emotional ping-pong

[0dense]

me, having gotten to the point in the year when I commute home in the dark and am very excited if I make it back before 7:30: :|

me on the bus, noticing that the city's put the lights back up in the trees: :D


Also, director and I are planning our door-decorations for the department halloween competition, and also our new hires are finally (finally!) onboarding, so I need to figure out what responsibilities to share with the new folks so that I don't stay as late and can have some time to study too, because I love this job but it is consuming me. Hosted a workshop today though, and got good feedback! so we're doing something right at least. 




..................................literally as I was writing the above I got a ping about a bit of absolutely WACK local news and apparently if we're collectively shut down to the extent that I can't go to work, I'll be spending tomorrow writing a story about a nuclear project under these hills, so uh if we go dark, just find me by my vibes I guess

Comments

[brewsternorth]

it turns out there really had been a nuclear plant in the outer bay area at one time, but they closed it for, of all things, sitting on a fault line-!

I read about this! They really didn't think it through. And now they've got all this nuclear waste hanging about. Still in proximity to a seismic fault.

In the same book (Mad Science by Joe Mangano: it's very antinuclear but a cogent read) I also found out about the nuclear power plant they nearly completed on Long Island, perilously close to a) a number of airports/flight test facilities; b) Manhattan; c) the track of some Atlantic hurricanes. They couldn't make it safe enough to satisfy the regulators, so they had to abandon it. Now it's the site of a windfarm and a gas-fired power station.

Pandemic disease instead of zompocalypse, perhaps?

[0dense]

0.0 on long island! what are they thinking! Wind, yeah, and hydroelectric, those sound like the ways to go on the east coast.
But that sounds like a cool read, I'll keep an eye out for it! I'm down to read something with a strong agenda if it's also got fair information. (That's actually a bit how I feel about Higginbotham and his book on Chernobyl: amazing research and very valuable interviews, even if he brings an artificial hero/villain narrative in sometimes)

ooh yes though, love me a good pandemic story. And they would've been protected because of the lab's security! something airborne would maybe spread fast enough for dramatic purposes, but the clean room / environmental protections could've been strong enough to keep it out (handwaves at the biosafety industry a bit). long-lasting viral pathogen with a liquid/aerosol vector, maybe. Like nipah/MEV1, Contagion was actually pretty good according to the folks I knew in lab safety.
ooh, actually, black plague is still around here in ground squirrels and such. maybe the pneumonic version went haywire?

[brewsternorth]

Good to know about Higginbotham. I started with Serhii Plokhy's "Chernobyl", just because my library happened to have it in, and notwithstanding the unanswered question of whether Fomin was *actually* in a car accident or if he fell from a balcony trying to break back into his apartment, it's a good synthesis of the history to date, as well as a good read.

[0dense]

hey yeah Plokhy! I think that's actually my favorite of the contemporary books I've read on Chernobyl. I have so many sticky notes on the copy I got from the library, I might just get it for myself for Christmas...