24 miles Fukushima

24 miles Fukushima

(Music by Burt Bacharach, sung by Gene Pitney as 24 hours from Tulsa)


Dearest Darling you had a right to say that the earth had moved, was it war?
Cause something happened to you while you were staying home
And you're not the same anymore

The sign said only 24 miles Fukushima
Oh only a short way away from the core

I saw a hideous light, an eerie glow in the night
And that is where I saw you
A tidal wave had dropped a small hotel and there you were
And so I walked up to you
Asked where I could get something to eat and you said nowhere

The sign said only 24 miles Fukushima
Oh only a short way away from the core

The geiger went beserk it clicked madly all day
I said 'no way'

The sign said only 24 miles Fukushima
Oh only a short way away from the core

The sirens started to play and daytime turned into night
Atoms were dancing, wildly
All of a sudden they lost control, the core melted down
The gas escaped, exploded
We thought we'd die before we got out of that evil town


The sign said only 24 miles Fukushima
Oh only a short way away from the core

Reactors do this to you
Fall out kills more than a few
What can they do?
And you can never, never, never go home again

Cogito Ergo Sim

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3d printers

Either I am getting old or things are getting very weird. The concept of 3d printers (as covered by BBC World Service's Digital Planet recently) is like science fiction or an April Fool's Day joke.

A 3d printer is like the Star Trek transporter except it doesn't actually take a thing from anywhere: It creates an object from a reasonably small number of basic ingredients. It works by building up layers until eventually it creates an entire object. So come up with a design and you can send it half way round the world to be output as a physical object!

And this is not just for small things. According to Digital Planet it is possible to output a house using this system.

The Fordist production line concept has long been threatened by robotic machinery capable of producing one off objects with more or less equal efficiency to the production line process. This means there are no economies of scale (at least in production) and threatens the whole concept of large scale industry.

3d printers, if they exist now or ever will exist, are yet another way of making distance (or proximity) irrelevant. Consequently expect city house prices to slump as people realise they don't need to live in giant urban landscapes.

According to Digital Planet, the wackiest idea is a self replicating machine. You design one and then give it to someone with the instruction that they must produce one copy and give it to someone else instructing them to do exactly the same thing. Pretty soon everyone in the world has a 3d printer.

Sheffield

The devastatingly attractive Israeli woman introduced herself by saying 'can I be your partner'? Unfortunately I was at the front of a queue and she just wanted me to hold a place in the queue for her. That's what it was like at the Sheffield Doc Festival. Surprises at every turn. At the entrance I was handed a leaflet asking me to boycott Israeli cultural products. Does that mean I can't mention her video Jerusalem SOS about a motorcycle based emergency service run by Ultra Orthodox Jews with some help from Palestinians?
Then there was the guy from Bournemouth who had made a video about American clothes lines. Apparently he discovered on Wikkipedia that this is a highly contentious issue.
A few seconds later I met the lady who had registered thesea.com Never since the time of Neptune has anyone had the sea as a domain! She got it because she was making video docs about sharks.

Fighting crime with Y line

Y line DNA is not like most of the rest of your DNA. At conception most of your DNA gets mixed. Some of the DNA is extracted from your mother, some from your father. But Y Line isn't like that. It consists of the additional chromosome that belongs to the male alone. Women are usually XX. Men are usually XY. Since women don't have Y, male babies inherit the Y line unchanged from their father.

As a result, Y line DNA is identical to the father's Y line and his father's Y line. In theory this should go back to the beginning of the human species but in practice there are small modifications to the Y line, though these occur very infrequently.

The upshot of this is that if you find Y line DNA you have a good chance of knowing the surname of the person you are seeking (if that person has the same surname as his father). The individual may never have given a DNA sample, yet the fact that male relatives have given samples (or the family group can be found on one of the many genealogical sites specialising in this type of investigation) is sufficient.

All this makes more or less redundant all the human rights cases dedicated to preventing the police from having access to the DNA of people who they have come into contact with, but who have not subsequently been convicted of any crime.

And the police would be very foolish not to use this system. Suppose a serial killer is at work and the police had 10,000 names of contacts in a database. If it turned out following one of the murders that the police could have known the surname of the murderer (and perhaps cut down that 10,000 to less than half a dozen) the relatives of the victim may well sue the police for incompetence.

The 1998 Human Rights Act enshrined the right to life (from Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights) into British law. Is it possible that any police force failing to take into account Y line DNA would be risking contravening this act?

Doe nuts

Stunned. I just watched Meet John Doe, a Frank Capra film. This included an American convention standing to the strains of God Save the King, the unmistakable sound of The People's Flag is Deepest Red, but most disturbingly of all Gary Cooper saying he was bollocksed.... Apparently all these things meant something different in America at the time (1941). But all three in one film?

Incidentally, how come no-on told me Gary Cooper couldn't act? I've spent quite a lot of my life singing the theme from High Noon (Oh Don't Foresake Me Oh My Darling) out of respect for the man: small but perfectly formed. But in Meet John Doe Barbara Stanwyck had to virtually hold him up. It got so bad Capra had to shoot one whole scene with Cooper's back to us so we couldn't see him!

At two hours, this film is far too long and the script by Richard Connell and Robert Presnell Sr. based on a screenplay by Robert Riskin is at best flabby (or so it appears in 2010). There are a lot of cute (Frank Capra) touches involving dogs and cats, a lovely montage and an almost unbelievably young Walter Brennan (who puts in one of the best performances of the film). A mixed bag. It is remarkable that Capra had to make so many compromises at a time when he must have been at the height of his prestige in Hollywood.

I used to think film was created by an auteur. That might be true now but it certainly wasn't in 1941.

She's stopped stooping?

According to the Forestry Commission (Massive survey probes the secrets of Britain's forests- August 26, 2009) there are now 2.75 million hectares of woodland covering 12% of Great Britain (about twice as much as in the early 20th century). This is not necessarily a great advance for society since the Forestry Commission (especially in the early years of its life) had a tendency to plant dead areas of monoculture (single species), including conifers which acidified the land. But it's probably better to have more tress than less. Certainly one of the best things about the London Borough of Waltham Forest (where I live) is the large number of trees (perhaps more than any other London borough).
But all is not well in the world of at least one tree species. Following in the wake of Dutch Elm's Disease another alien tree exterminator seems to be doing its worse: the leaf miner moth which attacks conker trees. Like the most recent financial crisis, this moth originated in Greece. There is no cure for it (hopefully unlike the financial crisis) and it has already infected one in two horse chestnut trees. According to the Royal Horticultural Society there soon won't be a single conker tree in Britain that doesn't suffer from the pest.
The moth doesn't kill trees but it does weaken them and make them more liable to suffer disease like bleeding canker, which kills trees.
It comes at just the wrong time because the kids have stopped playing conkers and an apparently healthy tree a few yards from my home is producing large quantities of crop but the local kids are just letting them lie on the ground until they rot or get swept up by the road sweeper. Is this a double wammy for the conker? Will it be lost as a result of a combination of an incurable alien invader and a lack of demand? Well, probably not. Most of these species manage to cling on somewhere (an isolated location or an island), ready to re-populate the mainland when there is an opportunity. But count on one thing: there will be fewer people stooping to conker in the next few decades.