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Comment: Shunning (Score 2) 582

by mdsolar (#46482873) Attached to: Measles Outbreak In NYC
Shunning might work. Unvaccinated kids don't pose a medical danger to vaccinated kids, but they are a potential emotional liability since they may die for a tragically preventable reason. If we say we don't want our vaccinated kids to get close to unvaccinated kids to avoid a possible emotional wound, then that places a lot of social pressure on the issue. Shunning is one of the cruelest things to do, so we ought to be sure the problem is really worth taking such steps. It's been working for smoking though.

Comment: No beginning (Score 3, Interesting) 118

One of the really attractive things about a Steady State Universe is that it does not require a beginning. It can be infinite in both space and time. This leaves time for the nearly impossible to occur without resort to special circumstances. It is fine for a monkey to hand us the works of Shakespeare now, if there has been infinite time already for him and his friends to bang on typewriters, but if they've only had 14 billion years so far, we might have to suppose they at least read the Cliff Notes. Being able to avoid those special circumstances means that the origin of life is to be expected as a mere accident. However, there is a problem with this solution to the very complex existing in less than infinite time: the monkey should be handing us a large number of copies of the the works of Shakespeare, not just one. So, the Fermi Paradox would seem to indicate that the Steady State Universe is not occurring, independent of all the observational evidence confirming the big bang. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

Comment: Panspermia (Score 5, Interesting) 118

Another Hoyle cause, panspermia, which urges that the origin of life is so unlikely that a larger event space is needed, so life spreads through the galaxy as microbes once started somewhere, is getting somewhat of a second look. The idea that life may be hoping between planets in the solar system, hitchhiking on meteorites, is gaining adherents. While still a long way from a microbe populated interstellar cloud, or the solution to the statistical problem Hoyle was addressing, this is another echo of the importance of his thinking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

+ - As Exelon threatens to shut nuclear plants, Illinois town fears fallout->

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes ""CLINTON, Ill.—

— Exelon's six nuclear power plants in Illinois have failed to turn a profit over the last five years, and the 27-year-old plant here is the most vulnerable for closing, a Chicago Tribune analysis has found.

Chicago-based Exelon, parent of Commonwealth Edison, and the nation's largest operator of nuclear power plants, said last month that unless market conditions improve, it will announce plant closings by the end of this year.""
Link to Original Source

+ - Nuclear accident near misses down to 14 in 2013 from 18 the year before->

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes ""Safety problems that triggered extra inspections or oversight by regulators declined again last year at U.S. nuclear power plants.

But a nuclear watchdog group said Thursday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission continues to be marred by inconsistent enforcement and safety lapses in overseeing America’s 100 nuclear power plants.

“Like Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic character Dr. Jekyll, the NRC is plagued by a split personality,” said David Lochbaum, the Chattanooga-based director of the Union of Concerned Scientists Nuclear Safety Project. “In many cases, the agency does an admirable job protecting the public and industry workers by enforcing safety regulations. But the agency too often turns into Mr. Hyde, and that kind of behavior could lead to a serious accident.”....
Last year, there were 14 instances at 10 nuclear plants that prompted extra NRC inspections and oversight, which Lochbaum termed “near misses.” That was the smallest number since the Union of Concerned Scientists began tracking such events in 2010.

“While both the number and severity of near-misses dropped in 2013 compared with events from 2010 to 2012, it is far from time to declare victory and reallocate resources and attention elsewhere,” Lochbaum said.""
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+ - Einstein's 'Lost' Model Of the Universe Discovered 'Hiding in Plain Sight'

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Dick Ahlstrom reports that Irish researchers have discovered a previously unknown model of the universe written in 1931 by physicist Albert Einstein that had been misfiled and effectively “lost” until its discovery last August while researchers been searching through a collection of Einstein’s papers put online by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “I was looking through drafts, but then slowly realised it was a draft of something very different,” says Dr O’Raifeartaigh. “I nearly fell off my chair. It was hidden in perfect plain sight. This particular manuscript was misfiled as a draft of something else.” In his paper, radically different from his previously known models of the universe, Einstein speculated the expanding universe could remain unchanged and in a “ steady state” because new matter was being continuously created from space. “It is what Einstein is attempting to do that would surprise most historians, because nobody had known this idea. It was later proposed by Fred Hoyle in 1948 and became controversial in the 1950s, the steady state model of the cosmos,” says O’Raifeartaigh. Hoyle argued that space could be expanding eternally and keeping a roughly constant density. It could do this by continually adding new matter, with elementary particles spontaneously popping up from space. Particles would then coalesce to form galaxies and stars, and these would appear at just the right rate to take up the extra room created by the expansion of space. Hoyle’s Universe was always infinite, so its size did not change as it expanded. It was in a ‘steady state’. “This finding confirms that Hoyle was not a crank,” says Simon Mitton. “If only Hoyle had known, he would certainly have used it to punch his opponents." Although Hoyle’s model was eventually ruled out by astronomical observations, it was at least mathematically consistent, tweaking the equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity to provide a possible mechanism for the spontaneous generation of matter. Einstein's paper attracted no attention because Einstein abandoned it after he spotted a mistake and then didn’t publish it but the fact that Einstein experimented with the steady-state concept demonstrates Einstein's continued resistance to the idea of a Big Bang, which he at first found “abominable”, even though other theoreticians had shown it to be a natural consequence of his general theory of relativity."

Comment: The debate is over (Score 1) 497

by mdsolar (#46433973) Attached to: Can Science Ever Be "Settled?"
The question is: when does skepticism turn into shilling? There is a point when a subject area becomes so well explored that there is nothing to be gained by taking potshots at the fundamentals. Claims against the foundations become extraordinary and require extraordinary evidence. So, when you hear a lot of noise about a well explored field with claims that the experts are frauds etc... it is pretty easy to infer that the noise is coming from money being spent to raise doubt to protect commercial interests. The link between smoking and cancer was very well established, but many shills were employed to question it in public, as an example. That is not debate, it is a fraud perpetrated on the public.

+ - Indian Point cleanup estimate 'unrealistic,' A.G. says->

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes "Federal regulators and Entergy are ignoring lessons from the Fukushima disaster in Japan and relying on "entirely unrealistic and unreasonable" assumptions about what would happen if there was a severe accident at the Indian Point nuclear power plant, according to the state attorney general.

Those include determining the region could be decontaminated within 90 days, which, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office said, would require 1.5 million workers. It also said the cleanup's price tag in a worst-case scenario could top $1 trillion, seven times more than Entergy has estimated."
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Comment: Vermont Yankee plumbing unknown (Score 1) 135

by mdsolar (#46364803) Attached to: NRC Expects Applications To Operate Reactors Beyond 60 Years
Actually, accurate documents seem to be rare. It was very hard to find out if Vermont Yankee had pipes running under it. Entergy told the State no until they started to leak. And, the military nuclear culture seems to be turning to falsified documents such as test cheating so the future work force for nuclear power is becoming more corrupt. Probably those documents will become completely useless in another generation.

Every young man should have a hobby: learning how to handle money is the best one. -- Jack Hurley

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