energy value (about 40,000°C). When all’s said and done, it’s a ridiculously powerful laser.

Conclusion: some lessons and a poll

I’d like to finish up with a few lessons I learned while writing:

• Immediately after you’ve written the last word on something, you see things which contradict it. All the time. Like with the exploding cars. I had a bee in my bonnet which drove me to write this series (1 and 2) on car explosions. Specifically, I argued that filmmakers overuse the “key in ignition –> BOOM” trope, whereas there are far easier ways to blow up a car. Ever since writing this scene, I can’t get away from car explosions in film and TV. How many of them use the key in ignition method? Almost none.
• Everything takes longer than you think. Perhaps I’m too prone to deep dives, but there’s no such thing as a quick post or diagram or paragraph. All those footnotes in my articles represent hours and hours of pointless rabbit holes! Well, except for the ones that are simply snide comments.
• It’s very hard to find a picture on the internet which you think you’ve seen before, and can sort of describe, but don’t know where you saw it. See “rabbit holes” above.
• Short is sweet. The old saying about brevity is true. To paraphrase: “I’m sorry for writing you a long letter, but I didn’t have time to write you a short one.” It’s much easier to waffle on than it is to write something short and sweet and to the point. And, on that note, let’s bring this post to a close.

I’m going to finish with a few quick poll questions, all in the spirit of helping me serve you, my loyal readers, all the better. You can enter all of the answers on one form:

That’s it for this week folks, thanks for all your support over the last half-year, and I’m looking forward to the next one! See you all next week, and until the, take care. Make sure to subscribe using the link below if you haven’t already, and please like and share this article³ with like-minded folks.

Featured Image: Charlie Day conspiracy theory meme from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Accessed here.

1. A Joule (J) is a unit of energy. A Watt, W, is a unit of power equal to one Joule per second. If it takes 100 J to heat something up, and I have a 100 W heater, it takes one second. If I have a 1000 W heater, it takes a tenth of a second, and so on. ↩︎
2. A quarter, which in a cosmic sense, is practically the same. ↩︎
3. Maybe not this one. Maybe a more content-y one. But hey, you do you. ↩︎