Wheat-dogg’s world
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Twenty years ago, a fission reactor at Chernobyl, Ukraine, exploded, killing 28 people by radiation poisoning and ruining the health of thousands more by contaminating the water and soil.

By all accounts, the accident resulted from a poor reactor design and ill-advised operational decisions by the crew. It was the unforgiving laws of physics, however, that led to the worst nuclear power plant disaster in history.

Nuclear power plants generate electrical power by using pressurized steam to rotate turbine blades connected to electric generators. The heat of a controlled chain reaction creates the steam.

The trick is to control that chain reaction so that the nuclear core is hot enough to create the steam, but not hot enough to melt the reactor. Loss of that control caused the Chernobyl disaster.

Nuclear fission occurs when an atomic nucleus is too unstable to maintain its structural integrity. Basically, there’s too much energy in the tiny volume of the nucleus and the nucleus quells the riot by splitting into two smaller nuclei and emitting gamma ray photons. The process inevitably leads to an increase in temperature of the radioactive material.

Uranium is a naturally occurring “fuel” for fission reactors like the one in Chernobyl. Uranium has two principal isotopes, U-238 and U-235, which have different nuclear but identical chemical properties.

The Inoculated Mind hosts Tangled Bank 52 this time, with a Star Wars theme. (I’m Red Leader Antilles. Cool!) As  always, there’s some great science writing contained therein.

Don’t be a droid. Use the Force and visit the Tangled Bank.

ninety years ago on march two nine
a new york evening sun newspaperman
don marquis
came to work early one morning
to discover a large cockroach
diving headlong onto the keys
of his typewriter

marquis printed in his march two nine one nine one six column what
archy the cockroach had painfully
typed all night

it began

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the
body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon
life
i see things from the underside now

since archy could only operate one key
at a time his nightly
compositions lacked both
capitals and punctuation
as time went on archy wrote less free verse
and more prose
but his observations remained at once
witty satirical and at times poignant

he spent part of his time
debunking the spiritualism fad
then in vogue popularized in part
by the author sir arthur conan doyle

he criticized prohibition and the follies of politicians
like this criticism of
hitlers ambitions in europe
archy had wise observations about life
in general like
procrastination is the
art of keeping
up with yesterday

archy had a friend mehitabel the alley cat
who also had many past lives
together archy and mehitabel and their assorted
non-human friends opened a window
into human society and folly in nearly 500 entries
as archy followed marquis from the sun to colliers magazine
and elsewhere

You gotta love it. Pres. George W. Bush wanted to reserve the entire floor containing the Royal Suite at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna for his entourage. Trouble is, Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones beat him to the punch, and Mick refuses to give up his reservation.

The details are everywhere, but this article in The Sun has a rather comical photo of Dubya.

Jagger is an outspoken critic of Dubya’s aspirations in Iraq, so there’s no doubt he’s sticking it to Bush by refusing to let go of the suite.  Jagger is not a US citizen, and given that he’s older (62) and richer than Bush, Dubya may just have to defer to age and Jagger’s deeper pockets.

Courtesy of Boing Boing, we have word of these two developments in the recording industry’s non-stop battle against file sharing.

The RIAA has filed suit against a Georgia family, asserting that the lady of the house had infringed on the copyrights of several recording artists by sharing the files over the internet.

The family has no computer, so one wonders how the RIAA will manage to convince any judge the case has merit. Perhaps the woman, Carma Walls, has an 802.11b card implanted in her head.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, a judge threw out an RIAA suit against 14-year-old Brittany Chan. A previous suit against Brittany’s mother for file sharing had failed, so the RIAA requested a ruling permitting them to go after the girl. The judge dismissed the case, saying the RIAA had failed to provide necessary documentation.

The RIAA has filed somewhere on the order of 3500 suits along these lines, in an effort to stem the flood of files being shared worldwide on the ‘net. It’s a futile battle. For every Brittany Chan or Carma Walls, there are probably hundreds of file sharers storing thousands of mp3’s on hard drives, iPods and CDs. Stopping file sharing is like nailing jelly to the wall.

While the real world worries about the avian flu and Mideast politics, one self-proclaimed expert says he has seen visions of a cosmic catastrophe that will make flu and oil worries irrelevant.

Eric Julien says a piece of comet will hit the Atlantic Ocean on May 25, creating tsunamis and earthquakes. He says messages from aliens and a 1995 crop circle lead him to believe that the impact will wipe out our civilization and kill millions of people.

Humbug.

Julien (also known as Jean Ederman) has managed to combine real science with his own peculiar imagination to concoct a tragedy that can only appeal to those poor souls who distrust real scientists and trust ufologists.

Julien’s only claims to expertise in space science are a series of UFO books and a career in the French air force. He also channels messages from aliens. Julien claims he has studied the orbital path of Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, which has an orbital period of approximately 5.5 years.

Space scientists are also interested in 73P, because the comet split into several pieces in 1995. These fragments — at last count there were 18 — are due to pass through Earth’s neighborhood in mid-May, somewhat earlier than Julien predicts. NASA scientists say the closest approach to Earth of any piece of 73P will be nearly 10 million kilometers (6 million miles) on May 14. By comparison, the moon is 384 000 kilometers (240 000 miles) away, so by those figures the comet fragments will miss by a country mile.

But of the two, I’d rather keep Geena Davis/Mackenzie Allen around for a while.

OK, I admit it. I am a sucker for TV. I have given it up several times in the past, but always end up returning to suckle at “The Glass Teat,” to use SF author Harrison Harlan Ellison’s phrase.

ABC premiered Commander in Chief last fall, starring Davis as a female vice-president who ends up in the seat of power. She is a political independent, a former academic with three kids and an understanding, politically savvy husband. Her running mate, a Democrat, picked her to appeal to that demographic, but as he lies in his sickbed, makes it clear to her that she has to step aside to let the Speaker of the House (played by Donald Sutherland) take charge.

After some internal conflict, she refuses, taking the oath of office at the end of the first episode.

The second ep was also pretty good, as we get a glimpse of the problems Allen and her family face professionally and personally as she settles into office.

Later eps lost the initial lustre and viewers bailed out. There were apparently some problems between the creator/writer/producer Rob Luria and ABC, too. They sacked him, replacing him with veteran TV writer/producer Stephen Bochco of NYPD Blue fame.

Then CiC went on hiatus, which is thinly disguised TV biz shorthand for, “we’re not too sure what to do now. We don’t have enough episodes in the can to run while we figure it out. So we’ll pull it off the air, run some other drivel in its place, and try later.”

Back in the day, before I was a high school physics teacher, I was a newspaper reporter for two smallish dailies. So I have more than a passing familiarity with the journalistic trade. Blogging, technically speaking, is not reporting, since it frequently includes commentary by the writer/editor/publisher of the blog. Reporters are supposed to leave personal bias out of their work.

While blogging is not reporting, it is a form of journalism, and should observe the same ethics that professional journalists follow. When bloggers cross the line of ethical behavior, they demean this vibrant new medium.

Michelle Malkin is a conservative pundit with an eponymous website/blog. Like fellow commentators Ann Coulter and Debbie Schlussel, Malkin revels in using biting invective, making extremist pronouncements, and being a loud anti-liberal, anti-Democrat gadfly. Malkin, Coulter and Schlussel have adoring fans who eat up their brand of commentary like some audiences love Jerry Springer’s show.

Recently, a group of students planned to protest the appearance of military recruiters at the University of California-Santa Cruz. The students sent out a press release about the protest, unwisely including their personal contact information. Malkin blogged about the protest, slinging the predictable extremist invective about the unAmerican activities of these liberal fifth-columnists, and published the students’ contact information on her blog.

Her acolytes responded by flooding the students with hateful and threatening e-mails and phone messages. Word got out, and soon supporters of the students were sending hateful and threatening e-mails to Malkin. (She wisely does not publicize neither her phone number nor her physical address.) Malkin of course used these e-mails as ammunition on her blog, saying her rights were being infringed, etc., etc.

William Dembski’s replacement at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary will be Kurt Wise, a creationist paleontologist who currently teaches at Bryan College in Dayton, Tenn. Dembski will leave as director of the SBTS Center for Theology and Science at the end of the school year.

Wise, who will also hold the position of professor of science and theology, believes the Earth is actually only a few thousand years old. So the essential message of the SBTS — that Biblical principles are more authoritative than scientific ones — will be unchanged.

Dembski, a proponent of intelligent design, argues that the probabilities of life developing without some external influence were too astronomical to have occurred otherwise. While not a creationist, Dembski shares creationists’ doubts that evolution is a valid scientific explanation for the development of life on Earth.

Wise graduated from the University of Chicago with a geophysics degree, then went on to receive his doctorate in geology from Harvard,  where he studied under reknowned biologist and science author Stephen Jay Gould. Despite that  training, Wise is a born-again Christian and says he accepts as truth the Biblical account of creation. He interprets the fossil record in light of that belief, saying the Flood in Noah’s time is responsible for the multitude of fossils and extinctions.

Those that disagree with Wise’s interpretation of the geologic and fossil records generally admire his intellect and scientific acumen, so his presence at SBTS may in fact be a slight improvement over Dembski’s posturing.

My AP students put this on my board, apropos of nothing.