Unless she's actually gone and killed herself, it sounds to me like she doesn't really believe her own hype.
Not at all. The thing you're missing is that sunk costs don't count. You would never set out to go bankrupt. However, if you've blown a hell of a lot of money on something that turned out to bankrupt you anyway, you might want to build on it anyway because it still puts you a little bit ahead.
And that's her take on it. From where she is she still thinks that life isn't bad, but she doesn't feel that getting to where she is through the trials and pain was worth it. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
There will be people who know the answer, and those that don't. Those that don't will spread their answers fairly evenly about. Those that know, will all agree, so when the votes are tabulated, the correct one gets the highest percentage.
That works for trivia quizzes. But do you expect the same thing to work for questions of policy? You can be pretty sure it would not; there are too many emotionally-loaded issues that people don't have the time to check up on.
Thought experiment: Immediately after Columbine, suppose a vote was held on banning trench coats and subjecting school outcasts and players of Quake to daily searches to prevent shootings and bombings. Given the hysteria whipped up about the hypothetical associations and hobbies of Dylan and Klebold you could expect something like this to have a chance of passing; once passed, it would be much harder to revisit the issue and rescind it. Or suppose someone decided to demagogue the Jon-Benet Ramsey murder and subject all child beauty pageant participants and promoters to fingerprinting and background checks?
Direct democracy doesn't work on the scale of the USA. It can't. What might work is a second-generation representative democracy where we delegate proxies to certain reps (perhaps on an issue-by-issue basis), but that is still paying people to do the political work that we do not have time to do ourselves. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
On the contrary, you can attack the conclusions even if the premises are right IF the conclusions leads to morally questionable results...
Wouldn't that be better cause to question the validity of the prevailing morality, instead of the conclusion?
or, more importantly, if the logical model that permits such premises is not sound.
But how do you measure the soundness of premises? It is one set of premises which produces the proofs and conclusions of Euclidean geometry, and another set of premises which produces the proofs and conclusions of other geometries (Riemann geometry is one such, if I have my terms right - IANA mathematician). Both are applicable to different things.
So what premises are applicable to the ethics of intervention (pro or con) in the lives of severely handicapped newborns in the here and now? That, my friend, is the $64,000 question, and Singer is certainly not doing any harm by forcing us to think about it.
Finally, perfect knowledge of what premises are right is not within human capability. The best we can do is to know something is pretty good, not that it is the ultimate. I have no trouble living with that. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
I know this may sound inhumane, but I'm sure the severly disabled aren't exactly living in a state of bliss.
Even some of the less-severely disabled. I have a very dear friend who was born with spina bifida. She avoided the brain damage which often comes along with this disorder (she's very intelligent and a charming lady), but her legs are mostly paralyzed; she gets around with a wheelchair and leg braces/crutches.
She told me herself that life isn't bad, but given the pain and other consequences of her condition she felt she would have been happier overall if she had not been born. I cannot argue with that. And given that a fetus or infant has no ability to make the decisions involved, I have to stand up for the rights of parents to choose what is best for their own family. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
Up until not too long ago, people _could_ "euthanize" babies right after they were born (or during birth). Even healthy ones. It was called partial birth abortion.
Just a few notes:
It is the ones who would prohibit this procedure who created that label. It is deliberately pejorative. The medically correct term is Intact Dilation and Extraction (intact, compared to the previous best-practice technique which involves slicing the fetus up in utero and removing it in pieces). Notice that the anti's never mention the gruesome nature of the alternative, or the danger to the woman of having sharp instruments poking around inside her.
There isn't a birth involved in a "PBA" (ID&E). No contractions, no natural dilation.
Abortions done late enough to require this procedure are almost always the consequence of heartbreaking tragedies. Fetuses so deformed they cannot survive, parents trying desperately for a child and their best chance is to avoid the complications of a full-term pregnancy and try again right away. This is true "family values"... and these are the people demonized by the anti's!
Just like gay-bashers often having suppressed homosexual feelings, sometimes the people pointing at other people and calling them monsters are monsters themselves. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
Ah, yes. Our elders will live forever if we don't put them in nursing homes! And all poisons of all successful organisms should be eliminated to protect the Earth; we have to get rid of all the atmospheric oxygen that's been contaminating our planet for so long!
Thanks. I feel better now. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
It took russia to create communsism as we know it.
I have to wonder exactly what you think the People's Republic of China (is People's Republic an oxymoron) and North Korea are. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
Sir, you keep typing that word wrong. You mean "anencephalic".
Which does bring up a burning question. Anencephalic infants cannot survive; many die before birth, and the rest are all dead within weeks. This is all due to failure of the skull and brain to form correctly; there is no cure.
Some women carrying anencephalic fetuses have tried to donate their organs. This has not happened yet, because hospitals refuse to take the organs before clinical death (the heart stops), and by the time the heart fails the organs have been damaged by lack of oxygen and cannot be transplanted. Meanwhile, other babies die for lack of hearts, livers and kidneys.
Should we:
Define life as "natural circulation" and allow the current situation to continue?
Define life as "presence of a living cerebral cortex" and allow parents to donate their anencephalic babies' organs immediately at birth?
Define life as "conscious existence" a la Singer, decide that massive surgical intervention to save malformed newborns is too expensive for society to bear, and allow the parents of babies with biliary atresia (a fatal malformation of the liver) a choice between euthanasia or natural death? (Most babies with this problem die, due to lack of donor livers or rejection of transplants.)
Other?
Sometimes there just aren't any easy choices. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
what's the difference between a baby 2 seconds after it's born and a fetus 2 seconds before it's born?
Mostly, huge (and irreversible) changes in the pulmonary and circulatory systems.
What, exactly, is the difference between abortion and infanticide?
That one's easy. Abortion (also known as "miscarriage") is the termination of a pregnancy before term; implied is the failure of the embryo/fetus to survive, otherwise it is known as premature birth. Infanticide is the killing of an infant, implying that it is already born alive. The really sticky issues, such as "What do you call the deliberate killing of a fetus before birth" cannot be resolved by appealing to the historical terminology. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
The life not worth the living? Does this kind of thinking remind you of anyone?
That's not it at all. The issue is "the life not yet begun", and the burning social question is "When does life as a human being begin?" (And the associated personal question is "Do we have any business making a new human being with X, Y and Z inherent problems and the consequent disadvantages and suffering?")
People have a lot of different attitudes about this. The Right-To-Life position is that it begins at the union of gametes (which I've heard parodied as "Life begins at erection"), and some even take issue with interfering with the gametes getting together. To the Warren Court, life which could be protected by the power of the state without reservation began at viability.
Singer starts with the premise that life qua human being is tied to conscious existence. In this he is not alone: The entire USA and the courts have no problem with proclaiming a body that's still metabolizing just fine, but can never be conscious again due to brain death, to be legally dead. Singer thinks that consciousness doesn't begin until a month or more after full-term birth and draws conclusions from this. You have no business attacking his conclusions unless you can find something wrong with his premises. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
A new software load for one of the two systems here in da cube may be an option. Space for a new box and monitor is out of the question even if I could get one allocated, and I don't have a spare system I'm willing to bring in.
I suppose it's okay, they pay me by the hour, but it still rankles that there are far better tools that I know how to use very effectively and they're just out of my reach.
Of course, the entire page refuses to address NT's TCO, like:
Total system re-installs when something hoses the registry.
Endless waits on hold when you have a problem that requires a tech-support call.
The wasted time when the tech-support information turns out to be wrong.
Other details like "Linux lacks a commercial quality Journaling File System" get me too. Does NT now have a JFS? I seem to recall that at the time Micro$oft first pointed this particular finger at Linux, NT did not have one either.
Ah, well. Being an embedded-systems guy rather than a sysadmin I am closer to being a (l)user than a kernel hacker, but it was just yesterday that I was hating the blasted Lose95 on the desktop because I didn't have awk available to extract some stats from my ICE trace-buffer dump files. Doing it in Excel is a pain in the butt. I hate Micro$oft. (I have to ask... do Cosmic and ZAP run under WINE? That would be a huge boost to my productivity.)
What's a bigger threat to you and your children's lives? China dropping an ICBM or some punk shooting you in the street?
This is a very misleading comparison, BTW. It asks people to rank the different likelihoods of possibilities in completely dissimilar categories: many small events not unlike auto accidents whose likelihood and consequences can be seen statistically, and a single event with a likelihood we can only guess and consequences we have never seen before.
The bigger threat is probably China, overall. Before the time the likelihood of being killed by a punk in the street reached 0.1% a year, we'd have a huge response to the problem. On the other hand, 20% of Americans could wind up dead or sickened because of a month of miscalculations about what an inbred and paranoid Chinese leadership will do, and we wouldn't have any ramp-up to warn us about the ultimate magnitude of our costs.
Photons have mass-energy, and momentum by the equation E = pc. A one-MeV gamma ray has more mass-energy than an electron (511 KeV). This can give a little electron a very big kick. I'd quote you the equation for the conservation of energy and momentum if I could remember that part of PHY 242.
Beta radiation doesn't penetrate a significant thickness of metal. Gamma photons do; most of the electrons which produce Cerenkov radiation in a reactor are secondary particles produced by the primary gamma emissions.
You want guaranteed safety? Look at some of the designs for gas-cooled reactors with pelletized carbide fuel. They can be designed so that "thermal broadening" cuts off the chain reaction before the fuel gets near melting; if you turn off the cooling fans, physics would shut them off.
The only "technical solutions" I've ever heard of involve digging a really big hole, and I'm afraid that I don't trust the stuff to stay buried long enough.
Depends what you bury. Fission products (the actual waste) have half-lives of 50 years or less. You could bury that or keep it around at your option; the Pyramids are as old as 5000 years, and in that time all of the cobalt 60 and strontium 90 and other ugly stuff would have all turned cold. It isn't going away overnight, but it doesn't have to. Radioactivity is actually an advantage compared to chemical poisons which might not degrade for millenia, or elemental toxics like mercury which will be toxic forever.
Chernobal is still critical.....burning away through the ground towards the water table.
Not by a long shot. The PBS special on it some years ago publicly put the lie to that one. Some of the fuel did melt, but it formed a slag with the sand which surrounded the core and melted into glass. This glass flowed lower in the building, where it hardened (the reactor was not critical without a moderator, and the graphite moderator burned away).
The hardened mix of fuel, waste isotopes, cladding and sand was named Chernobylite. The PBS show had footage of a piece of a hardened flow being shot off by a Russian marksman, then being placed in a shielded container by a small wheeled robot. That stuff is hard as rock; it isn't going anywhere.
I've seen this comment a bunch of times, differing only in a few words, about lots of different things:
We're dealing with the very basic building blocks of reality as we know it - it cannot possibly be safe.
You could plunk this identical comment in a discussion about genetically modified plants, and it would fit right in. It's a nice little non-thought, a perfect mantra for Luddites. But enough of demolishing the political posturing.
Wind and solar account for only a minuscule proportion of the total electrical grid capacity. DOE figures show that solar and wind together account for only 19 megawatts of the US grid's 750000 megawatt capacity. Worse, they cannot be used for more than about 20% of total capacity before they will require additional backup generators to sub for them when the wind dies and the sun goes down. More than that and you get the likelihood of blackouts.
The problem with solar and wind is that they are intermittent sources and cannot be scheduled. You cannot use them to replace other generating capacity until you can store energy for use later. Pumped storage is expensive and kills fish (see the Ludington, MI plant's records) and batteries are expensive and require maintenance. Batteries are also prone to mishaps, and materials commonly used to make storage cells (like lead and cadmium) are toxic heavy metals. Millions of battery fire hazards with toxic emissions have the potential to be more troublesome than a few large nuclear installations; the smaller number of sites is always going to be easier to inspect and control.
Solar power is still rather expensive, and wind power kills lots of mechanics; they both fall prey to the storage problem. Coal power kills lots of people with sensitive lungs (mostly the old and the very young). Nuclear power in the USA is, by and large, pretty damn safe especially given the silly regulations under which most operational plants were built. We've learned a lot since then; we could build totally fail-safe plants today if we could get past the political obstacles. We could also have disposed of all the spent fuel sitting in pools at nuclear plants by now, except for the anti-nuke political activists who do not want to admit that the technical solutions will work. How about getting out of the way?
Just as a comment, I've heard that atomic scientists once used Cerenkov radiation to locate beams in cyclotrons... by sticking their heads inside the machines! I can't be sure of the truth of this or not (having no primary source), but it would be funny if the Doctor Science comment about "sticking your head into the beam of a linear accelerator" had some basis in fact.
There have been a great many bystanders killed in explosions of chemical plants and oil refineries in the last ten years or so; people live across the road from those installations too. It's not feasible to completely isolate everything that might be dangerous.
Burning coal doesn't put radioactive carbon in your lungs; C-14 decays with a half-life of less than 6000 years, and all coal is many millions of years old. C-14 is created in the atmosphere when cosmic rays bombard nitrogen, not in coal seams. Accordingly, coal contains no detectable amounts of C-14. Tramp thorium, uranium, radium, polonium... sure. Just no C-14.
Nobody's gotten this entirely right yet... the blue light is Cerenkov radiation, which is created when charged particles like electrons (NOT neutrons) move through a medium faster than light travels through it. (Obviously this cannot be done in free space, but it can in water, in glass, and other media.) Much like an object moving through air faster than the speed of sound creates a sonic boom, a charged particle going faster than the local speed of light creates a "photic boom". Just FYI, some electronic devices such as Travelling Wave Tubes work on not-dissimilar principles.
How do the electrons get moving so fast? When a gamma ray bounces off an electron, the electron can recoil at high speed. This phenomenon is called Compton scattering, if I'm not mistaken.
(Man, did this thread ever attract lots of comments! Take a few minutes to write, and half a dozen people slip in.)
Briefly: The critical state is where each fission event emits neutrons which create, on average, one more fission (a "chain reaction", like falling dominoes). "Fast" (high-energy) neutrons are not as easily captured by U-235 nuclei as "thermal" neutrons (neutrons which have energies similar to the kinetic energies of particles in bulk materials). This last part is important.
As for what really happened, we're going to be at the mercy of relatively unsophisticated reporters and editors for some time, but it appears that some spent enriched fuel was being reprocessed chemically to separate it from fission waste products. Since the fuel is normally in the form of uranium oxides (extremely high-melting), it must be dissolved in acid to make it soluble at room temperature. Most acids are far from pure (they contain a lot of water), and the hydrogen in acid or water is a good moderator for neutrons. The uranium alone wasn't a problem, but adding it to a solution with lots of neutron-slowing hydrogen raised the neutron capture efficiency to the point where the tank went critical; in effect, it became a nuclear reactor. This is accompanied by lots of pretty blue Cerenkov-radiation light and killer doses of neutrons.
The reaction will stop when the solution gets too concentrated (not enough hydrogen to slow the neutrons) or too spread-out (too many lost neutrons to continue the reaction). Throwing in a neutron absorber like boron would fix it too. If the Japanese have a bomb-disposal robot capable of getting to the tank and dumping some boric acid into it, that would probably get rid of the immediate problem. Then the difficulty becomes one of cleanup.
Of course the big problem is how the workers got 8 times the usual quantity of uranium into the tank against all procedures. Somehow I don't think they were being as orderly and efficient as the stereotype of the Japanese would suggest.
Nope, I don't work in the biz, but I've spent lots of time listening to old pros talk shop.
Hint, most orbits are not geosynchronous. Polar orbits go over the poles. The only restriction is that the orbit has to be an ellipse (for the ideal 2-body case, in practice other influences perturb the shape), and the plane of the orbit has to go through the center of mass of the primary.
What this experiment is designed to measure is a predicted GR phenomenon called "frame dragging", where a massive rotating body (like Earth) causes the axis of rotation of other rotating bodies nearby (like gyroscopes) to precess. I'm not sure why the orbit is polar, but it may have to do with keeping the position reference (a star) in view at all times.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's her take on it. From where she is she still thinks that life isn't bad, but she doesn't feel that getting to where she is through the trials and pain was worth it.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Thought experiment: Immediately after Columbine, suppose a vote was held on banning trench coats and subjecting school outcasts and players of Quake to daily searches to prevent shootings and bombings. Given the hysteria whipped up about the hypothetical associations and hobbies of Dylan and Klebold you could expect something like this to have a chance of passing; once passed, it would be much harder to revisit the issue and rescind it. Or suppose someone decided to demagogue the Jon-Benet Ramsey murder and subject all child beauty pageant participants and promoters to fingerprinting and background checks?
Direct democracy doesn't work on the scale of the USA. It can't. What might work is a second-generation representative democracy where we delegate proxies to certain reps (perhaps on an issue-by-issue basis), but that is still paying people to do the political work that we do not have time to do ourselves.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
So what premises are applicable to the ethics of intervention (pro or con) in the lives of severely handicapped newborns in the here and now? That, my friend, is the $64,000 question, and Singer is certainly not doing any harm by forcing us to think about it.
Finally, perfect knowledge of what premises are right is not within human capability. The best we can do is to know something is pretty good, not that it is the ultimate. I have no trouble living with that.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
She told me herself that life isn't bad, but given the pain and other consequences of her condition she felt she would have been happier overall if she had not been born. I cannot argue with that. And given that a fetus or infant has no ability to make the decisions involved, I have to stand up for the rights of parents to choose what is best for their own family.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
- It is the ones who would prohibit this procedure who created that label. It is deliberately pejorative. The medically correct term is Intact Dilation and Extraction (intact, compared to the previous best-practice technique which involves slicing the fetus up in utero and removing it in pieces). Notice that the anti's never mention the gruesome nature of the alternative, or the danger to the woman of having sharp instruments poking around inside her.
- There isn't a birth involved in a "PBA" (ID&E). No contractions, no natural dilation.
- Abortions done late enough to require this procedure are almost always the consequence of heartbreaking tragedies. Fetuses so deformed they cannot survive, parents trying desperately for a child and their best chance is to avoid the complications of a full-term pregnancy and try again right away. This is true "family values"... and these are the people demonized by the anti's!
Just like gay-bashers often having suppressed homosexual feelings, sometimes the people pointing at other people and calling them monsters are monsters themselves.--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Ah, yes. Our elders will live forever if we don't put them in nursing homes! And all poisons of all successful organisms should be eliminated to protect the Earth; we have to get rid of all the atmospheric oxygen that's been contaminating our planet for so long!
Thanks. I feel better now.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Which does bring up a burning question. Anencephalic infants cannot survive; many die before birth, and the rest are all dead within weeks. This is all due to failure of the skull and brain to form correctly; there is no cure.
Some women carrying anencephalic fetuses have tried to donate their organs. This has not happened yet, because hospitals refuse to take the organs before clinical death (the heart stops), and by the time the heart fails the organs have been damaged by lack of oxygen and cannot be transplanted. Meanwhile, other babies die for lack of hearts, livers and kidneys.
Should we:
- Define life as "natural circulation" and allow the current situation to continue?
- Define life as "presence of a living cerebral cortex" and allow parents to donate their anencephalic babies' organs immediately at birth?
- Define life as "conscious existence" a la Singer, decide that massive surgical intervention to save malformed newborns is too expensive for society to bear, and allow the parents of babies with biliary atresia (a fatal malformation of the liver) a choice between euthanasia or natural death? (Most babies with this problem die, due to lack of donor livers or rejection of transplants.)
- Other?
Sometimes there just aren't any easy choices.--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
People have a lot of different attitudes about this. The Right-To-Life position is that it begins at the union of gametes (which I've heard parodied as "Life begins at erection"), and some even take issue with interfering with the gametes getting together. To the Warren Court, life which could be protected by the power of the state without reservation began at viability.
Singer starts with the premise that life qua human being is tied to conscious existence. In this he is not alone: The entire USA and the courts have no problem with proclaiming a body that's still metabolizing just fine, but can never be conscious again due to brain death, to be legally dead. Singer thinks that consciousness doesn't begin until a month or more after full-term birth and draws conclusions from this. You have no business attacking his conclusions unless you can find something wrong with his premises.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
I suppose it's okay, they pay me by the hour, but it still rankles that there are far better tools that I know how to use very effectively and they're just out of my reach.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Of course, the entire page refuses to address NT's TCO, like:
- Total system re-installs when something hoses the registry.
- Endless waits on hold when you have a problem that requires a tech-support call.
- The wasted time when the tech-support information turns out to be wrong.
Other details like "Linux lacks a commercial quality Journaling File System" get me too. Does NT now have a JFS? I seem to recall that at the time Micro$oft first pointed this particular finger at Linux, NT did not have one either.Ah, well. Being an embedded-systems guy rather than a sysadmin I am closer to being a (l)user than a kernel hacker, but it was just yesterday that I was hating the blasted Lose95 on the desktop because I didn't have awk available to extract some stats from my ICE trace-buffer dump files. Doing it in Excel is a pain in the butt. I hate Micro$oft. (I have to ask... do Cosmic and ZAP run under WINE? That would be a huge boost to my productivity.)
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
120 mm = 4.72 inches. (1 inch = 25.4 mm)
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
The bigger threat is probably China, overall. Before the time the likelihood of being killed by a punk in the street reached 0.1% a year, we'd have a huge response to the problem. On the other hand, 20% of Americans could wind up dead or sickened because of a month of miscalculations about what an inbred and paranoid Chinese leadership will do, and we wouldn't have any ramp-up to warn us about the ultimate magnitude of our costs.
Beta radiation doesn't penetrate a significant thickness of metal. Gamma photons do; most of the electrons which produce Cerenkov radiation in a reactor are secondary particles produced by the primary gamma emissions.
Well of course "Dvorak isn't really any faster than Dvorak". You mean QWERTY?
Deja Moo: The feeling that
The hardened mix of fuel, waste isotopes, cladding and sand was named Chernobylite. The PBS show had footage of a piece of a hardened flow being shot off by a Russian marksman, then being placed in a shielded container by a small wheeled robot. That stuff is hard as rock; it isn't going anywhere.
Wind and solar account for only a minuscule proportion of the total electrical grid capacity. DOE figures show that solar and wind together account for only 19 megawatts of the US grid's 750000 megawatt capacity. Worse, they cannot be used for more than about 20% of total capacity before they will require additional backup generators to sub for them when the wind dies and the sun goes down. More than that and you get the likelihood of blackouts.
The problem with solar and wind is that they are intermittent sources and cannot be scheduled. You cannot use them to replace other generating capacity until you can store energy for use later. Pumped storage is expensive and kills fish (see the Ludington, MI plant's records) and batteries are expensive and require maintenance. Batteries are also prone to mishaps, and materials commonly used to make storage cells (like lead and cadmium) are toxic heavy metals. Millions of battery fire hazards with toxic emissions have the potential to be more troublesome than a few large nuclear installations; the smaller number of sites is always going to be easier to inspect and control.
Solar power is still rather expensive, and wind power kills lots of mechanics; they both fall prey to the storage problem. Coal power kills lots of people with sensitive lungs (mostly the old and the very young). Nuclear power in the USA is, by and large, pretty damn safe especially given the silly regulations under which most operational plants were built. We've learned a lot since then; we could build totally fail-safe plants today if we could get past the political obstacles. We could also have disposed of all the spent fuel sitting in pools at nuclear plants by now, except for the anti-nuke political activists who do not want to admit that the technical solutions will work. How about getting out of the way?
Just as a comment, I've heard that atomic scientists once used Cerenkov radiation to locate beams in cyclotrons... by sticking their heads inside the machines! I can't be sure of the truth of this or not (having no primary source), but it would be funny if the Doctor Science comment about "sticking your head into the beam of a linear accelerator" had some basis in fact.
There have been a great many bystanders killed in explosions of chemical plants and oil refineries in the last ten years or so; people live across the road from those installations too. It's not feasible to completely isolate everything that might be dangerous.
Burning coal doesn't put radioactive carbon in your lungs; C-14 decays with a half-life of less than 6000 years, and all coal is many millions of years old. C-14 is created in the atmosphere when cosmic rays bombard nitrogen, not in coal seams. Accordingly, coal contains no detectable amounts of C-14. Tramp thorium, uranium, radium, polonium... sure. Just no C-14.
How do the electrons get moving so fast? When a gamma ray bounces off an electron, the electron can recoil at high speed. This phenomenon is called Compton scattering, if I'm not mistaken.
Briefly: The critical state is where each fission event emits neutrons which create, on average, one more fission (a "chain reaction", like falling dominoes). "Fast" (high-energy) neutrons are not as easily captured by U-235 nuclei as "thermal" neutrons (neutrons which have energies similar to the kinetic energies of particles in bulk materials). This last part is important.
As for what really happened, we're going to be at the mercy of relatively unsophisticated reporters and editors for some time, but it appears that some spent enriched fuel was being reprocessed chemically to separate it from fission waste products. Since the fuel is normally in the form of uranium oxides (extremely high-melting), it must be dissolved in acid to make it soluble at room temperature. Most acids are far from pure (they contain a lot of water), and the hydrogen in acid or water is a good moderator for neutrons. The uranium alone wasn't a problem, but adding it to a solution with lots of neutron-slowing hydrogen raised the neutron capture efficiency to the point where the tank went critical; in effect, it became a nuclear reactor. This is accompanied by lots of pretty blue Cerenkov-radiation light and killer doses of neutrons.
The reaction will stop when the solution gets too concentrated (not enough hydrogen to slow the neutrons) or too spread-out (too many lost neutrons to continue the reaction). Throwing in a neutron absorber like boron would fix it too. If the Japanese have a bomb-disposal robot capable of getting to the tank and dumping some boric acid into it, that would probably get rid of the immediate problem. Then the difficulty becomes one of cleanup.
Of course the big problem is how the workers got 8 times the usual quantity of uranium into the tank against all procedures. Somehow I don't think they were being as orderly and efficient as the stereotype of the Japanese would suggest.
Nope, I don't work in the biz, but I've spent lots of time listening to old pros talk shop.
What this experiment is designed to measure is a predicted GR phenomenon called "frame dragging", where a massive rotating body (like Earth) causes the axis of rotation of other rotating bodies nearby (like gyroscopes) to precess. I'm not sure why the orbit is polar, but it may have to do with keeping the position reference (a star) in view at all times.