This posting was inspired by the review last week of “The Rise of Nuclear Fear” and a commentary about radiation exposure from the Three Mile Island Accident. Spencer R. Weart, the author of the “Nuclear Fear” book, has a conclusion I consider worth repeating. “Much more electricity will be needed before the entire world reaches minimal prosperity. None of the ways to generate electricity is fully satisfactory. In terms of both my family’s health and the health of the environment, I would personally live near an existing nuclear reactor than near a plant fired by fossil fuels such as coal.” Continue reading
Monthly Archives: May 2013
1858
Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and the War They Failed to See
This is a fine book that puts the lead-up to America’s Civil War in human terms. Bruce Chadwick presents seven stories of different figures who played roles in the politics of the time. The stories are held together by their effects on James Buchanan’s presidency. The stories alternate with chapters on Buchanan, and it is easy to skip around in the book, reading the chapters that most interest you.
Buchanan must have been the most tone deaf president in history. He refused to believe that many Americans, North and South, saw every political action through the lenses of slavery. He never understood the abolitionist passions behind the fight over Kansas becoming a state. He “ended 1858 the way that he began it, completely blind to the slavery issue that threatened to destroy the United States.” He told the nation that “the slavery crisis that had divided America for years appeared to be over.” Continue reading
Picnic Time
Summer is coming and it will soon be time for picnics. As reported by Word Detective and confirmed on NPR, “picnic” first appeared in English in 1748. It seems to have come from a French word “piquenique,” which appeared in 1692. This was a nonsense rhyming word and roughly meant to pick a trifle. The first picnics were what we today would call pot-luck dinners. Only in the mid-19th century did “picnic” come to mean a meal eaten outdoors. For wealthy Victorians, a picnic was hardly a “trifle”. They staged elaborate outdoor gourmet meals on tables set with linens and crystal; all tended by servants. My sense of today’s usage is that “picnics” carry prepared foods away from home, while “barbeques” include cooking and occur in the back yard.
An unpleasant rumor spread in the late 1990’s, confirmed by Word Detective and Snopes, that the word originated as a racist term related to lynchings. I wonder how a pleasant family-oriented “picnic” inspired such a rumor?
The Rise of Nuclear Fear
I struggled with the first part of the book by Spencer R. Weart, my interest in the title kept me reading, and I’m glad I did. I suggest beginning with the personal note at the end of the book. The opening sentence explains the book’s focus on the psychology of fear and the “forces of imagery and their pressure upon policies.” The author also reveals his personal opinions, and I was frankly somewhat surprised that he believes we should develop nuclear energy. The book carefully presents the pros and cons, with more emphasis on the cons, that I hadn’t anticipated that position. Continue reading
Radiation Exposure from the Three Mile Island Accident
A friend told me he attended a conference where one of the papers presented concluded that the person receiving the highest radiation exposure from the accident at Three Mile Island was a journalist who flew from Singapore to cover the story. A Health Physics Society report by Robert J. Barish has a good discussion about radiation exposure during air travel. It explains the exposure “…is caused not only by x rays (photons) but also by a variety of energetic particles such as neutrons, protons, electrons, muons ( a subatomic particle similar to an electron), and pions (another subatomic paricle described as the lightest meson). These “…come from a variety of cosmic sources in our galaxy, with a lesser contribution from our own sun” Continue reading
Stigma
A web site called “Breaking Stigma” explains that the word “…traces back to the late sixteenth century when they would mark people (with a visible brand or cuts) for certain crimes…” “A great representation of this kind of mark would be within the book, ‘The Scarlet Letter’.” Stigma is used in current language to indicate a person who is ostracized because of some behavior, crime, medical condition, or anything else that could cause disgrace or forced isolation from others.