Nonsense, there is a one-size-fits-all narrative to describe anything in nuclear power. The management is corrupt, incompetent, and greedy. Nuclear power itself is like a coiled serpent, ready to strike at any moment, laying waste to hundreds of square miles of land.
We need some miners to step up and advise of the fastest method to dissolve uranium in a steel container and pump it out.
Seems easy enough.
1. Add highly toxic mining acid by the boatfuls to leaky glowing reactor core, spraying toxic acid all over mining engineer #1-500 in the process.. 2. Get mining engineers #500-1000 to pump glowing toxic corrosive dissolved uranium goo, which radiates fast enough to kill you in an hour just by standing next to it, into storage tank 3. Continue until you run out of cake. 4. Science!
A lot of roadblocks go up in a sudden poof of smoke when you say "or would you rather deal with a nuclear meltdown?".
Except for the ones provided by Mother Physics, for whom failure (up to and including nuclear meltdown) is always an option.
Atoms aren't very impressed when you pull out an ID card and shout "'I'm the US President and I'm ordering you not to irradiate 300 square miles of sovereign homeland soil!"
only to have DNA testing later show that hose people were innocent of those crimes>/quote>
Excuse me, but hasn't the opposite also been the case? That people were convicted based on 'DNA testing' which was alleged to have been 'scientific proof' and therefore less falsifiable than mere testimony - but that the convictions were then overturned?
I wouldn't bet the farm on an abstract claim of 'SCIENCE!' against a large amount of corroborating human testimony, is what I'm saying. 'SCIENCE!' has a habit of changing its absolute pronouncements every generation or so, while 'science' admits when it simply isn't 100% sure.
Oh, there's plenty of evidence. Too much, actually. Have you actually read the documented sighting reports for the original 1940s-50s wave of UFOs? It's a fascinating piece of history and has very little to do with the Steven Spielberg or Chris Carter media portrayal of UFOs as nuts-and-bolts saucers in the sky piloted by little grey men. Whatever UFOs were/are, they were witnessed by competent military observers - but they seem to inhabit a weird sort of grey zone between optical illusion and physical object. They appear, they're seen, sometimes they trigger radar, they don't do much, they go away, all in all they're pretty boring things. Little dots of light, mostly. The main thing we know is that they don't appear harmful (if you ignore the cases where multiple UFO sightings coincided with nuclear missile silo shutdowns/malfunctions). Bottom line is, we don't know what they are, but we know several things that they are not, and neither an invading extraterrestrial fleet nor an epidemic of synchronised mass hallucination seem to be really sensible explanations.
The UFO phenomenon is very interesting for this reason. But the personalities and politics which surround the field, ugh. Too much confusion, prejudice and conclusion-jumping by even the best writers (and I'd count Jacques Vallee - who by the way, was one of the people who really did 'invent the Internet' back in the day - among them. But even he gets way too paranoid.)
Science is absolutely not a competition. Was Argentina harmed because the US went to the moon?
John F Kennedy, 1961: "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because it is easy but because it will annoy Argentina."
theoretical physics have already reached the point of being untestable unless one can launch a spacecraft into close proximity to a black hole...
Good news everyone! The Large Hadron Collider will soon make it possible to rigorously test General Relativity, as soon as we can construct a sufficiently well-armed microscopic space fleet.
But it's worth repeating: opposing new nuclear will likely have the effect of keeping older nuclear online longer than it would if there were new nuclear plants built to replace the old ones.
Yeah, so it's the battered wife's fault if she says 'stop beating me with that old rusty pipe' instead of buying a shiny new rusty pipe for her husband to beat her with. Gotcha.
What if, and bear with me here because I'm going out on a speculative limb, what if nuclear fission is inherently unsafe because it requires constant active containment and building untested new designs with unknown failure modes turns out to be just as insanely dangerous as building the old untested designs with unknown (at the time) failure modes was?
and the 60+ years of "all radiation = bad = kill you dead",
Yeah, I think you might want to rethink that statement before you take a drink of the 1 Sv/hr emitting water in the basement of the turbine building at Daichi. Which could never have happened because nuclear power is so inherently safe.
You know, maybe the problem isn't that there's something unsafe about nuclear power
Gee, you know, let's take a bunch of the most toxic substances on the planet, zap up their energy level so they naturally want to heat to thousands of degrees and melt, then wrap them in metal cladding which burns in air and attach an active cooling system to artificially keep their temperature low, extract a fraction of the thermal energy and dump the rest into the ocean. If we ever turn the cooling system off the lot will melt and make at least a 20-km radius uninhabitable, might get into the jetstream or ocean and kill fish, and will certainly dump water into the basement where all the vital cables are which can kill you if you just sit next to it for an hour...... but it's okay because we'll be careful and nothing will go wrong because we'll always STAY careful every second of the day!
Nope, nothing 'inherently unsafe' about that kind of energy generation paradigm.
Yes, isn't it? And the really scary part is that the 'obvious' stupidity in the design was done by General Electric and approved by the best nuclear regulatory authorities in the world.
The lesson is that 40 years ago, when Top Men told us that commercial fission was perfectly safe, they were either unbelievably stupid, or lying, or both.
But those same companies and organizations are perfectly trustworthy today?
Excellent. Go right ahead snarking, Slashdot. The sooner fission gets shut down, the fewer catastrophic 'once in a million years' leaks every twenty years we'll have.
the origins of OOD was not about encapsulating data, but instead behavior. Data is intended to be completely hidden.
This approach is actually exactly what I think is unhelpful about OOP. In the real Internet-connected world of multiple rapidly evolving systems, the need we often find is the exact opposite: we need to exchange standardised forms of data in open, well-documented formats, while leaving any implication of behaviour associated with that data totally unspecified.
For example, if I send you an HTML file, you and I can both agree on what it represents - a Web page, a DOM tree - but I put no restrictions on what you should do with it. You can display it, you can harvest it for links, you can print it to hardcopy, and how and if you do that is your business, not mine.
If the Web had been object-oriented rather than data-oriented and had tried to tie behaviour closely to data then it would have been a huge brittle mess of very tightly-coupled classes and would never have gained traction. This is a lesson I think all OOP advocates need to mediate on. There's something important that we've missed.
good OO design says that your classes correspond to groups of real-world objects: bank accounts, people, widgets, whatever.
I sure hope not, because if you are building a system where classes correspond directly with domain objects, then you're building a system which is not configurable by its operators when the domain rules change. Which is great if you're the original programmer because it means you get paid millions of dollars to add a new report to the database (I've used OO databases where this was the case). Not so great if you're stuck in middle management and you need to tell the system that suddenly Company X is a bank, not a building society, and should now be considered a member of Class OrganizationBank not Class OrganizationFinancialInstitutionBuildingSociety - and you need to tell the system this without whipping out a Java IDE and recompiling.
What you actually want to be building in the real world is a system where data corresponds with domain objects, and where non-user-configurable chunks of program code operate on the data. Or, even better, where non-user-configurable chunks of program code operate on user-provided data representing operations which then operate on user-provided data, and you need to be able to cleanly manage the ambiguity and double-meanings associated with the user typing in a chunk of text into a text file and then pointing this at your program and telling it 'here, this is the description of a business transaction, which is both a thing and an event and an instruction to another system and a MIME mail message and just a chunk of text, and record all of those, and log it in another text file, and snapshot so we can back out if it goes wrong, and keep the lawyers and accountants happy at all times'.
And what you come up with when you've done this might be an 'object-oriented' system or it might not be. It might be implemented in an 'object-oriented' language like Java - partially - but once you've added enough layers of SQL and XML and SOAP and the like, you might end up scratching your head and wondering exactly whether the notion of hierarchically classed 'object' and things being always and only one datatype at once which is set at some mythical 'compile time' in a system which never stops running, actually makes any sense in the real world.
OO is practical for lots of problems, because it makes modelling real-world data easy.
Ahem. Actually, real-world data is exactly where OO doesn't make things easy, because domain objects are not often grouped into neat inheritance classes. If you followed textbook OO design methodology you would be tempted to implement, say, a HR system with employees given classes like 'Line Manager' and 'Executive', and then all Perl breaks loose when someone ever gets a promotion. So you have to fall back on multiple layers of abstraction and before you know it you've implemented a whole separate OO system inside your OO system and neither do quite what you want.
The more I see OO in practice, the more I think it is largely an illusion of ease rather than ease itself.
Computer Science is the domain of scientists and mathematicians!
Though to be a real computer scientist, and not just an effete self-absorbed mathematician, you need to be able to conduct proper double-blind experiments to prove your hypotheses about computational theory. First semester assignment is to design, build and implement a parallel universe where P=NP.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense, there is a one-size-fits-all narrative to describe anything in nuclear power. The management is corrupt, incompetent, and greedy. Nuclear power itself is like a coiled serpent, ready to strike at any moment, laying waste to hundreds of square miles of land.
Oh I wish that were hyperbole.
We need some miners to step up and advise of the fastest method to dissolve uranium in a steel container and pump it out.
Seems easy enough.
1. Add highly toxic mining acid by the boatfuls to leaky glowing reactor core, spraying toxic acid all over mining engineer #1-500 in the process..
2. Get mining engineers #500-1000 to pump glowing toxic corrosive dissolved uranium goo, which radiates fast enough to kill you in an hour just by standing next to it, into storage tank
3. Continue until you run out of cake.
4. Science!
A lot of roadblocks go up in a sudden poof of smoke when you say "or would you rather deal with a nuclear meltdown?".
Except for the ones provided by Mother Physics, for whom failure (up to and including nuclear meltdown) is always an option.
Atoms aren't very impressed when you pull out an ID card and shout "'I'm the US President and I'm ordering you not to irradiate 300 square miles of sovereign homeland soil!"
only to have DNA testing later show that hose people were innocent of those crimes>/quote>
Excuse me, but hasn't the opposite also been the case? That people were convicted based on 'DNA testing' which was alleged to have been 'scientific proof' and therefore less falsifiable than mere testimony - but that the convictions were then overturned?
I wouldn't bet the farm on an abstract claim of 'SCIENCE!' against a large amount of corroborating human testimony, is what I'm saying. 'SCIENCE!' has a habit of changing its absolute pronouncements every generation or so, while 'science' admits when it simply isn't 100% sure.
I have seen two UFOs, which I quickly debunked by looking at them with binoculars.
If you were able to self-identify it, it wasn't unidentified.
you need to present some evidence that they did.
Oh, there's plenty of evidence. Too much, actually. Have you actually read the documented sighting reports for the original 1940s-50s wave of UFOs? It's a fascinating piece of history and has very little to do with the Steven Spielberg or Chris Carter media portrayal of UFOs as nuts-and-bolts saucers in the sky piloted by little grey men. Whatever UFOs were/are, they were witnessed by competent military observers - but they seem to inhabit a weird sort of grey zone between optical illusion and physical object. They appear, they're seen, sometimes they trigger radar, they don't do much, they go away, all in all they're pretty boring things. Little dots of light, mostly. The main thing we know is that they don't appear harmful (if you ignore the cases where multiple UFO sightings coincided with nuclear missile silo shutdowns/malfunctions). Bottom line is, we don't know what they are, but we know several things that they are not, and neither an invading extraterrestrial fleet nor an epidemic of synchronised mass hallucination seem to be really sensible explanations.
The UFO phenomenon is very interesting for this reason. But the personalities and politics which surround the field, ugh. Too much confusion, prejudice and conclusion-jumping by even the best writers (and I'd count Jacques Vallee - who by the way, was one of the people who really did 'invent the Internet' back in the day - among them. But even he gets way too paranoid.)
what used to be one of the leaders of the "Free Press".
The 1950s beg to differ.
they got hit by events OUTSIDE the plans
Yes, not having any plan for the obvious in Japan would be the #fail.
Science is absolutely not a competition. Was Argentina harmed because the US went to the moon?
John F Kennedy, 1961: "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because it is easy but because it will annoy Argentina."
theoretical physics have already reached the point of being untestable unless one can launch a spacecraft into close proximity to a black hole...
Good news everyone! The Large Hadron Collider will soon make it possible to rigorously test General Relativity, as soon as we can construct a sufficiently well-armed microscopic space fleet.
But it's worth repeating: opposing new nuclear will likely have the effect of keeping older nuclear online longer than it would if there were new nuclear plants built to replace the old ones.
Yeah, so it's the battered wife's fault if she says 'stop beating me with that old rusty pipe' instead of buying a shiny new rusty pipe for her husband to beat her with. Gotcha.
What if, and bear with me here because I'm going out on a speculative limb, what if nuclear fission is inherently unsafe because it requires constant active containment and building untested new designs with unknown failure modes turns out to be just as insanely dangerous as building the old untested designs with unknown (at the time) failure modes was?
and the 60+ years of "all radiation = bad = kill you dead",
Yeah, I think you might want to rethink that statement before you take a drink of the 1 Sv/hr emitting water in the basement of the turbine building at Daichi. Which could never have happened because nuclear power is so inherently safe.
You know, maybe the problem isn't that there's something unsafe about nuclear power
Gee, you know, let's take a bunch of the most toxic substances on the planet, zap up their energy level so they naturally want to heat to thousands of degrees and melt, then wrap them in metal cladding which burns in air and attach an active cooling system to artificially keep their temperature low, extract a fraction of the thermal energy and dump the rest into the ocean. If we ever turn the cooling system off the lot will melt and make at least a 20-km radius uninhabitable, might get into the jetstream or ocean and kill fish, and will certainly dump water into the basement where all the vital cables are which can kill you if you just sit next to it for an hour... ... but it's okay because we'll be careful and nothing will go wrong because we'll always STAY careful every second of the day!
Nope, nothing 'inherently unsafe' about that kind of energy generation paradigm.
I am beginning to think that my fellow Americans are afraid of success.
Yes, nothing says 'success' like the smell of radioiodine in your morning coffee. Mmm-tasty!
Especially for nursing infants, it's just what the doctor ordered. Gives 'em that extra 'sparkle' to start the day and take on all life's challenges!
the technology was new for them and they did not know what they were doing
'They' was General Electric. Feel safer now?
I would say the best way to contain the threat is to not go fishing in the reactor building.
Or the Pacific Ocean, for maybe the next 300 years (that should let the Cs-137 decay).
The absolutely obvious stupidity is jaw dropping.
Yes, isn't it? And the really scary part is that the 'obvious' stupidity in the design was done by General Electric and approved by the best nuclear regulatory authorities in the world.
The lesson is that 40 years ago, when Top Men told us that commercial fission was perfectly safe, they were either unbelievably stupid, or lying, or both.
But those same companies and organizations are perfectly trustworthy today?
do you want nuclear power to be widely adopted?
No.
your attitude helps kill nuclear power
Excellent. Go right ahead snarking, Slashdot. The sooner fission gets shut down, the fewer catastrophic 'once in a million years' leaks every twenty years we'll have.
If we were all autists, society would fall apart.
Hey now, I went to aut school and got an aut degree and now I design autwork for Aupple, you insensitive Claude!
the origins of OOD was not about encapsulating data, but instead behavior. Data is intended to be completely hidden.
This approach is actually exactly what I think is unhelpful about OOP. In the real Internet-connected world of multiple rapidly evolving systems, the need we often find is the exact opposite: we need to exchange standardised forms of data in open, well-documented formats, while leaving any implication of behaviour associated with that data totally unspecified.
For example, if I send you an HTML file, you and I can both agree on what it represents - a Web page, a DOM tree - but I put no restrictions on what you should do with it. You can display it, you can harvest it for links, you can print it to hardcopy, and how and if you do that is your business, not mine.
If the Web had been object-oriented rather than data-oriented and had tried to tie behaviour closely to data then it would have been a huge brittle mess of very tightly-coupled classes and would never have gained traction. This is a lesson I think all OOP advocates need to mediate on. There's something important that we've missed.
good OO design says that your classes correspond to groups of real-world objects: bank accounts, people, widgets, whatever.
I sure hope not, because if you are building a system where classes correspond directly with domain objects, then you're building a system which is not configurable by its operators when the domain rules change. Which is great if you're the original programmer because it means you get paid millions of dollars to add a new report to the database (I've used OO databases where this was the case). Not so great if you're stuck in middle management and you need to tell the system that suddenly Company X is a bank, not a building society, and should now be considered a member of Class OrganizationBank not Class OrganizationFinancialInstitutionBuildingSociety - and you need to tell the system this without whipping out a Java IDE and recompiling.
What you actually want to be building in the real world is a system where data corresponds with domain objects, and where non-user-configurable chunks of program code operate on the data. Or, even better, where non-user-configurable chunks of program code operate on user-provided data representing operations which then operate on user-provided data, and you need to be able to cleanly manage the ambiguity and double-meanings associated with the user typing in a chunk of text into a text file and then pointing this at your program and telling it 'here, this is the description of a business transaction, which is both a thing and an event and an instruction to another system and a MIME mail message and just a chunk of text, and record all of those, and log it in another text file, and snapshot so we can back out if it goes wrong, and keep the lawyers and accountants happy at all times'.
And what you come up with when you've done this might be an 'object-oriented' system or it might not be. It might be implemented in an 'object-oriented' language like Java - partially - but once you've added enough layers of SQL and XML and SOAP and the like, you might end up scratching your head and wondering exactly whether the notion of hierarchically classed 'object' and things being always and only one datatype at once which is set at some mythical 'compile time' in a system which never stops running, actually makes any sense in the real world.
the hardware is imperative after all
Tell that to a transistor. It thinks it's a continuously varying function of two variables.
OO is practical for lots of problems, because it makes modelling real-world data easy.
Ahem. Actually, real-world data is exactly where OO doesn't make things easy, because domain objects are not often grouped into neat inheritance classes. If you followed textbook OO design methodology you would be tempted to implement, say, a HR system with employees given classes like 'Line Manager' and 'Executive', and then all Perl breaks loose when someone ever gets a promotion. So you have to fall back on multiple layers of abstraction and before you know it you've implemented a whole separate OO system inside your OO system and neither do quite what you want.
The more I see OO in practice, the more I think it is largely an illusion of ease rather than ease itself.
Computer Science is the domain of scientists and mathematicians!
Though to be a real computer scientist, and not just an effete self-absorbed mathematician, you need to be able to conduct proper double-blind experiments to prove your hypotheses about computational theory. First semester assignment is to design, build and implement a parallel universe where P=NP.
We just need to set up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Breeder Reactors
... buy them all from a drive-thru window and use them before we get home!