Category Archives: Other science

aka stamp collecting

Planting the Flag

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Denial Depot’s Jaws: A movie review looks at the movie from a denialist perspective.

Matt Hooper from the “Oceanographic Institute” turns up. No-one seems to have called him, he just kind of appears. I’ve heard that scientists can actually smell sources of funding from up to 50 kilometers away. Hooper takes one look at the body and arrogantly proclaims:
“It wasn’t an ‘accident,’ it wasn’t a boat propeller, or a coral reef, or Jack the Ripper. It was a shark.”

What alarmist nonsense! He just blew through all those equally good explanations. And as the local pointed out “nobody’s seen a shark”. So it’s unscientific for Hooper to assert there definitely is a shark. He’s hiding the uncertainty and doubt. Of course if he admitted there wasn’t a shark all his funding would dry up…

I just want to point out that as far as Jaws being a movie about denialism, I got there first.

Before TMI meant TMI

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TMI: Fear, Fukushima and Facts

A critique of the xkcd radiation dose chart I linked to, with some more details and caveats, some of which I recognize as true from by background (but wasn’t going to post on my own because it’s too far away from my areas of competence). Randall’s shortcoming is the mixing of chronic and acute exposure doses (long-term and short-term), which are not equivalent, i.e. a dose spread out over a period of time (e.g. months) does not have the same biological effect of the same dose that happens in a period of minutes or hours or days. Giving the body a chance to repair itself matters.

via fine structure

Over on the Other Side of the Line

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Understating the risks is just as irresponsible as overstating it.

The Mind of Dr. Pion: Don’t believe what the press is telling you!

There is no explicit by-line on this article, but the video contains an interview with BBC reporter Chris Hogg in Tokyo that repeats that a half life of 8 days means “that after 8 days the risk will have dissipated”.

The reporter is WRONG. Twice, because that is also not what the officials said. His ignorance of basic physics, in this case a topic I always teach in a college general education class, led him to misinterpret what was actually said by a government spokesman and hence mislead the public.

Misplaced Angst

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Your iPod is polluting China and L.A.—and Wyoming might be next

You may have been aware too that in manufacturing your electronic marvel, the Shenzhen plant emitted roughly 25 pounds of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. It’s even possible that you were aware of the 9-10 pounds of CO2 emitted in transporting the device to you from China.

Oh my GOD! 35 POUNDS of CO2 in getting my iPod delivered to me. That’s horrible!

Um, no, not really.

Bbbbut, 35 POUNDS!

Let’s look at that. Of 35 pounds (16 kg), about 9.5 lbs (a little over 4 kg) is Carbon. Two gallons of gasoline contain 11 pounds of Carbon. It sounds like a lot, but realize that driving 10,000 miles a year in a car that gets 25 mpg you dump 4 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Context matters.

Further, the blurb about China burning coal to generate the electricity to do the manufacturing needs to put in context as well. In the United States, the average person uses FOUR TIMES as much electricity as the average person in China. Add to that the China has been aggressively pursuing green energy — they already lead the US in wind energy generation, and are pushing forward in solar while we drag our feet. The US is not “greener than thou” and shifting the blame for pollution/CO2 distracts from the need to get our own house in order.

Let's Overreact Some More

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There are calls to shut down US reactors owing to earthquake concerns, despite the Japan situation being caused by a tsunami (which resulted from an earthquake).

Global earthquake activity since 1973 and nuclear power plant locations

This map shows a heatmap of 175,000 4.5+ magnitude earthquakes since 1973 based on data from the USGS (United States Geological Survey). And worldwide locations of nuclear power stations using information from the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency)

Amazing display revealing where the major fault lines are, along with the realization that there have been more than 175,000 earthquakes above this magnitude (and many more weaker than this) in the last (almost) 40 years and how few reactors are actually near earthquake activity.

MiniMe, You Retweet Me

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Yesterday I tweeted

Lesson from Japan is not that nuke power is dangerous. Tsunamis are dangerous. Four lost trains are not being used to bash train travel.

and frankly, it got a hell of a response (according to my modest standards) of 28 retweets (and a couple of copy/tweet RTs) at the time of this writing. With that comes a few responses that disagree. I’m not about to get into a discussion on twitter, explaining the details I couldn’t cram into 140 characters, into a series of messages limited to 140 characters.

I have a blog for that.

I was chided for the comparison with the lost trains

People would bash train travel too if one of the lost trains exploded and caused 1250 sq Km evacuation

This misses the point I was trying to make. Trains wreck and even explode (I’ve linked to some spectacular explosions from trains) and yet people are not widely afraid of train travel. In this particular instance, nobody is blaming train travel for the loss of the trains — they blame the tsunami. Why? because train travel is normally quite safe, and it took an unusual event — a rare, massive (especially for that fault line) earthquake followed by a wall of water to cause these events. Nobody has a problem identifying the trigger. The earthquake caused the Fujinuma irrigation dam to collapse. Do we now question the inherent safety of dams? Is there a call to eliminate them? Do dams, or trains, evoke the visceral response that nuclear power does? How much area was evacuated in response to the tsunami warning — was it more than 1250 square kilometers?

The issue is the asymmetric assessment of risk (or complete disregard for risk assessment, in some cases). There is a false premise used by some that if nuclear power is not risk-free then it cannot be permitted. This standard is applied almost nowhere else, because it can’t be. You are at risk if you get out of your bed in the morning, but you’re at risk if you stay in bed — there is always risk. In the time that Fukushima Daiichi reactor #1 has been operating, the US has averaged more than 40,000 automobile deaths per year. Why is that tolerable? It’s because we don’t assess the risk in the same way. A large number of people (potentially) dying all at once evokes a greater emotional response than the same number (or even more) dying over a period of time

Part of it is the same reason behind being willing to seemingly spare no expense to stop terror attacks, despite the relatively few who have died from them. We have a similar reaction to the term “radiation” as we do to “terrorism.” But coal plants are famous for the amount of radioactive material they spew into the environment. Hell, bananas are radioactive, as are people.

The bottom line is that, according to the available information, the almost-40-year-old reactors held up remarkably well to the earthquake itself, and it was the resulting tsunami that took out the backup systems that are now causing the (quite serious) problems. But one has to put this in context of the scope of the devastation, rather than holding the risk up to an impossible zero-tolerance standard. Put another way: how many people died in this tragedy, and what’s getting most of the press?

Getting Robbed by the Man

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Here in the US we lose an hour to daylight saving time tomorrow. A reminder of its existence, and also a reminder that “the man” is the DoT. Timekeepers use universal coordinated time (UTC), which doesn’t change.

Daylight Saving Time: How to Cope With the Loss of an Hour

For most people, the shift is a nuisance. But for some, it provokes weeks of sleep deprivation that take a heavy toll on mood and productivity, according to Dr. Phil Gehrman, clinical director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Behavioral Sleep Medicine program.

I’m one of them, at least in recent years. I suppose it doesn’t help that I generally get up before sunrise to beat the traffic for my commute, so exposing myself to sunlight (and only sunlight) immediately isn’t an option.

via @BoraZ

Geekherding

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rands in repose: Managing Nerds

Another default opening position for the nerd is bitterness — the curmudgeon. Your triage: Why can’t he be a team player? There are chronically negative nerds out there, but in my experience with nerd management, it’s more often the case the nerd is bitter because they’ve seen this situation before four times and it’s played out exactly the same way. Each time:

Whenever management feels they’re out of touch, we all get shuttled off to an offsite where we spend two days talking too much and not acting enough.

Nerds aren’t typically bitter; they’re just well informed. Snark from nerds is a leading indicator that I’m wasting their time and when I find it, I ask questions until I understand the inefficiency so I can change it or explain it.