ECHOES AND UPDATES

I just can't play as dirty as the Economist, so: anisotropic means having different properties in different directions; meromorphic is a mathematical term for functions of a complex variable with no singularities other than poles; and morbidezza is "the subtle, delicate and lifelike handling of skin texture in painting and sculpture."

Prof. Howard Hayden, Physics Dept., U. of Conn., writes:

It is often heard that "We pay too little for energy, so we tend to waste it." I have some trouble figuring out what this means, so I propose the following multiple-choice question to be put to anybody who makes that remark. "Do you mean that: (A) the oil coal, and natural gas companies and utilities should get more money? (B) the people who own the mine or well should get more money? © people should pay more for fuel and electricity, but nobody should get more money? (D) our friends in Washington should get the money, because they know so much better how to spend it than we do? (E) God should get more money, because She's the ultimate supplier of the energy?"

One of the few money-making government enterprises is uranium enrichment for nuclear fuel (increasing the concentration of U 235 in the mostly U238 uranium from 0.7% to about 3.5%), and the US is making about $1.5 billion a year providing this ser-vice to utilities at home and abroad. But its plants in Ohio and Kentucky use outdated WWII diffusion-process technology. The Soviets modernized their technology with ultra-centrifuges in the mid-70s, at first offering to enrich foreign uranium "for free" by keeping only a toll of the enriched uranium for themselves. Now they are charging hard currency and providing the service 20% cheaper than the US. On October 6, four New England utilities announced a contract with the Soviet plant in Sverdlovsk, and will be shipping it 6,600 tons of uranium for enrichment. If the US government had not insisted on a monopoly of enrichment, private technology would have outpaced the Soviets long ago.

A diagram in "AIDS in New York City", by the Amer.

Counc. Sci. & Health (1995 Broadway, 16^th fl., New York NY 10023), shows that of the cumulative adult cases of AIDS in New York City through March 30,1990, 94% were among homosexuals and IV drug users. "AIDS threatens everybody' is thus the usual half-truth by the social engineers, but their clout has caused more taxpayer's money to be spent on this largely self-inflicted disease among fringe populations than on cancer or heart disease which threatens everybody.

What arrived was a new edition, the pro-capitalist subject mat-ter quite unchanged, but the foreword passionately Red. Now we all change our opinions, and personally I am in no position to throw stones in this respect. Still I did not write an astrological foreword to a textbook of astronomy, nor did my opinions often coincide with fashion, and above all I never voiced opinions against my better judgement. But Heilbroner's irrefutable graphs did not prevent him extolling Marxism and condemning capitalism, with all the benefits of textbooks and articles that are in demand from such heroes of the Left.

But now the Communist ideology is in disrepute, it is time for the chameleon to change from Red to Green, which he does in an an article in the New Yorker (9/10/90). "It turns out, of course," he writes, "that von Mises was right." How shameless can an "of course" get?

THAT'S THE WAY

[Extract from letter to M.J. Ohanian, President of the American Nuclear Society La Grange Park, Ill.]

Dear Mr. President:

In your President's Column in the September 1990 issue of ANS News, you seem to suggest that our "credibility" with policymakers and the news media can be enhanced by putting less emphasis on nuclear power technology and more emphasis on the "non-commercial" aspects of nuclear science. This may be a useful change but it has nothing to do with credibility.

Legislators and the news media do not pay much attention to us because we do not support their political agenda. [ . . . ]

The issue is not whether we want legislators and reporters to like us. The issue is whether the Society has a moral obligation to advocate the scientifically correct position that nuclear energy is so much better than any other alternative. Columbus thought that the earth was round. Columbus gathered evidence that the earth was indeed round. Columbus then told everybody that the earth was round. A lot of people disagreed with Columbus. This was a "controversial" issue. But Columbus kept advocating that the earth was round. Eventually people began to believe that Colum-bus was right and everybody else (public opinion) was wrong. Columbus could very well have kept this to himself and let "public opinion" find out some other way.

Unfortunately, this is what some people in the Society think we should do with the "controversial" issue of nuclear power. They believe that we should keep the facts to ourselves and hope that someday the world finds out that we were right all along.

I, for one, think such a policy is not only foolish, but immoral as well.