Glowing Review of Lake Keowee in South Carolina

We returned this summer to Lake Keowee, a remote man-made lake in western South Carolina that offers ideal conditions for recreational boating, swimming and camping. The lake's not too crowded, the water's clean and never too cold, and you're only a half hour from Clemson University, a great college town. I'm not a happy camper, but the conditions at Keowee are unnaturally nice. We stayed nearly a week and no one among our group of 15 reported a single mosquito bite, even without lathering up with insect repellant.

The lack of mosquitos is apparently a side effect of the other memorable thing about Keowee. The lake's on the shore of the Oconee Nuclear Station.

Apparently, the nuclear power plant -- which features the same reactor design as Three Mile Island -- recirculates so much of the 18,500-acre lake's water for cooling purposes that mosquitos have no place to lay eggs.

This picture was taken by Harriet Freeman, a South Carolinan who gave me permission to run it on Workbench. One minute you're puttering around by boat through isolated coves with huge lakefront homes, getting away from it all, and then you cross a line of trees and find yourself looking with silent awe at an imposing concrete monument to human engineering capabilities.

In a worst-case scenario study of Oconee conducted in 1997, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission concluded that a radiation release from a spent fuel storage facility could result in 16,800 deaths within a 50-mile radius of the plant and 28,900 deaths within 500 miles, rendering 156 square miles around the plant as uninhabitable.

This would, of course, completely ruin a campout.

Blinky, the irradiated fish from The Simpsons The accepted wisdom at Lake Keowee is that Clemson University regularly monitors the lake and air around Oconee, judging it safe. But talking to a cashier at Bi-Lo supermarket isn't quite as scientifically rigorous as a peer-reviewed study, so I'm left wondering how safe it is to bask in Keowee's abnormally pleasant waters.

Oconee regularly releases tritiated water into Lake Keowee -- radioactive water that forms when oxygen molecules bond with tritium instead of hydrogen. There's no way to filter this water out of ordinary H20, apparently, but tritium's a naturally occuring element that we all get as background radiation. One pro-nuke blogger says tritiated water is "60 times less radioactive than orange juice."

Before next summer, I'd like to have a much better idea of whether I'm exposing myself to recreational carcinogens when I visit a place that's fast becoming one of my favorite spots on Earth. If anyone has experience assessing the risk factors in taking a nuclear family vacation, I could use your advice.

Nuclear Power · Travel · 2007/09/09 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

Dear Media: Child Sex Abuse is Not a 'Sexual Affair'

A St. Petersburg, Fl., city councilman resigned today amid reports that the police are investigating him for allegedly molesting three of his children. The media outlet that broke the story, Tampa Bay's FOX TV affiliate, described it in this manner:

City Councilman John Bryan abruptly resigned his post Friday amid accusations he had a sexual relationships with three of his adopted children.

The media has a bad habit of using the terms "sexual relationship" or "affair" in cases like this, as if the only thing wrong about the situation was the age of one party. Here's another egregious example from a FOX station in Arizona:

An ongoing sexual affair with a 9-year-old girl has landed a school bus driver in jail tonight. He now faces charges of child molestation.

The bus driver's a 63-year-old man. Child molestation is not an affair or a relationship. It's a crime. The media should stop couching such atrocities in language that implies the victims consented to sex

Journalism · Crime · 2007/09/07 · 12 COMMENTS · Link

Remembering Journalist Bill Muller

Bill Muller, one of my long-ago colleagues from the student newspaper at UT-Arlington, died yesterday at age 42 after a year-long battle with cancer. The Arizona Republic, where he worked the past seven years as the film critic, does a good job of covering his many accomplishments in journalism. Muller was an investigative reporter before he became a critic, and his paper editorializes today about why he was so good at it:

But above all else, Bill Muller was a great journalist because he was ... well, charming.

True to his Southern roots, he was a disarming, engaging raconteur of a newspaperman. Countless Arizona and national political figures over the years have opened the pages of The Republic and found themselves wondering slack-jawed how that clever Muller fellow got them to admit such things. And on the record, no less.

I didn't know Muller well, even back then, but he was one of those people who filled a room -- a big stocky dude with an even larger personality. Never shy about sharing an opinion, he had a booming laugh that could loosen fillings. At an intensely competitive school paper where everybody thought they were going to grow up and win Pulitzers -- and three of them were right -- Muller was one whose career I most expected to live up to his ego. And it did.

There's a Legacy.Com guestbook where some friends and colleages are sharing their remembrances.

Journalism · Texas · 2007/09/07 · Comment · Link

Straight Outta Kentucky: Meet Ronald Jenkees

I bought the CD tonight of Ronald Jenkees, an unsigned hip-hop musician from Murray State University in Kentucky, after finding his videos on "the YouTubes."

Go back through his videos and you'll find a bunch of great odd stuff coming from the most unlikely place imaginable (such as String Jams 2, a NFL Countdown remix and his Bill Simmons podcast theme). Jenkins also has filmed some non-musical videos, like one about trying to get his roommates to play Balderdash.

By 2022, Jenkees has amassed 400,000 subscribers on YouTube and 80,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.

Jenkees has released four more albums:

Disorganized Fun (2009)
Days Away (2012)
Alpha Numeric (2014)>
Rhodes Deep (2017)

He's also released the songs Mindful (2017) and Sky Tied (2019).

Music · Youtube · 2007/09/05 · 14 COMMENTS · Link

Paying Attention to the APML Format

I spotted a new XML button on a blog yesterday:

The button links to an APML file that describes a person's interests, in an XML dialect suitable for consumption by software. APML, which stands for Attention Profiling Markup Language, has a short-on-detail spec that wasn't easy to figure out. There's an example and a schema, but no description of each APML element and how it can be used.

The web applications Engagd and Dandelife support APML, so I joined them to see how they use APML to describe my interests. Like John Tropea, the blogger who led me to APML, I like the idea of pulling this kind of data out of sites like Amazon.Com and Netflix so you can use it elsewhere.

I publish an OPML reading list of the RSS feeds I'm currently reading. Engagd will analyze this file to determine the subjects most of interest, storing the results in APML. The site decided that I'm geeked about these topics:

The key attribute lists my biggest interests, according to Engagd. Before there are any misunderstandings, my concerns over "performance" are not personal in nature. I'm interested in the performance of the North Texas Mean Green.

Key interests should change as my reading list changes, because Engagd keeps monitoring it. The site can use my APML data to recommend items from other feeds, producing a new filtered feed in RSS format. Here's some Digg stories Engagd thinks I might like. (Note: The feed doesn't validate because of a rank element that's not in a namespace and other issues.)

APML doesn't show much promise in Engagd's current recommendation engine, but it's a new app limited by the data I gave it: one reading list. APML's designed to hold information about all of the stuff people are interested in -- products bought, movies viewed, books read, web sites clicked, celebrities stalked, and so on -- that they decide to offer for public consumption.

Excessive sharing gives me the heebie jeebies -- does the world really need to know much time I spent reading about Jason and Sam's breakup on General Hospital? -- but I'm going to start publishing an APML file on Workbench and pay some attention to the project. I don't like the green icon that Engagd developer Chris Saad has suggested for APML data, so I'm creating my own:

Get My APML

To get my attention, click my monkey.

Credit: Attention Monkey is borrowed from the Tango Desktop Project and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

Apml · Xml · 2007/08/31 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Journalist Laments 'Declining Trust in the Media'

For Los Angeles Times columnist Dana Parsons, the new film Resurrecting the Champ is an opportunity to feel sorry for how journalists are being treated these days:

I suppose I could just buck up and be a man about the new movie and forgive the filmmakers for their liberties with the truth.

That'd be a lot easier if we weren't living in a time of declining trust in the media and when some of our fellow citizens seem determined to convince the American public that the mainstream press is biased and unreliable.

Maybe they believe it; to me, their effort more closely resembles dangerous propaganda. They seem to think they're helping the republic by diminishing the mainstream press; to me, they're undercutting it.

The press has never claimed perfection, but it's still committed to covering the nation's agenda and getting things right. I know many people don't believe that, but if they disbelieve it enough, someday they'll be left with agenda-driven bloggers and empty-headed news coverage.

That's when the republic will begin to sag.

I admire a lot of journalists, but I think they have a blind spot with regard to the incompetence of many of their peers. Journalists don't get interviewed, so they rarely see how bad some reporters are at the fundamental task of gathering and reporting information -- especially in the broadcast media.

Unlike "agenda-driven bloggers," reporters don't scrutinize the media the way they cover government and other institutions. Because they don't, journalists have a much higher impression of their profession than everybody else.

If Parsons is worried about the future of journalism, he should spend less time lamenting and more time reporting. Telling people you're committed to getting things right is not as persuasive as getting things right.

Journalism · 2007/08/30 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Men's Restroom Etiquette for Dummies (and Senators)

I like Alex Dering's take on Idaho Sen. Larry Craig's clumsy attempt to form a rump caucus in the men's restroom at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport:

For all the men in the audience. Does the description of Larry Craig's actions sound like anything you would do in a public bathroom? I'm pretty sure the gay, the straight, the bi-curious, the hetero-transmetro-vanilla, the unsure, are all gonna answer the same way: "When I use a public bathroom I make no eye contact with anyone. I put the maximum amount of empty space between me and everyone else in there. IF, and I mean IF, I have to use the stall next to someone, no part of my body -- no foot, no hand, um, no non-foot or non-hand appendage -- goes anywhere near the boundaries of my stall. I try to touch as few things as possible." There's exactly one reason to look through the crack in a stall door. Two actually. (The second is if you're looking for the little Amish boy who may have seen you ice a cop.)

Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post offers his own rest-rule:

The key one, as I understand it from many years of being both a man and someone who uses restrooms, is Do Not Talk To Another Man Unless You Are On Equal Footing. What this means is, for example, that you don't talk to a guy who is at the urinal unless you, too, are at the urinal. If he's at the urinal and you're over at the wash-basin, you're not on equal footing. Most men understand this rule instinctively. Clearly this should be a major story in tomorrow's Style section.

Achenbach threatens the social order by suggesting that any form of talking is acceptable. I agree with the makers of the machinama Male Restroom Etiquette: