So you’ve come to believe that aircraft are spraying dangerous substances above your heads and you want to get rid of them?   So, how about using some vinegar?

Um…

Well… it is a weak acid so it could possibly react with chemicals that are either alkaline in nature or are just prone to breaking down in acid.  But those “chemicals” are rather high up in altitude, and aside from that obvious problem, one might think that if the chemicals were potent enough to be dangerous even after drifting down and surviving the harsh conditions of the upper atmosphere than vinegar probably would not do much.

Really, do I need to explain the flaws in the logic here?

Apparently so.

There are actually a lot more videos about this on Youtube. I did not have time to look at them all, so some may be even more lame.

I have to admit, this really does not amount to much of a story, since it’s unlikely to change anyone’s mind, but god I love watching something like this…

Interesting that she brought up the “M or J” thing.   I mean, how can you mistake an M for a J, which one is it?  And why do spirits always provide things one letter at a time?    The funny thing is that it actually would apply to me to a huge extent.  My deceased paternal grandfather was named Joseph Joyce.  My grandmother is Mary Joyce.  I have an uncle whose name is also Joe Joyce, I have an aunt named Mary Anne, a cousin named Megan and my brother’s name is James.  It might be more of a stretch (although that never stopped a psychic from claiming success), but my sister’s middle name is Marie and my paternal Grandmother’s maiden name was Moriarty.   I have many J and M names in my relations, although names starting with either one of those letters are extremely common.

I love how she says she didn’t know the age of the anchor woman’s daughter and therefore couldn’t know if she had a boyfriend.   The whole damn point of being a psychic is you’re supposed to know stuff without being given all the information necessary to figure it out.   If you know a person’s daughter is seventeen, for example, it’s not a long shot to guess she either has a boyfriend or has some kind of romantic interests.   If she’s six, you can probably guess she does not.    It’s so ridiculous to think a real “psychic” would need to be primed with the information to know this.

The best part is the other news anchor who actually takes her to task, pointing out that she didn’t guess the name of the woman’s daughter but only guessed J or an M for someone relating to the woman.   It’s very common for a psychic to claim success for something they didn’t get outright but were lead to.  It’s also rare to get a news personality who will take them to task for this.  I wonder why she wants to do his reading off camera?

A train carrying copper ore concentrate from a mine in Australia derailed a few days ago.  It was carrying 1500 tonnes of the concentrate when it derailed and a significant proportion of the load seems to have spilled from the cars.  Some of the concentrate spilled into the Edith River. It’s not entirely clear how much actually spilled into the river, but some estimates are that up to 1200 tonnes spilled from the cars, with a large portion ending up in the river.

Whether or not this is cause for concern really depends on the exact composition of the copper concentrate. Most forms of copper concentrate have low soluability in water, so much of it may just sit in a big pile where it landed in the river. Copper oxide is not hazardous at all, and is found very commonly in nature. On the other hand, if it contains large quantities of copper sulfate, there may well be reason for concern. Copper sulfate is mildly toxic and certainly would be reason for concern if it were present in such a large spill.

Although copper concentrate produced by mines is generally not considered hazardous material, it may contain other minerals that present a problem.   If the material contains significant amounts of cadmium, lead or mercury, then this could be a problem, since such a huge quantity has been spilled.   Of course, it would depend on the concentration of those materials and what type of chemical compounds they were part of.

Reports from Sky News do indicate that this copper concentrate was regarded as toxic, so there does appear to be some valid reason for concern over contamination of the river.   Officials have stated that any material that dissolves should be diluted to levels that are not hazardous.

But that’s not what everyone is so damn concerned about.
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The item shown bellow is a tritium-containing radiolumonescent key chain.  It’s basically a small glass vial containing radioactive tritium gas and coated with a phosphorescent compound and placed in a clear plastic case.   Tritium is a weak beta emitter with a half life of 12.3 years.  Because the beta particles are very low in energy, they are entirely blocked by the glass and are not detectable on the surface of the key chain.  The beta particles ionize the phosphorescent compound and produce a steady glow, most often in green (the brightest and most visible color) but also available in other colors.  Because of the 12.3 year half life of tritium, these key chains can be used for several years before there’s any noticeable reduction in brightness.

They’re really great little items and the perfect gift for just about any occasion.   For one thing, they’re an interesting conversation piece and a very good example of a practical application of radioactivity.   They demonstrate that you can indeed keep something radioactive in our pocket and be quite safe and they’re very eye-catching.

They also have quite a bit of practical value.  Finding your keys in the dark is very easy with one of these key chains.  In fact, it’s so easy that if you happen to misplace your keys, the easiest way to find them is to turn off the lights.  When entering your home or starting your car in complete darkness, the glowing key chain provides just enough light to easily select the correct key and use it without fumbling.   If you happen to drop the keys on the dark floor of your car, you can find them very quickly and without effort.   You can even see the glow of the keys if they are under a seat or somehow otherwise obscured from direct view.  You can get different colors and use them to mark different key chains, making it very easy to grab the correct one, even in complete darkness.

I’ve had these key chains before (and broken a couple by mistake).  I can attest to just how useful they are.   There’s also no other way of getting this same value without using radioactive material.  An electrically illuminated key chain could not provide such continuous periods of glow without the batteries quickly running out.   Standard phosphorescent glowing items are limited to a few hours of illumination and must be exposed to light first in order to glow, making them useless for something like a key chain, which is often kept in one’s pocket.

There’s only one problem with these amazing little glowing key chains:  nobody in the US sells them, at least not directly.   Technically, these are not approved for sale or ownership in the United States, although I’ve never heard of anyone getting in trouble for owning one.  Many people do own them and talk about them openly online and elsewhere.  It might just be one of those things that hasn’t shown up on the radar of a bureaucrat who was asinine enough to bother to do something about it.

Still, there are stories about their thugs stopping sales of these key chains on sites like eBay.  It seems that these days most of those sold on eBay are coming from sellers who are not located within the United States.  Exactly how much trouble you could potentially get in for these remains unclear, but it appears to be a case of selective enforcement.  (So if you have one, don’t ever leave the federal government looking for an excuse to call you a terrorist.)

Yet while the government may tolerate people owning them, you can’t buy them from any major retailer.   They can be purchased on the “grey market,” imported in relatively small batches or sold over the internet.  They can be bought from foreign retailers, like those in the UK, who will generally ship to the US without problem.   The best place to buy them, however, tends to be eBay, where numerous sellers will sell to US customers.

That, however, was not good enough for me.  I know a great product when I see one and these things are inexpensive, extremely useful and very easy to sell.  I had bought one and people were constantly asking me about it and where to get one.   I wanted to sell these, and not just by keeping it on the down-low, selling them on auction websites or to friends.  I wanted to really sell them, importing them wholesale and selling them openly and in quantity.

I also didn’t want even the slight potential to have the NRC knocking at my door, which does occasionally happen when someone tries to sell them in the US.   One would think that the government has better things to do, but of course, they don’t.

I thought it would be easy to do.  After all, these things are very readily available in other countries, and by “other countries,” I don’t mean just Russia, Zimbabwe and Cuba.  They can be bought in the UK.  They are brought into the US all the time.  They’re also perfectly safe.   Of course, I assumed wrong, but this was a few years ago, long before I had gained a full understanding of the bureaucracy that is the NRC.

I e-mailed, called and faxed the NRC several times about this matter.  I cannot even begin to explain how difficult they were.   First, nobody at the agency seemed to understand what I wanted to do or what the devices were for.  They told me that if I wanted to start the process of getting a consumer product containing radioactive material approved, I could get some paperwork to start the ball rolling, but it would be several thousand dollars just to begin and would take more than a year.  I told them I believed the items qualified as being license-exempt, since other items of comparable function and contents, such as illuminated watches are.   They didn’t seem to understand what I was getting at.

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I’m not entirely sure what the “occupy” protesters generally want.  They talk a lot about corruption in business and government.  Certainly, we can all agree that’s a bad thing and needs to be eliminated.   Other than that, most have little idea what the “corruption” is or where it needs to be routed out and how to do it.   Some are socialists, a few are anarchists and others just seem to not be sure what they are.

Now there has been a turn toward trying to blockade ports.   I’m not sure what the reasoning is.  Perhaps it’s a hatred of imports or a belief that blocking trade will somehow undermine the big businesses.  Regardless of their goals, it seems that some of the tactics have gone far beyond just getting in the way to the point of absolutely astounding danger.

Here is an amazing example of how bad it has gotten.

Faith in humanity? Okay, that’s fine. I really don’t think that any train driver wants to blow through a crowd or run over a toddler. I’ll even go so far as to say that the majority of the evil corporate executives at a railroad or transportation company would be horrified by the idea of a young child being torn apart under the wheels of a massive locomotive. I’m sure that the train driver, upon realizing that there is a child in the track will do everything possible to avoid running them over, which, unfortunately, is not much.

Perhaps this is just evidence that the educational system is failing, because in addition to humanity, there are some things you should always count on because they always work.

Inertia – It’s the property of an object to resist any change in its motion. It’s directly proportional to mass. In other words, heavy objects are more difficult to get moving that light objects. Makes sense, right? Well, conversely, once you get them moving, they’re also hard to stop.

Ever try pushing a car because it wouldn’t start? It’s hard to get it going but once you do it’s also hard to stop, which is why you need someone inside it to push the brake when it needs to. A two ton car has too much inertia for a human to easily stop it, even when it’s moving quite slow.

Trains have a lot more. A locomotive can weigh over one hundred tons. Fully loaded, each of the additional cars weighs anywhere from fifty to one hundred or more tons. So even a small freight train weighs thousands of tons. The ones that are used for transporting containers to and from ports are not small, however, and weigh a real real lot. They have a lot of inertia. When they get going, even at slow speed, it’s not easy to stop them.

Friction – It’s the property of two solid surfaces to resist motion against each other.  With wheels, it’s often considered to be synonymous with traction, the ability of the wheels to “grip” a surface and provide control and acceleration or stopping ability.   When you hit the brakes in a car, it’s the friction of a surface that keeps the car from just sliding away forever.

Not all surfaces have the same friction.  You will notice this if you are driving in different conditions.   Dry asphalt against rubber has quite a lot of friction, so if you hit the brakes on an asphalt road, you’ll stop pretty fast.   You may skid a bit, but it won’t be that much because the road provides plenty of friction against your wheels.   Now if you do the same on a wet road, which has less friction, you’re going to skid a lot farther.  Do it on an icy road and you’ll skid further still.  If you hit your brakes on a patch of smooth ice you will keep going almost like you didn’t hit them at all, although your car may also spin out.   One thing that will not happen on ice is a nice sudden stop, because there’s not enough friction.

You know what else doesn’t have a lot of friction?   Smooth steel rails against steel wheels.

And this is why, regardless of the humanity of a train driver, the train is not going to stop unless it has a good mile or so of warning that you’ve put your kid on the track.  It will keep going and kill you and your child.

For those interested in what actually happened: The original story can be read here. While it’s pretty clear from the video that the idiots were in the track right in front of a train, there are no reports of any deaths. Either the train was already coming to a stop and was light enough to not kill them all, or they realized it was not going to stop before it ran them over. Note that they are on the tracks but not chained to the tracks.

Just the same, this is one of the worst parents I have ever seen. It makes not vaccinating your children seem rather mild.

When astronauts first walked on the moon, NASA was recording the raw video on data tapes.  These tapes could have been used to provide better images of the event after the fact, even using technology of the day, and at the very least, fill in a few dead spots in the final recordings, caused by video source changes and problems in the converter settings.   Nasa took great pains to make sure the tapes were properly cataloged and stored and then, some time in the early 1980’s, like a complete idiot, lost them and presumably ended up erasing the tapes for reuse.

If that sounds stupid, you have not heard anything yet.

The multi-billion dollar Apollo Program brought back about 382 kilograms of lunar material (rock and soil samples).   Soviet unamanned sample-return missions brought back less than a third of a kilogram of material. There are also lunar meteorites, which are composed of material blasted off the moons surface by impact events, which eventually made their way to earth.  Although these meteorite samples do have scientific value, they events that brought them to earth combined with contamination and weathering means they do not have the same value as rocks collected on the actual surface of the moon.

The scientific value of moon rocks is enormous.  Analysis can help determine the composition of the moon, the age of the moon, the formation of the earth-moon system, the composition of the solar system and the levels and types of particles emitted by the sun.   The study of moon rocks is also critical to determining how future lunar missions might be carried out and to what extent the moon might be able to provide some of the resources necessary for such missions.  Analysis of moon rocks resulted in the giant impact hypothesis becoming the most accepted scenario for the formation of the moon.

While the material brought back from the moon has been subject to analysis and experimentation for more than forty years, there’s still much to learn.   Since the samples and the areas they were gathered from is relatively limited, many of the rocks are very unique in composition.   For example, the “Genesis Rock,” which was recovered during Apollo-15 appears to be the oldest rock of its type ever recovered.  At more than 4.5 billion years old, the rock dates to the very early days of the solar system.  It is possible that other samples may contain tiny fragments of the moon’s primordial crust, which would be even older.

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This has got to be one of the most bizarre, crazy and just plain disgusting stories I’ve heard in a long time.

Chickenpox is a pretty nasty disease to have.  Like most adults, I went through it when I was a child because there was no vaccine at the time.  It was pretty misserable, but I was lucky, because despite missing more than a week of school and being covered with an  itchy, painful rash, I didn’t have any lasting effects.   Some are not so lucky.  It’s fairly common to be left with disfiguring scars, especially on the face, from chickenpox (I know a few people with such marks on their cheeks or forehead).   It’s less common, though not unheard of to have more severe and lingering effects and occasionally even death.

The virus tends to be less severe in children than adults, there was once a custom of intentionally infecting children with the disease.   So-called “pox parties” were held where children intentionally came into contact with others with chickenpox to get the disease when young.  Whether exposing children to the disease intentionally was ever a justifiable idea is debatable (most medical experts think it was always a bad idea), but it certainly is not any more.   These days, there is a vaccine for chickenpox that is highly effective and avoids the discomfort, suffering, dangers and possible disfigurement of the disease.   The vaccine is now part of the normal vaccine schedule and most children receive it.  Chickenpox is therefore far less common than it once was.

But what to do if you’re a vaccine fearing idiot?  Since the antivax crowd seems to think that getting infections is a good thing and boosts the immune system, a pox party seems like it would be right up their ally.  The only problem is that the vaccine has reduced the number of cases of chickenpox enough to make it difficult to find a good pathogen host to infect your kid with.   So what to do?   Why not use social networking to find other like-minded morons around the world and swap spit by mail with them.

The most popular and widely reported on Facebook group for doing this appears to have been recently shut down, but that’s unlikely to actually stop anyone in the long run.

I’m not even kidding…

Via the Los Angeles Times:
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I’m trying a new method of addressing the lunacy of chemtrails by showing that dumping chemicals at altitude wouldn’t generally do very much or be a very effective way of exposing populations to the chemicals that some claim are being sprayed.  It’s worth noting that the chemtrail loonies can’t even seem to agree on what is being sprayed, so here are some of the more common chemicals claimed.

If chemtrail conspiracy theorists are to believed, then large jet aircraft, possibly the same aircraft that carry passengers are being used to spray unknown quantities of chemicals of some type at high altitude.  While it’s rather difficult to judge the altitude of an aircraft by sight alone, based on what has been claimed to be chemtrails it’s fairly clear that the aircraft were flying at normal jet altitudes, well above tropospheric weather.   If they were indeed passenger aircraft then the altitude is generally above thirty thousand feet.

Some commonly claimed materials:

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I started thinking about this topic after the discussion on an other post regarding loss of electricity turned to railroad crossings (grade crossings), where railways intersect roadways.   Understandably, loss of power for warning signals can result in some safety problems.

Unfortunately, adding entirely redundant backup power to railroad crossing warning systems wouldn’t actually address the real safety problem with railroad crossings:  idiots.    It’s really not hard to avoid being killed at a railroad crossing.   If there’s a train coming, don’t enter the crossing.   If there isn’t a train coming, it’s safe to cross.    It’s not hard to tell if a train is approaching either.   Most crossings have signals, such as flashing lights and gates to make it obvious, but even if the crossing lacks signals or the signals don’t work, it’s still fairly obvious.   Trains are generally required to blow their horn when approaching a railroad crossing, so if you’re about to go over a railroad crossing and hear a train horn, look both ways, because it’s possible that the signals are not functioning.

Seems simple, right?  After all, stopping at a railroad crossing to let a train pass is only going to cost you, at worst, a few minutes, and cutting in front of a train is not a good way to keep yourself alive.    It’s impossible for the train to stop in time to avoid a collision, and it certainly can’t swerve out of the way.  Estimating the speed and distance of  something like an approaching locomotive can be surprisingly difficult, especially when you’re also moving.   If you’re wrong and that train hits, it’s not going to do just superficial damage.

Despite these seemingly obvious facts, grade crossings claim a surprising number of lives.   In the US alone, hundreds die in grade crossing accidents every year – 247 in the year 2009 and 338 in 2007.  The problem is not confined to the US, of course.   Everywhere that grade crossings exist, there are deaths on a fairly regular basis.

Supporters of Social Darwinism might suggest that this is not such a bad thing, since it’s generally the fault of the idiot driver who gets killed, but the problem is more broad than that.  Despite the fact that locomotives tend to be a lot larger and sturdier than road vehicles, they can and do get badly damaged by striking cars and trucks.   Debris can fly up and injure train crew.  On occasion, trains have even derailed due to grade-crossing accidents.   Even if the accident does not cause any significant damage to the train, it still means that it has to come to a stop, the crossing ends up being blocked for some time and emergency services need to respond to clean up the mess.   And the idiots who try to beat the train are actually more likely to survive with injuries than die outright.   Add to this the fact that there may be other passengers in the vehicle who had no control over the situation and it’s easy to see why this is a major social problem.

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This is the kind of story that really burns me up.   General fear and ignorance by both authorities and the public is once again making life unnecessarily problematic for someone who didn’t do anything wrong.

Daytona Beach News-Journal:

Stetson student found with uranium on DeLand campus
Stetson University officials confiscated a package containing low-grade uranium from a student Thursday, DeLand police said.

Volusia County’s HAZMAT team, DeLand police and firefighters were called to the scene. Authorities discovered that the amount of uranium was small enough that it could be possessed legally.

Police said there was no immediate threat to the campus, but the Public Safety Office was temporarily sealed off as a precaution.

According to Cindi Brownfield, Stetson spokeswoman, possession of uranium falls under the university’s weapons policy, and the student will go through Stetson’s judicial process.

DeLand Deputy Chief Randel Henderson said in an email that police are “conferring with the FBI as a routine protocol.”

And also, here’s a clip from a local news station:

Uranium found in Stetson University dorm room: MyFoxORLANDO.com

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