Visit the Primordial Earth

Yahoo News reports on a collection of photographs from November 2012 from a volcanic field in Russia:

Tolbachik: hell valley on earth: Take a look at these stunning photos of an active volcanic complex called Tolbachik. The complex, located on the Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia, is one of many volcanoes in the area. Looking at these breathtaking images, it's easy to imagine dragons, demons and rivers of hell. Tolbachik is calm right now. A year ago, however, lava fountains and rivers decorated the landscape after the eruption began with the opening of two Tolbachik fissures. In the midst of this activity, photographers Luda and Andrey (lusika33) took a trip down to see that stunning hell valley on earth.

It is easy to see why this primordial scenery acts like a window on geologic time and appeals to Ur-memory, folkloric sensibilities and mythical imagination. See more below the jump, and compare to a Space.com video of a monster X4.9 class solar flare released 24 February 2014. These are grim reminders of something fundamentally alien in raw nature. All photos © lusika33. 

"The volcanic complex of Tolbachik is clearly visible from the village of Kozirevsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia."

World Wide Web's 25th Birthday

The first Web server, used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Image Source: Wiki.

On 12 March 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN. Google commemorated the event by asking him to write a guest post on its blog:

Today is the web’s 25th birthday. On March 12, 1989, I distributed a proposal to improve information flows: “a ‘web’ of notes with links between them.”

Though CERN, as a physics lab, couldn’t justify such a general software project, my boss Mike Sendall allowed me to work on it on the side. In 1990, I wrote the first browser and editor. In 1993, after much urging, CERN declared that WWW technology would be available to all, without paying royalties, forever.

This decision enabled tens of thousands to start working together to build the web. Now, about 40 percent of us are connected and creating online. The web has generated trillions of dollars of economic value, transformed education and healthcare and activated many new movements for democracy around the world. And we’re just getting started.

How has this happened? By design, the underlying Internet and the WWW are non-hierarchical, decentralized and radically open. The web can be made to work with any type of information, on any device, with any software, in any language. You can link to any piece of information. You don’t need to ask for permission. What you create is limited only by your imagination.

So today is a day to celebrate. But it’s also an occasion to think, discuss—and do. Key decisions on the governance and future of the Internet are looming, and it’s vital for all of us to speak up for the web’s future. How can we ensure that the other 60 percent around the world who are not connected get online fast? How can we make sure that the web supports all languages and cultures, not just the dominant ones? How do we build consensus around open standards to link the coming Internet of Things? Will we allow others to package and restrict our online experience, or will we protect the magic of the open web and the power it gives us to say, discover, and create anything? How can we build systems of checks and balances to hold the groups that can spy on the net accountable to the public? These are some of my questions—what are yours?

On the 25th birthday of the web, I ask you to join in—to help us imagine and build the future standards for the web, and to press for every country to develop a digital bill of rights to advance a free and open web for everyone. Learn more at webat25.org and speak up for the sort of web we really want with #web25.

Many luminaries have visited Twitter to wish the World Wide Web happy birthday under hashtag #web25, including:

• Richard Branson, who wrote: "What do you think the next 25 years hold? I hope we’ll have wifi on the moon!"
• The British Monarchy: "Happy 25th Birthday to the WWW!  @timberners_lee has made it easier for us to connect with people in the UK and the Commonwealth."
• British PM David Cameron: "Happy 25th birthday to the world wide web – a truly great British invention from @timberners_lee"
• Jimmy Wales: co-founder of Wikipedia: "The freedom to talk, to know, to learn, to let us take power and move the world."
• Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Digital Agenda: "For 25 years the world wide web has been a platform for change and a breeding ground for new ideas. It’s a place that knows no borders and the natural home of open, unlimited innovation, and a source of hope and inspiration for those in Europe and across the world."
• Nigel Shadbolt, co-founder of the Open Data Institute: "The values of the Web are the best of us – open, universal, accessible. We must keep those values alive. Thank you @timberners_lee #web25"
• Rebecca MacKinnon, writer: "Keeping the Web open & free is like keeping society open & free. Freedom isn’t “free.” It takes work and struggle. #web25 #netfreedom"
• Vint Cerf, Internet Pioneer, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google: "The WWW was conceived 25 years ago in 1989; commercial Internet services were just coming online. Happy 25th birthday!"
• Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law and Computer Science, Harvard University: "Happy 25th birthday, World Wide Web!  You are among the most amazing of human achievements.  Although, knowing you, are you sure you’re not really in your 50s and simply posing as a 25-year-old…?"
• Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering, University of Southhampton: "I can’t believe it’s 25 years since Tim wrote the proposal describing the system that was going to change the world. In some ways it seems like yesterday but trying to remember what life was like without the Web is a real stretch these days - it’s a different world. It’s time to celebrate how far we’ve come since those heady early days when the Web was in it’s infancy. We watched it grow and evolve at a phenomenal rate -  in awe and wonder at what was being achieved. Now it has become an integral part of the fabric of our lives and defines the nature of the digital planet."
• Kathy Brown, President and CEO of the Internet Society: "In a short time, the Web has matured and grown into a worldwide platform for interaction, community, and commerce. Along the way, it has changed the way people collaborate, the way organizations communicate, and it has transformed the world. The Internet Society is pleased to join W3C, the World Wide Web Foundation, and billions of Internet users around the world in celebrating the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web."
• Russ Housley, Internet Architecture Board Chair: "The IAB joins the W3C and World Wide Web Foundation in celebrating the 25th year of the World Wide Web. The open technologies and principles underpinning the web have driven a remarkable era of highly available information, open channels for self-publication, and new abilities to link the two." 
• Gene Kimmelman, President and CEO, Public Knowledge: "The Web is becoming an essential platform for human rights, free expression and movements to democratize and bring social justice across the globe. As we celebrate its 25 years of success today, we must also recognize how harmful governmental control and corporate consolidation can undermine the web’s future. Now is the time to use the Internet as a tool to galvanize public support to preserve the web’s potential to bolster human rights and justice."

Millennial Mysteries: Ghost Calls to Malaysian Flight Passengers

Image Source: veooz.

An odd report was published on 10 March 2014 in the Washington Post about the 777 Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 that disappeared early on 8 March over the South China Sea. Relatives have been calling passengers' cell phones and getting ring tones, but no answers; they can leave messages - which have not been answered. A Chinese messenger service says the phones are still connected.

Image Source: Google via Mirror.

Anniversaries: Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami

Memorial dome in Tokyo, dedicated to the people who died in the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, 11 March 2011. Image Source: REUTERS/Issei Kato via Telegraph.

Today is the third anniversary of the Tōhoku earthquake off the course of Japan and subsequent nuclear accident. Around 19,000 people died. It was the worst earthquake in Japanese recorded history.

Some of the most horrific devastation happened in one town. 95 per cent of the resort community of Minamisanriku in Miyagi prefecture was destroyed. Two years after the disaster, people were still afraid to rebuild the site because more than 10,000 people died there. To date, it remains undeveloped, also in part because the coastline sank by three feet. The beachfront municipality became a ghost town. You can see the entire town being swallowed by the post-earthquake tsunami here. The harrowing video was recorded by people who watched the destruction from the surrounding hills. An even more alarming, closer view of the black, fast-moving water is here.

Miki Endo, heroine of the lost town of Minamisanriku. The photo shows her with her marriage registration, shortly before she died. Image Source: J's Photos.

Miki Endo, a 24-year-old public worker, heroically stayed in the town, calling on its emergency announcement system, warning the townspeople to run away. HuffPo:

The Japanese publication Mainichi Shimbun reported that Endo did not let go of her microphone even as the tsunami engulfed the city. ... One survivor, Taeza Haga, 61, heard Endo's repeated warning calls and ran to his car to head for higher ground above the village. He told Endo's grieving mother: "I heard the voice of your daughter the whole way."

The last 10 seconds of Endo's broadcast before she died are here. Her body was later recovered; the associated news report, here, shows the building in which she worked, completely gutted after the disaster; it also describes how her family and townspeople found her body.

A Youtuber who commented beneath one Minamisanriku video remarked: "I live less than 50 metres from the sea in a bay that would funnel any Pacific tsunami right onto the town. We have some dinky little hills at the back of town but nothing of any real height. I might move soon I think." Another wrote: "If that don't give you the fear of God nothing will." Below the jump, see other videos of the earthquake and tsunami as they occurred. 

Nuclear Leaks 34: Fukushima Meets America's Pro-Nuclear Lobby

Image Source: OpEd News.

It has been nearly three years since Japan's nuclear disaster. Just at the moment when ocean-bound pollution from Fukushima is reaching the Pacific coast of North America, with potential but unconfirmed impacts on fisheries and crops, the pro-nuclear lobby has mobilized in the United States. A new documentary is out, Pandora's Promise (2013), which extols the 'green' virtues of nuclear power. Anyone concerned about climate change, the film insists, should promote nuclear energy. Or, to put it another way, if you are anti-carbon, you have to be pro-nuclear. This campaign reveals the ugliness of political plays around the energy business, as it plays down any dangers from Fukushima's fallout.

Robert Stone, producer and director of film, measured energy safety in terms of "deaths per terawatt," that is, how many people die per unit of energy produced. Within the first minute of the film, one narrator instructs the audience that the political outlook of the documentary is "liberal democrat." A liberal political concern for the environment is aligned with the interests of the nuclear industry. Whatever you do, the film enjoins, don't lose your head, don't panic about Fukushima. The director's statement insists that if you want to be a liberal, true and forward-thinking environmentalist, then you must be pro-nuclear:

I’ve considered myself a passionate environmentalist for about as long as I can remember. My mother read me Silent Spring when I was nine and the specter of a Cold War nuclear arms race was not an uncommon topic around the dinner table in my family. So my anti-nuclear and environmental roots run very deep. My first film was an anti-nuclear weapons documentary, Radio Bikini, that premiered at Sundance in 1988 and went on to receive an Oscar® nomination for Feature Documentary. My film Earth Days, which was Closing Night Film at Sundance in 2009, chronicles the rise of the environmental movement of my youth. In the course of making Earth Days I began for the first time to see the deep pessimism that has infused today’s environmental movement, and to recognize the depth of its failure to address climate change. It was initially through getting to know Stewart Brand that I was introduced to a new and more optimistic view of our environmental challenges that was pro-development and pro-technology. From there I began to seek out and discover a small but growing cadre of people around the world who were beginning to stand up and challenge what had become the rigid orthodoxy of modern environmentalism.

It’s no easy thing for me to have come to the conclusion that the rapid deployment of nuclear power is now the greatest hope we have for saving us from an environmental catastrophe. Yet this growing realization has led me to question many of the founding tenets of traditional environmentalism, from the belief that we can dramatically reduce our energy demand through energy efficiency to the belief that solar and wind power will one day power the planet. The almost theological adherence to a set of unquestionable beliefs by most liberals and environmentalists has likely contributed as much or more to prolonging our addiction to fossil fuels as the equally appalling state of denial among many conservatives when it comes to climate change. Both sides are locked into rigid, self-righteous ideological positions with potentially disastrous consequences for us all unless we begin to face the facts.

For the past three years I have devoted almost every waking moment to taking these ideas and shaping them into a documentary about what is perhaps the biggest and most unwieldy subjects imaginable: how do we continue to power human civilization without destroying the environmental conditions that has made modern civilization possible? I knew from the beginning that this film would have to be firmly grounded in personal narrative if it were to have any impact at all on a mass audience. Early on I determined that the film would be framed around a few key individuals who had undergone a dramatic intellectual metamorphosis on the issue of nuclear power, as I, myself had done. The evolution of their apostasy on this issue – their journey from being staunchly anti-nuclear to passionately pro-nuclear -forms the central dramatic arc of the film. My hope is to take the audience on a similar journey of discovery through the process of watching the film.

PANDORA’S PROMISE is without question the most personal and important film of my career. I’ve learned that just about everything I thought I knew about energy turned out to be wrong. And most of what I had been lead to believe about nuclear energy and its historical events turned out to be significantly different from what had really happened.

The making of this film has taken me to four continents on a grand tour of the hidden world of nuclear energy. I’ve been inside the doomed power plant at Chernobyl (the first cameraman to do so, I believe), deep into the Fukushima exclusion zone, and to a popular beach in Brazil that has a naturally occurring background radiation level that’s over 300 times what is considered “normal!” I’ve visited a little known research facility in Idaho where a new kind of reactor was developed 20 years ago that can’t meltdown and is fueled by nuclear waste.

If there was a single ah-ha moment it was when I was granted entry into a room in France (the size of a basketball court) where all the waste from powering 80% of the country for 30 years is stored: four cylindrical tubes 10 meters long and 1 meter wide are all that’s left from powering the city of Paris for 30 years with clean nuclear energy! I thought, “My God, what on Earth were we thinking?”

Robert Stone

April 22, 2013

Nuclear Leaks 33: Fukushima's Workers, Three Years On

Image Source: Kna Blog.

It has been nearly three years since the Japanese earthquake and nuclear disaster. Some 19,000 people died due to the earthquake and tsunami; short- and long-term casualties from the nuclear fallout are unknown. Those most exposed, of course, are the workers at the site. In November 2013, nuclear critics claimed that several clean-up workers have died but their deaths are not reported, or are not counted if they die while they are away from the plant. Even the famous first responders - the Fukushima 50 - remain unknown and unheralded. In 2013, the BBC spent weeks tracking down one of the first responders, who spoke about that first response team on condition of anonymity:

"The person who sent us back didn't give us any explanation," he says. "It felt like we were being sent on a death mission."

I put it to him that what he and his colleagues did was heroic, that they should feel proud. He shakes his head, a slightly anguished look on his face.

"Ever since the disaster, I haven't had a day when I felt good about myself," he says.

"Even when I'm out with friends, it's impossible to feel happy. When people talk about Fukushima, I feel that I am responsible."

For an outsider, such a reaction is quite hard to fathom. For help, I turn to psychiatrist Dr Jun Shigemura at Japan's national defense university. He is one of two doctors who have studied the Fukushima workers.

His research suggests that half of those who fought the reactor meltdowns are suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms.

"The workers have been through multiple stresses," Dr Shigemura says.

"They experienced the plant explosions, the tsunami and perhaps radiation exposure. They are also victims of the disaster because they live in the area and have lost homes and family members. And the last thing is the discrimination."

Yes, discrimination. Not only are the workers not being celebrated, they are facing active hostility from some members of the public.

"The workers have tried to rent apartments," says Dr Shigemura. "But landlords turn them down, some have had plastic bottles thrown at them, some have had papers pinned on their apartment door saying 'Get out Tepco'."

Image Source: Kna Blog.

Breaking Newspeak's Faustian Bargains

Image Source: Escapist Magazine.

In the new Millennium, online surveillance comes hand-in-hand the media's external imposition upon, and transformation of, internal thought. It is not news that Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) has arrived as a horrendous reality, although the UK is not yet known merely as Airstrip One. In some ways, the arrival is so horrendous that a portion of the public lives day by day in denial or willful ignorance, because it is easier to believe that things are not as bad as that. On 3 March 2014, Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick reported on the GCHQ collection of Yahoo users' video feeds and insisted, yes, it is as bad as that; we are living in a science fiction novel, where our own word processors are subject to outside control:

Whenever British journalist Luke Harding, working on his new book about spying whistleblower Edward Snowden, wrote something disparaging about the NSA, a weird thing would happen.

“The paragraph I had just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish,” Harding wrote in the Guardian this week.

The deletes kept happening for weeks. “All authors expect criticism,” wrote Harding, author of the new and astounding The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man. “But criticism before publication by an anonymous, divine third party is something novel.”

Finally, Harding politely asked whoever was doing it to consider stopping. A month later, they finally did.

He has no idea who did this. Were they American or British, a hacker or an offended National Security Agency analyst? We know they were reading Harding’s words as they were written but were they also watching him via a Skype-like device?

The news that GCHQ— the British surveillance agency that teams with the NSA and spy agencies in other allied “Five Eyes” nations, including Canada — has been intercepting and storing Yahoo webcam chats globally is eerie. We knew they could read what you typed, we suspect they can do this in real time, but now the massive Snowden leaked papers reveal that they can watch you talking to your nearest and dearest. Worse, you may have been naked at the time.

A program codenamed Optic Nerve gathered millions of stills from webcam chats between 2008 and 2010 and sent them in for viewing. In one six-month period alone, Optic Nerve scooped up images from more than 1.8 million Yahoo accounts around the world, the Guardian has reported.

Yahoo says it knew nothing of this.

In effect, people’s computer screens have become devices from Nineteen Eighty-Four where humans watch a screen that watches them back. But at least Winston Smith knew he was being watched.

In case you would like to know, the word processor that Guardian journalist Luke Harding was using was OpenOffice, which plainly lives up to its name. The Guardian has been in the thick of the Snowden leaks from the beginning. Harding admits that the entire staff felt paranoid. This post asks whether Orwell's dystopia is really here; or whether his Nineteen Eighty-Four world can still become a 'near miss,' a terrible alternate history that can still be narrowly avoided.

Nuclear Technology Course Online

Image Source: Institute for Energy Research.

This blog often covers nuclear topics. For those who would like to learn more, the University of Pittsburgh is offering a free online course in Nuclear Science and Technology (Hat tip: Nuke Pro). The course starts on 3 March 2014 (there are future rounds as well) and runs for eight weeks in English and with subtitles. You can sign up here. All it will cost you is the textbook, which is here. It is also available at many different libraries, listed here (get the 1992 second edition or its 2008 reprint). And you might need to brush up on your basic physics and differential equations.

See all my posts on Nuclear topics.