Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

Ugh

This morning I came in and booted WINTER, my Fujitsu office tablet, and got a big warning red box from Norton Anti-Virus saying there was NAV Error 3048,3 and it had to be addressed immediately. Immediately meant it tried to Autofix itself, but that didn't work, so I was supposed to download Norton Power Eraser and have it look for rootkits or other nasties.

Since I don't want to have nasties on my computers -- that's why I put on anti-virus and firealls in the first place, dammit -- I ran the program.

It managed to delete the executables to Office.

Actually, what it didn't like was a whole series of Windows 95/NT legacy programs that still run under XP, so that included my beloved Microsoft Office 95 Professional. Including the handy Office toolbar which isn't a part of Office 2003 and higher. Of course, Word 2003 can't read Word 95 files, so that all my documents -- both Physics and SF -- are temporarily out of bounds. (I can still read them using Cetus CWordpad, a version of Wordpad/Write that still can read Word 95/6.0 documents, rather than pretending that RTF files are the same thing. But formatting would be a disaster.)

And Then Microsoft Comes and Joins Symantec At The Stupid Party

Norton Power Eraser had dutifully created an XP System Restore Point before it did its damage. Naturally, the Restore Point failed. Thank you Microsoft.

Yeah, I know I'm living on borrowed time to some extent. And I am slowly getting some Windows 7 machines up to speed. I hope to run XP (or even NT4) in a virtual machine and make Office 95 "compatible" with Windows 7. But I haven't spent any time working on that yet.

I still don't know if there was actually a problem or if NAV just had a hissy fit over legacy code. Pisses me off that Microsoft has never had good file conversion manners. Office 97 changed the .DOC format, but was supposed to be able to read/write Word 95 documents. Except that it actually wrote .RTF files until people yelled enough. And even then, opening a Word 95 document in Word 97 isn't totally clean. And it's gotten worse through Office 2000 2003 2007 2010...

There are a couple of things I'll try tomorrow short of reinstalling all those legacy programs. Not optimistic, but we'll see. And I'll have to bitch at Symantec for screwing things up and doing something other than the screen messages said it was going to do.

Idiots.

Dr. Phil

Congratulations Are In Order

Delayed from May by the devastating tornado of April 27th, the University of Alabama held its graduation today. Though the campus itself was spared major damage, the city was not. They closed the university, cancelled classes and finals, but begged the families to stay away, because the streets were either impassible or needed.

To their credit, the students volunteered to assist. Cynics might argue that they had nothing else to do, but that doesn't explain the speed and the organizing -- they volunteered to serve when they were needed and didn't have to wait around to be asked.

So congratulations to the 'Bama Class of 2011 -- your graduation is more than just the sum of grades and credit hours. And you shall never forget it... or be forgotten.

It's Only Been Three Months

You can still get copies of Southern Fried Weirdness: Reconstruction or check out other ways to help Alabama relief efforts.

Dr. Phil

A Question

So a student asked at the beginning of class today, "What's this incident in Pennsylvania that they keep talking about on the news?"

Now let's be fair here. The student had heard of Three Mile Island. And Chernobyl. But the talking heads on the TV, while covering Japan, keep mentioning Three Mile Island and Chernobyl like you know what they're talking about. And then there's the simple fact that while Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were bigtime events in my life, 1979 and 1986 respectively were both before nearly all of my students in both classes were born.

I noticed in passing through channels late Monday night that Rachel Maddow on MSNBC was doing a heroic job of explaining terms, putting in historical context and making sure she was interpreting what the statements about the nuclear reactor woes in Japan were and more importantly were not saying. Then had a real nuclear physicist indicate whether she'd done a good job. She had. Rachel prepares her material better than anyone on television.

So Some Background

This afternoon I cobbled up a short list of links for my students, which I'll put here. Yes, it's Wikipedia, but they do a pretty good job of aggregating information on events like this:

# Japanese Reactors Fukushima I (Units 1-4) (ongoing 2011).
# Three Mile Island (1979).
# Chernobyl (1986).
# Article on Michigan and Midwest nuclear reactors.

The most interesting quote from the last article:

In one corner, there are those like Don Williams, a “seriously pro-nuke” retired Hope College professor, who has studied the industry and advocates for more nuclear energy.

He doesn’t think what happens in Japan should have any bearing on U.S. nuclear policy.

“But it will,” he concedes.

“Those poor people over there, they planned on a 25-foot tsunami and they got a 30-foot one. What are the chances of that?” Williams said.

I spent some time in both classes talking a little bit about the ongoing situation in Japan, which is steadily deteriorating. But from halfway around the world, and not precisely my area of expertise, except in the most general Physics teaching sense, it's hard to know exactly how bad this is or how bad it will get.

It's easy to make dire pronouncements about nuclear power global or awful predictions about what might happen in Japan. Easily lost in all this, which Williams referred to above, is that they did plan for a bad earthquake -- and the ten reactors involved got through that relatively in good shape. They did plan for a tsunami -- but what hit the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Station was far greater than they planned for. And this story is far from over.

Fictional References

The China Syndrome (film) vs. The China Syndrome (fact) -- a reference to a core meltdown burning through the bottom of a containment structure and "can't stop until it reaches China". The movie came out in 1979, just 12 days before Three Mile Island.

Finally, growing up one of my favorite disaster novels was the 1975 nuclear power plant meltdown story The Prometheus Crisis by Thomas H. Scortia and Frank N. Robinson. Typical of this type of book, you have a rather contrived set of multiple circumstances -- the two authors also wrote The Glass Inferno, which was combined with The Tower to make the movie The Towering Inferno. No doubt if I read The Prometheus Crisis today, it wouldn't hold up nearly as well as I think it might. (grin)

Dr. Phil

Japan - March 2011

I've been thinking of things to write on, not so much to pile onto comments on the earthquake and tsunami disasters in Japan, but as a placeholder to remind me later that this was the weekend.

However, before we get too far, I thought I'd share this video, posted by maryrobinette Mary Robinette Kowal on Facebook. It's about six minutes long and shows the tsunami waters racing into a town. Right at the beginning there's a white minivan turning the corner and racing ahead of the flood -- I don't know if they managed to get to high ground or not. Thankfully I did not notice any people in any of the other vehicles.

We like to think of ourselves as living in a modern technological age. Sure, we deal with storms and such, often treating them as inconveniences to our normally scheduled days. But the speed and power of natural events such as happened along the coast of Japan is in a whole different league. This is not Hollywood special effects wizardry in Yet Another Disaster Epic. This is real. And though six minutes isn't all that long, it's much longer than the snippets which have been endlessly played and replayed on CNN, Weather Channel and the various networks.

By the time you get to the end of this video, we are in a different territory in terms of the level of destruction and what kinds of things are floating by in a rush. There is an awesomeness and indeed a majesty of witnessing this sort of power -- especially, I'm afraid to admit, from the safety of a comfortable office half a world away.

I am sorry that unfortunately I don't have any references for this link. I don't know the town or who shot it or what will happen to these people. But I am grateful that this person did take the time and risk to document this, without commentary, for us to see.

Dr. Phil

Not Fully Vetted For Accuracy, But To Give A Taste Of What Is Being Said 'Round Here

Regarding the Michigan Oilpacolypse, WOOD-AM talk radio was giving some of the updates as I drove in this morning. Some of this may have changed since then... tough.

Enbridge says 840,000 gallons of crude spilled. EPA and Michigan suggesting in excess of a million gallons. One woman called in and said her son, working one of the vacuum trucks sucking the oil off the top of the water, was told that it was more like 4.4 million gallons -- only five times as much as the company is saying. Does anyone else think this sounds familiar?

Enbridge says they detected the leak Monday morning. They didn't call anyone about it until 1 pm.

Sunday afternoon there was a 9-1-1 call about a very strong oil smell. A fire truck arrived in the area where the actual leak occurred in Marshall MI, to find a Enbridge truck on site. The Enbridge person said it wasn't them, must be oil from some other oil processing facility.

Enbridge is still insisting that the leak was on Monday, not Sunday.

The radio people replayed part of a conversation with an Enbridge flack who said (a) the pipeline pressure is monitored 24/7, (b) that no one knew that a leak had occurred for some time, (c) that no one could explain why they were getting a low pressure reading on the pipeline and (d) now is the time to clean up, we'll figure out what happened later. Does anyone detect a contradiction / disconnect here?

There is a dispute as to whether there is enough boom, skimmers, vacuum trucks, etc. here or on the way. Also, some of the people helping to clean up the oiled birds are holding off on that waiting for respirators, because of the crude oil fumes.

A friend of mine teaching at an area community college reported that two of her students were sickened by the crude oil fumes from the leak.

The Enbridge board of directors will have met today. One of the board members in former Michigan governor Blanchard. Maybe that will help.

Ten days ago the DOT sent a letter to Enbridge detailing corrosion and metal loss in their pipelines. This particular pipeline was placed underground in 1969. Enbridge said they wanted to replace the pipeline, not repair it.

Enbridge alone has thousands of miles of crude oil pipelines in the Lakehead system, stretching around and through the Great Lakes and deep in the prairie states and provinces.

Enbridge wanted to restart the crude oil flow shortly after the leak. The congressman from Battle Creek objected. Strenuously.

Does anybody else find this all depressingly familiar?

Dr. Phil

First Stanza

Between Northwestern undergrad and Michigan Tech grad school, I worked for 2½ years in the Pre-Order Search Section between Order and the Cataloging Dept. at the Northwestern University Library. All three units were in Technical Services and all three were somewhat obsessed with accuracy. All of us had occasion to input data records and we worked hard at not making mistakes. One day someone was at one of the big IBM mainframe terminals and said, "Oops." A person at the next terminal said, "No 'Oops' at the terminal."

Refrain

Oops, I Did It Again,
(Oh No You Didn't)

Second Stanza

In grad school, I was sitting in the office debugging a FORTRAN program on Monday 19 October 1987 when one of the other grad students came in and said the stock market was crashing. At the time it was down nearly 300 points. It went on to drop over 500. I remember thinking that it was my generation's Great Depression being born and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. I mean, I was in the middle of graduate school, busy working on my doctorate. I'd defended my MS thesis, but hadn't gotten around to finishing the revisions, so officially I didn't have any graduate degree. If the economy collapsed and the university started laying people off -- there really wasn't any place to go. It would be two years or so before I could take wing and try to go somewhere, assuming there was an economy left at the end of the day. So I shrugged and went back to debugging my program.

Turns out my reaction was common. Unlike 1929, there wasn't the same kind of people dabbling in the stock market in 1987. If the stock market was crashing, most people didn't care. Indeed, the U.S. economy didn't tank and within a year things were back to normal. Or at least normal for 1988.

Refrain

I don't care,
(I swear)
I don't care,
At all.

Third Stanza

Thursday the New York Stock Exchange took a nosedive. For a brief amount of time the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down nearly a 1000 points, but that big drop only lasted like 90 seconds. Rumor has it that someone typed a sell order for 16 billion, instead of 16 million -- Citi denies this, but who asked them, hmm? Then automatic sell programs triggered on the big sell order and for a brief moment some stocks hit zero. Some want to blame the initial drop on concern about the Greek Debt. Some figure that some sort of correction was overdue.

The thing that killed me about Thursday was how much this was Not News. Yeah, I heard a bit in passing on NPR's All Things Considered, but if this was The End Of The U.S. Economy, you sure couldn't tell by the news. Indeed, the local TV news was dominated by coverage of the death of legendary Detroit Tiger's announcer Ernie Harwell. Thursday night NBC's Brian Williams was on The Late Show with David Letterman. I was not really paying attention, but they spent most of the time talking about last Saturday's incompetent Times Square car bomber and the unfolding ecological disaster off the coast of Louisiana. But a major stock dive? Just a few minutes right at the end. I expect tomorrow's Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me to be all over the (b)illion versus (m)illion issue, if it makes the show taping in time.

But the stock market wasn't much for news. Americans are weary of the economy -- and if some Wall Street fat cats got skinned on Thursday, then no doubt the sentiment is "good for them." Because the rest of all already had our retirement investments fleeced in 2008. What can they possibly take from us in 2010?

Meanwhile, neither Big Oil or Wall Street seems to get it, regarding why they need to be regulated for the good of everyone.

Refrain

And I'm free, I'm free fallin',
Everything is less than zero...

Chorus

Thank God for those financial institutions,
Too big to fail and,
Paying millions in big bonuses,
So they have the best and brightest,
Forever on the payroll.

Oops, I did it again.
(Oh no you didn't.)

Dr. Phil

Shawn Powers' House Burned Out

A friend of mine via online, the UCF, also an editor at Linux Journal and a legendary battler on the Atari 2600 in modern times, Shawn Powers, has posted that he's lost his house -- burned out. The family is okay, but they lost their animals.


From Shawn's phone about an hour ago...

Some of the people at Linux Journal set up a fund raising site to help the Powers on ChipIn -- in just a few hours they've raised nearly a thousand dollars. While money cannot replace that which is lost, on a cold winter's day in northern Michigan, knowing that those who care are helping out if they can is a blessing in itself.

Life goes on, with the good and the bad. Sometimes life can seem to get lost, or at least wanders aimlessly bewildered in the wake of massive bad news such as the earthquake in Haiti. But I know that when life smacks you in the face and you're having to deal with an immediate crisis, it doesn't seem so distant or minor. Shawn -- we're thinking of you and your family.

Thought some of the rest of you out there would like to know.

Dr. Phil