the darkerside to rants

ХудожникИконописikoni

Here be Dragons, originally uploaded by Michael Kalus.

The Statue that came with the Skyrim Special Edition.

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иконографияI admit it, I do believe people should not be told what to do with their own bodies or minds if they do not endanger others in the process.

Having said this: I have an ethical problem / dilemma when it comes to immunization.

Here’s the deal. Immunization works because everybody gets the shot. This creates a protection for the group (society) as a whole and even protects the few that are falling through the cracks (herd immunity).

The problem is that lately in the US (where else?) there has been a war on immunization. The arguments against it range from the paranoid fringe who perceives the immunizations as an attempt by the Government to control us to the fears that it causes autism. Unfortunately it seems more and more people all over the Western world seem to come to the same conclusion and as a side effect herd immunity is quickly disappearing and the rise of former vanquished or at least mostly controlled sicknesses like measles are making a come back. This is obviously not good at all.

So here is my ethical dilemma. I do not think we should force people to do something they do not want to do, but in this case? The cost in human life and economic impact is enormous. So should we go and force people to get their children immunized? Should we just tell them that it is their choice and live with the consequences?

I think the whole thing would be easier for me to answer (no, they shouldn’t) if the arguments of the vaccination opponents had any merit in a scientific kind of way. But they do not. So here I am now, wondering if there should be a limit to self-determination.

I guess I could make the argument that not having most of the children immunized poses a risk to others and as such my initial stipulation (as long as they do not cause anybody else harm) has already been violated, but is this really enough to force people to inject their kids with something they oppose?

Opinions welcome.

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икониFollowing the online “discussions” with regard to the events happening at Fukushima it seems that society is split into two groups, roughly in the middle.

On the one side you have the people who perceive nuclear energy as inherently evil and in essence “we’re all going to die”. On the other hand you have “experts” (I put this in quotation because it is at times hard to assertion the credential of someone online) who perceive the risks as overblown, if I want to step down to their rhetoric I would call them the “reactor hugger group”. The general consensus on this side has changed from: “They are much better engineered than Chernobyl and the Japanese have it all under control.” to “Well, look at how well they were engineered, they survived the earthquake and the tsunami!” or if they wanted to be really fastidious: “If a dam breaks thousands will die too!”

I think both sides have it wrong, but out of different reasons.

Let’s first deal with the con argument here.

Most of the anti-nuclear crowds argument stem from two things:

1. Chernobyl
2. Mushroom Clouds

The Chernobyl comparison is somewhat apt, although only to a certain degree. Yes, a reactor did blow up and spew it’s fuel over a large area and contaminated vast stretches around the world with radiation, but it is also true that the design of the reactor was different. This doesn’t mean that a Chernobyl like event couldn’t happen in any other power plant, but the odds are lower. How much lower? That’s the big question here.

The mushroom cloud on the other hand is completely silly. Granted, it is the symbol for the nuclear age and it is a vivid image at that. But the reality is that there never will be a mushroom cloud over a nuclear reactor unless someone detonates a nuclear bomb at a reactor. The “worst case scenario” is the Chernobyl type disaster where the fissile material gets ejected from the core and spread over a wide area. This would be known as a dirty bomb. You know, the one the US is so afraid of someone could set off in the US.

So what about the proponents?

I think here we have to split them into two groups:

1. Politicians, Internet Commentators, Industry spokes people.
2. Engineers and Scientists.

The first group tends to be either misinformed as much as most of the opponents or has a vested financial interest in keeping the Status quo and downplaying any risk.

The second group though, the engineers, had me scratching my head for a bit as I couldn’t quite figure out why they were so adamant about downplaying the potential risks. It only occurred to me on Sunday that the reasons is rather simple: If you design a technology at one point or the other you have to be convinced that you have done a good job, as close to perfect as possible. Engineering always has worked on these principals, we design something with as many safety ideas in place as we can think off, and then when something goes wrong we go back to the drawing board, identify the point of failure and find a solution from this happening again.

In essence: Engineers need to believe they are Gods of their own creation and they can and will only admit they aren’t when proven otherwise.

This is an inherit human condition: We all live our lives that way, if we wouldn’t we couldn’t get out of bed in the morning out of fear that something bad could happen to us. We get into our cars or walk down the street ignoring the dangers we are in because we realize the odds are stacked in our favour, until they aren’t.

Out of this behaviour comes the rationalization right now in the pro nuclear camp why everything is not bad, but actually rather good: The reactors survived the initial earthquake and tsunami and only later failed.

This is an interesting way to look at the current problem. The reason why we now seem to have at least two melting cores is that the power that is needed to keep the cooling going until we can fully arrest the nuclear reaction has failed. This is a condition that could happen in other places as well, with or without and earthquake and a tsunami.

The engineers and scientists who write their fingers bloody right now with this line of argument on why all the other reactors are safe (no earthquake / no tsunami) fail to understand this though, or rather, they believe in the multiple backups that they have installed at all the other plants. Unfortunately Fukushima did have 300% redundancy as well. In the eternal words of Murphy: What can go wrong, will go wrong.

Yes, nuclear reactors have triple backup for these kinds of events, but cascading failures have happened before, there will always be a risk, we can lower it, but it will always exist and to deny this is doing us all a disservice.

Risk vs. Benefit

Which brings me to the real question that we have to answer when it comes to nuclear power: Are we, as a society and as a species, willing to take the risks with nuclear power? Are the benefits we gain from using it outweighing the risks?

Nuclear technology is still “brand new” in human technology terms. We have steam power for around 200 years, we have the petrol engine for a bit over a hundred and nuclear power is only slightly older than 50 years.

In these 50 years we had Windscale in Britain, Three Mile Island in the US and Chernobyl in the Soviet Union and now, it seems, Fukujima in Japan.

Add to this dozens if not hundreds of smaller accidents and incidents all over the world and you understand that the technology is far from fool proof. We’ve decided to run a marathon before we could really walk.

What’s worse on that count is that whereas with the rupture of a dam we can see the damage right away, in a nuclear disaster we may not know for generations the true cost of the accident.

On the benefit side: Japan could not have become what it is today without the use of nuclear power. China’s growth would be much lower as well. Other places like the US, Europe and Russia also benefited economically greatly from the use of nuclear energy. There is only so much fossil fuel, rivers and landmass that we can use to create electricity after all.

To Nuke or not to Nuke?

What is needed now, globally, is a debate over the use of nuclear for energy generation. This requires homework, by both sides.

The No side needs to educate itself over the real risks that are posed by nuclear power plants. The impression of the mushroom cloud over a power plant is neither realistic nor helpful.

At the same time the group also needs to come up with a list of things they, as a whole, are willing to give up if we remove the nuclear power input, at least until we can (if ever) replace it with an alternative energy source. Just turning them off and continuing as before is not an option.

On the pro nuclear side there needs to be an end to pretending that we have the technology fully under control. Eventually there will be a disaster. No human technology is infallible and honesty from the side of the pro-atom lobby would be more than refreshing.

We also, as a species, need to address what we want to do with all the spent fuel and old reactors. This is something we will have to deal with regardless if we continue using nuclear for energy generation or not. So where are we going to put all that highly radioactive garbage?

This is not a black & white scenario regardless of how either side wants to paint it. Both sides have valid points and both sides also have valid arguments in their support. The question really is: Are we willing to possibly risk future generations for our current prosperity?

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God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or can but does not want to, or neither wishes to nor can, or both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, then he is weak – and this does not apply to god. If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful – which is equally foreign to god’s nature. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful, and so not a god. If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them?

Epicurus (341 BCE – 270 BCE)

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I just sent the following to Apple via their Feedback form, but I figure it would be nice to keep a copy for the rest of the world to see as well.

May I ask when Apple will join the 21st century and abandon the failed approach of using a monolithic file to manage a database?

Two years ago you guys sent me a questionnaire about my iTunes use. Including how many tracks I had in there. Well, I tried to tell you guys back then but you didn’t let me, your stupid web form maxed out at 30K tracks.

As it stands at this moment I have 78K tracks in iTunes (not counting video) and iTunes becomes more and more unusable by the day. It has gotten to the point that when I edit data in an album I have to shut down iTunes and start it up again so that it actually manages to read the changed data.

It is utterly broken and you guys keep stuffing more “features” into it without addressing the underlying performance and usability problems.

So how about this: Instead of enhancing it for the next iTard expansion you get two guys to write a SQL backend for it that allows me and others to store our data in MySQL or Postgress.

After that, feel free to go back and add useless features to sell more trinkets to some hipsters.

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So for the past few days I have encountered this a few times:

The interesting thing is: This only happens in Google reader. if I go to the site (e.g. BoingBoing), the video plays just fine.

Seriously EMI, what’s your problem? Afraid that people may actually LIKE the stuff? Idiots.

Oh, and here is the (rather cool) video, presuming you can play it from this blog:

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(via Schockwellenreiter

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I admit, I am not good with math (Calculus, Algebra I am quite good at, same goes for geometry), but this is beautiful and almost makes me want to try and get better at Calculus.

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Can you get them all?

(via Shockwellenreiter

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This story has made me wonder yet again what is life and what isn’t.

This isn’t an easy question to answer, there are a few things that play into this:

1. When is a human being a human being (abortion)
2. When is the right time to turn off machines (sickness)
3. Should we decide when we die? (Suicide).

Let’s try and go through this in order.

Life, for me, begins when the fetus can survive, on it’s own, outside the womb. This is the baseline. Modern medicine has shifted this though, we are able to keep babies alive much earlier than we used to. The question if we should do this (or not), is for a different time though.

Turning off the machines… This is something I think everybody has to find for themselves. Personally, my attitude is this: If there is a better than 90% chance that I will recover and be able to live a productive life (for me that is), then yes, please keep me on the machines. If the odds are against me then turn them off. I have no interest in being confined to a bed or chair for the rest of my life at the mercy of others who would need to feed, wash and change me.

I will go into this a bit more in a moment, but first let me get to the last point:

Yes. We should allow people to decide when they want to pass on. Even if that means that we assist them in their act. Digitas in Switzerland is a good example of an organization that I think we need more of. I know the argument against it. “People could feel pressured.” etc. But I think this underestimates people’s desire to live.

Anybody who thinks there isn’t already assisted suicide on a daily basis in this and other countries is seriously deluded. But much like abortions, we don’t see the failed attempts and the consequences. Who knows if this was really “just” binge drinking?

So why are we so hard off about suicide and many people think of it as a “sin”? I think this all harks back to a pre-industrial age, where many people were happy if they managed to live past the ripe old age of 30, many dying within the first year of life.

As such, the idea that someone could kill themselves and leave behind a family without means was a bad thing. So scaring people to live was a good way to keep the population numbers stable.

Of course the argument that suicide is selfish is somewhat apt, but so is the desire to be alive, we feed of other living things in order to sustain ourselves, yet, nobody would question that (no Vegans, you still kill animals in the production of your food, it does not matter that you don’t eat their flesh directly), but isn’t it any less selfish to try and keep people around?

It is always curious to me to hear people talk about the selfishness of the person killing themselves and how they feel “betrayed” and “left behind” without anybody ever questioning their own selfishness.

It is also somewhat funny to me to realize that our idea of love is: “If you love someone, set them free.” yet, when it comes for them to truly be free of this mortal coil we try to bind them to us with all our might.

So yes. I think we should have the choice to kill ourselves. I also think we should be provided with access to a pain free and safe way to end our lives, when we chose so.

Yes, I hear you, but what about the mentally ill? To this I have a counter question: What about the physically ill? I have heard over and over again the argument that people are in favour of suicide for the “terminally ill”, like cancer patients etc.

First of all: We are all terminally ill. Our life WILL end in death. There is no other outcome.

Secondly, have you ever been in serious pain? Were you of “clear mind” when that was the case? I wasn’t. You want that pain to end.

So why do we accept that argument for the physically ill but argue that people who are in mental pain do not have the same right? To say that they are not of “sound mind” and that they need “help” is a hollow phrase and utterly dishonest. Unless they are mentally challenged they will fully understand what the consequences of their actions are. Mental illness is a stigma, and even advocates for it will feel offended by my idea. But I stand by it: I am for giving everybody on this planet the right to have a safe and pain free death as long as they are of the age of majority.

Which brings me back to my second point: A productive life.

This will be different for everybody. But for me a productive life means that I can go about and experience the world and do the things I like. Sitting, half brain dead or paralized, in a chair all day long and staring out a window is not life to me. It is more akin to a prison.

Now, I cannot speak for everybody and I am sure there will be people out there who consider this kind of existence still worthy of experience, but I am not one of them. Turn off the machines for me and pass me the poison cocktail, this is were I would get off.

So what’s your take? What’s life? Should we have the right to end it when we feel like it? If not, why?

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