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I can't believe this has idea has reared it's head again. You're substituting one problem for a whole other set of problems. Here are some pertinent facts: There is only enough accessible Uranium ore to supply reactors for at most 80 years . It can take 40 years to completely decommission a reactor, longer than it's useful life. Nuclear waste can be unsafe for 10,000 years. This is not to mention the extraordinary build costs, which are only viable with government backing, nor the seemingly inevitable construction delays. That's not even touching on the accidents. In Japan old people are volunteering to clean up Fukashima because they know they're going to die anyway. For the price of one reactor, you could probably build a wind farm of much higher capacity. Hook it to a huge battery, and you're sorted. There are 441 reactors in the world, we don't need any more.

Imagine such towers all over the place. Drone delivery is going to get exciting. https://www.damninteresting.co...

So you KNOW that the US government at the time was riddled with Communist spies, right? Because they were. People like Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, Harry Hopkins, the list goes on. The Manhattan project was full of spies. The idea was that capitalism had reached its end, that socialism was the wave of the future, that we had all better get on board now before it all collapsed, stop me if any of this sounds familiar because they still say the same shit today. How was the US government supposed to resist the Soviets when so many people inside it wished to join the Communists?

https://www.damninteresting.co...

They wanted a circuit that detected between two frequencies. The system was supposed to be digital, but the artificial evolution had made use of analogue computing using magnetic fields and harmonics.

If the AI's are created in any kind of evolutionary manner, then almost certainly yes. It's happened with hardware design before.

You need to educate yourself about why bananas are clones. Then continue on with apples and other fruits. Starter words -> scion, grafting. Bananas and apples were clones long before mega-corps.

Interesting that Nicola Tesla wanted to do this: http://www.damninteresting.com....

I think the question of nuking Japan is open and shut in favour of the nuking. A conventional invasion of Japan would have been a horrific bloodbath with millions of deaths. The nuke saved lives on both sides... even with all the Japanese killed, it would have been worse with conventional war.

The first nuke was an oh-shit-what-the-hell-is-that event and the second one was proof that it wasn't some freak occurrence but something that America could do over and over. Two were the minimum required. Between them they finally convinced Japan that surrender was its best option.

And by the way before the nukes were dropped, leaflets were dropped telling people to get out of the target cities. (It would have been suicide to identify the specific targets of the bombs, so other cities were listed as well.) Sure the leaflets were propaganda but they also were as much of a humane warning as it was possible to give.

http://www.odditycentral.com/wtf/italian-village-plagued-by-mysterious-fires-has-been-puzzling-scientists-for-years.html

There are lots of stories about people experiencing weird power surges that electric company technicians can't solve. Some tie this to poltergeist activity. Some people think the Hutchinson effect is related. Others just chalk it up to Nikola Tesla's time-travel experiments blowing up the taiga.

Personally I blame shoddy script-writing for this reality. Seriously, how many times can humanity avoid extinction by the skin of it's teeth before people realize that they're living in a work of fiction. Poorly written by the lowest form of hack.

Almost the exact same thing was demonstrated with evolovable hardware in the 90s:
http://www.damninteresting.com...

Programmable circuits were trained through an evolutionary process to perform certain tasks. At the end of the process they performed the tasks perfectly, but the actual circuits that were produced were not understandable or functional under the normal rules of circuit design, using roundabout methods for the components to effect each other that were dependent on the exact design of the model of programmable circuit they were using. Try to implement the same circuit design using other hardware and it would just fail to do anything at all.

Evolution will "make use" of anything it can, even and perhaps especially factors that no intelligent designer would ever consider.

The main reason the bananas are vulnerable to this is that all commercially grown bananas are sterile clones, reproducing asexually: http://www.damninteresting.com...

Wild non-cultivated bananas are pretty much all seed and wouldn't make a very desirable alternative: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Since the commercial bananas are all identical, they are all equally susceptible to the same disease, which leaves three options:
1) Identify and switch to a different strain of banana that's not susceptible, which takes a lot of time, money, and likely has other drawbacks
2) Forget about bananas -- hard to do in parts of the world where they are a staple food
3) Use genetic engineering to try to create a disease resistant version before it's too late

Go here instead of the initial link. It has a longer and more interesting story.
http://www.damninteresting.com...

Damn Interesting has an awesome write-up all about this bomb. Definitely recommend this site for anybody interested. They've actually got a lot of really awesome articles there.

http://www.damninteresting.com...

That's unheard of!
http://www.damninteresting.com...
Unless you count the thousands of still-living people there that have been declared legally dead by bribed public officials and stripped of their property.

I'm taking "quantum effects" to mean ambient electric/magnetic fields and the impact of the surrounding structure that is not directly "connected" to the electric signal traveling down a neuron's axon and across to dendrites. What would qualify as quantum effects is the following:

(1) signal interference from surrounding tissue or parallel neurons firing. This can be anything as small as something which modulates the RATE of signal propegation, therefore impacting the timing of networked events. (see race conditions in a computer). Any minute physiological changes or electrical field changes along the axon which might modulate the action potential.

(2) signal prohibition. Anything in the surrounding environment (electric or magnetic fields) which might select against the initiation of a signal, such as increasing the threshold energy needed to start the signal or suppressing the sensitivity/receptiveness in the dendrites to incoming signals.

(3) signal promotion. Similar to the above, something in the surrounding environment (outside the cell walls) which might alter the internal structure of the cell to make it easier for a signal to fire or make the dendrites more sensitive.

Given the inverse square laws for the drop off in potency of electric and magnetic fields, the local environment would have the most significant impact, but can we completely discount the possibility of waves propagating through london forces, especially in the hydrophobic interior of the cell wall? The effects might be miniscule, but if there is any effect at all, could it have an impact on signal transduction?

http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ Here is an example of an FPGA combined with genetic algorithms that resulted in a solution to a problem which depended on "quantum effects" as I've defined them above. Meaning they expected all solutions to be transistor based, but discovered that the interference between non-connected components was integral to the working of the final solution.

It's still limited by the FPGA's gate count, which is pretty low by CPU standards.

Good sir, I point you to the work done by Dr Adrian Thompson evolving circuits:

http://www.damninteresting.com...

http://www.damninteresting.com...

There's some magic tricks outside of the basic programming for you. Paper is linked in there or easily searchable, and is quite interesting.

And yes, there might be reason to start to get concerned. Disruptive changes happen quickly. Eventually, we will be the ones disrupted..

By the way, females alone without males, without the fast mutation and genetic adaptation brought on by sexual reproduction and various gene combinations are doomed as a species, to extinction disease plagues, similar to a banana which lack a sex life, and it's terribly vulnerable to extinction. Google sex life of banana, or http://www.damninteresting.com...

Btw, I cannot post on here much under my user name anymore, because I got assaulted from excellent or good karma to bad and terrible within 2 days. See http://i.imgur.com/9DX8mI8.jpg. But I do post as Anonymous Coward, and sign it at the end with this user ID.

http://soylentnews.org/comment...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.damninteresting.com...
"Furthermore, both radiotherapy and chemotherapy have an immune-suppressing side-effect. Since both treatments kill the rapidly dividing cells of the immune system along with the rapidly dividing cancer cells, both can be used together if care is taken. But immune-stimulating Coley's Toxins work entirely differently, and their effect would be cancelled out if used at the same time as high-dose immunosuppressant chemo- or radiotherapy. It became an either/or situation-- and in the end, the fashionable new treatments won out over Coleyâ(TM)s fiddly reworking of an ancient 'natural' remedy. "

Some other suggestions by me here (primarily nutritional, but also on fasting helping with chemotherapy):
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

More on mushrooms and preventing cancer as also mentioned:
http://articles.mercola.com/si...

It is hard to know who to trust in the cancer industry to find, as you suggest, the best individualized treatment. It's certainly true that people selling alternative products and books (including Furhman, mentioned in my other post) have a conflict of interest. In general, the entire field of oncology is also sadly full of conflict of interest because oncologists make so much money by doing treatments.
https://www.burtongoldberg.com...
"Here is a shocking fact you most likely did not know: Unlike other kinds of doctors, cancer doctors (oncologists) are allowed to profit from the sale of chemotherapy drugs. In fact, most of the annual income oncologists earn comes from the profit that they make from selling these highly toxic drugs to their patients."

And:
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/20...
"And that is where oncologic decision making gets really messy. Because in the United States, at least, many oncologists make a good deal of their income selling drugs to their patients. ... Many oncologists vehemently deny being influenced by this financial conflict of interest. But such denials defy both logic and data. Oncologists would have to be superhuman not to be influenced, at least unconsciously, by such strong incentives. After all, there is often no single "best" way to treat any given tumor, and there's often good reason to believe that expensive new therapies might be better than older, cheaper treatments. In the face of such uncertainty, how could oncologists avoid being influenced by the knowledge that those promising expensive new treatments also help generate so much income?"

Integrative alternatives:
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/PA...

Regardless of the future, I wish you the best in making the most of each day like this celebrity with cancer:
http://www.reuters.com/article...
http://www.people.com/people/a...
"Resolved to face her last days with courage and humor, "I don't think of dying," says the actress, 73, who previously battled lung cancer in 2009. "I think of being here now.""

Good luck!

As long as they are not muslim, because muslims have serious religious issues with back doors. Which is probably why Alexander the Great's Persian wife killed his ass, not by a poisoned arrow, but by a poisoned mushroom dinner, a mushroom which looks like an arrow, and must have been misinterpreted in translation through the ages. Her upbringing taught her good morals, including sins similar to Sodom and Gonorrah. He had too many wives of his own kind too, so he wasn't totally in love with her, he killed some family members of hers, even if distant ones, he was trying to make her children learn Greek instead of their own mother tongue, he was bisexual like most Greek men of the time, including not having a problem with fucking sheep - there is a story of his army of male lovers marching through Anatolia, coming across a herd of sheep, and why do the same stinky hole day after day, variety is the spice of life, something fresh and exciting, like sheep-booty - all he really needed was a warm hole. So she probably had a religious problem with taking it in the back door, or sharing a dick with him, alternatively sucking it after pulling it out of his male lover's ass, and his Greek dick was too small (just look at all the statues), only good for anal sex, when she was used to bigger dick in her population, so she kill his ass, she didn't want him polluting her gene pool.

By the way the biggest issue facing the Greeks was sex, and overpopulation, which is why they had to start colonies in Sicily and southern Italy, like Syracuse (Archimedes lived there), Constanta, Cyrene, and most of it them Anatolia=Asia Minor, and the encroachment of these Asia Minor colonies on the indigenous populations was what really invited the Persians and Darius over, which invited Alexander and his Greek army over to Persia. There was constant racial disharmony between the Philistine colony Greeks of Israel, living in 5 city states, Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath, with stories such as David and Goliath being representative, also in Cyrene at one time the jews killed all the Greeks and danced with their intestines in their necks to celebrate, so the Persian semites sort of came over to the aryan Greeks after continuous colonization harassment from the Greeks, and the victory at Marathon was a turning point for the Greeks, then Hannukah is a celebration of not letting yourself be hellenized, under a hellenic king left by Alexander, but maintaining your identity, language and culture to which you have a right to do. Also Alexandria in north Egypt had a library established that held vast knowledge of ancient civilizations, but it was burned down by a muslim conqueror, saying it's either in the Quran, and then it's superfluous, or it's not in the Quran, then it's dangerous. Also the Iron Pillar of Delhi was shot at with cannons and withstood it a few times by muslim conquerors - there have always been continuous racial disharmony for millenia now, a lot of it having to do with immigration and encroaching on other people's territories, because of overpopulation, and because of sex. By the way a lot of creativity and perversion seems to go hand in hand, as sexually high functioning always horny and perverted people seem to also be very creative. There is two sides to everything. Sex, and population control issues are still here today, just like in the ancient world, and the Greeks finally found a solution, when they discovered silphium, as shown at http://www.damninteresting.com...

The prized plant became such a key pillar of the Cyrenean economy that its likeness was stamped upon many of the city's gold and silver coins. The images often depicted a regal-looking woman sitting in a chair, with one hand touching the herb and her other hand pointing at her genitals. The plant was known as silphium or laserwort, and its heart-shaped fruit purportedly brought the ancient world a highly sought-after freedom: the opportunity to enjoy sex with very little ri

It did NOT break up at altitude. Something rendered the aircraft uncontrollable. A loss of hydraulic pressure or power does this for a 777.

A loss of hydraulic pressure or power does not do this for a 777. It has a RAT (ram air turbine) which pops out in such cases. Basically a big propeller which gets turned by the wind as the plane glides at 500 mph and generates enough power rudimentary electronics (including radio) and hydraulic pressure. That's what happened with the Gimli Glider - a 767 mistakenly loaded with insufficient fuel (the original boneheaded imperial vs metric conversion foul-up before the Mars Climate Orbiter). which basically turned into a 100 ton glider when it ran out of fuel mid-flight. The RAT popped out and allowed the crew to control the plane to a safe landing. (Which of course means if this did happen on MH370, the search area needs to be much larger than where they're currently looking).

Hydraulic failure usually involves structural damage which compromises all the hydraulic lines. Most commercial aircraft have 3 independent hydraulic systems; some have 4. If there's damage which severs lines in all of those systems, the plane can "bleed" hydraulic fluid until there's not enough left to control the flight surfaces. I believe the 777 used a hybrid fly-by-wire + hydraulic system though, where pilot commands are transmitted to the flight surfaces by wire, and a hydraulic pump there moves the flight surface. So severing the hydraulic lines may have killed one control surface, but not all. (Severing the wires OTOH...)

Anyway, I'm skeptical that it broke up at altitude too. That usually generates a lot of floating debris (papers, luggage, clothing, bodies, etc.) scattered over a wide enough area that the crash area is quickly located. The pingers should be firing away so it's just a matter of one of the search boats traveling within a few miles from the plane's resting location. (KAL007 wasn't located because the Soviets knew from their radar tracks where it went down, and set up decoy pingers far away to get the U.S. and South Korea to search the wrong location).

It's a shame that Abner Doble couldn't have continued with his steam powered cars. Considering what he was able to do with them using 1920-1930's tech, it would be amazing to see what could be done today.

See On The Origin of Circuits:

"As predicted, the principle of natural selection could successfully produce specialized circuits using a fraction of the resources a human would have required. And no one had the foggiest notion how it worked."

"Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest-- with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output-- yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type."

"It seems that evolution had not merely selected the best code for the task, it had also advocated those programs which took advantage of the electromagnetic quirks of that specific microchip environment. The five separate logic cells were clearly crucial to the chip's operation, but they were interacting with the main circuitry through some unorthodox method-- most likely via the subtle magnetic fields that are created when electrons flow through circuitry, an effect known as magnetic flux. There was also evidence that the circuit was not relying solely on the transistors' absolute ON and OFF positions like a typical chip; it was capitalizing upon analogue shades of gray along with the digital black and white.'"

Dr. Thompson's publications seem to be difficult to find in free viewing form on the Internet, but the daminteresting article gives the gist of it: evolution will eventually make use of whatever characteristics are available to solve a problem.

Have to say, I thought it was pretty messed up.

You look at the 100 year mark? That is nice. I have some tulip bulbs that will make you a fortune.

What about leaving instructions near nuclear dump sites? You simply do not want your bonobos to dig up our old, radiating trash, thinking it valuable and wearing it as necklaces or whatever. Humans have done this, so there's no reason bonobo's wouldn't come to the same conclusion. (Ooh, shiny.)

This article talks about the problem, and some offered solutions, but concludes that it's pretty much impossible to make something look uninteresting or uninviting enough to prevent curious bonobos from exploring it. It's a pretty interesting read.

Making a car safer to drive because accidents becmoe more survivable is not the same thing as making accidents less likely, which is what we've been discussing. Those two cars will of course behave differently. Do you think that the presence of an airbag or a seat belt materially affects the car's handling? Of course not. The differences are due to a litany of other changes to cars over time.

As for that limb you're on. Don't look down:
https://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2006/060927ManneringOffset.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8198694?dopt=Abstract
http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/failure%20of%20seatbelt%20legislation.pdf
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Presence-of-Mind-Buckle-Up-And-Behave.html

And it's not limited to cars:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IB2xRfRHOA
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/07/peltzman-effect.html
http://www.damninteresting.com/the-balance-of-risk/
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673607603134/abstract
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/27/AR2009032702825.html
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61755-3/fulltext?_eventId=login
http://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/Wilson_Circumcision.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

DI did an article on this about 5 years back: http://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/?action=print

These devices need a difference in temperature, so in use they actually have heat sinks of their own on the cool end of them - they sit between a heat source and the heat sink, but I don't know that they'd conduct enough heat to the heat sink to be used on something like a processor. The use of thermoelectrics isn't new - much of the equipment the astronauts used on the moon were powered by RTGs, and the CIA lost some spy equipment in India that was spying on the Chinese back in '64 ( http://www.damninteresting.com/spies-on-the-roof-of-the-world/ ).

Try this one, by all definitions one of the most successful species of bird ever, numbered in the billions and driven to total extinction in less than 50 years. The kind of thing to expect when a species that find protection in numbers meet a tireless predator that kills for fun and profit.

Yes, there is a waste stream from reprocessing.

However, it is informative to look at how and when the mess that is - among others - Hanford, came to be.

Yeah, Hanford is bad but it does not hold a candle to its Soviet counterpart.

And a nice description of his story on Damn Interesting: http://www.damninteresting.com/free-fall-from-near-space/

Wow, that looks extremely similar to the red light created by the Starfish Prime thermonuclear bomb detonation in space! In that case, it was fast electrons from the nuclear explosion, spiralling along magnetic field lines and eventually colliding with oxygen atoms in the atmosphere, which emit a red glow when excited.

I'm going to guess that this is a picture of oxygen being excited by runaway electrons produced by lightning. Cool!

I wonder how efficient a ground effect vehicle would be?

http://www.damninteresting.com/ground-effect-vehicles/

A regular jumbo jet is already pretty good in terms of mpg/passenger, and ground effect is supposed to be better.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704901104575423261677748380.html

The sweet spot for fuel economy is often the basic single-aisle jet, often producing mpg better than bigger planes and superior to smaller regional jets as well. Boeing says the champ in its current line-up is the 737-900 with 180 passengers flying 1,000 miles. It gets nearly 99 mpg. The plane with the best average mpg in Airbus's current line-up is the A320 family.

At the other extreme, once the engines become viable you could imagine skimming the surface of the atmosphere in a space plane at hypersonic speeds.

It's a shame the US Government is spending billions on 19th Century technology instead of spending millions on scramjets or whatever the most promising contender is.

Actually, more like 700 years: http://www.damninteresting.com/the-phantom-time-hypothesis/

You are misunderstanding what we are discussing. The nuke test images are from the 50s, very old images. There were several insanely high speed stills of a nuke's first moments. The difference between a photograph and a video in this case is that the position of the lens is different for each still.

The Chernobyl plant did not have anything to do with weapons or politics.

- oh?

Nothing to do with weapons -

The RBMK was the culmination of the Soviet nuclear power program to produce a water-cooled power reactor based on their graphite-moderated plutonium production military reactors. .....
The refueling machine is mounted on a gantry crane and remotely controlled. The fuel assemblies can be replaced without shutting down the reactor, a factor significant for production of weapon-grade plutonium and, in a civilian context, for better reactor uptime. When a fuel assembly has to be replaced, the machine is positioned above the fuel channel, mates to it, equalizes pressure within, pulls the rod, and inserts a fresh one. The spent rod is then placed in a cooling pond. The capacity of the refueling machine with the reactor at nominal power level is two fuel assemblies per day, with peak capacity of five per day. .......
RBMK reactors were designed to allow fuel rods to be changed without shutting down (as in the pressurized heavy water CANDU reactor), both for refueling and for plutonium production (for nuclear weapons). This required large cranes above the core.

Nothing to do with politics -

In his book âoeThe Legacy of Chernobylâ, Zhores Medvedyev reveals that the turbine rundown test was to have been completed at the end of 1982, before the reactor was brought into a commercial regime. It was on a list of things, in typical Soviet fashion, that was agreed by the various ministries involved âoeto be completed laterâ notwithstanding the point that it was a requirement for the reactor to pass inspection. These kinds of oversights were typical to make sure that various projects were completed on or before deadlines, especially when there were bonuses at stake.

As to Fukushima - definitely there were some problem, I am still convinced that a privately operated reactor stands better even under these disastrous circumstances than a State operated one. It's right here, black on white.

You can't fight city hall, but sometimes you can knock it the fuck over.

seems to me that OCR would be an area that would be easy to build a framework for genetic algorithms, using a huge collection of solved OCR pages to evaluate. with each generation being tested on a random subset of pages so they do not learn to cheat instead of learn to solve.

only problem is sometimes GA make a solution that makes no sense and should not work but somehow does http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits

Occasionally we document it when we do, like the NSA back door in Lotus Notes: http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/2/2898/1.html

OTOH, sometimes we don't; like when we blew up the Soviet pipeline with software trojans: http://www.damninteresting.com/the-farewell-dossier

But regarding Windows and this anti-virus software? C'mon - you can pretty much bet that every country in which Microsoft has software developers already has their own back doors (disguised as accidental security bugs). How else can you explain that OS having so many more QA resources than comparable scale OS's (linux, bsds, unixes, etc) but having so much worse a security reputation.

Indeed, how do Americans fall for this stuff while people in other nations seem to be able to get better deals? Are we really just that dumb?

Not that much. The "will happily pay thousands of dollars because they're giving me a free phone now" is possible thanks to a logical fallacy called "hyperbolic discounting" -- the article in the link refers to lab animals, but it's proven that it works on humans, too. Simpler descriptions here and here. Of course it's being exploited and used as a marketing method since years.
And: not only Americans fall for this, and endless businesses all around the world use this trick to, well, screw us. We Europeans just like to think we are smarter than the yanks ;) but this marketing technique is so widespread we don't even notice anymore.

I think you may be remembering the work by Adrian Thompson using a 10x10 array of FPGAs. An article on this can be found here: http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits

Yeah, it's a trip to Mars - minus the lack of gravity, minus the cosmic radiation, minus the occasional pebble whizzing by at thousands of miles per hour, minus the constant knowledge that a few millimeters of metal alloy separates you from pretty much instant death at all times.

Surprisingly enough death isn't actually very quick in the vacuum of space (ref). You would maintain consciousness for about 15 seconds and be able to take actions which may save your life, and even after unconsciousness you would most likely survive without significant injury if returned to an atmospheric environment within about 90 seconds.

I'm hoping the parent was trying to be funny. Sadly, I'm not sure how this is informative though. Interestingly cars have been around since the 1800's and most of the first were in fact steam powered. Here's an interesting read about just how far steam powered cars advanced: http://www.damninteresting.com/the-last-great-steam-car

It makes you wonder what could be done with today's tech.

What do you mean "genetic-genetic"? The only thing that I can see that might be missing is a reference to "sexual reproduction" or "mating" in TFA, but I don't think that's strictly necessary for a GA. I especially liked the potential for "junk DNA" to build up. In my own simulations, chromosomes did either something or nothing consistently; perhaps it's just the domain that he's working in, but it certainly lends itself to "situational" expression of a chromosome.

It's certainly no Evolvable Hardware, but it's still a pretty neat idea.

Like this kid http://www.damninteresting.com/smoke-detectors-and-a-radioactive-boyscout

If anything like this:

http://www.damninteresting.com/body-snatching-barnacles-and-zombie-crabs

ever evolved to infect our species you'd have something pretty close to a zombie outbreak.

Imagine, people infected with something which diverts their basic instincts, millions more parasites start growing in their flesh and they protect them as an otherwise sentient free humans with all the zeal and ferocity that someone will protect their children.

You probably wouldn't want to eat too much of the locally grown crops or drink too much of the local water but people do live there and seem to do ok despite eating local food.
Slightly raised background radiation is not as bad as people think.
The heavy metals in the soil are a bit nasty though.

what surprises me is how little we hear about the other places that have been damaged by radioactive material.
The soviet weapons program was a disgrace.
Chernobyl pales in comparison to this:
http://www.damninteresting.com/in-soviet-russia-lake-contaminates-you

"Rather than the typical "background" gamma radiation of about 0.21 Röntgens per year, the edge of the Techa River was emanating 5 Röntgens per hour."

"Thirty-nine years of effluent had saturated the lake with nasty isotopes, including an estimated 120 megacuries of long-lived radiation. In contrast, the Chernobyl incident released roughly 100 megacuries of radiation into the environment, but only about 3 megacuries of Strontium-90 and Cesium-137. A delegation who visited Lake Karachay in 1990 measured the radiation at the point where the effluent entered the water, and the needles of their Geiger counters danced at about 600 Röntgens per hour-enough to provide a lethal dose in one hour. They did not linger long."

the nuclear energy industry isn't too bad.
Its the nuclear weapons industry that people should worry about.

Of course if you listen to greanpeace types everything within a 100 miles of Chernobyl is a desolate wasteland peopled with ghosts and it will remain that way for 50,000 years.

Look up "unskilled and unaware". It's an APA study that basically says that when you judge your own skills, you use your own skills as a benchmark, thus inflating your perception of what you are capable of. In other words, you don't know what you don't know.

In an interesting twist, extremely skilled persons under-rate their abilities.

Ah, here we are:
http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf

found via:
http://www.damninteresting.com/unskilled-and-unaware-of-it