No, it wasn't. It was showing 800 microroentgen per hour.
One of the things that confuses people about radioation are the different measurements.
A roentgen is the amount of X or gamma radiation needed to deposit in dry air 2.58E-4 Coulombs per kilogram, or roughly 100 ergs per gram.
Rads are the absorbed dose, the amount of energy actually absorbed in a material. 1 rad is equal to 100 ergs per gram.
Rems are the equivalent dose, a relationship between the absorbed energy and actual biological damage. Take the rads, multiply by a quality factor which is based on the type of radiation under discussion, and you the get rems.
A Curie is the unit of radioactivity, one Curie being equal to 37,000,000,000 radioactive decays per second.
Flip over to SI, and you have Grays as the absorbed dose (1 Gy = 100 rads), Sieverts as the equivalent dose (1 Sv = 100 rem), and Becquerels as the radioactivty (3.7E10 Bq in one Ci).
Her meter was showing 800 microroentgen per hour. That's gammas and x-rays, by the way. Those have a quality factor of 1; they're very penetrating, but also chargeless, massless, and very small, so they have a weak interaction cross-section. 800 microroentgen per hour translates to 800 microrads per hour, which when you multiply by the quality factor of 1 is, surprise, 800 microrem per hour.
So to get "maximum allowable annual doseage" (allowable by whom, exactly?) of 5,000 millirem, she'd have to hang around the reactor for 260 days, which is about 2/3rds of a year to begin with. I don't think she's going to be doing herself serious harm.
And the alphas and the betas? Lousy mean free path through air.
'Virii' is not the plural of 'virus.' 'Virii' is not even a word.
There is 'vari' in Latin, but it's the nominative plural of 'vir,' meaning 'man.' There's also a Latin form of 'virus,' 'viri,' but it's not a nominative plural, it's a genitive singular.
For there to be plural 'virii,' there must first be a singular 'virius.' There isn't. The proper plural of 'virus' is 'viruses.'
So I doubt it really is a statistical anomanly; maybe these solar-flare pairs occur every 50 years or so & that's why we haven't seen it before.
Um. No.
Maybe there really are solar-flare pairs every 50 years or so. But a solar-flare pair, both of which *are directed towards the Earth*, would still be relatively rare. Figure out how big the sun's surface area is. Then figure out how much of that suface area is actually pointing at the Earth at any given moment.
What's most interesting to me about this story is that both the engineers and the managers were making the best decision based on their perspectives.
Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. Check this paragraph from the story:
Mr. Schomburg insisted that because smaller pieces of foam had broken off and struck shuttles on previous flights without dire consequences, the latest strike would require nothing more than a refurbishment after the Columbia landed.
That's not a good decision. That's a horrible decision, based on a profound logical fallacy, and a completely unscientific argument. "[Bad thing] happened before, and it wasn't a disaster, so [bad thing] now won't lead to a disaster."
That's pure incompetence for anyone in that position. Or anyone at all, really. W.K. Clifford wrote about it long ago in The Ethics of Belief:
A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.
What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.
Feynman wept.
Re:Why not send it back to Earth?
on
Goodbye, Galileo
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· Score: 1
I doubt it. It's very deep in a biiig gravity well right now; the "suitable trajectory" probably does not exist.
Re:Why not send it back to Earth?
on
Goodbye, Galileo
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Send it back to Earth
Um...how? That would require a truly ridiculous amount of delta-vee, and it's pretty much out of gas.
If you are sharing MP3s you are stupid and most likely will get caught and find yourself in court.
Given the immense numbers of people currently sharing MP3s, and the relatively very very small number of people who have been supoenaed, I think you're working from a definition of "most likely" that's rather different from the one the rest of us use.
Query: Kazaa currently shows 4 million users online. Let's say the free-rider problem is a severe issue, and only 25% of them are sharing mp3s. What number of the remaining 1 million users would have to be taken to court for the chances of a random user to be caught to qualify as "most likely," and is that number greater than the number of cases it would require to bring the court system to a screeching halt?
I wasn't arguing that point, I was just saying that this technology is seemingly capable of yields far smaller than neutron bombs are.
I, personally, don't see much of a point to this weapon. The more accurate your bombs can be, the smaller your bombs can be, and our bombs are already sufficiently accurate that they don't need warheads of 50 tons of TNT-equivalent, and they don't have the problem of radioactive waste products. Being able to store huge amounts of energy in an excited nuclear isomer is a very neat trick, but I think we can find better uses to put it to then bombs.
Just about every new and terrible weapon developed throughout the history of mankind was accompanied by the hopes that it would make war too terrible to wage. The Gatling gun, the machine gun, mustard gas, modern artillery, long-range bombers, the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, sea-launched ballistic missiles, ICBMs.
You notice how nuclear weapons create a biiiig blast? That's due to the large quantities of x-rays steaming out of the reaction, which are absorbed by the surrounding air within a very short distance, which is then heated to obscene temperatures in a very small timescale.
That's the source of that destructive blast. X-rays or gammas, at the energies we're talking about the mean free path through the air is damned short, and you're going to get a rather large shockwave as a result.
You could produce a small yield neutron bomb and do the same thing and be less dirty with the radioactive material.
Huh? A small-yield neutron bomb?
A neutron bomb is a fusion warhead. As such, it requires a fission warhead to set it off. A 'small yield' fission warhead is, at the very least, going to be equivalent to anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand tons of TNT, and the second stage fusion warhead, which releases the neutrons, is going to add to that. "Small-yield fusion bomb" is something of an oxymoron.
And neutron bombs are rather dirty, indeed. In addition to the fallout from the fission primary, the intense neutron flux transmutes many substances, notably metals, in the surrounding area into radioisotopes. Some of those will have rather long half-lives.
WTF is the matter with some of you? Why is this sort of program being looked at as some sort of crime against humanity?
Look, in a conventional iron bomb, roughly half the total bomb weight is the casing. For a 2000 lb bomb, only about 950 pounds of that is actual explosive, and the rest is the steel bombcase.
The fragments of that bombcase is what makes the bomb so lethal. The blast alone won't kill you beyond a relatively small distance, but the blast will throw chunks of steel resembling flying lawnmower blades for upwards of 1,000 yards. Replace the steel bombcase with some sort of frangible shell that doesn't sacrifice penetration, and you can still kill the hard targets you want to kill while at the same time minimizing needless civilian casualties.
Why, on earth, would anyone possible consider that a bad thing? Does anyone see any other military on the entire freaking planet spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars on trying to *not* kill people?
Let's consider the strategic situation of the time that saw the devlopment of the nuclear bomb: hordes of Soviet tanks that stood poised to overwhelm European armies through sheer force of numbers.
Tanks are very resistant to blast and heat damage, the principal damage mechanism of "conventional" nuclear bombs. Thus, the neutron bomb.
A modern, three-stage nuclear bomb has is really three smaller bombs. First, you've got a fission trigger, roughly the size of Fat Man, maybe 10-20 kilotons. This ignites a fusion burn that can really be as big as you want it. The fusion burn liberates massive quantities of neutrons, which are generally used to ignite the bomb's U-238 tamper.
All a neutron bomb was was a 2-stage device. You leave the tamper off, or more accurately use one of a non-fissile material, and let the neutrons coming off the fusion burn fly free to penetrate those tank hulls and kill the crews.
The bomb would, in fact, have destroyed as many structures as a traditional, tactical nuclear weapon, because the bomb was, in fact, as large as a traditional tactical nuclear weapon: 150-200 kilotons or so, 10-20 times the size of the Hiroshima blast.
Prior to 9/11, a grand total of three other nations ever recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan. After that, all three nations dropped that recognition for one reason or another.
To suggest that the Taliban were a legitimate government is to claim that the sole requisite for the legitimacy of a government is to possess a monopoly on the use of force. It's to claim that any group of thugs with Kalashnikovs and the willingness to slaughter all those who disagree with them is every bit as legitimate a government as a modern representative democracy, that Stalin was as legitimate a national leader as Roosevelt, or Kim Jong-Il as Chirac.
In other words, you're claiming that the LA Crips are a legitimate government.
Look, American beer isn't awful. Yes, Bud, Miller, Coors, and the other megabrews are flavorless, bitterless, little bottles of swill, but if you think that's all American beer has to offer you've demonstrated that you're far too ignorant to even comment on the subject.
If you love beer, I really don't think there's a better country to live in, with the exception of Belgium of course. America has an incredible variety of excellent, excellent beers, in an incredibly diverse range of styles.
You like bitter English ales? Try Hopdevil's IPA or Rogue's Brutal Bitter ESB, or Sierra Nevada's Harvest. You want clean, smooth lagers? Steigmaier's 1857, Brooklyn Brewery's Brooklyn Lager, or Cricket Hill's East Coast Lager will do you. Hefeweizen? Live Oak and Brooklyn turn out excellent ones. Hell, even Coors turns out a decent one, Blue Moon.
American breweries turn out ales, lagers, stouts smoked stouts, rye beers, porters, Scotch ales, barleywines, chocolate stouts, oatmeal stouts, altbiers, kolsch, weizens, weizenbocks, pilseners, bocks, doppelbocks, eisbeers, maibocks, rauschbier, scwarzbiers, vienna lagers, red lagers, amber lagers, ciders, perries, melomels, and even friggin' braggot. With the obvious exception of lambics, if there's a style of beer anywhere on the planet, there's a brewery in America turning out an excellent example of it.
So all of you "fucking close to water" morons can bite it. You have no idea what you're talking about, assholes.
Re:Su-30 series or Quality/Quantity
on
In-Flight Reboot?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Anyone who has ever seen the Su-27 do the cobra manouver or the thrust vectored Su-30MKI or Su-35 do the 360 degree Kulbit manouver can attest to what these planes can do in close air combat. These are extreme manouvers that western planes cannot do
Um...bullshit.
The F-15 had to perform the cobra in acceptance testing. It's covered in 4.2 of Mil Std 1787. There are other aircraft that can also perform the maneuver. The cobra is nothing more than a pitch overshoot in response to a "stick snatch." It's part of routine acceptance testing, although it's usually performed at medium to high altitudes.
Some aircraft perform it easier than others. For still other aircraft, the manuever gets easier if you set the plane up for it, as they do with Su-27s at airshows (you've got to manipulate the cg and override the FCS).
Many aircraft simply aren't cleared to perform the maneuver, and it's not covered in pilot training, even with the Su-27. The reason for this is that it's a very showy maneuver that has no use in the practical or tactical realms. That "Goose, I'm gonna hit the brakes and he'll fly right by" is bullshit Hollywood crap; in a real dogfight, the guy behind you might overshoot when you dump that much speed that fast, but all that means if that now you're meat on a stick for his wingman.
The Mig-25 was already obsolete then in terms of technology but the sheer speed of the plane (Mach 2.8+) is unmatched by any other fighter.
Note that shortly after reaching that top speed, it needs new engines.
Re:on second thought, pass the lead gloves please.
on
United Nuclear
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· Score: 1
I stand by my statement. Uranium before isotope separation is.7 pCi/g. The human body's about.6 pCi/g, counting only the C-14 isotope. Factor in the K-40, the thorium, the radium, and all the other stuff you've got merrily decaying away inside of you, and you're up over.7.
I'm gonna switch to Becquerels 'cause the numbers are easier. 25 Bq/kg for uranium, so 1750 Bq for a 70kg mass of uranium. For 70 kg of human body, you're talking about 15,000 Bq just from the C-14, and another 4400 Bq from the K-40.
Re:on second thought, pass the lead gloves please.
on
United Nuclear
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· Score: 1
Are you confusing uranium with plutonium?
Nope.
but plutonium is a quite different matter.
No, it's really not. If you take plutonium into your GI tract, only about.05% of it will be absorbed into the body. Inhalation can be much more significant, depending on the particle size. You might end up absorbing 90% of it, if they're the right (or from your point of view, wrong) size, and that can do very bad things to your lungs, as well as ending up in your skeleton, as I said before.
Breathing in 5,000 3-micron particles will increase your risk of a fatal cancer about 1% above the background. I, for one, would also do "absolutely everything possible" to avoid inhaling any plutonium oxides, but then again, I'm also not a smoker.
Re:Plenty of Radioactive items...
on
United Nuclear
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· Score: 3, Informative
And by comparison, bananas shoot off about 3500 pCi/kg from Potassium-40. Beer, about 400, and beef about 3000. Some nuts, about 7000 pCi/kg from Radium-226. A Ci is a curie, 3.7 * 1010 disintegrations per second.
So that bunch of bananas sitting on your kitchen counter is bombarding you with about 130,000 beta particles each second. Natural uranium has an activity level of 0.7 pCi/g, so a kilogram of uranium sitting on your counter would be spitting 26,000 alphas at you in that time frame. And, of course, organic matter has a natural activity of 6 pCi/g due to carbon-14, so you yourself are releasing, oh, about 15 million disintegrations per second (3.7E10 disintegrations per second per curie * 1E-9 curies per picocurie * 6 pCi per gram * 70,000 grams per average adult male).
Just for comparison's sake.
Re:on second thought, pass the lead gloves please.
on
United Nuclear
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· Score: 3, Informative
Gah.
Saying a kilogram of plutonium in a water supply could kill thousands of people is like saying the water in the oceans could kill every person on earth. Technically, it's true, if you divided it up into nice doses and deposited it specifically in the body where it could do the most harm, you'd kill a bunch of people, but that's not going to happen just by drinking the stuff.
Chemically, plutonium follows pathways similar to calcium. If you ingest it in a readily absorbable form, it can wind up in the bone marrow, and there it can do bad things. But most forms aren't readily absorbable; divide it finely enough to dissolve in water, and you're going to end up with plutonium oxide, which isn't readily absorbable and won't stay around in the body too long. There were accidents during the Manhattan Project of workers inhaling significant quantities of plutonium, and their death rates by lung cancer weren't any different from the norm. It's a very bad idea to ingest plutonium, but that's probably due more to its heavy metal toxicity than to its radiological hazards.
The water in the oceans could kill far more people than a bomb would, also, if you split it into handy 2-liter doses and crammed it into everyone's lungs.
It's not only an alpha emitter, however. Plutonium undergoes significant spontaneous fission, and depending on the fission mode can spit out betas, gammas, or neutrons depending on its whims.
Re:on second thought, pass the lead gloves please.
on
United Nuclear
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· Score: 3, Informative
Insightful?
Depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. You're more radioactive than an equivalent mass of DU, because of the carbon-14 and other trace radioisotopes in your body.
Slashdot Mirror
Do a simple google search for "roulette dealer cheat" and see for yourself. IT IS NOT an urban legend.
Your search - "roulette dealer cheat" - did not match any documents..
Her meter was showing over 800 millirem per hour
No, it wasn't. It was showing 800 microroentgen per hour.
One of the things that confuses people about radioation are the different measurements.
A roentgen is the amount of X or gamma radiation needed to deposit in dry air 2.58E-4 Coulombs per kilogram, or roughly 100 ergs per gram.
Rads are the absorbed dose, the amount of energy actually absorbed in a material. 1 rad is equal to 100 ergs per gram.
Rems are the equivalent dose, a relationship between the absorbed energy and actual biological damage. Take the rads, multiply by a quality factor which is based on the type of radiation under discussion, and you the get rems.
A Curie is the unit of radioactivity, one Curie being equal to 37,000,000,000 radioactive decays per second.
Flip over to SI, and you have Grays as the absorbed dose (1 Gy = 100 rads), Sieverts as the equivalent dose (1 Sv = 100 rem), and Becquerels as the radioactivty (3.7E10 Bq in one Ci).
Her meter was showing 800 microroentgen per hour. That's gammas and x-rays, by the way. Those have a quality factor of 1; they're very penetrating, but also chargeless, massless, and very small, so they have a weak interaction cross-section. 800 microroentgen per hour translates to 800 microrads per hour, which when you multiply by the quality factor of 1 is, surprise, 800 microrem per hour.
So to get "maximum allowable annual doseage" (allowable by whom, exactly?) of 5,000 millirem, she'd have to hang around the reactor for 260 days, which is about 2/3rds of a year to begin with. I don't think she's going to be doing herself serious harm.
And the alphas and the betas? Lousy mean free path through air.
'Virii' is not the plural of 'virus.' 'Virii' is not even a word.
There is 'vari' in Latin, but it's the nominative plural of 'vir,' meaning 'man.' There's also a Latin form of 'virus,' 'viri,' but it's not a nominative plural, it's a genitive singular.
For there to be plural 'virii,' there must first be a singular 'virius.' There isn't. The proper plural of 'virus' is 'viruses.'
So I doubt it really is a statistical anomanly; maybe these solar-flare pairs occur every 50 years or so & that's why we haven't seen it before.
Um. No.
Maybe there really are solar-flare pairs every 50 years or so. But a solar-flare pair, both of which *are directed towards the Earth*, would still be relatively rare. Figure out how big the sun's surface area is. Then figure out how much of that suface area is actually pointing at the Earth at any given moment.
Statistical anomaly.
Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. Check this paragraph from the story:
That's not a good decision. That's a horrible decision, based on a profound logical fallacy, and a completely unscientific argument. "[Bad thing] happened before, and it wasn't a disaster, so [bad thing] now won't lead to a disaster."
That's pure incompetence for anyone in that position. Or anyone at all, really. W.K. Clifford wrote about it long ago in The Ethics of Belief:
Feynman wept.
I doubt it. It's very deep in a biiig gravity well right now; the "suitable trajectory" probably does not exist.
Send it back to Earth
Um...how? That would require a truly ridiculous amount of delta-vee, and it's pretty much out of gas.
Um...sure it will. You can get every bit as much lift from helium as you can from hydrogen, just use a bigger envelope.
If you are sharing MP3s you are stupid and most likely will get caught and find yourself in court.
Given the immense numbers of people currently sharing MP3s, and the relatively very very small number of people who have been supoenaed, I think you're working from a definition of "most likely" that's rather different from the one the rest of us use.
Query: Kazaa currently shows 4 million users online. Let's say the free-rider problem is a severe issue, and only 25% of them are sharing mp3s. What number of the remaining 1 million users would have to be taken to court for the chances of a random user to be caught to qualify as "most likely," and is that number greater than the number of cases it would require to bring the court system to a screeching halt?
I wasn't arguing that point, I was just saying that this technology is seemingly capable of yields far smaller than neutron bombs are.
I, personally, don't see much of a point to this weapon. The more accurate your bombs can be, the smaller your bombs can be, and our bombs are already sufficiently accurate that they don't need warheads of 50 tons of TNT-equivalent, and they don't have the problem of radioactive waste products. Being able to store huge amounts of energy in an excited nuclear isomer is a very neat trick, but I think we can find better uses to put it to then bombs.
Just about every new and terrible weapon developed throughout the history of mankind was accompanied by the hopes that it would make war too terrible to wage. The Gatling gun, the machine gun, mustard gas, modern artillery, long-range bombers, the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, sea-launched ballistic missiles, ICBMs.
What makes you think this'll be any different?
The atmosphere is pretty much opaque to gammas.
You notice how nuclear weapons create a biiiig blast? That's due to the large quantities of x-rays steaming out of the reaction, which are absorbed by the surrounding air within a very short distance, which is then heated to obscene temperatures in a very small timescale.
That's the source of that destructive blast. X-rays or gammas, at the energies we're talking about the mean free path through the air is damned short, and you're going to get a rather large shockwave as a result.
You could produce a small yield neutron bomb and do the same thing and be less dirty with the radioactive material.
Huh? A small-yield neutron bomb?
A neutron bomb is a fusion warhead. As such, it requires a fission warhead to set it off. A 'small yield' fission warhead is, at the very least, going to be equivalent to anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand tons of TNT, and the second stage fusion warhead, which releases the neutrons, is going to add to that. "Small-yield fusion bomb" is something of an oxymoron.
And neutron bombs are rather dirty, indeed. In addition to the fallout from the fission primary, the intense neutron flux transmutes many substances, notably metals, in the surrounding area into radioisotopes. Some of those will have rather long half-lives.
WTF is the matter with some of you? Why is this sort of program being looked at as some sort of crime against humanity?
Look, in a conventional iron bomb, roughly half the total bomb weight is the casing. For a 2000 lb bomb, only about 950 pounds of that is actual explosive, and the rest is the steel bombcase.
The fragments of that bombcase is what makes the bomb so lethal. The blast alone won't kill you beyond a relatively small distance, but the blast will throw chunks of steel resembling flying lawnmower blades for upwards of 1,000 yards. Replace the steel bombcase with some sort of frangible shell that doesn't sacrifice penetration, and you can still kill the hard targets you want to kill while at the same time minimizing needless civilian casualties.
Why, on earth, would anyone possible consider that a bad thing? Does anyone see any other military on the entire freaking planet spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars on trying to *not* kill people?
Bollocks.
Let's consider the strategic situation of the time that saw the devlopment of the nuclear bomb: hordes of Soviet tanks that stood poised to overwhelm European armies through sheer force of numbers.
Tanks are very resistant to blast and heat damage, the principal damage mechanism of "conventional" nuclear bombs. Thus, the neutron bomb.
A modern, three-stage nuclear bomb has is really three smaller bombs. First, you've got a fission trigger, roughly the size of Fat Man, maybe 10-20 kilotons. This ignites a fusion burn that can really be as big as you want it. The fusion burn liberates massive quantities of neutrons, which are generally used to ignite the bomb's U-238 tamper.
All a neutron bomb was was a 2-stage device. You leave the tamper off, or more accurately use one of a non-fissile material, and let the neutrons coming off the fusion burn fly free to penetrate those tank hulls and kill the crews.
The bomb would, in fact, have destroyed as many structures as a traditional, tactical nuclear weapon, because the bomb was, in fact, as large as a traditional tactical nuclear weapon: 150-200 kilotons or so, 10-20 times the size of the Hiroshima blast.
How can my landlord claim to "own" my apartment, when I'm the one living in it?
Because you have a contract.
Show me where the contract between me and the RIAA exists, and you'd have the merest glimmering of a point.
The Taliban weren't a government.
Prior to 9/11, a grand total of three other nations ever recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan. After that, all three nations dropped that recognition for one reason or another.
To suggest that the Taliban were a legitimate government is to claim that the sole requisite for the legitimacy of a government is to possess a monopoly on the use of force. It's to claim that any group of thugs with Kalashnikovs and the willingness to slaughter all those who disagree with them is every bit as legitimate a government as a modern representative democracy, that Stalin was as legitimate a national leader as Roosevelt, or Kim Jong-Il as Chirac.
In other words, you're claiming that the LA Crips are a legitimate government.
Okay, I'm sick of this.
Look, American beer isn't awful. Yes, Bud, Miller, Coors, and the other megabrews are flavorless, bitterless, little bottles of swill, but if you think that's all American beer has to offer you've demonstrated that you're far too ignorant to even comment on the subject.
If you love beer, I really don't think there's a better country to live in, with the exception of Belgium of course. America has an incredible variety of excellent, excellent beers, in an incredibly diverse range of styles.
You like bitter English ales? Try Hopdevil's IPA or Rogue's Brutal Bitter ESB, or Sierra Nevada's Harvest. You want clean, smooth lagers? Steigmaier's 1857, Brooklyn Brewery's Brooklyn Lager, or Cricket Hill's East Coast Lager will do you. Hefeweizen? Live Oak and Brooklyn turn out excellent ones. Hell, even Coors turns out a decent one, Blue Moon.
American breweries turn out ales, lagers, stouts smoked stouts, rye beers, porters, Scotch ales, barleywines, chocolate stouts, oatmeal stouts, altbiers, kolsch, weizens, weizenbocks, pilseners, bocks, doppelbocks, eisbeers, maibocks, rauschbier, scwarzbiers, vienna lagers, red lagers, amber lagers, ciders, perries, melomels, and even friggin' braggot. With the obvious exception of lambics, if there's a style of beer anywhere on the planet, there's a brewery in America turning out an excellent example of it.
So all of you "fucking close to water" morons can bite it. You have no idea what you're talking about, assholes.
Anyone who has ever seen the Su-27 do the cobra manouver or the thrust vectored Su-30MKI or Su-35 do the 360 degree Kulbit manouver can attest to what these planes can do in close air combat. These are extreme manouvers that western planes cannot do
Um...bullshit.
The F-15 had to perform the cobra in acceptance testing. It's covered in 4.2 of Mil Std 1787. There are other aircraft that can also perform the maneuver. The cobra is nothing more than a pitch overshoot in response to a "stick snatch." It's part of routine acceptance testing, although it's usually performed at medium to high altitudes.
Some aircraft perform it easier than others. For still other aircraft, the manuever gets easier if you set the plane up for it, as they do with Su-27s at airshows (you've got to manipulate the cg and override the FCS).
Many aircraft simply aren't cleared to perform the maneuver, and it's not covered in pilot training, even with the Su-27. The reason for this is that it's a very showy maneuver that has no use in the practical or tactical realms. That "Goose, I'm gonna hit the brakes and he'll fly right by" is bullshit Hollywood crap; in a real dogfight, the guy behind you might overshoot when you dump that much speed that fast, but all that means if that now you're meat on a stick for his wingman.
The Mig-25 was already obsolete then in terms of technology but the sheer speed of the plane (Mach 2.8+) is unmatched by any other fighter.
Note that shortly after reaching that top speed, it needs new engines.
I stand by my statement. Uranium before isotope separation is .7 pCi/g. The human body's about .6 pCi/g, counting only the C-14 isotope. Factor in the K-40, the thorium, the radium, and all the other stuff you've got merrily decaying away inside of you, and you're up over .7.
I'm gonna switch to Becquerels 'cause the numbers are easier. 25 Bq/kg for uranium, so 1750 Bq for a 70kg mass of uranium. For 70 kg of human body, you're talking about 15,000 Bq just from the C-14, and another 4400 Bq from the K-40.
Source.
Are you confusing uranium with plutonium?
.05% of it will be absorbed into the body. Inhalation can be much more significant, depending on the particle size. You might end up absorbing 90% of it, if they're the right (or from your point of view, wrong) size, and that can do very bad things to your lungs, as well as ending up in your skeleton, as I said before.
Nope.
but plutonium is a quite different matter.
No, it's really not. If you take plutonium into your GI tract, only about
Breathing in 5,000 3-micron particles will increase your risk of a fatal cancer about 1% above the background. I, for one, would also do "absolutely everything possible" to avoid inhaling any plutonium oxides, but then again, I'm also not a smoker.
And by comparison, bananas shoot off about 3500 pCi/kg from Potassium-40. Beer, about 400, and beef about 3000. Some nuts, about 7000 pCi/kg from Radium-226. A Ci is a curie, 3.7 * 1010 disintegrations per second.
So that bunch of bananas sitting on your kitchen counter is bombarding you with about 130,000 beta particles each second. Natural uranium has an activity level of 0.7 pCi/g, so a kilogram of uranium sitting on your counter would be spitting 26,000 alphas at you in that time frame. And, of course, organic matter has a natural activity of 6 pCi/g due to carbon-14, so you yourself are releasing, oh, about 15 million disintegrations per second (3.7E10 disintegrations per second per curie * 1E-9 curies per picocurie * 6 pCi per gram * 70,000 grams per average adult male).
Just for comparison's sake.
Gah.
Saying a kilogram of plutonium in a water supply could kill thousands of people is like saying the water in the oceans could kill every person on earth. Technically, it's true, if you divided it up into nice doses and deposited it specifically in the body where it could do the most harm, you'd kill a bunch of people, but that's not going to happen just by drinking the stuff.
Chemically, plutonium follows pathways similar to calcium. If you ingest it in a readily absorbable form, it can wind up in the bone marrow, and there it can do bad things. But most forms aren't readily absorbable; divide it finely enough to dissolve in water, and you're going to end up with plutonium oxide, which isn't readily absorbable and won't stay around in the body too long. There were accidents during the Manhattan Project of workers inhaling significant quantities of plutonium, and their death rates by lung cancer weren't any different from the norm. It's a very bad idea to ingest plutonium, but that's probably due more to its heavy metal toxicity than to its radiological hazards.
The water in the oceans could kill far more people than a bomb would, also, if you split it into handy 2-liter doses and crammed it into everyone's lungs.
It's not only an alpha emitter, however. Plutonium undergoes significant spontaneous fission, and depending on the fission mode can spit out betas, gammas, or neutrons depending on its whims.
Insightful?
Depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. You're more radioactive than an equivalent mass of DU, because of the carbon-14 and other trace radioisotopes in your body.
Waitminit.
You say citizens who don't pay taxes shouldn't get to vote. You also say we should vote Libertarian.
But isn't the Libertarian party the one who supports tax abolition? If you guys win, who gets to vote?