Explaining the Japanese nuclear crisis using poo

Once you get away from the explosions and help! Help! Radiation! Head for the hills… All this nuclear meltdown China Syndrome in Japan business gets a bit complicated. Too many millisieverts, half lives, critical masses and atomic bomb memories. Should we all be panicking? Or not?

Without wanting to be too complacent – and sitting far from Japan – I think, on balance, not.

Here are two options for you to make sense of it all.

1. Read this book. Physics for Future Presidents by Richard Muller. (Or he’s here on wikipedia.)

Or check out his University of California at Berkeley lectures on YouTube.

2. Or – watch the children’s version of events, using farting and poo.

Too reassuring maybe? Or effective at getting through to children. (And perhaps some older folks too?) He said poo! Hahaha. Etc. (Listen, we’ve just had a bunch of intelligent 11-year-olds sniggering everytime the UK’s shadow chancellor was named on the BBC Newsround TV show. Did I mention the politician’s name is Ed Balls? Every time.)

Or would this sort of thing have helped you to live through world traumas when you were young? I’m thinking the Cuban Missile Crisis, the introduction of internment in northern Ireland, Gulf Wars one two and three, England losing to Ireland in both cricket and rugby. That sort of thing.

To paraphrase somebody or another’s rhetorical question: Who in internet-land will object if with a poo in one hand and a fan in the other, we explain pretty much all postwar conflict?

(I can’t claim to have found this myself. Cultural Snow drew it to my attention. He’s also been writing crossly about the conclusions people jump to about European men in Thailand – of which he is one. The preeminent one naturally.)

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