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My Dad used to travel to the Idaho lab from time to time to time and had colleagues who were friends there. He talked about the great fishing up there.

Yes, no talking about it at home,especially during the Cold War. Back then, it was a custom to stand up and tell the class what your Daddy did for a living near the beginning of second grade. When I was in Kindergarten, I asked my Dad what he did at work and he said be made “big piles of paper” so I believed he worked in a paper factory. So guess what I told my second grade class? The teacher knew what my Dad did and told my parents and the three had a good laugh over it. When my little brother was in second grade, he said my Dad “cut bushes for people”. Well, my Dad did trim the bushes of our elderly widowed neighbor, a sweet old lady, as a kindness.

The Swiss school was interesting. I did not speak a word of German when I started, and classes were in High German, but outside of class, the kids spoke Swiss German, and I got them all tangled up at first. I went to a Bezirchsschule, which was like a middle school for kids destined to go to university.

At the time, I thought it was horrible that your life was sort of determined for you in 5th grade: top students went to the type of middle school I attended, then academic high school, then uni. Next tier down, kids were destined for vocations and applied sciences, next down, trades. Now I realize it was smart. Why imprison kids in an academic high school who are not suited for it? Why not let them get started on their vocations and trades? Why waste their youth and enthusiasm?

Oh my! What happened to the nuclear waste in Japan is horrifying! They needed my Dad’s teensy weensy spheres! They are so cool. And too bad the Soviets did not have another thing my Dad invented that would have prevented the Chernobyl meltdown. I had no idea what my Dad did except for a few things that went public, like the spheres and that meltdown prevention thingie he won an R&D 100 Award for.

Yes, greenies overriding and corrupting real science is an abomination.

I wanted to learn German in 5th grade, but my elementary school in West Springfield, VA was compelled to teach French. I came very late to the party and didn't learn much French. Frankly, the school didn't try very hard. My dad wanted me to take Spanish. I started that in Irving Intermediate. It was a Castilian variant. I was making progress, then we moved to San Diego. Spanish was compulsory. Mexican Spanish. The teacher literally put his head on his desk and slept through classes. More time wasted. I finally got into the German classes in high school and took it both years (10th & 12th grade). At UCSD, it was required to have written and oral proficiency in one foreign language. Had I arrived a year sooner, it was TWO. The German classes at UCSD were good enough to allow me to pass the written SATII in German, then do the oral proficiency with a native speaker. I was handed a recent copy of Das Bild and assigned and article to read. Having read it, I spent 20 minutes discussing in German, then on to idle chit chat about school and life. Today, I use Duolingo. German, Welsh, Spanish, Italian, Gaelic, French. It's fun to switch up languages. I finished the Welsh course, but that is just a starting point to proficiency.

I can appreciate being dropped into a school and having to battle to acquire adequate proficiency to function. My high school German teacher was raised in Karlsruhe. To this day, Germans in Germany can pick up the linguistic patterns I learned from her.

The Fukushima disaster continues to play out. Lots of radioactive material dribbling into the sea. Radiation intensities so high that 60 seconds is lethal to a human. Even rad hardened robots used to inspect the site are failing in a fairly short time. The unsettling news is that we have similar design reactors in service in the US. A grid down would put them in jeopardy of a meltdown in days. The spent rods depend on cooling pools that are run from commercial power. There is limited emergency backup power. Many are sited along rivers that supply drinking/agricultural water. Those will be polluted on failure.