You are claiming LNT as fact, when it is actually just an assumption.
No, I'm not claiming LNT; LNT makes a linear extrapolation and claims that all radiation exposure is harmful. I'm simply saying that there is no level below which you are guaranteed that radiation exposure won't cause cancer.
That depends on lots of factors, and it's hard to predict.
The point, however, is that radiation is different from other toxins. If you dilute an LD10 of strychnine a millionfold and expose a million people, nobody is going to die from it. If you dilute an LD10 of radon a millionfold and expose a million people, you're going to get several deaths due to radiation.
It's not something to lose sleep over as an individual, but it does matter for public health.
As long as the damage rate is below the repair capabilities of the cells there is no long term consequences.
So, you are saying that cancer only occurs when the amount of damage exceeds the capacity of the DNA repair mechanisms. If that were the case, most people would never get cancer from radiation because our repair mechanisms aren't usually that stressed.
Cancer usually occurs when the repair mechanisms are working but the damage itself is irreparable for some reason; for example, the damage may happen during a time of the cell cycle where repair is impossible, it may happen just as the DNA is being replicated, or the repair mechanism itself may make a mistake.
So, it's not surprising that you're drawing the wrong conclusions: your model of DNA damage and repair is wrong.
It's there when it's statistically significant otherwise you just don't know and it is as if it has no affect (so who cares?).
It makes a big difference: there really are safe levels of exposure to many toxic chemicals because, as long as the body can eliminate them, they don't affect you. Radiation is fundamentally different.
And statistical significance is a bad measure; we may never be able to actually observe, say, 21 extra deaths in a city due to some small radiation leak, but based on what we know about how radiation acts on the body and the fact that there is no threshold, we can extrapolate.
You misunderstood. You're using your phone as a modem: your phone pretends to be a serial modem and uses your data plan. I do that all the time myself.
What the GP seemed to want was to use his phone to connect to a remote analog modem without using a data plan. It's not unreasonable, but basically, it doesn't work.
A lot of those technologies have been proposed over and over again: multitouch, 3D direct manipulation, etc. For the most part, they are solutions in search of a problem.
That's only the surviving population; it doesn't tell you whether there were previous migrations that didn't survive, or small previous migrations that just completely got absorbed in the last big one.
People that are hypothesizing previous migrations (and there is some archaeological evidence) generally also assume that those populations died out, were killed, or were absorbed by the "native Americans".
No, you are wrong. Radiation does increase the risk of cancer at any dose; it follows from the way it works, which is different from most other kinds of injuries.
You won't find any scientific experiment showing that radiation increase risks of cancer at very low dose.
That's irrelevant. Of course, you can't experimentally measure the increased risk of cancer at very low doses (e.g., radiation far below background levels), and you may not care about the slight increase, but it's there. That's different from most other stimuli, which by their nature are harmless below a threshold.
What is insane: refusing to be challenged by scientific experiments or new discoveries.
One poorly done population study doesn't "challenge" anything.
If you were a Russian peasant farmer who was forced to live in marginal lands around nuclear waste dumps in the USSR, indeed, radiation wasn't very dangerous to you--something else was likely going to kill you first.
Furthermore, the kind of phrasing is rather vague: "only 800 deaths attributable"--that doesn't mean that only 800 deaths were caused by radiation, it only means that those were the deaths that they actually identified among the cases they looked at. And that's only one specific accident involving one particular kind of nuclear waste.
There is nearly nothing you can infer from this about the safety of nuclear materials in general, or at your risk of adverse effects from radiation exposure.
You see this is the problem with the anti-nuclear moment. They have become so obsessed with ending everything that contains a nucleus that they see it as acceptable to dismiss any science to the contrary as "biased"
Look, it's really not that complicated: radiation increases the risk of cancer and birth defects, at any dose. The mechanisms are understood, and there have been tens of thousands of experiments confirming that. Trying to argue that this isn't the case is simply insane. And it doesn't matter what kind of radiation it is.
Now to follow is the usual nonsense about uranium running out within 60 years, nuclear waste being impossible to deal with, and another chernobyl being just about to happen. It's all nonsense, and has been for two decades at least, yet we still burn coal rather than transmuting our nuclear waste in fast reactors ( Thank you for that one Kerry ).
It was Reagan that killed breeder reactors in the US (and effectively elsewhere). He claimed it was for proliferation concerns, but that makes no sense; more likely, he did it for economic reasons: nuclear fuel is big business for the US.
With breeder reactors, nuclear energy could possibly be an option. Without them, nuclear power is sheer lunacy.
So, complain to Reagan and the Republicans for the lack of responsible nuclear power in the US.
Come on, that was in the last millennium; nobody reads papers from the last millennium anymore, in particular not if they're from the same university. Besides, that's just a product; I mean, products aren't science, are they?</sarcasm>
I think the best way of dealing with this is to return to requiring copyright registration for some tiny, nominal amount, like $1/registration. That way, we can tell what is copyrighted and what is not.
If people are really attached to automatic copyright, one could say that the first three years are automatic, but then you really have to register explicitly or your work falls in the public domain.
Imagine how useful this sort of thing could be, in remote areas where there aren't power grids to tap into, helping emergency services in disaster recovery zones, etc, etc.
You're arguing that it's useful. Of course, it's useful. That doesn't change the fact that it is wasteful of precious nuclear fuel. In fact, being wasteful is often a simple solution to complex problems, but it's not a solution that scales.
No, you wouldn't use it to power conventional homes in convential situations but you could use it to do a whole bunch of things that would otherwise be more difficult, or perhaps even impossible, to acheive.
Yes, and it might be a good thing that those things are hard to achieve; for example, instead of trucking out nuclear power generators to people in remote areas, maybe those people should just move to where they can be hooked up to the grid more efficiently.
Look, I'm not saying US or Western European domination is great and good.
And why are you saying that? What does that have to do with what we're discussing?
My point--relevant to this discussion--is that the UN isn't "corrupt" or "anti-American", it is, if anything, quite friendly towards US interests compared to world attitudes as a whole.
What I am saying is that, especially as a US citizen, I'd rather have that than any of the other alternatives...
Well, duh! The US is using its international power primarily for its own economic and security interests. Of course, US voters like that. However, it's not prudent long-term policy ("why do they hate us?"), and it's also not ethical.
In science, the burden of proof always lies with the person making the claim
Sure. And it's fine to say that you'd like more proof for the claim "Anthropogenic global warming is occurring." But that claim isn't relevant for policy decisions about carbon emissions. At best, it's relevant for identifying nations responsible for the consequences of global warming.
The claim that's relevant about carbon emissions is "Massive carbon emissions are safe for the environment and climate.", and that claim is largely unsupported (and, in fact, there's evidence against it).
I think you misunderstood. I'm not asking whether people living under repressive regimes would like to live in a US-style democracy--of course they would. I'm asking whether people currently living under repressive regimes would vote to support current US policies if given a chance to voice their opinion; as a rule, they would not, among other things, because many people blame their political misfortunes on the US.
It doesn't do your cause any good to engage in that sort of ridiculous hyperbole, you know.
I don't have a cause; I'm simply pointing out that people like you are out of touch with reality if you think that the rest of the world likes the US or US policies because the US happens to be a democracy. Democracies often quite democratically decide to screw other nations, and the citizens of those other nations dislike them for that.
Except you can't, because the alternate statement isn't true. There is no such website; there is no such documented prediction trial of global climate metrics.
You make no sense; all data and models have been published and discussed at length. If you disagree with any of them, publish a paper.
You also seem to be starting from the wrong assumption that the burden of proof is on people claiming that global warming is happening and carbon emissions are dangerous. Quite to the contrary: given the potential risks, the burden of proof is on people arguing that continued massive carbon emissions are safe.
If the US and Western Europe aren't making the rules, somebody else is.
I didn't say that the US or Western Europe shouldn't make the rules. I'm simply pointing out that nobody in the US or Europe should live under the illusion that the rest of the world likes us a whole lot. You should realize that the UN criticism, rather than being "corrupt", is likely rather weak in comparison to what the world population as a whole actually thinks. Despite our noble self image, to most of the rest of the world, we are likely spoiled, arrogant, and imperialistic (which is not at odds either with people wanting to come to the US or Europe in droves).
not all governments derive their power by the consent of their people
Sure, but so what? Do you seriously believe that if you ask the citizens of North Korea or Iran, they are going to be any happier with US government policies than their repressive governments? In fact, we support repressive governments in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the world because we know that the citizens of those nations would be even less friendly towards us than their current repressive governments if given the chance for self-determination. We have, at times, quite democratically decided that our governments should screw other people, and they often aren't happy about that, and why shouldn't they be?
Yes, we can make the rules. I also think we could do a better job making the rules.
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, but the US doesn't have a good track record on the issue of land mines.
The UN, in fact, has tried to ban land mines. The fact that some mine types aren't included in the Ottawa treaty is a political compromise to get at least the worst kind of mines banned. But the US didn't even sign that compromise and continues to manufacture mines.
But, no, land mines aren't "torture", they are something even worse: they are designed to permanently disable and kill.
I've always viewed the U.N as a corrupt orginization and an enemy of the US. I'm sure many agree.
Actually, the UN is pretty mild in what it does, mostly because the US set it up that way. If the UN actually were a democratic organization, the US and Europe would fare far worse. That's not "corruption", it's reality.
The best thing the US can do is listen to what the UN has to say, because sooner or later those impoverished and powerless people that make up the majority of the world's population are going to be not so impoverished and powerless anymore.
Remember, people like Al Gore say, "Do this policy, because the scientific consensus in this area."
Yes, and Al Gore is correct. Saying "there is scientific consensus" doesn't mean "trust these people blindly", it means "you can check the results if you want to".
Slashdot Mirror
You are claiming LNT as fact, when it is actually just an assumption.
No, I'm not claiming LNT; LNT makes a linear extrapolation and claims that all radiation exposure is harmful. I'm simply saying that there is no level below which you are guaranteed that radiation exposure won't cause cancer.
But how much does it increase the risk?
That depends on lots of factors, and it's hard to predict.
The point, however, is that radiation is different from other toxins. If you dilute an LD10 of strychnine a millionfold and expose a million people, nobody is going to die from it. If you dilute an LD10 of radon a millionfold and expose a million people, you're going to get several deaths due to radiation.
It's not something to lose sleep over as an individual, but it does matter for public health.
As long as the damage rate is below the repair capabilities of the cells there is no long term consequences.
So, you are saying that cancer only occurs when the amount of damage exceeds the capacity of the DNA repair mechanisms. If that were the case, most people would never get cancer from radiation because our repair mechanisms aren't usually that stressed.
Cancer usually occurs when the repair mechanisms are working but the damage itself is irreparable for some reason; for example, the damage may happen during a time of the cell cycle where repair is impossible, it may happen just as the DNA is being replicated, or the repair mechanism itself may make a mistake.
So, it's not surprising that you're drawing the wrong conclusions: your model of DNA damage and repair is wrong.
It's there when it's statistically significant otherwise you just don't know and it is as if it has no affect (so who cares?).
It makes a big difference: there really are safe levels of exposure to many toxic chemicals because, as long as the body can eliminate them, they don't affect you. Radiation is fundamentally different.
And statistical significance is a bad measure; we may never be able to actually observe, say, 21 extra deaths in a city due to some small radiation leak, but based on what we know about how radiation acts on the body and the fact that there is no threshold, we can extrapolate.
You misunderstood. You're using your phone as a modem: your phone pretends to be a serial modem and uses your data plan. I do that all the time myself.
What the GP seemed to want was to use his phone to connect to a remote analog modem without using a data plan. It's not unreasonable, but basically, it doesn't work.
A lot of those technologies have been proposed over and over again: multitouch, 3D direct manipulation, etc. For the most part, they are solutions in search of a problem.
This isn't Verizon's fault; it's technically not possible to call analog modems over cellular phones, on any carrier.
That's only the surviving population; it doesn't tell you whether there were previous migrations that didn't survive, or small previous migrations that just completely got absorbed in the last big one.
People that are hypothesizing previous migrations (and there is some archaeological evidence) generally also assume that those populations died out, were killed, or were absorbed by the "native Americans".
Wrong.
No, you are wrong. Radiation does increase the risk of cancer at any dose; it follows from the way it works, which is different from most other kinds of injuries.
You won't find any scientific experiment showing that radiation increase risks of cancer at very low dose.
That's irrelevant. Of course, you can't experimentally measure the increased risk of cancer at very low doses (e.g., radiation far below background levels), and you may not care about the slight increase, but it's there. That's different from most other stimuli, which by their nature are harmless below a threshold.
What is insane: refusing to be challenged by scientific experiments or new discoveries.
One poorly done population study doesn't "challenge" anything.
If you were a Russian peasant farmer who was forced to live in marginal lands around nuclear waste dumps in the USSR, indeed, radiation wasn't very dangerous to you--something else was likely going to kill you first.
Furthermore, the kind of phrasing is rather vague: "only 800 deaths attributable"--that doesn't mean that only 800 deaths were caused by radiation, it only means that those were the deaths that they actually identified among the cases they looked at. And that's only one specific accident involving one particular kind of nuclear waste.
There is nearly nothing you can infer from this about the safety of nuclear materials in general, or at your risk of adverse effects from radiation exposure.
You see this is the problem with the anti-nuclear moment. They have become so obsessed with ending everything that contains a nucleus that they see it as acceptable to dismiss any science to the contrary as "biased"
Look, it's really not that complicated: radiation increases the risk of cancer and birth defects, at any dose. The mechanisms are understood, and there have been tens of thousands of experiments confirming that. Trying to argue that this isn't the case is simply insane. And it doesn't matter what kind of radiation it is.
Now to follow is the usual nonsense about uranium running out within 60 years, nuclear waste being impossible to deal with, and another chernobyl being just about to happen. It's all nonsense, and has been for two decades at least, yet we still burn coal rather than transmuting our nuclear waste in fast reactors ( Thank you for that one Kerry ).
It was Reagan that killed breeder reactors in the US (and effectively elsewhere). He claimed it was for proliferation concerns, but that makes no sense; more likely, he did it for economic reasons: nuclear fuel is big business for the US.
With breeder reactors, nuclear energy could possibly be an option. Without them, nuclear power is sheer lunacy.
So, complain to Reagan and the Republicans for the lack of responsible nuclear power in the US.
Come on, that was in the last millennium; nobody reads papers from the last millennium anymore, in particular not if they're from the same university. Besides, that's just a product; I mean, products aren't science, are they?</sarcasm>
I think the best way of dealing with this is to return to requiring copyright registration for some tiny, nominal amount, like $1/registration. That way, we can tell what is copyrighted and what is not.
If people are really attached to automatic copyright, one could say that the first three years are automatic, but then you really have to register explicitly or your work falls in the public domain.
The BSA is great advertising for Linux. Thank you.
My wireless card from 2004 still doesn't work properly,
Simple solution: do what you do for every other operating system--buy supported hardware.
Linux isn't even trying to support all hardware. Neither, for that matter, is Windows.
Imagine how useful this sort of thing could be, in remote areas where there aren't power grids to tap into, helping emergency services in disaster recovery zones, etc, etc.
You're arguing that it's useful. Of course, it's useful. That doesn't change the fact that it is wasteful of precious nuclear fuel. In fact, being wasteful is often a simple solution to complex problems, but it's not a solution that scales.
No, you wouldn't use it to power conventional homes in convential situations but you could use it to do a whole bunch of things that would otherwise be more difficult, or perhaps even impossible, to acheive.
Yes, and it might be a good thing that those things are hard to achieve; for example, instead of trucking out nuclear power generators to people in remote areas, maybe those people should just move to where they can be hooked up to the grid more efficiently.
This sounds like a terribly inefficient and wasteful use of nuclear fuel; there are far more efficient nuclear reactors.
Look, I'm not saying US or Western European domination is great and good.
And why are you saying that? What does that have to do with what we're discussing?
My point--relevant to this discussion--is that the UN isn't "corrupt" or "anti-American", it is, if anything, quite friendly towards US interests compared to world attitudes as a whole.
What I am saying is that, especially as a US citizen, I'd rather have that than any of the other alternatives...
Well, duh! The US is using its international power primarily for its own economic and security interests. Of course, US voters like that. However, it's not prudent long-term policy ("why do they hate us?"), and it's also not ethical.
In science, the burden of proof always lies with the person making the claim
Sure. And it's fine to say that you'd like more proof for the claim "Anthropogenic global warming is occurring." But that claim isn't relevant for policy decisions about carbon emissions. At best, it's relevant for identifying nations responsible for the consequences of global warming.
The claim that's relevant about carbon emissions is "Massive carbon emissions are safe for the environment and climate.", and that claim is largely unsupported (and, in fact, there's evidence against it).
Yeah, I'm kinda thinking so.
I think you misunderstood. I'm not asking whether people living under repressive regimes would like to live in a US-style democracy--of course they would. I'm asking whether people currently living under repressive regimes would vote to support current US policies if given a chance to voice their opinion; as a rule, they would not, among other things, because many people blame their political misfortunes on the US.
It doesn't do your cause any good to engage in that sort of ridiculous hyperbole, you know.
I don't have a cause; I'm simply pointing out that people like you are out of touch with reality if you think that the rest of the world likes the US or US policies because the US happens to be a democracy. Democracies often quite democratically decide to screw other nations, and the citizens of those other nations dislike them for that.
Except you can't, because the alternate statement isn't true. There is no such website; there is no such documented prediction trial of global climate metrics.
You make no sense; all data and models have been published and discussed at length. If you disagree with any of them, publish a paper.
You also seem to be starting from the wrong assumption that the burden of proof is on people claiming that global warming is happening and carbon emissions are dangerous. Quite to the contrary: given the potential risks, the burden of proof is on people arguing that continued massive carbon emissions are safe.
If the US and Western Europe aren't making the rules, somebody else is.
I didn't say that the US or Western Europe shouldn't make the rules. I'm simply pointing out that nobody in the US or Europe should live under the illusion that the rest of the world likes us a whole lot. You should realize that the UN criticism, rather than being "corrupt", is likely rather weak in comparison to what the world population as a whole actually thinks. Despite our noble self image, to most of the rest of the world, we are likely spoiled, arrogant, and imperialistic (which is not at odds either with people wanting to come to the US or Europe in droves).
not all governments derive their power by the consent of their people
Sure, but so what? Do you seriously believe that if you ask the citizens of North Korea or Iran, they are going to be any happier with US government policies than their repressive governments? In fact, we support repressive governments in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the world because we know that the citizens of those nations would be even less friendly towards us than their current repressive governments if given the chance for self-determination. We have, at times, quite democratically decided that our governments should screw other people, and they often aren't happy about that, and why shouldn't they be?
Yes, we can make the rules. I also think we could do a better job making the rules.
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, but the US doesn't have a good track record on the issue of land mines.
The UN, in fact, has tried to ban land mines. The fact that some mine types aren't included in the Ottawa treaty is a political compromise to get at least the worst kind of mines banned. But the US didn't even sign that compromise and continues to manufacture mines.
But, no, land mines aren't "torture", they are something even worse: they are designed to permanently disable and kill.
Since when does the U.N. need reason when bashing the U.S.?
Since when to right wing nuts need a reason to bash the UN?
I've always viewed the U.N as a corrupt orginization and an enemy of the US. I'm sure many agree.
Actually, the UN is pretty mild in what it does, mostly because the US set it up that way. If the UN actually were a democratic organization, the US and Europe would fare far worse. That's not "corruption", it's reality.
The best thing the US can do is listen to what the UN has to say, because sooner or later those impoverished and powerless people that make up the majority of the world's population are going to be not so impoverished and powerless anymore.
Remember, people like Al Gore say, "Do this policy, because the scientific consensus in this area."
Yes, and Al Gore is correct. Saying "there is scientific consensus" doesn't mean "trust these people blindly", it means "you can check the results if you want to".