S.I.R.? What's So Appealing About Smith and Mewes (or is that Smewes?)

(image sourced: http://www.jmewes.com/mewesmas.html)

It's interesting to me that I am so entertained by public figures such as Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith. Kevin Smith is a bit more of a normal fascination in a 'The Globe-National Inquirer-Star' magazine sense, but Jason Mewes seems to me to be a bit below the tabloid radar. I think that he has been a hopeless fiend and hasn't cared to hide the fact, particularly now that he has a very public outlet for speaking about such hopelessness. In a way, it is probably like gawking at a car crash as you pass however there seems to be considerably more to it than that.

Mewes has considerable value to contribute within his circle of peers, whether it is his active and worthwhile participation in Kevin Smith's movies and podcasts, or his numerous other television and feature appearances.

Maybe it is because of this duality – hopeless fiend, but with something big to bring to the entertainment table – that elevates them from the 'under the bridge' dope addict, to something more akin to a fictional character. Something more like Ozzie Osborne, but with less apparent brain damage.

Their stories are complex, their personalities are so different from people we befriend and hang out with daily, with their tales all the more fascinating as a result. In fact, now that I am giving the issue this much thought, it becomes apparent that these folk, because of the openness with which they bare their lives to the public, are – consciously or not – slowly writing brand new characters for their audience to follow the adventures of.

Focussing on Mewes for a minute. Through numerous podcasts, commentary tracks and interviews, we know that he was a friend of Kevin's from their adolescence. He was a fascinating, slightly younger kid to hang out with because of his off-kilter personality. He was a little bit off the rails, but more mischievous than criminal, and his only real criminality arose out of his dependencies.

It is Kevin and Jason's ability to actually make a cohesive narrative out of theirs and others lives that makes it like they are actually creating a whole new fictional world, immensely detailed and gigantic in scale. They let us in on just a little bit more detail, a few more insights and anecdotes every week. They, perhaps deliberately, create an emotional arc with their performances. It has its descriptive moments, it has its moments of levity and sadness, and it always involves a healthy dose of silliness (Let Us F**k!).

It is as if every week, they focus their personal x-ray machine upon the Van Gough painting that has been their lives so far. Every week, they take one hour out in order to shine the light on a tiny new piece of their parchment, and another handful of layers, colour, texture and detail are revealed beneath to give us visibility of just a bit more of these real-life characters.

'Real-life character' sounds rubbish. What about 'factional' characters. Not to imply their alignment with a faction, but to mean fictional characters derived from fact.

Maybe in their more toilet oriented moments they're revealing some 'fuctional characters' for their audience.

I think this is what makes their public offerings so bloody compelling. They are already people that we have become interested in because of their contribution to 'generation y' *cringe* culture. From that starting point, we can't help but be intrigued by someone who is so tuned in to the issues that run through our heads day in and out. These are guys who have insight, motivation and creativity, and as a result have lived somewhat extraordinary lives.

They are people who deliver works of interest to us all in the form of feature film, cartoon series and now - podcasts. Its almost as if their former (perhaps more standard) creative works are now taking a back seat to this new form of creative work which is documentary-cum-romantic comedy-cum-drama (hehehe cum-drama) as they lay out their lives for our entertainment.

And entertaining it is!

I for one, cannot wait for S.I.R. to launch in May. If these guys can monetise their investment in technology and communications as convincingly as Mister Smith has managed to monetise his projects in the past, I would expect that we will be hearing from them for quite some time to come, and that is some damn welcome news.

Bring it.

Nuclear Power and Renewables

[EDIT 9 May 2017]
 I haven't read this for AGES, but I know the flavour of my opinion piece below, and I know in hindsight that I was totally wrong. A huge geographic area was affected, and a huge population were displaced in this substantial man-made disaster. Out of interest, (though no-one will ever read this) I leave it published and untouched.
[/EDIT]



Japan's Fukushima Daiichi issues seem to be stabilising in the worlds eye over the last day or so, that is unless you read articles like this (dailymail.co.uk) from Sunday just gone.

Ostensibly the author seems to be railing against irresponsible reporting, stating that she swam in the ocean near a North Sea nuclear plant as a kid because of the warm water, and it didn't have any influence on her health at all. In the next breath she comes out with the statement;

the Fukushima 50 [vigilant plant workers].

They will almost certainly receive fatal doses of radiation as they work around the clock.

This is the most irresponsible of all journos, because not a single person has died due to radiation related causes, and none are likely to have exceeded levels of radiation exposure with long term health implications.

I came across the above article by way of Lewis Page, a Journo for the on-line tech news site TheRegister.co.uk. In his series of articles about Fukushima, he was talking to the fact that no plant worker has been exposed to a dose of more than a 400 millisievierts/hour, and that exposure was for minutes not for a sustained hour or more. 

With a current allowable dosage of 250 millisieverts, and with the plant workers being exposed to a usual dosage of less than 3-4 millisieverts per hour the workers are not at risk of sustained health implications - which start after dosages in the order of 1000 millisieverts. For perspective, a chest x-ray exposes you to a 7 millisievert dosage.

Yes the workers have to manage their time near the damaged reactors and spent fuel pools and they have to be withdrawn during planned venting of the primary containment or the undamaged secondary containment buildings, but their dosages are tolerable.

When we step outside the nuclear complex's boundary, these levels have been measured at between 0.8 and 9 millisieverts per hour. Now lets worst-case this. You would have to sit outside, in the one place that had a reliable 9 millisievert per hour dosage, for more than a full day before you exceeded the allowable dosage for the plant workers. You would still have no long term health implications from doing so, and taking steps such as sitting indoors would reduce or remove this risk.

Are the workers or local residents being exposed to iodine or casaeum radioisotopes which have half lives between 8 days and 20 years, and are if occurring, is the exposure at a truly hazardous level? This isn't likely. 

These isotopes are produced in the reactor cores themselves and the primary containment vessels for each of Fukushima's buildings are in tact. Primary containment is intended to firstly avoid unnecessary generation of radioisotopes that are superfluous to design intent, but to also capture such material and give it time to decay before disposing of it. Secondary containment in fact - the buildings outside the reactor cores containing the spent fuel pools - are similarly designed to capture and hold radioisotopes whose half-lives are measured in seconds, before releasing harmless steam to the atmosphere. 

There is evidence through TEPCO testing, of iodine and other longer lived radioisotopes registering small quantities in the southern discharge canal at the plant, and in reducing quantities in air, but in each case the dosages are so small as to have negligible influence on human well being as attested to by the March 21 TEPCO testing (pdf) showing just .04245 radon measurement, compared with the normal 'healthy' limit of 0.0400 - a difference of only 0.2% or 2/1000 over the tolerable target.

To put that in perspective, in the USA 2.4 million people will die this year. Of these 570k or 23.75%, will die from Cancer. 

It may be a trite correllation to draw, but we are talking about a 0.2% increase in your radon exposure beyond what has deemed to be acceptable exposure health-wise. This kind of exposure is unlikely to be the thing to tip us over the cancer edge. We are already 25% likely to die from cancer, and sure we don't want to do anything to worsen that rate, but would stress and related issues, arising out of worrying about invisible nasties, have just as much influence on your health as a fifth of 1 percent increase in your radon exposure? I'm thinking the two risks are comparable. 

Having already stated that our risks are only minimally increased by exposure, the difference that I DO see, is that with radon exposure we can take mitigating steps if we feel compelled, in order to reduce or remove the risk of isotopes such as iodine-131 from entering your thyroid. Steps such as avoiding dairy for a week. As iodine-131 has a half life of 8 days, if it measures at 0.042 radons per cm3 of sea water this week, it will measure 0.021 in 8 days time - well below tolerable levels.

Page took some care to point out aspects of this 'nuclear disaster' such as there being zero radiation-related deaths and zero high dosages received, and only death on the Daiichi site being caused by a crane operator falling during the actual quake. 

So we have a death toll of only 1, despite the quake at its epicentre (0.34g of ground movement) exceeding Daiichi's design spec (0.18g of ground movement) by a factor of almost 2. 

While the ground movement measure actually at Daiichi is not known, the quake itself has been recorded as a magnitude 9 on the Richter scale, which exceeds Daiichi's design spec by something in the order of 22.3 times, not just 2. That is 1410 Petajoules worth of energy experienced compared with the 63 Petajoules Daiichi was designed for. 

In explanation, I suppose we are talking at first about linear motion in the initial 'g' measurement, but about actual energy expended in the joule comparisons (Richter is a logarithmic scale, so an 8 is not 1/9 less severe than a 9 but is 22 times less severe), so the greater energy discrepancy between design and actual might be a more pertinent measure of the severity.

The tsunami itself was 14m high, and with a tsunami design spec of 5.7m, the wave inundated the compound. The reactors themselves and the backup power sources were at an elevation of 10 to 13 metres so were able to weather the wave comparatively well, however due to the significantly greater than spec event, the primary power and cooling went off line. 

 

The high-ground battery backups recovered for a time to ensure cooling was maintained. Portable generators were deployed in short order and the emergency fire system was fired up to continue cooling for the reactors. After build up of hydrogen in the spent fuel pools in buildings 1 and 3 resulted in their secondary containment being blown up, helicopter drops, fire truck pumps and concrete truck pumps were deployed at various times to continue pumping sea water into the spent fuel to maintain cool shutdown and to prevent damaging their containment vessels (a meltdown in spent fuel being unlikely).

So in summary, we have reactors that experienced a natural disaster significantly stronger than their design specs. The reactors immediately went into a cold shutdown emergency state, and the area was evacuated in preparation for the incoming tsunami. No deaths arose out of the tsunami. No deaths have occurred due to radiation exposure. No deaths are going to happen amongst plant workers let alone local residents who are far removed from the nuclear exposure. There is no credible reason to believe that radioisotopes are entering the biosphere (water, milk, fresh produce) in quantities that are going to cause long-term health implications. 

It truly seems to be a nothing-bad-going-on situation, and the media has been coming out with taglines such as "Fukushima: the danger of going critical" all the while cause that is news.

And people wonder why I have Bill Hicks spewing bile about mass media idiocy tattooed on me.

Geocentrism

When we travel overseas, it is only a matter of perception that tells us we have actually crossed the globe.

Yes we perceive that because we are surrounded by geology and geography that differs from our norm, because we are surrounded by people not speaking our native tongue and because we have a hard time sleeping, we have travelled some thousands of kilometres to other countries.

You could argue that such belief follows the scientific method.

Using the two-bit research methods only someone as lazy as I could try to get away with, I see that step 1 of the scientific method is achieved - that we experience something that is 'foreign' to us, ergo it holds that the experience could be literally foreign.

Our hypothesis, is that we have travelled a commensurate distance that allows for the difference in temperature, time, tongue, scenery, and that we now occupy a different country.

We predict, from the maps that we have studied as kids, that if we travel East, we hit a certain city, country, sea or ocean and we can test that theory by jumping onto a bus, a bike, a horse or whatever.

We can repeatedly test these predictions to validate the theory and to ensure that everything tallies with what we have been told is the truth;

planet=round,

planet=a certain size,

planet revolves daily,

moon moves around us monthly,

we both dance round the sun annually,

though we can never jump upon the next inter-planetary traveller in order to actually observe this behaviour from afar.

Consider then that there is a significant degree of faith in accepting that everything is as 'they' say it is.

Yes we perceive having jumped on a plane, having disembarked many hours later, having stepped into a foreign land that is the correct distance and duration away from our origin. We can also easily perceive that when we travel in a new direction and we travel to find the features and occupants that we expect, everything is in order.

We have just walked, cycled or driven in a particular direction, being conscious and alert all the while, and are now experiencing a new place, so surely we are in fact in this new place and we can thereby more-or-less confirm step 4 of the scientific method each time we do so.

Well, I'd like to suggest that in fact none of it is true.

If for example we were able to have an experience such as sitting outside the orbital apparatus and watching its movements over a long span of time, we could convince ourselves that we have conducted a stronger step 4 in the scientific method than we would have otherwise, but there are still two problems with this:

    a) with only 0.000007% of the current population reportedly having purportedly stepped outside the atmosphere, none of us will have done so AND

    b) overseas as a religion can also explain this kind of experiential/observational confirmation

I'll step back again before getting into my explanation.

I wish to reinforce that we take boffins' explanation that physicists have documented mathematical models and formulae to explain gravity, seasons, tidal changes, changes to the visible moon and so on, but that a significant proportion of us just believe. We don't test this belief by learning the laws and applying them to our own earth-based or astronomical observations. There is faith that the boffins' aren't pulling the wool over.

Consider this;

Could we each be living our lives and have lets say in my case, the greater Brisbane area which is 'real'?

I jump in a car and drive to work daily. My work tells me that a million or two customers - people that I will never meet - from far flung reaches of our state or country, need assistance with their cars, their licences and so on. I don't speak with any of them, I don't travel to any of them, for all I know a reasonable explanation could be that there is a computer dialling my workplace a few thousand times per day with people that I can reach out and touch (colleagues) having conversations with no-one real.

I jump in the car and drive home again.

My folks are in Tamworth and Newcastle, some hundreds of kilometres distant. Yep, I can jump on a plane, in a car or whatever, and a commensurate duration later arrive at my destination.

While genuine travel is the accepted experience, the theory being that these places are xx distance and yy duration away, and I predict that when I arrive, walking down the road yields the beach (and I can test this), who is to say that I haven't at one point, blinked, and been integrated into a Virtual Reality which gives me these experiences - Matrix and Lost City-style.

I have been able to reach out and touch my family members, but I don't KNOW that they are 600Km away right now, they could be in cold storage.

Maybe I have been placed into a simulator sphere, or into a computer program that can change my perceived surroundings, climate and companions. Maybe when I hear a foreign tongue it is simply gibberish that I am told is German. The computer program creates fellow foreigners that understand their comrade's gibberish and generates auditory responses in kind.

The system generates the photographic evidence that tallies with my expectations of family and friend's travel experiences, and the system ensures uploads of this evidence to social networking websites, when all the while those who have stepped out of physical reach are really just doped up and plugged in down the road in a computer simulator that looks like a mountain.

Are we actually able to reach out and touch the planets? Nope, only a handful have supposedly walked on another celestial body - and that happened in a Hollywood studio of course.

Are we actually able to prove that our distant friends and family are actually distant? No!

Sure the scientific method allows for us to hold something as being true if our experience and observations don't disprove it, and if it reasonably aligns with our expectations, but wow, religion also allows for us to take 'facts' on face value if they agree with our experience and observations.

I believe that The Himalayas exist, I believe that I have seen them, have walked among them, have touched, smelt, and spoken with their inhabitants. Can I prove that I was there? Well, no. Even if I had smuggled home a vial of dirt like that French bird in Michael Moore's 'sIcko', that isn't proof. It is proof that I have dirt, but doesn't prove that the Himalayas are real. I just have faith that my perceived experiences aren't just computer programs and implanted memory.

It is a rather geocentric view, but hey, prove me wrong. I dares ya!