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Democrats slashing Hanford's cleanup budget...

One of the three are here.

"The gravitational waves were detected on Aug. 14, first at the Livingston, La., observatory. A few thousandths of a second later, they were detected at the Hanford LIGO and shortly after that at the Virgo observatory." http://www.tri-cityherald.com/...

That would be me and three cities, Hanford is next door to us. Local Paper on event http://www.tri-cityherald.com/...

this hype (which, by the way is what one would expect from... a local news station...) is totally unjustified.

I totally agree with your conclusion. But, just FYI, King 5 News is not "local". It is based in Seattle -- about 200 miles from Hanford, and a world apart in attitudes. For actual local coverage, see this story. It has more details and less hype than I have seen elsewhere.

Does anyone have a link to an actual plot of the signal, where one could (hopefully) see the wave pattern, or any pattern?

The signal was just the difference in time one laser beam took to travel as opposed to a second laser beam.

Hanford LIGO is located here so the local paper has more than many sites http://www.tri-cityherald.com/...
Ours showed seven-thousands of a second after the one in Louisiana LIGO did.

That doesn't seem to be accurate; the local newspaper describes a fellow technician who dragged him out of the room, and I don't believe they would've had some sort of building-wide system of manipulators that could've then moved him from there to an ambulance:

http://www.tri-cityherald.com/...

At any rate, it looks like the glove box was just to allow access to adjust the equipment, and not perform the procedure. So there's every possibility that the actual work was done with manipulators. (You can play around with some of them in the museum in Richland; they're surprisingly nimble.)

That's a dumb thing to say. It's not a hard question. You say no, because it's still federally illegal and the security clearance is a federal matter.

Ah but the feds have blinked and said what is planned is good with them. The local paper said there will be 25 stores within
23 miles of me by next June. http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2013/09/04/2555938/state-sets-max-of-334-marijuana.html

It's something I wouldn't want asked, I've worked for the DOE before and didn't smoke as I could of lost my job, which payed well and enjoyable work.
I haven't smoked marijuana for a long time for that reason, I smoke the evil weed now, I eat the evil weed in cookies, I can enjoy marijuana once again.

You're talking about Hanford. Approximately one third of Hanford's waste storage tanks are known to have been or be leaking into the groundwater, having contaminated approximately 270 billion gallons or one billion cubic meters of aquifers. This contaminated groundwater is expected to reach the Columbia river in 7 to 45 years, and start contaminating everything along the river from Eastern Washington to Portland and the Pacific ocean shortly thereafter. The loss of real estate values along that river is a very real concern. Waterfront property is normally very valuable. Waterfront property on a radioactive river, less so.

Currently there is no practical plan to deal with this situation nor adequate budget to even stop it from getting worse. It is likely impossible to prevent this radioactive waste from reaching the Pacific. The Columbia river is quite a considerable river, 4th largest in the US by volume and the largest draining into the Pacific. Though Hanford is the most highly contaminated nuclear site in the US - containing approximately 2/3rds of all US high-level waste, it still retains an operating nuclear power generating station to this day. It uses a newer version of the type of reactor used at Fukushima, a General Electric Type 5 Boiling Water Reactor.

Over $30 billions (pdf) have been spent cleaning up Hanford already. 20 years into the initial 30 year plan only minor progress has been made. The vitrification plant, for example, is not expected to complete vitrification operations for another 34 years from now - and that may be optimistic, meaning we are further from the end now than when the work was begun. The estimate for the cost of the remaining cleanup is $112 billion and is, given the nature of such things, likely to be at least three times even that.

Although the so-far estimated cost of $145 billion is very high it is important to remember than Hanford was a critical part of the Manhattan Project, essential for developing the technology and materials that made the US the first nuclear weapon capable global power at a critical cusp of international relations. The cost of not doing that might have been much higher than cleaning up or living with this mess will be.

Cleaning up Fukushima will cost far more than cleaning up Hanford. Cleaning up Chernobyl will also be more costly, to the extent cleanup is possible at all. If you add up the cleanup costs of all three and the off-book costs of getting rid of the current stock of spent nuclear fuels you could probably outfit the entire world with alternative electrical energy solutions like geothermal, wind and solar for less. On this scale a manned Mars colony would be a trivial side project. Of more concern might be that cleaning up these messes entirely is quite simply not possible, even given the full weight of the national economies involved. It cannot be done. We have developed the power to create problems we cannot cure no matter how hard we try.

There was some confusion a few days ago when some ex-justice that worked with the Gadaffi govt tried to form a provisional govt without support from all the rebel cities and not all the human rights people backed him. Ghoga at that point had stated they were working already on a council of some kind with all the rebel city councils.

http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2011/02/27/1385560/libya-rebels-set-up-first-political.html

[I]t is as much a failure on the part of our national security to protect the information from being leaked in the first place.

Exactly so.

Why aren't heads rolling at the state department?
Why is only one low ranking military misfit under arrest?

Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, meanwhile, said the people who originally leaked the documents -- not Assange -- are legally liable, and he told Reuters news agency the leaks raised questions about the "adequacy" of U.S. security.
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2010/12/08/1283306/australian-fm-says-us-to-blame.html

It is not as cut-and-dried as TFA (I prefer to call it press-release journalism) claims.

From the Tri-City Herald: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2010/11/21/1260850/pasco-biomass-company-plans-to.html

There are plenty of so-called businessmen out there with grandiose plans of converting biomass to energy without any pollution. Unfortunately, this sounds like one of them.

In other news, the sky is BLUE! OMG, it's BLUE!!!!!!!!

Why the heck we have to have this sort of crap in the news after every tiny little tremor is beyond me. Yeah, the Pacific Northwest (where I live) is one of several areas in the world where major earthquakes happen every so often, geologically speaking. There's also a nice juicy volcano just waiting to blow its top. ZOMG, what next? Tornados? Oh wait ... that happens every so often also.

Someone wake me when we have a real disaster.

"Based on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), five Native American groups (the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Yakama, Wanapum, and Colville) claimed the remains as theirs, to be buried by traditional means. Only the Umatilla tribe continued further court proceedings. In February 2004, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that a cultural link between the tribes and the skeleton was not met, allowing scientific study of the remains to continue."

"Robson Bonnichsen and seven other anthropologists sued the United States for the right to conduct tests on the skeleton. On February 4, 2004, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit panel rejected the appeal brought by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Umatilla, Colville, Yakama, Nez Perce and other tribes on the grounds that they were unable to show any evidence of kinship."

Go back and research the stance of the Department of Interior and Army Corps of Engineers, the Clinton administration pushed the NAGPRA onto these remains to keep the American Indian votes.

The Federal Government tried to suppress the science by claiming 8000 year old remains were linked to the tribes in the region.

"As expected, the scientists' documents allege the Corps and Department of the Interior agencies mishandled the case in other ways - from failing to preserve the bones' scientific integrity to being biased in favor of American Indian tribes from the beginning, topics that have long been part of the legal banter while the case was on hold."

http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2001/01/03/136458/scientists-say-corps-destroyed.html

In the waning days of the Clinton administration the site destroyed. Ultimately the scientists won in Federal Court and the remains were not suppressed.

Actually, the price of hay is so high that some people are giving ponies away for free!

The ZDNet article just grabs a couple of pics from this 70 image gallery, which has a load of cool pictures.

The real factor is not whether most people who have access to these tools are honorable people, bent on good. The fact is that there are real nuts out there who are part of the system and will use it for all manner of dubious "investigations", sophomoric pranks, or outright evil purposes. At the very least, the public needs to know that these tools exist and who has access to them.

And in the end, the criminals will end up having the same tools the law does. What we need are not a whole bunch of police with lots of firepower (both physical and electronic), but methods by which ordinary people can protect themselves. I don't fear black helecopters, but I also do not want to hand unstoppable secret powers to my government. Ever since I helped put Bush/Cheney into office (biggest voting mistake of my life, and I do apologize), I don't trust them. Not an inch.

Huh. That sounds kinda nifty, actually. The invention, that is. I doubt you could---I doubt you should---be able to market and promote an invention without significant effort and outlay on your part, if you want to keep control of it.

Still, $3000 seems excessive, especially since the USPTO has demonstrated how bad it is at its job. (Researching prior art and the like.) And you'd likely not have the money to sue someone who infringed on you, in any case. Damn shame.

Anyone have an idea of how to make it so that inventions like this don't get lost in the mists of time?

--grendel drago

Wrong. Hirohito and the military knew about that city's destruction later that day, but were paralyzed by indecision. Hirohito did not meet with his supreme war council until about 11 a.m. Aug. 9, within minutes of when the second bomb fell on Nagasaki. Another choice quote: "The Japanese military did not want people to know about the atomic bomb," said Tsuia Etchu, founder of Nagasaki's Atomic Bomb museum. Etchu was an army officer in the city of Fukuoka when the bomb fell.

It stands to reason that the military didn't want people to know that America had these superweapons, so that people would still have some delusion about fighting to the death and taking as many American's with them as possible.

How about this US design. Not a research reactor,
graphite moderated and used masonite(!) for part
of the radiation shield (since we're talking about
flammibility). Far from a research design, in fact
it was the longest running US reactor, period:

http://b-reactor.org/hist-toc.htm

I can't find the PDF with the schematics of various
systems right now, but it's worth looking up.
The link is an HTML version of the original, written
by Westinghouse IRRC. It's scary, IMHO! Huge
enviromental disaster too.

Or how about this US design. The FFTF (Fast Flux
Test Facility):

http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/2893 364p-2929039c.html

Notice the date... and it actually wasn't decomissioned
until just last year. This was a sodium cooled reactor,
also at Hanford where "B" reactor was. And half a dozen
more really scary dangerous reactors. And Plutonium
processing. And single wall waste tanks (that leaked
into the ground water) that no one is really sure what
they contain _exactly_...

I guess you don't have a feel for the history of "expert's opinions" and where they lead: But the night of Dec. 2-3, 1949, was cloudier than expected, and the winds kept shifting. Calculations were off, and almost 8,000 curies of iodine 131 were released. And soon afterward, rain and snow came to force the iodine particles down all over the inland Northwest. One follow-up iodine 131 reading on vegetation in Kennewick was almost 1,000 times the limit set at that time. link

Experts are in love with their cool new field. Experts are human. Experts will almost always exagerate the benefits and minimize the harm that their work will bring. Not evil, just human.

But experts are not to be trusted.

The part that really makes me unhappy is hearing about the fatalities caused by this technology.

It should also be noted that north of the Stonehenge memorial in the town of Goldendale, WA, USA is the Goldendale Observatory Interpretive Center. It has a publicly accessable 24.5 inch telescope which according to the Tri-cityherald is America's largest publicly accessable telescope, assuming the WA state parks department didn't close it down due to budget cuts.

I tried some of the Lebanese stuff once. It'll definitely put some hair on your ass!

The table service was nice, but in general, I didn't care for the coffee. The spices they put in it wasn't to my taste, but you definitely knew you were drinking coffee. It's worth trying, if only for exploration's sake.

Miscellaneous links:

• Arabic Coffee in General
  A Recipe
  How everyone does it

Hey, If we're gonna be wired, we might as well do it right

Reviews: 1,2,3,4 That last one lets you submit your own review. Pretty cool.

The fate of Kennewick man is still a matter of some debate. A court approved study on the remains, but the American Indian tribes are trying to halt research while the decision is appealed.

For an example of why these findings are so political, check out this related story in The Guardian speculating that the Mexican remains might show the first Americans were of European origin.

Ruby Ridge, at which an FBI sniper was convicted (I forget the charge) and sentenced to jail for his role,

I think the single biggest gain this nation could see is a return to sanity at the federal level. Firing Janet Reno is the first step.