Panjandrum: The 'giant firework' built to break Hitler's Atlantic Wall

> As the ww2 generation passes on,

I was at a picnic recently that happened to be on VE day, it really struck me that now London is only about 35% or so English as the ww2 generation would've known it, almost no one has a particularly good reason to bother paying attention. I'm sure I was the only person there who knows who Barnes Wallis was.

And yes I miss the boffins. They do still sort of exist but that type of mind has been strangled by the last few decades drive towards left-brained processes where everything basically has to be nailed down before the work actually starts.

That latter point is one reason why we're struggling so much - we owe a great debt to the generations who built all the infrastructure and housing. We didn't pay it off, we now can't really do anything at scale other than extract rent. The victorians were building a HS2 every few years.

Various infantry bunkers laying about are also a reminder, but what really gets me are the bonkers last-ditch defensive weapons you can still find in places, like preset positions for flame fougasse batteries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_fougasse

They speak to the particular combination of desperation, urgency, and ingenuity found in the UK at that time.

What i find even more remarkable is how every town, village, school and institution have memorials for those who lost their lives in the Great War. Usually there is another plaque attached in memory of WW2. It's hard to imagine the scale of deaths. The tragedy is how little was accomplished by the sacrifices of ww1. It had none of the moral clarity of ww2 nor did most of the deaths achieve any strategic purpose.

On the other hand i knew an old scientist who had quite a few interesting and amusing stories to share about his efforts in WW2. One of them was about his attempts to perfect a formala. Several factories exploded before they succeeded.

You would probably enjoy the book “Backroom Boys” by Francis Spufford.

> British Isles

Britain and occupied Northern Ireland.

> I'm always struck by how easy it is to hike into some remote part of the UK and learn that the parish school was a training ground for Italian resistance fighters or that some park in remote scotland was where they trained commandos.

You're more likely to find a memorial to a historical genocidal tyrant or crime against humanity in Britain than anything worth celebrating. Britain helped fight a greater evil in the Nazis during the Second World War, but make no mistake - they were the lesser evil, not anything to be admired or vaunted.

Stephenson enjoys the word. He also used it in Cryptonomicon. I keep a running list of new words I encounter and share them online occasionally. Someone once recognized I was reading Cryptonomicon just from a string of those new words, lol.

Thank you for this. I was going nuts trying to figure out where I had read this before. Peace and love! For the uninitiated, the Neil Stephenson novel, "Anathem", is brilliant and extremely entertaining.