Not remotely related to science or technology, but this nice story of a mugging taking a beautifully positive turn is more appropriate for the end of the week anyway.

As I indicated curtly in my previous post, I’m a huge proponent of nuclear power.

Though there continues to be substantial political debate whether global warming exists—largely because responding to it would be economically damaging—the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is, and has been for some time, that global warming exists and is man-made. (See the IPCC statement, and a discussion of its significance in Nature—one of the top several scientific journals in the world, and definitely representative of the scientific community—for the most recent affirmations of that claim.) Even for those who refuse to believe in global warming—whether because they believe that the overwhelming majority of scientists and their communities are corrupt, or that scientists are incompetent, or that G-d will prevent climate change—few would argue that reducing pollution, if economically viable, is a worthwhile goal.

Nuclear energy provides a cheap, reliable, highly efficient way of generating electricity right now. Combined with a movement away from fossil fuels, nuclear power would offer cleaner air and cheaper power.

Though many argue nuclear power is unsafe, I believe their fears are largely unfounded. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island are the only two nuclear-power-related accidents we’ve had over the past fifty years, and only Chernobyl had radiation leakage. Given that 443 reactors have been built and are currently operating (not even counting secret and naval reactors) according to the IAEA, fears of nuclear-power apocalypse seem overblown. Nuclear plants, meanwhile, generate no air-based pollutants, in stark contrast to coal plants, which generate relatively high levels of toxic pollutants. Given the choice, I would much rather live close to a nuclear power plant than a coal power plant.

I have far more sympathy with those who argue that countries with nuclear reactors have access to material for nuclear bombs. Sadly, far too many countries today would indeed jump at the chance to create and use nuclear weapons. Though this criticism doesn’t apply to the thirty-two countries who already have nuclear power, and therefore should not be an argument about increasing the use of nuclear power in the United States, I do think that proliferation is a viable concern with spreading the use of nuclear power in the world at large.

Thankfully, we may soon have the best of both worlds: thorium reactors may soon become a reality.

Thorium reactors, unlike uranium reactors, do not produce plutonium (and in fact, will happily, cleanly destroy plutonium as part of its reaction process), and as a result, their waste products remain radioactive for only 500 years. They’re also safer: the thorium fuel cycle is sub-critical, meaning that, in the absence of human intervention, it will burn out quietly, rendering Chernobyls and Three-Mile-Islands are impossible. Thorium is also far more plentiful than uranium, being up to 550 times more plentiful in the Earth’s crust, meaning that such a reactor would be even cheaper to operate. On paper, thorium should be perfect.

Yet thorium has a major flaw: because thorium reactors are sub-critical, they require small amounts of uranium and plutonium to keep the reaction alive, which results in a slight catch-22. Even though such a hybrid plant would be far safer than a pure uranium- or plutonium-based reactor, it accomplishes nothing to assuage anti-proliferation fears.

The good news is that this will change in the very near future. Cosmos Magazine has a great article on two new ways of powering thorium reactors—the second requiring no uranium or plutonium whatsoever, instead using a particle accelerator powered by the reactor itself to keep the reaction running. Such a reactor would offer cheap, clean, powerful fuel to power our world well into the future with minimal environmental or social repercussions.

I fully anticipate a long wait before thorium reactors make an appearance in the United States, but unless fusion power finally proves viable—something I don’t think even ITER will help achieve in the near future—thorium promises to be one of the best options for our future energy needs.

I’m no fan of C++, but I look like a C++ evangelist compared to this poor chap, who assails C++ with a vengeance and eloquence that I have rarely seen. A choice excerpt:

C++ is philosophically and cognitively unsound as it forces a violation of all known epistemological processes on the programmer. as a language, it requires you to specify in great detail what you do not know in order to obtain the experience necessary to learn it. C++ has taken premature optimization to the level of divine edict since it cannot be vague in the way the state of the system necessarily is. (I’m not talking about totally vague, but about the kind of vague details that programmers are supposed to figure out even after a good design has been drawn up.) in other words, a C++ programmer is required by language design to express certainty where there cannot be any. a C++ programmer who cares about correctness is a contradiction in terms: correctness is a function of acquired certainty, not random guesswork. I’m discounting the ability to experiment with something through educated guesses, because the number of issues that must be experimented with in this fashion is gargantuan in any non-trivial piece of code. C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by guesswork and ignorance. I cannot live with this. I especially cannot live with it when I cannot even ask for help in maintaining the uncertainty I have. e.g., if I do not have enough foreknowledge to know exactly which type I need for a variable (and there is no type hierarchy, so I cannot be vague), I must guess, which is bad enough, but I have to repeat the guess all over! I cannot say “this thing here has the same type as that thing over there, and I’d rather you go look there because I just want to put down my guesses once” — there is no typeof operator and it certainly cannot be used in those anal-retentive declarations to afford a limited form of type propagation.

If you’re still a fan of C++, and have yet to adopt a decent language, maybe such a well-written, passionate rant will change your mind.

Yeah, that’s about right.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about the following dialog I got in Interface Builder 3 when trying to load Copilot Mac Helper’s NIB file:

I mean, I guess it’s nice to have a choice, but…is this really the best UI Apple could come up with?

Devin pointed me to an incredible video. Apparently, German computer scientists have figured out how to split a musical recording into its component notes, allowing you to manipulate a digital recording of a piece as easily as if it were just a MIDI recording track. This means that you could generate a cappella versions of your favorite song, or make an artist sing in harmony with herself, or simply fix a one-note recording error, all without having access to the original master tracks or doing any additional recording. You can see the (admittedly corny) video for a great overview of what they’ve accomplished and some great examples of what this technology makes possible.

Electronista has a good video of Android running on a reference platform. The video gives a nice feeling for what a touchscreen-focused Android phone would be like. The result’s about what you’d expect: not nearly as smooth an interface as the iPhone, but significantly better than many existing smartphones.

Personally, although I look forward to Android’s release and am extremely interested in what applications its fully open architecture will make possible, I’m inclined to wait for the second-generation devices. For actually getting things done on a phone, I have a strong suspicion that the BlackBerry Pearl and iPhone are going to remain the best two options for most people.

Modern forensics experts have assembled a picture of what Bach looked like.