Musings

General-purpose musings

There are 781 posts filed in Musings (this is page 75 of 79).

Chernobyl

A thunderstorm knocked out our power Sunday night. In spite of knowing better, we kept mindlessly flipping light switches. Electricity is ingrained into our lifestyle. Its not easily given up. As long as we live with electricity, we must live with power plants. And as long as we must have power plants, we must choose between:

  • coal, which scars the landscape and produces acid rain
  • oil, which rely on scarce oil from unstable regions
  • natural gas, which has the same issues as oil but at least burns cleanly
  • solar, which take up lots of real estate don’t come close to offering enough capacity
  • wind, which have the same issues as solar and only work in few locations
  • hydroelectric, which drastically affect the flow of rivers and the life that depends on them, and
  • nuclear, which is usually safe. Except when its not, in which case it becomes a monster.

Like it was one morning twenty years ago.

It was twenty years ago that an early-morning emergency drill backfired at Chernobyl, causing Reactor Number 4 to explode and release deadly radioactive steam and debris across the landscape. To paraphrase the late, Nobel-Prize winning physicist Andrei Sakhrov, we still don’t quite have a handle on the powerful forces we have brought into existence.

Twenty years have passed. Chernobyl will be a wasteland for many hundreds more. How have we progressed since? When we reach for the light switch, we expect something on the other end to be pushing out electrons. Is it worth another Chernobyl to keep our beloved elecricity? Are we willing to live in a world without electricity? If not, what’s next?

[I’m currently reading The Truth About Chernobyl by Gregori Medvedev, former chief engineer at Chernobyl. It brings back the same fear I felt in 1986 when I heard the scary news of the plant explosion. Also, see my earlier post on Three Mile Island.]

Blogger’s Battle

Dang, I hate it when I think of a fantastic topic to write about and then I don’t have time to write about it! Day job, you know. This one will take a few dayss to write and research so it’ll have to wait until later.

For now, nibble on some Mickey D’s.

Storytelling

I’ve been interested in learning the tricks to telling a good story, so I dropped a line to the Real Paul Jones thinking he would know where to find good storytellers in the area. Paul passed my query over to his friend Brian Strum, who sent me the following links:

More storytelling press

Good stuff, y’all.
Continue reading →

Sweet Rain

I awoke yesterday morning to the sweet sound of thunder: it was raining! I’d seen some of that in Australia but around here it had been a while. Yesterday evening’s stormy weather didn’t dump any rain, but the winds were freakishly strong. The horizon looked eerily menacing, with black clouds swirling as if alive. If only those clouds had offered any rain.

The home weather station reports that yesterday we received an inch of rain, at times falling at 1.5 inches per hour. That brings my rain gauge’s yearly total to 4.76 inches. That’s far below the average of 12 inches this time of year, but at least its more consistent with RDU Airport. Last year our house received 5 fewer inches of rain than the airport.

GI Joe To Go Hybrid?

I wonder if we’ll start seeing hybrid Abrams tanks? Imagine the progress made in alternative fuels if the military put its purchasing power behind it.

Imagine a battlefield of soldiers, all riding Segways . . .

Cyberspace Scoops Paper On Debit Card Story

The N&O ran a front-page article yesterday detailing how numerous banks have recently reissued debit cards as a result of a security breach. It seems that hackers may have compromised the security of OfficeMax, according to the article. OfficeMax denies this.

What makes this story notable is that I found out about it a day earlier as a result of the local tech crowd. Folks on the Triangle InternetWorkers mailing list mentioned the reissued cards, providing links to additional information on the breach. I knew all about this well before the paper mentioned it to me.

The article did have news I didn’t get online, like the name of the “national retailer” involved, but other than that it didn’t provide me anything I didn’t get online somewhere else. It just goes to show how quickly Internet-based (and citizen-journalism based) news sources are outpacing the traditional news sources (a.k.a., the “mainstream media”).

Update: here’s some more detail coverage of recent ATM fraud cases.

Every time I read stories like this, it makes me realize just how absurdly vulnerable our banking system truly is. No wonder banks choose to pay ransom to the hackers to sweep incidents under the rug: if people found out how fragile things really are, they would totally freak out. It would cause a rush on banks.

It’s one big house of cards, so to speak.

Countdown To Slackerdom

I was buying some things at the local grocery store last week. I saw the total was going to provide me a wad of singles so I do what I usually do: I kicked in a quarter to make my change a fivespot. You’d think this was simple math, but you’d be wrong. The slacker at the register gave me a blank look.

“Aw, man,” he sighed, fumbling with the money. “The last math I did was advanced trigonometry.”

Dust off those advanced trig skills, dude. NASA may be calling you.

High Marks For The Day

This is most bizarre. I have met more Marks today than ever in my life. Everywhere I turned I saw “Mark” on a namebadge. After the first 5 or 6 I just had to laugh.

As I returned to my hotel room tonight, the message light was flashing on my phone. When I asked the staffmember what the message was, he told me they were looking for a gentleman named Mark who had earlier dropped off some postcards. Even at this hour I’m discovering other Marks.

Okay, universe, you got my attention. What are you trying to tell me?

Their Escalators Don’t Go To The Top Floor

As I was leaving the San Diego airport yesterday, I watched as two men paused to choose which of two escalators they were going to use.

They chose the one that was less crowded. Because, you know, you get there quicker.