Laurie's charm, nevertheless + my ramblings

I've been remiss in getting a link to Laurie's new blog posted here. As you would expect, she is much more eloquent in her postings than I, and reports on the interesting happenings in her life on the west coast, at least for a few more weeks. Do check it out. Oh, and I noticed she will need some feedback or perhaps the site will suffer an untimely demise.

Patrick is recovering well from his surgery, and properly motivated by the return of his car keys, ceased taking his narcotics yesterday. So far, so good. We're going to see the orthodontist and the oral surgeon this morning and see what they think about the road map for the future.

Today we learn prosecutors are now satisfied in their attempt to find a salesman or two at Bear Stearns to hang with some charges. The latest effort of our government to attempt to solve all our problems, usually by criminalizing something somewhere in response to all misfortune, including acts of God. Thinking back to the lingering effects of our sub prime mortgage debacle, is it actually criminal when the financially brightest folks turn their sights toward profiting, at the expense of those less experienced and less able to defend themselves. In this case, the latter would most often be our young marrieds who are looking to afford themselves that beautiful suburban home (like the one their parents now live in after 30 years of work.) Seems so similar to my reaction to the introduction of a state sponsored lottery... yippee!!! let's see if we can extract more funds from those among us who can least afford it... and we can call it good for education!

The subject of nuclear energy is back... I've maintained for a very long time that we will need to look at this seriously, an interestingly silent topic in the energy discussion till now...

From NEI:

Nuclear Energy Around the World

As of March 2008, 30 countries worldwide were operating 439 nuclear reactors for electricity generation and 34 new nuclear plants were under construction in 14 countries.

• World Nuclear Power Plants in Operation
• World Nuclear Generation and Capacity
• Nuclear Units Under Construction Worldwide

Nuclear power plants provided about 15 percent of the world's electricity production in 2007. In total, 16 countries relied on nuclear energy to supply at least one-quarter of their total electricity. Countries generating the largest percentage of their electricity in 2007 from nuclear energy were:

Country	Percent
France	76.8
Lithuania	64.4
Slovakia	54.3
Belgium	54.0
Ukraine	48.1
Sweden	46.1
Armenia	43.5
Slovenia	41.6
Switzerland	40.0
Hungary	36.8
S. Korea	35.3
Bulgaria	32.1

Additional Information

• Top 10 Nuclear Generating Countries
• The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Power Reactor Information System database
• World Nuclear Plants Country-by-Country Map
• Source Book: Soviet-Designed Nuclear Power Plants