"I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine... What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima."

—Kurt Vonnegut

Nuclear power sounds like a good idea, until something like this happens. The cleanup process at the Fukushima reactors is slow going and high stakes. Humans must in essence give their lives to save the lives of others, and while this sounds glorious in some military venues I don't think many of us would volunteer. The fuel rods need to be removed, the normal systems for their removal have been destroyed, and a mistake could cause a meltdown that would additionally contaminate the immediate area severely and the planetary atmosphere as well, though at what level it is impossible to know. There is talk, and some movement by those who have the means, away from higher risk areas. The southern hemisphere is likely to be far safer than the northern with regard to radiation for the foreseeable future. What interests me is how few people here in the US seem to care one whit about it. Radiation is invisible, and we already have cancer, so how much worse could it get? And will we continue to sell nuclear reactors around the world for the purpose of powering televisions and washing machines? Is there any movement toward less dangerous low tech solutions? I'm not seeing it.

Just yesterday I finally stopped ignoring the Middle East and looked up a few things. Like who is Shia and who is Sunni. And who has nukes and where. And what exactly an Islamist is. It was....a useful exercise. Anyone else out there taking an interest in this juncture of history? I'm ready to be educated.

It just seems to me, after one *ok a fraction of one* day of looking into it, that the majority Sunnis in most of the Middle East have been supremely frustrated trying to deal with their less conservative, more secular Shia neighbors. And it seems clear to me that America has at least attempted to enact a separation of church and state, even though those words do not appear in the constitution. It was in the First Amendment to the US Constitution that Congress was to "make no law respecting respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". As wikipedia points out, lots of nations have this idea in their code, and there is a great range of shades of gray in its execution. Here in America we do fairly well, but nowhere near a perfect score. For one thing, the constitution has no control over the states and what local laws might be passed. Which may be how we have gigantic crosses along Interstate 5 in Washington State. Not so different from other places, where religion is supposed to guide personal and political life. Here we seem only able to elect Christian presidents. We like to think that we are above it, but we are surely not.

So I know I am rambling and I will call it quits. If you have an opinion about what is the crux of what is going on--in Syria, Turkey, Kurdistan, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia or any other involved party, feel free to comment and tell me! I'm building a mind map.

**Created Syria tag.

Last night while at a Sierra Club meeting involving the effort to hasten decommission of the Columbia Generating Station (nuke at Hanford), I started having all manner of thoughts about my book on homeopathy. I brainstormed my intro and some chapter ideas on the same page where I'd taken a few notes about newly understood seismic activity in the Tri-Cities area, the power needed to make fuel rods, the types of nuclear waste storage currently in use, and such. Part of what brought homeopathy to mind was the groupthink in evidence among the meeting attendees. The anti-nuke information being conveyed was at times not even faintly believable, but the group assumed that all present were on board with the effort to eliminate nuclear power from our bevy of power sources.

This morning in my inbox I find an interesting article by Art Markman on the question of what kind of creativity we display while our conscious minds are occupied with something else. It appears that for simple decisions, it's better to think about consciously it, however for complex issues it may be good to be distracted from the direct question. Dijksterhuis and Nordgren presented Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) in this paper. Another paper by Haiyang Yang et al shows that the duration of unconscious thought has an inverted-U shaped relationship with creativity, suggesting that unconscious thought may outperform conscious for moderate-length deliberations.

So for quick decisions tis best to focus on the matter at hand. For very long and complex deliberations, there might be time for both conscious and unconscious contemplation. And to harness the power of unconscious synthesis thinking, one needs a moderate amount of time in which to do it.

I've heard of UTT before but not by name. I generally have my best ideas while walking, which suggests to me that cross-crawl integration of walking may bring the two brain halves to apply their knowledge to whatever problem is at hand. I've seen the process modeled extensively by television character Dr House. House plays ball, drives bumper cars, or does pranks on his coworkers to distract himself from the burning questions, and allow his unconscious mind to sort out the myriad details of a medical case and arrive at a diagnosis and treatment. People may think that he is goofing off, but in fact it is physical play that brings his most astounding ideas to the fore. He starts with the conscious brainstorming with the help of his team, then goes off to do whatever activity life presents, then returns to the conscious cogitation. The science is beginning to support the use of this technique for creative decisionmaking.

HOMEWORK ATSDR CSEM
Taking an Environmental Health History
atsdr.cdc.gov/csem/csem.asp?csem=17&po=o (or pdf on moodle
complete post-test questions 1-8 by next class

class on week 11 is when we get the take-home final
due friday week 12
homeworks will be reviewed over Thanksgiving
and notice given to students who haven't complete them
no homeworks will be graded late

ACAM & AAEM conference in PDX this week
Marianne Marchese is speaking, 2002 NCNM grad
her book: 8 Wks to Wmns Wellness
( notes (melanoma notes integrated from this date back, radiation notes integrated from this entry to radiation protocol)Collapse )

Made by dolphins, whales, people, volcanoes, nukes. Very interesting visuals, mostly camera footage, some explanatory graphics.

Or not. Gazillions of jellyfish are swarming around nukes in Japan, Israel and Scotland. They've forced 3 nukes to shut down. Any large industrial facility that uses ocean water in volume is at risk of filter overwhelm, including desalinization plants and coastal power plants. They're cleaning up Jellyfish in droves from beaches in Lebanon to keep tourism going. In Savanna, Georgia they're saying that warmer water temperatures brought them in early. It may be that this is just an early and generous "jellyfish season" that has nothing to do with nukes or global warming. In the image below a workman is emptying a filter in a Mediterranean water cooling system for a coal burning plant, and getting a load of jellyfish.(  Images behind cut.Collapse )

I don't believe the powers when they tell me to panic. And I definitely don't believe them when they tell me NOT to panic. I think back to 9/11, when all those people in burning skyscrapers, just hit by airplanes, were told to remain calm and stay at their desks. The ones who decided for themselves that the situation was fubar and ran down the stairs were the ones who survived.

For this Japanese quake and tsunami the media machine has been spewing something constantly. Panic. Don't panic. Nothing to worry about. All under control. Oooops, out of control. Whoopsie.

It's up to us to decide what to do for ourselves.

Japan reportedly to rate nuclear crisis at highest level
By Chico Harlan, Monday, April 11, 9:30 PM

TOKYO — Japanese authorities planned Tuesday to raise their rating of the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis to the highest level on an international scale, equal to that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, according to the Kyodo news agency.

A level 7 accident, according to the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, is typified by a “major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japan-to-raise-rating-of-nuclear-crisis-to-highest-level/2011/04/11/AFxrFEND_story.html?wpisrc=nl_natlalert

I got enough responses to my bit about preparing to resist radiation that it occurs to me to wonder, is the media really working so hard to inflame panic? Or are they trying to keep us from panicking so that we will all just go to the mall and buy movie tickets instead of concerning ourselves with radiation? I have no idea what the media is up to, because aside from this outward mental spew I participate in it very little. I do not watch TV. I do catch a few minutes of NPR from time to time, and last I heard was some expert saying that the situation at the plant there has surpassed the level of the Three Mile Island meltdown. That was enough for me to know that radiation has already been emitted. I'm not panicked....but I'm interested. These ARE interesting times. I'm fascinated, in fact, with the homogenaity of the responses I've gotten. So everybody thinks it is a hoax? What is informing you of this certainty? And what makes you so sure you are right? I'll have to wait for my other bit a media---a weekly called The Week---before I will have any more media hype to pass on.