beliefs, current affairs, freedom of speech, pleasures, quotes, science, sexuality, thoughts, topographical

Quotes of the Week

A good selection of amusements amongst this week’s quotes …

The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.
[William Gibson]

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
[Thomas Jefferson]

Society places a great deal of importance upon “being concerned” about this, that or the other terrible thing going on somewhere in the world. I agree that a bit of this concern is useful in helping alleviate suffering in those places. But it strikes me that the vast majority of what we call “being concerned” involves getting into our own heads, turning over the information, imagining whatever we want to imagine, working up our emotions, wallowing in our feelings like a pig in mud. For some reason I’ve never been able to comprehend very clearly this makes us look good socially, like we’re doing the right thing. But I’m unable to see how watching endless reports […] about a disaster really helps anything.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/]

You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.
[George Mikes, How to be Decadent]

Cats are smarter than dogs. You can’t get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
[Jeff Valdez]

Life is fragile. You and I are living lives just as precarious as those people who got swept away into the ocean last week. We just fool ourselves into believing otherwise. But that’s not a reason to live in fear. Life is a terminal disease.
[Brad Warner on the Sendai Earthquake at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/2011/03/japan-earthquake.html]

Every mountain; every rock on this planet; every living thing; every piece of you and me was forged in the furnaces of space.
[Prof. Brian Cox; Wonders of the Universe; BBC2 TV, 13 March 2011]

I hear the argument, and it is an ingenious argument only a lawyer of his brilliance could make …
[David Cameron replying in House of Commons to Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

Never play with a dead cat and above all never make friends with a monkey.
[Osbert Sitwell, quoting his father in Tales My Father Taught Me. Thanks to Katyboo for this one.]

The natural world is a living erotic museum filled with variations in male genitalia, illustrating how natural selection has paid nearly as much attention to the male member as Catholic priests have.
[http://zinjanthropus.wordpress.com/]

To you , I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the loyal opposition.
[Woody Allen]

“Are there circumstances in which the government might …?”
“Well there could be circumstances. To answer your question in any other way would preclude all possibilities.”
[William Hague, UK Foreign Secretary, answering a question from the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee; 16/03/2011]

amusements, quotes

You Just Can't Get the Staff

Yesterday we received a communication from the Civil Service Club in London. In this they advertise their Annual Dinner as follows …

Three course dinner with Champagne reception & Canopies, with the Committees guest speaker.

How many committees? And whose marquees?

environment, topographical

More Thoughts on Japan

I continue to watch the news coming out of Japan, especially that about the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi neuclear plant.

I’m astounded at the lack of assistance the nuclear plant authorities are getting. They have now been struggling with (and losing) the battle to stabilise their reactors after the tsunami took out their backup cooling system on Friday.

I have to wonder (a) why they didn’t shout for outside back-up much earlier on Friday, (b) where the Japanese military are and (c) what priority is being given to getting grid power restored to the Fukushima plant. Why have the Japanese government not flooded the power plant with regiments of Engineers and Logistics experts. And why haven’t they deployed every available military pumping unit and bowser to the site, to help shift water (if only seawater).

Before anyone says it, I know they’ll need bowsers to deliver water to refugees, but I would have thought the nuclear plant needs to take priority, and their water companies should have bowsers too. Moreover the military will have bowsers which may be usable (for seawater) but not for drinking water. And pumping units are, I would have thought, not going to achieve a lot at present in the disaster area (there’s much else to do without worrying about pumping water away) and in any event, again, I would think the nuclear plant should take priority. Clearly too they would need a secure supply of fuel and other supplies – but that’s what logistics is all about.

Yes, I know the military won’t be skilled at managing and operating a nuclear plant. No-one would expect them to be. But their equipment, logistics skills and manpower should be invaluable. We proved in this country how valuable military logistics skills are during the foot-and-mouth epidemic in 2001, where the military were eventually called in and sorted out the problem very quickly. Good senior officers cut through obstructions and get things done quickly and efficiently; they’re trained to do just this; trained in logistics; and trained to deal with horrors like this in warfare.

Should we be exposing soldiers to such an undoubtedly dangerous environment? It’s a tricky ethical problem. But at times of national emergency such as this I would tend to the view that this is part of the military’s role; and indeed the military would expect such a role. After all we expect soldiers to go into battle, kill people, possibly get killed themselves and be exposed to depleted Uranium shells and worse. And they will have NBC suits; although they are by no means a comfortable environment to work in they’re available.

Would any of this have averted where we are now? We can never know. But it seems to me that it probably should have been given a shot. Maybe it has been and we just haven’t been told. We just don’t know.

All we can do is watch, hope and pray.

amusements, current affairs

Committee Decisions

Excellent letter in yesterday’s Times:

Sir, Professor John Murrell has been given the wrong definition of a committee. I always understood that a committee was a group of people who individually could do nothing, but collectively decided that nothing could be done.
Campbell Sylvester

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, topographical

Japan Disaster Appeal

A friend in London with many Japanese contacts and a Japanese friend in Tokyo have suggested that if anyone wishes to assist the Japanese people at this difficult time then donations to the Red Cross Appeal are possibly the best way to do so. Readers in the UK can donate online to the Japan Tsunami Appeal or by calling 08450 535 353.

current affairs, topographical

Media Disasters

1 Comment

I have to say I entirely agree with this post from Tim at Bringing up Charlie. WTF do all the broadcasters have to send extra reports out to “disaster zones”? They’ve done it with Japan; I dread to count how many extra reporters BBC TV alone has sent out to Japan to use their precious fuel and get in the way. They did it a couple of weeks earlier with Libya. And a couple of weeks before that with Egypt, where at one point I counted at least 8 extra reporters. If you don’t trust the staff you already have there to cover whatever happens, why are they there in the first place? Come on guys, wake up! This is totally unnecessary consumerism.