The Pepsi Syndrome

Male Reporter #1: Yes. While the Constitution does not specifically exclude giants and behemoths from the presidency, is it not true that the Mr. Carter's enormous size really violates the spirit of-

Dr. Edna Casey: Look! There he is! It's the president!
(Saturday Night Live, The Pepsi Syndrome)

As horrifying as the thought of a 100 foot tall Jimmy Carter is, the actual reality is worse. While the skit from all those years ago made fun of a lot of things, some of what it was lampooning isn't really funny at all. The movie The China Syndrome came out just a few days before the real accident at Three Mile Island. The result was a perfect storm of negative press for the nuclear industry. And now, many of the same people who have screeched and wailed for decades about the danger of nuclear power are screeching and wailing about the dangers of CO2 emissions. That nuclear power could have helped eliminate, or at least curtailed significantly.

“The China Syndrome” opened on March 16, 1979. With the no-nukes protest movement in full swing, the movie was attacked by the nuclear industry as an irresponsible act of leftist fear-mongering. Twelve days later, an accident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in south-central Pennsylvania.

Michael Douglas, a producer and co-star of the film — he played Fonda’s cameraman — watched the T.M.I. accident play out on the real TV news, which interspersed live shots from Pennsylvania with eerily similar scenes from “The China Syndrome.” While Fonda was firmly anti-nuke before making the film, Douglas wasn’t so dogmatic. Now he was converted on the spot. “It was a religious awakening,” he recalled in a recent phone interview. “I felt it was God’s hand.”

Fonda, meanwhile, became a full-fledged crusader. In a retrospective interview on the DVD edition of “The China Syndrome,” she notes with satisfaction that the film helped persuade at least two other men — the father of her then-husband, Tom Hayden, and her future husband, Ted Turner — to turn anti-nuke. “I was ecstatic that it was extremely commercially successful,” she said. “You know the expression ‘We had legs’? We became a caterpillar after Three Mile Island.”

The T.M.I. accident was, according to a 1979 President’s Commission report, “initiated by mechanical malfunctions in the plant and made much worse by a combination of human errors.” Although some radiation was released, there was no meltdown through to the other side of the Earth — no “China syndrome” — nor, in fact, did the T.M.I. accident produce any deaths, injuries or significant damage except to the plant itself.

What it did produce, stoked by “The China Syndrome,” was a widespread panic. The nuclear industry, already foundering as a result of economic, regulatory and public pressures, halted plans for further expansion. And so, instead of becoming a nation with clean and cheap nuclear energy, as once seemed inevitable, the United States kept building power plants that burned coal and other fossil fuels. Today such plants account for 40 percent of the country’s energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions. Anyone hunting for a global-warming villain can’t help blaming those power plants — and can’t help wondering too about the unintended consequences of Jane Fonda.

Yeah, Jane is real proud of herself over this. But the reality is that nukes produce power for less than even coal plants. They also emit no CO2. So if global warming is really a crisis, why is the world not embracing nuclear energy. Well, actually, a lot of countries are. But the farce is still strong in this country.

France, which generates nearly 80 percent of its electricity by nuclear power, seems to think so. So do Belgium (56 percent), Sweden (47 percent) and more than a dozen other countries that generate at least one-fourth of their electricity by nuclear power. And who is the world’s single largest producer of nuclear energy?

Improbably enough, that would be . . . the United States. Even though the development of new nuclear plants stalled by the early 1980s, the country’s 104 reactors today produce nearly 20 percent of the electricity the nation consumes. This share has actually grown over the years along with our consumption, since nuclear technology has become more efficient. While the fixed costs of a new nuclear plant are higher than those of a coal or natural-gas plant, the energy is cheaper to create: Exelon, the largest nuclear company in the United States, claims to produce electricity at 1.3 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 2.2 cents for coal.

Too much public policy is being driven by who can scream the loudest. This is no exception. The "environmentalists" who screamed about nuclear power have MoveOn-ed to screeching about global warming. But the demands for energy are increasing. If new nuclear plants are not built, the situation will become very grim as other "solutions" like the farce of biofuels are foisted upon the west. The orangutans will die, the rainforests will be burned and bulldozed and the sanctimonious will pat themselves on the back about how they saved the world. But it won't be worth much by then.

The linked article points to renewed interest in nukes, but also invokes Chernobyl.

Nuclear enthusiasm may be on the rise, but it can always be dampened by mention of a single word: Chernobyl. The 1986 Ukrainian disaster killed at least a few dozen people directly and exposed millions more to radiation. A new study by the economists Douglas Almond, Lena Edlund and Marten Palme shows that as far away as Sweden, in areas where the wind carried Chernobyl fallout, babies who were in utero at the time later had significantly worse school outcomes than other Swedish children.

Radiation - it's bad for learning now? Who knew? Put that aside for a moment. Let me point a few things out for folks. First, TMI released only a negligible amount of radiation. Because despite major design flaws, the unit had a containment. Chernobyl did not. This is an apples to oranges comparison and completely irrelevant. But the Pepsi Syndrome still dominates the discussion.

I really hope there are no 100 foot Jimmy Carters running about, though.

UPDATE: Oh heck. I wasn't the first to think of that SNL skit by several hours. Ed Driscoll beat me by a mile. Noel Sheppard also has a take on the article. Others: Brothers Judd, Right Thinking From the Left Coast, RD Savage, Dyspepsia Generation (great tagline: They disport — we deride),

Bison And Lawyers And Bears, Oh My

1,200 bison, also known as buffalo, are pretty much making a mess of the National Elk Refuge near Jackson, Wyoming. Federal officials wanted to thin the herd out since the buffalo are running the elk off and introducing disease to the other wildlife. So they proposed a relatively modest cull of about 70 bison per year - to be taken by hunters. But that was in 1998 when the herd only numbered about 500.

Enter the lawyers.

Yet it's the plan to kill bison that has garnered the most objection. That's because of the animals' docile nature — hunting them has been compared to hunting a sofa — and their iconic status as a last vestige of the once-wild American West.

"It's senseless and it's inhumane," said Jonathan Lovvorn, an attorney with the Fund for Animals.

The group filed a lawsuit in 1998 seeking to stop the hunt, which forced the federal government to delay the killing of bison until an environmental study was completed earlier this year.

Refuge manager Steve Kallin said the bison hunt would have been much smaller if the Fund for Animals had never filed a lawsuit. When a hunt was first proposed in 1998, there were about 500 bison on the refuge — a number Kallin said could have been sustained by hunting 70 animals a year.

Meanwhile, how many animals have succumbed to disease in that period of time? How much suffering imposed on animals in the name of "love" of animals? But never fear, there is still a way to blame this all on George Bush!

Most states forbid or discourage feed grounds because they allow the easy transmission of wildlife and livestock diseases. Aside from the elk refuge, there are 22 state-run feed grounds in northwest Wyoming, a region of towering mountains and fertile valleys where punishing winters routinely kill off wildlife.

Local hunters and federal wildlife officials say the first were started a century ago, by ranchers hoping to keep elk from eating the hay they had set aside for livestock during winter.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service established the National Elk Refuge in 1912. Feeding of the elk began the same year. As elk hunting gained popularity, bringing streams of wealthy outsiders to Jackson every fall, the feed grounds helped ensure an ample supply of the animals……….

……..Reiswig, who retired from the Fish and Wildlife Service in June, said he never liked the feeding program but was forced to accept it as a political reality.

"For us to march in and say, 'We're going to phase out this feeding program,' that was not an option," Reiswig said. "Realistically, in a Western state, given this administration, that's just not the way this game is played."

Yeah, let's see. The program was taken over by the Feds in 1912. The hunting was proposed in 1998. Seems about right to somehow blame it on Bush. Who's trying to buffalo who here? Meanwhile, a spring freeze is being blamed for a bumper crop of bear problems in the western US:

Pushed from their homelands by a drought and pulled by the scent of human food, black bears across western US states are breaking into homes and tearing up garbage cans in a desperate search for nourishment ahead of hibernation.

Fires across the west also destroyed bear habitat, and the animals face the continuing peril of losing their living space to urban development.

The bear in the Boulder neighborhood finally came down from the tree and fled. The animal was lucky — it wore an ear tag, meaning a previous run in with authorities.

Authorities would have killed the bear if they had caught it, said Tyler Baskfield, spokesman for the Colorado Division of Wildlife.

This year is on target for approaching the 2002 record of 404 bears killed or euthanized, Baskfield said. Colorado has a population of between 8,000 and 12,000 bears.

"We had a late freeze in June which killed the acorns and berry crop. We had a very dry mid-summer and grasses in the high country dried up. That pushed the bears down into the valleys where we have people," Baskfield said.

It is a similar story in much of the western United States.

How bad is it?

Bears are causing plenty of trouble in California, said the state's Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist Jason Holley.

"They can blow the door off the hinges. This time of year we're having at least three break-ins a night around Lake Tahoe," Holley said.

And the problem will not get better. The bears who are habituated to easy food ("Hey! Look at all the food behind that closed door!") are going to be a problem in future years. Look, folks, nature is not as Disney (or Animal Planet television) portrays it. And a lot of these ideas that are inspired by "love" of animals are, frankly, stupid. We're heading into a real problem, real soon with this. Last year I blogged a few stories about bears - this year has seen a huge increase. Something is badly out of whack - and it is not just a spring freeze. That may have contributed, but it looks a lot like there are simply too many bears - and too many bison. Something has to give.

The Forgotten Man

Dr. Ralph Asher Alpher, 86, passed away on August 12, 2007. I only found this out today when my wife pointed it out to me. In a way, it somehow fits that his obituaries are somewhat late. So was recognition for the important contributions he made to cosmology.

When he was a graduate student at George Washington University in the 1940s, some scientists had for about two decades hypothesized that the universe had begun in an explosion of condensed matter and had been expanding ever since. But some still favored the steady-state theory, which held that the universe had always existed in more or less its current state.

In 1948, Dr. Alpher published two papers based on research for his doctoral dissertation. The first was written with his adviser, George Gamow, a Russian-born physicist with a puckish turn of mind who obtained permission to include as a co-author Hans Bethe, an authority on the origin of cosmic elements. The authorship by Alpher, Bethe and Gamow was a scientific pun on the first letters of the Greek alphabet, which seemed appropriate for a paper on cosmic genesis.

The paper reported Dr. Alpher’s calculations on how, as the initial universe cooled, the remaining particles combined to form all the chemical elements in the world. This elemental radiation and matter he dubbed ylem, for the Greek term defining the chaos out of which the world was born.

The research also offered an explanation for the varying abundances of the known elements. It yielded the estimate that there should be 10 atoms of hydrogen for every one atom of helium in the universe, as astronomers have observed.

Months later, Dr. Alpher collaborated with Robert Herman of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University on a paper predicting that the explosive moment of creation would have released radiation that should still be echoing through space as radio waves. Astronomers, perhaps thinking it impossible to detect any residual radiation or still doubting the Big Bang theory, did not bother to search.

In 1964, after radio telescopes had been invented, the telltale background radiation was discovered independently. Nobody even mentioned that Dr. Alpher had predicted it. Only in July of this year was Dr. Alpher finally presented a National Medal of Science for his work. He was too ill to attend the White House ceremony. One other thing about Dr. Alpher.

Ralph Asher Alpher was born in Washington. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered him a full scholarship, but after he disclosed that he was Jewish, he said, the scholarship was withdrawn without explanation. Instead, he attended George Washington University at nights while working at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington and at the Johns Hopkins physics laboratory.

Rest in peace.

Jihadi Rocketry Club?

More and more detail is coming out about the arrest of two Egyptian men arrested in South Carolina, and subsequently indicted on terrorism-related charges. And it really does not look good. At all.

TAMPA - A laptop computer deputies found when they pulled over two University of South Florida students in South Carolina contained a video made by one of the men showing how to use a toy to detonate a bomb remotely, a federal prosecutor said Friday.

On that video, the student, Ahmed Mohamed, said the detonator could 'save one who wants to be a martyr for another day, another battle,' Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Hoffer said.

The prosecutor said that video was posted by Mohamed on YouTube, a popular Web site.

Also on the laptop were 'jihadi' images and footage of rockets used by Hamas, Hoffer said.

Although a judge granted bail for the other student, Youssef Megahed, prosecutors immediately appealed, delaying his release until at least next week. Mohamed waived his right to a bail hearing.

Hoffer disclosed the computer evidence Friday as he laid out the prosecution's case that Megahed should be denied bail because he is a danger to the community and a flight risk.

U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth Jenkins ruled Megahed could be released on $200,000 bail if he meets a number of strict conditions, including what amounts to house arrest. 'I do agree he poses a danger, no question about that, based on what was found in the car,' Jenkins said. She also said the government failed to demonstrate a specific danger to the community, as required by law.

Hoffer acknowledged under questioning from the judge that he had no specific evidence of Megahed's intentions. Hoffer said that under the current charge, Megahed likely faces less than three years in prison if convicted.

A lot of folks commented back when I first posted about this that the things they had in the car could have been used for amateur rocketry. Its beginning to look like they were right, they just didn't identify the type of rocket.

Thanks to Quilly Mammoth for tipping me about this news.

Five Out Of Four Studies Are Wrong

Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it is not very far off the mark, either. According to a number of very authoritative studies by Dr. John Ioannidis, many research studies are wrong. And the hotter the research field, the more likely the studies are tainted.

We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong.

Dr. Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye.

These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. "There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," Dr. Ioannidis said. "A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true."

The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined.

Dr. Ioannidis has been publishing a lot about this for a while now. Here's one of his papers that lays out a lot of very, very interesting conclusions. (The paper may be downloaded from PLoS Medicine. It is the most requested article they have ever published.)

Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true. This seemingly paradoxical corollary follows because, as stated above, the PPV of isolated findings decreases when many teams of investigators are involved in the same field. This may explain why we occasionally see major excitement followed rapidly by severe disappointments in fields that draw wide attention. With many teams working on the same field and with massive experimental data being produced, timing is of the essence in beating competition. Thus, each team may prioritize on pursuing and disseminating its most impressive “positive” results. “Negative” results may become attractive for dissemination only if some other team has found a “positive” association on the same question. In that case, it may be attractive to refute a claim made in some prestigious journal. The term Proteus phenomenon has been coined to describe this phenomenon of rapidly alternating extreme research claims and extremely opposite refutations [29]. Empirical evidence suggests that this sequence of extreme opposites is very common in molecular genetics [29].

And what is one of the hottest fields right now? Why, it's global warming. What a surprise. With more and more lurid findings being reported almost daily by the press. Hmmmm. From the WSJ article again:

Statistically speaking, science suffers from an excess of significance. Overeager researchers often tinker too much with the statistical variables of their analysis to coax any meaningful insight from their data sets. "People are messing around with the data to find anything that seems significant, to show they have found something that is new and unusual," Dr. Ioannidis said.

This should raise some very serious red flags for people.

UPDATE: I just love being linked by someone who teaches philosophy who says things like this:

Exhibit #1: Blue Crab Blvd: "And what is one of the hottest fields right now? Why, it's global warming. What a surprise. "

Does Dr. Ioannides say that global warming research is one of the problem areas? No. This is entirely Mr. Crabs' interpolation.

It might help the professor to understand the terminology:

In the mathematical subfield of numerical analysis, interpolation is a method of constructing new data points from a discrete set of known data points.

In engineering and science one often has a number of data points, as obtained by sampling or experiment, and tries to construct a function which closely fits those data points. This is called curve fitting or regression analysis. Interpolation is a specific case of curve fitting, in which the function must go exactly through the data points.

Whereas extrapolation is:

In mathematics, extrapolation is the process of constructing new data points outside a discrete set of known data points. It is similar to the process of interpolation, which constructs new points between known points, but its results are often less meaningful, and are subject to greater uncertainty.

So, did I make a best fit interpolation or a good (but possibly uncertain) guess based on the report? Well, actually, unlike the good professor, I actually read Dr. Ioannidis' paper. And his findings would appear to be applicable across scientific fields - because he is looking at the entire way research is conducted. So if anything, it is a best fit, not a guess.

Hey, prof, just so you know, my degree is not in philosophy. It is in mathematics. And thanks for acknowledging that I "interpolated" it correctly.

The Revolution Will Be Live-Blogged

The Washington Post's Marc Fisher will be live-blogging the two dueling demonstrations in Washington, DC today. Fisher will have a number of Post reporters stationed in various areas of the city and plans to update regularly as the day progresses.

Good morning, all–the weather is supposed to become lovely as the day progresses, so both sides in today's dueling demonstrations for and against the U.S. presence in Iraq have only their organizational skills and the appeal of their messages to blame for whatever size crowd they may draw as the day unfolds.

Supported by a crack team of reporters stationed all along the rally and march routes, I'll be updating the scene and the speeches, the confrontations and the passions, throughout the day.

Today's anti-war rally and march is, like several staged since before the Bush administration decided to take down Saddam Hussein's government, organized primarily by a group called the ANSWER Coalition. The pro-war rally, which was organized in response to the anti demo, is being put together by a new, ad hoc group called the Gathering of Eagles.

ANSWER has big plans for the day, protesting against the war in Iraq and against Israel at the same time. (There goes that new anti-Semitism again). Fisher isn't sure that is a good strategy:

The ANSWER Coalition is also using today's rally to fight other longstanding battles. Although many of the marchers joining the anti-war rally today may not know it, ANSWER considers this a demonstration against the war in Iraq and against what it calls "Israel's brutal repression of the Palestinian people." Today's event, organizers say, is meant to show solidarity with Palestinians and to oppose "the Israeli state's profoundly racist character." How that position will play with the bulk of the crowd remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the Gathering of Eagles plans on guarding the capitol's monuments - to prevent more of this from happening. (See the video at their website).

Das Vadanya Freedom

The Washington Post notes what "free elections" have come to mean under Vladimir Putin. They are neither. Russia is heading back to the bad old Soviet way of doing business, with the added features of a mafia-style leadership.

VLADIMIR PUTIN'S Russian "democracy" put on a remarkable show this week. On Wednesday, Mr. Putin accepted the abrupt resignation of the prime minister and announced the nomination of an obscure bureaucrat and personal pal, Viktor Zubkov, whom most Russians had never heard of. Yesterday, the parliament duly voted Mr. Zubkov into office by a count of 381 to 47 after a discussion of less than two hours. As an Associated Press reporter described it, "Lawmakers praised Zubkov, posed easy questions and gladly accepted his responses in rote exchanges" reminiscent "of Soviet-era Communist Party meetings."

Putin places a virtually unknown crony in office and the decision is rubber-stamped. That Zubkov will be nothing more than a puppet for Putin should be obvious. Putin will step down without actually having to step down; he'll simply fade into the background and pull the strings on his chosen successor. Dictatorship and corruption is on the rise in the world - and contrary to the assertions of the Western left, it isn't America that is leading the way.