I used to work at Superfund site [CAD095989778][], the old Fairchild Semiconductor plant. Turns out that semiconductor fabrication uses a lot of fairly toxic chemicals, and they just dumped that stuff on the ground, mostly trichloroethene, which also used to be used as a general anesthetic until they found it caused liver damage and cancer.
> Based on trichloroethene (TCE) concentrations and other volatile organic > compound (VOC) concentration trends in the groundwater, the current remedy [a > complex of underground walls and a system of wells that continuously pump > contaminated groundwater through filtration systems, plus bioremediation with > bacteria and tens of thousands of gallons of soybean oil to feed them] is not > expected to achieve Site groundwater cleanup levels for many more decades. It > is important to note that groundwater currently is not used for drinking > water or other potable uses. Love Canal was the first big toxic waste dump catastrophe in the US, but the way Allan Schiffman (I think it was) told the story, it wasn't until Fairchild turned up as a second such site that Congress realized they needed to create a system for tracking them and cleaning them up. (Truth is, Fairchild wasn't added until 1984, after groundwater investigations that started in 1981. It was the Valley of the Drums, in 1979, that was the second site that spurred the creation of Superfund.) [CAD095989778]: http://cfpub.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0901680 It seems like there's a lot of police brutality going on today, all over the US and in Egypt. The brutal repression of protests in Tunisia was last year's Love Canal, but once the brutal repression followed the protests to #jan25 at Liberty Square in Egypt, their spread worldwide was inevitable. I didn't see it at the time; when I wrote [Why Egypt’s popular rebellion is the greatest historical event in a decade, and how Barack Obama missed the boat] [1] on 2011-01-28, I had no idea that the former Poet Laureate of the United States would be writing New York Times articles about how he suffered an unprovoked beating by police less than ten months later. [1]: http://canonical.org/~kragen/egypt-massacre-sotu.html It's been a pretty rough year already. Aside from the thousands of heroes killed and maimed by police and soldiers in Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus, Yemen, Bahrain, Oakland, New York, San Francisco, and many other places, my friend Len Sassaman killed himself, John McCarthy and Dennis Ritchie died, and now it seems that a friend of some of my friends, and one of the founders of Diaspora*, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, has committed suicide as well. And, a few days ago, my friend JD Falk, antispam hero, died of cancer. People have asked me if there's an "occupy Buenos Aires", but I think they don't really understand Buenos Aires. There's been an encampment in the Plaza de Mayo a few blocks from our house since we arrived in 2006. The guys "occupying" the Plaza de Mayo are veterans of the Malvinas war, demanding not to be forgotten. The "villas miserias" or "villas de emergencia" are informal settlements, generally not in public parks, that house a substantial fraction of the city's population. So, while people are getting beaten and arrested around the world for exercising their right to assemble peaceably to petition for a redress of grievances, I'm sitting at home working on the midterm for the AI class. I've gotten through 14 of the 15 questions, and I'll finish the 15th one tomorrow. I realized that my birthday update omitted the most important information, which is that I'm really frustrated. I feel that I'm not making enough of a contribution with my life. If I were to get crushed by a bus or stabbed to death by a lunatic tomorrow, I would leave behind a few interesting essays and some useful software, but mostly a lot of unfinished projects that never bel to anyone else. And if I am only for myself, then what am I? I'm trying to have patience with the slowness with which my discipline is developing, but some months I feel like it's getting worse instead of better. Kragen -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-journal
