Idiots

CNN discovers, to their horror, that atomic weapons are easy to build. If you have access to weapons-grade uranium, that is. Which sorta like saying that becoming a billionaire is easy if you have access to a billion dollars. Weapons-grade uranium or plutonium is the whole *point* of a nuclear weapons program, not the actual mechanical construction of the bomb, which is ridiculously easy if you enrich the uranium enough. If you have the enriched uranium, sure, building a bomb is easy -- crap, you don't even need a detonator if it's enriched enough, just have your poor sod suicide bomber pull two lumps of U-235 out of separate lead caskets, slap'em together, BOOM! But pulling enough U-235 out of uranium ore, which is mostly U-238 (i.e., useless for weapons purposes) so that you can build a bomb... now *that* is a chore, and ain't no trucker gonna be doing *that* anytime soon.

But CNN breathlessly proclaims "The sky is blue!" in a yellow journalism haze of exuberance, and then acts like it's news. No wonder Ted Turner is disgusted with today's CNN and says "I should have never sold it"... it's turned into total bullshit.

-- Badtux the Scientific Penguin

Devastation

Before and after photos of the earthquake and tsunami disaster area. It's like an atomic bomb went off.

They're talking about tens of thousands of dead now. Thousands of bodies have already washed ashore. At least 200,000 people are homeless, their homes too damaged to return to, or simply not existing anymore.

Meanwhile, some nuclear reactors are threatening to melt down. Indeed, probably already have partially melted, thanks to incompetence on the part of its operators, Curly-san, Larry-san, and Moe-san, who, for example, let the diesel engines on their fire suppression system (what they were using to cool the reactors down) run out of fuel because, apparently, it didn't occur to them that the engines needed fuel (doh!). Just one example of the incompetence of the plant operators (letting hydrogen build up in the containment buildings so that they could explode was another one). The good news there is that these reactors have killed no (zero) people, and are unlikely to do so -- every passing hour they're that much cooler, as the more intense radioisotopes decay leaving less intense ones behind. The reactors are scrammed -- their control rods are in place, stopping the U-235 from actively fissioning -- what you're seeing now is residual heat that will eventually all be dissipated.

Which makes me wonder why there's such a focus on these reactors -- which have killed nobody, remember. I guess it's because of that word "nuclear" scares the crap out of people, because they think of explosions, mushroom clouds, that kind of thing. But in this case there's not going to be any explosion -- the uranium inside these reactors is not capable of exploding. It's only 5% enriched at most, which won't even fizzle. What you could get out of these reactors *if* they completely melted down would be radioactive steam (with short-lived isotopes from the radiation interacting with H20) as the melted control rods fell down onto the concrete floor of the containment building... because they were light-water reactors rather than graphite-moderated reactors like Chernobyl, you won't get the plume of heavier longer-lived radioactive carbon compounds that Chernobyl generated.

Back in the real world, on the other hand, some people in the far north of Japan are still cut off and rescuers haven't gotten there yet and are in *real* danger. Let's hope for their safety. This is winter in Japan, and Japan is pretty far north, in case you haven't noticed...

-- Badtux the Disaster Penguin

The latter days of a once-great nation

Discovery landed for the last time yesterday. About its landing, astronaut Michael Barratt said earlier this week, "they've lived a very long time, they've had a fabulous success record, they've built this magnificent space station, they've given us lots of science and a tremendous amount of experience of just how to operate in space. More than anything, we look forward to seeing them retire with dignity and bringing on the next line of spaceships."

But the United State cannot, of course, replace the Shuttles. There will be no next line of spaceships. The United States is no longer the kind of nation capable of building big stuff like spaceships anymore. We couldn't build anything like the Space Shuttle today even if we wanted to -- not because of a lack of technology, but a lack of capability and will. We no longer have the industrial base to build things on that kind of scale, we no longer have the talent pool to design things on that kind of scale, we just can't. Can-do America turned into can't-do America at some point in the past thirty years, and we're all the poorer for it.

- Badtux the Sad Penguin

Large Hadron Collider now operating

World disappears into massive black hole. News at 5.

-- Badtux the Snarky Science Penguin

What time is it?

Hopefully you guys have sprung your clocks forward by an hour to account for Daylight Savings Time. Bryan over at Why Now says the invention of the clock was the first step towards fascism. Well, maybe so, but not for exactly the reason you might think. Rather: The clock is what enables navigators to know where they are. And if fascists didn't know where they were, they couldn't try to conquer the world.

Wait, you say, what does a clock have to do with knowing where you are? Well, mankind has known that the world is round for quite a number of centuries, since long before Columbus (that thing about people thinking the world was flat in Columbus's time? Not true). The Greek mathematician Eratosthenes even used trigonometry to measure its circumference within 10% back in 240BC. Navigators could figure their latitude -- how many degrees north of the equator -- they were by using a sextant to shoot an angle to the North Star at night, could use that and the circumference of the Earth to measure how far they needed to sail north or south to get to the same latitude as some port and then go east or west to reach the port. But how far east or west?

To know their longitude, navigators need to know what time is it?. Wait, you say, how can that be so? Well, let's say you're leaving from Lisbon, Portugal, and sailing west. You know the longitude at Lisbon. You set your clock to 12 noon at the exact same time your sundial says 12 noon. Then you start sailing west with your clock and your portable sundial. Look at your clock when your portable sundial says 12 noon. The difference between what your clock says and what your sundial says is how many minutes of longitude you've sailed. And, since we know the circumference of the Earth, yay, we know how far east or west we need to sail to reach the port we're aiming for! So the invention of accurate clocks is what allowed navigators to accurately pinpoint where they were on the featureless oceans and how far they needed to sail to get where they were going.

Now I hear you saying, "what use is that to me today, when we have GPS?" But GPS is all about using clocks to navigate! Each GPS satellite has an extremely accurate atomic clock within it, synchronized to the master atomic clock in Colorado before it is launched. Each GPS satellite is constantly transmitting its position in its orbit and its time. The GPS receiver then receives that information a hundred milliseconds or so later, and can use the time delay between when the satellite transmitted the information, and when the receiver received the information, to know how far it was from the satellite (using the speed of light delay to compute that), which in turn puts the receiver somewhere on a sphere N miles from the satellite. Do this for two satellites, and you know you're on a circle where the two spheres intersect. Do this for three satellites, and then the three spheres intersect at a point, and you know exactly where you are -- you are at that point where the three spheres intersect. But this assumes that GPS receivers have an accurate atomic clock of their own inside. They don't. That's why they need a fourth satellite to determine their position -- the fourth satellite is what allows them to compute the actual Colorado atomic clock time based on the differences between the four satellites.

So: It seems rather odd that it's clocks that allow you to know where you are, but true. The invention of highly accurate clocks may have been the first step towards fascism -- but it was also an important step towards civilization as we know it. And now you know what time it is, so I'll let you go spring your clocks forward :).

-- Badtux the Timely Penguin

A real scientist in the White House!

Well, at the White House briefing table, anyhow. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steve Chu is Obama's pick for Department of Energy, the first scientist ever to be appointed to a Cabinet position. His pet project these past few years has been ARPA-E, a federal program to develop new alternative-energy technologies. He got it passed through Congress, but Bush never appointed a head for the new program nor spent the money allocated on it for energy research. Next month, though...

For more, see Eli Kintisch over at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's science blog...

-- Badtux the Science-lovin' Penguin

Floods and idiots

At the mouth of the Colorado River is a mass of sediments. These sediments are in layers, one layer for each spring flood that swept down the Grand Canyon and out the mouth of the river. These layers are like the rings of a tree, one for each year that the Colorado River has been flowing into the Gulf of California. You can drill down into this sediment with a coring drill and pull up core samples and count the layers. There are approximately five million of these layers, meaning that the Grand Canyon is at least five million years old.

Unless... unless you're one of the "young earth" creationists. Then these layers were created WHAM! 6011 years ago last Monday. Now, why God would create layers that say that the Earth is at least five million years old, the "young earth" creationists won't say, or they'll mumble some pious bullshit about "the Lord works in mysterious ways" which basically is the same thing as sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "I can't hear you! I can't hear you!" Because if God created these layers 6011 years ago, these layers that are identical to the spring flood layers that we can count for the 6010 years afterwards, it means that God deliberately is deceiving us. I.e., that God is a liar. And that's not quite what these folks want to say, but it's what they're saying anyhow.

So anyhow, here's the deal. You can believe your lying eyes. Or you can believe the natterings of idiots who say that God is a liar. Me, I'll choose what I can see for myself over the natterings of some fool who hasn't a clue and is trying to cover up his cluelessness with hand waving and bullshit, thank you very much.

-- Badtux the Old Earth Penguin

Animals

I have a deal for ALF animal rights activists: since you care so much about those little bunnies and mice and rats being used in cancer research, obviously much more than you care about the thousands of human beings dieing in agony right now from incurable cancers, here's my deal for you: Take their place. I mean, you already say that mice and rats are more valuable than human beings, so that's not a big sacrifice, is it?

C'mon. Let's treat you guys with these cancer drugs and make sure you don't die from them, and then we won't have to experiment with them on the rats and mice that you guys obviously care so much about that you're willing to fire-bomb the homes and cars of cancer researchers. And if we can figure out some way to give you cancer too, so we can see whether these drugs actually work, more the better! Bummer if the drugs don't work, but hey, you already said that a rat's life is worth more than your own life, so it's no big deal, right? Right? Right?!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

The smartest politician on the planet

Obviously too smart to be elected in the United States...

-- Badtux the Appreciative Penguin

From TED