I had never heard of this, though it happened in my lifetime. Perhaps the news cycle was all about the reactor explosion and fire in a place that is often called “Chernobyl”, which happened earlier that year.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
I had never heard of this, though it happened in my lifetime. Perhaps the news cycle was all about the reactor explosion and fire in a place that is often called “Chernobyl”, which happened earlier that year.
My official policy on book recommendations is, briefly: you will find it worthwhile or I’ll refund your money. [stderr] I note that nobody has ever taken me up on that offer in many years (I had a similar offer on my personal website before I started stderr here) so either my recommendations are awesome, or nobody cares. And, my official recommended books list, with this new entry, is [stderr]
I’ve had a strong suggestion that there should be an open thread here, so this is it.
I usually don’t set comments to close at any particular time, so I’ll loosely monitor this thread in semi-perpetuity and we’ll see if we ever need another one.
Recent conversations about small modular reactors reminded me about the US government’s history of leaving and losing nuclear reactors in various places, during the cold war. To be fair, the Soviets lost a few, too. And, even recently – one aspect of the Russian submarine Kursk that sunk in 2000 [wik] that didn’t get a lot of air-play was the fact that a nuclear reactor and several nuclear warheads sank with it. That must have made recovering the wreck interesting, and I’m sure that NATO intelligence was skipping about with glee at a chance to literally dissect a Russian ballistic missile sub. I wonder how many times the Soviets got to perform similar dissections on US gear?
When I start hearing the old trope about plucky rebels attempting to overthrow a vicious government, my first reaction is to check and see if the story is being carried by The New York Times and, if it is, I search for “${region} CIA involvement”. I’m sad that we live in such a cynical world, but that’s what it is.
Old welder to young welder: “OK, now we’re going to check your welds to see if they hold.”
Young welder: “They’re tight, they’ll hold up to anything.”
Old welder: “We’ll see about that.”
I recently listened to the audiobook version of a series of lectures and Q&A with Noam Chomsky. If you have problems with being depressed into immobility by world politics and economics, I don’t recommend it. This is a sort-of review of the audiobook, with some comments by me and some quotes, and I plan to, over time, post a few passages from it.
The whole “Columbus discovered The Americas” meme is stupid; rather obviously the people who settled down there 13,000 years before Columbus came, did. After all, they were there to greet him when he arrived, and promptly murdered a few of them. There were literally millions of people who discovered and inhabited the americas before Columbus was even born. What a strange conceit that it takes a white european to “discover” a place.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a special effects wrangler. In fact, the short story Armaments Race by Arthur Clarke [wik] really appealed to me – I thought that making swords and guns and armor and tanks for movies would be a fine way to spend my life.
I asked my masters in the Freethoughtblogs collective, because there are (I believe) some evolutionary biologists in the house. However, I don’t want to turn this into a case study of “what happens when you ask a scientist a question?” [because the answer is usually “maybe” or “that’s bullshit.”]