'Nother Solent

Words of wisdom from a reader.

Mark writes:

You wrote:
We expect all our children to grow up

I thought:
Maybe by the time they turn 40, but even that's probably wishful thinking.

Then I figured out you meant live past childhood...

How many atoms make five?

Rob of the Sporadic Chronicle writes:

If "Professor Yagasaki calculated that 800 tons of DU is the atomicity equivalent to 83,000 Nagasakis" then I think "atomicity" is being used to mean "number of atoms", not radioactivity.

The Hiroshima bomb contained approximately 10kg of uranium, and I suppose the Nagasaki bomb contained a similar weight of plutonium. Plutonium atoms weigh about the same as uranium atoms, so let's say the Nagasaki bomb had about as many plutonium atoms as there were uranium atoms in the Hiroshima bomb.

83,000 x 10kg = 830,000kg = 830 tonnes. So about 800 tonnes of uranium is about "equivalent to 83,000 Nagasakis" if all we're doing is counting atoms.

But counting atoms really isn't good enough, because not all atoms are created equal. U-235 (the uranium in bombs) and plutonium, and their decay products which would be found in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki fallout clouds, are much more radioactive than U-238 (depleted uranium).

And all this assumes that hundreds (or thousands) of tonnes of uranium have actually been used anyway. I don't know what the sources for those figures are, but if they're anything like "a cruise missile [contains] as much as 800 pounds of the stuff" [link to Bob Nichols article in Online Journal] then I would be inclined to doubt them.

I'll write a bit more about this (summary: depleted uranium is bad for you, but not remotely as bad as the Demonic Devil Poison it is often made out to be) soon.

Yep. Warmongering scumbags don't like depleted uranium because it's radioactive - it's not very, hence the "depleted" - but because it's dense.

More debunking from the Sporadic Chronicle here. This time the bunk-purveyor (bunker?) is Naomi Klein.

No, I do not want the next lot of protestors who invade the Commons to get skewered by swords or have their stupid heads blown off by Sig Sauers.

Unless they are terrorists. Then I do. And it's sometimes difficult to decide "terrorist or disgruntled daddy" in the first half second, which is when the decision has to be made, know what I mean?

Gorbachov and Yeltsin

have both criticised Putin's power-grab, the Globe and Mail reports. Yeltsin said, "Only a democratic country can successfully resist terrorism and count on standing shoulder to shoulder with all of the world's civilized countries."

His statement is, as they say nowadays, "false but accurate."

Ways in which modern people differ from all past generations.

• We expect all our children to grow up.
  
• Reliable contraception.
  
• Worldwide conversation. Not communication, conversation.
  
• Worldwide casual visitability.
  

The last one in particular could be better phrased.

Important Issue of the Day.

Why does the Japanese Prime Minister have greeny-blond hair?

Men In Tights.

the Guardian says, "The Commons staff, dressed in black tights and armed with ceremonial swords, were useless at protecting MPs yesterday." A similar anti-tights line was taken by Sheffield Today: "A grown man dressed in stockings and tailcoat, jaunty cravat and ceremonial sword slung at his side, rugby tackles a long haired protester to the ground as bewildered middle aged men look on. No, not a French farce, but an actual scene from the most extraordinary breach of security seen since Michael Fagan broke into the Queen's bedroom."

Why blame the tights? Nowt wrong with a Sig Sauer and tights; fetching combination. And don't worry about buckled shoes, either. They don't stop the bullets working. Come to think of it, nowt wrong with a sword if you get it out and use it.

Sheffield Today finishes by saying, "This latest incident may convince the authorities it is time to take the responsibility for security out of the hands of the men in tights and give it to the boys in blue." Good thinking, Batman!

I didn't think much of the Commons invasion. "Portly Tory" (as the Sheffield Today story describes him) Sir Michael Cormack, who tackled a protester, comes out of this story well. Nor do I think much of the Guardian's line "In the end, the majority must have the right to make laws, and the minority must accept the responsibility to obey them." Depends on the laws. Need I Godwinise? There's no must about it.

34567 accurate after all.

Ken Dobson writes:

I read your thoughts that the forged memos might have been drafts. That thought has run through my mind as well. It very well may be true, but the PO Box 34567 is accurate. If you look at other documents preiously released (go to USA Today etc) that are known authentic, Bush addressed a letter to the TANG with that po box and zip that is in those doucuments. (I think I recall it is when he requested transfer to Alabama) anyway, as odd as it sounds, I think the PO Box is accurate. Thanks
Ken Dobson

I couldn't find a USA Today link dealing with this. However Power Line has a post that confirms what Mr Dobson has said.

Atomicity II.

I wondered where A L Kennedy got the atomicity and the 250,000 Nagasakis thing from. So I googled. What follows is just my speculation, of course, but I'm pretty sure she got it from one of the sources below.

Searches upon most variations of "250,000" and "Nagasaki" or "Nagasakis" will take you promptly to this article by Bob Nichols. Bob Nichols is described as a a contributing writer for LiberalSlant, Democratic Underground, Online Journal, AmericaHeldHostage and other publications.

He says he got the 250,000 Nagasakis figure from this report (original PDF here) by Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat. Bhagwat is a former Chief of the Naval Staff for the Indian Navy, which sounds impressive and certainly impressed Bob Nichols. (I digress, but isn't it funny how people who have spent years proclaiming their oppostion to the military-industrial complex will sometimes swoon when a military man looks kindly upon them? CND used to be crazy about that German general who lived with Petra Kelly, until he killed her. And it is a very odd sight to see American Democratic activists raised on tales of protests against the Vietnam war so proud of Senator Kerry's medals from that same war.)

Admiral Bhagwat's report contains this sentence "The reported coming of an AIDS epidemic last year in India, down wind, may have a relationship to DU bombing in Afghanistan." Now you know how impressed to be.

Anyway, elsewhere the admiral says "Professor Yagasaki calculated that 800 tons of DU is the atomicity equivalent to 83,000 Nagasakis" and mentions a conference in Hamburg where this calculation was offered to the public. He implies that his own calculation is based on Yagasaki's.

So I googled Yagasaki. The paper Bhagwat cites must have been this one and the atomicity ur-document seems to be this one. Professor Yagasaki Katsuma (Yagasaki is the family name) really is a scientist with a position at the University of the Ryukyus. He seems to have served as an expert witness at the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan which tried G.W. Bush in absentia for waging a war of agression against Afghanistan, and other war crimes. (Verdict: guilty.)

Professor Yagasaki's documents are badly translated from Japanese and I found them almost impossible to follow. However he seems to use atomicity to mean the total number of alpha radioactive decays taking place within the body. I cannot help feeling that his comparison in terms of Hiroshimas and Nagasakis is designed to scare rather than illuminate. I'd probably get it wrong if I tried to make a calculation, but I would guess that by this criterion living in a place built on or of granite (most types of granite contain naturally-occuring Uranium-238) would give you quite a few Nagasakis too, but the people of Aberdeen aren't dropping like flies.

This usage of the word "atomicity" seems restricted to campaigners against depleted uranium and people who report favourably on them. Nearly all uses of it cite either Professor Yagasaki or Admiral Bhagwat. I expect Yagasaki used a correct Japanese term, probably but not certainly the Japanese for "radioactivity", which was badly translated as "atomicity". The others just copied blindly. A search for "uranium" and "atomicity" will now reveal hundreds of entries: the meme is propagating outwards, and now it's reached the Guardian its survival is assured.

So that's what I found out about "atomicity." No big world-shattering point will be adduced from all this. I just thought you'd be interested in following one oddly translated Japanese word into the big wide world of internet ignorance.

Atomicity.

In an article in the Guardian yesterday A L Kennedy wrote:

DU atomicity in Iraq is equivalent to 250,000 Nagasaki bombs, so simply by being there and breathing, reporters risk cancers and birth defects in their children.

By "DU" she means Depleted Uranium. But what on earth does she mean by "atomicity"? The meaning I was taught was "the number of atoms in one molecule of an element." In other words, as this encyclopedia entry says, a molecule of oxygen has an atomicity of 2. If there are Depleted Uranium molecules floating around Iraq each containing the same number of atoms as a quarter of a million Nagasaki bombs then I want one. Damn thing might be intelligent.

OK, not really. I gather atomicity had an earlier meaning about the degree of attraction between atoms, and also has a meaning in computer science - something to do with database concurrency control, whatever that is. But she couldn't mean either of those either.

I started to think, and indeed started to write, about the measurement of radiation; about Becquerels, milli- and micro-sieverts but gave it up in boredom. It's clear she's just copied a word she didn't understand, probably from someone else who didn't understand.

It's no big deal that Alison Kennedy got a scientific word wrong, or that others got it wrong before her. Nor is her concern about Depleted Uranium in itself the sign of a crank. One can't be interested in every issue, and I'm not particularly interested in this one, but here is an IAEA fact sheet and here's a report from the Royal Society for those who are.

It is a slightly bigger deal (a deal about the state of a major newspaper rather than the overturning of all chemistry and all physics) that this poor woman gets it into her head from somewhere that in some way or another depleted uranium shells are as bad as a quarter of a million Nagasakis and puts it all in a panic in her column - spliced with lots of desperate dashes - hamsters - herrings - intrinsicly comic animals great pre-emptive defence against accusations of hysteria - ricin in your crisps - obviously a joke, couldn't really happen - joking reference to self as delusional - acid etched nipples: the new chocolate - if you say so, Alison - self-deprecating pleas for freedom of information - freely expressed in major newspaper - this whole style great pre-emptive defence against having to back up your arguments -

- and no one at the Guardian even gives her a pill.

An email that stood out.

Although a helpful friend has reduced our computer problems, my email is still a mess. I'm ashamed to admit that I have almost given up on it as a means of communication. However I belatedly spotted a familiar name when doing a mass delete and managed to pull this one out of the group earmarked for deletion. I am very glad I did. "Glad" in a specialised sense of the word; for it adds to the horror of a horrific story.

Alex Bensky writes:

I was living in Israel at the time of the Ma'alot massacre and I remember gathering in the kibbutz lounge along with other stunned and horrified people to watch the outcome on tv. Something was nagging at me while I did, something out of order, and it wasn't until the next day that I figured out what it was.

You could hear the order for the soldiers to assault the building, see them running towards it, and hear the rattle of gunfire. The soldiers weren't firing on the move, lest they hit the children. Although the gunfire was audible none of the soldiers were falling and you couldn't see dirt being kicked up by bullets. The reason was that the terrorists at that moment weren't shooting at the soldiers, but spraying the children with automatic fire, their goal not to stop the troops or defend themselves but kill as many children as they could.

My reaction, as I mentioned to Meryl Yourish recently, shows what a naive and innocent chap I was at that age, because the next morning I thought, "Well, at least now the world will see what Israel is up against and cut it some slack." After all, I thought, the terrorists had deliberately targeted children and gave up an opportunity to kill Israeli soldiers so they could massacre the greatest number of children. Surely this will cause worldwide revulsion.

I believed that. Of course, I also believed in the Tooth Fairy.

My take on the forged Bush memos

is that this was an early draft of what was originally intended to be a far better forgery. The writer composed them on his own computer at home, using the default fonts on his own computer. Hence the carelessness over sometimes using and sometimes disabling the superscripted "th"; he had spotted the need to avoid superscripts for when he would re-cast the memos into a semblance of typescript later, but hadn't quite finished going through the text to find them. Hence the "P.O. Box 34567": he was going to look up something plausible later.

Then, for some reason, the forger lost control. Perhaps he tried it out on a few friends, who showed it to their friends, one of whom took a copy. Or perhaps something triggered him to decide that if the memo wasn't released now it would be too late. The little bird had to fly on its own too soon.

P.S. I don't ever blog in pajamas. Pyjamas, maybe.

[UPDATE SEP 15: a reader, Ken Dobson, informs me that the 34567, odd though it looks, is real after all. Scroll up to see more.

Farce repeats itself as tragedy.

I have a post comparing a headline about September 11 2001 in the Independent to one of the Carry On films over at Samizdata.

The dead sleep; the living move on.

Dunblane teenager takes US Open

"A Scottish teenager who survived the Dunblane school massacre has won the US Open tennis junior title. Andrew Murray, 17, became the first British winner of the prestigious competition when he beat Ukrainian Sergei Stakhovsky 6-4 6-2 on Sunday."

For each person there comes an event that brings it home: there really is evil in the world. Dunblane was mine. Of course I knew about the great slaughters of history and about contemporary massacres in far lands. Knew but never quite believed. Dunblane brought it home.

As I wrote here I thought about Thomas Hamilton’s victims, or their families, or the surviving members of the class almost every day for two years or more. For the most part this was a useless procedure. When brooding became prayer perhaps it helped a little. (Do I mean helped them, in their great trauma, or helped me in my little shadow of it? Both.) I don't know whether I'll end up depressing myself in the same way over the Beslan massacre. I have thought of it every day so far, but the days have been few.

One thing I am grateful for is that the press stayed away from the Dunblane survivors as they grew up. Whether this restraint on the part of the press was in obedience to their consciences or to some sort of injunction I do not know, but it is good that the children were spared the shrivelling light of unending public attention. Human beings, particularly growing human beings, are not made to be stared at too hard. That is why I also hope that they were not over-counselled; eight years of in-depth counselling might be a longitudinal version of a year of worldwide fame.

I assume that Andrew Murray was not in the actual class that was massacred, as the article says he was eight at the time and they were four and five. The children at the epicentre are still children. In the next couple of years we may hear more about them. May it be in the context of their achievements, as it has been for Andrew Murray.