Having being in the pool by six o'clock this morning before the water had a chance to change colour, I think I'll have an early night tonight after yet another long and interesting day.
It's Wednesday anyway, which means another HARD QUIZ on ABC TV when Tom Gleeson trots out four more walking repositories of totally useless and yet totally detailed knowledge about things which are of absolutely no consequence at all to anyone, least of all the contestants.
If you're not into questions such as "What year did the first episode of Coronation Street air?" or "How many episodes of Keeping up with the Kardashians are there?", you may wish to turn your mind back to 26 September 1983 when the computers in the Serpukhov-15 bunker outside Moscow, which housed the command center of the Soviet early warning satellite system, twice reported that U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles were heading toward the Soviet Union.
Stanislav Petrov, who was duty officer that night, suspected that the system was malfunctioning and managed to convince his superiors of the same thing. He argued that if the U.S. was going to attack pre-emptively it would do so with more than just five missiles and that it was best to wait for ground radar confirmation before launching a counter-attack.
Stanislav Petrov died on 19 May 2017. Let us hope that there is some other Stanislav to intervene when Vladimir Putin pushes the button.
