I don't think that there *are* any countries that are particularly fair. (I could be wrong.) But there are many that don't have a horse in this race, would those do?
OK, I'm prejudiced. I was once a paper boy. Because of this in college I used to read the San Francisco Chronicle from cover to cover every day of the week.
That kind of loyalty can lead to a rude awakening. The Chronicle turned from a reasonable paper into one spouting the latest fads, and spewing more misinformation than information. But I was loyal. And it got worse. Finally it was bought by Hearst, and got so bad I couldn't even read the front page anymore. Lies, misinformation, abuse, distortion, half-truths. For a long time I believed that I could figure out which stories were true, and which weren't. Then I saw a few reports of events where I was on the scene. I would have gotten closer to the truth, but I would never have believed that they would be *that* dishonest. The photographs are the worst. The angles are carefully chosen to only highlight one view, and then they are cropped to remove any remaining conflicting elements. I don't know that they are afterwards photoshopped, but I wouldn't be surprised...except that that might take too much time.
I don't live in New York or Los Angelas, so I could never check them out this way. And the Chronicle wasn't any shining beacon of journalism. But they degraded in a predictable way, if you consider how the newspapers were being bought out by the larger chains, and the newspaper chains were bought up by organizations who weren't basically news organization.
Let me put it this way. I'm not sure the news COULD be any more corrupt. I think it's already bad enough that people only believe it when it confirms prejudices that they already have, which means that it's passed the optimal level of corruption for controlling people. (Well, they'll also believe it when it has absolutely no effect upon them. So they can read it and say "Thank God I'm not him!" or "Well, he finally got what was coming to him!". Drama rather than reality. Or, perhaps, psychodrama.)
The real problem is that the actual content started disappearing much earlier. Even in 1960 the news was much less than it had been earlier. This is probably due to TV, but it's also due to increasing centralization of control. And the centralization of control has continued, until now there are probably only about 4 viewpoints commonly presented in the US. Perhaps 5.
1) Traditional conservative 2) Modern conservative 3) Traditional liberal 4) Modern liberal 5) Consipracies!! I've got conspiracies for you.
And they're all silly ways of looking at the world. Each of them has some element, however small, of reasonableness. But when they deny the reasonable parts of the other views they become just silly...well, silly and dangerous, but still silly.
You can say that I'm omitting important features, but I refuse to consider sports scores or the affairs of Hollywood stars important, and the business news is included in all the views. (Each with it's own slant of course.)
Local news, news that people could check on, essentially isn't covered. (Sometimes it is covered, which enables me to be fairly certain that most news is fiction. In a few cases I was there and could recognize the event. It just didn't bear much resemblance to what got reported.)
The net may be finishing off the newspapers, but they were already moribund. And most TV news *should* die. If print, radio, and TV news died, it would leave people better informed.
I'm not claiming that this is what physicists meant...quite. If not, it's very close. But I'm talking about what we intuitively see as timelike.
Well, one example is the wall of complexity that occurs in evolutionary theory. Things (nearly) have to have started off in the simplest possible way. Then they got more complex. After they got more complex, it was also possible for them to get simpler. (See cave animals, parasites, etc.)
P.S.: One shouldn't consider viruses to be devolved in this fashion, as they may BE one of the earlier simpler forms, adapted to live in an environment where their original food source had been scavenged by cells. OTOH, they are too complex to be the original form. But the original form probably didn't have it's own cell wall, so they may just have learned how to live without serpentine rock around them, or clay, or whatever the original substitute for a cell wall was.
The basic distinction between spacelike and timelike dimensions, is that timelike dimensions are monotonically ordered, while in spacelike dimentions one can go back and forth. This distinction is derived from the way we order our thoughts. If you can only move one way (and that includes not being able to stop), then that direction has become timelike.
I'm not really certain that this is the precise distinction that physicists make, but it's certainly the one that we make in thinking. (I don't really mean when one is briefly caught up in a torrent, as it takes experience to shape a model, so normally there's only time which is timelike. But if North-South also became monotonic, it would also, after awhile, be seen as timelike.)
N.B.: I'm not sure what loops would do to our conception of a dimension that was "locally monotonic" I think that it would continue to be seen as timelike, but I'm not sure. Various stories about time machines don't seem to leave the reader thinking that the thing they're calling time isn't really time, so my first guess is that loops, at least large ones, wouldn't affect the model.
I disagree. When a source gets to be more than a certain amount wrong, I start just ignoring it completely.
OTOH, I do agree that this means I ignore almost all media news. Even on local events they are so wrong that it should be embarassing. (I know, because I've been present at the site of a few stories, and have visited afterwards the site of several others.) At some point the noise level is so high that you introduce too much error trying to correct it.... And we passed that a few decades ago. (I don't know just when, as by the time I thought to check, it was already too high to enable one to figure out the truth. Which I used to believe I could do.)
Sorry, I know it wasn't creationist. I was using it to highlight the difference between theory and hypothesis. It's a hypothesis of cosmic panspermia...albeit in a form radically different from that originally offered, which was spores propelled by solar wind and cosmic rays.
P.S.: People seem to be attributing this theory to Fred Hoyle, but it was already (I think) nearly a century old when he adopted it. It was originally (I believe) proposed by a (I believe) Swede named (approximately) Arhhenus. Sorry for all the missing information, but the Web seems to have forgotten him, and I don't have the books I used in high school to hand anymore. (That was about 4 decades ago.) And this is a deep post on an irrelevant point in a day old article. *You* may be the only person who ever reads it.
No, but there was a huge volcano explosion in the Mediterranean sea at about the right time. It appears to have created a massive tsunami. It destroyed an island and probably boiled underwater for a month. This would be quite likely to create massive flooding and huge unseasonable rains.
Getting from what seems to have happened to something supernatural, however, is quite silly now, though one can see how it would have seemed reasonable at the time.
This is the information explosion in action. There's more information out there than anyone can keep track of, even in their specialty. So you are FORCED to operate off of things that you judge to be reliable based on some heuristic or other. And you ought to KNOW that much of the time you'll be wrong. So you either live in uncertainty, or you pick some belief and cling to it as true. Any you are forced to choose based on incomplete and inaccurate information.
If you don't rebuild your beliefs regularly, you are guaranteed to be living in a world that increasingly defies common sense. If you do, you live in a world where most people defy common sense. And there aren't (can't be?) any reliable, or even usually reliable, heuristics.
What beliefs you have when you first build your mental model of the world are set mainly by your family. Later as you grow they are adjusted by your peer group. Schools try, but have little real effect before your middle to late teens, by which time many students have decided that they are a waste of time. And the teachers in those schools have had their ideas set at least 20 years ago.
Meanwhile there are all these voices on the internet offering authoritative answers. Which do you trust? Why? Facebook and social networks amplify the effect of peer groups on one's opinions. Teachers devoting time to preparing one to pass rote tests limits their effect.
I'm not sure where this will lead, but the rise of stupid ideas that are easy to grasp to the top is quite easy to explain in this environment. Think of it as meme evolution in action.
If you're going to pick key words, Theory implies that there are reasonable tests. Possibly not ones that we can do yet, but ones that will plausibly become possible. I think the word should be hypothesis.
OTOH, if they are willing to propose a Theory of Intelligent Design that includes reasonable tests that could be used to falsify it, that would be interesting. Probably not worth devoting much time to, but interesting.
I, myself, have invented a hypothesis of cosmic panspermia via tourism. There's no feasible test, but if life were found on other planets, and it had some of the same features that earthly life has. (Hox genetic codes, e.g.) then it would become more probable. My hypothesis is that E.T. tourists stopped to have a picnic a long time ago, and were careless with disposing of their garbage, so the planet was infected with bacteria from their lunch. I can't imagine how you could prove me wrong. So it's a hypothesis.
(OTOH, this is nit-picking. I have no belief that the words will be used seriously. And I think that those who believe it will be allowed to be used to justify the teaching of anything besides fundamentalism are wrong, even though the law will probably be carefully be written so that it *ought* to mean that.)
You can't debunk the Spaghetti Monster. He's real. You can try, of course, but if you don't lie or fabricate you can't do it. I'm not sure about invisible pink unicorns.
You can find lots of citations for that if you want. And some of the criticisms are even valid.
Unions aren't any better than any other human organization. There's a tendency for entrenched power to use it's power mainly to increase it's power.
But the accusations against the unions are mainly made by people earning far more than any union worker does. Sometimes thousands of times as much. (The ones who make millions of times as much don't tend to make public appearances.)
So I have a very hard time taking their complaints seriously. Particularly when after an "negotiation session" where the workers got a bad deal from a company that was keeping it's financial status secret, I heard my manager say to someone who complained about the deal "Well, you should have got a better negotiator". After that, I've taken everything said by a manager, or someone representing management, as either a lie, or at best a self-serving partial truth. There's a reason they keep their salaries secret when they can, and hide the financial status as much as allowed. It's so that they can play games to their benefit and the worker can go hang.
The bad effects from the BP oil spill will be largely gone in a few decades. A couple of centuries at the most. The bad effects from fly ash are similarly confined in time. Nuclear plant problems have a scale that's 10 to 1000 times as long. This is a significant difference. And they can (potentially) affect a much larger area.
We haven't had a really bad nuclear accident yet. It doesn't look like this latest one is going to qualify, though it did come close to the lower end of "really bad". If things had gotten a bit worse to the point where Tokyo needed to be evacuated quickly it would have made it. This would have happened if the spent rods had really lost all cooling and started releasing lots of Cesium. Then the lives of the people in Tokyo would have been hostage to the direction of the wind...unless they left within a few days. Not hours, but not weeks, either. And the surrounding countryside would have been removed from the food producing areas of the country for at least decades. And that's the lower end of "really bad" for that location.
But do notice that New York City has several similar reactors near it. And don't think that because one kind of accident is not likely to happen there (it wasn't *likely* in Japan) that some other won't. And of course it will be one that wasn't foreseen, or at least not considered plausible by anyone in authority. At least not officially. (The Tokyo Electric Company has a history of problems and coverups, but guess what. The US companies do too.)
Anyplace near shore is at risk of a tsunami. Earthquakes aren't the only things that will set them off. They can be set off by the collapse of undersea canyons. (In fact, IIRC, the big earthquake in Indonesia did most of it's damage by causing the collapse of an undersea canyon, which set of the large tsunami. The earthquake itself did do damage, but relatively minor, it was the tsunami that did most of the damage, and that was caused by the collapse of the canyon. And earthquakes aren't the oly reason for that kind of thing happening.
"Power shouldn't go out" isn't an acceptable answer. Yeah, it's true. But power does occasionally go out.
What they should do is store them in a deep hole, so that they can fill the thing with water and let it boil off for a few days without worrying. Yeah, when power's on, the run a refridgerator, and keep the water cool (below boiling, anyway). But there's a reservoir that automatically dumps into it in case of power failure, and then they've got several days to straighten things out. It *would* make retrieving the spent rods more of a hassle most of the time, but how often does THAT happen, anyway?
Maybe store them vertically in a container with a slanted base. Older rods slide down to the deeper part. And there's a lock at the bottom that they can use to retrieve the coldest rods.
But, yeah, this is an after the event analysis. Still, it seems like that's how they should design them from now on.
It's not the EMP. Hard radiation destroys semiconductors built from silicon. Possibly even those built from gallium-arsenide. You might need to go back to vacuum tubes.
EMP is hard on magnetics, which radiation isn't, particularly. (At least it didn't used to be. By now the domains might be small enough that those are damaged, also.) Chips, however, are damaged by hard radiation. They ruin the charge distribution, cut small traces, change the ionization levels, etc. Also even interfere with the doping. The smaller and the faster the chip, the more sensitive it is to this kind of damage. Gallium-arsenide is harder to damage, and there may be another family that's even more rugged. But if you really want rugged, you need to go back to vacuum tubes.
A Faraday cage wouldn't do anything except prevent the control signals from getting to the device. Not what you want. Lead shielding has more going for it, as it would keep out the radiation...but also the radio control. So you'd need something that could operate without a remote controller. And without eyes, either. Those are also sensitive to radiation. Sound and touch could be managed. (I think this is beyond the state of the art even in an intact laboratory, much less in a badly damaged construction site, when there have been multiple explosions showering strangely shaped pieces of concrete around, and where the pre-existing maps no longer tell you where there is safe footing.
Now controlling from a cable...that's not impossible. Of course you're standing a safe distance away, and you can't see the environment your device is trying to move through. And even if the stairs were intact, it's probably heavier than their designed load limit.... well...perhaps not.
There's electronics and electronics. If nothing else, they could use vacuum tubes...which don't get fried by radiation.
OTOH, I seem to recall that there are also gAs electronics that are pretty hard against radiation. The probable answer is "Nobody has already designed robots or telefactors to operate in that kind of environment. And custom designs take a long time." (At current state of the art I think that telefactors are better than actual robots, but the idea is pretty much the same.)
If they weren't still needing to spray water in from helicopters I might agree with you. And if we hadn't already been lied to several times. (Lie *may* be a bit harsh. It's quite possible the people speaking didn't know what was going on, but felt compelled to say something. But they certainly publicly misrepresented the situation.)
As it is...I'm going to hope that things are getting better, but I'm not going to assume that they really are. Maybe they are. And maybe they're just trying to keep people from getting hysterical. And maybe they're trying to get their family members on flights out of the country before all the seats are booked. And from here we can't tell.
Absolute safety is, of course, impossible. But relative safety is.
I just wonder, though, whether humans can be trusted to operate nuclear plants safely. We don't have a good track record. Everywhere there's sufficient information we find critical information being hidden from the people who are supposed to ensure that things are safe for the economic benefit of plant management. In the US we have known unsafe plants being re-licensed after their design life is over to be operated at higher levels of power production than they were designed to EVER be able to safely produce.
I think that physically it's possible to build an operate nuclear plants that are reasonably safe (given the dangers inherent and the benefits, etc.). But I don't think that people can be trusted to do so. It's not a problem of physics, it's a problem of ethics and morality. And we have a very lousy record in handling that area. We don't even seem to be able to think straight about it.
We don't yet know if that was a worse disaster or not. Seriously. If the spent fuel rods start feeding Cesium into the environment, then I'm going to say that the Gulf disaster was the lesser evil. But maybe they won't.
This disaster has the potential to be much worse than anything we've seen so far. It could make Chernobyl minor. It could make Tokyo uninhabitable. It probably won't. But we don't know how it will work out, we don't know how we've been lied to (though we know we have). And it might be that the worst is over.
You just can't tell. Things are being hidden, and even the people who know the most are probably stumbling around in the dark much of the time.
Actually, I *HAVE* told the state to shut down those plants. I also told them not to build there in the first place. They ignored my advice. A couple of the plants that they built in especially bad places had to be shut down before starting up. We're still paying for them, even though we campaigned against them being built.
So, no, I don't think that the US is doing a very good job. California probably isn't even the worst. A map I saw recently seemed to show that the area around New York, NY was much more endangered. By obsolete plants past their designer specified lifespan which are being licensed to generate more power than their designers specified as the intended maximum. It may not be the same kind of disaster, but one should expect one just as bad. And there may well not even be the excuse of "a natural catastrophe of a magnitude it was unreasonable to expect". It's likely to just be a combination of greed and political expediency.
Nuclear power can probably be done safely. But I'm not sure that people can do it safely. Because they make stupid decisions for short-range profit.
I would not rate MSAccess as being a competitor to SQLite. It's not nearly as good. (Well, it wasn't around a decade ago...but at the time it was getting worse with each iteration.) It's sole advantage, if it is an advantage, is that it comes bundled with a programming environment. Unfortunately, they were in the habit of breaking things with every minor release. Or sometimes just because. (My general practice in debugging was to save a text copy of the program, and if I started to get compilation errors, to delete the current programs, and then re-import the text files. It usually worked. For a month or so.) Frequently the problems seemed intentional, though of course one could never prove that. And even if one could have proven malice, the EULA meant they would be held harmless.
For some reason I totally stopped ever allowing any MS software on any computer that I use. (Well, except a few fonts.)
Quantum theory seems to imply that they aren't parallel, but branching. And they are branching all the time.
N.B.: This is one variation of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory. So far there's no evidence that it's the correct interpretation, as up until now the ability to send messages between lines was not believed to exist. This theory, however, seems to say that it does. (I'm filling in a bunch of ignorance with guesses here!) If this is so, then we need to figure out both how to send a message, and how to detect it. At that point we would be in a position to send messages to a past. It just wouldn't be the past of which we were the future. Also the ability to receive messages. But, again, the messages would be from a future that wasn't our future.
I have to admit that this doesn't look spectacularly useful. It's not clear that there would be any benefit in sending messages, and if there weren't, then there wouldn't be any messages to receive. If people would act for net benefit, then it could be very useful. But people don't often act that way, because it's a system that encourages parasites. Still, perhaps timelines that are closer to timelines that send messages to the past are more likely to send messages to the past. In that case there could well be clusters of timelines that operated thus for mutual benefit. And they would be able to use the entire civilization as a massive quantum computer. (With, admittedly, a narrow choke point when it came to transmission of messages.)
Of course, the Many Worlds interpretation may be wrong. That its consistent with quantum mechanics doesn't mean that it's correct when it interprets what the equations mean. Copenhagen could be right. Or Implicate Order. Or... well, they tend to get sillier after that, ending up with Solipsism. To me the Many Worlds interpretation seems the most appealing, but the evidence isn't there to choose between several interpretations. (And it's probably impossible to EVER rule out Solipsism.)
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I don't think that there *are* any countries that are particularly fair. (I could be wrong.) But there are many that don't have a horse in this race, would those do?
OK, I'm prejudiced. I was once a paper boy. Because of this in college I used to read the San Francisco Chronicle from cover to cover every day of the week.
That kind of loyalty can lead to a rude awakening. The Chronicle turned from a reasonable paper into one spouting the latest fads, and spewing more misinformation than information. But I was loyal. And it got worse. Finally it was bought by Hearst, and got so bad I couldn't even read the front page anymore. Lies, misinformation, abuse, distortion, half-truths. For a long time I believed that I could figure out which stories were true, and which weren't. Then I saw a few reports of events where I was on the scene. I would have gotten closer to the truth, but I would never have believed that they would be *that* dishonest. The photographs are the worst. The angles are carefully chosen to only highlight one view, and then they are cropped to remove any remaining conflicting elements. I don't know that they are afterwards photoshopped, but I wouldn't be surprised...except that that might take too much time.
I don't live in New York or Los Angelas, so I could never check them out this way. And the Chronicle wasn't any shining beacon of journalism. But they degraded in a predictable way, if you consider how the newspapers were being bought out by the larger chains, and the newspaper chains were bought up by organizations who weren't basically news organization.
Let me put it this way. I'm not sure the news COULD be any more corrupt. I think it's already bad enough that people only believe it when it confirms prejudices that they already have, which means that it's passed the optimal level of corruption for controlling people. (Well, they'll also believe it when it has absolutely no effect upon them. So they can read it and say "Thank God I'm not him!" or "Well, he finally got what was coming to him!". Drama rather than reality. Or, perhaps, psychodrama.)
The real problem is that the actual content started disappearing much earlier. Even in 1960 the news was much less than it had been earlier. This is probably due to TV, but it's also due to increasing centralization of control. And the centralization of control has continued, until now there are probably only about 4 viewpoints commonly presented in the US. Perhaps 5.
1) Traditional conservative
2) Modern conservative
3) Traditional liberal
4) Modern liberal
5) Consipracies!! I've got conspiracies for you.
And they're all silly ways of looking at the world. Each of them has some element, however small, of reasonableness. But when they deny the reasonable parts of the other views they become just silly...well, silly and dangerous, but still silly.
You can say that I'm omitting important features, but I refuse to consider sports scores or the affairs of Hollywood stars important, and the business news is included in all the views. (Each with it's own slant of course.)
Local news, news that people could check on, essentially isn't covered. (Sometimes it is covered, which enables me to be fairly certain that most news is fiction. In a few cases I was there and could recognize the event. It just didn't bear much resemblance to what got reported.)
The net may be finishing off the newspapers, but they were already moribund. And most TV news *should* die. If print, radio, and TV news died, it would leave people better informed.
I'm not claiming that this is what physicists meant...quite. If not, it's very close. But I'm talking about what we intuitively see as timelike.
Well, one example is the wall of complexity that occurs in evolutionary theory. Things (nearly) have to have started off in the simplest possible way. Then they got more complex. After they got more complex, it was also possible for them to get simpler. (See cave animals, parasites, etc.)
P.S.: One shouldn't consider viruses to be devolved in this fashion, as they may BE one of the earlier simpler forms, adapted to live in an environment where their original food source had been scavenged by cells. OTOH, they are too complex to be the original form. But the original form probably didn't have it's own cell wall, so they may just have learned how to live without serpentine rock around them, or clay, or whatever the original substitute for a cell wall was.
The basic distinction between spacelike and timelike dimensions, is that timelike dimensions are monotonically ordered, while in spacelike dimentions one can go back and forth. This distinction is derived from the way we order our thoughts. If you can only move one way (and that includes not being able to stop), then that direction has become timelike.
I'm not really certain that this is the precise distinction that physicists make, but it's certainly the one that we make in thinking. (I don't really mean when one is briefly caught up in a torrent, as it takes experience to shape a model, so normally there's only time which is timelike. But if North-South also became monotonic, it would also, after awhile, be seen as timelike.)
N.B.: I'm not sure what loops would do to our conception of a dimension that was "locally monotonic" I think that it would continue to be seen as timelike, but I'm not sure. Various stories about time machines don't seem to leave the reader thinking that the thing they're calling time isn't really time, so my first guess is that loops, at least large ones, wouldn't affect the model.
I disagree. When a source gets to be more than a certain amount wrong, I start just ignoring it completely.
OTOH, I do agree that this means I ignore almost all media news. Even on local events they are so wrong that it should be embarassing. (I know, because I've been present at the site of a few stories, and have visited afterwards the site of several others.) At some point the noise level is so high that you introduce too much error trying to correct it. ... And we passed that a few decades ago. (I don't know just when, as by the time I thought to check, it was already too high to enable one to figure out the truth. Which I used to believe I could do.)
Sorry, I know it wasn't creationist. I was using it to highlight the difference between theory and hypothesis. It's a hypothesis of cosmic panspermia...albeit in a form radically different from that originally offered, which was spores propelled by solar wind and cosmic rays.
P.S.: People seem to be attributing this theory to Fred Hoyle, but it was already (I think) nearly a century old when he adopted it. It was originally (I believe) proposed by a (I believe) Swede named (approximately) Arhhenus. Sorry for all the missing information, but the Web seems to have forgotten him, and I don't have the books I used in high school to hand anymore. (That was about 4 decades ago.) And this is a deep post on an irrelevant point in a day old article. *You* may be the only person who ever reads it.
No, but there was a huge volcano explosion in the Mediterranean sea at about the right time. It appears to have created a massive tsunami. It destroyed an island and probably boiled underwater for a month. This would be quite likely to create massive flooding and huge unseasonable rains.
Getting from what seems to have happened to something supernatural, however, is quite silly now, though one can see how it would have seemed reasonable at the time.
It's much worse than that.
This is the information explosion in action. There's more information out there than anyone can keep track of, even in their specialty. So you are FORCED to operate off of things that you judge to be reliable based on some heuristic or other. And you ought to KNOW that much of the time you'll be wrong. So you either live in uncertainty, or you pick some belief and cling to it as true. Any you are forced to choose based on incomplete and inaccurate information.
If you don't rebuild your beliefs regularly, you are guaranteed to be living in a world that increasingly defies common sense. If you do, you live in a world where most people defy common sense. And there aren't (can't be?) any reliable, or even usually reliable, heuristics.
What beliefs you have when you first build your mental model of the world are set mainly by your family. Later as you grow they are adjusted by your peer group. Schools try, but have little real effect before your middle to late teens, by which time many students have decided that they are a waste of time. And the teachers in those schools have had their ideas set at least 20 years ago.
Meanwhile there are all these voices on the internet offering authoritative answers. Which do you trust? Why? Facebook and social networks amplify the effect of peer groups on one's opinions. Teachers devoting time to preparing one to pass rote tests limits their effect.
I'm not sure where this will lead, but the rise of stupid ideas that are easy to grasp to the top is quite easy to explain in this environment. Think of it as meme evolution in action.
Would solipsism count?
If you're going to pick key words, Theory implies that there are reasonable tests. Possibly not ones that we can do yet, but ones that will plausibly become possible. I think the word should be hypothesis.
OTOH, if they are willing to propose a Theory of Intelligent Design that includes reasonable tests that could be used to falsify it, that would be interesting. Probably not worth devoting much time to, but interesting.
I, myself, have invented a hypothesis of cosmic panspermia via tourism. There's no feasible test, but if life were found on other planets, and it had some of the same features that earthly life has. (Hox genetic codes, e.g.) then it would become more probable. My hypothesis is that E.T. tourists stopped to have a picnic a long time ago, and were careless with disposing of their garbage, so the planet was infected with bacteria from their lunch. I can't imagine how you could prove me wrong. So it's a hypothesis.
(OTOH, this is nit-picking. I have no belief that the words will be used seriously. And I think that those who believe it will be allowed to be used to justify the teaching of anything besides fundamentalism are wrong, even though the law will probably be carefully be written so that it *ought* to mean that.)
You can't debunk the Spaghetti Monster. He's real. You can try, of course, but if you don't lie or fabricate you can't do it. I'm not sure about invisible pink unicorns.
You can find lots of citations for that if you want. And some of the criticisms are even valid.
Unions aren't any better than any other human organization. There's a tendency for entrenched power to use it's power mainly to increase it's power.
But the accusations against the unions are mainly made by people earning far more than any union worker does. Sometimes thousands of times as much. (The ones who make millions of times as much don't tend to make public appearances.)
So I have a very hard time taking their complaints seriously. Particularly when after an "negotiation session" where the workers got a bad deal from a company that was keeping it's financial status secret, I heard my manager say to someone who complained about the deal "Well, you should have got a better negotiator". After that, I've taken everything said by a manager, or someone representing management, as either a lie, or at best a self-serving partial truth. There's a reason they keep their salaries secret when they can, and hide the financial status as much as allowed. It's so that they can play games to their benefit and the worker can go hang.
The bad effects from the BP oil spill will be largely gone in a few decades. A couple of centuries at the most. The bad effects from fly ash are similarly confined in time. Nuclear plant problems have a scale that's 10 to 1000 times as long. This is a significant difference. And they can (potentially) affect a much larger area.
We haven't had a really bad nuclear accident yet. It doesn't look like this latest one is going to qualify, though it did come close to the lower end of "really bad". If things had gotten a bit worse to the point where Tokyo needed to be evacuated quickly it would have made it. This would have happened if the spent rods had really lost all cooling and started releasing lots of Cesium. Then the lives of the people in Tokyo would have been hostage to the direction of the wind...unless they left within a few days. Not hours, but not weeks, either. And the surrounding countryside would have been removed from the food producing areas of the country for at least decades. And that's the lower end of "really bad" for that location.
But do notice that New York City has several similar reactors near it. And don't think that because one kind of accident is not likely to happen there (it wasn't *likely* in Japan) that some other won't. And of course it will be one that wasn't foreseen, or at least not considered plausible by anyone in authority. At least not officially. (The Tokyo Electric Company has a history of problems and coverups, but guess what. The US companies do too.)
Anyplace near shore is at risk of a tsunami. Earthquakes aren't the only things that will set them off. They can be set off by the collapse of undersea canyons. (In fact, IIRC, the big earthquake in Indonesia did most of it's damage by causing the collapse of an undersea canyon, which set of the large tsunami. The earthquake itself did do damage, but relatively minor, it was the tsunami that did most of the damage, and that was caused by the collapse of the canyon. And earthquakes aren't the oly reason for that kind of thing happening.
"Power shouldn't go out" isn't an acceptable answer. Yeah, it's true. But power does occasionally go out.
What they should do is store them in a deep hole, so that they can fill the thing with water and let it boil off for a few days without worrying. Yeah, when power's on, the run a refridgerator, and keep the water cool (below boiling, anyway). But there's a reservoir that automatically dumps into it in case of power failure, and then they've got several days to straighten things out. It *would* make retrieving the spent rods more of a hassle most of the time, but how often does THAT happen, anyway?
Maybe store them vertically in a container with a slanted base. Older rods slide down to the deeper part. And there's a lock at the bottom that they can use to retrieve the coldest rods.
But, yeah, this is an after the event analysis. Still, it seems like that's how they should design them from now on.
It's not the EMP. Hard radiation destroys semiconductors built from silicon. Possibly even those built from gallium-arsenide. You might need to go back to vacuum tubes.
EMP is hard on magnetics, which radiation isn't, particularly. (At least it didn't used to be. By now the domains might be small enough that those are damaged, also.) Chips, however, are damaged by hard radiation. They ruin the charge distribution, cut small traces, change the ionization levels, etc. Also even interfere with the doping. The smaller and the faster the chip, the more sensitive it is to this kind of damage. Gallium-arsenide is harder to damage, and there may be another family that's even more rugged. But if you really want rugged, you need to go back to vacuum tubes.
A Faraday cage wouldn't do anything except prevent the control signals from getting to the device. Not what you want. Lead shielding has more going for it, as it would keep out the radiation...but also the radio control. So you'd need something that could operate without a remote controller. And without eyes, either. Those are also sensitive to radiation. Sound and touch could be managed. (I think this is beyond the state of the art even in an intact laboratory, much less in a badly damaged construction site, when there have been multiple explosions showering strangely shaped pieces of concrete around, and where the pre-existing maps no longer tell you where there is safe footing.
Now controlling from a cable...that's not impossible. Of course you're standing a safe distance away, and you can't see the environment your device is trying to move through. And even if the stairs were intact, it's probably heavier than their designed load limit. ... well...perhaps not.
There's electronics and electronics. If nothing else, they could use vacuum tubes...which don't get fried by radiation.
OTOH, I seem to recall that there are also gAs electronics that are pretty hard against radiation. The probable answer is "Nobody has already designed robots or telefactors to operate in that kind of environment. And custom designs take a long time." (At current state of the art I think that telefactors are better than actual robots, but the idea is pretty much the same.)
If they weren't still needing to spray water in from helicopters I might agree with you. And if we hadn't already been lied to several times. (Lie *may* be a bit harsh. It's quite possible the people speaking didn't know what was going on, but felt compelled to say something. But they certainly publicly misrepresented the situation.)
As it is...I'm going to hope that things are getting better, but I'm not going to assume that they really are. Maybe they are. And maybe they're just trying to keep people from getting hysterical. And maybe they're trying to get their family members on flights out of the country before all the seats are booked. And from here we can't tell.
Absolute safety is, of course, impossible. But relative safety is.
I just wonder, though, whether humans can be trusted to operate nuclear plants safely. We don't have a good track record. Everywhere there's sufficient information we find critical information being hidden from the people who are supposed to ensure that things are safe for the economic benefit of plant management. In the US we have known unsafe plants being re-licensed after their design life is over to be operated at higher levels of power production than they were designed to EVER be able to safely produce.
I think that physically it's possible to build an operate nuclear plants that are reasonably safe (given the dangers inherent and the benefits, etc.). But I don't think that people can be trusted to do so. It's not a problem of physics, it's a problem of ethics and morality. And we have a very lousy record in handling that area. We don't even seem to be able to think straight about it.
We don't yet know if that was a worse disaster or not. Seriously. If the spent fuel rods start feeding Cesium into the environment, then I'm going to say that the Gulf disaster was the lesser evil. But maybe they won't.
This disaster has the potential to be much worse than anything we've seen so far. It could make Chernobyl minor. It could make Tokyo uninhabitable. It probably won't. But we don't know how it will work out, we don't know how we've been lied to (though we know we have). And it might be that the worst is over.
You just can't tell. Things are being hidden, and even the people who know the most are probably stumbling around in the dark much of the time.
Ok. You've got heat. Now what are you going to use for cooling? You've got to have both.
Actually, I *HAVE* told the state to shut down those plants. I also told them not to build there in the first place. They ignored my advice. A couple of the plants that they built in especially bad places had to be shut down before starting up. We're still paying for them, even though we campaigned against them being built.
So, no, I don't think that the US is doing a very good job. California probably isn't even the worst. A map I saw recently seemed to show that the area around New York, NY was much more endangered. By obsolete plants past their designer specified lifespan which are being licensed to generate more power than their designers specified as the intended maximum. It may not be the same kind of disaster, but one should expect one just as bad. And there may well not even be the excuse of "a natural catastrophe of a magnitude it was unreasonable to expect". It's likely to just be a combination of greed and political expediency.
Nuclear power can probably be done safely. But I'm not sure that people can do it safely. Because they make stupid decisions for short-range profit.
You mean they actually fixed it?
I would not rate MSAccess as being a competitor to SQLite. It's not nearly as good. (Well, it wasn't around a decade ago...but at the time it was getting worse with each iteration.) It's sole advantage, if it is an advantage, is that it comes bundled with a programming environment. Unfortunately, they were in the habit of breaking things with every minor release. Or sometimes just because. (My general practice in debugging was to save a text copy of the program, and if I started to get compilation errors, to delete the current programs, and then re-import the text files. It usually worked. For a month or so.) Frequently the problems seemed intentional, though of course one could never prove that. And even if one could have proven malice, the EULA meant they would be held harmless.
For some reason I totally stopped ever allowing any MS software on any computer that I use. (Well, except a few fonts.)
Quantum theory seems to imply that they aren't parallel, but branching. And they are branching all the time.
N.B.: This is one variation of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory. So far there's no evidence that it's the correct interpretation, as up until now the ability to send messages between lines was not believed to exist. This theory, however, seems to say that it does. (I'm filling in a bunch of ignorance with guesses here!) If this is so, then we need to figure out both how to send a message, and how to detect it. At that point we would be in a position to send messages to a past. It just wouldn't be the past of which we were the future. Also the ability to receive messages. But, again, the messages would be from a future that wasn't our future.
I have to admit that this doesn't look spectacularly useful. It's not clear that there would be any benefit in sending messages, and if there weren't, then there wouldn't be any messages to receive. If people would act for net benefit, then it could be very useful. But people don't often act that way, because it's a system that encourages parasites. Still, perhaps timelines that are closer to timelines that send messages to the past are more likely to send messages to the past. In that case there could well be clusters of timelines that operated thus for mutual benefit. And they would be able to use the entire civilization as a massive quantum computer. (With, admittedly, a narrow choke point when it came to transmission of messages.)
Of course, the Many Worlds interpretation may be wrong. That its consistent with quantum mechanics doesn't mean that it's correct when it interprets what the equations mean. Copenhagen could be right. Or Implicate Order. Or ... well, they tend to get sillier after that, ending up with Solipsism. To me the Many Worlds interpretation seems the most appealing, but the evidence isn't there to choose between several interpretations. (And it's probably impossible to EVER rule out Solipsism.)