Trust Us

The nuclear industry says it has everything under control and doesn’t need any pesky public oversight:

Citing a need to keep information from terrorists, regulators say the government will no longer reveal security gaps discovered at nuclear power plants or the subsequent enforcement actions taken against plant operators.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced the change in policy on Wednesday during its first public meeting on power plant safety since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It drew barbs from critics who said the secrecy would erode public confidence in the agency.
Until now, the NRC has provided regular public updates on vulnerabilities its inspectors found at the country’s 103 nuclear power reactors, such as broken fences or weaknesses in training programs.Citing a need to keep information from terrorists, regulators say the government will no longer reveal security gaps discovered at nuclear power plants or the subsequent enforcement actions taken against plant operators.

It’s remarkable to me that the NRC hasn’t had a public meeting on safety in nearly three years. At any rate, I don’t understand why the NRC can’t at least make generic disclosures on security issues. If the public isn’t aware of problems, who is going to provide the pressure to fix them? And odds are that if terrorists really want to learn of security vulnerabilities, they will regardless.

Horse Race

At a glance, I don’t quite follow the methodology, but this professor says that if the election were held today, Kerry would have a 90% chance of winning.
At any rate, there’s a pretty cool map illustrating each state’s relative electoral college importance.

I Believe in Love

The child rape victim has filed a motion to end the no-contact order with just-released Mary Kay Letourneau after her seven years of taxpayer-funded imprisonment.
Doesn’t seem like the sentence was a cost effective form of punishment or rehabilitation to me.

Battleground Strategy

South Knox Bubba points out that the Kerry campaign has yet to get its act together in Tennessee, even though recent polling shows the race is a statistical dead heat:

Bush 48%
Kerry 46%

+/- 4.2 (Bush was up 10% in the prior poll).
I hope this is because Kerry is still getting organized. But he has yet to show any real interest in the Volunteer State.

On Photography

Saw this quoted on a photo site, attributed to The Amateur Photographer’s Handbook by Aaron Sussman (pp. 116, 117):

After Edward Steichen had put together that monumental photographic exhibition, The Family of Man, he summed it by saying: “No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.” What he meant, of course, was that the wonders of even a simple camera are not fathomed by one man in a lifetime. Whether it’s a ten dollar Instamatic, or a three thousand dollar Hasselblad loaded with accessories, there is one magical ingredient that brings the inanimate machine to life: the brain of the photographer.

Needless to say, if a good photographer does not match the simplest camera, a bad photographer (me) is lost with a more complex one.
But hey, it’s fun trying.

Big Government

From the Daily Show:

It seems like the Republicans are only against government they don’t control.

Heh.