The short version of these two arguments are:
  - Fermi Paradox: Given how many habitable planets there are in the Galaxy and how long they’ve been about… where the hell are all the aliens? They should have over run the place with von Neumann probes already!
  - Simulation Argument: Given that it will become possible in the future to simulate not just individuals but whole populations, it is significantly more probable that we are ancestor simulations being run by our future prodigy rather than real world residents who will first develop that technology.

So SA’s answer to FP is simply: You are a Sim. The simulation does not include the aliens.

I never really got into playing The Sims, but I’ve watched friends gleefully torture the innocent bundles of pixels – taking away the ladder to the pool while they are in it and hiding the doors before setting the house on fire were  two of the more cruel and effective ways of killing off a Sim that had become boring and wasn’t fullfilling their basic reason d’etre: to entertain the god behind the keyboard.

We have to hope that our Ancestor Sims playing descendants are bound by some sort of moral, legally enforced, code that remembers these Simms are concious entities that deserve some basic rights.

Now assume for a moment that this is true and we are indeed Sims living in a grand archaeological reconstruction of our era, painstakingly built by trawling through our flickr pictures, Facebook posts, blog entries and random musings on Twitter. Imagine that the digital trail that you are leaving when you search for stuff in The Google is in fact what is being used to reconstruct your life – it is not a trail you are leaving, it is a trail that is being followed.

That significantly re-frames the question about what you should do about your digital privacy in a whole new light. It’s not just Evil Marketers or Crypto-Anarchist Hacktivist ID Thieves you need to protect your information from… it’s also your great, great(^n) grand child. But on the flip side, if a good deal of what goes on in my life is guided by the whim of that descendent, is it not a better idea to give them as much rich, good content to work with as you can?

My father’s cousin has recently turned up a photograph of my Great, Great, Grandfather and his family. It is fascinating to see and spot the family resemblances and so on, but the amount we can hope to really know about them is only what can be dug out of official records or from dusty memories of people that met one of the children in the photo when they themselves were a child.

Future geneologists are not going to have this problem. In fact they are likely going to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information. (Hello future descendants, I hope you are enjoying this!) What better way to experience an ancestors life than to re-simulate it and see for yourself what happened?

Therefore it is probably in your best interests to pour out as much information about yourself as at all possible into digital reconds of one form or another and to try your damnest to do stuff that is interesting. If it works out well, you might find that even more interesting things start to happen as your descendents have more material to add to the reconstruction of your universe. If it doesn’t work… well, don’t get into any swimming pools you don’t think you could climb out of if the ladder mysteriously disappeared.

As you’d expect from a project that was so tightly framed, there are some rough edges to the completed work, but these are not so jarring as the ones that spoiled my enjoyment of How to be the Luckiest Person Alive. This book may have been churned out in about a week, but in that week a designer and an editor were working hard on adding value to the collection of essays gleaned from the blog.

The main rough edge issues are repitition of some sections and also many of the essays were in response to emailed questions or previous discussions and they have not been properly re-framed to take that into account. It’s not hard to see where this is the case and backfill a little yourself, but does leave you feeling that one more week of editing could have made a big difference.

The overall structure, however, is well defined, and the selection of works used is excellent and they flow well together – this is where the majority of the editing time has gone and it has paid off.

We open with covering the principles by which Sebastian tries to live, the thinking behind them as well as ideas about how to think and when to think. What does it mean to act tactically or strategically or even philosphically and when should each be applied when navigating towards our goals?

This neatly links to a section on growth that takes a hard look at how to analyze your own habits, track them and incrementally change them for the better; greatness is something you do, not something you are – and this section is all about the personal growth required to build great things through the lense of how Sebastian has tried to do it.

Finally the book concludes with a section on action, covering the gritty detail of some of the methods explained in the section on principles and expanded and referenced in the section on growth. The actual secret sauce of these are quite simple to boil down:
  - Track what you do
  - Treat everyone well
  - Demand to be treated well yourself

What makes them compelling is the narrative of how Sebastian has applied these himself and where it has taken him.

What sets Sebastian’s work apart from other titles in the same sort of field, is that he does not pretend that aiming for the level of success he has already achieved nor the higher realms he has set his eyes on is in any way easy. Quite the opposite, as it opens with him crying on a station platform in the realization that he will never have a quiet suburban life, that he can’t.

I had read the majority of the contents of this book before on the blog, but this really is a well thought out collection of the work following both a personal journey toward and shining a light back down the path for others to follow. If they dare.

This is not your normal self help book or how-to on entrepreneurship or what have you, the title Ikigai means something like “reason for being” or “purpose” and it is very much a manifesto that fits its title.

I have been an avid reader of his blog for some time now. He is prolific, occasionally produces profoundly insightful gems and has pushed the line so far out on how much honesty one can put into bloging it is amazing. There are a great many blogs by and for wannabe entrepreneurs out there, the ones that standout are not those that claim to purvey fullproof get-rich methods so much as those that discuss their failures as openly as they discuss their successes. James’ blog is stunning in his discussions about and deep honesty in portraying his failings, and yet he is a slightly socially reclusive geek who has made the occasional multi-million dollar success. The journeys from crashed out, penniless failures back to success and happiness, by following his Daily Practice , are entertaining rides indeed.

So I was hoping that the book would be a collection of work cropped from the gem posts, taking a chronological route through his journeys to frame the value he espouses in his Daily Practice which he swears is the key to becoming and remaining happy and successful.

Unfortunately, it just doesn’t do that. The material is in a scattergun pattern and contains way too many of his “List of…” type posts. Those work in a blog post, not in a book. The editing seems to simply have been pasting material straight from the blog into a Word template and a search/replace of “blog” for “book” and “post” for “chapter”. This is a real shame, because many of the best pieces are in there, but instead of being a platform for delivering more of the wheat with less of the chaff it just looks a bit amateur.

As an interesting collection of work from his blog, it’s certainly a good introduction, but it can only be read as a selection of blog posts, not as a book.

My disappointment in the work had put me off getting his newer book, however I re-skimmed the whole of this one again before writing up this review and was reminded that, when he is on form, James’ work can be amazing to read… so I have just shelled out the 99c for the follow up work “I Was Blind but Now I See” in the hope that he has learned the lessons from this attempt and made a more serious attempt at planning, designing and editing a book this time around. A review will follow in due course.

Unsurprisingly, these projects have produced a fairly mixed bag of results, from the hastily and poorly constructed gathering of old posts with little thought to structure to the hastily but rather better constructed and themed gathering of old posts to a demonstration of the state of the art for this kind of project.

The lessons to be learned are clear:

• You still need a good editor.
• This model of publishing is very fast and direct.
• The technical barriers to entry are diminishing fast – it’s much like the early blogosphere.
• Building an audience on a blog and then selling them your book is a fairly workable model.
• Working too fast will have a severe impact on quality.
• You still need a good editor.
• Good design of your product matters. This is true of all products, of course, but it’s too easy to accept the default templates where a little time and money will make a big difference.
• You still need a good editor.

The books in question are (in order) “How to be the Luckiest  Person Alive” by James Altucher, “Ikigai” by Sebastian Marshall and “Mindfire” by Scott Berkun and I plan to review each of them more fully in upcoming posts.

I think that there is a tendancy to sneer at the idea of self publishing authors – it has for a long time been the laughing stock of the publishing industry and was synonymous with failed authors. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco sets the narritive around a small publisher who makes a tidy living out of exploiting SPAs and some of the lunatic fringe of that pool become the downfall of the men who considered themselves such literary giants. I doubt that the rise of self publishing was really what Eco had in mind for his theme rather than the a sly joke about intellectuals overcoming their fear of creating rather than just criticising and curating, but it is an interesting portrait of how the scene is normally characterized.

That was before Amazon.

That was before the internet made niche audiences reachable in a way that was previously impossible. If you are a world expert on the mating habits of newts, your book can not be published under the old model – you can try academic publishing or forget it; there just aren’t enough people out there interested in Newts… Except that’s not entirely true, with an educated population measured in billions a tiny tiny fraction is still many thousands of readers. You just need a way to reach them and a print on demand or usable eBook system. We have entered an age where we have both.

So are these books aimed at niche audiences? Perhaps, I read these guy’s blogs because I am interested in how succesful people work, how they fail and how they improve. I’m interested in how to operate better in the business world: How do you get the space to be creative? How do you gain the skills to drive projects that will really deliver something useful to the world? How do you live, work and grow in these spaces without drowning in bullshit HR or management buzz words about work/life balance? I guess that is a fairly narrow niche.

This does not mean that I’ve resumed blogging because I plan to eventually sell a book! I have no idea what niche exactly my blog is aimed at, which is exactly why it is doomed to be read forever only by a few people I know. Rather it’s because something I’ve learned from these three books is that there comes a point in time where you have to stop just consuming and start producing too. I think I’ll have more to say about that topic in the future too.

So should you buy and read these? Wait for the full reviews, but the short answers are; “it’s only 99 cents so why not”, “yes” and “definitely”.

Among the various sources of inspiration and advice I’ve been following is the excellent blog of Sebastian Marshall, a most fascinating chap who is pursuing the goal of becoming the most skilled strategist of our era. A lofty goal, but one I have little doubt he can achieve. I had a most interesting discussion with him on Skype last week about Eastern vs Western mentality and business practice that was illuminating.

Sebastian encourages his readers to make contact with him and many good articles and pieces have come out of that, so I decided I should also step out of the shadows and get in touch, hence the reason I ended up having a call with him. His review of what I’d written in my email was very positive too, so positive in fact that he decided to publish it on his blog.

In that article I mention a few items I have been reading and would like to give a slightly broader review and pointers on each of them…

Less Wrong

The home of modern rationality on the internet, currently powered by community submissions but founded on the bedrock of the writings of Eliezer Yudkowski. The barrier to entry on this site is steep as there is a lot of material to consume in the “Sequences“. I got my teeth into them properly only after I got Sony’s eBook reader and grabbed the eBook editions of them. I recommend this route as the material is much better read in an armchair than at a desk.

Eliezer’s day job is to try and make an AI, a rational friendly one that wont accidentally turn us into paperclips. In order to explain why this is a problem we should be concerned about, he discovered he’d first have to explain rationality and biases… out of this has come a very large body of work on how modern scientific methods, rationality and philosophy should work. His “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” is also very good fun.

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Most “self-help books” serve their purpose by making you feel less bad about whatever item it is you need self-help for at the point of purchase. After that they tend to either gather dust or the contents turn out to be significantly less illuminating than the cover suggested or the barriers to completing the suggestions are way too high. You are therefore quite right to think that “self-help books” are largely to be avoided.

GTD is not one of those.

The principal of keeping your goals, projects and tasks written down in nice simple lists is, of course, obvious. But you have no idea just how effective it can be until you take a careful look at how to go about doing it and making sure you use the right tools.

How to Make Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

I guess people feel that this book sounds kind of creepy, seedy, or otherwise the kind of thing only an oily, souless, used car salesman would want to read so that he can get better at manipulating people. I certainly had that impression before I finally got around to picking it up and reading it.

The language is 1920s tub-thumping style, which is actually quite endearing after you get over the hurdle of taking it seriously. Certainly there is plenty of information in there your stereotyped used car salesman would like but that doesn’t mean that it is not equally applicable to anyone in any walk of life whose job, and the jobs of everyone they touch, wouldn’t be made better by interacting more effectively. The secrets aren’t all that deep and mostly boil down to “be excellent to one another”. If you want to make friends and influence people, the book genuinely recommends that you go out of your way to be friendly and helpful… not so seedy after all really!

Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa

The Samurai era is as close to modern Japan and informs its thinking in much the same way as the Wild West is to Americans. Musahi is a great fun, quasi-historical and epic romp through that world that is thoughroughly enjoyable and informative.

I was not totally keen to go, I admit, as my Mum is in town visiting and it is still worrying to be separated for any length of time from Wife and New Baby after recent events, but needs must. As it turned out, the guys didn’t really need my help at all, other than to demonstrate that we care enough about this deal to send me along and show we are keen on supporting our partners.

Some quick notes on my thoughts on South Korea after this my third visit…

The Japanese say that Koreans have Italian hearts, meaning that they are warm and romantic, that is certainly true – the welcome I receive there is always huge – but they have a work ethic and drive that defy’s belief to go with it.
Everything in South Korea revolves around business, in the newspaper you will find important business page articles in the main news section and every other item will mentions the potential business impacts of any story if there are any. These guys care deeply about growing their economy and are focusing all their energy on it.

There is a large amount of fear and ignorance (among otherwise very bright people) about the situation in Japan – many seem quite convinced that the food is radiocative and Tokyo is not a safe place to be. Curiously, the disaster is always referred to as the “earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster”. This is slightly distressing to me, as a much more accurate description would be “earthquake and tsunami disaster (and accompanying, distracting Fukushima accident)”. I doubt though that SK is unique in seeing it the other way around… the media drive to play on people’s fears about nuclear power to sell papers is surely still as strong elsewhere. I think I convinced one guy at least to put his plans for a Tokyo trip back in place, with a promise of some guided tour time and the assurance that I think it is safe enough to live here with my two month old child!

Lastly, on my “night off”, I awoke twice out of dreams. Once I was dreaming of an aftershock and the other I was dreaming of changing baby’s nappy. There seems to be no escape, even in the arms of Morpheus!

The needle keeps getting bounced out of the groove by the aftershocks and a little bit of the old music repeats – a gulp of fear and a glance around the environment to check you are in a survivable area in case the shock gets big. Luckily these aftershocks are now fewer, further between and not nearly so strong; apart from the mag 7 one the other week (the long predicted large aftershock) which left the nerves a little more rattled.

Meanwhile the catalogue of errors and judgement mistakes that TEPCO executives have made over the past few years as well as over the first few days of the accident begins to trickle out and the official accident level has been raised to 7 – the same as Chernobyl. But despite all this, I think my faith in the fundamental safety of the plant was completely justified. It is still not “a Chernobyl”, nor could it ever be one, and no one is going to die as a result of it. Not even in twenty years of cancer.

Life goes on in Tokyo and is basically unchanged, but my eyes have been widened not just by the terror of my own brief experience, but more by being on the periphery of a genuine disaster. The real one, not the media fantasy one.

Life in Tohoku, meanwhile, goes on but will never be the same ever again. Hopefully soon we will stop counting the dead and start paying proper attention to the living, stranded among the ruins of their own lives and desperately in need of aid. If you haven’t read Tracey and Dee’s account of their first trip to help, please do – but be warned you will need the tissue box to hand, I well up just thinking about it.

The broken lives and lost towns and villages, the videos of schools swept away by the flood, the pictures of the tangled remains of roads, homes, cars and fishing boats dashed against each other… all of it has left wounds not just on the landscape but on the people. Especially those who are left bereft, but also on me too.

So what can I do? There is a helplessness in the face of the scale of this that makes action difficult. Donate, donate and donate again to the relief efforts and encourage others to do the same and lend whatever support one can to the brave souls charging out to volunteer with the relief efforts directly. Encourage others to do the same. Which brings me to the real point of this post: #quakebook.

Out of that desperation was born an idea, in the shower of Our man In Abiko. Germinated on Twitter and assembled with a speed and tenacity that defies belief. The very creation of the thing was a joy to watch, as it unfolded before our eyes 149 characters at a time, and the final result is incredible. This is not just some charity book. The works in here are touching and empathic, they will transport you through those dark moments of horror and back into hope for the future of this beautiful nation.

What can you do to help? Well you can buy a little slice of hope and beauty amid the darkness and every penny will go to the Japan Red Cross. Every penny will help.

So go download a Kindle reader for the device of your choice and buy #quakebook (US Amazon or UK Amazon).

This is one of the little aftershocks of March 11th that makes my heart leap with joy, not fear.

The thing is, surviving an earthquake is easy. Surviving the aftermath of an earthquake is much harder.

Friday 11th March was never going to be a completely ordinary day for me. New Baby, being still Very New and only as old as the month itself, meant that I had been off work for the past few days learning what an amazing rainbow of different colours poo could have and what the true meaning of broken sleep is. It was brilliant – I was on cloud nine.

So I was going into work for the afternoon only on Friday for a few reasons:

1. Paternity Leave of three whole days already consumed.
2. Actual holiday time wants conserving for trips to see Granny and Grand Dad in Scotland at Christmas time.
3. I genuinely had a backlog of stuff I had to get fixed and other projects that needed nudged to stay on track
4. One of the Big Bosses was in town for a company event.
5. That meant a free piss-up I could plausibly claim to the wife I had to attend to show face.

So the office was quiet with most of the staff at the big event, only two other Engineers, S and Y, and F who works on localization of some of our stuff in. Y had been off for a few days since just before the arrival of New Baby and we had just got caught up on mutual events and sorted through the heap of stuff we needed to get done between us when his phone rang, so I turned back to the computer and opened my task list to plan what I was going to do first.

We are on the sixth floor of a seven floor building (in American counting, with no zero) so we are used to feeling every minor tremor. Minor tremors happen a lot in Tokyo, old hands and natives are so used to them that they can function completely normally through most of them without breaking stride. Personally though, every single one of them freaks me out a bit, my eyes automatically dart around to check if I’m near anything tall and heavy then over to a picture or clock on a wall to see if I can see it swaying (and thus decide if it’s just my imagination, as occasionally happens, or a real tremor). I believe I get a sort of startled rabbit look about me when this happens which my colleagues, completely good naturedly, find a little funny.

There was a little tremor. In my usual seat, I know where all the nearby heavy stuff is so my eyes go straight to the clock on the wall that is showing 14:46 and swaying a lot. It’s a strong one. Y went right on talking on the phone without a breath.

And here is where the story properly begins, because normally at this point in the anecdote someone makes a funny comment as the shaking stops, people may or may not laugh at my startled rabbit expression and office life will go on for the rest of day, safe in the knowledge that there will be something to discuss over a beer later.

The shaking didn’t stop. It got stronger. The clock started bouncing around and bashing against the wall in a crazy beat, the windows and partition walls rattled and creaked. Y beside me went right on talking, but across the partition I caught S’s eye and saw the startled rabbit expression on his face. In that moment of silent communication, we both got off our seats and climbed under our desks.

Normally at this point in the anecdote, the shaking stops and everyone will laugh it off as a strong tremor and try to guess the intensity number before someone finds it on a website (which is also a race). Indeed Y, on the phone, was laughing – I’m not sure if it was at me climbing under the desk or something the other party had said.

The shaking didn’t stop. It got stronger. I noticed my knuckles were white with their grip on the leg of the heavy desk. The floor was shaking and shunting hard, first one way and then the other. Things were crashing off of shelves onto the floor… one of my colleagues was shouting something I couldn’t understand completely but was along the lines of “Fucking hell! Wont it fucking stop already!?”. No one was laughing.

There are no previous anecdotes that I could tell you that might explain what normally happens next. We are in deep, uncharted water. From here on in, it is the aftermath.

The shaking didn’t stop. It got stronger. It is at this point that you realise that you are in a Big One. You realise that people are going to be dead when this finishes. You realise that you might be one of them. Just how earthquake-proof can you make a building? It is shaking like it’s on one of those sadistic fairground rides with “Scream if You Want to go Faster!” painted in bright jagged letters with flashing lights but far less controlled.

You are not in control of your destiny at all in this moment. No one is. The building will either collapse and crush you to death, or it wont.

The building you left your wife and new baby in two hours ago, leaving them alone together for the first time since they were discharged from the clinic less than a week ago, will either collapse and crush them to death, or it wont.

These are extraordinarily hard thing to process as you are cowering under a desk.

It is impossible to know where to put your fear.

All you can do is hope that it will stop soon and that you and everyone you love will be allowed to live.

The shaking didn’t stop. It got stronger. Brains do weird things at times like this. I remember thinking “Shit, it’s the Tokai quake. I wonder what it’ll be like to fall as the building collapses around me? What will it be like to be crushed?” I saw it, in my minds eye, that very scenario – the floor tore apart and Jamie’s body tumbled away from me down into a mess of concrete.

I can not tell you how long this went on, I genuinely don’t remember. Probably less than a minute or something. You never want to have a minute as long as that one.

And then it got a little less. And then it got lot less. And then it was just a gentle sway and we picked ourselves out from under the desks wondering if we’d survived or not.

The office is wrecked. There is paper, monitors, binders, PCs, potted plants, books, bins, trash and glass/perspex “well done employee” trophies where the floor used to be. An ominous crunch sound comes from the comms room.

After a brief round of “You OK?” / “Yeah, you?” we checked the internet and found the epicenter was Sendai. We all realised at the same time that the only other one of our in Japan colleagues not here or at the other event was in Sendai. Next we rush to windows to see the scene on the streets – if the other buildings look physically badly damaged ours might be as well. Many of the other buildings are still swaying as if a gentle breeze was washing through them but none of them look like they have suffered any kind of collapse. The streets are filled with people, but no debris or corpses.

We found later in the day that the colleague in Sendai was OK and he has since safely made it back to Tokyo after a most arduous adventure.

Someone opens the comms room door to reveal a scene of computer carnage that would make the most stout-hearted sys-admin cry. They make to step inside and I tell them to stay the hell out, if there’s a big aftershock you could get killed in there! They shut the door. In the movies, there would be a dramatic aftershock at this point to nail the point home. It turns out that Mother Nature has watched a couple; there is a dramatic aftershock at exactly this point and no one wastes time getting under a desk. That aftershock would have been the strongest earthquake I had ever felt to date in Japan.

Another brief round of “You OK?” / “Yeah, you?” later and we set about nailing open the doors and trying to contact other colleagues and family members. It should have occurred to me now to also kill the power to the comms room. It didn’t. Luckily it occurred to another colleague arriving back from the (prematurely cancelled) big event an hour later.

Of course the phones don’t work – a moment’s thought and we realise that we know that emergency services get the bandwidth first. I decide that the internet is the way forward and leap to my PC to email my wife only to discover that it is a casualty of the quake – the lights are on, but no one is home. A stream of the bluest air any mortal has ever heard in my presence hit that poor machine as I cursed it and the silicon that crafted it. I needed to talk to my wife. Now. Didn’t it understand that?

S’s machine must be working, he’d been able to look up the epicentre, so I borrowed it to fire off mail to her phone and GMail.

“I hope they’re alright.” I muttered aloud. You may not know the true depth of meaning and feeling in the emotion called sincerity. I know it. The second dramatic aftershock arrived on queue.

Of the four of us, I was certainly the luckiest in terms of getting home – I am quite close, just an hour on foot or twenty minutes on my bike (which I had accursedly decided not to use that day because I thought I was going to have a couple of drinks later!). Y and S are not married men with families. Poor F has family, both these and her home were much further away, she decided to wait till the others were leaving as they would be heading in the same direction.

I packed up the broken laptop (which miraculously worked again the next day), wished my colleagues good luck and promised them I’d update them later and bolted down the outside back stairs. Two floors down, the smokers in that office pointed out some chips of brick that had come out of the wall. I hit the ground floor at a brisk walk and start the journey home.

The streets of Yotsuya and Shinjuku are filled with people. There is almost no traffic. People are standing so close together they are physically touching, even though there is plenty of space. That alone is enough to tell you how traumatic this has been in a country where the hand shake is replaced with the bow. Not many people are moving yet, I guess they are waiting to see what their companies tell them to do: go to refuge area or go home or (in some cases) go back to work.

You could not have dragged me to a refuge centre. I need to be home. Now. I pick up the pace as I come through the centre of Shinjuku. An aftershock stops me in my tracks and I watch the buildings sway like reeds again. I am now walking at maximum speed.

It is less than twenty minutes after the quake when my phone beeps. It is the email from my wife telling me they are OK. I stop on the street and try not to weep. With shaking hands I reply again and then update Facebook that we are all safe.

I pass Shinjuku station where there are crowds gathered, watching events unfold on the giant East Exit screen. I barely slow down. The rest of the journey passes in a blur of churning emotions. Although I have seen not a single obviously damaged building, I am hugely relieved to see that ours is standing. I get up the stairs and burst into our apartment and into the arms of my wife and daughter.

And then surviving started getting harder.

First as we realised that we had been really fortunate and that the scale of the disaster unfolding in the North East was tragic beyond measure. Every image and story that slowly started to emerge tore holes in the heart.

Second, every aftershock, which came one every couple of minutes sometimes leaving the building moving for a few minutes like a huge ship on the swell, frayed a little of the nerves. New Baby obviously felt the tension and became constantly restless.

And then the difficulties at the Fukushima plants began to unfold. I know more than the average layman about this subject – I’ve studied a bit of physics and read quite a bit about nuclear power generation and safety and also about Chernobyl. My initial analysis of the situation was therefore that it was basically under control and controllable. From the information that was then available at the time, I dont think I was wrong to make that assessment. The actual evidence of course did not stop a massive amount of sensational reporting about how people in Tokyo and then North America would be horribly annihilated because of the meltdown of doom. This is still, I hope, far over-hyped from the actual amount of risk to health.

Then it just kept getting worse. For every move forward, there seemed to be two more catastrophes. And still it was always still going to be fine, as long as the containment vessels remained intact. The steam discharges from the water cooling going on, while radioactive, would never be harmful outside the 3km exclusion zone. There might be more minor discharges like that but in many ways all they had to do was simple – keep the cores cooled by water for fifteen days till they become sufficiently inert to no longer be able to melt.

Everything is against them though. Fires, explosions, failed valves. And the final clincher – that the containment vessel for #2 at least was probably not completely intact. What has become more clear over time is that the situation at the plant is significantly more difficult than was at first revealed. This morning I have again awoken to more bad news – potential criticality in unit 4. They’ll want to put some boron on that.

This still does not mean that I think we will all be irradiated and die! The situation at Fukushima (150 miles from Tokyo) is very similar to the Three Mile Island accident (100 miles from NYC) and as we should all know by now, there were no long term consequences in NYC nor anywhere else in the US after TMI beyond a 15 km radius of the plant. The Japanese exclusion zone remains sufficient, for now.

The previous advice from the UK FCO was completely sensible and Chief Scientific Officer Professor John Beddington comments were illuminating and completely correct as far as anyone could see. If you haven’t already seen the condensed summary of his recent call to the embassy, please do.

The only slight quibble I had with that summary is that I don’t think wind direction is so irrelevant, but as luck would have it, Nature is on our side for this and is blowing it out to sea, not towards Tokyo.

But as of a few moments ago, the UK has updated it’s advice based on the new situation:

The most recent advice from the UK’s Chief Scientific Adviser remains that for those outside the exclusion zone set up by the Japanese authorities there is no real human health issue that people should be concerned about. This advice is kept under constant review. However, due to the evolving situation at the Fukushima nuclear facility and potential disruptions to the supply of goods, transport, communications, power and other infrastructure, British nationals in Tokyo and to the north of Tokyo should consider leaving the area.

The UK’s worse case scenario (a complete meltdown of one or two of the reactors) will still not cause any danger more than 50km away. Beyond that there will doubtless be a rise in radiation levels but this will not exceed safe levels, even if the wind does turn to Tokyo that will still be the case – no damaging levels of radiation.

It has been tiring, fighting an uphill battle to keep this message afloat amidst the sensationalism. What has made it worse is the constant and disheartening lack of information coming from the site, a void that is filled by wild speculation and doom-saying. And of course, because my (and other level headed, evidence based) advice about this has had to change so dramatically, and even though it is still overall still pretty safe, it makes the doom-sayers seem more right. It will all come out in the wash of course, but if the probability of reaching this stage was understood at the start of the problems we could have done an even better job of trying to keep people informed.

For this to all still come out all OK, without a serious discharge, they need to keep all the fuel cooled with water for another ten days. There are lots of reasons to think that this is completely achievable – if they can get enough reliable power to keep the pumps running and nothing further goes seriously wrong (like another big earthquake or tsunami or explosion or fire) that’ll be the case. They are running a new power line to the plant and sending more generators, if these get there then it can still be brought under control.

Given the state of the place though, I feel a bit bleak that this will be achievable which makes the UK FCO’s “worst case” scenario seem increasingly likely. There are credible reports that the spent fuel pool at #4 already has an uncontrolled criticality and #5 and #6 also now carry definite warnings that their fuel pool temperatures are rising. All of thee things mean temperature rises and that leads to fuel melt and that leads to radiation release.

Plenty of folks are already leaving town, either south or East in Japan or abroad for a few days. It is an agonizing decision for anyone considering it. You feel like a turn coat or traitor and some of the sentiments from other people who are definitely sticking it out have not been kind. Abandoning Tokyo, a place you love, your home and your friends is a gut wrenching thing to do.

So, am I going to practice what I preach?

No. I’m not. We’re going to take a holiday to Singapore for a few days.

I believe that, the situation is extremely serious and may well be reaching the worst case scenarios that on previous evidence seemed almost impossible. Radiation levels in Tokyo will probably rise but should stay within safe levels. Closer to the plant there is a much greater risk of course. At time of publishing, no where outside the evacuation area is in any danger from elevated radiation levels.

We will none-the-less almost certainly be exposed to more cosmic radiation in the plane than if we had stayed in Tokyo.

So why go? Too much trauma. We’re not surviving the aftermath very well, not because we’ve been the victims of the horrors further north and not because of fears of radiation and certainly not because there is any supply shortage. It’s the wear on the nerves from the aftershocks that is huge, it reminds you of the quake itself, every time. You snatch up the New Baby and wonder if this is another Big One and will you need to bolt for the door.

But it would be foolish to pretend that I haven’t also succumbed to the paranoia about the Fukushima situation.

While I can rationalize it all very well (it’s an over reaction and the risk does not justify that response), the presence of New Baby ratchets up the caution glands. So we’re leaving Tokyo for a week, it’s the irrational thing to do.

I hope that when we come back, the worse cases wont have occurred, or if they have, than my assessment of the safety in that situation outside the current exclusion zone will have been correct and that Tokyo will forgive me for leaving her in an hour of crisis.

Lastly, if you have not yet donated to the disaster relief of the North, please, please do. Their earthquake stories are all much worse than mine. Their losses are unimaginably painful. Their suffering is continuing now. They have no way to escape from it.

The super high radiation spikes measured appear to have been anomalies and even at the plant levels are high but basically safe.

1 and 3 are definitely fine. The fire at 4 is out and was not fuelled so there was unlikely to be any big radiological release from it.

Everything I have written so far is still the best available advice, unless TEPCO have been covering up how bad the situation really is.

What is concerning me is the info we are NOT getting:

• rate of water loss from #2
• any info about the state of the containment vessel
• current temperature of the remaining two reactors, which is now also increasing

Last night, I was expecting to hear this morning that everything was flooded and under control, instead the news of damage to the torus and containment vessel and exposed rods in #2 was out of left field.

I am therefore having to re-evaluate on the assumption that TEPCO have been withholding the true scale of the problems at the site and I am therefore now nervous.

Reports that this will turn into Chernobyl are still ridiculous, but the probability of a significant radiological release that could be harmful to a wider area has, in my estimation, gone up.

At the moment the wind is blowing North and East – out to sea (and fingers crossed it stays that way) so if the situation does deteriorate, Tokyo will not fall into any kind of immediate danger.

I am on tender hooks for more, better, verifiable info but the last news conference has made me lose a bit of faith. As the journalists at the site said to Edano – please TEPCO – tell us more and more regularly! If I, a staunch nay-sayer against the (still far too high doom-saying) am wavering, then it should really tell you that this is not good enough.

If units 5 and 6 also get into any kind of serious trouble it will definitely be time to worry. It would, for me, be proof that what I and others have been saying was true – but the foundation on which the advice was based was false.

I reiterate that there is still absolutely no cause to panic. The current releases and radiation levels are not hugely dangerous and should not get significantly worse. The current exclusion zones are plenty. If nothing else goes wrong.

My faith in further things not going wrong has been shaken, admittedly mostly by the lack of clear information available rather than any hard facts that the situation is genuinely bad.

Further recommended reading (all of which I agree with completely subject to the above caveats) are

1. Gakuaranman’s Great Tohoku Earthquake (Latest) is regularly updated including notes from Japanese press conferences
2. AltJapan’s Should I Stay or Should I Go is an excellent “current status” snap shot
3. Mutant Frog’s Radiation safety update for all your radiation fears.

Update 15th March 18:14 Tokyo

All the info above remains correct according to the available data. The lack of hard data (which I mentioned) has not improved and is what was making even me a little nervous: My current feelings on the situation. <-- This has turned out to be sadly prescient.

The best info summary currently available is Gakunman’s Live Report.

Original post, no longer current.

The good news: As I understand it, both units 1 and 3 have been flooded with seawater and are now safe. They will never produce power again, but public safety is more important than economic return. 4 has had a fire, which I understand to be under control now, but was not fuelled – it is bad for raising temperature in the area and could throw up tiny amounts of materials in the smoke but this is not our biggest problem.

Unit 2, after suffering much the same problems as the other ones, has also reached the flood-with-seawater level to cool the core down.

The pumps which are supposed to keep the fuel rods covered with sea water have a problem so the level was not high enough and it appears that up to about 80 cm of fuel rod were exposed for some time. This probably means that some of it will have melted (see What the Media Doesn’t Get About Meltdowns for info on melted fuel). Some radioactive materials are likely to have escaped.

If I understand correctly, this is not dis-similar to the Three Mile Island accident which (as noted in the previous post) was much less bad than the popular perception of it.

The water level is rising again according to Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano which is good because if it cools down, no more melts. It is also very important to note that by “some radioactive materials” this should still only affect the very local area (within 3 km to cause any potential health problem at all and 20 km for an increased risk from atmospheric discharge).

So, where does the melted stuff end up? In the containment vessel which was intact up until this morning. This morning, when I was kind of expecting to wake up to all three being totally under control, we’ve had further bad news. The torus at the bottom of the containment vessel (a key part of the cooling mechanism) and the containment vessel itself are damaged.

For those who have been worrying about how bad it could get, this is about as bad as it could get. The loss of more radioactive material into the surrounding environment and atmosphere is inevitable. This still does not mean the end of the world. The danger outside the 20km exclusion zone remains low. The radiation levels at the plant are very high, but these drop off with distance squared (ie very quickly) and dosages must be kept in perspective.

We need more information on how bad the damage to the containment vessel is to make any further insights. This is the most serious accident of recent years but we are still all basically safe!