Heard in a movie, The Fourth Protocol:

[Sarah]

There are various meanings of "Chinese" in the archives (I was looking for "Chinese baseball" aka "kickball"), but (and again without context) they were talking about mass and not size. As the critical mass of Pu-239 is ~24lbs, needing 200lbs, even for a dirty bomb, is at best ridiculous and definitely "chaotic, badly organized" as LH said.

S.


On 2011-03-02, at 5:06 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Heard in a movie, The Fourth Protocol:
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I'll have to check, but I believe we had a discussion of various
> meanings of "Chinese" here. It's either that or it was something *I*
> posted ;-) "Small" might have been one of the meanings that got missed.
> Others include "devious", "meaningless" and "nonsequitur". But, in this
> case, "small" seems to be the operative definition (more accurately,
> "smaller than normal").
>
>     VS-)
>
> On 3/2/2011 7:42 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 7:22 PM, Victor Steinbok<aardvark66 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> the object in question is far smaller than a "football".
>>> Standard (Size 5) ball is 71 cm (28 in.) in circumference or about 22.5
>>> cm (9 in.) in diameter.
>> By God, I think you've got it! The discussion was in re the smallest
>> mass of plutonium - "twice as heavy as lead, it's going to weigh about
>> 200 lbs." - necessary for the construction of a working dirty bomb.
>>
>> --
>> -Wilson
>
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