…a “great day”:http://mlb.mlb.com/news/gameday_recap.jsp?ymd=20071028&content_id=2285700&vkey=recap&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb to be a Masshole.

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When I was walking through the redwoods this summer, I ran across the bench pictured above.

It’s hard to see in the photo (tricky light, cheap camera, and I am just learning iPhoto), but the plaque praises Bernard Baruch (of “Baruch plan”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2006_06/LookingbackBaruch.asp fame), stating that “his stature is that of the redwoods.”

You can download a larger version “here.”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/file_download/1 You still might have to enlarge it.

Normally, I think it’s lame to post this sort of thing. But this time I cannot resist.

Someone found this blog by Googling

bq. how+much+money+those+a+per​son+that+works+with+a+centri​fuge+machine+make+a+years+

I’ve never blogged about that particular aspect of uranium enrichment, but wish the individual the best in his/her endeavors.

Unless they involve things that can blow a lot of shit up.

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Or The Dan Ponemantown Massacre , Big Poneman, MC 900 Ft. Poneman…

Former NSC proliferation guru Dan Poneman is “in a band”:http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/columns/intelligencer/10903/ called Coalition of the Willing. The photo is from their gig at the Knitting Factory. Seriously.

The band includes other luminaries, such as Hungarian ambassador Andras Simonyi and former Doobie Brothers guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (about whom _ACW_ has “previously blogged”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/612/showing-skunk-baxter-some-love).

A documentary about them is below. That still is of Tommy Ramone.

[Thanks to FoKerr _MAP_ for the tip. ]

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This is sweet.

Areva has an “animated
tutorial”:http://www.areva.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=arevagroup_en%2FFolderGameQuiz%2FFolderGameQuizFullTemplate&cid=1033576020007 on the nuclear fuel cycle.

Just click the part that says “Follow the guide!”.

[ Thanks to FoKerr _MBN_ for this. ]

While discussing his previous life in NYC, the IAEA DG “disclosed”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/world/middleeast/elbaradei-sep.html?ref=middleeast&pagewanted=all to the _NYT_ that he reads blogs:

Q: New York is home for me: I spent 15 years in New York. New York is still home. I have lots of friends, memories. I love New York not because what it represents, an effort to look at the big picture, integrate and learn how all of us need to work together, succeed together. It’s a merit system. It doesn’t matter where you’re coming from. And you are rewarded on your merit and tolerate each other. That’s to me, still an elusive goal we haven’t reached. *You see sometimes the comments on the blogs saying, “His name is Mohamed and that says it all”.* That makes you feel that there is still a lot of work to do.

Q: Meaning?

A: Meaning that I’m inherently biased, because of my background, my identity, religious origin… It just shows how much we still have stereotyping. How much we cannot come to understand that we can rise above all these petty allegiances and identify, simply with each other as human beings.

If this one is in his bookmarks, I’d like to know.

FoKerr _LH_ sent along “this piece”:http://www.nypress.com/17/5/books/books.cfm by Mark Ames which makes the case that there are a number of similarities between neoconservatism and black metal.

This part is hilarious:

Then there’s [Richard] Perle, who…has his own infamous Black Metal nom de roque: The Prince of Darkness. Arrrggghhh! *Launch fireworks and pyrotechnics from front of stage, set off explosions, lower giant skull as The Prince of Darkness and David “Axis of Evil” Frum take to the stage in their End to Evil monsters of hardline ideology tour!*

The similarities don’t stop there. Whereas Vikernes and other Black Metalists saw heathen Norway in a life-or-death struggle for existence with the Semitic tribes’ Judeo-Christianity, Perle and Frum see Judeo-Christian America under threat from Islam. And both have the same solution: War, dude!

Speaking of metal (OK, grindcore) and hilarious, this is Napalm Death doing what is perhaps the shortest song ever recorded:

The _New Yorker_ has “an article”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/03/070903fa_fact_keefe in which Patrick Radden Keefe explains several methods by which experts determine the age of a given bottle of wine.

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Now, whatever else you want to say about nuclear-weapons testing, it apparently has given the world a couple of different ways to figure out if you got your money’s worth by dropping several grand on that bottle of whatever.

According to Keefe, a gentleman had the contents of a particular bottle carbon-dated in an effort to figure out whether he had been swindled. That’s where nuclear-testing came into play:

bq. All organic material contains the radioactive isotope carbon 14, which exhibits a predictable rate of decay; scientists can thus analyze the amount of the isotope in a bottle of wine in order to approximate its age. Carbon 14 has a long half-life, and carbon dating is relatively imprecise for evaluating objects that are several centuries old. But *nuclear atmospheric tests in the nineteen-fifties and sixties offer a benchmark of sorts, since levels of carbon 14 rise sharply during that period. In this case, the amounts of carbon 14 and of another isotope, tritium, were much higher than one would expect for two-hundred-year-old wine*, and the scientists concluded that the bottle contained a mixture of wines, nearly half of which dated to 1962 or later.

Similarly, Philippe Hubert, a French physicist, developed a method of determining the age of wine which also is related to nuke testing. Keefe writes that Hubert

bq. had devised a method of testing the age of wine without opening the bottle. Hubert uses low-frequency gamma rays to *detect the presence of the radioactive isotope cesium 137. Unlike carbon 14, cesium 137 is not naturally occurring; it is a direct result of nuclear fallout. A wine bottled before the advent of atmospheric nuclear testing contains no cesium 137,* so the test yields no results for older wines. But *if a wine does contain cesium 137 the short half-life of the isotope—thirty years—allows Hubert to make a more precise estimate of its age.*

More trivia to fill your head…

Ms. “Oliver and I”:http://oliverandi.blogspot.com/ correctly “notes”:http://oliverandi.blogspot.com/2007/08/plugging-away-to-october.html that she finished a “63-mile bike ride”:http://www.waba.org/events/2007/50statesride.php yesterday. As some of you may recall, it was a bit hot – a condition which caused me to drop out at mile 50. I need to get in better shape.