You've got to see this !

Vernal Equinox

...GARY. . you re priceless!!!  ;-))

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G'day JustinO,

 

I was lucky enough to photograph the rising moon in Oz.

 

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIcMN64RijcRk2hYplFSaFAf8kKvPsqmfdEOBcBB29j1NiCqq5NA0nAnRPfojBLsqht-VS821UJPF363WMk9VmMdVuXJwH1D9oWk2ZKMQMgHIrWJ0R2RN06qrSuJOMaKnskD8E7WtTiJI/s1600/Mooning.jpg

 

Gary

VERNAL EQUINOX

Tonight will be the SUPER MOON for the Vernal Equinox. . .when the moon will be the closest to the earth in 18 years. . ..  

Well, here is an early Super Moon. . . .one that is much closer. . .LOL

This is rather current. . .like this week!  LOL

Colors Snapping Over The Dunes

Maxime's St Paddy's Day Blessing. . . . . ..

St Patrick's Day

Faith n begorrah. . tis luvely heah on The Dunes . .brilliant sun, 50ish degrees. .I have the place to me-self today so I spent some time earlier out back exposed to the rays. . avoiding tan lines. . .LOL 

Peter's coming later for "non traditional"  St Patrick's day supper.  I understand there'll be some wannabe-Irish here for 'happy hour' [chez O'Shea every hour's a happy hour] and supper.  Parents didnt mention who is coming. . . .so nous verrons. . . .

The origins of St. Padraic are somewhat 'shrouded in mystery'  [now aren't those traditional words. . hehe] like all interesting characters. . the less you you know about them the more intriguing they are.  One of the strong legends is that Padraic was captured  on a raid off the coast of Portugal and the Celtic Pirates [hmmm sounds like a good name for a basketball team. . hehee. . of course we already have the Boston Celtics. . .mostly tall black men. . with  token white now and then .;-) ]. . ..well, the Celtics took him home as 'booty' and he was sold to a local farmer near Armagh where he was sent to tend the sheep.. . . a good biblical labor for future leaders.  lol


I am not having much success in finding a satisfactory green but I guess I shall stay with this one.


I heard somewhere earlier that Boston is featuring a Gorgeous day. . with 60 degree weather.  Oh everyone must be hanging out on the Commons. . .that is, those not already ensconced in the pubs and bars in South Boston, Southie, and the rest of the predominantly Irish enclaves. . . T'wasn't but a late century ago when the Brahmins of Boston had signs in their store windows and work places "No Irish-Catholics need apply."  Well, we showed 'em:  we took over the bloody city!  Huuurrraaahhh.


Maybe you've heard the expression "lace-curtain Irish". . .well when  we began taking over, doing the hiring, getting up in the world in politics, in the Church, in education. . .thanks to the Irish Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of St Joseph, and other groups of Sisters who opened schools and colleges and educated the Irish urchins free of charge, one of the signs of "making it" was to have lace curtains in the parlor windows. . . Yepper, we had arrived !  Lace curtains. . .faith n begorrah !. . .Confession on Saturday, Mass n Communion on Sunday. . . .and in those days to prepare to receive the Lord we had to 'fast' = go without food and water from midnight!  Today it is supposed to be 1 hour. . .which most young Catholics don't know about and thus don't observe.


I've often heard older people say that the best and prettiest babies are the children of Irish and Italian and Irish and Portuguese parents. Gorgeous kids grow up to be stunning people. . . .;-))  How does this face grab ya. . .?  hahahaa   

S

http://corbettharper.com/blog/2011/03/of-atoms-and-men/

This articles is from http://corbettharper.com/blog/2011/03/of-atoms-and-men

I am reposting it here for our info.  This helps me so much better understand the horrendous disaster in Japan, esp after the quake and tsunami.

Thanks, Corbett, for sharing your knowledge with us.

ciao,  justin

 

Of atoms and men

Since last week’s earthquake and tsunami, I’ve been very disturbed by reading these reports coming out of Japan about the reactor problems at the Fukushima power plant. Even though I’m not usually interested in most scientific or mathematical fields, I did spend three years studying nuclear chemistry, learning how nuclear reactors and atomic bombs operate and what physical principles they rely on. It is, after all, fascinating to understand how a lump of metal can somehow put out vast quantities of energy while changing its own nature in the process. Although I haven’t done much with that knowledge the past few years, I’ve remembered enough of what I learned to feel that the reports are not consistent and that there is something crucial going on at the plant that the Tokyo Electric Power Company is not being honest about.

For those of you not up on atomic power theory, here’s a quick overview. All atoms contain a nucleus (NOT “nuculus”, thank you very much, George Bush!) composed of protons and neutrons. The number of protons in a nucleus determines what chemical element the atom belongs to. The number of neutrons in the nucleus, however, is not necessarily consistent within an element and determines what isotope of that element the atom belongs to. While some isotopes of an element have similar properties, others are massively unstable, and their atoms will spontaneously degrade into lower-numbered elements, releasing energy in the process. Some stable isotopes can be converted to unstable isotopes to intentionally release energy, usually by bombarding the stable isotopes with free neutrons. This splitting of unstable elements is termed fission, and is the basic principle on which all current forms of atomic power rely.

Nuclear power reactions generally make use of uranium-238 in this process. U-238 is extremely stable, but U-239 is not and can thus be used to generate power. Atomic weapons and a few reactors (including the Fukushima 3 unit) are more likely to use plutonium-239, which has a higher energy output but is not found in nature. Power reactors usually use this energy to boil water and drive steam turbines. The reactor basically replaces a coal or oil fired boiler.

Inside the reactor, the rate of fission is maintained at a constant level because each fission event, in addition to producing heat energy, also produces more free neutrons. These transform other atoms of U-238 into U-239, which then fission in their turn to produce more energy and neutrons, a process called a chain reaction. Left to itself, this process would keep accelerating. It is limited by the control rods of the reactor, which are constructed of elements capable of absorbing large numbers of neutrons without becoming unstable. Power levels inside the reactor are regulated by the positioning of the control rods. When the reactor is shut down, the control rods are fully inserted into the reactor core to absorb all neutrons and halt the chain reaction.

How is this relevant to the events at Fukushima? It works like this. After the quake and tsunami, TPEC stated that all of the reactors at the plant had been shut down, and that it was continuing to cool the reactors to remove residual heat, but that the tsunami had flooded the backup generators and halted the cooling process.

Subsequently they began to report rising core temperatures in one and eventually three reactor units in spite of all the efforts made to cool them, leading gradually to fears that the cores would undergo meltdowns.
This is what has been bothering me. A reactor is shut down by fully inserting the control rods. The control rods absorb the free neutrons and make it impossible for fission events to take place inside the core at any noticeable rate. Without the fission events, the reactor cannot generate energy. So why are these reactors somehow getting hotter?

The second law of thermodynamics dictates that stored energy has to diminsh over time, not increase. Whether the reactor core was partially exposed due to evaporation or not, the flow of water through it would still be carrying heat away from the core. If the water was not moving, it would still be absorbing heat from the core and distributing it to other parts of the structure. If the core were completely exposed to air, the air would be serving the same role, albeit much more inefficiently. If the core were enclosed in a complete vacuum, energy would still be radiating away from it. Under no set of circumstances would the reactor core, simply sitting there with a certain amount of residual heat, be getting hotter. It would be cooling, possibly at an imperceptible rate, but still cooling.

The only conclusion I can come to is that TEPCO has lied about this situation from the beginning, and that the reactors were not properly shut down following the tsunami, due either to human error or damage to the control systems. They are still operational to some degree and generating heat energy, and the technicians have failed to halt the process, with the result that core temperatures are climbing.

Confirming this analysis is the report that TEPCO attempted to halt rising temperatures in the Fukushima 1 reactor by using seawater and boric acid. Boric acid, like all forms of boron, is a good neutron absorber and is heavily used in atomic industries for shielding and safety measures. But why put a neutron absorber into an idle reactor which is not generating any neutrons? The logical answer would be that the reactor is in fact generating neutrons as part of an ongoing fission reaction. Thus, the announcement that boric acid was being used in the attempt to prevent a meltdown is effectively an admission that the reactor is still active.

At this point, then, the Japanese PR teams are living on borrowed time. There will be no criticality accident―a reactor unintentionally reaching critical mass and beginning a self-sustaining chain reaction―because that has already occurred. There will also be no partial meltdowns. Unless some dramatic reversal happens, all three reactors will undergo meltdowns, which are already taking place, and the incident will not be closed until the meltdowns change the fuel configuration within the reactors and thereby halt the reactions.

How will this process work? Nuclear reactors are heavily dependent for stable operation on the manner in which fuel is loaded into them. Each fuel element within a reactor core contains many thousands of carefully sized and positioned fuel pellets. This is done so as to maximize the exposed surface area of the fuel and thereby the neutron capture rate. A meltdown occurs when the ongoing reactions raise the temperature of a portion of the fuel above its melting point, and the fuel literally runs out of the core to pool on the bottom of the containment vessel. This process greatly reduces its exposed surface area, cutting down on its ability to capture neutrons and keeping the fission reactions from sustaining themselves. Since a meltdown will always shut itself off given time, it is not as disastrous as popularly supposed as long as the containment vessel is not breached. However, it will always result in the complete loss of the reactor.

What the exact sequence of events leading up to the failure of the reactor control systems at the Fukushima plant was, I can’t begin to say. My best guess is that the earthquake and tsunami combined somehow misaligned or otherwise damaged the control systems so that the reactors could not be completely shut down. This incident may serve as a warning against one design danger of boiling water reactors, where the control rods have to be inserted by power from below the containment vessel; in a pressurized water reactor, the rods are inserted from above and can fall into the reactor freely due to gravity, making for a more foolproof system.
I realize this is an unsual post, but the contradictory statements and unexplained actions surrounding this accident are too unusual not to comment on. Maybe I have missed a piece here in examining this situation. But from the very beginning, it seemed strange. At first I thought TEPCO was simply refusing to shut the reactors down after the cooling loops had been damaged in order to keep power supplies going. That was the only way I could account for the news of rising core temperatures. When they announced that the reactors had in fact been shut down, it was baffling. According to the laws of physics, an increasing risk of a meltdown in an idle reactor is not possible. Yet that is exactly what the reports are asking us to believe has happened.

One final thought. If the reactors had been kept running when the earthquake struck, instead of being automatically shut down as a safety precaution, they would have been able to keep powering their own coolant systems and operating normally. Instead, because the operators were overcautious and didn’t want to risk the breach of a containment vessel surrounding an active reactor, they chose to rely on backup systems for which they did not have supplies. Now they face a higher risk of radiation leakage along with the certainty that half their plant will be destroyed. The meltdowns at Fukushima are one more example of how human overcaution can lead to even greater calamities than might have occurred had men faced a threatening situation boldly and aggressively.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 15th, 2011 at 11:30 pm 

Gay Relationships: Guy Gawking - Part One

Posted: 15 Mar 2011 06:54 PM PDT

When I first came out to myself as a gay man many years ago, I was completely clueless about the gay lifestyle. Like any culture, I quickly came to learn that the gay community has its own norms and practices that differed to lesser or greater degrees than what I'd experienced in the mainstream heterosexual world that we all grow up in and internalize.
Living in the suburbs of Chicago where few resources existed for learning about and meeting other gay folk, I established a friendship base in the Windy City itself, which houses a fairly large gay metropolis. It was here that my virginal journey into gay society began. So naïve I was in learning all the social nuances involved in this new land I was venturing into!
I amusingly recall one day walking through the gay ghetto with one of my friends, just chatting away about this and that, when all of a sudden in mid-sentence, his neck spun around in a double-take (very similar to Linda Blair in "The Exorcist") when a striking man in a tank-top walked past us. I found myself a little startled and taken aback by his behavior, which seemed so overt and untamed by my conventional standards with his eyes bugged out and tongue wagging. As I quickly came to learn, this commonplace ritual is called "cruising", an important social skill that all single gay men quickly learn to develop to snag themselves a potential date or casual sex partner for the night.
My continued immersion into the gay brotherhood brought an interesting tidbit to light about gay socialization; that is, this whole "gay gawking" phenomenon of sizing up with the eyes of one's attraction to another is not exclusive to the singles' scene. It's not unusual for gay couples to partake in this activity, either together or separate from one another. And that is the topic for this article, spurred by an interview I gave for journalist Diane Maples who was writing a piece for MSNBC.com on the practice of "ogling" that occurs and its impact on monogamous relationships. The following includes some of the content I offered during the interview for her story....
Got Whiplash?
You know what I'm talking about! You see that hot guy coming towards you as you're walking down the sidewalk. Your eyes connect briefly, hold slightly, and then the gaze is diverted. He walks past you and you turn around ever so slightly to see if he looks back. And he does..bingo! Or maybe you and a friend are sitting at a restaurant having dinner and you find yourself mesmerized by the hunk at the table just opposite you; you can't help staring at him in awe until your friend kicks you under the table to snap you out of it before the restaurant runs out of napkins to soak up your drool.
Having the eyes pulled in the direction of a good-looking or intriguing person is a natural part of attraction and all its mysteries. "Gawking" isn't isolated only to gay men; it's also very rampant among our heterosexual counterparts as well. You see plenty of our straight gal pals smacking their boyfriends in disgust when their eyes wander to the exotic woman that walks into the room. It's a normal human response, though does tend to be more of a "man thing" (gay or straight), as we men tend to be more visually stimulated in our erotic orientation.
So this is all well and good if you're single and available, but what happens if you're already in a relationship with someone and you become gripped with this magnetic draw? Is it ok for a gay man in a committed partnership to appreciate the beauty of a good-looking man who's not his own lover? Are there varying degrees of "gawking" that are acceptable versus violations? Or is it completely taboo to even look at another specimen other than your husband? These are the ultimate questions...and in actuality, there is no necessarily right or wrong answer.
What it comes down to are values and conducting yourself in such a way that you remain in integrity with yourself and your relationship for what you believe to be the best option for you. To say what is right or wrong would be a value judgment, imposing one's beliefs on another without permission or consent. We have enough of that in our society! I believe it is up to each individual and each partner in a relationship to define their own values about this particular issue and behave accordingly to stay within the confines of health within their personal worlds.
It is also important to ensure our behavior doesn't violate the boundaries or rights of others; therefore, "gawking" behavior should also be kept under wraps and controlled so as not to embarrass, humiliate, or offend the receiver of our attentions. It truly is an issue of respect.
Gawking & the Gay Couple
While "to gawk or not to gawk" remains a personal dilemma and choice, I will offer some viewpoints about this phenomenon as it pertains to gay couples in committed relationships. These are personal and professional biases; it is always up to each partner to make their own decisions regarding the role this type of behavior plays in their relationship.
Though I'm generalizing here, I believe that "gawking" is probably less of an issue in gay relationships than straight unions for a number of reasons. Due to the male tendency toward the visual, there may be more acceptance and understanding among gay men to disregard the occasional "straying-of-the-eye" and not view it as a threat to the stability and commitment of their relationships.
Because of our marginalized status, gay relationships also tend to have a less defined structure and more flexibility of roles than the straight blueprint for how relationships are "supposed to be run", thereby making things looser and more relaxed. Additionally, an unfortunate drawback of gay culture is that looks and appearance are glamorized and emphasized as a prime value, therefore there tends to be more focus on what somebody looks like and this reinforces "gawking" tendencies. Just some theories!
Another important point to emphasize about "gawking" and committed relationships is that we're human! Therefore, noticing and acknowledging someone's good looks is a normal function of being alive...we're hard-wired that way and it's a chemical reaction. Also, just because a partner finds someone else attractive doesn't mean that he will or even create a temptation to cheat. Issues of respect and boundaries will need to be defined in each relationship around attraction, behavioral conduct, and involvements with others and is specific and unique to each couple's situation.
( Continued Tomorrow: Tips For Managing the Gawking Impulse In Your Relationship )
Article By: Brian Rzepczynski, Certified Personal Life Coach, is The Gay Love Coach: “I work with gay men who are ready to create a road map that will lead them to find and build a lasting partnership with Mr. Right.” To sign up for the FREE Gay Love Coach Newsletter filled with dating and relationship tips and skills for gay singles and couples, as well as to check out current coaching groups, programs, and teleclasses. Brian is a friend and contributing author to GAYTWOGETHER, please visit him at http://www.TheGayLoveCoach.com


~~~ thanks to Michael @gattwogether.com and Brian