The tanks in Washington State (Hanford, to be precise) are cold-war era relics filled with corrosive slime. The Fukushima tanks are overflowing with treated water. And yes, the problem is that distillation won't work, since the main problem is tritium, actually in the water itself.

And so what? Before we can evaluate how bad this is, we need to know how bad the radioactivity is. Are we talking "enough to kill everybody" or "enough to detect"? Given that this is water that has already been cleaned, I suspect the latter. The only radionuclide they couldn't get out is tritium, and that at a relatively low concentration. Until there are actual numbers, I won't get excited.
And when you read "highly contaminated water", remember that bananas are too radioactive to meet Japanese food regulations. A little radioactivity goes a long way, as does a little hysteria.

A better source for more detailed information is the government website at NISA (nuclear and industrial safety agency) here., with the latest report at here. It's got pressures and temperatures, as much as they know. On the other hand, it is scary how much they don't know. They have no idea of the temperature of the spent fuel pools in #1, 3, and 4, or the water temperatures inside the reactor vessel in #1, 2, or 3. (They are monitoring the external temperature of the reactor vessel.) That's not good enough -- couldn't they just drop in a remote temperature sensor into the spent fuel pools? How hard can that be?

I'm sorry, but the more things change, the more the stay the same. The parallels are eerie:

1) Daniel Ellsberg / Pentagon papers == whoever / This stuff

2) Operation Phoenix == "capture / kill" CIA operations in Afghanistan.

3) The corrupt Ngo Diem == The corrupt Hamid Karzai.

4) French war in Vietnam == Russian war in Afghanistan

5) Corrupt, worthless army == The corrupt, worthless Afghanistan army.

6) Support for the war from North Vietnam == Support for the war from Pakistan

7) Death from above via B-52's, AC-47's, Hueys == Death from above from F-16's, Predators, Reapers

8) Massive civilian casualties == Massive civilian casualties

9) Nationalism / Religion fueling the fire == Nationalism / Religion fueling the fire

10) Slow build up over years, with too little to start with == Slow buildup over years, with too little to start with

11) Humiliating defeat for the US, with a small fig leaf == ????

Without lots more soldiers sent in, and perhaps even then, this war is lost. When are we going to recognize it?

Ummm -- Juneau, Wisconsin is a city in Dodge County. Juneau County (where this doofus works) does not contain Juneau (the city). Not that it matters much. As a resident of WI, I can say there is a lot of people around here that agree with this doofus. Must be, since according to the law in WI, everybody who has sex with a person under 18 is committing a crime. (Section 949.09 -- 16-18 = misdemeanor, section 948.02 -- 15 & under = felony.) No exception for when both are under the age of 18, you can still get put in jail and on the sex offender registry. Something is wrong when the law criminalizes what over half of people do. But this prosecutor just can not let go of the power to ruin people's lives.

As a statistics teacher (HS / Tech school level), this doesn't surprise me in the least. Statistics and statistics education has become a giant game of "plug the numbers in and damn the understanding". When a student has never calculated a standard deviation by hand, how can they be expected to know what the heck a root mean square deviation from the sample mean really is?

Going further, I would say that statistics is a tool for answering questions. Like any other tool, it works well for some jobs and not for others. So far, no problem. But the problem comes from students that are just not willing to understand the questions that statistics can answer. Case in point -- a p value of 0.05 does _not_ mean that the null hypothesis has a 95% chance of being wrong. That's what stats students want it to mean, because they are not willing to ask the questions that stats can answer.

Until students are willing to actually do the work, for the sake of actually learning, I don't see any hope.

On the windows machine I got because I absolutely had to have one for work, there was a row of buttons across the top. I guess they were intended to be media keys, since there was a template with e-mail, web and other stuff icons on them. But at the very top right of the keyboard, right where it would get banged when handling the keyboard, there was an evil key: the power off.

The first time I hit it accidentally, I swore and turned the darn PC back on. The second time, I swore louder. The third time, I threw it away. I would have preferred to shove it down the throat of the designer, but I restrained myself.

While I take this document seriously, I have a hard time thinking it will do what the scientologists want, even if it is adopted. Points 1, 2, and 3 would collectively prohibit "religious vilification" and the like. Point 4 would prohibit interference with freedom of religion. What if my religion requires me to vilify other religions? This is not a trivial point, as many religions require their adherents to work against other religions. Examples include the missionary years expected of a mormon, the anti-semitism in the koran, the anti-atheism of evangelical christian faiths in the US, etc.

Nobody can be free to practice religion without the freedom to vilify other religions.

Not needing to reboot the computer is a nice luxury, but still, turning it off to save the energy is a good thing to do when you're not using it. That's why I've got a low power server/gateway (see here -- low power and quiet!) for my home network that stays on all the time, and a laptop that I actually do stuff on.

Wow -- now I feel like I'm fitting in here. I remember reading board books to by kids by Sandra Boynton, including the one with hippos coming to a party ("One hippo all alone, calls two hippos on the phone . . . "). That was definitely better than counting by dogs -- the dogs book had all those barking noises that just have to be made. Don't bother arguing with a child that your throat hurts and you can't bark -- you'll lose.