Angels and Demons

Friday evenings if we are free and not chained to the office desk are meant to be spent with friends. If I can think this and I have at least one friend who agrees with me then at least we can share it together. The friend in question is of course Azami. I had planned to go to the Lex with Yoshi this Friday evening but after my little chat with Kuri I had felt a need to try to manipulate and engineer fate a little. I realize that these are the usual corridors of politicians who would love to having you thinking in parallel to their thinking. These are also the haunts of councilors, mediators and arbitrators and Jazz, who occasionally likes to be the go-between.
I don't know what I expected as I pressed her name in my cell phone but she answered cheerfully and why wouldn't she? She can see my name calling her. I am not usually a person who is indirect and many know this attribute in me quite well but I decided on a longer drawn out approach with Azami because I feel in a situation as delicate as this I need to assess her feelings and thoughts before I can formulate my strategy. I have in the back of my mind a cunning plan! When she said her only free night was Friday, I had to cancel my date at the Lex.

We had decided to go out together but by the Friday afternoon she wasn't feeling too well and instead called me to inquire that if instead I would like to go over to her place and watch a movie, which I agreed to do. When I arrived she unboxed the beers that I brought with me and put them in the fridge to chill and I shared the news of what's been happening with Hitomi and I and what's happening in the Mars.
She listened politely and then stated rather than asked if I had been out with Kumi. It didn't matter if she'd seen me with her or someone had told her, I wasn't going to be deceitful but I had intended to be economical with the truth. "So what's happened?" she asked probably sensing my tone and choice of words.
I told her that Kumi's Internet lover had gone and she smiled.
Was it a smile that acknowledged justice or one of irony, was it a smile at her own prophetic words or one that sensed an opportunity?
I won't know because she looked at me and with the feeling that this topic was over asked me to choose a DVD from her new selection on the table. I looked through her selection and said I hadn't seen 'Angels and Demons' even though it has been out for four months.
And so it came to pass that the two girls moved away from discussing the topic that was awkward at this time and sat close together to enjoy a story that is pure fantasy... "Or is it?" as Dan Brown may narrate over the introductions.

I laughed at the size of the piece of anti-matter developed by CERN and at the science that said if it came into contact with normal matter it would be equivalent to a five kiloton nuclear device.
That is so wrong. If we could make a piece that size I think at least half of the city would be missing. Thankfully all the antimatter that CERN has ever made in the real world, and we are talking in sub-atomic masses here, could only create enough energy to run your desk lamp for five minutes. For a nuclear explosion you need fissile material and a whole set of conditions and the bringing together of a critical mass. A change in any of the conditions, such as temperature, enrichment, shape and density could make your material mass sub critical and then you have no nuclear explosion at all. It takes a great effort to make it explode but when it comes to antimatter it takes considerable more effort to make it NOT explode. The biggest nuclear explosion ever was about 50 megatons in 1961 and it took several hundred kilograms of Uranium 235 to make an explosion that big. It would only take one kilogram of antimatter to produce devastation of a similar size and thankfully without any of the associated radioactive contamination or fallout.

The Illuminati was the organization opposed to the Church in this movie and they were described as a group of men of science opposed to the teachings of the Catholic Church. The word 'Illuminati' actually means enlightened although it seems that artistic license is taken with this version. I also believe that most conspiracy theorists who believe in an 'Illuminati' organization," see it as a shadow government secretly trying to manipulate a new world order.

Overall I did enjoy the story and was even amused by a line that one Cardinal gives Professor Ludlum and is inferring the previous story of 'da Vinci code' when he gives him a book from the Vatican archives, "If you write about the Catholic church again please be Gentle with us this time."

There are Angels in this world and there are demons too but the trouble is trying to decide who is on which side. I wonder which side you would mentally place me on if I said that for humanity to truly move forward we need to acknowledge that now is the time we should admit to ourselves that we have to outgrow religion.