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You know the old joke, yes? The reason women are bad at estimating distances is that since they reached sexual maturity they've been told that this is ten inches:
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I now think of that one every time I go to our local Fred Meyer. There's a display on the corner cap of the luncheon meats aisle, an evocatively named brand of summer sausage, called Yard O' Beef. The individually packed sausages are about six inches long.
All of which came back today when I finally got reminded, on NPR, of the dimensions of those famed hardened aluminum tubes which Iraq was supposedly going to use for centrifuges in a uranium enrichment program. Three inches in diameter. Three inches. Yeah. No nuclear scientist worth his scientific reserve will say that it's impossible to make a centrifuge out of tubes that small, but they did say it was extremely unlikely. Translation from the science-ese: it's absurd, is what it is. Ludicrous. Laughable. Too small by significantly more than an order of magnitude. You'd have better luck building a bazooka out of a soda straw. See, you have to have someplace for the centrifuge rotors to go, and then room leftover for a sufficient volume of gas to get the right molar weight of difusion gases relative to your uranium. Gas diffusion uranium enrichment centrifuges are huge; so big you have to have a double height ceiling to park one in a room.
So the Bush administration is getting a pass on this even in the critical press, because nuclear scientists won't say the obvious, and the public doesn't know it: there's really only two ways to claim these tubes could have been meant for centrifuges, either you're completely ignorant of uranium diffusion refinement processes, or you're lying. There isn't room for plausible informed error.
[--------------------------------------]
I now think of that one every time I go to our local Fred Meyer. There's a display on the corner cap of the luncheon meats aisle, an evocatively named brand of summer sausage, called Yard O' Beef. The individually packed sausages are about six inches long.
All of which came back today when I finally got reminded, on NPR, of the dimensions of those famed hardened aluminum tubes which Iraq was supposedly going to use for centrifuges in a uranium enrichment program. Three inches in diameter. Three inches. Yeah. No nuclear scientist worth his scientific reserve will say that it's impossible to make a centrifuge out of tubes that small, but they did say it was extremely unlikely. Translation from the science-ese: it's absurd, is what it is. Ludicrous. Laughable. Too small by significantly more than an order of magnitude. You'd have better luck building a bazooka out of a soda straw. See, you have to have someplace for the centrifuge rotors to go, and then room leftover for a sufficient volume of gas to get the right molar weight of difusion gases relative to your uranium. Gas diffusion uranium enrichment centrifuges are huge; so big you have to have a double height ceiling to park one in a room.
So the Bush administration is getting a pass on this even in the critical press, because nuclear scientists won't say the obvious, and the public doesn't know it: there's really only two ways to claim these tubes could have been meant for centrifuges, either you're completely ignorant of uranium diffusion refinement processes, or you're lying. There isn't room for plausible informed error.
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