Sheldon Cooper is going to cry over this..a bright young mind has been wasting his career on string theory with all those superfluous dimensions. And Penny will get the Nobel prize because she's been wearing homemade amplituhedron earrings she created one night over too much Jägermeister with Raj. He'll get "honorable mention" at the ceremony in Norway and start talking to girls as a by product. Howard will be tremendously proud of his girlfriend and screw up the relationship again......and Howard will still not be a Doctor. The big question is whether Amy Farrah Fowler will ditch her now disgraced boy toy and fully come out to Penny or make a play for Raj.

Totally read it! Seriously cool grist for a guy that worked in dosimetry as a clerk until they figured out I could do dBase and let me loose on organizing their exposure database several decades ago. I didn't have the formal schooling to be an expert in nuclear physics, but always an amateur interest. One of the good things the Department of Energy (and they've done many other dumb things) did was encouraging and sponsoring these kinds of exchanges.

Joshua: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? "

Yes and No. It is a high alpha emitter, but that is low-energy and blocked by a piece of paper. It's not a big beta or gamma producer. The problem is more the poisonous effects and internal deposition....as alpha can make it through several nearby cells easily. This notion of spreading it out is rather ludicrous. Even if you could collect it all up (think big mining operations that produce massive amounts of waste itself) and then tried to spread it...it's a heavy metal and likes to clump. Unless you suddenly have hundreds of billions of dollars in your pocket to do all this....it's far better to secure it in situ as best as possible with your tens or hundred of millions of dollars.

The old "dilution is the solution to pollution" theory. It doesn't work so well on thinks like transuranic waste. So, what level of "spreading" is OK? What happens when streams concentrate it downstream into the oceans and it gets into fish? Is it OK to eat a salmon with 100 nanocuries of Pu239 or a steak with 1 microcurie of Cesium 137? It may be quick, but it's not the best...or even the easiest. In fact, stabilization is the far better way to go and let time take care of it.

I don't get how 50 gallons of nearly dry Strontium at the bottom of an annulus (that's the empty space between two tanks) with cameras watching it is anywhere near "almost as bad" as the tens or hundred of kilograms of plutonium spread across the equivalent of small European country, but whatever. People forget they're paying a bill for an arms race and the legacy of cleaning up from a hastily engineered atom bomb in WWII and subsequent Cold War ain't cheap! To the tune of BILLIONS of dollars actually. Russians have been (and continue to visit and help) at Hanford. That was part of the article about building trust. I've visited with them before...bright folks with some incredible experience and wisdom.

Is it me or does that seem overkill? I went to Radio Shack and an autoparts store to buy three parts. A battery holder for 8 AA alkaline batteries, a 9V power lead (it's at 12v though), and a cigarette lighter adapter. I already had a car charger for the phone with a USB port on it. Wired the three together and I have a nice compact little power brick capable for recharging my iPhone and variety of other USB or 12V devices for a few days before the batteries go down. I use it camping too. $2.99 + $2.00 + $6.00 + $1.00 = http://ots.mwrc.net/images/dyn/sitemin_file2.php/product_images/119474/image/SP-8+Battery+Holder+copy.jpg http://rsk.imageg.net/graphics/product_images/pRS1C-2160125w345.jpg http://www.powerwerx.com/_images/products/atcsocketbare_xlrg.jpg

Canadians want to do with the penny? This is yet another example of a government caving to the tyranny of inflated pocket change. And I'm sure the U.S. will be the next domino to fall. We know puppet autocrats in Washington have been in league with the evil Cabal of Paper Money (see their eye on top of the pyramid on a $1 bill) for centuries and shadow organization called "Amex" is trying to do away with decimals altogether. Living life in integers only is a planned conspiracy to strip God-fearing Americans of our copper-plated zinc liberties! If anything our government should begin re-minting what they illegally usurped from us in 1858 with the "retirement" of the half cent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_cent_(United_States_coin) Our founding father, Abraham Lincoln, guaranteed us the penny denomination when his image was first struck in copper and his big house on the obverse....he's rolling over in his grave that he'll only be available to us on paper $5 bills! And this whole crazy notion of rounding to the hugely inflated nickel is just crazy talk. Jefferson used to teach us that if we saved enough Lincolns we could one day have the likeness of him in our pockets...and now he'd be the first increment on the fraction chart? He and his fancy pants are all bunged up in Monticello as we speak saying, "It's called 'penny candy'....not 'nickel candy'!" I say, "Nay!" Unless the government cushions this effrontery by, at the very least, reintroducing the three cent piece (perhaps with Ron Paul as the missing Founding Father on the back)....it will be just just one more case where our out-of-control government is stepping on our necks and depriving us of life, liberty, and useless small change. Demand re-minting of the Half Penny and Three Cent piece NOW! Call your legislator NOW!

I swap the 1% of cash that I do have in a safe, turn off my cell phone and leave it at home powered off but not destroy it, pack and fire up the dual sport motorcycle with license plates, and go camping in the mountains. Not sure if I'd take a piece or leave it....it depends if I think I'm being pursued by that assassin from No Country For Old Men (a shotgun and a flamethrower) or just a disgruntled husband (small caliber Bond-like gun). Bourne always seem to cross borders with ease in the movies, but I know I don't have the chops to pull that off so I would just stay as rural as I could and try not to attract undue attention. Maybe in area of the country that distrusts well-dressed corporate henchmen/government officials with aviator sunglasses....maybe somewhere like Idaho. Idaho English is one foreign language that's pretty easy to learn and I can fake it a slight accent already. Also, the bad guys have a hard time navigating those black suburbans with tinted windows on forest service roads and even harder time pursuing a motorcycle. Or, maybe I'd stage a SCUBA accident where the body can't be found......in a deep, cold lake in the same part of the world.

The site is blocked here at a major international corporation! Should I worry that my employer has blocked the site and I can't sign up? Does that mean they've pre-protected me and already signed me up with a special corporate agreement or that I need to start looking up and over my shoulder for funny looking planes orbiting my position?

Through life I've never had a cool new product when it first came out. Not only do I have a Nest installed....now it's part of a big lawsuit! Bonus! Now I guess I should go to a rave and show off.....let people set my Nest via iPhone. Do I have to buy trendy shoes and get a special haircut now? P.S. Honeywell can lick my love pump. I'm keeping my Nest!

After I saw what a water heater explode through two floors of a house, a bullet spin on ice, and learned that flatus burns in two different colors from the show....I don't find much of what they do hard to believe.

President Josiah Bartlett is rolling over in his grave.

I cut the tie from the subscription Cable pig 18 months ago. Just use their high speed internet. I bought a used PS3 for the front end and tVersity to stream, Easynews for newsgroup aggregation and I can usually get HBO and SHO stuff pretty quickly (yes, I'd love for them to find a way for me to pay them without going through a cable company), and rabbit ears for local channels. Flipping CBS, NBC, PBS, and ABC is sort of nostalgic...and cool at the same time since it's HD these days. The downside is that I can't surf and see what new shows may be coming up and sometimes hear a long-time later about a cool new show, but then I head to Easynews and usually find it pretty quickly. A 2TB drive and I'm in hog heaven with a great backlog of great movies and can go watch Charlie Sheen's slow decline into a Season 8. Winning!

That filtering isn't quite as easy as you would think and not just cesium, but a potpourri of nasty isotopes. An evaporator like the one below is pretty common technology and probably the way they'll eventually go to reduce the amount of waste. http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/242AEvaporator