Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Plainly Difficult" channel.

  1. I got my masters in biological psychology in 1976, and the Monkey Mother experiment was still a matter of hot debate. The study, which had hundreds of hours of film and photos associated with it, was almost impossible for most humans to properly evaluate because most of us would have done the same thing as Mr. Difficult would have done - try to comfort the lonely and sad monkeys because it was just too heart wrenching not to. Watching the films of monkeys and the scary objects with no cloth mother to comfort them was just too much for some of my fellow students to watch. It was nearly impossible to write up unbiased study summary because some of the monkeys were treated so badly. The study gave us some insight into the importance of a mother's love and comfort, but the need to raise some monkeys without that love just overwhelmed the study's positive results. It is a good example of why many behavioral researchers use things like rats instead of monkeys. Monkeys just look and behave too much like us.
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  2. As usual, it take a number of failures happening in just the right order to cause a disaster. This is also why airplanes crash.
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  3. Terrible accident. I had to undergo hazmat response training for my job, and the SL-1 accident was used as an example of a nuclear reactor accident that would require local resources. The control rod design was always an issue with these small reactors since there was no way to restart a cold reactor without someone manually withdrawing a fuel rod by hand. The need for portability precluded any kind of machinery to do the job. Then reactor only contain 40 of the normal 59 fuel rods since the reactor was only being used for power and not to test providing steam for space heating. as part of the specs for the reactor. The fewer control rods meant the withdrawal of the control rod would make the reactor critical much faster, and that's just what happened. As to why Byrne decided to withdraw the control rod as far as he did, we will never know. The best guess, minus the suicide idea, is the rod was stuck and, in the process of yanking on it. it came free faster than assumed and caused the accident. The Army CID and Atomic Energy Commission investigators along with the Idaho State Police spent quite a bit of time investigating all aspects of the three men's lives as well as lives of their families. Byrnes' wife was having an affair with another man, prompting the divorce case. It was not with Richard McKinley however. Could it have been suicide on the part of Byrnes? It's possible, but the stuck fuel rod, something that happened six times in the previous year, seems a lot more likely of an explanation. My training was mostly that if I saw steam coming from a reactor building, get back in my vehicle and hightail it out of there.
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  4. I was involved in dam safety work for almost 20 years. Completion bias is probably the biggest enemy of good engineering that exists, but this is especially true for dams. There aren't many locations that meet the geologic, geographic, and financial conditions needed to construct a dam, so once a location is chosen and work started, it's nearly impossible to stop it. The concept of "sunk funds", the amount already expended before a problem is found, just drives a project forward so the whole thing doesn't turn into a complete waste. Even more unfortunate is the ones who know the true dangers of a dam are project engineers who have the least amount of input into the safety and suitability of a project. Trust me, there are more disasters out there ready to happen when all the right conditions are met.
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  5. Thanks, another excellent video. Have you seen the Wikipedia article on this? It appears to have been written by a Russian with orders to show the Soviet army took extreme precautions with the troops, everything came out fine. and stories about soldiers and villagers getting cancer were alarmist and conspiracy theories. It has all the hallmarks of coming out of the St. Petersburg disinformation bureau.
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  6. Excellent video, and fair coverage of all sides in this one. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the operation. anyone with an interest in military aviation history still stands in awe that this operation was successfully carried out. In later US war games, it only succeeded 10% of the time.
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  7. @Natasha Yes, it was really too much for me as well, and I remember arguing about this with our own ethics department. All he was doing was torturing animals to prove what already knew. Infants of any species always want their mothers when they are scared by anything.
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  8. I was 11 years old in 1957. The family had decided to use our two weeks vacation to make a tour out west. We had stopped in Tonopah and stayed at the Mizpah Hotel ("Home of the Atomic Steak", according to the neon sign out front), and 60 miles west of Frenchman Flats, inside the area of what was then known as the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range, where atomic tests were being conducted. Once such test was set off during the evening of what must have been some time in June. All the hotel guests were invited to observe the test from the roof of the five story hotel, the tallest building between Las Vegas and Reno. When the bomb detonated, I saw a small version of the light show observed in Honolulu. It was quite impressive and, according to the experts, perfectly safe from where we were. That was probably true for Tonopah since the prevailing winds were from west to east. None of my five brothers and sisters or me have ever gotten any kind of cancer that usually results from atomic fallout, but that little excursion into atomic bomb history has always had a nagging place in the back of my mind.
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  9. Seems like having the facility surrounded by residential areas wasn't a good idea.
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  10. I've heard of this operation before, but your explanations are lot more interesting and entertaining than just dry military history.
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  11. There are some of the most ignorant comments in this thread I've ever read. I sailed and flown in the so-called Bermuda Triangle extensively over the course of 30 years, especially from the Bahamas through the Turks and down to the Virgin Islands. Without a working compass, you're doomed. There are hundreds of small islands scattered about between the Bahamas, Turks, and Keys, the great majority uninhabited. With rare exceptions, there aren't landmarks on these islands that would tell one from the other. Lt. Taylor's major mistake was not letting another pilot with an apparently working compass take the lead once Taylor realized (or believed) his compass wan't working. The lack of clocks in the planes wasn't uncommon as they were constantly in the clock shop for repair. They were in essence high quality pocket watches attached to the instrument panel of a vibrating airplane. Each pilot going up would have had his Navy wristwatch and the time would have been synchronized between the pilots at the preflight briefing. All the pilots in Flight 19 were experienced fliers, and it was Taylor's not letting go of command which doomed the flight. It was also Navy discipline that kept the flight together even when at least some of the pilots knew they weren't making it home again. Today we train in human factors and flight deck management, and every pilot knows they have the right and obligation to take over if the pilot in command is making bad decisions. This simply wasn't the case in 1945. Finally, there's no evidence Lt. Taylor was late for the preflight because he was drunk the night before. Lt. Taylor was rarely seen in the officers club drinking and he was regarded as rather standoffish by other officers. He had been working a heavy schedule of training flights, and the best evidence is he was simply tired and overslept. He had even asked to be relieved of this flight, but was informed no other instructor pilots were available. Another issue for the flight was the radio technology of the day. All the voice communications were on HF radios on frequencies somewhat higher than AM commercial frequencies of today. They were bulky tube (valve) radios known for their short range, propensity to quit working or work poorly, and being subject to tremendous static interference, something commonly experienced in the subtropical climes of south Florida. Even when the weather was good, aircraft radios weren't reliable for transmitting information from base to multiple aircraft at the same time. Some would either not hear the messages or only get parts of them. Under the stressful conditions of being lost and facing a probable ditching at sea, it's not surprising that so many messages were garbled or just not received.
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  12. Studying the design and construction of this bridge is probably the one universal case study done by all civil and mechanical engineering students. If not for her galloping motions and ultimate collapse, Gertie would have toiled along in relative obscurity instead of being the engineering landmarke the bridge, or at least remnants of the bridge, she is today. BTW, when watching the films of the motion, set YT to show it at half speed. The conversion of the original Kodachrome film to B&W shows Gertie galloping with about 50% more motion than reality.
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  13. This kid was the prototype of a mad scientist. He's also the prototype of a messed up kid after the divorce of his parents, with neither one looking after him properly. If David had driven to the area of Moab, Utah, he would have found plenty of uraninite free for the digging. It would have just taken a shovel, geiger counter, and a strong back to collect it.
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  14. Miasma was still a current theory for through the 1880's for all sorts of disease outbreaks in the American South, but especially malaria. Given the prevalence of swamps in the South, the theory was that it was the rotting vegetation from the swamps that caused the diseases, but not because of water consumption. The cause was breathing the "night vapors" from the common foggy nights in swampy areas. The cure was to have your house be just slightly above these fogs, or going to a "resort" that was in a drier area when an outbreak of disease had begun. People would close themselves up inside their homes to prevent breathing the night air, and doing so also prevented many mosquito bites, the real cause of malaria. A coincidence of the miasma theory was draining the swamps would prevent miasma, but doing so also gave mosquitoes less places to breed. Since the swamps were greatly decreased, and malaria also decreased, the miasma theory was reinforced rather than debunked. Even in the early twentieth century, when transmission of malaria by mosquito bites was well proven by the construction of the Panama Canal, it was still common to see real estate sold with a location above the "vapors" as a desirable feature.
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  15. They Croydon Crash was nearly the death knell for single engine commercial passenger aircraft. It was also the start of using paved runways for commercial airports. The same public distrust of single engine airliners spread across the Atlantic, and an indirect outgrowth of the Corydon crash and other similar crashes was the growth in the early 30's of twin engine all-metal monoplanes like the Lockheed Vega, Boeing 247, and Douglas DC-2. The stage was set for the beginnings of civil air transport as we know it today.
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  16. The Russian have an active disinformation campaign going on that targets various forms of digital media, and Wikipedia gets hit a lot by them. Since all the original sources are in Russian, and many of them were written for the express purpose of denying Russian responsibility for any bad effects of Soviet policies or events, they tend to get away with it without some pretty difficult and tedious research by non-Russians. Now people are reading the Wikipedia article about Totskoye and coming away with the impression the Soviets were really good about protecting everyone from radiation and pollution, even though Western militaries in 1954 didn't have a clear idea of how badly radiation could affect people. Just another reason to be cautious about using Wikipedia as a source without confirming it from other sources.
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  17. I used to live in the area of the Pacific NW that was a major target of these balloons. Most of the area in 1944 was covered in dense forest, and it rarely rained in summer. By September. most of the area was bone dry and, as we still see today, huge fires can break out from things as simple as lighting strikes or discarded cigarette butts. We were lucky the winds were unfavorable until November, when most of the area had received rain that put an end to the threat of large fires. We don't really know how many balloons reached the area since the population was sparse and the only evidence would be if they had started a small fire that forest rangers saw from their fire towers. Even today, there are occasional finds of remnants of the balloons, some which probably did explode, just not starting a fire large enough for anyone to see before it went out. It would have been big trouble for the US and Canada if the Japanese had decided to use chemical or biological weapons, but even worse trouble for the Japanese. There would have been a massive response by the US, and the immediate and long term results would have been horrific,
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  18. As usual with scary nuclear accidents in the US, the results of which we were all going to die, no one was directly killed as a result of the "meltdown" and radiation. The only directly caused deaths related to the incident itself were two volunteer firefighters responding to the plant. Their engine hit a slick spot on the road, the engine overturned, and the two firefighters died from the impact. Since it has now been forty years since the accident, many longitudinal studies have been and are still being conducted. With the exception of one dubious study, not one has show a higher that expected level of deaths that can be linked ot the accident. The results of the studies have been frustrating due to the fact the 16 counties surrounding TMI have the highest natural levels of radon of any of the 38 states surveyed. As a result, some cancers have always had a higher than expect level of cancers than areas with low radon levels, and that continues to this day. For many people in the area, spending time in a basement recreation room is far more dangerous than any result of the TMI accident. The one area of deaths that have shown a consistently higher than predicted level is from diseases caused by stress. Due to the poor public communications. many people in the area were convinced the results of the accident was covered up, and many lived in great fear of getting cancer from the plant. While it's hard to quantity deaths not directly related to the plant. at least two large studies have identified an increase in illness and deaths usually due to long-term stress, and the term "radiation phobia" was coined to identify this stress syndrome. The same kind of thing occurred after the Fukushima accident in Japan. The combination of TMI, Fukushima, and Chernobyl, while in total being responsible for a relatively low number of deaths and illnesses, have lead to many countries, Germany being the most extreme among them, to close down functioning nuclear power plants and switch to coal and natural gas plants, even though both sources of fueling power plants are well known causes of deaths, running into the thousands annually world-wide.
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  19. Interesting concept, but you just know the losing side is going to be looking for revenge, and a wider war will always develop. There have been a few instances of this kind of thing, and it only works if there's a strong cultural imperative that the small battle will be the only battle. Some Native American tribes that couldn't risk all out war because of their small number of warriors settled disputes of honor or territory with small battles, but traditions were strong enough that the battle didn't expand to the rest of the tribes.
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  20. Wows. It is amazing that you've now gotten to three years. Seems like it was only about a year ago I started watching your videos when you had maybe 10k subs. Congratulations.
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  21. Once the socialist protesters show up, a scuffle will always escalate. Even the 1886 version of Antifa was trying provoke a riot, and this time, they succeeded.
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  22.  @kimjonglongdong3158  Nagging in that, after reading of the deaths in St. George due to fallout from the testing, if it might affect me too. That's a different question from an unreasoning fear of atomic power. I was a project manager of a two year refit job in one of the biggest nuke plants in the county. That job required me to be in various parts of the plant almost every day, so fearing nuclear power itself obviously wasn't an issue. You might have a better understanding of what I wrote if you had ever seen an atomic test that wasn't on film.
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  23.  @Flapjackbatter  Good heavens, no, not a firefighter. I run out of burning buildings, not into them. I was a deputy sheriff. For reasons that remain a mystery to me to this day, our county board of supervisors gave hazmat responsibility to the sheriff's department. I had to take a bunch of hazmat courses. The bottom line was run like hell until you think you're far enough away, and then run like hell some more. :-)
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  24. Great video. Both of those scientists sound like they were more than a little unstable.
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  25. @PoorMans Chemist That's big talk for a guy whose hobby is making "wildly poisonous" chemicals in his backyard. Have you informed your neighbors about this, even though they are probably too stupid to understand?
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  26. These kinds of tailing dam ruptures have happened many times in the past. This was just one of the biggest of them and affected the most countries. Tailings dams are a necessary part of mining, but we need much better oversight and regulation of them to stop this kind of disaster in the future.
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  27.  @frantisekmakovicka1660  The world has never been at peace because there were always regional conflicts. With the exception of conflicts caused by religion, we are at a historic low when it comes to regional political conflicts.
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  28.  @s.sestric9929  It was somewhat similar in that original thought was that Byrne and McKinley were having a gay love affair and the Mckinney broke up with Byrne, thereby leading to the murder suicide. That line of inquiry was abandoned pretty quickly as was the story of the affair with between Byrne's wife and McKinley. It is a sign of how we think as a society but, after 27 years as a police officer investigating such cases, the first suspects in a murder are the spouse or significant other, regardless of adultery or sexual orientation. We followed that line of investigation first because it turns out to be true in a surprisingly large number of cases.
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  29. The lack of surface wind was caused by a combination of the anticyclone and the lack of a low pressure system close enough to London to cause a pressure gradient. An anticyclone by itself doesn't cause a lack of wind, it's the difference in pressure between a high and low pressure system. As seen in the weather map, the broad high pressure ridge (as shown by the "H" symbols) stretched from the UK all the way to European Russia.
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  30. Yes, it is. The Deer Isle-Sedgwick Bridge was similar in design and construction to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. It survived the stormy winter of 1942-1943, although just barely, It has some of then same stability issues as Gallopin Gertie, and was retrofitted with extensive longitudinal and transverse diagonal stays. So far, at least, the fixes worked.
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  31.  @PurityVendetta  First, I've not seen this thread for a year. This is the kind of thing that happens when you have a pilot in command who's been lost before and always made his way out of it. I assume Lt Taylor was doing as many dead reckoning pilots do - fly five minutes more and on the same heading, hoping he saw something familiar. He got panicked as darkness approached, and never got back a reciprocal route so he at least knew where he started out. On an overwater flight, pilots were trained to stay in formation so, if ditching was necessary, there would at least be more pilots and equipment in the water to help them survive and attract the attention of rescuers. In this case, the tragedy was compounded by the fact the PBM-5 rescue aircraft sent to fly a course that may have located the flight apparently exploded in mid-air before it reached the right area. The PBM-5 had a problem wit leaking fuel tanks,and mid-air explosions weren't uncommon. As usual with any aircraft incident, a bunch of things have to go wrong in just the right sequence before fatal results occur.
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  32. I heard Qxir was kind of a narcissist though...
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  33. Thanks. I was vaguely aware of this one but it's nice to get some details.
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  34. Yes, please do more railway disaster videos. Road transport accidents like fog or snow pileups would also be interesting.
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  35.  @GigsTaggart  Correct, but that presupposes a stable footing for the dam. If things keep moving, the bentonite cracks again.
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  36.  @PurityVendetta  Yes, the rule was to fky to the setting sun. Once you're over the Atlantic, the only large landmass is Florida to the east. The problem this time is Lt's Taylor believed the island chain was the Keys when it was most likely the Bahamas Flying to the setting sun if he was over the keys would just put him out in the Gulf. A few minutes of map calculation of fuel and time would have shown him he couldn't have flown as far south as the Keys, but he was responsible for five other pilots plus his own career, so panic set in. With enough panic, all reason goes out the window. It was a sad event, but it wasn't the first, and it won't the last, at least until everything flying are robotic drones.
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  37. It's quite a chestful. Actually typical for Russian generals, just that Zhukov had more than the next general down the line. The top generals actually had orderlies that did nothing but get the uniforms cleaned and pressed and put the medals on whatever dress uniform the general would be wearing if it was some formal occasion. Generals didn't haul around that chestful of decorations every day. For soldiers with the amount of medals and awards Zhukov received in his long career, that was a four or five hour job. It wasn't just a matter of pinning them back on, they had to be arranged in a precise order and lined up with the most important medals and awards first. The orderlies were chosen because they had an eye for detail, had learned the Soviet medals and awards system, and, presumably, because they had strong fingers.
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  38.  @jwenting  The video at 1:10 would suggest otherwise. Tokaimura was established in 1889, long before the JCO plant.
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  39.  @buddymoore6504  I don't think so. The reactor was strictly an Army project from the start. They were using the DOE reservation in Idaho because it was far enough away from any population center that a catastrophic failure like what actually occured wasn't likely to contaminate a lot of people..
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  40. Destroyed planet? Your parents and grandparents spent most of their lives working like dogs while they hoped the USSR or the US didn't start a war that would actually destroy the world. They worked 50-60 hours a week so you'd have a better life than they did. You are a classic ungrateful millennial. This is why everyone hates you.
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  41. Interesting video. I hope you're doing okay. You don't sound quite as animated as usual but, then, with all this crap going on, who does?
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  42. I have no idea how to edit anything on Wikipedia. If you do, you're welcome to give it a shot.
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  43. Take a look at the Stanford Prison Experiment if you haven't already done so. EDIT - Never mind, I see that's already coming up. A much darker result than what Milgram did.
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  44.  @PlainlyDifficult  I believe it. Keeping Baby Plainly asleep is way more important than getting too animated on a video. :-)
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  45.  @ashkebora7262  Yes, I put "meltdown" in quotes because the core only suffered a partial melt due to a high-temperature chemical reaction between water and the zircaloy metal tubes holding the nuclear fuel pellets. This was not a meltdown of the core, and they hydrogen bubble that formed was the thing that could have released some radiation into the surrounding area. That didn't happen, and the core, while damaged, remained intact. I have to be careful about the words I use in regards to TMI because of the ridiculous notions put in people;'s minds by "The China Syndrome" movie, one of the most dishonest antinuclear screeds ever created. Even though TMI was never mentioned in the movie, everyone knew what Jane Fonda meant, wink, wink.
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  46. Thanks for this documentary. As you asid, a much longer film would be required to show both how it happened and then the effects of the gas releases to the surrounding population. Another mass industrial accident similar to this is almost inevitable as more and more plants are being built in countries where corruption and negligence are endemic to the culture and political systems.
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  47.  @mavenmanion  Define "overindustralization". Do you know the world is less polluted today than is has been at any time since the 1950? There is less poverty in the world, and more people are literate, than any time in history. People are healthier, live longer, and have less acute and pandemic diseases than any time in history. By any objective measure, the world is better off now than it has ever been. What has happened is we have an entire generation of young people who have grown up with the 24 hour news cycle. You have stories thrown at you around the the clock of how bad things are. Some of the stories are incomplete or outright false. All this has caused millennials to have the highest rates of depression of any age group. Negative biases or interpretations of events tend to be more pronounced in people with depression. People with depression have a predisposition to interpret even ambiguous events negatively, and positive events of the same type still tend to be interpreted negatively. The problem with the world, my young friend, is you. Turn off the TV. Get off the twatter, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. Stop reading things like the Huffington Post, Reddit, and Tumblr. None of that is real. Get outside and grow things, see things, travel. The world is not going to hell in a handbasket.
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  48.  @mavenmanion  LOL. And you know nothing about me and have mischaracterized my arguments. I'm 72 years of age. I earned a master's degree in atmospheric science. I actually never mentioned climate change in my comments, did I? The fact the world is less polluted is provably true. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, it's a naturally occuring gas. There's no question that it has been put into the atmosphere in increasing amounts by man. There's no question the earth has been heating up as combination of that carbon dioxide and solar flares. What I don't believe is we actually the have scientific knowledge to predict life as we know it will cease to exist in 100, 200 or 500 years. Even assuming a steady state increase in carbon dioxide doesn't give us such a short timeframe. I'm confident, or at least hopeful, that industrial processes invented and applied in the last 25 years, less carbon based pollution from power production with increasing amounts of solar, wind, and hydro sources, and the increase in electric vehicles and even cleaner internal combustion engines will lead to at least a leveling off in the rise of Co2. This doesn't even take into account other options like carbon sequestration. If you want to believe you have inherited a bleak and dystopian world, have at it, but that kind of thinking is not good for your mental health.
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  49. Total spam. Don't click on the link.
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  50.  @-szega  Have you heard of the term "straw man"? It's intentionally misrepresenting my arguments because it is easier to defeat than responding to my real arguments. (https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman} That's what you just did. I never said it wasn't a significant accident. I wouldn't be that foolish. Now, if you have an argument against any of the facts I posted, I'd be happy to hear them. Just don't try to set me up again.
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