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Emergency preparations

For electric power outages longer than half an hour, or so, It is possible and even practical to have a generator to provide power for the necessary appliances. Freezer, refrigerator, electric control for a gas furnace, some lights, and even tv and radio are fairly low power. Look at the name plate of all of these you want to be able to maintain functional through a power outage of perhaps a few days. Add up the number of Watts they use. That gives you a rough starting point to shop for generators. I have a 3000 Watt generator that is more than enough for me. This one is just a small and cheap one to show how inexpensive it can be. http://www.lowes.com/pd_473285-48270-APG3014_0__... The simplest way to hook one up to the house wiring is not legal so have an electrician install a switch and instruct you on how to turn some circuit breakers off to reduce the load. The labor will be the biggest expense. Here is an example of the low end switches. http://www.lowes.com/pd_394441-48019-TF151W_0__... Gasoline is still the least expensive and easiest to store for emergency backup. Once you have your generator and can hook it up, the only limit to how long you can run it is the amount of gas you have on hand. A few 5 gallon cans of gas can be handy to have around for many things. You are already thinking along these lines so i hope you proceed with it. Emergency preparedness is a good thing. The exact nature of an emergency is impossible to predict, by definition. But the basic needs are almost always the same. Shelter, water, food and fuel.

Prof Wade Allison

Why radiation is safe & all nations should embrace nuclear technology - Professor Wade Allison

Radiation is Freightening

Radiation is scary because we know enough about it to know that some radiation is dangerous. For most of us, we first learn about radiation with the story of Madam Curie's discoveries and subsequent early demise. Her work was so dangerous because she was making discoveries. No one knew the danger. But, thanks to her and the many researchers that followed her, those same experiments and observations can be done safely. We now know how to prevent the damage. Some radiation is dangerous but with knowledge and respect we can (and do) work with radiation sources safely.

Recursion

Recursion is a fundamental property of reality. The laws of physics operate on the present instant to produce the next. Although the progress of time from one instant to the next for us seem seems to be continuous but is not. There is some minimum time interval, probably near the Planck time. 

The resolution of the Ultraviolet catastrophe was to assume that there is a finite minimum frequency. Without that assumption, the energy would become infinite as the wavelength decreases to zero. Length, time, and energy all had to have some minimum quantity, called quanta. The size of the minimums just had to be finite - not zero. The size turns out to be some 35 orders of magnitude smaller than our familiar world. 

Some very simple recursive systems display complicated, even unpredictable behavior. Conway's Game of Life is an example well worth the time to investigate. If you want a deep dive into the concepts, I recommend a book, A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram.

Concept of the week for 2013 52 -- Hormesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis

Nuclear Proliferation

The US never had a monopoly on the knowledge of how to make nuclear bombs. At least two of the people who worked on the Manhattan project thought that it was too important for not only one nation to have this knowledge. They found ways to communicate it to Russia, which was an ally at the time. When FDR told Stalin that we had nuclear bombs Stalin did not ask any questions. I think that was because he was afraid he reveal that he already knew as much as FDR. Non-proliferation efforts were doomed even before the first test. Then with Ike's"Atoms for Peace" program and France's entry into the nuclear "club" the race was on. FDR's decision to not share the results from the Manhattan project with Russia or even England was a mistake that undermined the trust we could have had internationally. I agree that nuclear weapons, themselves, are not the problem. The attitudes of regimes are the problem. We need to face the fact that we are part of the problem. Now, how to fix this?