Those in greatest need of moral help

Dear Reader,

I have someone new following, well welcome to Mark Foreman’s chemistry class where he chooses what to teach. The place where we all have an enjoyable time with chemistry. While chemistry should be done while sober it should not be somber.

But we also think about other things, in the same way as chemistry does not exist in a vacuum away from the rest of society we do something think about things that have nothing to do with chemistry.

I am sure that you will be aware that a man attacked a cinema in the US recently. To be frank with you I think that the deeds of James Holmes are disgusting. I saw recently that the Pastor at a church in the USA (where one of the dead worshipped) prayed for the well being of James Holmes. This level of forgiveness and the prayers might be quite a shock to some people.

I heard around about the year 2000 that a catholic priest had prayed for the soul of Adolf Hitler, this caused quite a stir.

Regardless of your religious views the following logic can be applied to these cases (I am paraphrasing the statement of the catholic priest). He said “Those who have done extraordinarily bad things are in special need of moral and spiritual help”.

Another thing (which shocked me at the time) was when one of my sunday school teachers said “God loves Saddam Hussein”, at the time all young people in the UK were viewing Saddam as the ultimate bogey man and as a person to hate. My understanding of what the sunday school teacher was saying was that God loved Saddam and was very unhappy with Saddam’s deeds. But rather than wanting Saddam to be laid low with a thunderbolt God would have been more happy if Saddam had changed his evil ways and become a good man. Sadly in Saddam’s case he did not reform, I guess that you all know what happened regarding Saddam.

Even an atheist would be more happy if Saddam had woken up one morning and suddenly understood that he needed to change his ways and behave better. The danger of striking Saddam dead with a thunderbolt is that someone just as bad would replace him (Saddam 2.0), a new and morally upright Saddam would have been better than either Saddam 2.0 or the old Saddam.

Right now regardless of religious views (or lack of) I think that we can all agree that the gunman responsible for the cinema outrage is in special need of moral guidance. Those of us who take a secular view will be likely to want that he repents sufficiently that he does not add to the distress of those injured and the loved ones of the dead by misbehaving in court.

I am rather displeased that Anders Brevik was allowed to use part of his trial as a soap box for him to spread his poison, I think that TV cameras should be excluded from court but reporters should be allowed to be present for most stages of the trial. I think that the British system is best, the trial should be reported in the media but some restrictions should be imposed to protect the privacy of the victims.

I sincerely hope that both Anders Brevik and James Holmes learn the error of their ways and understand that they have done something deeply wrong. As long as they fail to see the error of their ways both their true punishment and rehabilitation will be delayed.

The purpose of nuclear reactors and something about plutonium

Dear Reader,

It has come to my attention that the myth that the civil nuclear power industry is part of the military nuclear sector has shown itself again. I would like to point out the folly of this idea. One blogger has repeated this claim recently, so that I can not be accused of quoting him out of context. I am going to make a length quotation of his text. He claimed recently that

“If fission technology did not have military application, if the fission of uranium did not produce plutonium for use in nuclear weapons, there would be very few nuclear reactors on the planet.

The production of boiling water due to waste heat from isotope creation in nuclear reactors is not the reason for their existence.

The very first nuclear reactors were built in order to produce the bomb which killed Nagasaki.

Every reactor in the world is dual use. The primary use is military.”

Now I think what is happening is that Paul is mixing a small amount of truth (yes the first reactors were part of the US nuclear bomb project) with a lot of his personal opinion. Then he is posting it in a way which makes it look like a series of facts. It is important to distinguish between fact and opinion.

Many reactors are needed for isotope production for medical and industrial purposes. A world without reactors would mean that radiotherapy would become much more expensive in some parts of the world. Thus if we get rid of reactors we will make this life saving treatment less available to the poor, frankly the idea of the rich getting medical treatment while the poor suffer and die of curable things is as morally offensive as it gets.

Next while the idea of wicked nuclear plant companies supplying plutonium to an equally wicked bunch of bomb makers might be something which troubles many people. I can tell you that there is very little to worry about as the problem has been solved.

I have been inside a range of civil nuclear sites in different parts of Europe, I can tell you that a lot of security features exist in these sites which prevent the illicit movement of nuclear materials. One of the safeguards are cameras which are watching you, I never quite know when I am being filmed in a such a place so I make a policy not to have a silly look on my face. Frankly I do not want some bunch of UN inspectors to end up looking at pictures of me with a silly face on my face.

The UN make sure that nobody sneaks plutonium or used fuel from the civil sector into the military sector.

I have also had my workplace inspected by the UN, unlike some rogue states I was cooperative. A few polite but firm men from the UN visited my lab, they wanted to know what I was doing. I told them (truthfully) that there was close to no radioactivity in the lab, but they still collected a gamma spectrum in my lab. I think that they were using a BGO detector and they found nothing interesting in the spectrum. I imagine that if I had been cooking some illegal nuclear brew in the corner that the inspection would have been rather disagreeable for me.

For many decades the civil nuclear sector has been quite rightly very separated from the small islands of the military nuclear sector.

Also the plutonium which is made in the civil sector is frankly no good for the bomb markers, if anything plutonium has been crossing from the military sector into the civil sector. I have seen reports explaining how Soviet made bomb grade plutonium is to be converted into MOX and then sold to civilian nuclear power companies. Now to my mind that is a great example of beating swords into ploughs and converting spears into pruning hocks. This is because when the plutonium comes out of the civil power reactors it will no longer bomb grade, as far as bomb makers are concerned it will be a rather disagreeable grade. The great redeeming feature of this used plutonium will be the plutonium-240.

Now in the interests of world peace I am not going to give out any details which have misuse potential but I feel that I can tell you that to build an atom bomb which works the device must do the following three things.

1. Change from sub critical to super-prompt critical
2. Make change 1 in less time than the typical time between the random appearance of neutrons in the fissile material
3. Inject a pulse of neutrons into the fissile material at the right moment to power up the bomb

Now requirement three in a plutonium based bomb is already quite hard to do, but there are ways to do it. I think that the main barrier against would be wicked nuclear hooligans is requirement two.

The spontaneous fission of plutonium-240 is the key to stopping bomb makers. If we consider for a moment the plutonium signature in the fuel of unit 2 at Fukushima then we will see that the fuel has the following isotope signature (all in atom %). I got the data from Z.D. Thome et. al. in Nuclear Engineering and Design, 2012, volume 247, pages 123-127. 

0.69 % Pu-238, 65 % Pu-239, 21 % Pu-240, 11 % Pu-241 and 2.5 % Pu-242.

Now this 21 % Pu-240 will be a major head ache for a bomb designer, it will raise the spontaneous fission rate for the plutonium by a factor of 27 from the grade of plutonium which was used for the first atomic bomb test.

It is also important to bear in mind that even for fast neutrons the fission to activation ratio is worse for Pu-240 than it is for Pu-239. As a result the addition of a large amount of Pu-240 to the fissile material in a bomb would require the mass of plutonium to be made larger. In general the more plutonium in the bomb the higher the rate of spontaneous fission.

This will mean that the bomb designer working in his den will need to design something which works more than 27 times faster than the first American design had to. Now while technology may have improved, but I am sure that given the choice a bomb maker would far rather use a bomb grade plutonium with far less Pu-240.

Now imagine some evil gremlin of a bomb maker has built a nefarious bomb and I imagine that the gremlin wants to threaten the world and hold it to ransom with the threat of an A-bomb detonation somewhere. I imagine the wicked gremlin wants his long and dire reign of evil, and he knows that he needs a bomb which can be left on the shelf for a long time and still be trusted to function. As soon as his bomb has gone past its “best before date” the gremlin will lose his means to threaten the international community.

The plutonium-241 will shorten the shelf life of the bomb, this isotope of plutonium undergoes a beta decay to form americium-241 which has a far higher decay heat and emits gamma rays. As a result the bomb will be plagued by an increasingly intense heat source at its core which also is becoming a bigger and bigger radiation threat to the gremlin each time it tries to service the bomb. I have done some calculations (using A-level physics) and I have been able to confirm that the Fukushima grade of plutonium will emit much more heat than a bomb grade plutonium. The heat output will skyrocket as more and more americium-241 forms.

Now some of my readers will agree with me, that is fine with me but some of my readers may not agree with me. If you do not agree with me then feel free to comment and we will discuss the matter like adults.

The truth about the purpose of nuclear reactors and something about plutonium

Dear Reader,

It has come to my attention that the myth that the civil nuclear power industry is part of the military nuclear sector has shown itself again. I would like to point out the folly of this idea. One blogger has repeated this claim recently, so that I can not be accused of quoting him out of context. I am going to make a length quotation of his text. He claimed recently that

“If fission technology did not have military application, if the fission of uranium did not produce plutonium for use in nuclear weapons, there would be very few nuclear reactors on the planet.

The production of boiling water due to waste heat from isotope creation in nuclear reactors is not the reason for their existence.

The very first nuclear reactors were built in order to produce the bomb which killed Nagasaki.

Every reactor in the world is dual use. The primary use is military.”

I hold the view that this blogger is mixing a small amount of truth (Yes the first nuclear reactors were there to support the USA’s nuclear bomb program) with his own opinions which have been dressed up as facts.

Many reactors are needed for isotope production for medical and industrial purposes. A world without reactors would mean that radiotherapy would become much more expensive in some parts of the world. Thus if we get rid of reactors we will make this life saving treatment less available to the poor, frankly the idea of the rich getting medical treatment while the poor suffer and die of curable things is as morally offensive as it gets.

Next while the idea of wicked nuclear plant companies supplying plutonium to an equally wicked bunch of bomb makers might be something which troubles many people. I can tell you that there is very little to worry about. The problem has already been solved.

I have been inside a range of civil nuclear sites in different parts of Europe, I can tell you that a lot of security features exist in these sites which prevent the illicit movement of nuclear materials. One of the safeguards are cameras which are watching you, I never quite know when I am being filmed in a place like CLAB so I make a policy not to have a silly look on my face. Frankly I do not want some bunch of UN inspectors to end up looking at a picture of me with a silly face on me.

Also the UN do make inspections at short notice of any site where they think nuclear activities either do occur, or might be going on.

I have also had my workplace inspected by the UN, unlike some rogue states I was cooperative. A few polite but firm men from the UN visited my lab, they wanted to know what I was doing. I told them (truthfully) that there was close to no radioactivity in the lab, but they still collected a gamma spectrum in my lab. I think that they were using a BGO detector and they found nothing interesting in the spectrum. I imagine that if I had been cooking some illegal nuclear brew in the corner that the inspection would have been rather disagreeable for me. To my mind the fact that the UN can catch the bad guys with inspections is another thing which reduces the chance of people being able to bad stuff.

For many decades the civil nuclear sector has been very separated from the small islands of the military nuclear sector. The degree of separation is quite rightly strict.

Also the plutonium which is made in the civil sector is frankly no good for the bomb markers, if anything plutonium has been crossing from the military sector into the civil sector. I have seen reports explaining how Soviet made bomb grade plutonium should be converted into MOX and then sold to civilian nuclear power companies. Now to my mind that is a great example of beating swords into ploughs and converting spears into pruning hocks. This is because when the plutonium comes out of the civil power reactors it will no longer bomb grade, as far as bomb makers are concerned it will be a rather disagreeable grade. The great redeeming feature of this used plutonium will be the plutonium-240.

Now in the interests of world peace I am not going to give out any details which have misuse potential but I feel that I can tell you that to build an atom bomb which works the device must do the following three things.

1. Change from sub critical to super-prompt critical
2. Make change 1 in less time than the typical time between the random appearance of neutrons in the fissile material
3. Inject a pulse of neutrons into the fissile material at the right moment to power up the bomb

Now requirement three in a plutonium based bomb is already quite hard to do, but there are ways to do it. I think that the main barrier against would be wicked nuclear hooligans is requirement two.

The spontaneous fission of plutonium-240 is the key to stopping bomb makers. If we consider for a moment the plutonium signature in the fuel of unit 2 at Fukushima then we will see that the fuel has the following isotope signature (all in atom %). I got this data from Z.D. Thome et. al. in Nuclear Engineering and Design (2012, volume 247, pages 123 to 127)

0.69 % Pu-238, 65 % Pu-239, 21 % Pu-240, 11 % Pu-241 and 2.5 % Pu-242.

Now this 21 % Pu-240 will be a major head ache for a bomb designer, it will raise the spontaneous fission rate for the plutonium by a factor of 27 from the grade of plutonium which was used for the first atomic bomb test. A typical bomb grade plutonium contains less than 8 % of plutonium-240. While the trinity test used a very good quaility bomb grade (less than 1 % Pu-240) according to P.P. Parekh et. al. in Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, 2006, volume 85, pages 103-120.

If you look at the history of the American bomb project you will see that when the first atom bomb was being got ready for testing a great concern existed that it would fail due to the tiny trace of plutonium-240 in the fissile material. I suspect that a master bomb making team which have already built many designs of bombs that they could cope with 8 % Pu-240, but for a first timerI think that this level of Pu-240 would be a great barrier.

It is also important to bear in mind that even for fast neutrons the fission to activation ratio is worse for Pu-240 than it is for Pu-239. As a result the addition of a large amount of Pu-240 to the fissile material in a bomb would require the mass of plutonium to be made larger. In general the more plutonium in the bomb the higher the rate of spontaneous fission.

This will mean that the bomb designer working in his den will need to design something which works more than 27 times faster than the first American design had to. Now while technology may have improved, but I am sure that given the choice a bomb maker would far rather use a bomb grade plutonium with far less Pu-240.

Now imagine you are some evil gremlin of a bomb maker, you have built your nefarious bomb and I imagine that the gremlin wants to threaten the world and hold it to ransom with the threat of an A-bomb detonation somewhere. I imagine the wicked gremlin wants his long and dire reign of evil, and he knows that he needs a bomb which can be left on the shelf for a long time and still be trusted to function. As soon as his bomb has gone past its “best before date” the gremlin will lose his means to threaten the international community.

The plutonium-241 will shorten the shelf life of the bomb, this isotope of plutonium undergoes a beta decay to form americium-241 which has a far higher decay heat and emits gamma rays. As a result the bomb will be plagued by an increasingly intense heat source at its core which also is becoming a bigger and bigger radiation threat to the gremlin each time he tries to service his bomb. I have calculated the heat output of ten kilos of plutonium with the same isotope signature as the Fukushima plutonium, and the heat output of this reactor grade plutonium will be far higher than a bomb grade plutonium.

While some of my readers might agree with me, that is fine with me. However some of you might not agree with me, that is fine with me as long as you do not allow your disagreement to lead you to misbehave. If you do not agree with me then please leave a comment and we can discuss the matter like adults.

Pussy riot and the dose meters

Dear Reader,

The women who are alleged to be part of the punk band in Russia are still in trouble, I saw alleged because the punk band wear masks when then appear in public and at least one of the women who were arrested has claimed that she is not part of the band. I predict that this case will be an interesting one which we should keep an eye on.

A second thing which I have noticed is that a claim has been made that workers at the Fukushima site were told to tamper with their dosemeters to reduce the dose that they recorded. I do not want to sit in judgement on the matter as the full story has not been gathered. I think that guilt by accusation is deeply wrong.

Imagine a world where I could accuse TEPCO, Greenpeace or even you of being “in league with evil aliens from Mars who are planning to poison the school meals in Göteborg with mind distorting drugs” and then these companies or you are then punished based simply because I have made this accusation. Such a world would be a deeply wrong place, and I have to confess that I could not keep a straight face while typing that nonsense about aliens.

If you read the IAEA book (Lessons Learned from Accidents in Industrial Radiography) you will read about the dire actions of the small minority of bad industrial radiographic workers. One common bad behaviour is that some of the radiographic workers remove their dosemeters before they enter a high radiation area to do a source recovery operation, this is a behaviour which is calculated to hide an accident from the radiation protection authorities and also from their supervisor. I wholeheartedly condemn these attempts to sweep accidents under the rug, and I am displeased at the idea that the employers would encourage such a behaviour.

I hope that I am merely being “angry in the abstract” rather than being displeased by a real case of a employer trying to make false measurements.

I worry that in todays climate that some people will say or write anything to blacken the name of some unpopular person. I think that testilying is wrong. For example while Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read has done some rather unspeakable deeds, it would be wrong for me to make a false claim that he murdered ten policemen using a toothpick and a bag of dog treats. Just because someone like Al Capone has done many bad things it does not make dishonesty right.

Another interesting document

Dear Reader,

Here is another interesting document it is by a man who explored the basement under the Chernobyl reactor after the serious accident back in the 1980s.

What ever you think of the nuclear sector, I think you have to be impressed with this man for his brave work to establish what happened in the reactor building.

Nuclear powered car

Dear Reader,

It has come to my attention that some time ago the Ford motor company had the idea of a nuclear powered car, I have a few things to say regarding this car.

A 10 cm cube of lead weighs 10 kilos, if the reactor in this car has a reactor which is the size of a football then as the volume of a sphere is given by V = 1.3333 x pi x r x r x r, then as a foot ball has a radius of 10 cm we can estimate the volume of lead needed.

A 20 cm radius sphere has a volume of 33.5 litres, the 10 cm radius sphere has a volume of 4.2 litres, so a total of 29.3 litres of lead is needed. This will have a mass of 293 kilos.

Now this 10 cm layer is just the primary shield, in most reactor designs we need some additional shielding to deal with the fact that radiation will leak out through the holes in the primary shield which are needed for things like steam to come out of the reactor. I think that we also need to consider the shielding of other key parts.

Now to avoid the xenon hole we will need to use some form of vented fuel such as liquid in a homogenous aqueous reactor or a molten salt reactor. We will need to purge the xenon out of the fuel and trap this on an activated carbon pad. If we make the pad 10 cm in diameter and 20 cm long then it will need a lead shield of 10 cm. This will have a volume of 1570 cc. The shield will be a cylinder which will have a radius of 15 cm and be 40 cm long. This means it will have a volume of 28.3 litres, if we deduct the volume of the pad this leaves us with a need for 26.7 litres (267 kilos) of lead.

Now already before we consider the secondary shield and the shielding around the turbine and the pumps we have a lot of lead (560 kilos), I am sure that my readers will be aware that the engine weight of this car is getting larger. As the UK car (class B) license only covers up to 3.5 tons, I think it is possible that the nuclear powered car may be too heavy for a normal car driver to legally drive.

Fukushima report

Dear Reader,

The government in Japan has published a report on the subject of the Fukushima accident which some of you might like to read. If you want to read it then please click here.

Uranium and carbonate

Dear Reader,

It has come to my attention that some statements have been made in public which suggest that uranium sticks to DNA and thus is more dangerous than a radioactive metal which does not stick to DNA. This statement has been recently repeated by Paul Langley who is an antinuclear blogger.

I would like to point out something, that while uranium(VI) does bind to DNA it also binds to carbonate. As the concentration of carbonate in the human body is so much higher than that of DNA, the carbonate will by competing with the DNA (and all the other molecules which can bind uranium) for the uranium. As a result the amount of uranium which will bind to the DNA may be much lower than would be predicted if only the binding of uranium to DNA was considered. A paper on this subject can be seen here. I think that those who like to talk of uranium binding to DNA in living cells should repeat their calculations after having taken into account the effect of carbonate anions.

If you want to see what a uranium carbonate complex looks like then please see here.

I would also like to point out that an alpha emitter does not need to bind to DNA in order to have a baneful effect. I think that the uranium binding to DNA is a bit of a red herring, one which will confuse the general public.

The length of an alpha track in water is sufficiently long (at least 50 micrometers) that the alpha particle can travel some distance through a cell. You can see a graph of alpha range as a function of energy here. I will warn you that the example of the range (in meters) of the beta particles of Sr-90 used on this latter page is misleading as the Y-90 daughter has a much higher beta energy.

Dose estimates

Dear Reader,

I have found an interesting document which is on the subject of the atomic bomb tests done years ago down under in Auz. Now before we get going, I do not want to get dragged into a debate regarding the rights / wrongs of nuclear bombs or the moral issues associated with bombs and their testing. What we will be dealing with here is just the reported facts.

A document has been released some time ago by the Australian government which gives estimates of the radiation doses which Australians were exposed to as a result of the bomb tests there.

What is interesting is that the doses are quite low, if the data in the document is true then the vast majority of the Australians were exposed to low doses of radiation. But before we look at the dose estimates lets look at what the current UK limits are.

The 1999 law (1999 Ionising Radiations Regulations) set the following yearly limits

20 mSv Radiation worker

6 mSv Trainees aged between 16 and 18

1 mSv The general public

While the 1980s Ionising Radiations Regulations set the upper limit for a radiation worker at 50 mSv per year.

If we look at table 7.27 in the report from down under we will see the results.

A. 78.9 % of the people involved had doses which were lower than the current UK limit for the general public (1 mSv). I hold the view that this low dose of less than 1 mSv is nothing to worry about.

B. Only about 4 % of people are in the above 20 mSv group, these are doses which would break current UK law for a radiation worker.

C. Very few people (19 people, 0.2 %) are in the above 50 mSv group. These doses are above the yearly limit in the 1990s for radiation workers.

D. About 6.3 % of the people had unknown doses, in some ways this is the most interesting and more worrisome group. Most of these people were in the Royal Australian Air Force.

What would be very interesting is if an alternative set of dose estimates or measurements exist from the same bomb tests. By the way if dose estimates get you angry, do not get mad at either me (I did not make the dose estimates) or someone else but do feel free to point out other dose estimates which you think are more trustworthy.

Silly thinking

Dear Reader,

I have had an interesting time recently; I have had encounters with people from two different opposite ends of a spectrum of opinions. Both persons seemed to react in a defensive manner suggesting that they think that I am a member of the opposite camp to them.

For legal reasons (and to spare them their embarrassment) I will not be naming either person who had such a vigorous reaction to me.* But I would like to say that this type of siege mentality does suggest that the person is insecure and rather weak minded, if a person’s reaction when dealing with a person that they do not know well is just

“You do not understand XYZ, so I am right”

Then I hold the view that the person is downright rude, and is behaving in a very stupid way. For example a person who works on the statistics of the measurement of drugs of abuse expresses a view which goes against the view expressed by a person writing about medical statistics then for the latter to use such an excuse is downright stupid.

How can the latter person know if the first one does or does not understand the subject. Frankly I think that this is an abusive argument the sort of thing which an arrogant and pathetic person who is scrapping the bottom of the barrel resorts to.

On the other hand if we take the example of two populations of cats, the black cats are on average 3.5 kilos with a standard deviation of 0.5 kilos. While the tabby cats are on average 3.8 kilos with a standard deviation of 0.1 kilos. Now if the first stats person was to claim that tabby cats are heavier because they are overfed, and the second stats person disagrees. Then it is reasonable for the second person to say

“You do not understand, you are claiming a difference which is far less than the sum of the standard deviations”

Then it is a reasonable statement to make, the statement of “you do not understand” is qualified by a statement explaining what is not understood.

Then we have the opposite problem, the problem where folklore and urban myth is taken as being more important than facts which have been proven by science.

Part of this problem is when people take the experiences of themselves and then claim that these are representative of the majority of people dismissing results collected using far larger cohorts. This rejection of the results obtained with the larger cohort normally occurs when the people rejecting the better work have some vested interest or wishful thinking.

For example a person might dismiss the work by Richard Doll on smoking by stating “I know Mr White at number 12, he is proof that smoking is harmless he has been doing it since he was 15 and now he is 85 years old”.

While Mr White might have beaten the odds and outlived many non smokers, the work of Richard Doll on the smoking habits of male medical doctors, their life spans and their causes of death do suggest that smoking will shorten your life and increase you chance of getting lung cancer. Richard Doll said that as a consequence of seeing the results of his study he underwent a “health education moment” and then gave up smoking.

Another great problem are the those who hold the view that unless a person has experienced something that they are unentitled to have a opinion. This is a particularly dangerous trap for the mind. I was told by an industrial psychologist that this argument is often used by drug abusers as a means of rejecting the advice that they should quit abusing drugs.

I think it is a very stupid reason for rejecting an opinion, I will give you an example. I have an office on the sixth floor. I have not experienced falling off the roof of my building, but I hold the opinion that falling off the roof onto the tarmac of the carpark would be very bad for my health. I think that only a very silly person would argue that because I have not tried casting myself down from the roof that the opinion is worthless or without basis.

If I was a betting person I would be willing to wager a lot on the probability that a person who plays this pathetic card is very selective in their acceptance of it. For example the typical person (even one who plays this card) would object to being excluded from a debate about the question of “should truck racing be allowed on the public road” solely because they lack a driving license for anything larger than a private car.

Another problem is people who choose to hold folklore above careful epidemiology. They also tend to get angry when folklore disagrees with an examination of the mechanism of something.

Yet another great problem these days is that the general public “know” things which they strongly believe in but have no evidence to back up their beliefs. Further more if you look at the information sources which the public are being advised by then you see no facts just opinion. I will get onto this later.

But before I go, I would like to point out a book which I keep meaning to read. It is called “Straight and crooked thinking” by Robert H. Thouless. Years ago my father (a philosophy graduate was given a copy by a priest he knew). I think that sometime I will get a copy and then have a go at reading it. It is a book all about good and bad thinking.

* If you think you are one of the people who has been so silly then please either leave a comment at the bottom or mail me.