Decrepit Old Fool

Here’s one I never thought of: nuclear reactors along the Tennessee river are being shut down because the river is too warm to cool them.

The nation’s largest public utility shut down Unit 2 about 5:42 p.m. CDT because water drawn from the Tennessee River was exceeding a 90-degree average over 24 hours, amid a blistering heat wave across the Southeast. “We don’t believe we’ve ever shut down a nuclear unit because of river temperature,” said John Moulton, spokesman for the Knoxville, Tenn.-based utility.
- Houston Chronicle: TVA reactor shut down: cooling water from river too hot

I’m sort of a fan of nuclear power but… what do you do then?  Redesign the cooling towers, I guess.  “Yes maam, we’ll have those towers redesigned and retrofitted and the reactor back up by next week.”  Maybe they could put massive intake fans along the base of the towers.  It’s an interesting problem in searching out a reduced-carbon energy infrastructure. 

I saw that knothead Glenn Beck pushing bulletproof backpacks for kids.  Wonder if he owns stock in the company?  That would be pretty sweet – pump up fear and hate, then rake in the cash.

Now you can provide on the spot protection against guns and knife violence!

Independently tested to the standards set by the National Institute for Justice to provide Level II ballistic protection, as found in most police body armor, at almost 1/10 the weight.

Yeah, because it only covers a small area on your child’s back, not the torso and vital organs like a police vest.  But hey, it could help!  The company’s website paints a pretty grim picture of school safety:

Since 1999 over 328 incidents have occurred, leaving 229 dead and 422 injured in school violence alone. That is an average of about 1 per week since the Columbine Tragedy. In almost 97% of these documented incidents, MJ Safety Solutions backpack could have provided the ballistic protection that could have saved lives.

Wait a minute.  Even assuming these statistics weren’t from the general proving grounds of Charmin bathroom tissue, (and I strongly suspect that to be the case) there are something like 88,000 public schools in this country.  Columbine was around 3,000 days ago so that’s around 264 million school days.  Divided by 328 incidents, on any given school day your child would have roughly one in eight hundred thousand chance of an “incident” happening at his school…

This backpack can provide life saving defense for anyone: school children, educators, journalists and tourists to name a few. This is a full size, ultra leightweight backpack packed with features to make it practical for everyone.

…divided by the chance that the incident would even involve your child (schools are big places and most of the incidents are small-scale) and the vague subset of those cases where your child could turn around and present his or her backpack to the line of fire or the path of a knife at just the right instant to stop a bullet. I think that works out to about a one in 792 skabillion chance this backpack would ever do anything except be damned uncomfortable on the school bus.

And incidentally, how many handgun rounds could pass through a fully loaded school backpack?  Have you looked at kids’ textbooks lately?  This very thought has come up before.  Just when you thought a safety idea couldn’t get ANY dumber, how about proposing keeping old textbooks under childrens’ desks as bulletproof shields?  Yes, someone actually proposed that.  :gulp:

I wonder what percentage of those “incidents” involved one kid clobbering another kid with his backpack?

Last thing I did with the VW was begin work on the interior.  It involved quite minor lateral forces on my fingers – not much more than when I’m weightlifting or riding my bike, but my hands have been hurting more and after that I couldn’t even sign my name.  Immersion in ice water for a half hour helped a lot but didn’t help the general physical discomfort of doing body work or restoration work on the interior.  It isn’t arthritis or carpal tunnel, it’s just the latest wrinkle in fibromyalgia. 

It appears my “working on cars” days are drawing to a close.  So I’m going to buy a Honda Civic and blend in with the crowd.  Have it serviced at a garage like everyone else.  But it’s not as if I won’t have anything to do.  There’s still writing and photography, and bicycling. That should keep me out of the pool halls.

If you’re in central Illinois and thinking about getting a classic VW, drop me a line.

Are you a macho man, bored by politics?  This may help.

As Orac says, “Can’t be any worse than the way we choose presidents now.”

SpaceLaw Probe links up to an amazing document from the Eisenhower administration: An Introduction To Outer Space.  This 16-page phamplet describes launch vehicles, orbital mechanics, engineering challenges of operating in space, scientific, economic, and intelligence (as in spying) opportunities, and discusses the risks of space militarization.  It is as clear and relevant today as it was in 1958 – worth reading even if you only want to see a sparkling example of science writing for the public. 

Here’s a brief sample that especially caught my attention:

…Other instruments in the satellites will measure for the first time how much solar energy is falling upon the earth’s atmosphere and how much is reflected and radiated back into space by clouds, oceans, the continents, and by the great polar ice fields.

It is not generally appreciated that the earth has to send back into space, over the long run, exactly as much heat energy as it receives from the sun.  If this were not so the earth would either heat up or cool off.  But there is an excess of income over outgo in the tropical regions, and an excess of outgo over income in the polar regions.  This imbalance has to be continuously rectified by the activity of the earth’s atmosphere which we call weather.

By looking at the atmosphere from the outside, satellites will provide the first real accounting of the energy imbalances, and their consequent tensions, all around the globe.  With the insight gained from such studies, meterologists hope they may improve long-range forecasting of world weather trends.

(We have constructed such a satellite; it is called the Deep Space Climate Observatory.  But it is sitting in a box in a warehouse outside Washington, DC., where it has a poor view of the Earth’s atmosphere.  That’s a pretty interesting story in itself.)

The historical context of the publication is important; it was released only 6 months after the Soviets launched Sputnik.  Imagine the president calling in his Science Advisory Committee.  What a meeting that must have been!  And one year after Sputnik, Congress passed the Space Act, which created NASA and took other actions as well.

From the list in the back of the document, Eisenhower had some really heavy hitters on the Committee.  It is notable that they were listed in alphabetical order, not by ego size.  (As a bit of historitrivia, my father briefly worked for one of them, Dr. Edwin H. Land, testing a revolutionary instant photography technology.  He said when Land and Adams got to talking photochemistry, nobody else could keep up.)

There’s a lot more – it is difficult to do it justice in this brief summary.  Eisenhower said:

…This is not science fiction.  This is a sober, realistic presentation prepared by leading scientists.  I have found this statement so informative and interesting that I wish to share it with all the people of America and indeed with all the people of the earth.  I hope that it can be widely disseminated by all news media…

And blogs, Ike.  Don’t forget the blogs…  ;-P

The ordinance has survived several challenges, and will soon be statewide.  I have no political point to make here, except this is one of the more visually interesting “No Smoking” signs I’ve ever seen and it looks surreal when placed on both the inside and outside of the door.

The expression on the guy’s face seems to say; “There are few pleasures to be had, but my pipe and the long, solitary walk back to the outpost where I stand vigil.”

Spotted this little guy on the way to work last week.  It was hot but the grass was still a little bit green.  Now, the grass is all brown (even trees are dropping leaves though fall is a ways off) – and all the grasshoppers I see now are brown.  It could be camouflage though landing on a nice white concrete post wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. 

Authorities have moved to stop a French teen who published his own complete translation of the latest Harry Potter novel online.  They were, however, impressed by the near-professional quality of his translation work.

*blink*blink*… Wow.  Something tells me that kid won’t have any trouble finding a job. 

Listen to Dick Cheney making a cogent, well-informed and prescient analysis of why it was not a good idea for Bush Senior to invade Iraq:

Remember Cheney mopping the floor with Edwards in the Veep debates?  Don’t underestimate him.  It’s obvious that Cheney is a smart guy, and completely on target.  And yes, he did use the “Q-” word.  After saying these things in 1994, for him to turn around and argue in favor of the invasion under Bush The Younger does indicate two things:

• The vice presidency really is a second-bananas job, and

• Cheney will sacrifice anything, including all the factors he mentioned in this clip, with his integrity and a cherry on top, to support his boss.

(From Stranger Fruit)

Tangential Update: Karl Rove has resigned.  Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out, Karl.

I like movies, but I don’t watch many of them and I’m seldom in a hurry to see them as they come out. Last night we watched V is for Vendetta and in response to all the people who told me to watch it two years ago, yes it was pretty cool.  It takes place in the “near future,” where Agent Smith from those awful “Matrix” movies plays a masked avenger out to topple a brutal totalitarian regime that has taken over England.

The movie exhibits some parallels to our current world – the government manipulating fear of terrorism, a public swayed by government-connected TV commentators.  It is a very good story with good acting and some twists.

My favorite scene was where V enters the bedchamber of one of the scientists who ran the bioweapons lab where he was created.  Best I can remember:

“You’ve come to kill me?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God.”

The movie raises issues of the value of assassination over warfare; in England, V takes out the real bad guys one at a time while the United States endures another agonizing civil war. 

On a scale of bricks to fruit, I’d rate this movie “pretty darn entertaining”.