Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
Puts all the dental x-rays and chest films I’ve gotten done over a life-time into perspective…
We all will go sometime but I am in no real hurry to kick off the mortal life for the here-after…I bet the people in Northern Japan feel the same way too…hopes & prayers for them and all of us.
Saw this chart over at Kate’s place@smalldeadanimals yesterday. As the saying goes, perspective is everything.. And don’t get me started about the MSM–total over-the-top hysterical hype. Nancy Grace is THE WORST. By chance I flipped thru last night just in time to stop and catch her act as she was in the middle of one of her classic rants. Responsible journalism at its best! My general science teacher my freshman year in HS in ’58 at ht of the Cold War doubled as our town’s Civil Defense Director. We got ALL the DOD films/Data on nuclear testing, how to use both Geiger-counter & dosimeters as well as all the sheltering and decontamination tricks waaay in advance of my military service. (just wash & peel contaminated fruit like bananas & oranges–all the radiation contamination is on surface-vacuum-cleaners and hoses –assuming electricity the next state over–work wonders for flat surfaces, etc., all the needed thickness of dirt and/or cement, stone, etc for shelter–how to make quick lean-to in basement with tables covered with table-cloths, sheets, etc. to protect against initial radiation–all the CD manual stuff plus a healthy academic dose of over-pressure research, half-lives, blast radii, thermal flash-burn damage effects–the whole 9 yards) We probably knew more by the end of our freshman year as 15-16 yr-olds than 90%+ civilian AND military combined–I watch the illiterates on the tube today with a mixture of both disgust and laughter.
You should have seen my facebook pages the last few weeks. Turns out a bunch of blue shirt nukes have some choice things to say about incompetent nuclear reporting. I must say I was less than professional when the Surgeon General said Potassium Iodide pills wre a useful precaution on the West Coast.
All in all I think this might help the nuclear industry. It’s raised curiosity, and with modern information technologies it isn’t very long before the curious realizes the expets aren’t terribly concerned. Hell, it might make people less likely to trust the media next election.
20,000+ dead and missing in Japan and the media hyperventilates over the Fukishima problems. I don’t think the media is able to comprehend the bigger story, so has defaulted to the one with the pre-prepared talking points. They so disgust me.
Back on topic, the chart is excellent, too bad it isn’t getting broader coverage.
When I was in EE in college, I took some courses in Nuke Engineering. The prof was a nuke engineer and we had a reactor at Tech as well. Ol’ Nick, as we called Nick Demos, would just shake his head in disgust over the stuff that came out of 3 Mile Island.
We can hope the public will look more at nuke power, but I’m betting not. The public is simply too inclined to have someone else do their thinking for them.
I’m reading Mortimer Adler’s book “How To Read A Book” because I’m putting together some teaching materials and I came across a citation in my research. he makes a very good point about pundits packaging things so well, and I paraphrase, that people don’t think for themselves, they just take an opinion they’ve read or heard, and, like putting a cassette in a cassette player, they just recite the opinion when appropriate and they perform acceptably without having to think for themselves.
Some that happens on the right, but it is endemic to the left.
There are exceptions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima
Yeah, a lot of the more informed info on the web boils down to that there’s nothing to be worried about. Except: why did the USN have the George Washington leave port in the middle of a refit cycle?
Even with low levels of contamination it’s a lot easier to move a ship that to have to decontaminate it. Plus given everything else going on in Japan at the moment the refit may not be the best use of those resources at the moment.
Yeah, and we know how lazy those ELTs are. The might actually have to do some work and lose all that rack time…
There was a professor on NPR yesterday that said that you could actually eat all that radioactive spinach and drink all that milk. The radiation from intake would be about the same dose you’d get from living in Denver (yeah me). Since Denver is much closer to the cosmos we get more radiation than New York.
The reason the milk is being tossed along with the spinach is simply to err on the side of safety. He does, after all, make a good point; what if we scientists are wrong about how much radiation you can internalize.
He also pointed out that we have, possibly unfortunately, gotten really good detecting radiation. Really really good.
Our dose limits are based of an assumption known as LVNT, Linear Variation, No Threshold. Start with a population exposed to a high, but not acute, dose such as Manhattan Project workers and residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Determine what the increase in the cancer risk is as a function of dose. Assume the risk is linear, i.e. receiving half the dose results in half the risk. Assume there’s no threshold below which the body can cope with the harmful effects. Pick an acceptable increase in cancer risk and you get your maximum permitted dose.
It, like everything else in nuclear power, is very conservative. It is exceedingly unlikely that we have underestimated the harmful effects of radiation. If we are wrong it is certainly in the other direction, that we consider harmful doses that have no effect or are even beneficial.
Just remember, you can almost make a little money on the side on hysteria. Look at the EWJ chart as a case in point.
Woe betide the poor SOB who needs a barium enema…
I just shudder at all that barium I drank at the Naval Hospital Portsmouth Virginia in the diagnosing of gall stones. No wonder the hands glowed brighter on my watch! NOT!
No discussion of dosimetry is complete without the concept of radiation hormesis
Kinda like Lex with Guinness – for strength!
Mah Kitteh and I are ‘way ahead of all of you hetero and homo doodahs. We sleep alone.
Now, Mah Kitteh has been known to condescend to sleep with me when he was horribly wounded, leaving gifts of bloody cat pus on my pillow (Hey, you know how the kitties are, about the abscesses!).
Generally, I sleep all by myself, and so does my kitty, either in a separate room, or outdoors.
In my considered opinion, people who voluntarily sleep in the same bed with humans or other critters, emergencies excepted, are batshit insane. I really don’t care that they might be in the majority.
P.s. In my own experience, I cannot sleep well in an American-size double bed if there is someone else in there, even if the someone and I are familiar with each other’s nekkid bodies. Now, a Queen-sized bed allows each of us to get some sleep, and not worry too much about wiggling and keeping the other party awake.