Costs of decommissioning nuclear power plants

I won't offer much more than an acknowledgement on this topic tonight for lack of time. The main point to be made is that these costs are a very strong function of our regulations, and our regulations are both incredibly strict and inconsistent.

Opponents of nuclear power often attempt to confuse the issue, acting as if nuclear waste does not already exist. They'll complain that Yucca Mountain is insufficiently analyized or otherwise inadequate without ever acknowledging that it's the best we have. It certainly is easier to secure waste at one site than the dozens and dozens we have now, yet instead of seeking the incremental improvements they would have us remain in a state that is worse. Incidentally, have you read this?

As for decommissioning plants themselves, how clean is clean? That decision alone would raise or lower the costs by entire orders of magnitude. Opponents of nuclear power want the area restored as if no one had ever set foot there, but there simply isn't any logical reason for that. If it was a good site for a nuclear power plant, it's probably a good site for another one - rip out the parts that are past their useful lives and start over. The cooling is there, the power lines are there, the staff is there, the seismic analysis is there, the emergency plan is there - why throw this all away?

Busy....

Posting will be near-nonexistent for a few days as I deal with a nasty deadline. In the meantime, there are plenty of links to bloggers on the left and others on the right. By the time you've checked them all out I might even be back.

Eclipse coming

Some of us will be able to see a partial eclipse of the sun on Monday.

If you go to see it, make sure you protect your eyes. Don't try sunglasses unless you want to join the company of other sunglass wearers like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles. Sunglasses do not filter out the rays that do the harm.

Here's some more info, with pictures of past eclipses.

TechTV offers some tips if you decide to try to photograph an eclipse. And remember, it won't do your eyes much good to put filters over your lens and then point it using the viewfinder...

Be aware that direct sunlight can damage CCD devices like those in your digital optics. So don't try to shoot it unfiltered with anything that uses CCDs, such as your digital camera, EyeModule, and possibly your camcorder.

Or you can view it with your own handmade neato pinhole camera.

Revenge

I really do have a life, but occasionally I catch myself channel surfing. Or worse, actually stopping to watch a show.

At the moment it's F/X, with "When Good Pets Go Bad". I won't doubt that the animals in question were provoked, but I could do without the accompanying purple prose which would imply that animals are more civilized than humans are.

Then we get an assortment of bizarre events. Running with bulls. A woman mauled by a house cat (really - it took 38 stitches to patch her up). Stallions fighting. Disease bearing monkeys loose from a testing lab. A bison throwing a tourist several feet in the air into a tree.

Some of it was perversely entertaining. In one, a bull actually made it into the stands attacking the spectators. One TV personality was attacked by a muzzled bear, and another was attacked by an unmuzzled lion. And guy in a Santa suit was attacked by a reindeer (I'm not kidding) - he survived, but the reindeer had a heart attack and the Santa guy ate him.

But the climax was a videotape from Spain or thereabouts. Somebody pulled off the road in a rural area to answer nature's call and crosses a fence into a field. A friend(?!) of his back at the car decided to videotape him from outside the fence. Our star still has his pants down as he is approached by a curious donkey. With one hand on his trousers he tries to run away and fend off the donkey with the other. Next thing you know he is lying on the ground, the narrator mentions something about the donkey seeking a mate, and...well, they didn't show the rest.

So you thought you were cheap?

Try again.

Blogrolling

I don't have much new content to offer about now, but maybe you've been missing these folks.

Hawspipe has the only clean Marine joke I've ever heard.

Gene Expression is a combo of "A geneticist, a writer, a capitalist, a biochemist, an economist...and a blender." AKA Godless Capitalist, Joel Grus, Elizabeth Spiers, Razib, and Mary C. If you want controversy, this is the place.

Tom Daubert and Swen Swenson keep us up to date on Big Sky country.

The above are mere bloggers, but with Sasha Castel we have "La Blogatrice". Opera, politics, and some of everything else through the eyes of a New York woman. (What ever happened to BJ Thomas, anyway?)

And don't forget the Heritage Daily Briefing.

Taking evolution too far

I'm usually not the first one to an article, and usually unwilling to blog about what everybody else has. But I have to point this one out anyway, from a champion of animal rights:

Steven Wise leans to the lectern. "I don't see a difference between a chimpanzee," he states unequivocally, "and my 4 1/2-year-old son."

I'll bet that a chimpanzee could though.

Maybe it's time for some family services agency to take the boy away from him and replace him with a monkey. @#$% idiot!

Household power problems

Unless you can borrow an ex-spouse's car, here's another thing not to do at home. Wind up the engine in the car while in Neutral, then shift it into Drive (or dump the clutch into high gear) suddenly. Did you notice anything?

Well, people are everlastingly doing the equivalent to our electrical supply system. And your house's wiring feels those sudden changes or "transients", passing them on to your appliances.

Just as some things are more fragile than others, some electrical equipment is more sensitive to transients than others. Big strong dumb things like heaters can take about anything. But devices containing chips are especially sensitive - transients can destroy the physical devices or just the data these devices contain. Even light bulbs are sensitive to transients - have you noticed that they usually fail the instant you turn them on?

Once I was driving in rural Illinois when I saw a very bright flashing in the distance. I was already going that way and I had nose troubles, so I drove toward it. About 15 miles later I found the problem - a power line had broken loose from the welding shop it supplied and was flopping about on the ground. Those flashes were momentary short circuits, and every one of them would have felt like a big impact on the devices downstream. Anyway, a bunch of people were standing there watching it jump and flash and make noises. Fortunately no one was stupid enough to fool with it.

You can protect yourself from the power company and your neighbors in various ways. After frying her PC's motherboard, a relative is going to have the utility install some power conditioning apparatus for a fee of about $6/month. Or there's other equipment available from companies like Smarthome.

The above protect the whole house. But that doesn't mean that you don't generate transients yourself. Bump the garbage disposal. Turn on a light. Turn on a power saw, refrigerator, or air conditioner. Anything with a motor might take as much as 6 or 8 times as much current when it starts as it does when it has come up to speed - maybe you even see the lights dim when some of them kick on. For this reason it is smart to use surge protectors and uninterruptible power supplies.

Surge protectors are easy to find, but realize that they don't last forever - each spike damages them a little until they can no longer help. As for UPSs, I wouldn't be without one. They have the added virtue of alarming if the voltage coming to them from the wall gets low, so you have some warning about impending brownouts.

Transients aren't the only thing that can be wrong with your household electricity. If the voltage is consistently low or high there can be problems. In the US your appliances generally expect the voltage to be 110V, and lesser voltages can cause performance problems.

If the voltage is low something is probably overconsuming. I saw an excellent example of that at a friend's house once, where the lights to their barn were getting progressively dimmer. The power line from the house had been a DIY installation, definitely not in accordance with codes and standards. I told my friend that he probably had a short that was big enough to bleed juice like a fiend but not big enough to trip the breaker. Ah, he remembered a particularly ugly splice in the buried wire and he went to dig it up. A couple of scoops later steam was coming from the ground. He shut it off, respliced it with a better connection and better insulation, turned it back on, and suddenly he had brighter lights and lower power bills.

If the voltage is high, that's probably because the other side of neutral is low. This is bad because it tends to overheat sensitive devices like computer chips. Since computer chips are found in almost anything nowadays, voltage control is more important today than ever before.

Minor variations can make a difference too, because the heat increases approximately with the square of the voltage - a 10% increase in voltage can give you a 21% increase in heat to reject, which forces the operating temperatures up. Even light bulbs won't last as long - if they seem to last longer in some parts of the house rather than others, you might have this problem.

What's "the other side of neutral"? That's too much to explain here, but the cure might be as simple as rearranging the way your breakers are arranged in your distribution panel.

Gosh, I'll bet you wish I had a tip jar now, eh?...

Wake me up!

I know Dave Tepper has that trademarked, but surely he can cut me some slack for contributing so generously to his list of songs a few weeks ago. Now I need a list of my own, of Songs You Can't Possibly Sleep Through.

If I have any circadian rhythms at all, they must not be on a 24 hour cycle. Or maybe I was meant to live on the equator with constant length days. Anyway, it seems like I'm about as likely to be wide awake as dead sleepy at any given time of the day, and it shows in the times of some of my posts. It's not sleep apnea - I already checked (and from what I can tell there's an unseemly haste to prescribe expensive treatments for this - hey, it's just the insurance company's money...).

It wouldn't be so bad if I had been born rich instead of so...otherwise. But having a day job and other remnants of a life beyond blogging besides, well, at least I've learned that once in a while a catnap works wonders. Maybe I need this gadget.

Wanna make a million bucks? Figure out a way to transfer sleep and other bodily functions. There would be no more unemployment - they could all be eating, sleeping, exercising, fornicating, excreting, whatever, for someone else. Why not? - we already have surrogate mothers and "Exercise in a Bottle". And it'd take care of that teen sex thing too - "Can't come tonight - I have to have sex for my folks."

But this morning, despite crashing at a fairly reasonable time last night, I didn't wake up until about 11 AM. I must have slept through an hour of "Bob and Tom" and a metal CD. So now I'm looking to burn the ultimate Can't Sleep Through It CD.

Any suggestions?

World's best public bathrooms

We amateur journalists need a head for news. I knew I was on to something when channel surfing took me to the Travel Channel where I found "The World's Best Public Bathrooms". Here's the poop.

Sloan's ice cream shop somewhere in South Florida was 10th best. They had big windows into the bathroom that became opaque when the door was properly closed. Not all of the patrons close them properly, although we were spared the proof.

If a woman suggests Pasha's in Chicago you might want to reconsider. The women's room has a bar and live entertainment. As if they didn't spend enough time in there already.

The Maximum Salon Day Spa in NYC offers use of a thoroughly modern massaging throne with the latest in cleanliness irrigation technology, although men might do well to avoid some of the settings.

The best bathrooms for flirting were in Club Sugar in Santa Monica, CA. Gosh, why didn't I think of that?

But the best of all was with a jeweler in Hong Kong. A $200 jewelry purchase entitles you to visit a bathroom heavily decorated with gold, including a $3M toilet.

Incidentally...

Where do they find the leather-lunged announcers who shout "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL" for the World Cup matches? Does Guinness keep a record? The longest I've timed so far has been about 10 seconds.

Civic pride

St. Louis' own Anne Wilson is a nominee for the Sexiest Female Blogger. Through some grievous oversight somehow Alison was omitted. Paul?

Voyeur dorm et al

A few years ago I heard a morning DJ hyping something called "Voyeur Dorm". It was a house in Tampa, FL, populated with college aged girls and innumerable webcams. The DJ gave out a temporary password and invited people to go online and check it out. So, in the interests of science...

Yeah, there were a lot of cameras. Some were infrared so they would produce an image after the lights were out, and some were labeled "pee cam". With my dialup line there wasn't much practical perv appeal, especially given the spike in traffic. But if nothing else it was enough to convince me that it wasn't a put on.

I'll say. Now TechTV's CyberCrime show is covering this, complete with blurred images and bleeps. Allegedly this operation has thousands of subscribers and has made $3M since 1998, and the girls make $400 to $700 a week.

The city fathers in Tampa are out to put Voyeur Dorm out of business, on the grounds that a business is being run in a residential neighborhood. This case could be fun to watch.

Ah, next story, on Upskirting.com. Yep, you guessed right. There are websites devoted to various tricks for shooting cameras up women's skirts and showing the relevant pictures. One trick was a low-slung gym bag with a camcorder pointed upward within.

More power stuff

If you don't look at anything else, check out Home Energy.

James Dulley has a regular newspaper column on household energy savings, and this site too.

Do you want to get really serious? Check out Home Power, which shows you how you can generate your own power and get off the grid. Unfortunately they let political nonsense detract from their message somewhat.

Kansas Windpower has been around for a while and I've heard good things about them. And there's Sunelco in Montana.

For a more yuppified approach there's Real Goods Trading from Ukiah, CA. They have a demonstration project described here.

Here are directories for solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind power related businesses.

Then there's straw bale construction, earth sheltered construction, passive solar...I'd dig up more if I had the energy.

Cooler roofing

Alright, I've amused myself at the expense of Californians and their ongoing energy problems. Now I'll point out something that you all and many others can do to save lots of power. In return, all I ask is that you throw Gray Davis out of office, preferably in totally humiliating fashion. Deal?

Last year sometime I read a quote from a scientist who claimed that the energy shortages in CA could have been prevented if all of the roofs there were of white reflecting material. I haven't found a link to that, but here are some others.

The examples here are for commercial or govt facilities such as schools. Zoning or other restrictions might make such roofing impractical for residential use, not to mention that the pitched roofs might reflect the heat off to your neighbors, and the light can be dazzling. But for flat roofed buildings and mobile homes this might be just the ticket.

Kyoto vs. the US

Steven Den Beste is back and has a lot to say about the Kyoto Protocols (which sound like they were written by an Ayn Rand character).

Is Eric Raymond homophobic?

Eric Raymond has the following to say about girls learning how to perform oral sex:

Therefore, a teenage girl teaching herself how to give a good blowjob is not merely learning how to give a blowjob. She is declaring her intention to acquire the (now mainstream) virtue of sexual competence. She is matter-of-factly reaching not just for a particular skill that she knows will be expected of her as an adult, but to learn the attitude and sensitivity that will take her further on the path of sexual ability. She is growing herself up.

Looked at this way, it's hard to see why anyone living in 2002 should find Ms. Krinsky's report of her self-training exceptionable. One might just as well object to her teaching herself how to cook, or drive, or dance.

Now wait a minute. What does Mr. Raymond have against lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders and transsexuals? Surely members of these groups would be offended if she refused to cook or drive for them. If BJs are just another social skill, doesn't our thoroughly modern teenage girl have more to learn yet so as to be more inclusive?

Power alert in California

Heh heh...

May the lights go out in Sacramento first, so Gray-out Davis and his coconspirators in California govt can simmer from their own folly.

Well that's not fair, is it? What about the rest of the town - what did they do to deserve this?

Only this - they had a perfectly good nuclear power plant in Sacramento, and the locals voted to shut it down.

So let them sweat in the dark.

Enron - environmental darling?

Paul Georgia has the story.

Unsupportable claims?

Godless Capitalist and untold others are jumping on Eugene Volokh's acknowledgement that "Nor can one argue that intelligent design is unproven, but evolution is proven.".

Among the complaints is that, as opposed to ID, the theory of evolution has "predictive value". What's more, GC put evolution in the same class as the theory of gravity in terms of predictive value.

OK, let's take GC back to Mesozoic times. We'll give him perfect knowledge of the genomes and distribution of all organisms alive at that time and all technology available today except the historic records (for obvious reasons). We'll warn him about all the earthquakes, Ice Ages, tectonic plate motions, volcanoes, meteorite strikes, or any other large-scale external phenomena from then until today. His challenge is to derive the distribution and genomes of the species of today.

How would you go about that even in principle? And if you can't do it, then where is the predictive value that we're told is "on par with gravity"? Based on what you could have known then, but with today's technology available, would you even have predicted the passing of the dinosaurs?

Now suppose you had made some predictions based on our current knowledge of gravitation. Would you have done better?

One more thing. GC says

Redo history from the Big Bang with a video camera? Impossible - so why is this even asked? It's not asked for ANY other theory.

That's because it's not needed to prove any other theory - that's the load you picked up when you ruled out creationism. You say there was a Big Bang but you can't show us one?

I'm agnostic - I don't claim to know if either of the groups discussed above has the right answers. But for all this talk of science, why don't the atheists ever come out and admit that they can't prove that there is/are no god(s)?

Where is Jane Galt?

Hyper-prolific blogger Jane Galt hasn't posted anything new for over 48 hours. Send out a search party.

There's no such thing as race?

That's the politically correct answer. Then there's this.

Anti-achievement

From the liner notes of John H. McWhorter's Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America: "Is school a "white" thing? If not, then why do African-American students from comfortable middle-class backgrounds perform so badly in the classroom?" The theory is that blacks are held back in academic achievement by other blacks, who disdain excellence in schoolwork as "acting white".

This is an interesting phenomenon, but IMO it's not unique to blacks. Doing exceptionally well in school didn't score us white guys any social points either.

IMO it's not just academic performance that is inhibited by peers. You couldn't be too "arty" either, unless you had some offsetting virtue (probably athletics).

Comments?

Genetics questions free-for-all

Given an arbitrary DNA sequence, can you determine whether there could be a corresponding organism, ie, could it live at all?

Given an arbitrary DNA sequence from existing organisms, can you determine their species?

Given two arbitrary DNA sequences from existing organisms, can you tell whether they can interbreed?

Because I said so

Don't miss Ipse Dixit's Caption of the Day contest.

It's the only possible explanation...

Dawn Olsen is holding the quarterfinals of the Sexiest Male Blogger contest. The winners face Tony Woodlief and me in the semis.

Town Hall has a blog

It's the C-log, and looks to be a terrific resource for conservatives.

How to cheat at Minesweeper

From the ScreenSavers.

Tech TV's Call for Help had an interesting segment on data recovery today. They showed several unfortunate PCs, including laptop that allegedly had been in the Amazon River since 1993. The presenter claimed to have recovered all the data from the laptop's hard drive. They also included some .wav files demonstrating sounds made by failing hard drives.

On Decoration Day

Thank you Andrew Olmsted. Via Hawspipe.

I finally scooped Instapundit...

Jonah Goldberg has a post about blogs in Town Hall today. Unaccountably he failed to mention this one.

He does mention this:

It's horse-and-sparrow journalism. The horse blazes the trail and eats the hay. The sparrows feed on what the horse leaves behind in steamy piles on the road.

UPDATE: I should have known better. I had just received the email from Town Hall mentioning this about 2:30AM, when even Glenn Reynolds sleeps. It looked like it was dated on the 27th. But this originally was published on the 24th in the WashTimes. Maybe next time...

I must say, I like his characterization of what the horses of the media produce. Especially the Horse - take it away, folks.

Hot teen sex!

I have plenty of opinions on this topic, which seems to be going around like wildfire. Particularly with reference to this US News article.

What I found interesting was the part about the girl with gonorrhea in her throat. Where did it come from?

Implicit in the arguments for sex education is that it's the teen boys that are knocking up or infecting the teen girls. Well, kids are generally born "clean" - if one of them gets a dose of clap, there are adults involved somewhere.

Well, of course there are. Older guys have been after young girls forever, and older women aren't innocents either. Why?

Because they're better in bed? How can that be? - they don't know anything.

Ah, that's it - because they don't know anything. They're easier to impress. Buy 'em a burger, tell them they're pretty, pass them a joint and you're in the saddle. You can't stop them, you know - teens will have sex.

Or will they? Is it possible that the real problem is older predators?

So what if it is? If the kid is legal, anything goes. We wouldn't dream of passing any laws against it, and increasingly it seems that we're even losing the will to condemn this.

Maybe we should. We might not want to lock somebody up for robbing the cradle, but we can discourage it. We can treat these people as beneath contempt. We can publicize them.

And if they start suffering misfortunes at the hands of strangers unknown, well...sometimes you just can't stop people from doing things.

For entertainment purposes only

Glenn Reynolds links us to this, about defeating Sony's CD copy protection with a magic marker. I'm all for protection of intellectual property, but I'm having a hard time crying about this one.

That gave me an idea for another way to use your CD burner. Throw away your batteries - just plug the inputs straight into the wall and copy electricity! Then you could play it back any time you needed the power, just like a perpetual motion machine. If you needed more power in the same space, use a DVD burner instead. Right?

I would hope that most people from civilized societies nowadays would find a problem or two with the above scenario, even if they don't know exactly what it is. The ones who try it anyway, well, let's hope a breaker trips before you start a fire or get burned or electrocuted. Nah, we'd better not spread that one - there are enough strange ideas already.

For instance, legend has it that when telephones were new, scamsters would call people to tell them that the phone company was going to blow out the lines, and they should take their phone off the hook and put a pillowcase over it to catch the dust. And this nearly rendered the phone systems inoperable.

Yesterday I got a call from a relative asking about an email she had received. It told her to delete jdbgmgr.exe from her Windows system because it was a virus. This is only the latest in a series of similar scams going around - here is a list.

If they're going to do that, the least they could do is have people delete something really malicious. Like AOL.

A grounding in basic electricity

A while back I posted an item about static electricity. The idea was to lay some basic groundwork leading up to a discussion of power generation and distribution for nontechnical people. In what follows I'll assume that the material in that earlier post is familiar.

Static electricity is comparatively simple to analyze - it's about electric charges that are not moving. Start moving those charges around and entirely new phenomena emerge.

A faucet provides a familiar analogy for these phenomena. It provides a connection to a supply of water that is under pressure, in what for our purposes is a limitless quantity. The electrical analogy for this pressure is the potential, or voltage. And just as water flows from where the pressure is higher to where it is lower, electric current flows from higher voltages to lower voltages.

Alright, go find a sink with a working faucet, and open the drain. You want to make sure that that water has some place to go once you turn it on. The electrical analogy for this is a "ground" - either way you are establishing a place where the flow can go without accumulating or "charging up".

Now turn the water on very slowly. Does water come out immediately? No, it takes some time to fill the spout before the water comes out. In an electric circuit, we have an analogous phenomenon called "capacitance" - you have to charge up the wires before you can deliver any power.

Now turn the faucet more wide open. You get more flow. That's because the faucet internals are positioned to ease the flow of water, which is analogous to electric current. Electric current is measured in units of charge passing through per second - the most commonly used unit is the "ampere" or "amp".

Now turn the faucet wide open. You're delivering as much flow as you can. That's because you have minimized the amount of flow resistance in your water "circuit". In an electric circuit the corresponding phenomenon is called "resistance".

The water flowing through the faucet is at a higher pressure (say 40 pounds per square inch, or psi) on the inlet of your faucet. Where it leaves the faucet it is at the same pressure as the rest of the room, or 0 psi. What happened to the pressure? The relevant energy was consumed by fluid flow friction inside your faucet, or its "resistance". In electric circuits the resistance of a device tells you the ratio of how much your voltage will drop across it to the amount of current that is flowing at the time.

Now shut off the faucet as quickly as you can. Depending on how your plumbing is designed, you might have felt a "water hammer" caused by forcing the water moving in your pipes to come to a sudden stop. There is an analogous phenomenon in electric circuits called "inductance".

Hmm, that's strange. Electricity is a bunch of moving charges which are almost massless, and I never see wires jump when I flip off a switch. So where is this inductance crap coming from?

Well, this post is getting king of long, so I guess I'll cut it off here. So you'll just have to sit on pins and needles for the next thrilling installment...

Post abortion stress syndrome?

Fortunately the closest I have come to an abortion (to my knowledge) was once when I was the designated driver.

I know several women who have had abortions, and I don't know a one who wants to talk about it. And it's not like they're not out there - allegedly 43% of all women in the US have had an abortion by age 45.

So I stumbled upon this site which speaks of "post abortion stress syndrome". It seems consistent with my observations - that this is a bigger deal than militant feminists would have us believe.

Feminists have been quoted as saying that this condition does not exist, and the site acknowledges that there is no formal recognition in medical literature. Maybe it was created by anti-abortion activists, whether by outright fabrication or by establishing an environment where women who get abortions are driven to it by their activities.

I don't think so. IMO abortion has been trivialized medically and psychologically. You can give the kid up for adoption and be through in 9 months. You can raise it and be through in 20 odd years. Or you can abort it and deal with it forever.

Make your money greener

It's been a while since I've heard anything about George Washington Carver. IMO he can't be mentioned often enough.

Why? Because we could use thousands of others like Carver in any color we can find them in. He showed farmers in the South how to rotate their crops with peanuts and sweet potatoes to enrich the land, and then created the products that created the demand for these crops. The resulting bounty to Southern agriculture was incalculable, and it was all from a man born a slave.

Our new Carvers could work on industrial processes that cause pollution, such as burning of fossil fuels, production of chemicals, disposal of solid waste, or handling of vast quantities of livestock waste from factory farming. Today a landfill, tomorrow a mine.

Or they could develop more products from corn or cane sugar, giving us hope of ending the ethanol boondoggle and ridiculous price supports.

The way to deal with pollution is to create new products, processes and markets. That means educating more engineers and managers to create and implement the industrial and other changes needed to make things cleaner.

You'd think Big Green would be right on board with this. But does anyone think we'll ever see the "Greenpeace School of Engineering", or "Sierra Club School of Business", or "Working Assets Venture Capital Fund"?

Hell no. They're too busy buying lunches in Washington, mugging for photographers, blowing smoke for journalists, exploiting cheap labor by college students, cutting trees for fundraising letters or hassling working people trying to make a living.

They're social pollution. And they don't deserve a dime of your money.

Field guide to the North American watermelon

As noted before, the name of this blog is a reference to people who cloak their political goals with environmental initiatives (they look green, but they're really red on the inside. Or else they're what Lenin called "useful idiots"). So how do we know who the watermelons are?

For one, they speak of "anti-environmentalists". No, there's no such thing. We all live on the same planet, drink the same water, breathe the same air, eat the same food...we're all in this together. Everybody wants a good environment - we just disagree about what one is, and how much we'll put up with in exchange for other benefits. And we have these people to thank for the fact that many of us now are conditioned to be suspicious of environmental initiatives - they've created divisions where none need exist.

They want you to give money to professional bitchers like Greenpox Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. Have these groups ever done anything besides pushing for bigger govt to solve problems? Would you rather spend your money on, say, developing a more efficient engine, or on buying enough Congressmen to raise CAFE standards?

They object to capitalism and private property, preferring govt control. There are problems to be addressed with resources subject to "the tragedy of the commons". But they should note that for truly deadly pollution, it's hard to top places with huge govts and/or nonexistent property rights, like Mexico or the former Soviet Union. Obviously neither capitalism nor private property are necessary.

They object to local control. If a community is satisfied with, say, the level of arsenic in their water, then why should anyone butt in? Why should automotive exhaust in Nebraska be regulated the same way as it is in Los Angeles? Why should some New Yorker who wants to see wolves in Yellowstone National Park on his vacation be able to force locals to live with them all year?

They demonize their opposition, presenting issues in terms of good vs. evil rather than your values and interests vs. mine. You cannot oppose them without having your motives questioned, and nothing is more questionable than being wealthy.

And further environmental progress in large measure will depend on kicking these people out of the leadership of environmental groups.

Blogrolling

The highly evolved James Rummel tells us about the Chinese navy, image manipulation, lunar colonies and teaching women how to shoot.

David Janes offers deep thoughts.

Myria has some history with solar photovoltaics (PV), and lots of other stuff too.

Of my permanent links on the left, Dave Tepper is the one most likely to point me to something I haven't seen before. Just don't ask him any embarrassing questions.

Attention older women - (over 35)

Hey, that's not my definition - I just heard it on TechTV. Personally I prefer "crone"...

Anyway, I'm still ripping off TechTV, which tells us that y'all are flocking to GameHouse. (Have you ever seen a popup ad for "Depends"?). It has a number of games for sale, or you can play them there if you're not spending enough time reading charming blogs like this one.

Handy utility

I've lived in a bunch of places where I couldn't or wouldn't have cable TV or a satellite dish around, which deprives me of TechTV. When I think of all the poor souls out there with Internet access but no TechTV - oh the humanity! So as a public service I'll tell you about some of what you're missing.

IMO the best show is The ScreenSavers. It's a 90 minute bull session for geeks with product demos, short interviews with people like Willie Nelson and Kevin Mitnick, news, polls, user call-in, babes whose names give me Google hits in conjunction with "nude", and occasional fights among people dressed in Star Wars outfits.

Tonight Megan Morrone demonstrated this neato toolbar I'm experimenting with now. You put it on your Win98 or higher toolbar and it gives you a text entry box and an icon to click for a menu.

Enter some text and instantly it fires up Google with the results. Enter an equal sign and a mathematical expression and it'll calculate it. Enter a period (or cnn) and an expression and it'll look for that keyword on CNN. And so on for dozens of options such as Ebay, Merriam-Webster, Amazon, weather, the Bible, Daypop, Jeeves, the CIA World Factbook, AIM, ascii conversions, hex conversions, alarms, timers, program launching, phone lookups and even a word unscrambler for cheating at Scrabble. You can download it here, and it's open source, so you can finagle with it if it suits you. I'm not through reviewing it yet but it looks terrific so far - check it out.

Call me "George"

Again the limited size of comments fails me, so I'll address this here.

Now Mr. Den Beste takes issue with me, aka "George". Why?

Two posts down you'll see a post entitled "Snuffing the candle at both ends". This is the original version:

You'd better not disagree with Steven Den Beste. You'll find yourself in elite company, such as with the creeps that killed Daniel Pearl.

The only real solution for such people is to have their faces rubbed in the reality implicit in their attitudes. Anyone who opposes fetal cell research should spend a day helping to care for someone who suffers from advanced Parkinson's disease, for instance. Anyone who opposes physician-aided euthanasia should watch the documentary prepared in the UK which showed what Diane Pretty's life was like before she finally died the horrible death she most feared.

And people who try to claim moral equivalence between the US and the Islamic Fundamentalists we face should watch the video of Daniel Pearl having his throat cut and then being brutally decapitated. Then they should be asked to explain just how it was really America's fault that he died.

Do people who oppose fetal stem cell research cause Parkinson's disease? His parallel doesn't hold otherwise - it's between them and the guys who cut Daniel Pearl's throat on videotape. That is totally out of bounds.

Yeah, let's put euthanasia in play, so you can browbeat possibly curable people into suicide because Junior wants all of his inheritance ("Here Doc, I'll split it with you"). Let's put pressure on doctors to contain costs by pulling more plugs. Let's establish a market in human life ("But honey, if you say OK, the insurance company offered us a lot of money!"). Let's start down the mother of all slippery slopes...

I have a better idea. Let's start with an apology for one of the most asinine parallels ever. And I'll challenge Mr. Den Beste to see if he can identify any potential downside to euthanasia.

I have a problem with drawing parallels between those creeps and people who oppose euthanasia (between cold-blooded killers and those who oppose it no less), just like some people don't like constant invocations of Hitler. Anyway, although I've seen him here from time to time, I sent an email to Mr. Den Beste as a courtesy.

But the original post was more heated than what I usually write, and I took another look after I had sent the email. Then I recognized the faulty parallel, which had been my inspiration for proposing an apology. So I took the post back down, noted it as having been changed to what you see in the previous post, and reposted it. Whoops, I guess I shouldn't have sent the courtesy email.

Then I checked my email. SDB had written a calm, reasoned email that noted a couple of things I had written. Crap - he'd already seen the original version. I replied that I had revised and reposted, and but for an innocuous title change (I think the original was "Let's put this one to rest") the post has remained the same since.

I went on to something else, then about 10 or so I picked up email #2 asking me who I was to ask for an apology, etc. Yes, the tone had changed. What I didn't know at the time was that subsequently he had also replied on his blog at greater length.

In reply I noted that we had crossed in the mail and I had already told him about the recall. Then I got his 3rd reply, which directed me to his post without comment. I had just come back from that when I saw the comment to the previous post where Godless Capitalist figured out who "George" was.

I leave it to the reader to determine the accuracy of Mr. Den Beste's characterization of my initial post, which in any case had been withdrawn well before his post appeared (note that he's in San Diego, CA, 2 hours behind me), and he had also been notified of this.

I must say, I learned a lot about myself. For one, I'm pretentious. Also, I'm trying to suppress alternate points of view (where have I heard that line before?).

On the other hand, who else can claim that Mr. Den Beste has mentioned their bodily orifices on his blog? Do you suppose I could sell pictures of them?

C'est la vie. We've all learned something new now, haven't we?

The real story on radwaste

But for one minor quibble, I can give this no higher compliment than "I wish I had written it".

Snuffing the candle at both ends

I take issue with the following from Steven Den Beste:

The only real solution for such people is to have their faces rubbed in the reality implicit in their attitudes. Anyone who opposes fetal cell research should spend a day helping to care for someone who suffers from advanced Parkinson's disease, for instance. Anyone who opposes physician-aided euthanasia should watch the documentary prepared in the UK which showed what Diane Pretty's life was like before she finally died the horrible death she most feared.

And people who try to claim moral equivalence between the US and the Islamic Fundamentalists we face should watch the video of Daniel Pearl having his throat cut and then being brutally decapitated. Then they should be asked to explain just how it was really America's fault that he died.

Do people who oppose fetal stem cell research cause Parkinson's disease? If the cure already exists, give it to them - if it doesn't, then how do you know it ever will? All we know for sure is that embryos are being consumed (a nice word for it) prospectively while there is much unheralded promise in adult stem cell research.

Yeah, let's put euthanasia in play, so you can browbeat possibly curable people into suicide because Junior wants all of his inheritance ("Here Doc, I'll split it with you"). Let's put pressure on doctors to contain costs by pulling more plugs. Let's establish a market in human life ("But honey, if you say OK, the insurance company/guy who needs the liver/hospital administrator/VA bureaucrat will give us a lot of money!"). Let's start down the mother of all slippery slopes...

I'll challenge Mr. Den Beste to see if he can identify any potential downside to euthanasia.

(This post has been modified)

Republish!

This morning I checked this blog and got "page not found". I checked Instapundit and he said "republish". I did, and now you can see this.

So who likes Cornerhost? Any other recommendations?

More urban legends

Nobody but a knee-jerk say-anything liberal believes this crapola about advance knowledge of the events of 9/11. If you believe it, go away - I don't have time for you.

Unless we're talking about Bill Gates... Look at this too.

Wanna waste an afternoon? Conjure the Sage of Seattle! (just don't call him the oracle). Just fire up the Windows Notepad, WordPad, Word, or some other GUI editor. Try writing your name, your blog's name, your Email address, etc, in a big font, then change the font to WingDings or WebDings. Try it in all caps too. Add in the recreational chemicals of your choice, wrap a rag around your head and let the spirits speak!

I like what you get with Yasser Arafat's initials. Use all caps with WingDings.

Tennis ball cannons

Do.

Overdo.

Don't.

But it can't hurt

Here I thought I was doing something good for my health.

Changing your Blogger password

From Ev's help system:

Question

How do I change my Blogger password?

Answer

To change your password, from the Blogger home page, sign in, and click on one of your blogs. Then click the Team button.

Then click on your name, then click [Edit My Profile]. From there, you can change any of your user information, including your password.

I own James Lileks

What's more, it was easy. All I had to do was put some money in his tip jar, and now he dances to my tune.

You don't believe me? Explain it to the campaign-finance reform crowd. They'll tell you at great length that I would only have left money because I have nefarious designs on his site.

They're right of course. Jasperwood? My idea. That matchbook thing? I outdo myself sometimes. The Gnat movies? What else could have inspired him? And he's powerless to protest - he's under strict orders.

Just to prove it to you, I'll even make a prediction - he'll write something clever about the Middle East in the next few weeks. Remember, you heard it here first...

Under the logic of campaign finance reform, I couldn't possibly have done it because I like Lileks's writing or his site. Never mind the hard link that has been here since day 1 of this blog - I'm still one of the few who hasn't ever linked to one of his Bleats or Screeds.

Suddenly I got an even better idea - what if I send some money to the campaign finance reformers and just tell them to drop their campaign. Surely they will - if they don't, they'll disprove their entire program.

About those priests

I've been trying to look some of this stuff up with little luck. Maybe some of the rest of you can help.

1) How often are priests busted for messing with girls?

2) We're calling these creeps 'pedophiles', which implies desiring sex with children. But these 'children' appear to be exclusively boys.

3) Do gays and non-gays sexually abuse children at the same rates? For instance, if straight men are X times more common than gay men, then I would expect that roughly X times as many girls would be sexually abused by men than there would be boys sexually abused by men. Is this true, or is one kind disproportionately more prevalent than the other?

4) Are there differences in reporting rates? That is, who's more likely to tell - the boys or the girls?

Controlling drugs and governments

Perry De Havilland gets it right.

And while you're there, check out this.

Problems with Blogger/Blogger Pro

If you have posted recently with Blogger Pro, take a good look at your site. See if it didn't foul up in rendering something about your posts. It did for me, and I think I've seen at least one more example. Check it now!

It's a dirty job, but...

Charles Austin can channel Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D., Saudi Arabia). Does that mean we can get rid of the original one?

At least let's make sure she doesn't breed with Richard Cohen.

WORLD EXCLUSIVE - until Gato wakes up

We had the First Irregular St. Louis Blog Bash or whatever you might call it. Scarcely ever has any venue been blessed with such an array of luminaries (and me too, semiconscious as I was). And if Pat and Leo from TechTV couldn't make it, it was their loss.

Oh yeah. If you ever go to TNGs in Webster Groves, that's a fairy on the waitress's hip, not an angel. But don't take my word for it.

Porn and me - The Early Years

I once heard a joke about three kids wandering around in a park when they stumbled upon some lovers in the bushes. The 4 year old said "They're fighting". The 6 year old said "They're making love". And the 8 year old said "And badly".

Do kids learn more about sex at an earlier age nowadays than they did, say, 30 years ago? I don't think anybody would argue against that. My own experience stands in sharp contrast - I was a bookish smalltown Midwestern kid with a set of encyclopedias and 3 TV channels.

Now this isn't a "True Confessions" blog, but IMO my own experiences running into porn when I was a kid might be amusing. And it's from a geeky kid's perspective, where the book learning was far ahead of any practical knowledge.

Breasts I figured out bright and early. I knew what they were and allegedly even drew some pictures of them at a very young age, but I don't remember how I found out what they looked like. It was probably from a calendar at an auto repair shop or something like that, and probably wasn't a photograph. I didn't know what the big deal was about them though, although somehow I liked looking. Maybe it was just the fact that they were usually so ostentatiously covered (except for that June or July 1967 Playboy I found, with Lisa Baker, DeDe Lind and Sherry Jackson, the girl from "Make Room for Daddy" - I can't believe I still remember that, but at least it proves that I really did read it). Anyway, I found out what they were for biologically speaking from a book, and later on I learned of other applications and expressions like "first base".

I'm not sure when it was that I figured out that girls and boys had different plumbing. It was probably fairly late, because the rest of the family was much older and didn't wander around nude. The little girls in the neighborhood weren't helpful (but they made up for it later, believe me). That Playboy wasn't any help - I think it was about 1970 or so when pubic hair started showing up ever so coyly in mass-market men's magazines. National Geographic didn't go there either. The best information I had was the paperwork from a box of tampons mentioned a few posts ago, and that was a black and white cross-section of a woman's pelvis.

But hey, that picture made me think - if THAT'll fit in there... So even before I learned about it on the streets I deduced the ins and outs of coitus. The ins, anyway - the practical details needed work. I definitely didn't appreciate the reproductive significance, and it sounded kind of gross. I figured people probably didn't do stuff like that - what for? For all I knew, if you were into stuff like that, you'd do as well with an ear. Hey, I was little...

Then I was snooping somewhere and discovered some porn. My analytical mind went to work immediately and I examined the women closely. It was kind of frustrating though, because a lot of the photography was grainy and small, and the women were downright shaggy. It definitely wasn't up (!?) to Larry Flynt's highly-groomed brightly-lit speculum-friendly photographic standards, so I still had more questions.

I saw some practices that hadn't occurred to me either. I already knew a name for one of them too (the one you might free-associate with "Monica"), and from context I realized it was an epithet. But I hadn't associated the word with the act, and I hadn't heard it often enough to know it was considered a bad word. Until, frustrated as a faster kid eluded me in a game of tag, I hollered "you @#$@!" at him at the top of my lungs.

My parents heard (along with everybody else for blocks in those pre-AC days), and I was called on the carpet. Did I know what it meant? "No", I answered honestly. But you can bet your bottom dollar I started thinking about it. I realized it was a compound word, and eureka! - there's even a term for what was going on in those pictures! I was probably about 9 at the time.

I kept learning more things. I knew what condoms were, but called them "rubbers". I knew the machines that dispensed them (usually in a rest room of a cheap diner or bowling alley) always said "for the prevention of disease only". I didn't know what diseases those might be, but I wanted to find out. Secondhand.

(There were other machines there too, containing such novelties as a "pecker stretcher". There were also tiny topless playing cards sold one suit at a time, which I furtively acquired at a quarter or so each until I got all four.)

We kids had arguments about what certain words meant, especially the F word. We also knew the number 69 had some sort of significance, and you couldn't pour a sidewalk in town without a kid inscribing this in it. (Later I learned 68 - you do me and I'll owe you one).

Sometime around this time the Supreme Court decided that something wasn't porn if it had "redeeming social value". That explains what I found about this time. There would be a long narrative section running through it, often with some Masters & Johnson type descriptions of sex and arousal. It would be accompanied by no-holds-barred smut that had utterly nothing to do with the narrative. The performers did seem to be having a good time though.

But I didn't think of any of this as anything anybody I knew would ever do. I sure hadn't caught anyone in flagrante delicto. Or even dogs...it must have been the water.

I ran into some literary things too. I wound up reading "Studs Lonigan" out of desperation, but much of it was lost on me. In particular, I asked an 80 year old relative what a "whorehouse" was. She didn't need her Ex-Lax that day.

I guess that takes me to about age 10. It's been a long time since then, a few things have changed, and I might even have learned a thing or two. I guess I'd have to conclude that the worst effect of porn that I recognize was a cultivation of unrealistic expectations - as I ran into real women later they set me straight right away.

But then this exposure didn't take place in a vacuum. Somehow I got opposing ideas about sexual continence and norms in sufficient quantity to keep me out of trouble at a time when herpes, AIDS and other treats were running amok.

I'm not sure where those ideas came from. I wasn't a churchgoer then either, I don't recall any discussion about sex with anybody but other kids, and this was before sex education. Readily available books were coy. And retrospect, I had some really bad examples. So all I can figure is that somehow it was simply subliminally built into our culture, including the understanding that those examples were bad.

I see few signs that that culture I grew up in still exists. Meanwhile porn has become pervasive, and while performers are not necessarily on the A list they aren't pariahs either. And Larry Flynt - good grief.

So although I might conclude that I didn't suffer anything I couldn't deal with, I'm not sure a modern kid has the same countervailing influences. With the result that....

Two managers

American Heritage is featuring an article inspired by Enron about "why the boss needs a boss". Henry Ford was used as an example.

Some years back I read David Halberstam's book "The Reckoning", which compared the histories of Ford Motor Company and Nissan. It described some of Henry Ford's management practices, which were, uh, unconventional (which is no surprise if you've read much about Ford).

For one, he hated accountants. He was known to go to the accounting department and just fire everybody there. It got to the point where people would stack invoices on a scale and weigh them to get an idea of how much was owed. You know, to balance the books.

Then Alfred P. Sloan arrived at General Motors. He proceeded to invent much of modern management as Peter Drucker watched and took notes. The result was some of the best management literature ever seen, and each man gave his name to a prominent business school.

Tech TV hosts in St. Louis this Saturday

Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton of TechTV's Screen Savers will be in Ballwin, MO at the CompUSA store from 11 AM to 1 PM.

To kill a mockingbird?

If you've seen or read "To Kill a Mockingbird", you'll recall a moral dilemma that arose at the end, and how the characters dealt with it.

Stephen Den Beste gives us this case from the UK. As he puts it:

A film crew has spent the last month filming at the home of Diane Pretty, the British woman who is horribly crippled with motor neurone disease and who has been legally prevented from a merciful, rapid and painless death by British law.

It's going to be broadcast tonight, in just a few hours, on British television. Anyone who opposes euthanasia, who states sanctimoniously that "every life can still be a source of joy," should watch the program and see what a living hell her life had become.

Plenty of people die unpleasant deaths, in hospitals or elsewhere. But we don't all have film crews around for the last month and get on the BBC. That's what I find interesting about this story. IMO this woman became a pawn of someone with bigger fish to fry, just as Norma McCorvey (aka Jane Roe) became Sarah Weddington's stepping stone.

I certainly wouldn't trade places with this woman or her husband. But I've also heard the old legal maxim "hard cases make bad law". It's a little much to expect our entire society to change the rules so radically based on one tragic overexposed case.

I'm against euthanasia, but that's another post. What I'm interested in for now is in better ways for this to be handled. SDB referenced an article with this quote:

His wife always said she wanted her husband to help her commit suicide because she feared the choking and asphyxia often caused by her disease.

and this one:

"Diane had to go through the one thing she had foreseen and was afraid of - and there was nothing I could do to help."

SDB says "It was the death that anti-euthanasia activists condemned her to." You'd think they had given her the condition.

I see things a little differently. It's easy to say what I might have done or counseled. But FWIW if someone begged me to help them commit suicide, and I didn't have to flip the switch myself, and I didn't have to stick around and watch, I think I might just do it. Given a choice between throwing the doors wide open to euthanasia, or being a hypocrite, give me hypocrisy every time.

Then what? I suppose I'm guilty of something or other depending on the jurisdiction. So it's up to the investigators, medical examiners and prosecutors what happens next.

If they chose to prosecute, what do you think the opportunists at the Voluntary Euthanasia Society would have done? If they gave two cents about Diane Pretty's comfort they would have counseled her husband to help her commit suicide, then offered to defend him against any prosecution. But then they wouldn't have their film, and might not have had their test case. What's one miserable death when you have a chance to reform society?

Does life imitate art? We know what happened in "To Kill a Mockingbird". Suppose her husband had helped her commit suicide, and she did it. What should happen next?

The best idea yet

James Miller scores on EconoBlog.

Jane Galt, Mindles H. Dreck and Arnold Kling contribute there too, so what are you waiting for?

Reality check

Alright, how many of you actually knew someone else who had a blog when you started?

I sure didn't. A reference to Instapundit from the Weekly Standard got me reading blogs last fall. After a couple of months looking around at various blogs it seemed that some of my favorite subjects weren't being covered, or maybe weren't getting my own perverse spin. Combine that with a long-suppressed urge to learn more about the Web and this is what you get.

As a result of this I've learned a tremendous amount and been exposed to some really terrific people. But in real life? - ha! I work among a bunch of late-20s to 50ish professionals, about 99% college grads, and I haven't run into one yet who knows what a blog is. And for the most part these people are IT professionals - I have to wonder what it's like among less-technical people.

We're reading all about Pim Fortuyn. I have yet to run into anybody who has heard of him. Jenin? Oh yeah, she's that porn star. Yasser Arafat? Well, you're not so skinny yourself.

So I'm looking forward to the Midwest Blog Bash this weekend in St. Louis. I haven't met any of the people there and I have no idea what any of them look like. But I'll have more in common with them in the first 5 minutes than I have with some people I've worked with for a year. Come see us!

Government corruption

I have a million and one beefs with Democrats and modern-day liberals, both philosophically and in particulars. But what is really aggravating is watching how they'll bray ever onward about something needing a solution, while ruling out every form that solution might logically take.

Let's consider corruption in govt, for instance. Nobody likes it. Democrats in particular should be outraged, because govt is their chosen vehicle for delivering so many social goods - their cries should be the loudest as we run the corrupt out of town. But no, they were the guys who defended Bill Clinton to the end, demonstrating that it's all about partisanship, not good govt.

Regarding corruption, what should we expect of govt employees, including our Senators and Representatives? We trust these people with our liberty, our treasury and our economy. Clearly they will be subject to solicitations for favors. What if they are compromised?

This isn't exactly hypothetical. "Charles Dodgson" writes "So the corporations are buying the laws they want."

But why does he focus on the corporations? If they're "buying laws", who are they buying them from? There's only one source of supply - the govt. So it should be clear that such corporate malfeasance (if in fact that's what it is) cannot occur unless the govt is involved. And arguably the most corrupt govts on earth exist where there are no corporations - nobody with any knowledge of history can support the idea that govts need outside influences to cause corruption.

So how do we attack this problem of govt corruption? Do we focus on the millions of people who might conceivably benefit from rule-bending or -breaking? Or do we focus on the one party that must be present to all acts of corruption, ie, the govt itself?

IMO it seems clear that the most socially efficient way to approach this is by putting more responsibility on the govt. That of course is a major undertaking, made the more complicated by the fact that the body that must implement the changes has an interest in preventing their implementation. (which is one more argument in favor of smaller govt).

But in the meantime Mr. "Dodgson" can help us by dropping this focus on corporate demonization and acknowledging that none of this could happen without the govt.

Creating a theory, part IV

I have dynamite intentions of keeping this blog from turning into The Evolution Forum, but duty calls for at least one more post.

I had hoped that this was clear by now, but let's make it even more explicit - this isn't about supporting any particular religion or theory other than evolution. And even in that, the question is limited to consideration of what I called The Theory in this post - that's my definition of "evolution", Mike Gannis.

I haven't defended religion generally or in particular, and religion is not relevant to this discussion. Thus invocation of religion is out of order.

MG: I'm not advocating anything in particular, so I can't be advocating anything that's "demonstrably false". I'm asking for support of evolution on its own merits, but you keep injecting references to others. We don't prove scientific theories by default. And when you drag religion in in disparaging terms, that IMO is "picking a fight".

MG: In #36 you said "who needs species?" (then gave me this roses/leeches thing that I'm still scratching my head about). When I responded that you needed to take the species thing up with the feds and biologists you responded as if I were avoiding the issue. No, I'm just noting that without the species you've removed the entire frame of reference. It's not for nothing that Darwin named his book "The Origin of Species".

PO: how about saving us a trip to the community college and telling us if an individual's genome remains 100% identical over its lifetime? Do we know? And if it varies, doesn't that let Lamarck back in the door?

Extrapolations

Do men who extrapolate ever have erections?

I have to wonder. It must be terrifying - if the rate of growth were sustained long enough, Paul Ehrlich's phallus would exceed the volume of the known universe. And when it receded! - it could continue to grow smaller and smaller, perhaps forming a black hole and sucking in the entire planet.

If there's a Stupid Example Hall of Fame, the above could be a finalist. But really, some phenomena are self-limiting, and others come and go with changing conditions. And we can't say that we know what's happening beyond those most extreme data points we have available.

Take boiling, for instance. You might think that the hotter the fire you have under the pan, the faster the water in it will boil. That's true over a range, but then at a certain point the higher temperatures actually make things worse. This phenomenon must be taken into account when designing nuclear reactors, among other things. (Test it yourself with a hot frying pan - flick drops of water on it as you heat it. As the temperature rises, the drops will spread out and evaporate instantly. But at some point before you ruin your pan, the drops will form a ball and skate around the surface.)

Then there's freezing. Liquid water gets more dense the colder it gets, until just a few degrees above freezing. Then it starts to expand, so much so that by the time it freezes the ice has a lower density than the liquid around it. Which is why ice floats.

There are plenty more examples. Compressible fluids behave differently as their velocities approach the speed of sound. It's well known in medicine that "the dose makes the poison", and you can die from drinking too much water. Extrapolate biological responses to radiation doses down from Hiroshima levels to zero and the resulting predictions turn out way high. Tax receipts can actually decrease as you increase tax rates. And calculations involving subatomic particles must take quantum-mechanical and relativistic phenomena into account - simple Newtonian mechanics don't work anymore.

So we have to be careful when we extrapolate. We're familiar with the phenomena that I described above, but I dare say that we haven't seen everything yet. Especially under the extreme conditions that are found in stars or other remote parts of the universe.

Yet it is popular to presume that the laws of physics can be extrapolated all the way to their singularities or beyond. Having done so, some claim that the universe resulted from a "big bang". Who knows, maybe it's true. But the fact is, we haven't seen a big bang. So we can't know if our extrapolations have led to situations like the above, when the rules change.

Hmm. Why would scientists persist in formulating such predictions, even pushing them to be taught in our schools? Ask Bryan Preston.

Eddie Stanky, all time great

Some of you have no idea what that title is about. Heathens! (In case that results from a Y-chromosome deficiency, I'll refer you here.)

Those of you who are hardcore baseball fans might be smirking at this title. Eddie Stanky, the Brat? A guy who retired almost 50 years ago with 29 career homers and a .264 batting average? Well, bear with me.

I'm a red-blooded American who's interested in history of all sorts, so I find baseball history irresistible. You can fill shelf after shelf with baseball books (even George Will has written two) and there's still always something new. There are plenty of websites too, like the "Baseball Reference" one used earlier and permalinked on the lower right side of this page.

I'm also a numbers kind of guy, and no sport generates them like baseball. There are plenty of raw statistics, and then there are guys like Bill James who are everlastingly concocting new ones. It's to the point where they've even had to coin a new name for the field - sabermetrics (where the "saber" comes from the Society of American Baseball Researchers).

Bill James is an opinionated and prolific "sabermetrician". He released "The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract" earlier this year, in which he provides his ranking of the 100 best players of all time for each position. What's more, he provides anecdotes about all of these.

James's big thing nowadays is something he calls "Win Shares". It's some sort of uber-statistic which attempts to rank a player's overall value to a team in a way that transcends eras, stadiums and positions. Was Ty Cobb better than Pete Rose? James will determine the answer for all time...

James ranks Eddie Stanky 34th all-time among second basemen. Joe Morgan is #1, Jackie Robinson is #4, Craig Biggio is #5, Ryne Sandberg is #7. Want more? Buy the book, tightwad.

James isn't the only one with an opinion though. Now we have "Clearing the Bases" by Allen Barra. Barra complains that most sports point to fairly recent players as the all-time greats, but baseball points to long-dead heroes like Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner. Barra argues in favor of more contemporary players, noting changes in the number of competitors, the impact of integration, and the accumulated wisdom of experience in their favor. So he throws out a lot of old-timers who played in days when the batter could specify the pitch, or fielders didn't wear gloves. He also scoffs at a lot of traditionally revered statistics like batting average and RBIs in favor of newer ones like on-base average.

OK, let's take a look at on-base average. After you pitch the old old-timers Barra's way, long retired players still dominate the list, with Williams, Ruth and Gehrig in the top three slots. But next comes Frank Thomas, Edgar Martinez is 7th, and Jeff Bagwell, Wade Boggs, Barry Bonds and Jim Thome all show up in the top 25.

Back to our hero. Eddie Stanky retired in 1953, years before I was born, so all I knew about him were anecdotes or quotes something like "He can't hit, he can't throw and he can't run, but the little guy sure does kill you". It turns out that Stanky is 27th all-time in on-base average at .410, tied with quite respectable company - Harry Heilmann, Charlie Keller, and Jackie Robinson.

I'm sure we're not through coming up with innovative baseball statistics. OBA is actually kind of dated by now - Barra says Branch Rickey used to argue that it was superior in his time. Nowadays SLOB is getting more popular, and it'll be interesting to see how well Bill James "win shares" work.

Hero Street

You probably haven't heard of Silvis, IL. Back around the 1930's the locals didn't think too much of it either. When a bunch of Mexican section hands moved to the area to work on the Rock Island Line, this is where they were moved after city fathers determined that they could no longer live in boxcars in the railroad yard. So the boxcars and all went to unpaved Second Street.

The erstwhile Second Street is a block and a half long. But it contributed 84 men to WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. 8 of them didn't come back, and 1 won a Silver Star. No street of comparable size can boast of such a record of military service. That claim has stood up to rigorous research and been verified by the Department of Defense. Which is why, in 1967, it was renamed Hero Street.

The official web site goes into much more detail, especially about a monument they're raising money to build. Let's give these guys the recognition they deserve.

< clever-intro>< /clever-intro>

John Weidner has it all figured out.

Find the Apricot

Probably not be suitable for work. From methodshop.

This is tamer - check it out.

Affirmative action in practice

There has been some discussion elsewhere about John McWhorter, a professor at UC Berkeley. He dared to question affirmative action, and immediately he was pounced upon with allegations that he benefited from it.

So what if he did -may we not evaluate his statements on their own merits? "Well, he said 1+1=2, but can I trust him?"

Racial spoils systems are offensive inherently, but they become pernicious too when standards are bent to accomodate. I'm not sure that was the case with McWhorter. (It was true with Alan Bakke, though - his alternate, Patrick Chavis, has been maiming or killing his patients.)

Some years back I worked for a company with a highly placed black executive in the engineering department. After the Bakke decision and numerous others, I knew that this might not have anything to do with his talents. So I discreetly asked a few people who weren't known for parroting party lines. They were unanimous in their praise for him, and noted he had worked his way up from the control room. Belated apologies, Mr. Reed.

In the early 90's I went to the personnel office at the University of Illinois. I wasn't there to research social justice, but eventually I noticed that of the dozens of people I saw, I was the only white male there. Sure, it could have been a statistical anomaly....

Sometime in the 80's a relative sought a job as a state trooper in Illinois. He took a test and did fine relative to traditional standards. But he wasn't good enough for a white guy, and minorities with lower scores got in instead. Are they fine cops? Maybe so.

But when considering the propriety of affirmative action, you have to consider that this is a zero-sum game - you're creating losers. Is it just my imagination, or is this just never discussed?

Comment snafu

I understand that at least one person has discovered he is banned from my comments. I'm not sure how that happened, because to date I have not deliberately banned anyone. Nor have I intentionally deleted comments, but I know of at least 3 that are gone.

I could have fatfingered it, or it might have something to do with YACCS upgrades. In any case, I'm working on a fix, and my apologies in the meantime.

UPDATE: It should be fixed now. Upgrade your YACCS to get more control over stuff like this. I still don't know what happened to the 3 comments, and can't be sure I didn't lose more.

Doing my part

Tonight I'm going to go home, grab my guitar and kick out the jams for peace in the Middle East.

Creating a theory - part III

If you've been following this succession of posts, several of us have been discussing the theory of evolution on its own merits, without reference to religious alternatives. It can be awkward to follow, because the comments I am addressing below are found under another blog item here.

I must say, I admire Paul Orwin's faith in things unseen when he says "I think intelligent design theory is another incarnation of the 'God of the Gaps' theology, which will die a slow and painful death as the gaps are closed". This looks like antipathy to me - why?

Doug Turnbull notes that bacteria adapt to antibiotics, showing characteristics that weren't there before. And how does that happen? Is it totally dependent on random changes in the genome? That would appear to offer an infinite number of possibilities, which even bacteria are not prolific enough to generate. But if these mutations are not totally random, what guides them? How can a cell zero in on the most effective mutations in a finite time in order to survive?

I don't agree with DT's assessment of astrophysics under my criteria. Science deals in what is useful, not in what is true, and astrophysics has generated some useful results. What's more, much of it works with phenomena well known here on earth, such as relativity, red shifts, gravitation, etc. And the consequences of being wrong are not great in any case, with the possible exception of predictions of the life of the sun, or the paths of objects that might collide with the earth.

But on the edges, when it uses a century or two of observation to predict what will happen billions of years from now, it's dodgy and should be recognized as such. It's as if you were given a minute to observe a species unlike any on earth and expected to be able to tell how old it was and how much longer it would live.

As for the videotape comment, we'd ask for something like that for about anything else in the hard sciences. Don't tell me this reaction occurs, show me, and then another lab had better be able to duplicate it too. If I tried to beg off saying the process took too long, you might rightly think me a charlatan, or at best you might withhold judgment. Perhaps such standards are inappropriate in this setting, but there's nothing unfair in asking for demonstrations per se.

DT says this: "If you really think it's reasonable to believe that every species on earth now has always been present as it is to believe in the theory of evolution, then I'm not sure any argument is really possible." Maybe so, but that's not because I'm being unfair. I believe that those who postulate that some species weren't here from day one implicitly assume the burden of demonstrating that that is true.

As for extrapolation, I will dedicate an entire post to this later.

DT also says that evolution is the only testable hypothesis that explains said data. OK, what other hypotheses were tried and found wanting?

DT notes that certain sections of DNA don't seem to code for anything, and thus can be used as a timer of sorts based on rates of accumulations of mutations over time. How do we know that these sections don't code for anything? Genomes are very complex and we don't understand them yet. Are we now prepared to say that no use will ever be found for these sections that don't seem to code for anything under our present knowledge, and that these mutations don't serve some subtle determinate function unknown today?

I have read various books about chaos theory and have been amazed at some of the complex emergent behavior arising from unexpected places. I have to wonder what yet is to be found in the genome, and if it's possible that the diversity and resilience of life results from the emergence of behavior encoded in DNA from day 1.

The arguments that really floor me are the ones that attempt to use what could be called design features to disprove design arguments. As I see it, this amounts to postulating an omniscient, omnipotent Creator, and then arguing with Him - "ya shoulda done it this way!". I can be an arrogant SOB, but if I thought such a being existed, I'd happily defer to His judgment and would hope to learn from it. And I'd do a lot of experiments to figure out how He did things in hopes of staying on His good side or guessing what He might do next - science would be an essential part of my religious practice.

I'll ask religious people to abstain from commenting on this post (send me email if you want). I respect your beliefs, and you're welcome to comment elsewhere. But I have found that your presence in such discussions leads in unproductive directions, and I ask for your indulgence in this. Thank you for your understanding.

Static electricity basics

I've been trying to come up with a blog-item length approach to this for a while. Let's see if this does any good. It will be simplified, perhaps too much - I'm sure people can find something to disagree with.

What is electricity? For our purposes today, we'll say it's a means of transmitting energy via electric charge differences.

OK, what's an electric charge? Physicists don't attempt to define this really. They just note that the smallest units of charge are protons and electrons, with arbitrarily labeled "positive" and "negative" charges respectively. Since electrons are easier to shake loose than protons are, for practical purposes electricity results from moving electrons.

Charged particles have their own electric fields, which exert forces when they interact with the electric fields of other objects. These forces are inversely proportional to the square of the difference between the particles - they get stronger rapidly as the particles get closer together. They tend to repel objects of like charge, and attract those of opposite charge. A result is that protons and electrons tend to stick together tightly into aggregates which as a whole carry no net charge, and getting electrons concentrated takes some "pressure".

If you've ever been zapped by static electricity, you have evidence that it's no big trick to get electrons loose. There will always be some running around, and this rate increases with temperature. But they are randomly distributed such that we can't take advantage of them for electric power.

It also makes a difference what substance we're talking about. The freedom of electrons to move within a particular substance varies over a broad range. The substances in which electrons move freely can be called "conductors", and are usually metallic. Substances that hold on to their electrons tightly are called "insulators". There are substances with intermediate properties known as "semiconductors", but that's another post.

The trick with electricity is to get these movable electrons directed and packed together long enough to make the resulting forces to do work for us.

A measure of the "packing" is the electric potential. This is sometimes called "voltage" because it is measured in volts (named for Alessandro Volta). Volts are a measure of the amount of energy stored per unit of charge.

These forces created by "packing" these electrons are significant. One of the reasons why electricity must be used as generated is that the demand is so large relative to the size of the devices it is practical to build to hold the electrical energy. Such devices, called capacitors, can literally blow up from the stresses if misused, and they're expensive in very large sizes. Thus when energy must be stored, it stored in a form other than electricity, then turned into electricity upon demand.

So how do you "pack" the electrons, and how do you get them to go where you want and do work? That'll be another in a series of blog items that'll be sure to thrill you. Stay tuned...

Fun with trojans

A relative of mine gets a little too crazy with her PC. Despite repeated warnings, she'll still open email attachments with alacrity. So I just spent the last 20 minutes on the phone figuring out how to deal with the consequences.

It was a Trojan. She doesn't have a firewall, but a recently updated virus scanner caught the thing in an email from a friend of hers. I don't use Norton AntiVirus myself, so I don't know the details, but apparently the software "quarantined" the trojan. (Backdoor.Autoupder). This trojan supposedly is not widely spread, but it's loose in central Illinois for sure.

You might wonder what the firewall would have done. This trojan apparently contacts external machines to load more objects, which can be used for much mischief. Unlike many others, products like ZoneAlarm test outgoing traffic along with incoming, so if a mysterious program looks for access to the Web, you can deny it. In that way, even if a trojan gets installed, it can't call back to the mother ship and announce its presence. Then your PC can't be used for such things as distributed denial of service attacks like this.

If you have a broadband and don't have a firewall, kindly post your street address and a picture. That way we can all find you and knock you silly until you get with the program. ZoneAlarm is a freebie. Get it. Now!

UPDATE: I'm getting a disturbing number of Google hits on this one. It's fairly new, so make sure your antivirus program is up to date. Or else Quana and I will come and get you...

Hypothetical attack on a nuclear power plant

From Jane Galt's blog, the question has come up about what might happen if a US commercial nuclear power plant were struck by a 747 loaded with a fertilizer-type bomb as was used in OKC by Timothy McVeigh (who might have had ties to al-Qaeda via Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef).

So what do I know about this? I'm an engineer who spent 10+ years working on 4 different US commercial nuclear power plant sites (7 units - 2 PWRs and 5 BWRs, out of ~100 units). So I know a little about the hardware, the people, the procedures and the regulations. I'm a bit out of date because I haven't worked in the business for a while, but you'll pardon me for assuming that regulations haven't been lightening. And no new sites have begun construction since I was starved out. There's no conflict of interest because I no longer work in the business and I don't even own any stock, and as a mechanical engineer I can profit no matter what form of energy we use. Enough disclosures, let's get started.

Returning to the question, no Updated Final Safety Analysis Report that I have ever seen addresses planeloads of fertilizer bombs explicitly. I think you can guess why. There are provisions for "missile protection", such as uprooted trees, but these would not have the energy of the postulated planeload of fertilizer bombs.

I could go into a long discussion of this, as I'm sure you know by now. Nuclear power plants are not built like office buildings or even the Pentagon. You're talking at least a foot of reinforced concrete for the primary containment building, with a steel liner inside that. Outside that there's the secondary containment which is far less substantial but would soak up some shock.

And then what would happen? Possibly just an indefinitely long shutdown of the reactor while damage is assessed and repaired. They'd have to detonate the bomb just right before the crash dispersed it, and they'd have to hit a target that's substantially smaller than the WTC.

If primary containment were breached, then the reactor would have to be shut down, and hopefully the piping would be intact to do so. That is likely, because that piping, electrical and instrumentation systems within primary containment are built to handle nasty things like earthquakes, pipe whip, and internally generated missiles. And they are subject to "environmental qualification" for steam, high radiation levels, temperature, etc..

Control and power systems are required to be redundant and physically separated such that the same event (fire, explosion, whatever) is not likely to disable both divisions. That physical separation is a lot more concrete, fire barriers et al.

Ordinarily the containment buildings are on the opposite end of the plant from the power lines, so one would expect that there wouldn't be much physical damage to these. That suggests that offsite power would still be available. But let's shut it off anyway. And let's assume that any other units onsite are shut down, so they can't provide any power either. Then what?

There are still two redundant trains of onsite power, most likely diesel generators. They'll be sitting in separate seismically qualified buildings of reinforced concrete some distance away from the containment, with about 7 days worth of fuel in tanks that are probably buried in reinforced concrete underground. They're tested at least monthly to show that they'll pick up plant loads in a prescribed order to make sure that essential plant motors and controls receive power as necessary for a shutdown.

Back to the containment. Let's say it's Osama's lucky day and we've breached secondary containment, primary containment, and a few more feet of the reinforced concrete that makes up biological shielding, the drywell, or whatever other such facilities an individual plant might have (I can't speak for every design out there, but there's quite a bit of standardization because only 4 companies have reactors running and they're all regulated by the same Federal agency). We've breached the primary loop so severely that the reactor cannot be brought to a cold shutdown and we have a partial core meltdown a la TMI.

The bad news is that this will be worse radiologically than TMI. The good news is that TMI wasn't that bad. We're not talking Chernobyl here - the reactor internals don't contain tons of graphite to stoke a huge fire and form immense clouds of particulates (and we don't have a government that will tell everyone that nothing happened when an accident is visible from outer space. ) You'd be talking steam, short half-life isotopes of nitrogen, gaseous fission products generated inside the failed fuel rods, and possibly other radioactive nasties that can become airborne (I can't think of any, and they're probably so dense that they wouldn't go far).

Meanwhile the emergency plan is running balls to the wall. It's highly likely that some plant personnel might be lost in the initial explosion, but most of the essential personnel would be inside seismically qualified reinforced concrete buildings on the far side of the stricken containment building. Experienced operators, engineers and fire brigade personnel are evaluating the damage and responding, and relief shifts are coming in. Subject matter experts from around the country are a phone call away. Alarms are sounding, local, state, and federal authorities are notified, radiological experts scatter to measure the radiological impact, emergency personnel identify shut-ins and arrange to escort them out of the area, iodine pills will already have been distributed and will be available upon request, and then there's whatever the state itself might do in addition to the above. Emergency planning was one of the worst problems with TMI, and led to requirements to perform the above. And it's not pure window-dressing - the plants conduct drills with Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors onsite to evaluate them, and they'd damned well better do well unless the plant manager wants a black eye or worse.

So what happens to the environs? It'll take some cleanup, and there will probably be some lost life expectancy due to high radiation exposure to staff. Milk will be thrown away as a precaution. Offsite there could be more lost life expectancy, but that will take years to show up.

So where's the body count? Where's the symbolic value? IMO they'll hit something else because these plants just don't have the marquee value. They passed near Haddam Neck, Beaver Valley, Susquehanna, Peach Bottom, TMI and Indian Point the last time.

I'm sure I've left something out, working off the cuff like this - it's worth what you're paying for it. Questions are welcome.