Fukushima: Temperatures Rise in Spent Fuel Storage Pool
April 13th, 2011Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen demonstrates how Fukushima’s fuel rods melted and shattered from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
Via: NHK:
The Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, says the water temperature in the spent fuel storage pool at the No. 4 reactor in the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has risen to about 90 degrees Celsius. It fears the spent fuel rods may be damaged.
TEPCO took the temperature on Tuesday using an extending arm on a special vehicle. It found the temperature was much higher than the normal level of under 40 degrees.
To cool the fuel, TEPCO sprayed 195 tons of water for 6 hours on Wednesday morning.
The company thinks the pool’s water level was about 5 meters lower than normal, but 2 meters above the fuel rods.
TEPCO believes the water level is likely to rise by about one meter after the water spraying on Wednesday.
The company also believes temperatures rose after the loss of the reactor’s cooling system.
TEPCO says high levels of radiation at 84 millisieverts per hour were detected above the water surface, where radiation is rarely detected.
Rebels Hijack Gadhafi’s Phone Network
April 13th, 2011Read, U.S. Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators for context and then you tell me who you think pulled this off. While the story below describes a much different technical solution than what’s described in the latter story, there’s a lot happening that’s spooky.
If Ousama Abushagur is just a, “31-year-old Libyan telecom executive raised in Huntsville, Ala.,” I’m the Easter Bunny:
By March 21, most of the main pieces of equipment had arrived in the U.A.E. and Mr. Abushagur was ready to ship them to Benghazi with three Libyan telecom engineers, four Western engineers and a team of bodyguards.
But Col. Gadhafi’s forces were still threatening to overrun the rebel capital and trying to bomb its airport. Mr. Abushagur diverted the team and their equipment to an Egyptian air base on the Libyan border. Customs bureaucracy cost them a week, though Egypt’s eventual approval was another show of Arab support for rebels. Egypt’s governing military council couldn’t be reached for comment.
Four Western engineers and team of bodyguards, eh? And then, upon learning that their destination in Libya was under threat of attack, this crew wound up at an Egyptian airbase and eventually moved the gear into Libya somehow. Would you be able to fly a planeload of mobile phone equipment and mercenaries onto an Egyptian airbase and then be allowed to go on your merry way into Libya? I don’t think I’d have much luck with that myself. I wonder what kind of connections one would need to be able to pull off something like that? (Rhetorical question.)
Also, when Huwei refused to sell the “rebels” the necessary telecommunications equipment, a “hybrid technical solution” was arranged via UAE. Ah ok, so Ousama Abushagur uses UAE as a proxy to purchase the gear and then he heads off with his Libyan engineers, four “Western engineers” and some mercenaries.
This is a joint CIA/NSA operation, but the Wall Street Journal isn’t going there this morning.
Update: Wired Isn’t Going There Either
This is from: How Libya’s Rebels Got Their Cell Service Back:
Notice that all of this took place without U.S. support.
Mmm hmm. Tell me another one, Spencer.
—End Update—
Via: Wall Street Journal:
A team led by a Libyan-American telecom executive has helped rebels hijack Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s cellphone network and re-establish their own communications.
The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, is giving more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the outside world after Col. Gadhafi cut off their telephone and Internet service about a month ago.
That March cutoff had rebels waving flags to communicate on the battlefield. The new cellphone network, opened on April 2, has become the opposition’s main tool for communicating from the front lines in the east and up the chain of command to rebel brass hundreds of miles away.
Facebook’s New Realtime Analytics System: HBase to Process 20 Billion Events Per Day
April 13th, 2011Via: High Scalability:
The need for such a high powered analytics system is driven by Facebook’s brilliant plan for world wide web domination via the viral propagation of social plugins, all tying the non-Facebook web back into Facebook and the Facebook web back into the non-Facebook web. Basically anything that people can do is captured and fed back through Facebook and anything done on Facebook can be displayed on your website, building closer relations between the two.
Research Credit: Matt
TSA Patdown of Six Year Old
April 13th, 2011‘Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?’
April 13th, 2011Via: Rolling Stone:
But if you want to get a true sense of what the “shadow budget” is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall’s haul doesn’t seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn’t seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.
Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley’s investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.
The technical name of the program that Mack and Karches took advantage of is TALF, short for Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. But the federal aid they received actually falls under a broader category of bailout initiatives, designed and perfected by Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, called “giving already stinking rich people gobs of money for no fucking reason at all.”
Research Credit: cgroove69
EFF to San Francisco Entertainment Commission: Don’t Turn SF into a Police State
April 13th, 2011Stark raving maniac fascism.
Via: EFF:
The city of San Francisco has a long history of political activism and cultural diversity, which could be in danger if the San Francisco Entertainment Commission has their way. The Electronic Frontier Foundation joined civil liberties and privacy groups in criticizing a proposal from the San Francisco Entertainment Commission that would require all venues with an occupancy of over 100 people to record the faces of all patrons and employees and scan their ID’s for storage in a database which they must hand over to law enforcement on request. If adopted, these rules would pose a grave threat to the rights of freedom of association, due process, and privacy in San Francisco.
iPads Take a Place Next to Crayons in Kindergarten
April 13th, 2011The elite want to liquify your child’s brain, squirt it into a plastic tube, package it up and route it to their private prisons, wars for resources, and dead end cubicles. This process should be automated to the extent possible. Here’s a visual representation of what public education has become:
Via: AP:
Kindergarten classes are supplementing crayons, finger paints and flashcards with iPads, a development that excites supporters but that detractors worry is wasted on pupils too young to appreciate the expense.
Next fall, nearly 300 kindergartners in the central Maine city of Auburn will become the latest batch of youngsters around the country to get iPad2 touchpad tablets to learn the basics about ABCs, 1-2-3s, drawing and even music.
“It’s definitely an adventure, and it’ll be a journey of learning for teachers and students,” said Auburn kindergarten teacher Amy Heimerl, who received an iPad on Tuesday ahead of the full deployment in the fall. “I’m looking forward to seeing where this can take us and our students.”
Related: Screen Based Public Education
Chinese Mining Operations in Australia
April 12th, 2011So it goes…
Via: Guardian:
China is leasing huge areas of land in Australia to secure a vital source of mineral resources, the latest sign of its acquisitive approach to the commodities trade.
No longer satisfied with buying iron ore and coal from Australian mining companies, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, China is developing its own mining operations, funding a port with a mile-long breakwater jutting into the Indian Ocean.
French Veil Ban: First Woman Fined for Wearing Niqab
April 12th, 2011Via: Guardian:
Police have fined a woman in a shopping centre car park outside Paris for wearing a niqab, or full-face Islamic veil, in the first enforcement of France’s burqa ban.
The 28-year-old woman was stopped by police in the car park in Les Mureaux, north-west of Paris, at 5.30pm on Monday, the day the niqab ban came into force. Police said she was stopped “without incident” for a few minutes and given a €150 (£132) fine. She has one month to pay.
Under the law backed by Nicolas Sarkozy, it is illegal for women in full-face veils to go anywhere in public, including walk down the street, enter shops, use public transport, attend doctors’ surgeries or town halls. They face a fine or a citizenship class.
On Tuesday morning another woman in a full-face veil was stopped by police after she tried to enter a town hall in Saint-Denis, north of Paris. Followed by a French TV crew, she had brought some paperwork to the town hall for a bureaucratic issue just before 11am. She was refused by officials on the grounds that she was wearing a niqab. On the way out police asked her to remove her face-veil to check her identity.
When she refused she was taken to a local police station, where she lifted her veil but insisted on putting it back on again. She was not fined but Le Parisien reported that she had been given a written reminder and a leaflet explaining that full-face veils were no longer allowed in public and she risked a fine.
Brave New World Among Top 10 Books Americans Most Want Banned
April 12th, 2011Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Via: Guardian:
Banned in Ireland when it first appeared in 1932, and removed from shelves and objected to ever since, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is still making waves today. The novel of a dystopian future was one of the most complained about books in America last year, with readers protesting over its sexually explicit scenes, “offensive” language and “insensitivity”.
