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Tsar Bomba Yield: The 100-Megaton Bomb Nobody Built

The Tsar Bomba yield everyone quotes was never detonated. Swapping lead for uranium halved the bomb and cut its fission output by 97%.

Siting a data centre means overlaying five constraint maps. Three are dissolving this decade. Two never will, and they point to a place we know.

The OVHcloud data centre fire wasn't bad luck — the free-cooling design that made SBG2 cheap also removed the room the gas system needed to work.

AI energy per query swings 2.4x on the identical prompt, depending only on what you count — and still answers a narrower question.

The Kola Superdeep Borehole didn't stall for lack of rubles — at 180°C the granite went ductile and sealed the hole around the drill.

The Vela Incident's bhangmeter was 41-for-41 on real nukes before 1979's double flash. The optics, not the spies, are why it's still disputed.

Challenger's O-ring had a tested 53°F safety floor. Launch day hit 36°F — a 17-degree gap engineers had already measured, not guessed.

Thomas Midgley's leaded gasoline didn't win because it worked better than ethanol — it won because you could patent it.

800V DC power is replacing 54V busbars in AI racks — not because voltage is trendy, but because copper stopped scaling at 1MW per rack.

AI model collapse isn't about running out of text — it's a curation failure, and the difference decides which labs keep improving.