randform

In a link in this randform post about food among others the issue of obesity versus hunger was mentioned.

I am not so sure wether this comparision was really helpful in this context. As a matter of fact in western countries it is often the poor who have obesity problems. First a diet which is high on carbonhydrates, fat and sugar is often simply cheaper than a high quality fresh (organic) vegetable/low fat diet. Secondly even if you could replace a bad fat meal with simple and low cost but good ingrediences, this often requires a certain degree of diet education and awareness. In particular everybody who finally managed successfully to get rid of the extra load due to excessive heavy calories should be dearned cautious to put on new ones. But this is usually a long and not so easy learning process.

And as it seems for example in the US it is rather that people are lured into an unhealthy food consumption. It is especially the children, which are defenselessly exposed to subtle marketing methods.
According to a study Food and beverage companies spent $1.62 billion to market their products to children in 2006. The FTC study was requested by Congress in response to growing concern about childhood obesity in the United States. The study, did not look directly at the possible link between food and beverage advertising to kids and childhood obesity, but to assume that such a link exists is definitely not too far fetched, a more detailled distinction between advertisements for healthy nutrition versus fast food/soft drinks etc. will give more information.

Over here in Japan the advertisement of food in restaurants is especially interesting to observe. Restaurant/food stands meals are usually modelled in plastic, which looks like Fimo (please see images). This food modeling seems to be a kind of art form, may be similar to food fotography (which uses also often plastic). For me the meals look rather like some futuristc nano food, however given the sucess of this kind of advertisement it is obvious that people feel attracted to this plastic food simulation. Interesting question, why? Because this kind of food cant rott and smell badly?. Because colors and shininess are exagerated and thus better perceptible as a kind of 3D symbol?

after “read the rest of this entry” you can find an artwork by Franziska Assisi (Bosnia) called: “Fimo naschen mit nichtlichtartigem Beschleuni-GEAR”

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I currently have to refrain a bit from blogging as I am currently a bit busy with all sorts of stuff, like I just finished my class, I have to prepare for a geometry conference and to care about other general organisatorial stuff like such “nuisances” as that the electricity of our appartment was suddenly switched off. As everybody nows such “nuisances” can keep one pretty busy.

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I hereby post the answer to new comments by a reader called Ken concerning the previous discussion about the future use of nuclear energy (please see the preceding posts). Again I think that they give a fairly good overview about the current stage of the discussion.

Ken’s comments are again in light grey blockquotes.

You again misunderstand the concept of a resource peak. It is when the supply and demand curves deviate. Not when the resource runs out.

Hi Ken, thanks for the comments, here my answers:

In the blogpost I wrote: “with the nowadays conventional commercial use of nuclear energy the Uran sources will be finished in about 60 years.”
In my answer to your last comment I wrote:
“..you can put it also like this: it seems to be cheaper to built breeders than to employ more costly exploitation methods.”

So maybe I expressed myself unclear. With “nowadays use sources will be finished” I meant that uranium wont be available anymore for the nowadays use and prices. So this is in particular the case when supply and demand curves deviate. Means: instead of the nowadays use of nuclear energy one will make more and more use of other technology in order to compensate for the higher and higher prices for uranium exploitation. It is clear that there will be in principle still Uranium on earth in 80 years, but it will be harder and harder to exploit it, so one will increasingly built breeders.

U233 is the desired product of the Thorium cycle, not a waste product.

First even if you would use U233 in a closed cycle, I believe that there will always be rests in the reprocessed spent fuel. Secondly to my knowledge up to now there exist only research plants, which are capable of burning U233.

According to world nuclear
India thinks about burning U233 in a three stage process:

* Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs, elsewhere known as CANDUs) fuelled by natural uranium, plus light water reactors, produce plutonium.
* Fast Breeder Reactors (FBRs) use this plutonium-based fuel to breed U-233 from thorium. The blanket around the core will have uranium as well as thorium, so that further plutonium (ideally high-fissile Pu) is produced as well as the U-233. Then
* Advanced Heavy Water Reactors burn the U-233 and this plutonium with thorium, getting about 75% of their power from the thorium.

So according to this plan, next to the uranium-233, plutonium will be produced in a fast breeder. Given that Russia has already problems to burn all of its plutonium from old weapons (half life of Plutonium 239: 24,110 years), it is clear that this creates a plutonium market which wants to feed itself. And just think about the high proliferation risk of plutonium.

I can give the British Jounal of Cancer Research article that shows the inverse correlation between proximity of children to nuclear power plants and the incidence of cancer.

Yes thanks I would like to have a look at it.

When I spoke of cancer causing chemical agents I was not referring to those leaching from nuclear power plants, I was speaking for those from the hundreds of vastly less regulated industries that are in the same areas nuclear power plants are located as well as distrubuted through out the country.

These industries could be a reason for cancer, so it would be important to include the local industries in a study which investigates the causes for a higher cancer risk near a nuclear power plant.

You vastly underestimate the difficulty in containing the witches brew of heavy metals that come form coal burning power plants and claim falsely that it is easier to contain mercury from coal plants, which accounts for up to 40% of all environmental mercury and will stay with us for a very long time. Mercury is only one toxin emmited and rarely contained from coal plants. The waste from nuclear plants is contained. Very little ever makes its way into the environment.

I didnt claim that it is possible to fully contain mercury from coal plants, I just said that there exist mercury filters, which one could think about employing in existing coal plants as a fast measure against blasting all this mercury into the air.
As a matter of fact it seems that also burning forests contribute to the mercury in the air, in this article in a (rather conservative) german newspaper it is claimed that this contribution is far higher than by coal plants.

But again: I am not in favour for coal. In particular if we speak about conventional green house gas emmitting power plants then there is a variety of alternative power plant types, which seem to be less environmentally harmful than coal plants.

And again: in principle one should try to do everything possible to employ renewable energies sources and not greenhouse gas emitting sources.

Although I should feel honored by the attention, your analysis is more polymical than analytical and so I really am just frustrated by your response.

Would I spent all this time answering carefully to your comment if I wanted to be polemical? I surely take your comments serious, last not least one can only test back ones own hypothesis’ in a discussion.

Second comment by Ken:

Here is the problem,

“In short: if mankind is unable to deal with this rapid expansion it probably doesnt matter how we blow up our planet.”

Why do you think this is even possible with commercial nuclear reactors.

The question was how to deal with a rapid population and industrial growth/expansion. The problem is that with or without commercial nuclear reactors at some point the problems regarding the distribution of ressources, let it be food, place, energy etc. will accumulate. And it is very suggestive that there will be wars about scarce ressources. Thats what I basically meant with “blowing up the planet”. Nuclear reactors do not help in solving these substantial problems. On the contrary due to a high proliferation risk, due to a hardly controllable waste problem etc. they just postpone and make the problems worse and rather irreversible. Like if a soil is radioactively polluted then it is lost for a long long time.

Also your argument for “renewables” is not founded on physics. No matter how efficient you think that wind mills will become, they will not provide the power needed. You can debate this, but you will lose. Solar is the same. The cost of these technologies are also (meaning in addition) prohibitive.

I consider solar energy to be a renewable energy. Regarding the costs one has to take into account a lot of things.
Look at the example of photovoltaic solar cells (it is the example I know about best, thats why I prefer to use this example over windmills, hydropower, thermosolar energy, geothermal energy or other renewable energies, but there are similar arguments for these energies). So just as an example: Solar cells used in spain produce electricity which costs roughly as much as electricity produced in conventional power plants. In Germany this looks different, because there is just not so much sun. So one has to look carefully at the local circumstances. The price e.g. for photovoltaic solar cells depends currently highly on the price of high pure silicon which is currently rather high due to the demand for high pure silicon in the semiconductor industry. But first this price is declining and secondly there are now slowly emerging companies who specialize on producing silicon for solar cells (which needs not always be that highly pure). Moreover there is a lot of research going on with other materials for photovoltaic solar cells. So there exists prognosis’ that the price for electricity produced with photovoltaic solar cells will be even in Germany down to conventional energy prices within a few decades. I wrote a bit about solar cells here in this and this post.

We have here also the question of where the money for research went and goes. I still think there should be some money go into research in nuclear energies, however the bulk money should be put into renewable energies and energy saving technologies. There is now a project of a whole city to be built in Abu Dhabi, which will be “fueled” only by renewable energies.

So my argument for “renewables” is definitely founded on physics and even on economical considerations.

Spent fuel rods are DANGEROUS. Stand within a score of meters of one after it has been pulled from a reactor and it will kill you with an absolute certainty. So will standing inside a blast furnace. I do not suggest that you do either. So what? Nearly every home in the Western world, by law, has trace amounts of Americium. It is classic reactor waste. It is probably in your hall way, keeping you safe. Millions of smoke detectors are thrown away in land fills every year. This is the same stuff that the famous radioactive boyscout used to drive his back yard nuclear reactor. I do not advocate being caviler about this, but you definately have expressed a favoritism towards coal over against a technology that is vastly less polluting, not just in terms of heavy metals but CO2 and acid rain.

I again like to point out that I am not in favour of coal.

It is safe and efficient and you would prefer that we put up windmills that are inefficient.

What means safe? With any technology you may have problems and sometimes life-endagering problems. The question is just, where do we expect more problems and where is a higher likelyhood of problems. windmills are definitely less dangerous than nuclear power plants, especially on a long term basis. About the efficiency of renewable energies I wrote already above.

Reactor and fuel designs are evolving very rapidly as well. You are using statistics to swat at gnats when there are vultures circling. Compared to the heterocyclic hydrocarbons, heavy metals and other toxins produced by a variety of industrial activities, the trace amounts of radiation that might leak into the environment from nuclear power plants is not harmful.

If a nuclear power plant works as planned then you are right, the traces of radiation should be OK with the given scientific knowledge. But firstly this scientific knowledge may change, like for example the recommended values for an absorbed dose are largely based on scientific studies done in relation to the events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so under quite a bit different conditions than the one one has in the case of a longterm dose of a nuclear power plant. Secondly I think the problems due to nuclear waste, accidents (think also of transport) and proliferation are much more important than the radiation of a normal working power plant.

We live in a cocktail of chemicals, how do you so easily single out radiation as the source in any epidemiological study, it seems like it would be very hard.

Where did someone single out radiation as a source?
The childhood cancer study gave no reason or cause for the higher incidence of Leukemia they ust stated that there is a higher risk.
The researchers said (but that was not part of the study) that given the
allowed radiation from a power plant and given the current scientific knowledge of a harmful absorbed dose one shouldnt get a higher Leukemia risk by living near a power plant. But the study says that there is a higher risk. So in short: There s a higher risk, but nobody knows why.

A good indication wether radiation is the source for that higher Leukemia risk would be to look wether the occurences of Leukemia are spatially homogenously distributed, but maybe they do not have not enough samples for that. I dont know.

People get worried about harmful isotopes within fuel rods but drink organo-mercurial compounds without a second thought. They fret about radiation causing the leukemia around Sullifield, even after it is demonstrated that the real culprit was munitions manufacturing during WW II.

I didnt look into that case.

Is it better to figure out a way to clean up the chemicals or get rid of the reprocessing plant. I’ll bet if you did the later it wouldn’t affect out comes that much. but would cost resources that may be better spent attempting the former, I’m just guessing.

You won’t get rid of the reprocessing plants. Reprocessing plants are used in order to reuse parts of the spent fuel, you could e.g. use reprocessed uranium in a fast breeder or plutonium in MOX fuel.

If you shuttered the nuclear plants you would replace them with coal fired ones. Would that be a step in the right direction? You believe that you are doing the right thing in your opposition to nuclear power, are you?

The share of nuclear energy is currently about 6% of the total worldwide energy consumption. Alone better energy saving would reduce the energy comsuption by far more than 6%, so you wouldnt need to replace them with coal plants. On average. What do I mean by on average? This means that also if you have to built a coal plant, because you couldnt provide renewable energies fast enough to substitute the need of electric currency at a particular location (a location where you switched off a nuclear power plant) and because you dont have the money for a cleaner conventional green house as emmitting power plant (one could see this as an international task to help developping countries in avoiding to employ coal plants) then there should be a coal plant saved somewhere else, where energy saving and renewable energies were already efficiently employed.

Yes at the moment I think I am doing the right thing in opposing commercial nuclear power, but I am also very concerned about the global warming (see eg here, so in particular i see keeping up nuclear research as a fall back option in case global warming would lead to a series of survival-of-mankind-threatening effects. But currently this is not the case. So as I already wrote at the moment I think nuclear energy is rather counter productive in solving the problems and I am not suggesting good old coal as the preferred substitute.

I decided to post hereby my answer to a comment on the last nuclear energy post (please see below), because people usually do not read the comment section and because I think this small discussion with a reader called Ken gives a good overview about the current situation. I included Ken’s comments in blockquotes (letters in light grey):

Hi Ken thanks for the comment. Please let me comment on it:

Is the untested technology you speak of the use of the Thorium cycle instead of the Uranium cycle? It’s safer.

I spoke of both. In this elder randform post (which I linked above) I agreed with you that the Thorium cycle seems to be safer than the U-238 – that doesnt make it safe though.

With current methods of uranium mining it is expected to peak in 50 years. This does not mean it will run out. Uranium is freely soluble and the Japanese have developed a method of extracting it from sea water. It will cost a lot more than the current spot price but it will be inexhaustible.

My source about the limits of Uran was the website of the World Nuclear Association – a PRO nuclear organisation, which is fairly matter of fact. At the time when I wrote the post they listed 60 years, they currently have the opinion that it may be 80 years. I cite:

“Thus the world’s present measured resources of uranium (5.5 Mt) in the cost category somewhat below present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for over 80 years.”

On the seawater option they say:
“…seawater (up to 4000 Mt), which would be uneconomic to extract in the foreseeable future.”

So of course in principle it is possible to extract more Uranium. However given the current use and exploitation methods the ressources will be done in about 60-80 years. Given the current development of breeder technology and what is written on their webpages you can put it also like this: it seems to be cheaper to built breeders than to employ more costly exploitation methods. Please take also into account that nuclear energy is on the rise. So the ressources may be faster finished than assumed.

In addition, Thorium is the fuel cycle of the future and uranium will be used primarily to drive this, although plutonium is also a good source of neutrons from the reaction creating a market for reactor produced and weapons grade plutonium leading to its destruction.

You are right that breeders may create a new market for plutonium, something I actually mentioned in another post, where it seems that the US is going to built a reactor type, which can burn MOX fuel. Why do you think this is good?

Childhood cancer in France is lower than in the rest of Europe.

I may believe you, but that doesnt say much.
If childhood cancer in France is lower than in the rest of Europe, – and if nuclear power plants are a source for cancer- then this could mean that the density of nuclear power plants in France is still low enough for being recognizable as a risk factor on a national level.
As a matter of fact the reactors in France are probably also fairly well maintained.

Your statistics do not link radiation from nuclear power plants to cancer.

Well yes, the childhood cancer study doesnt link radiation from plants to cancer. BUT – that was not the point of investigation of the study!
The study says that a child is clearly more likely to get Leukemia if it lives in the vicinity of a nuclear power plant. The study doesnt say anything on the cause for this higher likelyhood! In fact I could imagine that the cause may actually be more due to radioactive ground water or radioactive particles in the air than to radiation.

There are many cancer causing chemicals that have not been excluded which are likely to >co-exist with any isotopes which you have given no evidence for actual exposure to.

yes the non-radioactive chemicals used in a nuclear power plant can also be a cause for a higher cancer rate. I didnt exclude this. But that would be bad enough. Wouldnt it?

If these is a cause for any increased up tick in cancer rates (and not, for example increased life >span, which is also a risk factor), then by supporting the quasi-religious view that nuclear power is evil you could in fact be diverting attention from a true danger that could be removed or dealt with.

I said in that above mentioned elder randform post that I actually would support research in nuclear technology, so I definitively have no quasi-religious view on nuclear power. I am just very concerned about the future commercial use of nuclear energy -especially with regard to worldwide future energy consumption. Last but not least it is the scale which makes a real difference.
And i think especially the waste is a big, big problem.

The example of this that pops to mind is the much touted Navajo Neuropathy story from NM. This is caused by a point mutant originating in a single individual and is recessive. The anti-nuclear people claim that it was cased by uranium mining, which started in the 1950’s. No one explains how in 50 years time this amount of inbreeding could happen to account for scores of families being affected, but that didn’t stop the LA times from linking it to uranium. I think that the people in NM would be better served by access to genetic testing and consulting, but I’m an advocate for nuclear power, so I must just be nuts and not know what I’m talking about. There was mining for uranium and there are people in poor health and they both exist in the same place, ergo…

I dont know about this case.

The burning of coal is vastly more dangerous than the small amounts of radioactive waste produced at nuclear power plants. These include tens of thousands of tons of mercury, chromium, arsenic, lead, uranium, and thorium. This is spewed into the air along with carbon dioxide, nitric and sulfuric acid and silicate particulates. This is your true alternative that you are promoting to radioactive isotopes contained within zirconium ceramic fuel pellets in intact fuel assemblies in overly engineered fuel.

I am fully aware that burning carbon causes tremendous environmental problems.
However I think one can easier deal with them than with the ones from nuclear energy, like for example with filters etc. At the moment I think that it is easier to deal with a rapid global warming due to too slow development of renewable energies than with a rapid expansion of nuclear energy.
In particular I am not in favour for coal. I think the question is more how to deal with overpopulation and a rapid industrialization. As I wrote above -even breeders will provide energy for only a relatively short time period (looking at the time of existence of mankind). In short: if mankind is unable to deal with this rapid expansion it probably doesnt matter how we blow up our planet.

The ressources let it be energy, food or place are limited. period.
Enforcing nuclear power seems to me rather a way how to postpone and enlarge the real problems.

If one would get a hold of this rapid expansion then by employing measures like energy-saving architecture etc. renewable energies will be fully sufficient in my opinion.

In around 500 years, most of the biologically dangerous isotopes are decayed to natural levels.

No. As an example: Uran 233 (produced in the Thorium cycle) has a half-life of 160000 years.

They pulled intact wooden furniture from King Tut’s tomb, I think that we can safely sequester the small amount of waste produced from nuclear power plants until it poises no threat.

I dont understand this argument.

The Mercury from the coal plants that you are advocating will be circulating around the environment for eons.

There are already pretty good mercury filters, they are just not everywhere installed.

Sorry dude, the future is looking to be nuclear, not your precious coal.

As I already pointed out, I am not in favour for coal. Concerning the nuclear power: I fear you may be right.

“Die Toteninsel im Nebel”, artwork by Justin Hoffmann

This is an update post to a previous post about a nuclear dump site near San Francisco. I will discuss in this post here a possible relation to an increased risk of cancer near San Francisco.

Due to the alarming results of the IPCC study concerning the world climate the discussions about using nuclear energy got a new boost. An often heard argument is that nuclear energy is relatively safe and that nuclear fission is a fairly well tested technology.

This is not true.

First the old technology is not as safe as assumed, as pointed out e.g. in this study. And secondly and more important: future use of fissile techology would make rather new and untested (and on average more dangerous) techologies necessary, namely the technologies of BREEDER REACTORS. (please see this randform post (and the therein cited other randform posts) for details)

Why? – because with the nowadays conventional commercial use of nuclear energy the Uran sources will be finished in about 60 years.

In this post I also gave a rough outlook on how an increased demand of nuclear energy (which accounts nowadays for about 6 percent of the total worldwide energy consumption) by a factor of ten would change the world.

– One may infer that a factor ten is too big since it would mean that 60 % of nowadays worldwide energy consumption would be covered by nuclear energy, however given the general increase of energy consumption this portion will shrink very fast and will still leave us with about 4000 new nuclear power plants (instead of nowadays about 450).

And these are nuclear power plants in a rather untested technology as pointed out above.

Likewise the nuclear waste problem is accumulating over the years- means if the waste per year is ten times more than before it will be in ten years 100 times more than in the initial year.

And nuclear waste is longterm problem.

An example:

In this randform post a considerably small nuclear waste problem (an old nuclear dump site near San Francisco) was mentioned which may have affected the lives of people.

I looked into this example a bit more.

If there is an environmental cause for an increased cancer mortality rate it is not far fetched to assume that there should probably be also an increased childhood Leukemia mortality rate (especially given the above mentioned study about childhood leukemia). So I looked wether I could find something there. However there is a study carried out mainly by the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health which says:

A simple and direct analysis of the spatial distribution of childhood leukemia was performed using geographic data from a large case/control study. The data consists of cases of childhood leukemia and their corresponding birth cohort controls located in seven San Francisco Bay Area counties. Both parametric and randomization analyses show no evidence of a non-random spatial pattern of childhood leukemia among six of these counties….

So the study found no spatial pecularities, i.e. no increased risk of childhood Leukemia in Marin County. Based on geographical data using GPS:

…the latitude and longitude coordinates were mathematically transformed so that
distance is measured in kilometers; that is, a new Cartesian
coordinate system was established in kilometers relative to
the latitude and longitude point (37.5, ± 122.5). Nearest
neighbor distances were then calculated to compare
statistically the spatial patterns of cases and controls.

So with statistical methods nearest neighbour mean distances between living locations of sick children (case/case pairs) and sick/nonsick children (non-case/case) where compared where

When no spatial pattern exists, the mean nearest
neighbor distances calculated from case/case and non-
case/case pairs are expected to be equal and the frequency
of the case/case pairs is expected to be equal to a known
value that depends only on the number of cases and
controls sampled.

If I understood correctly the statistical techniques used in the study are based to a great extend to techniques listed in this article.

I currently do not have the time to look into all the details but what I find important to mention is that the study (if I understood correctly) compared a total number of 12 (case+non-case/control) observations in Marin county. (In all the counties 333 observations).

The Northern California Cancer Center has a quite well documented archive of cancer statistics, which is publicly available to some extend and I looked briefly into it. Unfortunately spatial differences in cancer occurence are only listed since the year 2000.

But to my worry: on a first glance (which is just a suspect and NO statistical analysis!) one CAN actually observe spatial pecularities for Marin county, i.e. the five year death counts of cancer for Marin county seem to be increased for : skin cancer, the already mentioned breast cancer and Leukemia (where no difference between adult/non-adult had been made). (I looked only at death counts in order to avoid errors from over-diagnostization).

This means on the other hand: If this first glance would turn out to be of statistical significance than an environmental cause is rather likely.

Looking at the statistics it is clear that the local pecularities of cancer mortality rates for e.g. liver cancer (probably due to too much drinking) or Karpozy Sarkoma (due to Aids) in San Francisco look much more dramatic than the local pecularities of Marin County – just already by the sheer size of death cases. However for the individual case this is no consolation.

Concluding: this “small” waste problem (if I understood correctly the authorities see NO problem) MAY have had already quite dramatic consequences.

This tells us what?
IF it would turn out that there is a nuclear waste problem in Marin County (I again emphasize, what I found are only loose suspects) then just extrapolate this for the to be expected nuclear waste problems (see above) and how authorities would deal with them.

But apart from this – lets put it that way: I wouldnt necessarily swim in Marin county waters anymore until this question hadn’t been thoroughly examined.

　”Immer wieder la Wiener! – greetings from a barbiequeuekoo” artwork by Hiro Mourikama

It’s Barbeque season in Fukuoka and apparently even Kyushu University has a barbeque station right off the law building. Usually students gather there and -judging by the smell- grill meat or fish (please see below image).

However given the fact that the livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global and especially regarding global warming (please see also this randform post) and given the roaring fish market (partially monitored by the fishinfonet) it would be advisable to understand more, what the main reasons for the barbeque sessions are. Is the smell of meat important or can this eventually be substituted by vegetables? Is the fire an atavistic essential? The combination of the previous with the social aspect?

Up to now according to FAO director-general Jacques Diouf the world only needs 30 billion dollars a year to eradicate the scourge of hunger. But as a matter of fact also if this sum is rather small (like in comparision to the other sums mentioned in the article) it seems to be already now an unmanageable problem to find solutions to distribute food in a balanced way.

Given the upcoming problems due to climate change and overpopulation this wont get easier.(->There was already a link to the Impacts of Climate Change on health chart in death/million of the United Nations Development program in this randform post)

So may be one should now also start thinking about a minimal astronauts diet for the earthly being, consisting of cheaply produceable carbonhydrates with a vitamin and mineral supplement. Hopefully not soylent green.

I may be a bit sensitive to this – but the music within shopping centers is usually first just ugly and secondly as it is usually in addition perpetual and repeating it makes me want to run out of the shopping centers right away. (The music in some of the shopping centers over here is actually in my view a torment to the employees and really a case for a health review!).

I know what I am talking about since I worked once in a gardening center in Germany, where the shopping music was also rather terrible which made working there almost unbearable.

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The math and science building of Kyushu University is located at Hakosaki Campus which is directly in the entry lane of Fukuoka airport. Probably this is one reason, why the faculty of math will soon move to another bigger and newer campus which is located in the west of Fukuoka. However this campus is quite far out, so nobody really wants to move there. As I understand also other campuses located elsewhere in Fukuoka should go there.

As a matter of fact -may be I am wrong as I didnt really make a statistical analysis of that- but it seems that there is a general tendency to move university campuses, which were usually located in the center of a city to the outskirts of a city. And this is only partially due to the higher needs of space regarding more and more sophisticated experimental setups, people etc – as in principle – also given the usual high real estate costs in a cities center – one could try to find more space within the center of a city (remark: For the case of a particle accelerator this could indeed be difficult, but in general new experimental set-ups are not that big). In short -given that the above observation is true – one could see this as a society’s unwillingness to fund more space for universities in the center of cities – and thus it could display certain priorities of a society.

The above jet flying over Hakosaki campus which looks like tatooed from underneath has such a wild appearance and looked so gaga or silly that I was supposing that it might have been the private jet of a pop group like lets say beastie boys?? (just joking…:))

I am not sure, but it seems that it is forbidden to use a bike on major roads here in Japan. This may get a bit problematic in particular if the bike-lane layout is unfortunate as above, where it is hard to understand why the bus stop had to be made in such a way that the sidewalk got completely squeezed – especially given the fact that if a bus stops it occupies anyways half of the red roadway. It is actually quite easyy to get run over by a bike.

I found an even worse sidewalk/bikelane layout on a trip to the long penninsula which sits in front of Fukuoka (please see map for details). The biketrip there was intended as a refuge into nature – in particular I wanted to have a look at the open sea. But the trip turned out differently -the road to the penninsula’s tip was completely jammed due to heavy excursion traffic, the sidewalk very small and the sidewalk/street complex concealed with fences on both sides so that there was no way to leave the street. Given the heat (no shade) and the smell of the exhausts the biketrip became rather nightmarish.

So instead of having a look at the sea, I took the first exit of the road, which is the seaside park uminonakamichi and visited Marine World instead, which holds a shark (=HAI in german) basin. There was actually a diver in the basin and one wonders what makes people go in there voluntarily.

Some images of the shark basin at Uminonakamichi after the more

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