Review: IT'S ME, Edward Wayne Edwards, the Serial Killer You Never Heard Of

IT'S ME, Edward Wayne Edwards, the Serial Killer You Never Heard Of by John A. Cameron
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

What motivated me to start this book was another case, advanced in an interview with the author that was posted to YouTube, suggesting that the murder of Teresa Halbach was yet another of Edwards' dirty deeds, fitting the modus operandi the author developed for Edwards. This was the murder made famous in the Netflix documentary miniseries Making A Murderer, for which Steven Avery was ultimately convicted. In the interview, the author suggests that a bystander, captured for only one second in one courtroom hallway scene, was none other than Edwards himself. He suggests that this seemingly incidental cameo would have been no accident, that Edwards could have been in the area during the time in question, and that the framing of another person, indirectly manipulating law enforcement to pursue a false version of the crime, was Edwards' murderous career stock-in-trade. The author theorizes that the attention given to Avery's earlier wrongful conviction may have attracted Edwards to come to the area to do the alleged murder and frame-up.

I felt rather open-mindedly optimistic about that theory after watching the YouTube clip, and it was shortly after that when I coincidentally spotted this book while wandering the stacks at my local library! After getting to page 211, however, I am very decidedly pessimistic about not only the theory that Edwards killed Halbach and framed Avery, but also the entire related story which the book advances.

A good story though both are, I've abandoned this book for now. I may finish it later. I should be clear that the Steven Avery/Teresa Halbach connection was advanced by the author after the book was published, so you'll find no details about that within.

This edition (likely the only one) is a lovely hardcover. Yet I am baffled by the publisher's choice of typeface. Who sets a book entirely in sans serif? While the materials of the book are quite lovely, and no-doubt not cheap to use, the publisher seems to have given the book to a team of noobs to execute, and the author was apparently left entirely to his own devices as to how to present the story. After reviewing an intermediate draft, I think any reasonable editor would have had a serious conference with the author on points of style and presentation to insist on a serious reworking. Alas, what you see is what you get.

This book attempts to sell you on a serious crime theory, and to do this, you need a first-person documentary account. Instead, we have a very awkward third-person retelling that essentially novelizes the whole concept. Conversations are had, set in passages of quoted dialog, and the reader is left to wonder: is this an actual quote, as in, did he really say this, or is this just a bit of stylistic dialog advancing a point in the narrative, intended to be interpreted as the "gist" of what transpired? To take this book SERIOUSLY*, you do not want to find yourself confronted with such questions.

The author advances a novel theory of crimes alleged to have been committed by Ed Edwards, some of which have been attributed to other perpetrators, a number of whom have been convicted and, if the author's theory is correct, are wrongfully so. If the author's timeline and attributions are correct, it would make Edwards the No. 1 serial killer in the world, par excellence, with a killing career spanning some 62 years or so. From the first kill in the late 1040s to the last in 2010 (if I'm remembering correctly), every one done with an extremely high level of skill and precision so as to not attract attention at the wrong moment, and not leave evidence pointing directly at him. Here is a purported serial killer who required no learning curve, no sloppy or hesitant early kills to acquire skill and technique. He was born a master, and that was by itself going too far for me to believe.

The author assembles various prison and judicial records (or unofficial reports, the formatting set in the book for some exhibited listings appears contrived to look official, but may not be an actual record in any real database or file, in this way becoming only a dressed-up synopsis notation) in an attempt to create a timeline tracking Edwards movements and correlating them to crimes. But, there are very large empty spaces in the result of this process where no firm evidence is forthcoming. The author also gives us the cryptograms from the Zodiac case, along with a purported solution and recovered plaintext messages via his friend Neal, a genius. The messages are interesting, for what it's worth, and feed into the notion that Edwards might be the Zodiac, but not one page is spent elucidating the process which arrived at this solution, nor a discussion about how Neal can be confident it is a valid solution.

Another opportunity to gather firm evidence to bolster the theory is completely wasted in the letters and conversations which the author and his friend Neal have with Edwards. Rather than frank factual discussions about their ideas and direct solicitations from Edwards for corroborating statements or dis-confirming evidence, the keystone players engage in a sort of tongue-in-cheek string-along game with the man. They adopt personas and hedge their information, structuring a contrived relationship with him which they think might get Edwards on their side; somehow make him more cooperative, less likely to be dismissive or engage in deliberate misdirection (a tactic the author warns Edwards is a master at).

Well, I think they seriously misplayed their chance. Edwards responded very cordially to all their inquiries, eludes that there are more bodies and stories to talk about than they apparently know about, and that in any case, a meeting ought to be arranged soon as he knows a state execution is already pending on other recent convictions. Yet, in my opinion, the author and his friend instead choose to continue to toy with Edwards about their theory and knowledge, and in due course not long after their direct communications open, Edwards' death sentence is carried out...leaving all their questions still effectively unanswered!

The rest of the author's evidence consists of little more than entirely subjective handwriting and photo analysis. Does this writing sample from Edwards' correspondence with the author look like this note left by the Zodiac? Does this face, known to be Edwards, sufficiently resemble this face, possibly the perpetrator of one of the other documented crimes?

And with that the whole book's case melts down to the simple judgement of the eye of the beholder. No real leads are developed or run down conclusively. No new evidence is brought to light. And most tragically, Edwards' is never really given the opportunity to come forward and explain how "It's ME" and provide details of the listed crimes and leads or details which could be later corroborated and verified, the substance that would form the foundation of a solid case.

If in fact Edwards is the killer he is alleged to be, guilty of the other murders the book attributes to him, especially the Zodiac and Black Dahlia killings, I am afraid that clear and convincing evidence of this fact may be, with Edwards' death, forever lost to history. But, at least with respect to the Zodiac legend, we can add both Edwards and the author's names to the very long list of people who have claimed to have clear and convincing evidence to have either been or known the Zodiac.



* This use of capitals is an INSIDE joke. The text is infected with plenty of words and sentences highlighted in all-caps; the author makes no use of typographical or other mechanisms for adding emphasis to his points (well, except for !!!). Instead he's written it all out in a sort of plain-text fashion that reads a little like an emailed screed from a CRACKPOT. Too bad really, as I don't think he is one, exactly.

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Review: Radiation: What It Is, What You Need to Know

Radiation: What It Is, What You Need to Know by Robert Peter Gale
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is reasonable at addressing commonplace radiophobia and addresses radiation from all sources, natural and man made, especially medical. A lesser amount of attention was given to accidental radiation releases from nuclear power, and given it was for primarily this reason I chose to read the book, I was slightly disappointed. In all though, I found it worthwhile.

I am one of those people who are of the opinion that if we wish to maintain and enhance our standard of living for the future, especially if we ultimately decide that fossil-fuel carbon dioxide inputs need to be eliminated as much as possible, then only nuclear power will be able to maintain us in the energy-available standard to which we've become accustomed. More energy makes life more productive and more enjoyable and more long-lasting for all. We should be efficient about our use, certainly, but energy abundance give us comfort and choice. We would not have this under a purely renewable-source energy economy. So, does it make sense to exclude nuclear power on safety grounds, from the outset? That's a question I was hoping the book would help me answer.

In the book, nuclear power disasters were discussed, just not in the clearest way, and the information given was fragmented across the chapters. I hoped for an answer to the question of whether it's actually necessary to cordon off large territorial exclusion zones in response to such catastrophes, in the interests of protecting human health. I was left to gather the fragments presented in the book, and make a judgement about this myself, which ended up like this:

In such disasters there three isotopes which convey just about all the radioactivity exposure risk to people in the general vicinity of the release: I-131, Cs-137, and Sr-90.

I-131 is risky, but mostly to children, and only for a short time (about three months overall), and only if foodstuffs produced within the affected area aren't temporarily replaced with outside supplies during the danger period. In Japan, food was handled expertly and most Japanese have iodine rich diets which tend to make them far less at-risk to start with.

Cs-137 is pretty ubiquitous, and has a very long half-life, making it especially concerning to the public. But this long half-life also means that the activity of the element is very low, reducing risk. Its biological half-life is also quite short, happily, further greatly reducing risks to human health. Any amount of it you do manage to ingest is likely to be excreted again before hardly any of it at all will have a chance to deposit radioactive energy in your tissue. So the great concern over this, perhaps second most prevalent element released in an accident, is probably misplaced.

Sr-90 has a half-life similar to Cs-137, but has a complex biological half-life. To our bodies, it resembles calcium, and so some proportion may end up migrating into bones and teeth, where it will probably stay long enough to release a good portion of its radioactive energy.

This is pretty much all the book has to say on those matters: two-to-one in favor of the idea that our reaction to the risks from a catastrophic nuclear accident is hysterical. The Sr-90 question deserves more attention. How much of this is present around an accident zone? What's the risk?

Since this is supposed to be a book review, I won't detail them here, but I've encountered various materials that offer me some pretty great hope for Cs-137 in particular, that this is just not enough of a risk to human health to warrant massive exclusion zones with their life-altering permanent evacuations and costly and elaborate washing and soil-stripping operations. According to this work, people could return to their homes and lives in the zone like that around Fukushima right now, if they wanted to, and not be at significant added risk for future radiogenic health problems.

For Sr-90, while a significant product of fission, it's non-volatile nature makes it much less likely than the others to escape to the environment in significant amounts during a disaster. This may be the best reason to allay concerns with it. Sr-90 was more of a risk during the era of atmospheric atomic weapons testing, and for the Japanese atomic bomb survivors, from the fallout nuclear weapons produce. This main source of Sr-90 exposure has long been now, happily, over.

I-131 seems to be the single biggest risk in a reactor disaster, and with its short half-life, within a few months of a point immediately following a meltdown with containment loss, it is simply no longer a factor, it has all decayed away. In the early phase, people should do their best to avoid exposure if they can, but for most it will be enough simply to eat clean food from outside the affected area, and follow limited evacuation for those most at risk (e.g. families with young children).

For people like the Japanese, who have ready access to clean replacement foodstuffs, and a diet rich in natural iodine, little special action is needed. Most are best served by eating outside food and waiting things out.

For others, like those near Chernobyl in 1986, short-term evacuation with supplemental iodine administration, particularly to the young, would've produced similarly low levels of risk. The impoverished condition of most of the population, and lack of a robust food system were main drivers increasing their risks.

However, in both cases once the I-131 has decayed off there's no longer much risk. People could move back into the zone and resume life as before. To allay fear, those who want them could obtain dosimeters to understand and place into perspective the actual radioactivity they are receiving. Most people would probably see amounts very close to the original background radiation anyway. A few may see more, and this can be either rationalized in terms of measuring it against statistics (an education requirement attaches to do this effectively). Or, anyone who feels uncomfortable by the amount they see, no matter how small, can be allowed to take charge of their lives as before and choose to move away. In this way, people are empowered to freely identify and manage their risks as they choose, just as in other parts of their lives.

The important takeaways here are (1) people are overly fearful of radiation, despite living lives continuously within its effects, and in some cases depending on it /for/ health, (2) understanding the real risks from radiation may allow us to overcome these fears and make more intelligent choices regarding how we obtain the energy we need to enjoy the lives we desire.

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Review: Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century

Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century by Thomas E. Woods Jr.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



You'll know we've made good progress reclaiming the Republic when plural forms of denominating the United States return to common language. This helpful perspective illuminates how this a one time federation of States has devolved into a set of almost mere administrative districts of The State.

"Cooperative Federalism" is what one clumsy-yet-slick YouTube channel called our present state of affairs (Crash Course, made possible with support from PBS).

This book shows you how any such sense of federalism as that is nonsensical and is no federalism at all, yet we (or the government) continue to use that term because not doing so would be to admit a bit too plainly that the Constitution stopped having any serious force at the root of our Republic almost since it got going, certainly after the Civil War, and ever more starkly so in the decades since then.

This book shows that the path to restore the originally designed balance is not so hard to see, yet would still require courage and some difficult to manage sense of agreement among fellow States in order to see results. Herding cats, that would be.

The book also shows that a big part of the problem for our present era is the distortion of our history that's taken place through the public education system's civics curriculum. It's a short walk to start sounding like a conspiracy theorist, and yet it needn't be any planned conspiracy that got us to this point...just simple step-wise expediency and time.

The book offers a refreshing take at what it would be like swimming up that particular stream.



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Review: Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk by Massimo Pigliucci

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



(unedited and lightly proofed)

I found this book well worth reading, esp. the last 30 pages or so. I withheld two stars from my rating mostly for what didn't happen in Chapter 6. If you're short on time, here's a shortcut approach to getting the book's chief take-away:

Start with Chapter 11, § "Science as a Bayesian Algorithm" (page 275 in the edition I read from), and read from there through Chapter 12 and the Conclusion. That'll be about 31 pages. The essence of the book and its take-away for readers is right there. Glance at the footnotes for that portion too. After this, if you're wanting more depth, rewind to the beginning and start. Otherwise, you'll have the most important bit and will be primed to think about Goldman's Five Criteria when evaluating the judgements of experts you may be exposed to, no matter what the topic of interest. That will serve you quite well. This last part of the book is really the only part that to me affirmatively addressed the statement in the subtitle, "How to tell science from bunk." That there wasn't more to flesh out the premise of the subtitle perhaps was also a reason I withheld some stars.

As for the rest of the book, I felt there was somewhat less than I wanted on the philosophy of science and science-vs.-pseudoscience. The types of logical fallacy are important, and didn't get much more than an incidental treatment here. I need bolstering in this area myself, and didn't get it here. Types of logical fallacy seem to show up very often in arguments portrayed in media, so having a toolkit for this would help in making quick evaluation of what some "news" program's analyst or magazine article's author is trying to sell you.

The history of the development of science is interesting backstory, and worth including, but I think if other parts of this book were edited down to make room for it, I would have appreciated a different cut.



That's about it for the hard review. In the remaining space, I'm going to talk about a silent parade of elephants that sit quietly among you as you read Chapter 6, which is good, but could really be a whole book in itself if you wanted to address said elephants. As it is, the author pretty much confines himself to an orthodox narrative and leaves the elephants unaddressed (perhaps he wasn't even aware of them).

Chapter 6 addresses the relationship of science and politics by focusing on the global warming issue, which is too bad in my view, because this issue has too much baggage attached to it for many lay readers, myself included, and as a result it makes too narrow a survey of the relationships between them.

There is much more to say about the relationship of politics and science, and I won't touch on any of it except to suggest that this alliance of politics and science (where it gets the majority of its funding now, a relatively recent innovation for good or ill) is a key reason behind the anti-intellectualism addressed in the book. "Scientific American" magazine, for example, today could be regarded more as a public-policy advocacy magazine which derives its authority from the science it portrays, rather than a magazine devoted to the promotion of science, and dissemination of its discoveries. The politically focused parts of the magazine have become dominant over the pure science articles. The pure science features have also been cut down in length and scope to make room for the political, with more reliance on freelancing science writers over the researchers themselves, who used to write up their own features more often.

When the name of science is used to justify political ends, and those ends run counter to basic human liberties, or even simple expectations about the role of government in a polity, the resentment for the politic bleeds over into a mistrust of science too. Science then gets tossed out wholesale, at worst, as just additional government propaganda. The solution may be greater separation. Science should retain its typical conservative (in the non-political sense) approach and disclaim public policy action when the science upon which the policy is relying for its authority, doesn't support that policy. We have good science supporting bad policy, and when the policy fails or backfires, the public will (and has) link the failure with the science, and this may be unjustified if the science didn't support the policy action in the first place...so scientists should say so...beforehand!

I have serious reservations about the conventional presentation of current climate change science. I have to do several gut-checks each time I confront it to try and evaluate if my own biases can be justified. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I think they can, yet I will listen. But I am also tired of being labelled a "denialist" just for having my doubts, and being able to conceive of a mechanism whereupon the science process could be hijacked for a political result. This chapter doesn't soothe this ache any, but instead left me with an impression along the lines of: "You shouldn't take my word for it, but if in fact you don't, you're a denialist because Al Gore got it mostly right. Just sayin'..." Oh man.

Not addressed in Chapter 6 were issues like the co-opting of science for political ends. And climate science could be the poster child for this. We could say that the IPCC's pronouncements that current global warming is human caused are true. Our national and supernational governments immediately leap to a conclusion that they now have license to take action, and that they also know the appropriate action to take and the proper way to assess and balance the consequences of any such action. We've been presented truckloads of new proposals or in some instances been saddled with new law and regulation about various forms of anti-carbon or carbon-trading tax schemes. Evaluations of the likely impact of such schemes all so far as I am aware, all suggest that these will ultimately have insignificant effect, but do significant economic damage in the meanwhile, and simultaneously bolster and centralize government authority over economic affairs. Whoops! Was that what we wanted? The science may be sound, and careful analysis should answer any skepticism in time, but what we really ought to be skeptical of are governments and their plans to fix things. The track record is terrible, and the incentives almost always line up in ways that are destructive to long term freedom, prosperity, and enjoyment of life.

Few realize or take the time to contemplate the implications that the IPCC is primarily a government-consensus body, not a union of concern scientists. Further, it's divided into two groups, Working Group 1, which is charged with public relations, advocacy, and public policy, and whose work is usually what is reported by media. The other is Working Group 2, which in my opinion is the group to actually focus your attention, for this group is more interested in doing the research and integrating the scientific picture.

The results of present science and their interpretation between the two working groups, to my present understanding, has a wide gulf. While WG1 tells you we're sure what's going on here, it's going to be terribly catastrophic for all life on earth, especially human, and the fast majority (>90%) of scientists agree, WG2 is far more conservative, restricting itself to a more reserved opinion that the climate is changing, and that humans are influencing that change, but how bad it could be, and how it might go anyway if humans had no role is not clear. WG2 is more open about its confidence in current understanding of the mechanisms behind the climate system, and shows that the agreement among scientists is not so uniform as WG1 would like you to think; that the basis and confidence for selecting any particular sort of mitigation strategy is very premature at present.

WG2 shows that this science is largely one of measuring and modelling, making ever more complex data models to fit the observed historical data, then extrapolating these models to attempt to forecast the future. But why would such a model work? Answering this key question requires actually understanding the climate system, and unfortunately the focus has been too much on the data modelling (it's easier and gets funding). Here's a lesson on what that can get you:

Ptolemy had presumed the orbits of the planets were circular, and made predictions for their motion that soon strayed from observation. Not wishing to abandon the idea of circular orbits, he was able to introduce increasingly complex modelling terms he called "epicycles" that permitted this original concept to approach any desired level of accuracy and permit the observations to match his model. Great! At least you'll be able to predict where in the sky to look for a planet at any arbitrary time, but holding onto the Ptolemaic model, no matter how precise, would deprive you of actually understanding what was really going on: the planets' orbits are elliptical, not circular, and the reason is gravity. If you don't know this, you cannot progress in understanding the solar system or motion itself. Ptolemy's epicycles would've sufficed to predict the map of the solar system on the sky, but if we had held to them, we would have become stuck in his era, and our modern world would likely look more like his did then, and less like ours does today.

Our climate science is very possibly "Ptolemaic" at this point. And disagreeing with or remaining justifiably skeptical of the IPCC's orthodoxy gets you shunned as a "denialist." I think using such labels at this point is more a way to foreclose legitimate dissent, give license to policy ends for political reasons, and perhaps safeguard government funding streams to certain corners of the science establishment.

Okay, I shall end this massive digression and this review with a nod to Chapter 5, which is very useful if you are a "denialist" because you'll need to consider the sources that are feeding your "denialism". A process of re-normalization and filtering may need to be applied if there is any hope at screening out bias which may be present in opposition arguments. Ultimately, this could require you to become expert in the subject yourself. The end of the book, cited at the top of this writeup, is most helpful in giving you a strategy to proceed short of making that great leap to becoming expert.



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Fukushima Radioactivity a Complete Non-issue

I write this in reaction to a discussion group posting I saw recently, citing this article from The Register

I admit to having a starry-eyed youth regarding nuclear power. Growing up in the 80s, I viewed it as a boogeyman that made all the adults wary, but which just made the industry interesting to me. I saw all the old 50s "Our Friend the Atom"-type films. It seemed like _the_ miracle that would solve all our energy needs. We could be fabulously wealthy with essentially limitless electrical power available for just fractions of a penny/kWh.

Then, in April 1986, I lived under a mild pandemonium as Chernobyl became a household word, and civic officials from my town began patrolling sidewalks with civil-defense issued Geiger counters from the 50s, waiting for the arrival of the fallout clouds (despite living in Northern Minnesota; the fallout never came...of course). Terrible, frightening, and captivating for the curiosity of a young boy. Gradually, the bloom came off the rose. I witnessed recountings of the Three-Mile Island accident. I was scared by the spectre of films like "Silkwood" and "The China Syndrome". I Began to view it like other magic-bullet cure-alls of past and present. Hypothetical promise unable to live up to testable reality.

Before the 2011 Tohoku earthquake/tsunami, I was already doubtful about the future of nuclear power. I thought that, much like wind/solar/etc., it was a power technology that was just-competitive only because of massive subsidy and investment by government, making its real cost far greater than it's advertised price.

I've since learned that there is too much conflation in the minds of the public of the two kinds of nuclear tech: weapons and power generation. Weapons tech is completely incompatible with civilian power generation, and the two technologies overlap very thinly at one end of their Venn diagrams. The inputs into civilian use simply cannot be repurposed for weapons use. Power reactors of any design simply cannot become nuclear explosives (though one design, Chernobyl's RBMK, can explode (by steam) if operated incompetently). I've also learned that next to the modern-era renewables subsidy (most especially wind power), the subsidies to the nuclear industry are just about non-existent, and only very slightly more than that handed out to fossil fuel sources (yeah, we subsidize it all).

I'm opposed to subsidy on general principle, and I think that the cost disadvantage of nuclear power today can be explained by the largely unnecessary and over-reactive nature of government regulation of the industry (safety standards too stringent vs. real risks, and protection and waste mitigation policies administered in inefficient and idiosyncratic ways, and a culture of secrecy bourne mostly out of US Navy pressure (read: ADM Rickover) to ensure that Soviet nuclear tech remains behind the US), and also due to available economies of scale going unexploited (each plant is a unique and custom facility, insufficient total reactor buildout, etc.). With private market development (which definitely would require public acceptance, presently unlikely), I believe the already small price differential compared with coal would diminish to negligibility, and definitely be superior to oil and nat-gas.

In the wake of the Tohoku quake/tsunami, I became further pessimistic of nuclear power, esp. a completely private industry without government involvement, namely: how could the industry secure for itself the necessary liability insurance to cover any disaster, like  Fukushima, absent a government backstop?

Over the past several years, I've gradually come back around on the potential of nuclear power. I still think, for the present, it's unlikely we'll see much growth in the industry worldwide, but I now think this will mostly be for reasons of public attitudes, not of economic or technological impracticability. If you're one of the many who are convinced by the present climate science, to believe that we are responsible for a carbon-fueled global warming trend that can only be mitigated by forced de-carbonizing (I am not)...then you especially must re-examine nuclear power, because it is the only economically viable alternative whose technology is mature, and that can be produced affordably and at scale, compared with other renewable sources.

Since 2011, I've been studying radiation. It's /the/ great bugaboo in the public mind when they think of nuclear power. People are too afraid of it. If you want to find a nuclear power station, with government regulations what they are today, your best bet is to map and search for the conspicuous hole in the natural background levels! Our fear is caused in part by an obsolete model (the Linear/No Threshold model) of biological response to radiation doseages. Especially at the small end of the curve described by this model, most of our data is interpolated or simply guessed at, the signals of damage have been insufficient to reliably measure. Yet this old model implies that there is "no safe level" of radiation. That conclusion is highly dubious, borne mostly out of an abundance of caution given significant gaps in our scientific understanding. New research (too preliminary as yet) suggests that the may be a hormetic effect produced by low-levels of radiation above the average background level of most places. But even as considered under current practice, the LNT model /is/ saying that the lower the dose, the lower the risk...so the question which must be asked is, what /is/ the specific risk? Perhaps in the totality of your living situation, and relative to other risks, living in a previously contaminated disaster zone would, for you, represent an insignificant added risk to enjoying a healthy, happy, long and satisfying life!

Even with the handful of nuclear power disasters, including Japan's, an insufficient amount of radioactivity has been released to do much harm to anybody. Most people will be totally unaffected, medically. In fact, it can already be said that more people were harmed or killed as a result of mandating evacuations in Japan, than would have come to harm in the future (due to elevated cancer rates) from the added radiation exposures. Both in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and in Fukushima's, the real threat from contaminated soil and water is too small to warrant having those exclusion zones persist. Your skin is adequate shielding from the radioactivity of the released substances. In most situations, the volume of air or structure nearby will stop any emitted radiation long before it even reaches you. The real threat is from ingesting radioactive isotopes which would then have an extended opportunity to do damage to your cells while your body worked to remove them. But even here, the quantity of isotopes available for ingesting is simply too small to hardly warrant mention. The fear factor would preclude it being legal, but it's likely you could drink milk from a cow that was eating hay grown on contaminated soil, and eat fish modestly contaminated from swimming in the contaminated waters near the reactor sites, and live a full lifetime free from any side effects.

Folks served electricity from a coal-fired plant are generally exposed to more radioactivity from the coal itself, and the air emissions and ground waste after its combustion, than they would be had they lived right next door to a nuclear power station and been powered by it, instead.

All that to say that, even when nuclear power goes horrifically and catastrophically wrong, compared to other sources of power, it's orders of magnitude safer for human populations. How many coal miners died last year, and every year since coal became a primary fuel source? How many oil workers? How many refinery plant accident deaths? How much death, disability and destruction from flyash retention dams which have given way?

And Fukushima taught the industry lessons, such that in the future (if the public will accept it) reactors will be better designed to withstand such cataclysm without releasing anything dangerous. Most the operating reactors in the US are pressurized-water types. The designs evolved from similar designs used for the nuclear-powered carriers and submarines in the US Navy. Now you talk about robust: the Navy nukes are put through more strenuous regimes of operation than the earthquake/tsunami gave Fukushima Daiichi: extremes of load, extremes of temperature, extremes of vibration and angles of tilt. They've all operated without fail. There hasn't yet been a nuclear-plant related disaster aboard a US Navy ship. Simply building to the standard of these Navy reactors eliminates most risks.

This is already way TL;DR, but the worries about nuclear waste are similarly vastly overblown. I'll simply indicate that what is regarded as waste today, the retired and casked spent-fuel assemblies currently stored on-site for lack of a geologic repository a-la Yucca Mountain, Nevada, are not especially dangerous even if they were left un-casked. They represent a harvest of only 3-4% of the obtainable nuclear energy within, and so are actually a valuable future fuel resource (to alternative reactor designs than could extract it). Even if unpursued as a future fuel source, the operational lifetime of a plant and the relative harmlessness of the material itself is such that the most prudent course of action would be to just secure the sealed casks permanently on-site after decommissioning. The earth will long be a cinder from the expansion of the sun as a red giant, before we could burn up enough nuclear fuel to make the spent-fuel waste require any serious land area to store.

So...now I'm circumspect. I once again believe in the untapped potential of nuclear power. I think that future research and education may show that the post-catastrophe exclusion zones of Chernobyl and Fukushima may not be necessary to protect human life in the aftermath of what are the sufficiently rare worst-case scenarios for nuclear-power gone wrong. With adequate demonstration of contingencies to minimize the rate of such incidents (these would become actuarial and public-image considerations), I think a key critical stumbling block for nuclear power, a privately generated and maintainable market for accident liability insurance to bulwark the remaining risk, becomes realizable. With that, there is no great economic barrier to entry for nuclear power tech to achieve dominant adoption rates. /If/ the public will accept it in their backyard, and if government will permit it, plants could be built and come online w/o any coersive economic incentives that we currently use for renewables. The true cost of nuclear would be measurable, and I think it's likely to be low enough to once again have a shot at being the /magic-bullet/ promised us in the 1950s.

There will never be the magnitude of obtainable power from all the various renewables, that there is right now from nuclear. Whether we actually tap into and exploit it will depend on education and public attitudes, which are currently very poor. If we must de-carbonize, unless we shift to nuclear we will be forced into accepting a very austere energy future, as renewables cannot reliably come up to replace what would be lost from fossil-fuel, even if we could afford it (which we couldn't...a close look at subsidy levels to renewables will make that clear).

Most humans still find it quite difficult to accurately measure and quantify risk. Since 2011, I've become convinced that overall negative risks from non-nuclear power technologies are at least equal to or greater than those from nuclear power. Greater use of nuclear energy would allow us to reduce and perhaps eliminate reliance on coal, the dirtiest of the fossil-fuel sources and the backbone of electrical generation now; saving our oil-based sources for transportation that cannot be converted efficiently to utilize renewables (e.g. jet travel, diesel shipping). We could also perhaps feed more people, as this hopelessly misguided push for biofuel grown from land that might otherwise be growing food would be priced rightly back out of economic viability.

Not only is the Fukushima radiactivity a complete non-issue, it may just be the story that points the way to a new future course. It may be a phoenix rising.

More resources:

An important independent source of factual nuclear energy information.
A podcast on the impact of Fukushima radioactivity.
Take a look at Rod Adams' Atomic Insights, and follow @atomicrod on twitter.

Review: Signals: The Science of Telecommunications

Signals: The Science of Telecommunications by John Robinson Pierce

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



The most shocking thing I've learned from this book: the technology that makes phone number portability possible has existed in widespread deployment for USA customers since 1983!

That's it. The following association and implication of this statement is not within the book, but one I came to with information from other sources, including study of my own phone service billing, so permit this little digression:

***

This technology was developed and activated long-ago by phone companies to satisfy their internal needs. It has side benefits for external customers of phone service, who could from a technical standpoint access a portability feature. No providers actually made this capability available to subscribers back then.

In the 1990s, as cellular phones drove demand by subscribers to change service providers or service locations, these consumers increasingly desired to keep an old numbers. Eventually, this resulted in government regulations to "force" providers to make subscriber phone numbers portable. The new law compensated providers for their effort by legislating a number-portability tax, which feeds a subsidy program paying providers back for the administrative and technology overhead they insisted would be required to comply with the portability mandate.

This being the case...why are USA subscribers STILL paying federal line taxes to "pay" for the "hardship" phone companies say exists today. In fact, why were USA subscribers EVER paying this tax? The capability was already extant!

The truth is, since at least 1983 (before the portability laws) this capability has been an existing core property of national network! All subscriber lines are referred to by internal network numbers, and have separate external numbers (the number you dial). The association between these two numbers is established inside the phone network, by editing the switching databases in the part of the network your phone is attached to. This is something your chosen service provider must do to establish your service, regardless whether you wanted to port over an old number or were willing to accept an assignment of a new one.

This gives the phone companies the greatest internal flexibility, which is why they implemented it. For their needs. But WE subscribers pay for it, not by private company charges to our phone bills, where competition would work to bring about the best available price, but through legislatively mandated taxation, which works independent of market forces and where, years and decades now since implementation of this network function, we're STILL paying at a fixed rate; as though the supporting switch gear was just installed, and as if new switch gear today wasn't more feature-rich at a lower marginal cost like all other technology we buy.

The galling thing for me is that this is a capability that pre-existed the taxation, and was already necessarily factored into rate-structure for service. Because we foolishly allowed the government to make mandatory, a capability that from a technical standpoint was already available, we end up with a slightly less efficient and unreasonably more expensive system.

***

The book is not very deep, and aimed at curious individuals who know rather little about the field, and may have little interest in anything beyond acquiring a grand overview.

Curious and technically or mathematically adept people who are otherwise unaware of the field will gain entry points for followup to deeper learning.

I gather the authors were famous titans of comm technology's previous era. I found this a pleasantly easy reading introduction to the world of communications signals, with an early focus on the dawn of radio, and a later concentration on the development of telephone technology.

It's old enough that quite a lot has changed since the book was published. From the perspective of 1990, it's very interesting indeed to read the authors' forcasts for the future. Most of this turned out to be nearly spot-on. We have indeed gone almost entirely digital; optical fiber trunk lines are preferred both locally and internationally.

It's also interesting to read about past technologies that predated the wide adoption and development of internet services, that filled a niche and enjoyed some popularity in some countries for a while. Like videotext in the UK and France (especially France).

With videotext, the driver was a desire for interactivity with high-bandwidth content (video and graphics), but with only low-bandwidth channels available (analog modems). The solution there was to have the low-bandwidth channel control and high-bandwidth broadcast. You got some interactivity in the ability to select amongst a limited set of high-bandwidth object, essentially controlling your receiver to preset to you only the desired objects, and have the others coming over the TV broadcast filtered and discarded.

The future seems to be video-on-demand, delivered via the internet. And while access to fully interactive bandwidth has increased several orders of magnitude for most people, that bandwidth still is not yet wide enough in most cases for efficient service. E.g. it doesn't yet make sense to try to stream HD video content from a server direct to an end user device in most situations.

Yet with proliferation of smart cell-phones, etc., more people are coming to expect and demand access to high-bandwidth services beyond basic phone and low-bitrate web interactivity. They want to treat it like just another TV, and the devices themselves are capable of a good viewing experience, if only the content can be delivered.

We've made the internet work with high-bandwidth media by proliferating caching servers to disparate locations. I don't have data, but there might be more caching data centers online now than commercial broadcast TV transmitters.

In the future, we might want to re-examine neglected multicast technology as a means to get more service to more endpoints out of limited bandwidth channels.

This serves as an entry point into new realms of discussion, far afield from the book, so I end here.



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Review: Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



The book is mostly exposition of specific events in the history of the Sovietization of eastern Europe after WWII. It is very matter of fact, and doesn't stretch out too far in passing judgement on what happened, other than weakly conveying a sense that it was bad. I think that was on purpose, as I found the tales themselves did a good job of illustrating the oppression and "badness" resulting.

This is not intended to be a very serious review, more of a free-form stream of thoughts I'm having since finishing the book.

I think what I found most striking was, that whole nations and societies were quickly and (relatively easily) subsumed into a totalitarian regime with lasting impact to personal freedom and even basic mental and physical well-being. Even if your personal story, living within the regime, was rather benign (as a few were), you could still, mentally, feel the weight of the oppression.

What did that take? Really, I think this was an episode of an epidemic. A period of disease passing over the populations of eastern Europe as a kind of virus of pure ideas. A pathology of thought. Force was involved, certainly, but as the events of the fall of the Berlin wall so clearly demonstrated: always and everywhere, governments consist of some minority which imposes its will and authority upon a larger majority. This majority, acting perhaps under notions individual self-interest, tacitly acquiesces to the authority of the reigning minority (seeing no obvious alternative). The resultant state of affairs can be benign or tyrannical, and the critical realization is that there is nothing preordained about the outcome. You can just as easily land in a totalitarian horror show as in a free society, or at any place along this continuum.

Once set, that's a state of affairs which can persist for a surprisingly long time, possibly indefinitely in some cases. Until, all of a sudden it stops working. By the end of the book we have illustrated for us numerous cases of popular passive and active resistance to the regime. All of a sudden, a sort of critical mass is reached, and enough people stop accepting the authority of the people tasked with being the instruments of the regime. And these implementers, individually realize something alike with their fellows on the other side of the baton and shield. They blink, and the collective effect of these individual actions witnesses an earthquake in the political power landscape. The majority reclaim something of their natural human freedom. The upheaval will later settle out, and society will land at some other point on this continuum of free-unfree.

The fall of the wall, though not addressed specifically in the book, represents the ideas of the final chapters, and represents an idea I took away from a contemplation of the book's accounts. The fall was spontaneous, unplanned and unwanted by the reigning minority. A tipping point was reached as a new meme took root in the minds of enough of the public on both sides of the wall. The asymmetry of information in the hours immediately proceeding the mass descent of the public upon the Brandenburg gates served to be the final grain of sand that starts the whole pile to avalanche down toward a new level. The border guards, steeped in the undercurrents of dissatisfaction with the current oppressive state, and cut off from their leadership at this critical moment, were left to operate on their own individual best judgement. The crushing masses of cheering people on both sides were unprecedented, and seemed to suggest an idea in the minds of at least some of the guards, "perhaps these people know something important which I don't." And finally, when the first few brave individuals (possibly not as brave as you might think since they were acting under the belief that cross-border movement was no longer restricted) moved the final yards to cross the line, the guards had a choice: shoot or let-pass. And without specific orders, they chose not to act, just observe. And the massed majority retook possession of their own individual freedom in a brilliant moment.

This notion of how societies allow themselves to become oppressed, and later retake their freedoms, fascinates me. Within this book are stories tracing the descent of several societies of eastern Europe into fealty and bondage to the Soviet regime. It's frightening how easily it happened, and to be successful, how it had to have taken the action of the transmission of ideas as well as a small bit of targeted coercive force. As the wavefront of the Soviet meme spread, the previously infected peoples actively participated in the process of constraining and coercing the submission of people later exposed to the meme. From an active core, the regime oppressed itself into being. The oppression occasionally reflecting back upon the members within that active core, becoming a self-reinforcing situation for a good long time.

A free society or a totalitarian state? What makes either possible seems to come down to the culture of the moment and the ideas which hold the minds of the people therein. The regimes are sticky, though. Once one sort becomes established, whether benevolent, benign, or oppressive, it seems like it takes a outsized communication of ideas to reach a critical mass strong enough to reshape it into something else. But like an earthquake, the tension can seem to build almost completely unnoticed, until all of a sudden, enough people recognize their inner notions are not just their own, but the same as their neighbors, and the earth heaves and the waves sweep over. Cultural consciousness builds up like a pile of sand grains. At some unknown point, the last few grains before the avalanche fall and bring about an awakening. Depending on the ideas represented by those grains, we seem fated to either knuckle-under to an oppressive tyranny, or emerge into a refounding of respect for our own freedom and our neighbors.



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