When looking at that map, bear in mind that the scary red threshold, 19 microsieverts per hour, corresponds to the natural radiation level of Guarapari’s beach, a popular Brazilian tourist attraction.
And background levels in Ramsar, Iran, are even higher: 250 mSv per year, which is 28.5 microsieverts per hour. Yet studies showed that people living there had a slightly lower rate of lung cancer.
It's to draw attention to the problem, since many people seem to either be in denial about it or just hoping it goes away.
What problem? The problem of abnormally low radiation levels in nursery schools near Fukushima? Because that's what that picture is actually showing: lower than background level.
If they took the same kind of pictures in the Alps, they would probably be all red.
"A school in Starye Bobovichi, Bryansk Oblast, Russia.", oh my, look at that white trail of radioactivity going up the stairs of that school!
Then you read the explanation: the bars are just where the guy passed with the detector, and white means "background radiation". That means that there's absolutely no extra radiation at all. But that's not what it looks like when uninformed people see the picture.
Then orange and red mean a "higher radiation dose". How much higher? Twice the background level? Three times? Ten times? That's still way less than you get when living in the mountains or visiting a Brazilian beach.
If they would make the same kind of pictures in other places, they would look the same or a lot worse while no nuclear incident has ever happened anywhere near them, and local people are perfectly healthy.
The only picture that worries me, is the one of the nursery school in Soramame Fukushima City. Radiation levels there are so low there, I wonder if those children are getting enough bananas.
The Maxwell equations use "c", which is not necessarily equal to the speed of light. It is entirely possible that Maxwell's equations are correct, c is constant, but the speed of light is very slightly less than that (but close enough to have gone undetected in all experiments so far). That would mean that the speed of actual photons is not constant, although you would have to accelerate to enormous speeds to notice the difference.
Now I'm not saying that I definitely believe that this is all true, just that maybe it could be a possibility. Photons with a very tiny mass and a speed very, very close to c. There need be no contradiction if we stop calling c the speed of light.
A quick charge for your car is 20 or 30 minutes. Now imagine how long it would take a plane to charge even allowing for higher currents.
20 to 30 minutes.
Batteries can charge in parallel. You may need bigger cables, and more of them, but there's no reason why you can't charge them in the same amount of time.
The only problem for electric planes is the weight of the batteries. It will take a few enormous breakthroughs in battery technology before they're light enough to power an airliner with.
Did you even read my post? I'm not questioning the validity of GR, in fact I was arguing that there needs to be no contradiction between GR and the possibility that photons could have a tiny amount of mass and travel slightly slower than c.
The speed "c", commonly but perhaps erroneously called the "speed of light", remains the ultimate speed limit. Velocity addition remains valid, particles with mass still cannot reach c, etcetera.
I'm just saying that maybe photons travel at speeds slightly slower than c, and that would be OK.
Only a million dollars? Surely you can find some philantropist willing to pay that kind of pocket money? Maybe Musk himself, perhaps? You make it sound as if that was a lot of money for something with so much potential.
What I don't understand is what the size of the observable universe has to do with anything. As far as we know, the universe itself is unbounded. The size of the observable universe is just the distance light has been able to travel since the big bang. Why would the wavelength of Unruh radiation be bounded by that? I don't see any physical reason for that.
Maybe "the speed of light" is a misnomer, c is just a maximum speed defined by the universe, and photons travel at speeds that are extremely close to this cosmic speed limit. It would then be perfectly possible for them to have a tiny amount of mass. No laws break down (at least not in GR), you just have to replace Einstein's flashlights by hypothetical devices that transmit information slightly faster than light, with precisely the speed c.
Turns out "faster than light" is possible after all (but not faster than c).
I have a much simpler system that just uses an ordinary weight scale and Can Identify You By Your Weight With 100% Accuracy! I tested it here at home on our family of four, and it correctly identified each of us every single time!
Oh, yes, that will surely help a lot. After all, when people buy things, the first thing they look at is the part of the manual that has all the warnings and disclaimers. No responsible person will ever use anything without having thorougly read and understood those "don't put baby into microwave" warnings. They really help a lot and should be expanded even more. Hell, every item, no matter how small, should come with a 100 page booklet of warnings. Fortunately we are already well on the way towards that goal.
It doesn't always help, though. Not long ago, I noticed that I had been violating the safety instructions of our kids' favorite beach ball. It said "must only be used in shallow water". But there is no water in our garden, yet we had been playing with it for months. Of course we put it on eBay straight away, but it just goes to show you that even educated people don't always read the safety instructions.
That actually does sound plausible. Got wind of an investigation, deleted everything, made it look like an accident. "Oh, I'm such a dufus, ran rm -rf * on all my servers and backups, then used dd the wrong way around, and then the cat jumped onto the keyboard and typed cat/dev/urandom > *, and then I pulled all the drives out to try to save them but accidentally dropped them from the tenth story, right into a garbage compactor truck, and you won't believe what happened next..."
If only it would actually work for moving vehicles. Right now it looks like a decidedly static setup. Might work for bus stops, but not for highway driving.
A Tesla Supercharger charges an empty 90 kWh battery to 80% in 40 minutes. That would be 108 kW, right? And the new wireless demonstration is 20 kW, the first step into creating an unbelievable 50 kW charging system? Yawn...
O, but of course it's wireless, so it will save you a massive amount of time! Sure, it will take an hour and 26 minutes to charge that same battery to the same 80% BUT when you have to connect to a supercharger it can take up to 60 seconds to plug in and unplug! Wireless is obviously better then.
It can use the same PRGEN code that any HTTPS security suite provides to generate a strong source of random numbers.
In fact, you only need to take the product of two large randomly selected primes modulo a 2^(block cipher's bit-width)-1, then use that as the key for any NIST approved cipher in CBC counter mode to generate a incredibly random source of 1's and 0's that won't repeat before the end of the universe. Once you've keyed your block cipher, you encrypt 0, then 1, then 2, etc. and each iteration produces a block of 256 or 512 or 1024, etc. bits to use as the next part of your bitstream.
Alternatively, every so often just query the kernel for some randomness from its pool that does rely on the timing of system events, drive seeks, etc. and re-seed the cipher.
Hell, you don't even need a cipher. You could do this with any hashing function. Take SHA512, salt with one block-length of random bits from/dev/random, then just keep hashing the the previous output to generate the next block of randomness.
My point is that every device already has a source of strong randomness and a way to generate cryptographically strong pseudo randomness. That's how HTTPS gets itself started up initially.
It's so damn trivial that if you did a search for "generate strong randomness" online you'd get pointed to the source code or syscall on a myriad of platforms which provide such a service already.
Or you could take the number of tenths of a second since startup. Good luck trying to pass at exactly the right tenth of a second to not get frisked.
We have solar panels and we're producing more than we need. Bought them in anticipation of an electric car in a few years. In my street, half the houses have solar panels. That's an average street with young families, not a rich neighborhood. Even now that the subsidies have run out, people are still installing them because it takes less than 10 years to recoup the investment and they last about 20 years.
Meanwhile, given the massive interest in solar panels, new technologies are being discovered all the time yielding cleaner production methods with less toxic materials. All of that while at the same time the oil industry is investing in fracking and other extremely polluting methods.
How can you seriously say that we need to continue to burn fuel?
the power they used to charge their cars came from sources that did. All they did was move the pollution upstream. Out of sight, out of mind I guess.
In the not too distant future, people will look back at this period in time and wonder how it was possible for people to consider it perfectly normal and acceptable that thousands of individual engines were burning fuel and exhausting toxic fumes in the middle of our cities. When I walk past my daughters' school on a foggy november morning and smell the dreadful stench of car engines, I can't wait for all that pollution to be moved "upstream" to our solar panels.
Even if the energy is created in an old fashioned fossil fuel burning plant, that's still way better than doing it in the middle of a city. And the plants can use all sorts of filters and scrubbers so they're cleaner than the combination of all those individual car engines that are only relatively clean in lab conditions but go way over the limits when you push the gas pedal down. Emission limits for power plants continuously go down and are frequently monitored.
But that's assuming we keep using fossil fuel for electricity. In reality, many European countries now produce the majority of their electricity using renewable sources. Or, at the very least, with natural gas which pollutes a lot less.
And even if you forget about all that, at least make a fair comparison: don't just compare the fuel burnt to generate electricity with the fuel burnt by cars without taking into account the cost of producing that latter fuel. When you have filled up your gas tank, you have already used about the same amount of energy as what's needed for an electric car to travel the same distance, and you haven't even started burning your fuel yet. Oil has to be pumped up, refined, and transported to gas stations. Have you ever seen a refinery? It uses enormous amounts of energy and is not exactly clean. If you add that to your comparison, combustion engines don't even come close to ZEV cars anymore.
Oh, sure, it's all our fault, we haven't given them enough opportunities.
Take Salah Abdeslam, for example. He had a good job as a technician at the Brussels public transport company but got fired because he regularly didn't show up for work. We should have given him more opportunities, we deserve to get shot to bits for not helping these people more.
Yes, but you also need an adapter cable from Lightning port to 12V car battery. It does drain your iPhone battery very quickly and the phone gets really hot.
The biggest problem is that we keep running old nuclear plants well past their designed lifetime instead of building new, safer ones and shutting down the older ones. People are afraid of nukes, so they oppose new plants, and therefore we actually increase the risk by extending the old plants.
Also, people are always comparing the fuel required to generate electricity for electric cars to the amount of fuel burnt by gasoline cars, but they tend to forget about the energy required to produce the gasoline. I read an article claiming that the amount of energy required to produce fuel for a gasoline car (pumping up the oil, refining, transporting) is about the same as what an electric car needs to drive the same distance. So when you have finished filling up your gasoline car, you have already polluted more than the electric car before you even start your engine.
Granted, the article I linked to is probably not entirely accurate (it talks about "electricity" but it really ought to call it "energy" in general since much of the refining process is powered by burning a significant portion of the product) but it seems to be in the right ballpark when it comes to the amount of energy used.
Slashdot Mirror
When looking at that map, bear in mind that the scary red threshold, 19 microsieverts per hour, corresponds to the natural radiation level of Guarapari’s beach, a popular Brazilian tourist attraction.
And background levels in Ramsar, Iran, are even higher: 250 mSv per year, which is 28.5 microsieverts per hour. Yet studies showed that people living there had a slightly lower rate of lung cancer.
http://webecoist.momtastic.com...
It's to draw attention to the problem, since many people seem to either be in denial about it or just hoping it goes away.
What problem? The problem of abnormally low radiation levels in nursery schools near Fukushima? Because that's what that picture is actually showing: lower than background level.
If they took the same kind of pictures in the Alps, they would probably be all red.
The pictures are indeed quite deceiving.
"A school in Starye Bobovichi, Bryansk Oblast, Russia.", oh my, look at that white trail of radioactivity going up the stairs of that school!
Then you read the explanation: the bars are just where the guy passed with the detector, and white means "background radiation". That means that there's absolutely no extra radiation at all. But that's not what it looks like when uninformed people see the picture.
Then orange and red mean a "higher radiation dose". How much higher? Twice the background level? Three times? Ten times? That's still way less than you get when living in the mountains or visiting a Brazilian beach.
If they would make the same kind of pictures in other places, they would look the same or a lot worse while no nuclear incident has ever happened anywhere near them, and local people are perfectly healthy.
The only picture that worries me, is the one of the nursery school in Soramame Fukushima City. Radiation levels there are so low there, I wonder if those children are getting enough bananas.
The Maxwell equations use "c", which is not necessarily equal to the speed of light. It is entirely possible that Maxwell's equations are correct, c is constant, but the speed of light is very slightly less than that (but close enough to have gone undetected in all experiments so far). That would mean that the speed of actual photons is not constant, although you would have to accelerate to enormous speeds to notice the difference.
Now I'm not saying that I definitely believe that this is all true, just that maybe it could be a possibility. Photons with a very tiny mass and a speed very, very close to c. There need be no contradiction if we stop calling c the speed of light.
A quick charge for your car is 20 or 30 minutes. Now imagine how long it would take a plane to charge even allowing for higher currents.
20 to 30 minutes.
Batteries can charge in parallel. You may need bigger cables, and more of them, but there's no reason why you can't charge them in the same amount of time.
The only problem for electric planes is the weight of the batteries. It will take a few enormous breakthroughs in battery technology before they're light enough to power an airliner with.
Did you even read my post? I'm not questioning the validity of GR, in fact I was arguing that there needs to be no contradiction between GR and the possibility that photons could have a tiny amount of mass and travel slightly slower than c.
The speed "c", commonly but perhaps erroneously called the "speed of light", remains the ultimate speed limit. Velocity addition remains valid, particles with mass still cannot reach c, etcetera.
I'm just saying that maybe photons travel at speeds slightly slower than c, and that would be OK.
Only a million dollars? Surely you can find some philantropist willing to pay that kind of pocket money? Maybe Musk himself, perhaps? You make it sound as if that was a lot of money for something with so much potential.
What I don't understand is what the size of the observable universe has to do with anything. As far as we know, the universe itself is unbounded. The size of the observable universe is just the distance light has been able to travel since the big bang. Why would the wavelength of Unruh radiation be bounded by that? I don't see any physical reason for that.
Why would it be a problem?
Maybe "the speed of light" is a misnomer, c is just a maximum speed defined by the universe, and photons travel at speeds that are extremely close to this cosmic speed limit. It would then be perfectly possible for them to have a tiny amount of mass. No laws break down (at least not in GR), you just have to replace Einstein's flashlights by hypothetical devices that transmit information slightly faster than light, with precisely the speed c.
Turns out "faster than light" is possible after all (but not faster than c).
I have a much simpler system that just uses an ordinary weight scale and Can Identify You By Your Weight With 100% Accuracy! I tested it here at home on our family of four, and it correctly identified each of us every single time!
OK, his title should have been "My Kingdom for Slashdot unicode support".
Having the center of mass below the lifting part is just as interesting, ask anyone who has tried to make a rocket with the engine at the top.
Oh, that's OK then.
Human hair, yuck!
Chicken feathers, yummy!
People are weird when you think about it...
Oh, yes, that will surely help a lot. After all, when people buy things, the first thing they look at is the part of the manual that has all the warnings and disclaimers. No responsible person will ever use anything without having thorougly read and understood those "don't put baby into microwave" warnings. They really help a lot and should be expanded even more. Hell, every item, no matter how small, should come with a 100 page booklet of warnings. Fortunately we are already well on the way towards that goal.
It doesn't always help, though. Not long ago, I noticed that I had been violating the safety instructions of our kids' favorite beach ball. It said "must only be used in shallow water". But there is no water in our garden, yet we had been playing with it for months. Of course we put it on eBay straight away, but it just goes to show you that even educated people don't always read the safety instructions.
That actually does sound plausible. Got wind of an investigation, deleted everything, made it look like an accident. "Oh, I'm such a dufus, ran rm -rf * on all my servers and backups, then used dd the wrong way around, and then the cat jumped onto the keyboard and typed cat /dev/urandom > *, and then I pulled all the drives out to try to save them but accidentally dropped them from the tenth story, right into a garbage compactor truck, and you won't believe what happened next..."
If only it would actually work for moving vehicles. Right now it looks like a decidedly static setup. Might work for bus stops, but not for highway driving.
A Tesla Supercharger charges an empty 90 kWh battery to 80% in 40 minutes. That would be 108 kW, right? And the new wireless demonstration is 20 kW, the first step into creating an unbelievable 50 kW charging system? Yawn...
O, but of course it's wireless, so it will save you a massive amount of time! Sure, it will take an hour and 26 minutes to charge that same battery to the same 80% BUT when you have to connect to a supercharger it can take up to 60 seconds to plug in and unplug! Wireless is obviously better then.
The reference was P100D, so maybe the car is using two of them?
It can use the same PRGEN code that any HTTPS security suite provides to generate a strong source of random numbers.
In fact, you only need to take the product of two large randomly selected primes modulo a 2^(block cipher's bit-width)-1, then use that as the key for any NIST approved cipher in CBC counter mode to generate a incredibly random source of 1's and 0's that won't repeat before the end of the universe. Once you've keyed your block cipher, you encrypt 0, then 1, then 2, etc. and each iteration produces a block of 256 or 512 or 1024, etc. bits to use as the next part of your bitstream.
Alternatively, every so often just query the kernel for some randomness from its pool that does rely on the timing of system events, drive seeks, etc. and re-seed the cipher.
Hell, you don't even need a cipher. You could do this with any hashing function. Take SHA512, salt with one block-length of random bits from /dev/random, then just keep hashing the the previous output to generate the next block of randomness.
My point is that every device already has a source of strong randomness and a way to generate cryptographically strong pseudo randomness. That's how HTTPS gets itself started up initially.
It's so damn trivial that if you did a search for "generate strong randomness" online you'd get pointed to the source code or syscall on a myriad of platforms which provide such a service already.
Or you could take the number of tenths of a second since startup. Good luck trying to pass at exactly the right tenth of a second to not get frisked.
We have solar panels and we're producing more than we need. Bought them in anticipation of an electric car in a few years. In my street, half the houses have solar panels. That's an average street with young families, not a rich neighborhood. Even now that the subsidies have run out, people are still installing them because it takes less than 10 years to recoup the investment and they last about 20 years.
Meanwhile, given the massive interest in solar panels, new technologies are being discovered all the time yielding cleaner production methods with less toxic materials. All of that while at the same time the oil industry is investing in fracking and other extremely polluting methods.
How can you seriously say that we need to continue to burn fuel?
the power they used to charge their cars came from sources that did. All they did was move the pollution upstream. Out of sight, out of mind I guess.
In the not too distant future, people will look back at this period in time and wonder how it was possible for people to consider it perfectly normal and acceptable that thousands of individual engines were burning fuel and exhausting toxic fumes in the middle of our cities. When I walk past my daughters' school on a foggy november morning and smell the dreadful stench of car engines, I can't wait for all that pollution to be moved "upstream" to our solar panels.
Even if the energy is created in an old fashioned fossil fuel burning plant, that's still way better than doing it in the middle of a city. And the plants can use all sorts of filters and scrubbers so they're cleaner than the combination of all those individual car engines that are only relatively clean in lab conditions but go way over the limits when you push the gas pedal down. Emission limits for power plants continuously go down and are frequently monitored.
But that's assuming we keep using fossil fuel for electricity. In reality, many European countries now produce the majority of their electricity using renewable sources. Or, at the very least, with natural gas which pollutes a lot less.
And even if you forget about all that, at least make a fair comparison: don't just compare the fuel burnt to generate electricity with the fuel burnt by cars without taking into account the cost of producing that latter fuel. When you have filled up your gas tank, you have already used about the same amount of energy as what's needed for an electric car to travel the same distance, and you haven't even started burning your fuel yet. Oil has to be pumped up, refined, and transported to gas stations. Have you ever seen a refinery? It uses enormous amounts of energy and is not exactly clean. If you add that to your comparison, combustion engines don't even come close to ZEV cars anymore.
Oh, sure, it's all our fault, we haven't given them enough opportunities.
Take Salah Abdeslam, for example. He had a good job as a technician at the Brussels public transport company but got fired because he regularly didn't show up for work. We should have given him more opportunities, we deserve to get shot to bits for not helping these people more.
Yes, but you also need an adapter cable from Lightning port to 12V car battery. It does drain your iPhone battery very quickly and the phone gets really hot.
The biggest problem is that we keep running old nuclear plants well past their designed lifetime instead of building new, safer ones and shutting down the older ones. People are afraid of nukes, so they oppose new plants, and therefore we actually increase the risk by extending the old plants.
Also, people are always comparing the fuel required to generate electricity for electric cars to the amount of fuel burnt by gasoline cars, but they tend to forget about the energy required to produce the gasoline. I read an article claiming that the amount of energy required to produce fuel for a gasoline car (pumping up the oil, refining, transporting) is about the same as what an electric car needs to drive the same distance. So when you have finished filling up your gasoline car, you have already polluted more than the electric car before you even start your engine.
Granted, the article I linked to is probably not entirely accurate (it talks about "electricity" but it really ought to call it "energy" in general since much of the refining process is powered by burning a significant portion of the product) but it seems to be in the right ballpark when it comes to the amount of energy used.