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I really hate the comparisons of Three Mile Island to Chernobyl. Three Mile Island was an example of a failure at a nuclear facility that was solved correctly. Chernobyl was an example of a failure that was caused by extraordinary stupidity and handled as badly as you could handle such an incident.

Actually, Chernobyl was an example of an experiment gone bad:

The immediate cause of the Chernobyl accident was a mismanaged electrical-engineering experiment. Engineers with no knowledge of reactor physics were interested to see if they could draw electricity from the turbine generator of the Number 4 reactor unit to run water pumps during an emergency when the turbine was no longer being driven by the reactor but was still spinning inertially. The engineers needed the reactor to wind up the turbine; then they planned to idle it to 2.5 percent power. Unexpected electrical demand on the afternoon of April 29 delayed the experiment until eleven o'clock that night. When the experimenters finally started, they felt pressed to make up for lost time, so they reduced the reactor's power level too rapidly. That mistake caused a rapid buildup of neutron-absorbing fission by products in the reactor core, which poisoned the reaction. To compensate, the operators withdrew a majority of the reactor's control rods, but even with the rods withdrawn, they were unable to increase the power level to more than 30 megawatts, a low level of operation at which the reactor's instability potential is at its worst and that the Chernobyl plant's own safety rules forbade.

- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/chernobyl.html

Chernobyl was more akin to America's nuclear experiments that released lots of radiation into the atmosphere. Hanford's "Green Run" purposefully released radioactive gases in order to test our ability to detect releases of radioactive material. And all those above ground nuclear tests didn't do us much good in terms of release of radiation.

Fact is that there has never been a release of significant amounts of radiation from a electricity generating nuclear plant unless people started screwing around with it on purpose. Far more radiation has been released from coal. And far more people have died in accidents relating to the production of oil. From a land use perspective, even solar and wind are more destructive to the environment than nuclear.

You didn't think the SR 71 wasn't replaced, did you ?

Um... Yeah, it was replaced... With *satellites*.

And just a word of wisdom from someone who works for 'the dark side': Supersonic aircraft are not stealthy--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/xplanes/stea-flash.html

-b

Advocates call the law a necessary control on hate speech in an age where the Internet makes the spread of messages easier and faster. Opponents say it's censorship and has no place in a free society.

Not only are we divided on whether it should be legal, we are divided on what it should be.

Is it hate speech to call other races subhumans, but legal to note in a scientific paper that there IQ differences between races, moral evolutionary differences, or even that statistically, crime is not distributed evenly between all groups?

Half of scientists say race doesn't exist, the others keep quiet.

The bigger issue here is what we're obscuring the pursuit of truth with all sorts of social pretense. Let's look at the facts and keep emotion (true hate speech) and censorship out of the debate.

This is 2009 after all, and the telecoms have already been paid for 45Mb/s symmetrical bandwidth to everyone.

No, they haven't. Where did this rumor start? If you actually check the facts, you'll discover that the government hasn't given the telecoms a single cent towards improving national broadband. Nothing at all.

The telecoms were given $200B in financial incentives in the 1990s to provide symmetrical 45Mb/s bandwidth and universal service. Read this, or at PBS. Or just Google it yourself.

The previous post said ".50 cal machineguns." The only claims that they used .50 cal rifles (not even machine guns) are from gun control advocacy groups and the GAO, on the theory that they could have obtained them, not that there was any evidence that they had.

The report by the ATF and the FBI said that there were 3 .50 cal rifle magazines and 4 .50 cal rifle magazine springs . If there is any .50 cal magazine-fed machine gun, there is one really stupid engineer. Magazines and springs do not make a machine gun and would be useless for a machine gun. Machine guns are generally belt-fed.

The source of this information? That conservative bastion, PBS. (If you didn't pick up on it, I was being sarcastic.) You could also try reading the Wikipedia article about it, before making unsubstantiated claims.

They did have a lot of weapons. So do a lot of people in Texas. (My brother just bought another gun in Texas.) Yes, they were a cult. And, so were many religions that today have hundreds of millions of followers. They also traded them. Weapons owned by civilians did not generally decrease in value during the Clinton administration. They were a good investment then and now.

If you want to argue that they were horrible people and the government is a scapegoat and did nothing wrong there, fine, then do that. But don't support it by claims that are demonstrably false. (And generally, even when government does get blamed for something not their fault, it doesn't come close to making up for blame they don't get that no one knows about.)

They are as slanted as PBS, constantly trying to explain why we need more and bigger government programs. I don't need to hear that bias. Just once I'd like to hear either the BBC or PBS present a story about why government needs to be smaller, but of course that will never happen.

It's not like they'd ever run a story on Thomas Jefferson.

A whole load of links done with the Google site:slashdot.org search modifier

Slashdot 2006

PBS 2007

Slashdot 2008

Sensory substitution

Fahrenheit is zero-referenced from the freezing point of sea water. Not exactly a stable reference point, but thats what it's based on. Don't recall the gradient reference is based on.

The original Celsius scale was inverted: 100 was freezing and 0 was boiling. Along the way someone pointed out how stupid that was: "Hey! Dumb ass, you have the scale upside-down!" It was quietly turned right-side up.

If you want a nice romp through the history of temperature measurement, may I suggest Nova's 'The conquest of Cold' aka 'Absolute Zero' http://video.pbs.org/video/1050757560/program/979359664/topic/979382098

Are they taking the deck gun off for the tourist flights? No, I'm serious - the Almaz had a 23mm aircraft cannon mounted to its underside to shoot at american targets (maybe the MOL?)

A recent NOVA episode interviewed a couple of former cosmonauts who said the only time it was fired was a test just before they decommissioned (de-orbited) the last one.

I recall from the "Battle of the X-Planes" Nova (here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/xplanes/ ) that Boeing had similar difficulties in forming the composite body for their JSF design. Since the composite was formed in-house, I don't think it makes sense to blame the contractor in this case. If anything, I think it just goes to show how difficult it is (for anyone) to produce carbon fiber composite to the degree of precision aircraft specifications require. OTOH, what ever happened to the self-healing carbon composite I read about in Popular Science years ago?

I think you may have missed the sarcasm in my orginal statement.

If you aren't a shareholder it doesn't involve you...

Nothing could be further from the truth. Decisions are made, both for and against particular corporate policies, strategies and business practices, that affect tens of thousands every day. Love Canal, eWaste shipped overseas to China and India, and inferior construction on nuclear reactors in the US come to mind, there are multitudinous others.

... the shareholders don't seem to think it's good for them: the stock is down on the rumor.

All of which means that smart money is afraid of another TW/AOL debacle. Which if it goes forward would still affect all of the subscribers, who are (I would wager) non-shareholders/investors.

Which amply reinforces my points above.

The short version, the users will get hosed.

This is part three of my explanation of how America went from having the fastest and cheapest Internet service in the world to what we have today -- not very fast, not very cheap Internet service that is hurting our ability to compete economically with the rest of the world. Part one detailed expected improvements in U.S. broadband based on emerging competitive factors, yet decried that it was too little too late. Part two explained how U.S. broadband ISPs are different from most overseas ISPs and how those differences make it unlikely that we'll ever regain leadership in this space. And this week's final part explains that this all came about because Americans were deceived and defrauded by many of their telephone companies to the tune of $200 billion -- money that was supposed to have gone to pay for a broadband future we don't -- and never will -- have.

Just read TFA and it looks like the project's goal is not to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but to find out how to use sunlight as an energy source to synthesize molecules.

Over here, across the pond, we've got a team of Yanks already working on the other side of the carbon equation: Artificial leaves to capture CO2 from the air. And, in typical Yank fashion, its being done by private enterprise.

They were featured recently on Nova ScienceNow.

I'm sorry, what was your point again? That there is corruption in the US? I didn't disagree. However, it is quite low when compared to the world...

I might have high standards. I consider Italy to be awfully corrupt and France to be fairly bad. If you compare the US with really shitty countries like Nigeria or Russia, it comes out fine. But then again, are those the countries that you want to compare yourself with?

Your examples are interesting because they demonstrate how corruption is actually dealt with, as opposed to tolerated.

True, but only because Abramoff went too far in his corruption. It is clear that he was at the center of US politics and many other lobbyists were doing the same things, in a slightly more modest fashion. I don't see any indication that most politicians want to deal with it. They just want to prevent excesses that will become public and will result in outrage.

That may be, but a bribe that is a promise is:
(a) A pretty bad bribe... who says the promise keeper will keep their word? They've already demonstrated moral corruption by bribing you.
(b) Almost impossible to detect or fight unless the parties are exceedingly stupid.

Not at all, a gentlemens agreement that is enforced by a group is extremely effective. What happens if a big company doesn't do this? They will quickly lose influence in DC, since the other politicians will stop listening to them. So they are forced to do it. It is very easy to detect as well, just look at the CV and donations list of a politician who becomes a lobbyist. A law could be made that disallows politicians from becoming lobbyists for the companies that they had contacts with while in office.

This is a very tough problem to solve... who gets to decide what can go on TV? The government? Won't they abuse this power to curtail legitimate criticism? Who decides what is "legitimate"?

You are right. But there are several solutions that can help:
- Spread the power around by changing your system to be multi-party (it's harder to win with a negative PAC campaign when you have to discredit 5 opponents instead of 1)
- Media reform (instead of dismissing lies they like to discuss the 'controversy')
- Better defamation laws so lies can be countered effectively

Examples? Does this "independent media" have anywhere near the viewership of the US networks? In the US, the networks are pathetic... they simply go after a demographic, and their idea of "balance" is putting a useless right winger up against a useless left winger. US newspapers tend to be better though... at least until they all disappear.

UK, Germany, France, Holland and the Scandinavian countries all have way better media than the US. The problem with the US media is not that they go after a demographic. In fact, as long as the main biases are accounted for I like that far better than media that pretend to be impartial. The real problem is firstly that they have too much time to fill and want to fill it as cheaply as possible. So what do you get: sponsored and dumbass opinions, 'controversies', reading twitter messages and emails out loud on air, etc. What is rare: expert opinions, critical interviews, investigations and other forms of real journalism. The second problem is cultural. The media consider what happens in Washington DC to be normal. There is almost no criticism directed at the system. They only see fault in individuals (and those are always exceptions). Here is a nice quote:

BILL MOYERS: I think you wrote that "The media stars in Washington almost never understand that there's anything wrong with the establishment of which they're a part."

GLENN GREENWALD: That's right. I mean, if you were to say to normal Americans, and it's the reason why these issues resonated, and why Barack Obama made them a cente

"Utility officials have already stated"? Oh yeah, that's comforting. Are these the same "utility officials" who mismanaged the power grid in CA so badly a few years back that we had rolling blackouts all summer?

Are you seriously blaming the utility officials for the outright fraud perpetrated on California by:

1. The politicians (mainly republican) who partially deregulated energy grid in California
2. Energy companies like Enron who defrauded the state to the tune of $8 Billion

Utility companies were in a bind... they couldn't add more power generation, but had to buy from out of state (enter: profiteering by Enron & buddies, while FERC sat by and watched the rape).

You might want to read up a bit about the Cali power crisis before you spout off on it.

The elite (rich person) does not go "all over town setting soup kitchens and churches on fire" but is largely responsible for the need for soup kitchens. When 5% of the population has over 50% of the wealth, there's a deeply unfair distribution of money, property, and opportunity. This apportionment takes necessities from the poor to provide luxuries for the rich. The rich don't think "community sucks" but rather don't think about the community at all. Your example of how rich people act is a ridiculous straw man. If you're unaware of the effects of class distinctions then you live in the same isolated environment as this guy who talks about his world view as a corporate executive versus the reality of his decisions and actions.

something akin to what Japan has (I live in Japan--it works!).

In the Frontline documentary, Sick Around the World, Japan was one of the featured locations. As is so often the case, every system around the world has problems, some less visible and obvious than others, and Japan is no exception. In Japan the government negotiates a "rate book" with listed fees for all medical procedures offered by doctors and hospitals. These rates govern prices in all medical transactions, even completely private ones. In Japan, hospitals and the doctors who run them are usually quite small operations and almost completely private (think small neighborhood hospitals with 20 or so beds). The problem is that doctors and hospitals barely earn enough money to stay in business in Japan. This works to some extent because the Japanese are culturally very hard working and industrious people who are generally slower to complain than Americans or Europeans and less vociferous when they do. However, even they have their breaking points and the Japanese health care system is probing their limits with these low regulated fees for medical services. When one considers the rapidly aging population in Japan it becomes clear that sooner or later (probably sooner) something is going to have to give; either doctors and hospitals will begin cutting services or going out of business or (more likely) the government negotiated rates will have to rise substantially.

That's retarded. The only reference to anything like this that I can find is this page [s8int.com] which makes the argument that a certain piece of aztec art bears a resemblance to a tyrannosaurus skull. So yeah... hardly pervasive and hardly convincing to anyone who doesn't already desperately want to believe.

So I guess this page and this page and this page and quite a bit more just don't exist now do they?

fuck, are you using big or something? Because Google presented a crap load on a simple search for artifacts depicting dinosaurs.

No we haven't. The young earth grand canyon meme is debunked nicely here. It also doesn't stand up to some basic critical thinking skills, like if flash flooding carved the grand canyon, how come it left relatively fragile islands of rock standing up in the middle of the canyon in places?

That doesn't debunk anything. It's out dated too. But hey, don't let that stop you. Anyways, check out this, and look for the canyons created by Mt St hellens eruption when dams burst as well as the one in south carolina that happened during/result of a flood. As for the rock islands, the massive flood theories do not damage their existence. They were present in the flood simulations (using actual water and sediment) in the original Nova program. BTW, Nova is not really a creation science organization, your probably not going to be able to discredit them because of a simple god connection.

In order to believe young earth creationism, or ANY kind of age for the earth that's not in the millions or billions of years, you essentially have to throw away a ton of accepted knowledge, like how radioactive isotopes work, how sedimentation happens, plate tectonics, and so on. This includes things that are not only accepted but practically acted upon.

No you don't. You would have to change the relevence of the knowledge, that all. But I'm not asking you to believe the world is not millions or billions of years old. I'm asking you to view the evidence for what it is, support for an interpretation and not a fact that can't be disproven.

Basically science and technology are like a giant pyramid with the coolest crap on top. You can't accept the stuff on top, like say the GPS in your car or a radioisotope powered pacemaker, without implicitly allowing for the fact that all or most of the stuff beneath it is true, like the age of the earth.

See, here is where you are wrong. Have you ever heard the expression "there is more then one way to skin a cat"? Just because something is known to work one way doesn't mean it is the only way or the true way. We make batteries in about 30 different types of processes. we have roughly 50 different types of internal combustion engines and engined that don't run on combustion at all. We can make hydrogen though approximately 15 or more different ways. What you have to understand just because something fits, doesn't mean it happened like that and at any time, evidence could come along to change the entire understanding of what happened. And when you deny that possibility, you have stop doing science and started a religion or something.

Hey, I like Obama, but if...

...Obama's just JFK and Clinton reborn.

...then the tabloids are going to have a field-day. What's Ken Starr doing these days?

he flushed money down the bankster hole... okay, that might have been smart or dumb, not sure yet.

It's not just dumb, but accord to William K. Black, it's illegal and wrong: just watch or read.

But healthcare reform? Seriously, THAT'S what you'd fight to STOP?

I fear like the previous attempt in 1993 this one will fail and the US will still be saddled with its current mess.

Bullshit! Is all humans are the same then surely Africa does not need our help and should be as thriving a community as any other western civilization. Since that's clearly not the case your above statement is just a bunch of shit, and the rest of your statements as suspect...

You might be interested in Guns, Germs, and Steel.

It's not open source, but for $0.01, you can buy Robert X. Cringely's wonderful though dated Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date. Not only does Bob give you first-hand accounts of the people who pioneered computer hardware, software, and operating systems, he's also pretty damn funny. You could also point your students to his free sites: the current site or the old site.

He's not always right, but he's usually knows what he's talking about and he's frequently entertaining.

What chaps my ass is that the healthcare bill making its way through Congress is supposed to make healthcare more accessible. Instead, you have the Senate health committee voting to extend patent protection for some drugs. And you've also got the White House cutting a deal with Big Pharma to prevent the government from negotiating lower drug prices.

But studies paid for by big pharma INSIST (and they've convinced the American Heart Association) that your blood pressure has to be UNDER 120/80.

Fine. I'll just get some $40/year generic diuretic or ACE inhibitor from Walmart.

At least, I would if I could afford the $200 visit to the doctor's office.

The above comment is my opinion as a 3rd world physician

"3rd world" medicine is all some Americans get. Wendell Potter, former VP at CIGNA, on the experience that made him quit:

But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. I've got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement. And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee-- all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.

It was absolutely stunning. It was like being hit by lightning. It was almost-- what country am I in? I just it just didn't seem to be a possibility that I was in the United States. It was like a lightning bolt had hit me.

PBS had a great 1 hour segment on this not too long ago. Their segment covered the rapid decline in albatrosses due to offspring being fed the plastic from the pacific. I haven't been able to find the complete coverage of the segment I saw on my local PBS station, but I have managed to locate part of it here titled: World's Oceans Face Problem of Plastic Pollution

Like this?

There was a show describing natural immunity to HIV. In fact, one of the interesting discussions was how the prostitutes in Africa had actually developed immunity to the virus.

Interesting PBS NOVA show on Global Dimming or the effects of a hundred thousand US jet flights a day. they mostly halted the three days after 9-11. The upper atmosphere become noticeably more clear in that short period.

But even with Tesla aside, this isn't new... it's just not as vastly useful as people re-discovering it seem to think it is. It doesn't work over gigantic distances, only moderate ones, and there's no engineering you can do to get around that.

The misunderstanding a lot of people have is that they think Tesla was chasing *truly* wireless power - when in fact this was probably never his goal. Tesla was always chasing after something he called "longitudinal waves" in an attempt to perform worldwide "wireless" power transmission - he even called one of his companies World Wireless.

Tesla certainly wasn't foolish enough to believe this distance was possible with purely wireless transmission, but instead investigated single-wire transmission systems using the ground as the single wire. His initial success at single-wire transmission was at Colorado Springs in 1900 with three lightbulbs in a closed circuit loop with no power source and a transmission source a hundred feet away. In this experiment, as in his later vacuum tube powering experiment performed at considerably greater distances (eventually miles away), the objects in question were always had a metallic contact with the ground.

Take a look at figures 3, 6, and 7 on this page: http://amasci.com/tesla/tmistk.html. This seems the most likely explanation for the experiments at Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe. Wardenclyffe in particular is where we find Tesla sinking iron rods 300 feet into the ground, burning out local power station dynamos with his energy demands, and constructing a massive omnidirectional transmission tower.

The reasonable conclusion from all this is that Tesla was always pursuing single-wire transmission schemes in which literally the entire Earth itself was the single wire, and the transmission medium for the wireless component was the entire ionosphere. "World Wireless" seems to have been meant quite literally, which was in keeping with all we know about Tesla's personality. Unfortunately, as we all know, Tesla needed something like an order of magnitude more funding than JP Morgan was willing to provide - particularly after Marconi.

Beyond that, though, Morgan would have probably pulled the project even if Tesla had gotten it working: if single-wire worldwide transmission was in fact his intention, it would've been impossible to meter consumption on a per-user basis.

A quantity of small "coulds" coming together at the wrong time and place is how a lot of accidents happen. This has happened in regards to missile warnings before though thankfully we didn't achieve a critical density of "coulds":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/missileers/falsealarms.html

"Lovins said the reason for the decline is cost: on an even playing field with no hidden subsidies, nuclear is simply more expensive than other options, especially co-generation."

"Nuclear is dying of incurable attack of market forces despite what the industry wants you to believe," he remarked, adding that micropower offer more climate solution per dollar spent than nuclear."

http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0607-nuclear_debate.html

And my favourite: the Nuclear Wonderland! (Now a tourist attraction).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300

In your earlier post, you did not give enough information to use my "google finger". What google terms do you derive from "In science, a 2 year old can be dated 14 million years old."? You said nothing about snails. It has been known for some time that radiocarbon dating of snails is unreliable because they ingest limestone and incorporate it into their shells. Tamers (1970) citing a 1963 study observed "The use of terrestrial shells for radiocarbon dating is generally regarded as giving unreliable results". Of course, your original assertion that "a 2 year old [snail] can be dated to 14 million years" is false, I notice you amended that to "thousands of year (sic) old" in your later post, which is in the right order of magnitude.

You can use your brain if you want to. There is more to it then just snails, that why I pointed to your google finger. Coal test wrong, oceanic fossils on mountain ranges test differently as the elevation goes up and so on. There is also the problem of people on here thinking that carbon dating goes back to prove a time line of the dinosaurs which is impossible.

The link you provided mentions nothing about your original assertions. It is a collection of quotes on the methods used for fossil dating.

Your right, I can't find the link I was presenting and don't know why the page is different now. Anyways, here are a few links that shouldn't change.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/previous_seasons/case_firsthuman/index.html
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42940
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200503/s1331570.htm

I will probably find my link to the fossils not lining up or running through several periods of time like trees extending through several thousand years of sediment or diamond necklaces found in coal mines embedded in coal supposedly dating back to millions of years before man has been around.

I know your time is very valuable (for example, it takes an immense amount of time to learn the difference between waist and waste) but would it really take that long to back up your statements? You make outlandish claims, then when asked for evidence say "you are in charge of proving my claims" and "It's a widely believed fact!".

Actually, you made a false asertion so you show where the bible says only adam and eve was here. Everyone I know who has actually read a bible knows the bible says nothing of the sort. Either pony up or shut up about it. The only way I could disprove your so called widely believe fact is to paste the entire bible here. You know that's impossible so show your evidence.

It was called "The Spy Factory".
Here's a transcript (search for "Folsom" 4/5ths down the page):
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3602_spyfactory.html

--

This space for rent.

*cough* NSA *cough*

I don't have any kids, but I think Nova ScienceNOW is a great program. I think its by Neil DeGrass Tyson. It's on PBS, highly entertaining, simple enough for anyone to understand, but not condescending. Here's the website if you want to check it out. They have some streaming video. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/

Huge fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson as well - check out his new show Nova Science Now. It's a little parochial, but I believe it's intended for a younger audience - it definitely has a good fun factor with solid science qualities. Also love seeing him on Colbert. Total riot!

You can actually follow the Cringely predictions over the years, I picked 2007 for no reason in particular,

This is my 2007 predictions column, where I first examine my predictions from 2006 to see how well or poorly I did (my multiyear average is around 75 percent) then provide a list of predictions for the current year that are sufficiently vague that I may be able to squint and claim that they were correct, too, a year from now.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070105_001440.html

He makes predictions for the next year, and comments on the ones from the year that has passed. According to that 2007 article, he was ONLY 60% right, and hes normally fairly honest with what counts and what doesnt, if hes off by a few months then that doesnt count. He says there that 60% was very low for him.

That is my worst performance EVER. I got nine of 15 predictions correct for a 60 percent average. In my defense I'll point out that just because I am wrong now doesn't mean I'll still be wrong in another week. Three years ago I predicted Intel would support AMD's 64-bit instruction extensions, but they took 53 weeks to do so, making me off by seven days. I think that by the end of February, 2-3 of these predictions could still swing the other direction.

To all the people who bash popular writers in pithy comments online, if you think you are up to the job of making predictions about tech, why dont you write a column yourself? Think about all the big bucks you'd be making for what you already do! And its "sooooo easy" remember?

This is a no-brainer!

1. Check out Neil deGrasse Tyson, who hosts the excellent show Nova ScienceNOW, currently in it's third season. It runs just after NOVA for several weeks in a row.

2. Try Robert Krulwich, who co-hosts the great NPR show & podcast RadioLab, with the equally wonderful Jad Abumrad. They are great for driving and listening.

Both are brilliant at making complicated sciencey topics seem fun and interesting. My 13 year old daughter enjoys both shows immensely with me. RadioLab, especially, is fun and funny, and you can gather up all podcasts on iTunes (there are about 25 full shows presently, plus lots of smaller in-between podcasts).

Both of these guys appear frequently on public radio shows too, like Ira Flatow's Science Friday, which is also good but a little more current eventsy.

Hope you enjoy these!

PBS has Nova ScienceNOW, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3210/02.html

It's pretty good, and surprisingly current.

Parent is right. PBS has a decent interview which talks about this in language most people should be able to understand. The person being interviewed was the head of a project called the Integral Fast Reactor which was a new approach to recycling the 'waste'. Apparently the project was extremely successful in just about all of its goals (one of which was a focus on creating a new generation of significantly safer nuclear reactors), then canceled at the 11th hour by the Clinton administration in order to win brownie points with anti-nuclear factions of the Democratic party.

You are really underestimating the power of nuclear weapons, or you're using a different definition of complete destruction than everyone else. If by complete, you mean "vaporized," then you may be correct. However, according to this site, a one-megaton surface blast would leave a crater 200 feet deep and a thousand feet across, and everything within about 3200 feet of of the detonation would be gone except for some foundations. Out to 1.7 miles, only heavily reinforced building still have some remnants. Out to 2.7 miles, some multi-story buildings would still have their skeletons standing, and significant damage to structures would extend out to about 4.7 miles.

This doesn't get anywhere close to the documented blast of Tsar Bomba, which was a 50MT bomb that had a 4.6km fireball, caused damage at significant distances (with atmospheric lensing causing damage hundreds of miles away), and would have caused third-degree burns to creatures 60 miles away. It was detonated on the island of Novaya Zemlya, and it broke windows in Finland and Sweden.

I don't think that either nation could ever have blanketed the entire planetary surface with nuclear weapons; blast effects and areas just don't match up. But to suggest that nuclear weapons are little more effective than conventional weapons -- which is essentially what your post says -- is dead wrong.

I skimmed the Rolling Stone article, and it was difficult to find any specific evidence for what Taibbi is asserting. I have no doubt that Goldman is a huge behemoth that abuses its position to affect markets in a way that benefits itself at the expense of lower-tier investors, which makes it doubly dissapointing that Taibbi mounts such a weak attack. He chooses to fill his "expose" with invectives like [t]he world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. To prove this point, he simply lists the former Goldman employees which are now, or were, in positions of power. I find the Frontline documentaries on this topic to be much more rational and informing:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown/view/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/breakingthebank/view/

I skimmed the Rolling Stone article, and it was difficult to find any specific evidence for what Taibbi is asserting. I have no doubt that Goldman is a huge behemoth that abuses its position to affect markets in a way that benefits itself at the expense of lower-tier investors, which makes it doubly dissapointing that Taibbi mounts such a weak attack. He chooses to fill his "expose" with invectives like [t]he world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. To prove this point, he simply lists the former Goldman employees which are now, or were, in positions of power. I find the Frontline documentaries on this topic to be much more rational and informing:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown/view/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/breakingthebank/view/

You and the grandparent are under a misapprehension. Generally the rich do not pay "duty" or "tax". Many of the people who buy this will be oil baron types from countries with no fuel tax. The type of people who "can afford it" are the type of people who pay almost nothing. Hell even Warren Buffet (who pays 17% tax whilst his assistant pays 30%) and Bill Gates (Sr.) have been campaigning against the unfairness of how little they pay.

Once again with feeling. Tax is for little people. Like you.

P.S. Actually an interesting thing about Warren Buffet's comments is that if you look through the Google search it seems this hasn't been reported much in mainstream media????

my driving license has *never* been requested or required for anything

Maybe not requested directly from you, but all of that license information, including home address and the photo, is stored in the DVLA database. You have no idea who has access to it, or what they have done with it.

I don't have *anything* else with my photo on, at all.

Perhaps you don't, but most adults will also have a passport.

Additionally, credit/debits cards are *not* as big over here as over countries and a lot of people only "trust" cash.

Not true. "Behind the U.S., the U.K. is the next largest market with 59 million credit cards, according to the Lafferty Group, a research firm in London." (source)

How do you get your cash if you don't have a debit card? Every employer I've ever worked for has insisted on paying me through monthly bank transfer or standing order. Banks have inconvenient opening hours and are, well, inconvenient. Every single person I know uses ATMs. and you can't use an ATM without a debit card.

A lot of the resistance to I.D. cards in the U.K. has been "OMG the government will have my infos!". But unless you're paid cash in hand, have no mobile phone, no drivers license, no passport, no bank account, no NHS records, and aren't registered for council tax or to vote, then the government already have most, or all, of the info that would be stored on the I.D. card. The only addition is the biometrics.

Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ghana804/

College student Cynthia Moreno posted the "Ode to Coalinga," her hometown, in her MySpace journal. The "Ode" was extremely critical of Coalinga and its inhabitants. Apparently Moreno thought better of having posted it, and she deleted it six days later. But not before the principal of the local high school, Roger Campbell, gave the Ode to his friend Pamela Pond, the editor of the local newspaper, the Coalinga Record. Pond published the Ode as a letter to the editor . . . What's more -- this part of the story is related only in Moreno's brief to the court and not in the opinion -- Moreno learned that Campbell had given the Ode to Pond before it was actually published, and she contacted Pond to ask her not to print it. According to Moreno, Pond said she would not publish it, but then changed her mind and did so.

And it's not like there hasn't been fallout:

According to one online source, Moreno and her family are not the only ones who suffered consequences from the publication of the Ode. Pond was dismissed from the newspaper.

Other good information in the article. Not that anyone will read it....

Why can't they have the other one go over and at least push?

The rover's average speed is about 34 meters per hour. It stops every .5 to 2 meters to take pictures of its surroundings and search for hazards, then continues. Spirit's total travel distance over the mission has been 4.8 miles and Opportunity has travelled 10.3 miles.

Their landing sites were basically on opposite sides of the planet, 6,000 miles apart.

I think it would take quite a while for Opportunity to get over and help Spirit...

Sources:
Speed
Distance travelled
Landing site distance

The PBS article below expands on the details of the case. Prior to publishing her "letter to the editor" the paper was fully aware that it was a post from Myspace, not a true letter to the editor. In fact, the editor was the person who added her name to the letter, not the principal as stated in the /. piece. The author was made aware that her now deleted rant would be published as a letter to the editor. The author was assured by the paper that the "letter" would not run, but then they ran it anyway.

I think this is a prime "what not to do" example of journalistic ethics.

Media Shift @ PBS

"Before the movie "50 First Dates", there was a sci-fi short story that posited this, with horrifying consequences."

LOL,

before the movie and sci-fi story there were (and of course still are) plenty of *real* people with severe anterograde amnesia. One of the more famous cases just died

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_(patient)

I worked with a patient who attempted suicide by asphyxiation. They survived with a profound case of anterograde amnesia. You could leave the patient room and return 30 seconds later, and the patient would have no knowledge of you or your meeting 30 secs prior. It took literally 100's of repetitions of exact sameness before any noticeable learning occured. For example, taking them from point A to point B required tracing the exact same route, multiple times per day, for months on end before this person had any sense that they were actually going to destination B and back (though they were never able to go alone).

It *may be* frustrating to the individual, if they have any sense or insight as to their condition. They may get frustrated by the frustrations of those around them. Generally speaking (*very generally speaking*) severely dementing illnesses are as hard, if not harder, on those individuals who are around the demented indivdual.

Side story: My grandmother had a pretty wicked case of Alzheimer's disease. She would call our house 10+ a morning asking is she had a doctor's appointment that day. She knew she had future appointments, just didn't know when and had no ability to remember she had just called and asked us the same question 5 minutes prior :-). So we get the brilliant idea to write down the dates and times of all appointments and post them to her refrigerator. So, then we get the calls every day, "Is it Monday?" LOL. See "Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter":

http://www.pbs.org/pov/discover/?season=1995&offset=9#film-list

For a very thoughtful and thoughtprovoking piece on Dementia. Was nominated for an academy award when it came out.

later,
jeff

It's a shame that the original Frontline/World video report wasn't linked to -- it's an incredible and horrifying expose on the worldwide problems of e-waste disposal.