Just sayin’…

The National Weather Service in Indianapolis had been tracking the storm for hours and was in close contact with fair officials. The agency issued a severe thunderstorm warning — with winds whipping at 77 mph — at 8:39 p.m., shortly before the [...]]]> Here’s a quote from the LA Times regarding the Indiana stage collapse tragedy:

The National Weather Service in Indianapolis had been tracking the storm for hours and was in close contact with fair officials. The agency issued a severe thunderstorm warning — with winds whipping at 77 mph — at 8:39 p.m., shortly before the collapse.

Daniels said it did not appear that anyone could have predicted such a tragedy. “I’m not clear how anyone could have foreseen a sudden, highly localized blast of wind,” he said.

Uh, paragraph 1 would seem to negate paragraph 2.

In any case, while 70+ mph winds are pretty significant, they don’t seem that implausible in the random scheme of things. I’m having a hard time believing that these venues shouldn’t be designed for just such “gusts”.

Anyway, the important and unfortunate thing is people died and were injured because of this. My thoughts go out to them and their families.

That’s like saying, “Fewer murdered than by Stalin” – I mean it could be bloody anything but still horrific. For all we know there might have been less radiation released at the bombing of Nagasaki than Chernobyl.

Definitely a “Bear Shits In Woods” [...]]]> So I go to my iGoogle RSS feed page and see:

That’s like saying, “Fewer murdered than by Stalin” – I mean it could be bloody anything but still horrific. For all we know there might have been less radiation released at the bombing of Nagasaki than Chernobyl.

Definitely a “Bear Shits In Woods” kind of statement.

In all honesty they’ve never been able to execute the later, so it has sort of been moot to me.

On the other hand, [...]]]> While I’ve gone through phases, for most of my life if been conditionally pro-nuclear. That is “pro” if:

• They can make general operation safe.
• They find a solution to the waste.

In all honesty they’ve never been able to execute the later, so it has sort of been moot to me.

On the other hand, I always assumed the former was probably essentially solved, though with some lack of comfort.

The woes in Japan have made me rethink and perhaps more importantly consider the metric by which to judge if a solution is viable.

Here’s the thing – I know they have a gazillion safe-guards, but even forgetting negligence or fraud, in life the worst case scenario always finds a way of happening. I know this from my own work – no matter how well you’ve thought out something, you always forget some detail (like that earthquakes come with tsunamis). In short, if there’s a way for all your safeguards to fail, given all the probabilities you can pretty much guarantee that some day it will happen.

With other fossil fuel supplies, solar, hydro, and wind those worst case scenarios may yield pretty ugly situations (particularly hydro), but their outcomes are tenable at some human level. Certainly no amount of death is acceptable, but being honest, the failure of those forms of power generation yield less than ideal, but tolerable outcomes.

Not so for nuclear. The “worst case scenario” of a nuclear power plant failure is simply untenable. There is no risk matrix that can end with spreading radioactive/fissionable materials over wide areas of inhabited or previously habitable area as being “acceptable”. No amount of prior benefit can survive the cost/benefit analysis of a failure here – a single nuclear disaster simply outweighs the benefit of all nuclear positives combined.

In short, a nuclear power plant cannot fail to its worst case scenario. It has to be “fail safe”.

But again, nothing, nothing at all, is fail safe. And while a coal plan blowing up is a pretty ugly and nasty scenario, it is a drop in the bucket compared to a nuclear meltdown. Thus I’m inclined to think nuclear fails an important test:

Can you live with the worst case consequences?

The answer seems a pretty clear “no”, and you don’t have to be Japanese to see it.

Seriously, if you want to lose your faith in humanity, read the comment section of pretty much any blog…

In any case, [...]]]> A few days ago I wrote about the psychology of political figures. Personally I’m inclined to believe most at the highest levels are likely sociopaths (could any normal person handle either the levels of stress they handle or cognitive dissonance, aka lies, required to support all the compromises we require of them?).

In any case, I ran into this book being referenced in a a blog comment and found myself transfixed by its content:

“The Authoritarians”

It’s a free book written on human psychology/sociology by University of Manitoba Associate Professor of Psychology Bob Altemeyer. Now I agree, a book being “free” on the Internet usually is a bad sign – either it’ll be bad writing or serious wing-nuttery (left or right), but the above is neither. It is an intensely interesting book and I was literally (ok, figuratively I guess since it is digital) unable to put it down.

I am not saying it is a perfect book, certainly on the surface it would seem to have enormous liberal bias, however the author goes over considerable effort to show why it’s not bias, but rather unfortunately “how the chips fall”.

Even so, I’m not convinced that it doesn’t suffer from liberal bias. However the points it makes and the studies it elucidates are extremely interesting and valuable. If nothing else, it gives you some potential new ways to look at our would be leaders, and perhaps more importantly, their unquestioning followers (again, both left and right). While yes, it does attack say the more mindless Bush followers directly, I don’t see any reason not to believe it’s equally applicable to Obamabots.

If you enjoy books like Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational” (another book that I highly recommend)(also with flaws as well), then I think you will this one. To note like Mr. Ariely’s book it is not only filled with science, but also with great humor.

If you do read it, make sure you read the chapter notes as well – they are equally illuminating and often highly entertaining.

However, I wonder if the problem isn’t making kids who aren’t beautiful (or [...]]]> Dove has sponsored the “Campaign for Real Beauty” which on the face of it is a good thing. Certainly women, young girls, and society needs a redefinition of priority around beauty. And I’ll also skip my skepticism over any ulterior motives here.

However, I wonder if the problem isn’t making kids who aren’t beautiful (or even are) feel beautiful, but rather try to deprecate the importance of beauty at all. You see in their ads they’ve got these kids (many of which are frankly not exactly ugly) saying “I am beautiful”, the point being that they’re brainwashing themselves that they’re beautiful even when maybe they aren’t. They are, “beautiful inside”.

Well yes of course they are, however the point is we’re still focusing on that damn word. They still need to be “beautiful”.

So, maybe the answer isn’t to self delude ourselves about our beauty, and thus associated value, but rather to say, “It doesn’t matter if I’m beautiful – I have worth regardless.”

This is one of the thing that annoys me about many Hollywood movies. You have this “worthless” character and they redeem themselves by finding their talent, their purpose, their “inner” or “outer” beauty.

Well, maybe the better message, the better lesson, is that it doesn’t matter if you’re pretty, you’re talented, you have a “purpose”. Even the most miserable, untalented, ugly of us have worth and value and you don’t have to do a damn thing to gain that.

So while I applaud the thought, I think the it’s potentially misdirected. Forget beauty – everyone has worth even if they are an ugly schmuck like me.