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U.S. Offers Glimpse at Manhattan Project Facility
jonerik writes "According to this article from the Associated Press, the US government is this week permitting the public a rare glimpse of its high-security Y-12 nuclear weapons plant as part of Oak Ridge, Tennessee's annual Secret City Festival, which is being held this coming weekend. Although the plant is still associated with ongoing nuclear weapons work, members of the public will be permitted to see parts of the facility associated with its work on the Manhattan Project's 'Little Boy' bomb, which was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. The facility produced the uranium-235 which was used in the device using 1,152 massive calutrons across nine separate buildings in 1944 and 1945. 'Don't you know the people in Knoxville wondered what in the world was going on out here,' Department of Energy guide Ray Smith said on Monday. 'All this material was coming in, truckload after truckload, and nothing ever left.'"
I win - AGAIN!!!
I' ve now been using OS X for my Manila server for a month or so and the amount of frustration that I've experienced in that short period of time is more than in the 14 years I've been using Macintosh computers. The promise of OS X - a stable OS with a state of the art GUI - is not kept. I have two major grudges - the lack of integration between the UNIX-derived file system + tools with the Mac OS heritage and secondly the confusing and counterintuitive GUI.
First the UNIX / Mac OS non-integration. I've been wanting to script a backup routine for Frontier requiring it to save fresh copies of all its databases and then quitting, while I manipulated the database files (moving, renaming, compressing). Trying to use a shell script I found out that "gzip" (file compression) and "cp" (copy) along with the other UNIX commands trashed my databases as they didn't understand the Mac OS file system. Somebody then mentions gnutar, an archiving utility, could do the trick, but what is the difference between gnutar and tar, which reportedly doesn't work? I try to find these tools, but Sherlock doesn't search through the UNIX directory hierarchy, as these are hidden in the GUI. So I have to resort to "find" (which I can't comprehend) and end up trying to digest the man-page for "find" until I conclude that this is greek to me. At this point I wish for KDE, an X-windows based GUI that is ugly but at least gives you a decent file system browser. So, my experience is so far that most of the UNIX tools are useless for a Mac person like me unless I really want to grok man pages. Hey - is this "the computer for the rest of us?"
Which brings me around to the GUI. OK, I'm impressed with graphics that scale and blend. It looks fantastic, but when none of the essential applications support this (hello Adobe, have you pulled the plug on the Mac??), this really is nothing but eye candy. And unfortunately the transparent look makes it difficult to sometimes see which window is the active. Furthermore, the striped scrollbars looks like progress bars when viewed at angle often causing me to do a second take as it registers in my mind as a progress indicator due to this optical illusion. The Finders file hierarchy is strange to say the least and the lack of "memory" regarding the settings for a window really throws me for a loop. Furthermore the dock with it's complete disregard for context in the objects it accepts is a most disturbing concept. I can have aliases to applications sitting next to ditto for running applications, applications windows, or even some sub-dialog box from an application. The miniauture windows doesn't tell me which application a window belongs to so if I've minimized a couple of windows I'll have to move my mouse over them in order to obtain some identification.
I could go on - but I guess you know the tune by now. So in the end I must say that there is very few things that in my view make OS X an attractive alternative to other OS'es.
* I can't get my most importat apps (the MS and Adobe bunch) to run under this OS. Classic is not an option.
* The clever UNIX utils are not useful in a Mac OS context, so who cares.
* There is no decent GUI for the UNIX part of this hybrid OS, no GUI file browser. Maybe one can cheat "Finder" into doing this but I don't want to fight my OS.
* The graphics are stunning - but this aspect is abused to make the GUI incomprehensible
So it's a sad feeling sitting down in front of my Cube and feeling like an alien. I only use OS X now because Frontier is so much more stable than under OS 9, so in retrospect I had been better of with a Wintel box running Frontier.
http://www.tubboy.net/
Did someone say Secret City?
Draw draw draw!
What really happened down at Oakridge
you know, you retain a lot more anonimity when you don't sign your posts
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) -- Mountaineers who ascend North America's loftiest peak are often brought down to earth by "virus-laden poo" left behind by previous climbers, a medical report says.
The unsanitary conditions created by piles of human feces on Mount McKinley can cause diarrhea among climbers, which can lead to widespread problems when combined with the physical stress of a mountain expedition, according to the report in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine.
Of 132 climbers interviewed on the 20,320-foot (6,200-meter) peak in the summer of 2002, more than a quarter reported having trouble with diarrhea, said the report, which was conducted by officials with the Alaska Division of Public Health.
At high altitudes and in cold temperatures, the authors said those troubles can be severe and potentially dangerous, leading to acute mountain sickness, hypothermia and fatigue-related accidents.
"They think they're going out on a pristine climb and there's virus-laden poo all around them," said Dr. Bradford Gessner, a mountaineer and one of the study's authors.
The researchers said other peaks around the world had similar sanitation troubles but they did not have data on the degree of the problem.
The study recommends a campaign to better educate climbers about hygiene and to impose stiffer penalties for breaches. Climbers also should use alcohol-based hand sanitizers or other antiseptic cleansers after defecating, use purification tablets for drinking water and avoid crowded sleeping arrangements.
Such steps also are appropriate in other well-traveled climbing routes, like Washington's Mount Rainier and on Himalayan peaks, they said.
The National Park Service already has started a clean-up campaign, including the distribution of devices called clean mountain cans to store feces for removal from the mountain, said Roger Robinson, lead mountaineering ranger for Denali National Park and Preserve, site of McKinley.
Because of the harsh conditions, piles of feces have accumulated at the mountain's crowded high camp, located at 17,200 feet (5,200 meters), Robinson said.
"It's just an ice pack up there. You really can't dig down and bury anything," he said.
Incidentally, Buddy's Bar-B-Q has truly amazing barbecue (as I've mentioned a few other places). And I've had it catered on several occasions at ORNL (not Y-12).
It's not like we find any reason to visit Tennessee these days...
Hey, maybe its where Saddam's WMDs are hiding?!?