Category Archives: science

environment, science, topographical

Japan Nuclear Update

Referring to my Sunday post about the events in Japan, a friend in the US has asked me “Are you still this non-apocalyptic after the latest explosion?”. And given what has been reported about the situation at the Fukushima reactors since Sunday I feel I should update my opinions.

So where are we? Well it’s really difficult to tell. There have now been three explosions, and a further significant release of radioactivity. Albeit the radioactivity appears to be relatively short-lived nucleotides. But we now really don’t know enough about what is actually happening in Fukushima. In fact nobody knows exactly what’s happening apart from the engineers on the ground. All we are getting is the third- or fourth-hand account which the Japanese government are putting out and which is then being spun every which way by the media.

Do I trust what we’re being told? Again it is hard to say. All nuclear authorities (and governments) have a poor track record of owning up to bad news; the Japanese are no better or worse that anyone else. That means I am very skeptical about what’s being admitted to. What is being said may be true, but it may not be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But as I say, we really don’t know, and cannot know.

However as I understand it, and despite the latest reports, the worst case scenario still cannot be as bad as Chernobyl due to the design of the reactors. Of course that doesn’t mean it couldn’t still be really very nasty. Remember that these nuclear plants have three or four levels of containment between the fuel rods and the open air. A full meltdown and fire, as happened at Chernobyl, would require all the levels of containment to be breached, all the cooling to have failed and at least some of the control rods to not be in place between the fuel rods. Given that we are told the reactors shutdown correctly, all the control rods should be inserted amongst the fuel rods which, if I have understood correctly, makes the worst case Chernobyl scenario highly unlikely.

Let’s also be clear. This situation has not obviously been caused by the earthquake – the facility appears to have withstood a quake some 5 times more severe than its design limit. (I have read that the design limit was to withstand a quake of magnitude 8.2, so this 9.0 quake is way above that design threshold; remember the Richter Scale is logarithmic.) It was the subsequent tsunami taking out the nuclear plant’s backup power generators which triggered the problems, and that clearly was not designed for. One has to question the wisdom of building nuclear facilities so close to such an active geological fault, especially one know to trigger tsunamis.

It’s undoubtedly a nasty situation, and extremely scary for the local population. But as far as one can tell the Japanese authorities are probably handling this as well as anyone could. We just have to hope that the authorities and the engineers are doing enough.

But we just don’t know (and may never know) enough about what’s really happening inside those reactors – no-one does except the engineers on site.

if you want to know more technical details there are good posts here, here and here, and regular technical updates here.

environment, science, topographical

Japan

No, I’m not going to write in any detail about, what I suspect we all agree are, the horrors of the recent events in Japan; I’m not going to indulge in ghoulish voyeurism. However I find these events fascinating from a forensic viewpoint: what happened; how and why did it happen; how did it unfold. So I will content myself to comment on one or two things which have stuck me, as a scientist, over the last few days.

First of all the size of the quake. Initially assessed at Richter 8.9 it has now been upgraded to 9.0. This is normal as further seismic data becomes available. According to Wikipedia this makes the Sendai quake equal fourth largest in the last 150 years. This should not be surprising given the geology of the area.

There were some fore-shocks; but that is only known with hindsight. This brings home to me just how impossible it is for even the best experts to predict earthquakes. A lot of progress has been made in recent years on predicting volcanic eruptions, if only in the short term. But earthquakes are a totally different problem. Predicting when a geological fault is going to move is next to impossible. Japan has regular (almost daily) relatively small earthquakes because of where it sits on the fault lines. The scientists had predicted a big quake “sometime in the next 30 years”, which is about as precise as earthquake prediction appears possible at present. Is the Sendai Earthquake this big event? Well who knows. It isn’t impossible that a larger quake might happen, although my guess is that it is now much less likely.

Earthquakes impossible to predict with accuracy; so are tsunamis. As I understand it whether a quake generates a tsunami depends on many factors: the way the fault moves, the size of the movement, the seabed topography. The area around Japan is at high risk of tsunamis because of the type of faults in the nearby seabed and they have had tsunami monitoring and warning systems in place for some 40 or more years – but all they can do is send out alerts once a tsunami has been created and detected. And then tsunamis travel so fast (up to 500 miles an hour, apparently) that for nearby coasts any warning is almost too late.

It is in the nature of Japan that they are one of the most naturally controlled of societies. They are not people to leave things to chance if they can have a process to ensure it works properly. And they are world leaders in earthquake-proof design. In consequence they are possibly the best prepared of nations for earthquakes: they have very strict building codes, everyone is taught the drills almost from birth, there are excellent communication channels and warning systems. That is fine as far as quakes go, and as we have seen on the TV footage the majority of buildings (at least the more modern buildings) remained intact following the quake.

What is infinitely harder is to defend against a tsunami. Tsunami can be so large and generate such power that protecting against them is almost beyond our engineering (and almost certainly financial) capabilities. As protection one would have to build enormously high (50 feet?), thick and strong sea defences along every inch of low-lying coast. Sure it could be done, but probably no country on earth could afford to do it, especially for such relatively rare events. Physically preparedness is hugely hard; preparing the people, as is done for earthquakes, is almost impossible.

What is clear is that in much of the affected coastal areas it is the tsunami which has caused the vast majority of the damage. Again the TV footage shows buildings remaining intact after the quake but being simply washed away like matchsticks by the tsunami. Avoiding even that would be a huge engineering problem, but one I suspect Japan may now try to address.

This brings me to thinking about the situation at the Fukushima nuclear facility. As a scientist what has impressed me here is that all the fail-safe systems in the nuclear plants have worked as designed. Notwithstanding there do appear to have been issues. Fukushima 1, which blew the lid off it’s “shed” on Saturday, was working as designed until the backup generators were swamped by the tsunami (again it is the tsunami which has caused the problems!) and even then backup batteries were available. Even the venting of steam (and thus small amounts of short half-life radio-isotopes) is a planned and controlled event. And the “shed” is designed to fall apart (outwards, as it did) in the event of an explosion, so that explosion (however spectacular) wasn’t a majorly significant event.

Let’s be clear that, from what we’re being told, there is no nuclear meltdown at these plants; the reactors were automatically closed down when the quake struck, just as designed – this itself ensures that there can be no meltdown. (If meltdown were going to happen it would almost certainly have done so by now with far more major consequences than we’ve seen.) However there could well be some damage to the casings of a small number of fuel rods (as I understand it, it is this which caused the explosive hydrogen to be created). The reactors, having been shut down, do still generate heat which needs to be removed but this reduces quite quickly over a matter of days and (notwithstanding the problem at Fukushima 3) the worst of the heating problems should now be past.

What is of concern is whether the Japanese authorities are being truly open and honest about the situation at the nuclear plants; like most nuclear authorities they do not have a track record of transparency.

What I suspect will also happen is that Japan (indeed all the nuclear industry) will question the advisability of putting nuclear plant in areas most open to tsunami – like maybe not on Japan’s east coast?!

Of course those in the anti-nuclear lobby will use this same information to draw totally the opposite conclusions. As scientists we need to remain clear about what is designed for and whether it worked. I shall be most interested to see the reports from independent international inspections.

Finally a comment about the planet we live on. Many things in these events have stunned me, not the least being the awesome power of the tsunami. But perhaps the most staggering of all I found on the Scientific American website where there are many good reports:

Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology said the earth’s axis shifted 25 cm as a result of the earthquake, and the US Geological Survey said the main island of Japan had shifted 2.4 metres.

That doesn’t sound a lot, but they are incredibly large effects for the planet!

Our thoughts and hopes are, of course, with all the people of Japan.

Images from 123RF

beliefs, medical, personal, quotes, science, sexuality

Quotes of the Week

Another weekly selection of esoterica …

Anyone who tells you that your body is anything other than the beautiful, glorious MIRACLE that it is is, as they say in “Princess Bride”, probably selling something.
[Emily Nagoski at ]

[E]ach of us has the job of finding the beliefs we’re not interested in carrying with us any more, uprooting them, and finding something new and healthier to take their place. This process is neither easy nor painless. But it is a path to the confidence and joy I advocate everyone bring to bed with them every night.
[Emily Nagoski at ]

Men always fall into the absurdity of endeavouring to develop the mind, to push it violently forward in this direction or in that. The mind should be receptive, a harp waiting to catch the winds, a pool ready to be ruffled, not a bustling busybody, for ever trotting about on the pavement looking for a new bun shop.
[Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation, 1894]

Sex ought to be a wholly satisfying link between two affectionate people from which they emerge unanxious, rewarded, and ready for more.
[Alex Comfort]

The debate [in 1907 American Medicine about the weight of the soul] went on from the May issue all the way through December, whereupon I lost the thread, my eye having strayed across the page to “A Few Points in the Ancient History of Medicine and Surgery,” by Harry H Grigg, MD. It is with thanks to Harry H Grigg that I can now hold forth at cocktail parties on the history of haemorrhoids, gonorrhoea, circumcision, and the speculum.
[Mary Roach; Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers]

Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.
[Henry Miller]

A promiscuous person is someone who is getting more sex than you are.
[Victor Lownes]

We do not remember. A certain group of our little people do this for us. They live in that part of the brain which has become known as the ‘fold of Broca’ … There may be twelve or fifteen shifts that change about and are on duty at different times like men in a factory … Therefore it seems likely that remembering a thing is all a matter of getting in touch with the shift that was on duty when the recording was done.
[Thomas Edison; Diaries]

amusements, beliefs, pleasures, quotes, science, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

This week’s selection of the good, the bad and the ugly …

Relationships are like a card game where you start with two hearts and a diamond, but end up needing a club and spade.
[Tony Green on Facebook]

Every concept the mind can create includes its opposite. No thought is ultimate because each idea depends on every other idea it might possibly contrast with for its apparent self existence. Our own existence as individuals is dependent upon all of creation. This does not negate our individual existence. It is an attempt to see our individual existence in a different light.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com]

When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?
[Montaigne]

Urethane treatment is standard on all products (with exceptions)
[Amtico Flooring Brochure]

Comedians really aren’t that different from scientists. They look at the world and question why things are as they are and try to find an answer. It’s just that scientists do it with far more rigour and the possibility that humanity will be much improved by their discoveries. Perhaps comedians are just lazy scientists. Very, very lazy, stupid scientists.
[Robin Ince, The Times Eureka Supplement; March 2011]

And finally, dreadful joke of the week …

Why did the scarecrow win a Nobel prize?
Because he was out standing in his field.
[The Times Eureka Supplement; March 2011]

Bring back Basil Brush, all is forgiven!

medical, photography, pleasures, science

Pussy Porn


The Sleep of the Just, originally uploaded by kcm76.

Another for all you pussy fans out there …

Harry the cat sleeping the sleep of the just on my desk this afternoon, under my desk lamp – again! And who should blame him when it is throwing it down with rain outside. He was spark out; he didn’t twitch a whisker at having the camera stuck 4 inches from his nose clicking away.

As Garfield once remarked: “Eat and sleep. Eat and sleep. There must be more to life but I do hope not.”

amusements, pleasures, science, thoughts

Mapping the Cat Brain

Oh, yes. Cat’s certainly do have brains. They have very well developed, subtle and devious brains. In fact it has been shown recently that Cats Adore and Manipulate Women. They do it to men as well, but either they don’t like men as much or we’re more immune to it.

The bond between cats and their owners turns out to be far more intense than imagined, especially for cat aficionado women and their affection reciprocating felines, suggests a new study.
[…]
The researchers determined that cats and their owners strongly influenced each other, such that they were each often controlling the other’s behaviors. Extroverted women with young, active cats enjoyed the greatest synchronicity, with cats in these relationships only having to use subtle cues, such as a single upright tail move, to signal desire for friendly contact.

And then today I came across this mapping of the cat’s brain at CatStuff.

In the light of this latest research the diagram clearly ought to contain a tiny gland for sniffing out male humans and a much larger gland for detecting females.

Oh come on lads, you already knew we stood no chance!

books, current affairs, history, science

And the Managers are Still in Charge of the Loony Bin …

This is a long quote and deserves a post all of it’s own.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, after the Labour victory [1945], had announced: ‘We are the masters at the moment.’ But who were the ‘we’ in this sentence?

The most eloquent answer to this question in art is found in Anthony Powell’s comic masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, the first volume of which, A Question of Upbringing, was published in 1951. The story begins in the year 1911 at an unnamed boarding school, obviously Eton, as the hero, Nick Jenkins, ambles idly through the winter mist to have tea with his chums. As he makes his way back to the house he passes a very different sort of boy – it is Widmerpool, who forces himself to have a run each afternoon. Widmerpool appears to be no more than a figure of fun in the school section of the book, but even in this early glimpse of him, the narrator and his readers become aware that he is a figure who lives by the will, in some mysterious sense more in tune with his times than the languid, bohemian Nick, who wishes to live by the imagination.

Powell was a close friend of Malcolm Muggeridge at this date, and the two men would often walk round Regent’s Park together discussing the fundamental clash on which the emergent novel was to feed, namely the war between the will and the imagination. Power mania had been an obsession of Muggeridge’s since his Marxist days: what draws men and women to power, how they become addicted to it, how it takes over from other appetites. One of Muggeridge’s beliefs was that power addicts were often dyspeptic, and he rather cruelly attributed Stafford Cripps’s dyspepsia to power addiction. When Widmerpool grows up, he too is a dyspeptic. There is a memorably funny Sunday lunch when Widmerpool gives the narrator a meal in his club, washing down cold tongue with a glass of water. By the time the narrative has reached the postwar period, it is no surprise to find that Widmerpool, a fellow-traveller with the Communists, who has rather dubious associations in Eastern Europe, is an MP in the Labour interest. He has achieved what he wanted from the very beginning, on that run through the winter mists in the Thames Valley: the free exercise of power. Widmerpool is a manager, a wheeler-dealer. He judges people by how they have got on; he has no sense of England’s past, no feeling for people (at quite a late stage of the sequence, he forgets the narrator’s Christian name). Much of Powell’s somewhat peppery Toryism goes into the creation, no doubt, but the novel contains a really acute perception of what had happened to England during the war. It had not been taken over by Bolsheviks or by the working class. Widmerpool is an efficient, ruthless staff officer, a paper pusher. He could easily have said, after the 1945 election: ‘We are the masters.’ He would have meant that the managerial class, previously all but non-existent, had taken over. The growth of bureaucracy in Britain in the postwar years, the filling up of political, Civil Service and professional posts with colourless, pushing people controlling others for the sake of control, was to be a feature of life from then onwards. Widmerpool was a man of his time, and a man of the future.

[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

Well, no change there then!

As so often in his two books, The Victorians and After the Victorians, AN Wilson gets his rapier right to the heart of the matter. Although both books are chunky paperbacks (both weigh in at some 500 pages) they are well worth reading – and eminently readable. AN Wilson gives a rather more perceptive, and admittedly slightly jaundiced, view of the history of Britain between the 1830s and 1950s than one finds in the standard texts. He delves under the political and economic covers, especially around the underlying reasons for both world wars and (at least for me) puts a completely new spin on modern British history.

beliefs, science

Conspiracy Theories

1 Comment

Like many of you, I have a soft spot for conspiracy theories. Although I wouldn’t claim to be an out-and-out believer in such theories I’m a natural skeptic, I’ve worked in business and I’ve been around long enough to know that there is more goes on under the surface than often meets the eye – and that sometimes, just occasionally, that may amount to a conspiracy. But I also know that all organisations, managers, politicians, governments spin (to use the current euphemism for “lie”) everything to their (hoped for) advantage. Often they don’t actually realise they’re doing it – I know; I’ve done it myself. And seldom is there any attempt at conspiracy. But just sometimes there is.

It was interesting therefore to see, in the December 2010 edition of Scientific American, a short article by professional skeptic Michael Shermer under the title “The Conspiracy Theory Detector – How to tell the difference between true and false conspiracy theories”. Shermer ends the article with the following “rules”:

[W]e cannot just dismiss all such theories out of hand, because real conspiracies do sometimes happen. Instead we should look for signs that indicate a conspiracy theory is likely to be untrue. The more that it manifests the following characteristics, the less probable that the theory is grounded in reality:

  1. Proof of the conspiracy supposedly emerges from a pattern of “connecting the dots” between events that need not be causally connected. When no evidence supports these connections except the allegation of the conspiracy or when the evidence fits equally well to other causal connections – or to randomness – the conspiracy theory is likely to be false.
  2. The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy would need nearly superhuman power to pull it off. People are usually not nearly so powerful as we think they are.
  3. The conspiracy is complex, and its successful completion demands a large number of elements.
  4. Similarly, the conspiracy involves large numbers of people who would all need to keep silent about their secrets. The more people involved, the less realistic it becomes.
  5. The conspiracy encompasses a grand ambition for control over a nation, economy or political system. If it suggests world domination, the theory is even less likely to be true.
  6. The conspiracy theory ratchets up from small events that might be true to much larger, much less probable events.
  7. The conspiracy theory assigns portentous, sinister meanings to what are most likely innocuous, insignificant events.
  8. The theory tends to commingle facts and speculations without distinguishing between the two and without assigning degrees of probability or of factuality.
  9. The theorist is indiscriminately suspicious of all government agencies or private groups, which suggests an inability to nuance differences between true and false conspiracies.
  10. The conspiracy theorist refuses to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he or she has a priori determined to be the truth.

The fact that politicians sometimes lie or that corporations occasionally cheat does not mean that every event is the result of a tortuous conspiracy. Most of the time stuff just happens, and our brains connect the dots into meaningful patterns.

current affairs, medical, science, sexuality, thoughts

Pubic Hair Removal – Why?

1 Comment

An interesting article in the Guardian on Friday (11 Feb) by Bidisha in which she asks why women are these days removing their pubic hair. Her contention is that it’s a fashion (almost certainly) and that it is generally a bad idea, psychologically, for both men and women. I’m not sure I entirely agree with this, but it’s an interesting argument:

Are women so ashamed of their bodies’ natural beauty, so unaccepting of things as they are that they will do anything at all, even if it’s degrading, to get some willy time? A man who withholds his attention and affection according to the follicle count of a lady’s crotch doesn’t deserve intimacy with a real-life woman. A man who likes a woman without pubic hair despises adult women so much that he wants us to resemble children […]

I worry about these men too […] They are now in danger of returning to a Victorian naivety. They may well believe that […] women naturally do not have any body hair. Upon seeing some real hair on a real woman for the first time they may well vomit or faint, or both […]

As for the women, don’t you have anything more interesting to do than dutifully coif your cassoulet?

You can find the full article here.

beliefs, medical, personal, quotes, science

Quotes of the Week

Quite a lot of quotes, and slightly early, this week as I missed last week’s post. And lot’s of zen type quotes too as I’m getting to the end of several zen books. So here goes …

There is no optimal state of consciousness. Optimal is just an idea, another manifestation of the Great Somewhere Else. Consciousness is just an idea.
[Brad Warner; Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality]

What is true during dreamless sleep is true no matter whether you can recall the experience and write about it or not. What is true in a whorehouse in Bangkok is true whether you visit it and take Polaroids or not. What is true for six-legged aliens on the fifth planet circling Epsilon Centauri is true whether you go there and talk to them or not. You may never know the life your toothbrush leads when you’re not around but it’s certainly real.
[Brad Warner; Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality]

Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.
[Jane Wagner]

After all, it is no more surprising to be born twice than it is to be born once.
[Seagal Rinpoche; comment at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/2011/01/literal-rebirth.html]

Reincarnation is a fun subject. I do like the concept ‘how can you return if you never leave?’ I think that sums it up nicely. From the perspective of our experience, it’s easy to find examples of how this might actually work. Consider this: when you were five, playing in your yard, you suddenly thought a strange thought – I wonder who I will be when I grow up? Will I still be me? And of course, you did grow up, and you are still you – but you are not the child who asked that question so long ago. Did the child ‘die’? No,it didn’t. But the child is not there any more – so how can that be? Maybe reincarnation is a little like that?
[Mr Reee; comment at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/2011/01/literal-rebirth.html]

The pen is mightier than the sword but a vagina beats anything you’ve ever seen.
[Bizarro Seagal; comment at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/2011/01/literal-rebirth.html]

‘Bonsai?’
‘The Japanese art of training little trees to resemble big ones. Wouldn’t work unless there was a scale-independent structure.’
‘I knew a bloke once did bonsai mountains,’ said Olly. It took a few seconds for us to twig.
‘You mean pet rocks?’ enquired Deirdre.
‘Suitably fragmented rocks do look a lot like mountains,’ I said.
‘He didn’t just sit a rock in a bowl, you know,’ said Olly. ‘It’s lots of work making proper bonsai mountains. He had all the gear – little hosepipes with spray-action nozzles and fans stuck on special stands to weather them with miniature rainstorms, spark generators for small-scale lightning, lots of tiny mirrors to focus the Sun’s rays. Even a tiny snow machine.’
‘Really?’ Deirdre was interested in gardening and this just about counted.
‘Yeah. But he had to stop.’
‘Why?’
‘The rocks got infested with greenfly. On skis.’ Deirdre hit him.
[Ian Stewart; Cows in the Maze]

The tricky part about being human is that you have to be your own pack leader. You have to know that you can keep yourself safe, stand over your own emotional center of gravity and stay stable but responsive.
[Emily Nagoski; at ]

Let me tell you, friends, this is an amazing book. Just reading it put me into an altered state of consciousness. I entered a realm where perceptions of form and matter vanished, to be replaced by an amorphous void beyond all thought and senses, a world of peace and quiet undisturbed by the anxieties and uncertainties of the material universe. In other words, I fell right to sleep.
[Brad Warner; Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death and Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye]

Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave.
[Indira Gandhi]

What is religion but the distillation of an individual’s perception of the truth? By that definition, even atheists have religion.
[Amelia Nagoski]

Chinese medicine calls the gut the lower dan t’ien – guess where the upper dan t’ien is? Yep, the head. My gut is a brain just like the one in my skull.
[Amelia Nagoski]

There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to
new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally of course, there are times that are cold, and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.
[Seagal Rinpoche; comment at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/2011/02/reasons-to-be-cheerful.html]