Photographer Nate Bolt's setup:
Watch Nate Bolt interviewed on MSNBC:
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Monday, April 11, 2011
Grandma hacks the internet with shovel
A 75-year-old Georgian woman was despondent following her arrest and subsequent release for alleged cutting a fiber-optic cable in her poverty-stricken village of Armazi -- and causing Internet outages in three neighboring countries.
Facing up to three years in prison, the woman pled her innocence in court Friday. She argued not only that she wasn't responsible for the outage, she doesn't even know what the World Wide Web is.
"I have no idea what the Internet is," Hayastan Shakarian told news agency AFP, arguing between bursts of tears that she lacked the strength to cut through the thick cable.
Shakarian said she had been collecting firewood; police argue the woman was scavenging for scrap metal when she discovered the primary fiber-optic cable which runs through the two countries. Service went down when she apparently hacked into it with a shovel severing the line, officials said.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Farmville Break
Sometimes I just have to escape for a time to contemplate things from another perspective. Farmville is my virtual weekend getaway to my country estate. It's affordable and pretty low maintenance. More about that here.
Contemplating global events.
Contemplating global events.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Friday, April 1, 2011
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Evacuation level radiation found 25 miles from plant
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Power company says smoke spotted at another Japanese nuclear plant
Smoke was spotted at another nuclear plant in northeastern Japan on Wednesday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.
The company said smoke was detected in the turbine building of reactor No. 1 at the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant around 6 p.m. (5 a.m. ET).
Smoke could no longer be seen by around 7 p.m. (6 a.m. ET), a company spokesman told reporters.
The Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant is about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, where workers have been scrambling to stave off a meltdown since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems there.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. owns both plants.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Fire at New Hampshires Seabrook Nuclear Power Station
On Monday at 11:43 a.m., officials reported smoke in the "B" Residual Heat Removal vault and the plant's fire brigade was called to the scene. The Residual Heat Removal is a system used to help cool down the reactor.
The smoke was believed to be coming from the elevator power supply equipment.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Neil Sheehan said because it took the fire brigade more than 15 minutes to declare the event terminated, the plant is required to tell the outside world.
The smoke was believed to be coming from the elevator power supply equipment.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Neil Sheehan said because it took the fire brigade more than 15 minutes to declare the event terminated, the plant is required to tell the outside world.
Hungry Sharks
375-pound shark leaps into boat - US news - Weird news - msnbc.com
"Jason Kresse, 29, of Freeport, and two crew members had been fishing for red snapper about 50 miles into the Gulf of Mexico and were dumping fish guts into the water about 3:45 a.m. Monday when they heard two big splashes in the distance.
"All of a sudden something hit the side of the boat," Kresse told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "He ends up landing on the back of the boat."
The mako shark had apparently been in a rush to feed. It began thrashing around, and Kresse said he and his crew couldn't get close to the 375-pound fish to toss it back in the water. It damaged the boat before dying several hours later."
More and more I have been finding reports of aggressive animal behavior in the Gulf. In this case, as in many others. My suspicion is that these animals are starving to death, their food chain having been severly damaged by the gulf oil spill.
I am not alone in predicting events such as this will become more and more prevalent, in direct proportion to catastrophic habitat destruction due to incidents such as oil spills, and radiation contamination.
I am deeply concerned for the health of the life on this planet. We need to begin living locally and simply NOW. We need to stop mining, stop drilling, stop building and start planting.
Our very lives, and the survival of so many other living things depend on it.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
More hungry sharks
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Letter of Concern
| UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY | ||
| BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 94720 |
May 11, 1999
LETTER OF CONCERN.To Whom It May Concern:
During 1942, RobertE. Connick and I led the "Plutonium Group" at the Universityof California, Berkeley, which managed to isolate the first milligram of plutonium from irradiated uranium. (Plutonium-239 hadpreviously been discovered by Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan.)During subsequent decades, I have studied the biological effectsof ionizing radiation --- including the alpha particles emitted by the radioactive decay of plutonium.
By any reasonablestandard of biomedical proof, there is no safe dose, which meansthat just one decaying radioactive atom can produce permanent mutation in a cell's genetic molecules. My own work showed this in1990 for xrays, gamma rays, and beta particles (Gofman 1990: Radiation-InducedCancer from Low-Dose Exposure). For alpha particles, thelogic of no safe dose was confirmed experimentally in 1997 by TomK. Hei and co-workers at Columbia University College of Physiciansand Surgeons in New York (Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences (USA) Vol.94, pp.3765-3770, April 1997, "MutagenicEffects of a Single and an Exact Number of Alpha Particles inMammalian Cells").
It follows fromsuch evidence that citizens worldwide have a strong biological basisfor opposing activities which produce an appreciable risk of exposinghumans and others to plutonium and other radioactive pollution at anylevel. The fact that humans cannot escape exposure to ionizingradiation from various natural sources --- which may well account fora large share of humanity's inherited afflictions --- is no reason tolet human activities increase the exposure to ionizingradiation. The fact that ionizing radiation is a mutagen was firstdemonstrated in 1927 by Herman Joseph Muller, and subsequentevidence has shown it to be a mutagen of unique potency. Mutation is the basis not only for inherited afflictions, but also for cancer.
Very truly yours,
John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology
All Things Nuclear • Where Did the Water in the Spent Fuel Pools Go?
All Things Nuclear • Where Did the Water in the Spent Fuel Pools Go?
One cause of low water levels may have been that water splashed from the pools during the earthquake. I haven’t seen reports suggesting significant water loss by splashing or that the water levels in the pools were low shortly after the earthquake. Also, as noted above, the reported rate of heating of the pools at Units 4, 5, and 6 suggests that the water level was not significantly reduced early on.
Moreover, except in the case of the Unit 4 pool, even if the water levels in the pools had dropped by several meters during the earthquake—corresponding to hundreds of tons of water being spilled—the heating and boiling times to expose the fuel would still be too long to account for very low water levels in the pools.
A second possible cause of the low water levels is that the pools at Units 2, 3, and 4 all developed significant leaks. Some reports said that a leak was suspected in the pool of Unit 4 and possibly in Unit 3. This analysis suggests that all three pools may be developed leaks.
Dave Lochbaum has suggested a common failure mode for leaks in the spent fuel pools. Large doors in the side of the pools are equipped with rubber tubes that are inflated to seal around the door. Even if these seals were not damaged, without power to run the pumps that keep the seals inflated, they can lose air over time and create leaks around the door. Such leaks may not show up immediately since it could take some time for the seals to lose air pressure.
The pumps for these seals currently do not have backup power so leaks of this kind can result from an extended loss of power from the grid. This is a vulnerability of this type of plant design that could happen elsewhere, including at a number of plants in the the US, and needs to be addressed.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Efforts to search for children orphaned by quake face challenges
Child welfare specialists have gathered from various parts of the country for this unusual mission under the initiative of the central government.
Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, the other prefectures that were most severely damaged, are also preparing to accept those specialists and are expected to request their dispatches soon.
In Iwate, 17 specialists including psychologists and child minders from nurseries in Hokkaido, Aomori, Akita, Tokyo and Kanagawa have arrived. On Saturday, they met local counterparts and started their searches in the cities of Kamaishi, Ofunato and Rikuzentakata and the town of Otsuchi.
The experts will initially work in groups of three and look for children without parents at evacuation shelters along with people in charge at the shelters.
If there are any children who have no place to go, the specialists are planning to entrust them to temporary care homes at child consultation centers or host parents.
FOCUS: Efforts to search children orphaned by quake face challenges | Kyodo News
Terje Sorgerd: Aurora Borealis
The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.
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