Your waste bad; my waste good

 

Not the clean-up's mascot,
but it made a good story

Recently the BBC reported 

Japan has begun releasing treated radioactive water from its damaged Fukushima power plant into the Pacific Ocean - 12 years after a nuclear meltdown.

This kicked up a stink in the usual places (notably social media). China rushed to  ban Japanese seafood (carefully avoiding the admission that it has several reactors discharging 3 or 4 times as much as the planned 30-year Fukushima discharge ...

<parenthesis>
(about 22  tera-becquerels per year over 30 years, as opposed to the 60-80 tera-becquerels discharged by China's plants. Sellafield discharges 150 tera-becquerels per year into the Irish Sea. A huge plant in France discharges many  times that into the North Sea)

<source>
These figures...

<background>
A tera- becquerel is 1,0[oops]000,000,000,000 becquerels, and More or Less asked its usual question: 'Is this a big number?'
</background>~

... come from the BBC World Service's More or Less, which concludes with the interesting view that anxiety about nuclear accidents does more damage (in terms of real harms to public health) than the accidents themselves. It's only 9 minutes long and is well worth a listen.

</source>

 That BBC report says

Traditional female divers in South Korea, known as "haenyeo", tell the BBC they are anxious.

"Now I feel it's unsafe to dive in," says Kim Eun-ah, who has been doing the job off Jeju Island for six years. "We consider ourselves as part of the sea because we immerse ourselves in the water with our own bodies," she explains.

Strangely, those divers don't seem to be concerned about the much higher radioactive discharges made by Chinese power stations  – another example  of the point made at the end of that programme: people are useless at comparing risks. (What the programme doesn't add is that politicians know this, and exploit the weakness as far as they can.) 

</parenthesis>

...). 

Is that the time?

b

Update: 2023.08.31.14:40 – Added PS

PS

But the fact that almost all scientific analysis accepts this discharge as 'safe' ...

<parenthesis>
(one observer pointed out that the risk incurred by a Japanese fish diet was vastly outweighed by the radiation dose experienced in an inter-continental flight, because of exposure to cosmic rfays and other scary stuff in the ionosphere)
</parenthesis>

... doesn't mean that everyone gives it their blessing. The discharge may be safe, but it is not an example of best practice. Look at the dates in articles such as this; the earliest is ten years old, and most were published in the last five years. The safety standards are much older than that. International safety standards are hammered out over decades:

The Convention on Nuclear Safety was adopted on 17 June 1994 by a Diplomatic Conference convened by the International Atomic Energy Agency at its Headquarters from 14 to 17 June 1994 [HD:my emphasis].

In fairness....

<tangent subj-"self-editing">

The cliché that came to mind was 'to be fair'; but I didn't want to sound like something out of a football interview.
</tangent>

..it has been updated 4 times since then. But the latest update pre-dates the original Fukushima Daiishi accident by more than 8 years. We're making a mess of the planet, and the prospects won't get any better if polluters insist on toeing lines drawn decades ago.

Visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic.

CAM, an alumni rag that I'm sent...

<autobiographical-note>
(and which, much to MrsK's chagrin... 

<tangent> 

I wonder what happened to that word to make it lose favour at the turn of the eighteenth century. Perhaps it's anti-French prejudice – a bit rich when you think about it:

From the Collins Online Dictionary

</tangent> 

 ...doesn't go immediately into the recycling...,

<explanatory-note>
I use the Letters section of the latest edition as an indication of what's worth reading in the previous  one.
</explanatory-note>

...)
 </autobiographical-note>

... has a  short feature with the title...

<ducking-and-covering>
(and no, I still refuse to use the Newspeak "titled"; for more details than is good for your sanity, see the <rant />  here. In short, for socio-historical reasons, British English needs two words to do duty for three meanings, whereas American English has a more comfortable two x two; so the Chicago Manual of Style can pontificate as much as it wants. I know what I know.
</ducking-and-covering>

...This Idea Must Die: <object-of-iconoclastic-target-practice>. Last month the idea in the crosshairs was 'Learning styles determine outcomes'.

Visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic. The concept of learning styles has been with us since the late 1990s and early 2000s...

<autobiographical-note>
Aha – that's why it was so popular when I was studying for my PGCE in 2004-5.
</autobiographical-note> 

...,when it was accepted that to optimise learning, teachers must identify the particular learning style of a child and align the way they presented information accordingly. 

Only, it’s a myth [sic...

<bugbear> 
I do wish people would stop using this cliché ('myth' to mean widely-held mistaken belief or misapprehension. Still, we know what the writer means, so perhaps I should get a life; I've been banging on about this since the mid '70s, and this boat has not only sailed; it's way beyond the horizon.
</bugbear> 

. ..]. There is no evidence whatsoever to back it up. The idea has been extensively and empirically tested to see if children learn the most in conditions that align with their preferred ‘learning style’. They don’t. Yet a systematic review published in the journal Frontiers in 2020 found that teachers still believe they do. In fact, the review found that 89 per cent of teachers self-reported [sic...

<bugbear> 
Oh dear. Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.
</bugbear>  

...] a belief in matching instruction to learning styles 

Source

'bogus interventions and frameworks': from CAM article

To be clear: the writer is not saying 'Teachers should spout stuff regardless of the individual abilities/interests/needs of their students. That would be ridiculous. Of course it's part of the teacher's job to be aware of these things, and to tailor their delivery accordingly. He is simply saying aardVARK hunters [Visual, Auditory, Reading/writing and Kinesthetic] are wasting their time and energy.

The letter I sent to CAM may not see the light of day, but here it is:

Professor Astle is right: 'bogus interventions and frameworks' are rife in the world of education. In fact, I think Michael Gove's notorious dismissal of experts was directed at these self-styled experts peddling non-evidence-based 'solutions'. When, as a very mature student, I took my PGCE more than 30 years after my time at Cambridge, one of my eyebrows was almost permanently raised.

He identifies teacher-training as a suitable locus for the introduction of sanity. But earlier in his article he cites the fly in the ointment: that 89% of self-confessed obscurantists already ensconced in the profession. During traditional teaching practice, students will perforce be exposed to this sort of indoctrination. If PGCE students are to survive their training (most of my colleagues on that course just drank the Kool-Aid)... 

<inline-ps>  

(and went on to increase that 89% figure) 

</inline-ps> 

...Professor Astle and his colleagues need to provide persuasive and unarguable evidence that commonly-held beliefs are wrong.

That last sentence presents a wan hope. One or two academic papers aren't going to turn the tide of belief in this 21st-century snake oil. The PGCE is a trial by paperwork. Whatever that paperwork says, the influence of the teaching practice staff-room, featuring those 'bogus interventions and frameworks', will outweigh it. Paul Simon was right:

When I think back at all the crap I learned in highschool

It's a wonder I can think at all.

b

Update: 2023.09.02.19:40 – Added <inline-ps />

Water, water everywhere

...and the trouble is, it's not flat  The trade winds make it pile up on one side of the planet, and when the trade winds vary - as they do, largely unpredictàbly - the water slooshes back and forth, with earth-shattering consequences.

This is el Niño,  officially known as 'El Niño Southern Oscillation' (ENSO).

<bon-ish_mot critique="It doesn't really work, does it?">

With its sister la Niña (the same, but with polarities reversed).

should the terrible twins be known together as the SOENSO?
<bon-ish_mot>

A June 8 BBC explanation says

The phenomenon was first observed by Peruvian fisherman in the 1600s, who noticed that warm waters seemed to peak near the Americas in December.

They nicknamed the event "El Niño de Navidad", Christ Child in Spanish.

And Advent has started early this year: the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced the beginning of the latest El Niño in June 2023:

A seven month Advent. One tries ones best to be a glass-half-full sort of person, but - as some wag on the radio last week put it - it's half full of  economy cava rather than champagne.

If that explanation is not enough, I recommend the edition of The Climate Question, devoted specifically to El Niño, which starts off from some mysterious structures criss-crossing the Pampa de Mocan. These were pre-hispanic earthworks, investigated by the Proyecto Arqueo-Ambiental de la Pampa de Mocan

The north coast of Peru is a relatively flat area, with rivers running across it from the Andes mountains down to the Pacific Ocean, making it susceptible to extreme flooding during El Niño. However, using a flexible irrigation system, ancient farmers in the Pampa de Mocan were able to prepare for these sudden floodwaters and use them for agricultural production. Canals were constructed in the area from the Early Horizon Period (1100 BC) up to the Late Intermediate Period (c.AD 1460). These canals had multiple functions, carrying river water at some points in their use-lives and diverting floodwater at others, followed by a third life as agricultural fields once they were no longer used to channel water.

Discussions about the management of natural disasters are especially relevant in the present day, with most modern strategies focused on predicting and detecting events and mitigating their effects. The research from the Pampa de Mocan reveals that pre-Hispanic farmers in this region had a different approach, using opportunistic agricultural techniques to turn El Niño from a catastrophe into an advantage, and allowing them to utilise the Pampa de Mocan as both a productive agricultural area and a risk-management strategy.

PAAPM article

<anachronism_alert>

As these irrigation ditches were pre-hispanic, how did they know it was called El Niño? Some kind of miracle, I reckon.

</anachronism_alert>

 The Mochica civilisation, which built and/or maintained these irrigation ditches during the first millennium CE (I say 'and/or' because the archeologists of PAAPM haven't ruled out the possibility that they were dug in pre-Moche times) were eventually wiped out by a 'Super El Niño'. But, as that El Niño programme observes, they did a lot better with a few hand-tools (not sure whether they had technology as advanced as a wheelbarrow) than current Peruvian authorities.

And for some more glass-half-full stuff have a listen to the latest edition of The Climate Question, featuring an extended interview with the new chairman of the IPCC...

<newspeak_alert>

They're so right-on on that programme that they call him 'the new chair'. I suppose someone who speaks for the agency would be a spoke. I know there are issues with the male-bias of the language, but this sort of '-man' is just an undefined  person (German man) as opposed to a man (German Mann). And in any case Professor Jim Skea is one of us poor chromosomatically challenged caitiffs.
</newspeak_alert>

..., who you will be relieved to hear, has his fingers crossed as to whether governments are going to meet their net-zero goals.

That's all for now.

b

Update 2023.12.29.12:00 – Added PS

PS A few months after  I published this, an article in  The Conversation, added to the picture, with particular reference to fresh water:

It is a well-known fact that water is the key to life on Earth. But it is less well known that only about 1% of all water on the planet is fresh water available to humans, plants or land-based animals.

The rest is in the oceans, or locked up in polar ice sheets and rocks. In a climate changing world, the global distribution of that 1% takes on a whole new significance.

 It went on to give specific information about the effects of El Niño in Australia (and in the the southern hemisphere generally (in unquoted bits of the article):

...Drying will change vegetation patterns and further increase temperatures, which could be above 35°C for large parts of the year by 2100 if emission rates continue to be high. This would have severe effects on the health of humans and habitats.

Similarly, drying in central Australia has knock-on effects on weather and climate for coastal areas where most of Australia’s major cities and population are situated. Drying trends are also being experienced in the south-west and south-east of the country leading to habitat stresses and change, wildfires, depleted rivers and impacts on human health, especially in urban areas.

As with many aspects of climate, the exact nature and scale of changes and impacts are hard to predict or model at local or regional scales. But this new paper points to clear shifts in patterns and complex climate processes in the southern hemisphere which will reduce water availability during El Niño events.

Drying will generate additional stresses on habitats and species in key regions. It will also impact human populations with varying capacities to adapt and, ultimately, our global food systems. Although the southern hemisphere is mostly water, what happens there really matters for the whole planet.

My bad - a mis-step in the culture wars minefield

<apologies-for-absence>
Sorry. In a recent frenzy of tidying I accidentally deleted everything but this update (the 08.06 one). I imagine it's squirreled away in a trash bin somewhere, but until I find it ...
</apologies-for-absence>

<STOP_PRESS update="2023.08.07.10:15">

No, it's gone without trace. Here are the highlights: I've better things to do than try to reproduce the deathless prose. 

I noticed some time after the fact that Elon's fearless scythe had cut off an account I had on the app formerly known as Twitter:

This was accompanied by a screed that explained steps I could take to appeal/reverse/otherwise fix the ruling. As my last tweet was dated back in March (I haven't  been inclined to spend much time on Twitter since  Mr Musk started his race to the bottom), I didn't think it worth my while to go through all this,. but here's the gist:

I suspect, though, that my unwitting transgression was my use of 'cotton-pickin'' in a tweet about Nadine Dorries. Look hard enough and there's racism at the root of this term. But I used it in a paraphrase of something Deputy Dawg used to say before jumping to a wrong-headed or obvious conclusion; his southern drawl should have warned me that I might be treading on some toes..

</STOP_PRESS>

 

Update: 2023.08.06.07:10  – Added PS

PS:

 <background> 

As Li'l Miss Barnacle's Long Goodbye ticked into its seventh eighth week, this tweet appeared:

 

 

Having said she was standing down "with immediate effect" seven eight weeks ago, she cannot now stand down until Parliament is back in session (after the party conferences, or – perhaps more significantly – after the publication date of her book). So her constituents ("marvellous", according to her June tweet) will remain unrepresented until then. I imagine the local booksellers will have  got their pre-orders in.

</background> 

PPS And the last bit of the repair:

<REPAIR Update="2023.08.08.12:55">      

Victoria Boliviana in the wild

As a passing thought I mentioned a TV programme I had seen about the discovery and naming of a new giant waterlily:

For a (stupid) moment I thought "Aha, so that's what Victoria means, but as any fule kno Victoria was the goddess of victory, and there's nothing particularly victorious about a waterlily. No, the reason for the name was just that a Victorian collector wanted to curry favour with his monarch, just as William Herschel had done with her grandfather;

<background> 

Herschel, a devoted subject of England’s King George III, suggested that the new planet be named Georgium Sidus, or George’s Star. This went against the naming convention that had developed in the Western world, in which planets were named after Roman deities. It was also less appealing to astronomers outside Great Britain for obvious reasons. Several alternative names were tossed around, including Herschel (after its discoverer) and Neptune. German astronomer Johann Elert Bode, whose observations helped establish the new object as a planet, suggested another possibility: Uranus.

Bode’s suggestion became the most popular, and chemist Martin Klaproth even named his newly discovered element “uranium” in a show of support. Although astronomers in England continued to use Georgium Sidus until around 1850, they eventually joined the rest of the world in calling the seventh planet Uranus.
Source

</background>

Update: 2023.08.31.09:05  – Added PPPS  

When I wrote about the timing of Li'l Miss Barnacle's exit my suggestion of the coincidence of her publication date was not entirely serious. But in a recent The Rest Is Politics Rory Stewart is convinced that the timing is no accident. He says something measured (or do I mean mealy-mouthed?) like 'she should be very careful'. But he is obviously quite aghast at her atrocious behaviour.

Perhaps, though, he is being diplomatic rather than mealy-mouthed. I wonder if there's a risk of prosecution for Contempt:

Contempt of privilege is a term used to describe any act - or failure to act - that may prevent or hinder the work of either House of Parliament. A more specific offence against parliamentary privilege is known as a breach of privilege.

source

Maybe not. Litigation in politics is a rather hackneyed weapon in the culture wars...

<parenthesis>
(and has given the word weaponize a new lease of metaphorical life): this is from Ngrams:

</parenthesis>

... but involving electoral realities in a tawdry publicity stunt is hardly a mark of good faith. She obviously has contempt both for Parliament (in particular for the PM – who only got to read her letter of resignation via the Daily Mail...

<tangent>
(For some reason I'm reminded of Alan [not then  Lord] Sugar and Jürgen Klinsman's shirt: 'I wouldn't  wash my car with it'. No idea where that memory came from.)
</tangent>

... and for her constituents. Come to think of it, her contempt extends to the public in general. But maybe actual contempt doesn't come into the legal defition. 

</REPAIR>

 

 

The other St Pancras...

.... Not a station but a church. The church at Widecombe-in-the-Moor, known familiarly as 'The Cathedral of the Moor, is dedicated to St Pancras, patron saint, it says here, of  '...children, jobs, and health':

When Saint Pancras was born toward the end of the third-century, Diocletian was the emperor of the Roman Empire, sharing ruling authority with three others. In the years prior to Diocletian’s reign, Christianity began to be tolerated within the empire. Emperor Diocletian slowly reversed that trend, beginning the final wide-reaching persecution of Christians before Emperor Constantine the Great legalized Christianity.

One tradition states that around the year 299, Emperor Diocletian and one of his co-rulers, Galerius, took part in a pagan divinization ceremony.... In 303, after Diocletian and Galerius consulted an oracle, they published an edict that began a great persecution of Christians. Churches were destroyed, Scriptures were burned, and Christians who failed to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods were killed. A fourteen-year-old boy named Pancras was among them.

<autobiographical-note>
At the same age I remember  being impressed by the words of "Faith of our fathers":

How sweet would be their children's fate,
If they like them  [HD: our fathers] could die for Thee!

Unfortunately the opportunities for juvenile martyrdom weren't great in London W.5 at the time.
</autobiographical-note>

On a holiday I am just back from,  in the West country, I was reminded of a piece I wrote a while ago, which mentioned (tangentially, of course) the odd-looking symbols applied to some chemical elements., for example Hg (mercury, or quicksilver):

This sort of "quick" [2023 clarification: the "living" sense, as in "the quick and the dead"] is the basis for an aperçu that I've recently had about an anomaly I met in the school chemistry lab. Some elements have seemingly random symbols, like K and Sn  and Hg. As a schoolboy I was content to just learn them; some of them, anyway,  had mnemonic value – tin and Sn shared an n; and s is close to t both alphabetically and with regard to where the tongue goes in forming it. But Hg? 

Well the alchemists (or whoever) who first named mercury chose a different metaphor for its fluid behaviour; not alive-silver, but watery-silver, not quicksilver but hydrargyrum.

And my stay near Widecombe has led to an explanation of Sn  (slightly more persuasive than the ones I gave back then).

Tin-mining was overseen in Dartmoor by four stannary towns  (from Latin stannum). Wikipedia says:

Devon's stannaries are usually referred to by the names of stannary towns which were the locations where white tin was assessed, coined, and sold. They were also the location for some of the institutions associated with the operation of the stannary.

King Edward I's 1305 Stannary Charter established Tavistock,   Ashburton and Chagford as Devon's stannary towns, with a monopoly on all tin mining in Devon, a right to representation in the Stannary Parliament and a right to the jurisdiction of the Stannary Courts. Plympton became the fourth Devon stannary town in 1328 after a powerful lobby persuaded the Sheriff of Devon that it was nearer the sea and therefore had better access for merchants.^[2]

The Devon stannary towns are all on the fringes of Dartmoor, which is the granite upland which bore the tin. No definition of the boundaries of the Devon stannaries is known, if indeed one ever existed.

<autobiographical-note>
In the late 1980s I worked with [more under than with, as he was a bit of a silverback] a west-countryman with the (to me) unusual name 'Stannard'. I'm sure he had a tin-mining background.

<tangent>
He flew to the USA (in those pre-facetime days) to spread the word about X.25... 

<meta-tangent> 

Wikipedia hasn't heard of VAX PSI, the product he was king of (Google has, but with only scrappy links to odd books, because what was once a free-standing product is now a part of DECnet/OSI. Don't ask.).

</meta-tangent>  

.... Just before his flight he realized he needed a pointer [pre-infrared of course]. I  had just  acquired a telescopic one and added it to my professional writer's kit. I lent it to him (well, gave it, as it turned out).

While abroad he had a heart attack, and (a mark of his eminence - I did say he was a king) DEC laid on a wake and invited his widow.

Remembering a story told by Tommy Cooper...

<just-like-that>
A man rings at a front door, which is opened by a lady who has obviously been crying.

"Can I speak to Eddie?' he asks, and she bursts into tears again. 'Eddie's dead' she wails.

'Did he say anything about a pot of paint?"
</just-like-that>

...(or maybe it was Frankie Howerd), I didn't mention my pointer. I'd never have used it anyway, but it was a bargain at a car-boot sale, and a treasured possession.
</tangent>

</autobiographical-note>

 

Where was I? Oh yes, Widecombe
.

b

In the church there was a... Is that the time? Stay tuned for an update.

Update: 2023.07.21.18.25 – Added PS

PS (on Dan'l Whiddon et al)   
In St Pancras church there is an automaton depicting the grey mare lent unwisely by Tom Pearce in the song Widecombe Fair. It was originally made in 1959, and after many years in pieces in a box several miles away from its home, it has been lovingly and expertly restored.  

                                                                        

The fair is still held annually, on the second Tuesday in September.

<tangent subject="schedule?">
Unless Tom Pearce was very patient (as well as naïve) - I'm thinking of 'Friday soon or Sarurday noon' - the fair must have been rescheduled since the song was first sung  (it was first published in 1890, but must have predated that. Widecombe and District Local History Group have tra Dartmoor ced it to an actual occurrence in 1802:

We found a sign at the Tom Cobley Tavern at Spreyton, which says all these characters left from outside that pub in 1802 to go to Widecombe. 

"That's the earliest date we've been able to find."

Source

 </tangent>                  

 In another Dartmoor church, at Chagford ...

<inline-pps>

(home of my spare rubber ferrule...

<etymological-peccadillo>
(interesting expression, that. The -ule suffix says it's small, and the ferr- bit says it's made of iron; a small iron bit. But a rubber one? This is another example of the workings of the etymological clock (mentioned on this blog all over the place [here's an early case]. There's nothing salty, for example, about a salary, and a companion shares more than bread. The sal- and the -pan- had relevance at an early stage in the words' development, but language moves on. Show me someone who insists on decimation involving a penalty of one tenth, and I'll show you a pedant.)
</etymological-peccadillo>

... – dropped in Chagford car.park less than an hour after I bought it. Until I replaced the old worn one I had sounded like Blind Pew delivering the Black Spot.)                                           

</inline-pps>

...(one of the four stannary towns), lies the body of Mary Whiddon, whose ghost... 

<spectral-background>
(she was shot by a jealous former lover on her wedding day in the seventeenth century, in the church, just as the ceremony was starting)
</spectral-background>

...haunts the nearby Whiddon Park, and the possibly connected Three Crowns Inn. A rather breathless webpage has it that

Whiddon Park is where Mary lived and in 1971 a daughter of the house was to be married in Chagford church. On the morning of the wedding a guest awoke to find the apparition of a young woman dressed in a period wedding gown standing in the doorway of his room. Luckily the bride of 1971 did not take this to be an omen and went ahead with the wedding. It is said that she placed her bridal bouquet on the grave of Mary Whiddon as a mark of respect. Locally it is also said that Mary’s ghost also haunts the Bishop’s Room and corridors of Chagford’s Three Crowns Inn. This is also substantiated by the belief that an ancient tunnel once linked Whiddon Park with the inn? (HD: sic. Perhaps the ? reflects some doubt in the writer, or maybe it was just a reminder, not meant for publication, to check. Why, I wonder, would a ghost need a tunnel [however ancient]?)

I wonder if she was related to the Dan'l Whiidon mentiomed as one seventh of the improbable load on Tom Pearce's grey mare. But perhaps Whiddon is just a common surname thereabouts .

But there's cricket to watch.

b

Update: 2023.07.23.17.05 – Added <inline-pps />