It’s the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that picked up a story that someone might have found El dorado an hidden paradise. They also claim that it is an ancient city that was discovered on google maps. But if they would have read the original article in The Online times they would have found the following quote:

Hemming says that while the paper in Antiquity is “significant work by serious people … none of this has anything remotely to do with El Dorado or that racist, incompetent nutter Percy Fawcett. It’s as though someone tried to link a discovery at Stonehenge with, say, Edward Lear’s travels in the Balkans”.

They would also have found that the original paper was published in 2003 by Martti Parssinen and Alceu Ranzi. If they would have tried a little bit they would have found their report in Antiquity. There you can see that they totally missed the whole thing. The sites was discovered by airplane. The news in the report is that they discovered some earthworks (Ditches and soil hedges!) in an area they did not expect to find them. And it is not a city, it is earthworks. The authors speculate that the earthworks might have been for defense, ceremonies or for storing live aquatic food. Far from a city…

So why did this pop up now? Could it be due to David Grann mentioned in the article? Well at first it seems like that. He has written a book called “Lost city of Z” that was published in 2009 and is now being prepared for a movie. But i found a more plausible reason on amazon, the store not the rainforest… His book is being released as a pocket on January the 25th..

Good work David Grann, you got yourself some nice pr for the release of your book.

Naturally  Swedish blogggers swallowed the bait, but some had operating bullshit detectors.

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It’s the mathematican Matt Parker that have found that the Wollworths store are placed to form exact equilateral triangles much in the same way as Stonehenge and other monuments are arranged. Naturally he is just illustrating how stupid the whole argument of alien assisted construction of ancient monuments is. The later according to an article in the Daily Mail a couple of days ago.

Personally i am convinced that if you draw lines in beetwen selected pubs here in Prague you will see a picture of Vaclav Klaus drinking a pint of Staropramen…

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The solution is quite easy. And even reduces emission of greenhouse gases. Build some more more nuclear power plants and at the time increase transmission capacity to our neighbors. This way we have some headroom for cold days. If that’s not enough we could import more electricity when needed. But it works both ways, when not using the extra capacity we could export cheap and clean nuclear power to Germany and other countries that use a lot of power plants using coal as a source. And if we use the thorium reactors i mentioned  the other day we could actually get rid of our nuclear waste at the same time.

Unfortunately it takes so long time to build new power plants that Sweden would face this issue many times before they are operational.

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But reading an article in Wired the other day, really made my head spin. They painted up an picture that made a “new” (It’s not really new, first experiments was made in the 50’s. Experimental reactors where running in the 60’s!) reactor look like the holy grail in solving our energy needs.

It’s a nuclear reactor burning thorium instead of uranium or plutonium. Thorium is much more abundant than uranium and it does not need expensive enrichment. That means you can use all the thorium you mine. When using uranium in a nuclear power plant you only use one specific isotope and this is normally 3-5 % of the ore. So most of the uranium mined is useless for generating power.

You might say what about the storage of the waste from the reactor? The radioactive waste from a conventional reactor needs to be stored for 10.000+ years. And that is quite a challenge…

The neat thing is that since thorium is a lighter than uranium the waste is of a completely different nature. It “only” has to be stored for a couple of 100 years. And if that is not good enough, if we mix the waste from our current reactors in the fuel it burns up generating energy and transmutes into short lived isotopes!

Too good to bee true? Whats the catch?

First of all it is a more complicated process, the fuel get’s polluted and looses efficiency over time, so there need to be a process to remove these pollutants. But the rest of the “catches” are what normal people would call features. The fuel is harder to ignite which means it is safer, much less risk of a reactor meltdown. The waste is polluted with a uranium isotope that makes it unsuitable for nuclear weapons. And one of the biggest problems is that the nuclear industry is not interested. Why not? Well their business model is largely built on enriching uranium and selling fuel to the reactors. And thorium based reactors does not need any enriched fuel, just dig it up out of the ground, clean it and start running your reactor. Yes quite simplified, but truth is that the producers of nuclear fuel will have to find other ways of earning money.

So if these reactors was running in the 60’s how come we don’t run them today? Some cynics say it’s due to the fact that they do not produce plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons. But this is not really true, since most commercial reactors produce an isotope of plutonium not really suitable for weapons. The real issue was time to market. In 1973 the Arab states cut off oil supply to the west. So the US decided to lower their dependency on oil, and that quick. That year, the US nuclear industry signed contracts to build a record 41 uranium based nuclear power plants. So all the money and research went into uranium based fission.

But India wen’t in another direction. Since they where developing a nuclear weapons arsenal they where outside the non-proliferation treaty and where largely excluded from trade in nuclear plant equipment and fuel. Also they lacked indigenous uranium, but have 12% of known thorium deposits in the world. So they started developing a nuclear fuel cycle using thorium. And are today running a hybrid using conventional reactors to ignite the thorium.

But these reactors still generate a large amount of regular long lived nuclear waste. The really cool reactors is called molten salt reactors (MSR). These work by pumping a molten flouride salt containing thorium and some uranium (or waste from regular reactors) through the reactor. This liquid is then continuously cleaned from radioactive pollutants. The pollutants have the nice property that when you store them for about 10 months they turn into fuel that is feed back into the reactor.

So while some people argue about the IPCC and who is right or wrong in climate gate (Sorry in Swedish) and others are discussing how to get the world united on carbon dioxide emissions (Also in Swedish), why don’t we start by solving the engineering issues with the thorium fuel  cycle and start replacing coal based electricity with green energy from thorium.

An extensive article about thorium reactors can be found in an 2006 issue of cosmos. More in depth information about thorium and thorium reactors can be found at the world nuclear association.

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During 22 years from 1984 to 2006 Sweden had a “thought ban” on nuclear reactors.  It was forbidden to design nuclear power plants or calculate costs for running these plants. This was one of the consequences of a referendum in 1980 about the future of nuclear power in Sweden. (One could note that this was a strange referendum, 3 options existed but none of them was an yes. They where all about stopping nuclear power in Sweden.)

So where are we now 30 years after this referendum? Well we are trying to stop emission of greenhouse gases, mostly focused on reducing carbon dioxid. One of the easiest and quickest ways to do this is to build more nuclear power plants and phase out the ones fueled by coal.

Sure and what about all the nuclear waste we have to keep secure for 10.000 years? Thats a relevant question and leads me to why i wrote this article.

There are “new” (They where first described in the 50’s and some where running in the 60’s!)  types of reactors that instead of using uranium as a fuel uses thorium. In the process they can transmute our old reactor waste. That is they reduce the waste we already have produced! The result is nuclear waste with a half-life time of less than 100 years. So the waste only needs to be stored for 100’s of years instead of 10.000+ years for conventional nuclear waste.

The Chinese and the Indians are already doing serious research into thorium based reactors and an US-Russian consortium is adapting thorium based fuel so it can be used in the reactors we already have built. A lot of this research have been done in the 30 years Sweden in principle banned nuclear research. Yes 30 years. It was first in 2009 that the Swedish government again started to give grants to nuclear power research.

This thought is not new, already in 2004 the Swedish newspaper DN published a debate article (Sorry it’s in Swedish) written by Niklas Ekdal covering this subject.
One could just wonder where Sweden would have been today if they used at least some of the approximate 20 billion SEK  that went into designing a long term solution to the waste problem into nuclear power research instead of forbidding all thoughts about constructing new reactors…

And bye the way, thanks for the comments on the Swedish blog “Klimatbluffen” that gave me the idea to write something about the Swedish “thought ban” before finishing my article about green nuclear power plants.

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What about these for an example:

• A woman who suddenly can’t open her eyes. It usually keep on for three days, then she is normal again for a couple of months.
• A man who can’t freeze. Or rather his body copes so good with cold that he has swum under the north pole and climbed mount everest in shorts!
• Allergic against cold! A ice cube on the skin will give a huge blister, even snowflakes in the face will give responses. And yes antihistamines help…
• A boy who almost never sleep. (Poor parents, young children’s sleep patterns are stressful enough…)
• People who can’t remember and others who can’t forget!
• A girl who can not feel pain.

And there is alot more details about theese and other strange deseases over here. Check them out!

There is also a story of a girl who doesn’t get older. She is 16 now and still look like a 6 month old baby….

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This sounds like a great solution, beefing up SAAB and at the same time giving Koeningsegg a lot of production capacity. Also it’s a way for the Swedes to bring back SAAB to Swedish ownership again. But then it’s a strange deal. A small company with 50 employees that builds a handful of cars each year, buys a company with thousands of employees building approx. 100000 cars a year!

But then some people think it’s a joke...

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The situation in Sweden today is that the police has to arrest someone carrying a new designer drug to have a sample to analyze she want’s to rationalise things buy letting the goverment proactive buy drugs for analyze and by that means spead up hte process of criminalizing the new drugs.

And finally she says the classic statement that shows that she has missed the whole pont: “The discussion about drugs must be brought up at the kitchen table and in schools.” It will not work! Today the Swedish official stance is that all drugs are “killers” and that you immediatly will get addicted and fall out of society. But the kids are not stupid, they see friends using drugs, they do research on internet and they discuss with their peers. And the conclusion for many of them? That the state and other authorities are lying! (There is a open letter to the minister stating the same thing here.)

So the day when we really need to warn about a new drug or a bad batch the kids will not listen.

In the modern transparent society we need to have policies based on evidence and facts, we also need to regain trust from drug users, drug abusers and teenagers at risk. This is one part of what i call harm reduction. Another Swedish blogger commented on that here.

Another part is needle exchange programs for those who inject drugs. There has been a trial program for over 20 years in the Malmö/Lund region and the other day there where an evaluation of the program. The conclution was that the needle exchange program did not help. But read this comment from the top medical officer handling epidemic diseases in the region:

(Translated from Swedish, se the link above for the original.)

“Last year 25 persons got HIV from sharing needles, 24 of theese live in Stockholm”

Mind you Stockholm does not have a needle exchange program… And one! case in the rest of the country, and we don’t even know if he is from the region with the needle exchange program. Not starting with needle exchange programs right away is just cynical!

And then we havn’t even considerd all the other possibilities of vaccinations against hepatitis, health checks and actually meeting and building up trus amongst the abusers.

Happily the city of Helsingborg has realised this, congratulations for doing something right in figthting the downside of drugs!

I have had some feedback on my post the other day about errors in the translation of official EU documents translating “drug use” to “drug abuse” when translating to Swedish and Danish. Some have asked me in private: “But shurly it must be a misstake on that page or a misstake by that translator” But no this is systematic.

For you that are billingual check out another English page and it’s Swedish translation. Note that “drug use” have turned into “Narkotikamissbruk” (Drug abuse in Swedish). The danish page is here, there the phrase is translated into “narkotikamisbrug”. And there is several examples all over those pages.

Please submit komments! And if you find any more misstranslated pages please let me know. Naturally not only pages related to drugs. All systematic translation errors are interesting, i will do something about them even if they go against my political compass. Cause it is so totally wrong to change the meaning of a text!

And to them who dissagree with my vievs above, would you fell ok if Swedish documents with “drug abuse” where to be translated into documents stating “drug use” instead? This is a 2 way street you know…

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Imagine the biggest non opensource database company not only owning their biggest rival MySQL but also a lot of other key internet technologies such as: java, solaris,  netbeans, virtualbox  (virtilisation software) , openoffice (A microsoft office “clone”). Not to mention the great technologies SUN has turned out in the last years, amongst them ZFS. (A totally new way of implementing an in theory unlimited journaling filesystem with end to end check summing on all data, and for many considered the best thing since sliced bread.) But also their own CPU architecture the SPARC and will be producing their own hardware to run all this software on.

I still haven’t decided if i should be scared or happy for the effects this will have on a lot of open source software. Interesting times we are living in!

And i’m not the only one thinking that and it is worrying that Oracles website could not cope with the load, but SUN’s could.

Content server request failed

But sun's did handle the load.

Some quotes from sun:

Press Release Quotes

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems. Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

Larry Ellison
CEO
Oracle

“Oracle and Sun have been industry pioneers and close partners for more than 20 years. This combination is a natural evolution of our relationship and will be an industry-defining event.”

Scott McNealy
Chairman of the Board of Directors, Chairman of Sun Federal, Inc.
Sun Microsystems

“This is a fantastic day for Sun’s customers, developers and partners across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of the technology marketplace. From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun’s SPARC and x64 systems. Together with Oracle, we’ll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace.”

Jonathan Schwartz
CEO and President
Sun Microsystems

Even Swedish mainstream media have started to cover the story. For example Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter .

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I guess this is against what people think, but as normal when global climate things arn’t as simple as they seem. (I tend to be very sceptic to anyone who is totally shure about global warming.) Look over here at news.com.au for the story i read the following:

Ice levels are decreasing in western Antarctia, but growing in the east. And since east anterctica is about 4 times as large the net effect is that there is more ice on Antarctica today than for ten years ago. Actually last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.

But please note the article isn’t published yet by the British Antarctic Survey but will be in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.

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