The current estimate is more like 1 in 4000, which is more like drawing 4-of-a-kind in five cards... not exactly a common poker hand.
I dunno. 1 in 4000 is not such great odds when it's an asteroid destroying the earth.
If a doctor recommended surgery, and the mortality rate was 1 in 4000, I'd make damn sure the benefits outweighed the risk. And I'd update my will.
Suppose somebody built a nuclear power plant next door to you that had a 1 in 4000 chance of going critical on any one day. That's a median of 11 years, right?
I hope that whenever a risk comes along of 1 chance in 4000 of destroying the world, people take care of it.
Notice that they say "22,700 to 69,600 deaths from heart disease each year." That's because there's a wide confidence interval. That page has a very important lesson -- none of these numbers are exact, and they all have a range. That's because it's difficult to figure out what the effects are. When I talk to these people, one of the questions I ask is, "Where did you get those numbers from?" They use good methods, but they'll be the first to acknowledge in their papers that their methods and results aren't exact.
As to the coal power deaths, Wikipedia gave 24,000 a year, and there are reasonable grounds to disagree.
I've always seen the "deaths due to..." as being difficult to really make sense of, unless they deaths are somehow gruesome, unusually painful, or immediate.
The way to look at this is to set a goal: all people in a certain area should be able to live to 90 years of age with nothing more than effects of aging. Then you start determining what are the lowest hanging fruits for obstacles to hitting that target. Is it coal plant exhaust? Fatty foods? Not enough sex? Simply genetics? Whatever it is, get a list and figure it out statistically based on what is actually happening in death statistics and diagnoses of chronic illnesses.
I read a lot of the medical literature every week. In general, it's difficult to tell whether something like fatty foods is responsible for deaths, and it's more difficult to figure out the magnitude of the effect. For the most part, all we have are associational studies, and associational studies are wrong as often as they're right. There's still no consensus on the effects of salt.
Most of those factors have very low magnitudes of effect and very wide confidence intervals. So fatty foods might turn out to be responsible for a 1% increase in mortality. Except that nobody can give you an accurate number.
Some of the coal emissions studies measure the incidence of different diseases, such as lung disease, among people who live near coal plants and people who live far away. So you might get a 10% increase in deaths among people with asthma, and a 0.1% increase in overall mortality. The confidence interval of the 10% increase would be much greater than the confidence of the 0.1% increase, and the 0.1% increase might not be statistically significant.
Your classifying Fukushima as a minor accident? It's classified as level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the highest level possible. I agree that it is not as bad as Chernobyl, but hardly minor.
I was counting the number of immediate deaths, which were zero for Fukushima and 56 for Chernobyl. I wasn't familiar with the INES. As people say, the INES isn't suited for all purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I was also trying to bend over backwards to be generous to the nuclear power industry. The Japanese really fucked up at the most important time, before the accident, but at least they had a few layers of defenses left. Chernobyl blew the roof off. If I had to choose between being the plant manager of Fukushima or the plant manager of Chernobyl, I'd pick Fukushima.
You never have 50,000 death per year in the US to coal. Perhaps 5 to 10 in the long time average due to mining accidents. I really doubt the total number of workers mining coal is close to that number. And: fix your damn mining safety issues instead of blaming it to 'coal', mining of uranium is only marginally more safe.
You can never calculate exactly how many people die from coal emissions, so I used an estimate that would be in the neighborhood. There are lots of people dying of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and bronchitis. They're going to die eventually, when their lung function goes down below a certain threshold, and coal emissions brings their lung function down a little sooner. Another vulnerable group is people with heart failure.
Here's an estimate of 24,000 lives a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... In the 1980s I used to work on the same floor as a bunch of energy industry magazines, and they had reports floating around from different organizations, which I would pick up occasionally. I remember reading some surprising number like 50,000. I don't have those reports around any more so I can't easily check. It might have been 50,000 in the 1980s, because that was around the time coal plants were installing pollution control equipment. The pollution control equipment was fairly expensive, particularly because it cut the power output by about 10%. You can make coal emissions as clean as you want, if you can spend a sufficient amount of money. There were debates during the Reagan era about things like, "How much should society spend to save the life of a 4-year-old girl with asthma?" (The economists said $220,000.)
The best-documented and highest estimates of the number of deaths from coal power that I saw came from the nuclear power industry. The worse coal looks, the better nuclear looks. They were fond of saying that coal plants had higher emissions of uranium and radium than nuclear plants did (barring catastrophe). Those guys are pretty good engineers. I hope they know what they're doing. The American Lung Association also had some similar figures.
Coal mining used to be one of the most dangerous occupations in America, but it's gotten safer because (1) open pit mining is safer (2) even underground mining can be safe if they follow safety rules with the same diligence that the nuclear or airline industry does. There are a few companies that have a, shall we say, investor-centered approach to safety, and they have most of the accidents. The Wall Street Journal used to love to run stories about mine accidents on the front page, and look up the mine owner's records of safety violations, injuries and deaths with MSHA. In the last big US mine accident, there was strong evidence that the supervisors were deliberately violating safety rules about ventilation etc. In some countries, that would be a crime and they would go to jail.
Uranium mining has some problems with the radioactive dust and gas in the air. I don't know if they can filter it out. You can filter anything, but you might not be able to breathe for more than 10 minutes with a filter that traps the very smallest particles, and you couldn't do any heavy work. But at least uranium mines don't have coal damp.
It always amazes me to hear about cost overruns and delays with new nuclear plants considering that in essence they're little more complex than coal plants, which keep popping up everywhere without any apparent issues.
So, is it just the red tape causing delays, or is it something else which make a nuclear plants so much more complex than a coal or gas plant?
One reason is that they have a lot of quality control. If you have a stuck valve inside a reactor, you can't just go to Home Depot and get a replacement.
Reactors are even more critical than aircraft. If a commercial airliner goes down, 300 people die. If a reactor blows up, you've got Chernobyl.
The tight specifications are required not only for individual components, but also for the fault trees for the system as a whole. It's hard to eliminate the possibility of some unexpected failure along a pathway in the appendices of the safety documents that was assigned an insignificant probability. Like a tsunami overwhelming the system.
The nuclear industry will tell you that the slow regulatory approval, with lots of opportunities for nuclear opponents to slow things down, are another reason.
I don't have a conclusion about nuclear power myself. OTOH, 200 tons of uranium can cause a really bad day. OTOH, we've been running a couple of hundred nuclear power plants worldwide for, what, 40 years, and we've had only one major accident and a couple of minor ones. The health effects of coal power plant emissions are so horrible (50,000 deaths a year in the U.S., more in China) that coal makes nuclear look attractive. I've been waiting for affordable solar and wind power for a long time.
I'm not sure what reference books you're thinking of. Google Books was scanning the entire collections of entire university libraries.
However, I was trying to find the song that was the source of the line, "A pint's a pound the world around, so damn all foreign measures," which was originally a British anti-metric tirade. I was pretty sure that I had seen it in a letter in Science magazine. Science is online in full text, and I subscribed, so I searched for it. I couldn't find it.
I went to the New York Public Library Performing Arts library and told the librarian what I was looking for. He led me to an entire bookshelf full of reference books of song titles. I thought the title was, "A pint's a pound the world around," so I spent a couple a few hours going through every likely book. But none of those books were online. If they were, it would have been a lot easier.
I was there at a Wikipedia event, and the librarians showed us around. They rolled out two book carts with the Rogers & Hart archives. They have files with articles about every theater in New York City, with information that is available nowhere else (and disintegrating). They would like to digitize those files and put them into a database, maybe Google Books, but they can't, because they're full of copyrighted articles, many of which are from publications that aren't even in business any more, and it would be impossible to get permission -- orphan works. I think they could be more aggressive in exercising fair use, but they want to maintain good relations with the creators who donate their archives to the library.
I compared the science collection at my local library and my local Barnes & Nobel. My library had a shelf full of science classics, like Microbe Hunters. B&N had this year's publisher's offerings. If they don't sell, they're gone. For the next Christmas sales season, they send all the slow-movng books back to the publishers and buy the new season's offerings. Microbe Hunters? Can't find it in a commercial book store.
One thing that libraries are very good for, is to just walk around aimlessly along the shelves and see what's there. You still can't do that online.
For example, I was at a library just the other day, and didn't really know what book I wanted, so I just wandered around, picking up a book here, a book there, putting back a book when I found something more interesting. Left the library with The Complete Conan Saga, and Gaimans The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Good point. Librarians know that. They know their patrons, and put together an interesting collection for them. So I used to go to the science and math section, the 500s and 600s, and find a good small collection of science and math books. I could pull out a book like The World of Mathematics. When I go to a big open-shelf university collection, the 500s might go on for ten shelves, but most of them will be specialized books, like, a 1995 conference proceedings.
Clinging to yesterday's 19th century inefficient technology with some ill-defined nostalgia for the past is probably not the best way to ensure liberty in the 20th century.
In defending brick-and-mortar libraries, were are not clinging to 19th century technology.
We know about and use the latest technology here.
Therefore, we know that the promises of visionaries and marketing people often aren't kept. Most of us have been through this many times before. Many of us have struggled to get these systems working. Most of us knew what was going to happen with the Obamacare website.
Digital technology is a great addition to the brick-and-mortar library. If you think that we can therefore dump the brick-and-mortar library and put everything on line, you haven't used libraries much and don't understand them.
As Carl Sagan said, it's nice to smoke a joint and write down a lot of visionary ideas. But then you have to wake up next morning and look over your visionary ideas and see if they make sense.
That being said, even if all libraries go DRM, there is nothing stopping you from walking into a bookstore and buying a hardback with a $20 bill.
You don't seem to know that there are lots of people who can't afford to walk into a bookstore and buy a hardback with a $20 bill. The people who read books the most are children and students.
Also, real libraries have old and out-of-print books, rare books, maps, art collections, local publications and artifacts, and plenty of things that are highly unlikely ever to be digitized, or which history -- and historians! -- demand be kept for the public good. In this information age, we need librarians more than ever. Get rid of libraries and you scrap civilization itself.
Librarians have another important value. They understand the way information is structured -- what's there and how to find it.
For example, I was researching medical topics. The New York Public Library used to have an excellent medical collection -- and an excellent staff of medical librarians, which is even more important.
One of the librarians explained to me how medical information is structured. When a doctor wants to learn about a new subject, he goes to a review tutorial article, which is designed to give an overview of the field. There are certain medical journals which are generally recognized as core journals -- the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, The Lancet, BMJ, and a few others. http://library.mssm.edu/brando... If you look at a Wikipedia medical article, those are the reliable medical sources that they cite. So if I want to learn about macular degeneration, for example, I would start by looking for a review article on macular degeneration in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The point is that the New York Public Library used to have not only books and journals sitting there, but a medical librarian who understood the field (most medical librarians have PhDs in a biomedical science), knew how information was structured, and clued me in.
(In fairness, the NYPL has a good telephone reference service, and I've used it, but it doesn't compare to having a librarian right there to explain it to me and show me how to look it up.)
But now, the New York Public Library tossed out is medical collection, and fired the medical librarians.
Mayor Bloomberg said, "OK, let's throw out all the paper and get digital subscriptions. People will even be able to use them from home. We don't need libraries." Here's the catch: A personal subscription to the New England Journal of Medicine is $100. A library subscription to the paper edition is $4-500, because journal subscriptions are based on the number of patrons who can read it. A digital subscription to the New England Journal of Medicine costs thousands of dollars. A librarian told me that they would charge her based on the number of patrons in the entire New York Public Library system, which would be tens of thousands of dollars. They charge even more to let your patrons read it from home.
I will leave it to you to consider the absurdity of New York City, one of the world's major medical centers, without a medical collection in its public library, at a time when we're supposed to become medical consumers. Let them eat Wikipedia.
Right. I used to use Science Citation Index, which can answer questions like, "What are the most heavily-cited articles in Cell?"
The New York Public Library used to get the paper edition. Now it's digital-only. The subscription model, based on university libraries, is to charge libraries based on the number of patrons. So there might be 10,000 users at Columbia University. But if the New York Public Library wanted to subscribe, they would charge them based on the entire population of New York City. It would be prohibitively expensive. So public libraries can no longer get those reference books.
You're exactly right. I've had the same experience.
One of the best libraries in New York City was the Donnell library on 53rd St. and 5th Ave. It was originally designed as a collection for elementary and high school students, but it was the best place for an adult to learn about a new subject. It was staffed by some of the best librarians in the world. A good librarian knows the field, knows how to order good books, knows where everything is in the collection, and knows how to help people.
They had 2 bookshelves of their science and math collection, 500s and 600s, which contained every classic science and math book I read in high school -- Microbe Hunters, The World of Mathematics, 1-2-3 Infinity -- they were all there. And they also had the new books that I hadn't read yet. In the big book stores, by contrast, they bought only the latest titles from this year's offerings by the publisher, and unless a title was really popular, they yanked it from the shelves in 3 months and never stocked it again. I could stand in front of those 2 bookshelves and get an education just by looking at the spines of the books.
Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg decided to sell the Donnell in a real estate deal. He decided the land was too valuable for a library. (Long story, Google "Donnell library.") I've talked to librarians. There's no library in New York City today with a collection like that. You can't stand in front of 2 bookshelves full of the classic science and math books. (There isn't even a bibliography that lists those books.) Once that book collection was dispersed, that information was gone.
Bloomberg and the library director said, Oh, we don't need paper books any more, we can get digital subscriptions. Well, surprise. Because of the way journal publishers price their digital subscriptions, the cost of a subscription to a single journal can be thousands of dollars. They charge academic libraries according to the number of users. A librarian told me that if she wanted to get a digital subscription to the New England Journal of Medicine (the most essential medical journal of all), they would charge her a price based on the entire population of New York City. There are basic publications (like Science Citation Index) that I used to use in print, that are not available any more in any public library.
That's a distinction without a difference. The people in the private sector are wasting the investors / suppliers / customers money.
The difference is that the investors / suppliers / customers have a choice when dealing with a particular private company. We have no real choice regarding paying our taxes (assuming one doesn't want to wind up in a courtroom over it).
I don't have a choice when I buy health care. It's an oligopoly. I can choose among several different insurance companies, most of whom offer the equivalent unsatisfactory product.
I'd like to buy health care with the price, quality and service of the Canadian system, but I can't. The Canadian system costs half as much, the outcomes are just as good, and the wait times are exaggerated.
True but these people in government are directly responsible for wasting the taxpayers money.
That's a distinction without a difference. The people in the private sector are wasting the investors / suppliers / customers money.
For example, when I pay my health insurance bill, I know that in the private health insurance bureaucracy consumes about 30% to 40% of my bill.
To put it another way, if there are 5 people delivering health care (doctors, nurses, office managers), there's 1 person in the insurance company generating paperwork and 1 person in the doctor's office dealing with insurance company paperwork.
I would like to see a simplification and reduction of administration in the government, but when you try to eliminate something specific, it usually turns out that it was there for a reason. For example, during the Clinton Administration, a bipartisan Congress thought it would be a good idea to cut out some of the FDA red tape, and require them to approve drugs faster. I'm reading articles in medical magazines about how the drugs that were approved faster were more likely to have safety problems and be recalled.
Sometimes government is more efficient than private industry. In Canada, health care costs about half as much (in taxes) as it costs in the U.S. (in insurance premiums). Medicare is more efficient than Medicare Advantage. The VA hospital system, despite what you may have heard about scheduling problems, actually has better outcomes than the private systems, and they're cheaper.
With the invention of agriculture, we got a secure, efficient food supply, but we also developed hierarchical societies.
With the industrial age, factories, research, and financing, our society got really complicated. We have ways of distributing power, feedback mechanisms to control that power, and parasites who exploit that system to gain more power.
It reminds me of the immune system, where we have very efficient mechanisms to destroy parasites, but we also need increasingly complicated feedback mechanisms to control those destructive mechanisms, and we're in an endless war with clever parasites who keep learning how to subvert our system.
In the air force during WWII they used to say that we need 1,000 men on the ground to keep 1 man in the air. Maybe it's like that in technological societies. We need 1,000 bureaucrats to keep 1 scientist working in the laboratory.
And it's not that different in private business. Managers move back and forth between government and private industry, so they know how to do things.
That's why a lot of corporations effectively outsource their R&D to startups, and acquire the startups if the project is successful. But then the corporation need an acquisitions bureaucracy, and the startups need a venture financing bureaucracy. Once you go beyond two guys in a garage, management gets complicated.
It's easy to manage a group of people about the size of the original hunter-gatherers. Once you get bigger than that, it's complicated to manage people.
We're still dealing with shit bush set in motion so while he is enjoying his retirement and not being tried for war crimes, bringing him up is legit.
At least ww2 actually ended with a surrender and Hitler committed suicide.
GWB wanted to be the Republican Truman. You know, create democracy in our conquered enemies.
It turned out to be harder than GWB (and his handlers) thought it would be.
The irony is that he went to Yale, which has one of the best political science departments in the country, where they teach you how governments are run, and GWB spent it getting drunk with the frat boys instead.
Then he went to Harvard Business School, where they teach you how to manage things, and he spent that getting drunk with the frat boys instead too.
There were very few professors who would flunk George H.W. Bush's son.
Sorry, but any time a statement is made about the current president being evil/lazy/bad or whatever, if you bring up Bush at this point, you lose. Yes, Bush was a terrible president, that doesn't justify it for Obama.
You would like to create a new Godwin's law for GWB? Pardon me while I ignore you. You would like to put Bush's entire career down the memory hole, wouldn't you? That would conveniently help you avoid the difficult problem of dealing with facts, like his "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.
Bush got us in to the Iraq war, the worst American policy disaster in the 21st century. We lost $3 trillion (according to Nobel laureate economist George Stiglitz), 4,000 American lives, between 150,000 and 650,000 Iraqi lives (which you don't care about), destroyed the economy, and turned the country over to an Islamic movement which is even worse than Saddam Hussein.
GWB signed off on a policy of torturing prisoners, even if they turned out to be innocent cab drivers. His interrogators literally used the same interrogation methods that the North Korean Communists used on American prisoners, according to testimony by the interrogation instructors before Congress. So GWB was actually using Communist torture. I knew Communists who turned against Stalin when they had to face the facts. They had more integrity than the Bushies.
GWB became dictator of Iraq, able to set up the military and economy any way he wanted. We saw what the world is like when we give the Republicans a free hand. The first thing they did was turn over the management to Republican party hacks, who took a well-running economy and couldn't keep the electricity running. The second thing GWB did was reach out to the thugs and murderers in each minority, arm them, and let them kill everybody else. Under Republican rule, we can have that here too.
Remind me again why we went to Iraq in the first place. After Bush's intelligence sources told him exactly where Saddam was hiding his WMDs, and Saddam let the UN inspectors inspect whatever they wanted, and the inspectors reported that they weren't there.
And of course there is GWB's stellar record of military service. When the other stupid right-wing American patriots were rushing to Vietnam to fight (and lose) last century's policy disaster, GWB was rushing in the opposite direction, using his dad's connections to land a safe berth in the Champagne brigade of National Guard (until other priorities came up and he went AWOL).
Obama is another disaster and sellout, but not of GWB's magnitude. At least Obama got through Princeton and Harvard law with his own hard work, not with his father's alumni contributions. At least Obama could speak in full sentences. At least Obama held a job in the private sector for a while, and demonstrated his competence, unlike GWB who never made a living until his dad's friends cut him into a multi-million dollar stadium deal built with taxpayer's money. Unlike GWB, Obama was not an alcoholic until the age of 40 when he found religion and an arranged marriage to a wife who could keep him out of trouble. Unlike GWB, Obama doesn't believe that God speaks to him.
The Iraq war is an impossible mess. Obama is going to come up with a bad solution, whatever he does, because GWB left us with nothing but bad solutions. Tell me again, whey did we go in?
There's a lot of legitimate uses for elements and isotopes, and I can see people not wanting to get all mixed up with government red tape. Do we have a very good reason to ban trade or ownership of THE BASIC BUILDING BLOCKS OF MATTER? I mean, I could see restrictions on the few isotopes that could be used to make nuclear weapons, but other than that it's just another hazardous material.
The main "legitimate" use of radioactive isotopes is in medical tests and cancer treatments. In the U.S. breast cancer patients with a good prognosis can avoid chemotherapy by using radiation instead, and prostate cancer patients can avoid surgery. It's also used to treat painful metastases.
The U.S./U.N. boycott of Iraq created a lot of problems in Iraq for Iraqi doctors who were trying to treat cancer patients. Iraqi doctors (most of whom were trained in the U.K. and hated Saddam Hussein) were complaining in the British Medical Journal and The Lancet that they couldn't get radioactive isotopes, because the people who were running the embargo didn't know the difference between medical isotopes and weapons isotopes. (The "humanitarian exceptions" to the boycott were a cynical farce. The Wall Street Journal once sent a reporter down to the Iraq border where the embargo inspectors were arbitrarily rejecting things like batteries in childrens' toys.)
So the doctors were writing that they had to give patients much longer exposures because of the short half lives of medical isotopes. With weak isotopes, a breast cancer patient would have to spend an entire day on an operating table, rather than half an hour or an hour as we do in the U.S. Eventually the medical isotopes wouldn't work at all.
A few of the medical journals calculated that the embargo cost about 500,000 Iraqi lives, mostly children. One of the biggest hits was that they weren't allowed to import chemicals for water purification, such as chlorine, at all. So they didn't have clean drinking water and the incidence of infant deaths caused by diarrhea soared to third-world levels, where it's a major cause of infant death. As you may recall. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that the deaths were worth it. http://fair.org/extra-online-a...
Iraq used to have the best health care system in the Arab/Persian middle east, free to Iraqis, and patients used to come from around the Arab world. The Iraq war destroyed it. George W. Bush appointed a right-to-life Republican as head of the Iraqi health care system, and his idea of de-Bathification was to privatize it and charge fees. I think Bush also fired all of the doctors who were members of the Bathist party. Bush's appointee did more harm to the Iraqi health care system than the bombs. After security broke down, the Shiites started killing the Sunni doctors and vice versa.
If there is a just God, Bush will go to Hell for destroying the Iraqi health care system. And his torment will be spending eternity with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
I dunno. I looked over the Wikipedia page for Stenotype and I didn't see anything that looked that difficult. It's a new keyboard with chorded keys, like the piano. I'd have to learn a big new vocabulary, but the abbreviations have a system. I never had any way to try it out without investing a couple of thousand dollars.
It seems as if you could create a stenotype keyboard on a tablet. I wonder if the Raven works on a tablet.
I learned Gregg shorthand without too much trouble, with probably 50 hours of applied work. Once I got to the point where it actually made my note-taking easier, it was easy from there. After I started using it, my speed and accuracy picked up.
If you get a list of the 30 or 100 most frequent words, and make unique 1- and 2-letter abbreviations for each one, you can type pretty damn fast. It get a little complicated to figure out unique abbreviations (do I use "t" for "to" or "the"?). It also gets complicated to figure out prefixes and suffixes (do I use "g" for "go" or for "ing"?).
You can even put them into auto-correct.
There was a company that wrote a small shorthand program for the qwerty keyboard. It was basically a text expansion program for a big vocabulary of common words. I forget the name.
They first sold it for $50, which was a reasonable price, and I meant to get it to try it out.
Then they raised the price to about $300, which was out of the impulse buy range.
Then they sued XyWrite with a patent claim for XyWrite's (obvious) auto-correct, so fuck them.
Is the closed-captioned news created by software, or do they still have stenographers doing it?
In my understanding, transcription software like Dragon is acceptable for many purposes if it's trained on one voice, but it can't transcribe voices that it's not trained on. And Google messages is not too accurate and takes an enormous amount of cloud processing.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a 1 in 4000 chance of destroying the entire world. The risks are low, but the damage is great.
The current estimate is more like 1 in 4000, which is more like drawing 4-of-a-kind in five cards... not exactly a common poker hand.
I dunno. 1 in 4000 is not such great odds when it's an asteroid destroying the earth.
If a doctor recommended surgery, and the mortality rate was 1 in 4000, I'd make damn sure the benefits outweighed the risk. And I'd update my will.
Suppose somebody built a nuclear power plant next door to you that had a 1 in 4000 chance of going critical on any one day. That's a median of 11 years, right?
I hope that whenever a risk comes along of 1 chance in 4000 of destroying the world, people take care of it.
Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you,
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful.
You might as well live.
The health effects of coal power plant emissions are so horrible (50,000 deaths a year in the U.S., more in China)
No, you're thinking of second-hand smoke.
Notice that they say "22,700 to 69,600 deaths from heart disease each year." That's because there's a wide confidence interval. That page has a very important lesson -- none of these numbers are exact, and they all have a range. That's because it's difficult to figure out what the effects are. When I talk to these people, one of the questions I ask is, "Where did you get those numbers from?" They use good methods, but they'll be the first to acknowledge in their papers that their methods and results aren't exact.
As to the coal power deaths, Wikipedia gave 24,000 a year, and there are reasonable grounds to disagree.
I've always seen the "deaths due to..." as being difficult to really make sense of, unless they deaths are somehow gruesome, unusually painful, or immediate.
The way to look at this is to set a goal: all people in a certain area should be able to live to 90 years of age with nothing more than effects of aging. Then you start determining what are the lowest hanging fruits for obstacles to hitting that target. Is it coal plant exhaust? Fatty foods? Not enough sex? Simply genetics? Whatever it is, get a list and figure it out statistically based on what is actually happening in death statistics and diagnoses of chronic illnesses.
I read a lot of the medical literature every week. In general, it's difficult to tell whether something like fatty foods is responsible for deaths, and it's more difficult to figure out the magnitude of the effect. For the most part, all we have are associational studies, and associational studies are wrong as often as they're right. There's still no consensus on the effects of salt.
Most of those factors have very low magnitudes of effect and very wide confidence intervals. So fatty foods might turn out to be responsible for a 1% increase in mortality. Except that nobody can give you an accurate number.
Some of the coal emissions studies measure the incidence of different diseases, such as lung disease, among people who live near coal plants and people who live far away. So you might get a 10% increase in deaths among people with asthma, and a 0.1% increase in overall mortality. The confidence interval of the 10% increase would be much greater than the confidence of the 0.1% increase, and the 0.1% increase might not be statistically significant.
Your classifying Fukushima as a minor accident? It's classified as level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the highest level possible. I agree that it is not as bad as Chernobyl, but hardly minor.
I was counting the number of immediate deaths, which were zero for Fukushima and 56 for Chernobyl. I wasn't familiar with the INES. As people say, the INES isn't suited for all purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I was also trying to bend over backwards to be generous to the nuclear power industry. The Japanese really fucked up at the most important time, before the accident, but at least they had a few layers of defenses left. Chernobyl blew the roof off. If I had to choose between being the plant manager of Fukushima or the plant manager of Chernobyl, I'd pick Fukushima.
You never have 50,000 death per year in the US to coal.
Perhaps 5 to 10 in the long time average due to mining accidents. I really doubt the total number of workers mining coal is close to that number.
And: fix your damn mining safety issues instead of blaming it to 'coal', mining of uranium is only marginally more safe.
You can never calculate exactly how many people die from coal emissions, so I used an estimate that would be in the neighborhood. There are lots of people dying of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and bronchitis. They're going to die eventually, when their lung function goes down below a certain threshold, and coal emissions brings their lung function down a little sooner. Another vulnerable group is people with heart failure.
Here's an estimate of 24,000 lives a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... In the 1980s I used to work on the same floor as a bunch of energy industry magazines, and they had reports floating around from different organizations, which I would pick up occasionally. I remember reading some surprising number like 50,000. I don't have those reports around any more so I can't easily check. It might have been 50,000 in the 1980s, because that was around the time coal plants were installing pollution control equipment. The pollution control equipment was fairly expensive, particularly because it cut the power output by about 10%. You can make coal emissions as clean as you want, if you can spend a sufficient amount of money. There were debates during the Reagan era about things like, "How much should society spend to save the life of a 4-year-old girl with asthma?" (The economists said $220,000.)
The best-documented and highest estimates of the number of deaths from coal power that I saw came from the nuclear power industry. The worse coal looks, the better nuclear looks. They were fond of saying that coal plants had higher emissions of uranium and radium than nuclear plants did (barring catastrophe). Those guys are pretty good engineers. I hope they know what they're doing. The American Lung Association also had some similar figures.
Coal mining used to be one of the most dangerous occupations in America, but it's gotten safer because (1) open pit mining is safer (2) even underground mining can be safe if they follow safety rules with the same diligence that the nuclear or airline industry does. There are a few companies that have a, shall we say, investor-centered approach to safety, and they have most of the accidents. The Wall Street Journal used to love to run stories about mine accidents on the front page, and look up the mine owner's records of safety violations, injuries and deaths with MSHA. In the last big US mine accident, there was strong evidence that the supervisors were deliberately violating safety rules about ventilation etc. In some countries, that would be a crime and they would go to jail.
Uranium mining has some problems with the radioactive dust and gas in the air. I don't know if they can filter it out. You can filter anything, but you might not be able to breathe for more than 10 minutes with a filter that traps the very smallest particles, and you couldn't do any heavy work. But at least uranium mines don't have coal damp.
It always amazes me to hear about cost overruns and delays with new nuclear plants considering that in essence they're little more complex than coal plants, which keep popping up everywhere without any apparent issues.
So, is it just the red tape causing delays, or is it something else which make a nuclear plants so much more complex than a coal or gas plant?
One reason is that they have a lot of quality control. If you have a stuck valve inside a reactor, you can't just go to Home Depot and get a replacement.
Reactors are even more critical than aircraft. If a commercial airliner goes down, 300 people die. If a reactor blows up, you've got Chernobyl.
The tight specifications are required not only for individual components, but also for the fault trees for the system as a whole. It's hard to eliminate the possibility of some unexpected failure along a pathway in the appendices of the safety documents that was assigned an insignificant probability. Like a tsunami overwhelming the system.
The nuclear industry will tell you that the slow regulatory approval, with lots of opportunities for nuclear opponents to slow things down, are another reason.
I don't have a conclusion about nuclear power myself. OTOH, 200 tons of uranium can cause a really bad day. OTOH, we've been running a couple of hundred nuclear power plants worldwide for, what, 40 years, and we've had only one major accident and a couple of minor ones. The health effects of coal power plant emissions are so horrible (50,000 deaths a year in the U.S., more in China) that coal makes nuclear look attractive. I've been waiting for affordable solar and wind power for a long time.
I'm not sure what reference books you're thinking of. Google Books was scanning the entire collections of entire university libraries.
However, I was trying to find the song that was the source of the line, "A pint's a pound the world around, so damn all foreign measures," which was originally a British anti-metric tirade. I was pretty sure that I had seen it in a letter in Science magazine. Science is online in full text, and I subscribed, so I searched for it. I couldn't find it.
I went to the New York Public Library Performing Arts library and told the librarian what I was looking for. He led me to an entire bookshelf full of reference books of song titles. I thought the title was, "A pint's a pound the world around," so I spent a couple a few hours going through every likely book. But none of those books were online. If they were, it would have been a lot easier.
I was there at a Wikipedia event, and the librarians showed us around. They rolled out two book carts with the Rogers & Hart archives. They have files with articles about every theater in New York City, with information that is available nowhere else (and disintegrating). They would like to digitize those files and put them into a database, maybe Google Books, but they can't, because they're full of copyrighted articles, many of which are from publications that aren't even in business any more, and it would be impossible to get permission -- orphan works. I think they could be more aggressive in exercising fair use, but they want to maintain good relations with the creators who donate their archives to the library.
I compared the science collection at my local library and my local Barnes & Nobel. My library had a shelf full of science classics, like Microbe Hunters. B&N had this year's publisher's offerings. If they don't sell, they're gone. For the next Christmas sales season, they send all the slow-movng books back to the publishers and buy the new season's offerings. Microbe Hunters? Can't find it in a commercial book store.
One thing that libraries are very good for, is to just walk around aimlessly along the shelves and see what's there. You still can't do that online.
For example, I was at a library just the other day, and didn't really know what book I wanted, so I just wandered around, picking up a book here, a book there, putting back a book when I found something more interesting. Left the library with The Complete Conan Saga, and Gaimans The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Good point. Librarians know that. They know their patrons, and put together an interesting collection for them. So I used to go to the science and math section, the 500s and 600s, and find a good small collection of science and math books. I could pull out a book like The World of Mathematics. When I go to a big open-shelf university collection, the 500s might go on for ten shelves, but most of them will be specialized books, like, a 1995 conference proceedings.
Small libraries can be better than big libraries.
Clinging to yesterday's 19th century inefficient technology with some ill-defined nostalgia for the past is probably not the best way to ensure liberty in the 20th century.
In defending brick-and-mortar libraries, were are not clinging to 19th century technology.
We know about and use the latest technology here.
Therefore, we know that the promises of visionaries and marketing people often aren't kept. Most of us have been through this many times before. Many of us have struggled to get these systems working. Most of us knew what was going to happen with the Obamacare website.
Digital technology is a great addition to the brick-and-mortar library. If you think that we can therefore dump the brick-and-mortar library and put everything on line, you haven't used libraries much and don't understand them.
As Carl Sagan said, it's nice to smoke a joint and write down a lot of visionary ideas. But then you have to wake up next morning and look over your visionary ideas and see if they make sense.
That being said, even if all libraries go DRM, there is nothing stopping you from walking into a bookstore and buying a hardback with a $20 bill.
You don't seem to know that there are lots of people who can't afford to walk into a bookstore and buy a hardback with a $20 bill. The people who read books the most are children and students.
Also, real libraries have old and out-of-print books, rare books, maps, art collections, local publications and artifacts, and plenty of things that are highly unlikely ever to be digitized, or which history -- and historians! -- demand be kept for the public good. In this information age, we need librarians more than ever. Get rid of libraries and you scrap civilization itself.
Librarians have another important value. They understand the way information is structured -- what's there and how to find it.
For example, I was researching medical topics. The New York Public Library used to have an excellent medical collection -- and an excellent staff of medical librarians, which is even more important.
One of the librarians explained to me how medical information is structured. When a doctor wants to learn about a new subject, he goes to a review tutorial article, which is designed to give an overview of the field. There are certain medical journals which are generally recognized as core journals -- the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, The Lancet, BMJ, and a few others. http://library.mssm.edu/brando... If you look at a Wikipedia medical article, those are the reliable medical sources that they cite. So if I want to learn about macular degeneration, for example, I would start by looking for a review article on macular degeneration in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The point is that the New York Public Library used to have not only books and journals sitting there, but a medical librarian who understood the field (most medical librarians have PhDs in a biomedical science), knew how information was structured, and clued me in.
(In fairness, the NYPL has a good telephone reference service, and I've used it, but it doesn't compare to having a librarian right there to explain it to me and show me how to look it up.)
But now, the New York Public Library tossed out is medical collection, and fired the medical librarians.
Mayor Bloomberg said, "OK, let's throw out all the paper and get digital subscriptions. People will even be able to use them from home. We don't need libraries." Here's the catch: A personal subscription to the New England Journal of Medicine is $100. A library subscription to the paper edition is $4-500, because journal subscriptions are based on the number of patrons who can read it. A digital subscription to the New England Journal of Medicine costs thousands of dollars. A librarian told me that they would charge her based on the number of patrons in the entire New York Public Library system, which would be tens of thousands of dollars. They charge even more to let your patrons read it from home.
I will leave it to you to consider the absurdity of New York City, one of the world's major medical centers, without a medical collection in its public library, at a time when we're supposed to become medical consumers. Let them eat Wikipedia.
Right. I used to use Science Citation Index, which can answer questions like, "What are the most heavily-cited articles in Cell?"
The New York Public Library used to get the paper edition. Now it's digital-only. The subscription model, based on university libraries, is to charge libraries based on the number of patrons. So there might be 10,000 users at Columbia University. But if the New York Public Library wanted to subscribe, they would charge them based on the entire population of New York City. It would be prohibitively expensive. So public libraries can no longer get those reference books.
You're exactly right. I've had the same experience.
One of the best libraries in New York City was the Donnell library on 53rd St. and 5th Ave. It was originally designed as a collection for elementary and high school students, but it was the best place for an adult to learn about a new subject. It was staffed by some of the best librarians in the world. A good librarian knows the field, knows how to order good books, knows where everything is in the collection, and knows how to help people.
They had 2 bookshelves of their science and math collection, 500s and 600s, which contained every classic science and math book I read in high school -- Microbe Hunters, The World of Mathematics, 1-2-3 Infinity -- they were all there. And they also had the new books that I hadn't read yet. In the big book stores, by contrast, they bought only the latest titles from this year's offerings by the publisher, and unless a title was really popular, they yanked it from the shelves in 3 months and never stocked it again. I could stand in front of those 2 bookshelves and get an education just by looking at the spines of the books.
Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg decided to sell the Donnell in a real estate deal. He decided the land was too valuable for a library. (Long story, Google "Donnell library.") I've talked to librarians. There's no library in New York City today with a collection like that. You can't stand in front of 2 bookshelves full of the classic science and math books. (There isn't even a bibliography that lists those books.) Once that book collection was dispersed, that information was gone.
Bloomberg and the library director said, Oh, we don't need paper books any more, we can get digital subscriptions. Well, surprise. Because of the way journal publishers price their digital subscriptions, the cost of a subscription to a single journal can be thousands of dollars. They charge academic libraries according to the number of users. A librarian told me that if she wanted to get a digital subscription to the New England Journal of Medicine (the most essential medical journal of all), they would charge her a price based on the entire population of New York City. There are basic publications (like Science Citation Index) that I used to use in print, that are not available any more in any public library.
The difference is that the investors / suppliers / customers have a choice when dealing with a particular private company. We have no real choice regarding paying our taxes (assuming one doesn't want to wind up in a courtroom over it).
I don't have a choice when I buy health care. It's an oligopoly. I can choose among several different insurance companies, most of whom offer the equivalent unsatisfactory product.
I'd like to buy health care with the price, quality and service of the Canadian system, but I can't. The Canadian system costs half as much, the outcomes are just as good, and the wait times are exaggerated.
so the issue isn't isolated to government.
True but these people in government are directly responsible for wasting the taxpayers money.
That's a distinction without a difference. The people in the private sector are wasting the investors / suppliers / customers money.
For example, when I pay my health insurance bill, I know that in the private health insurance bureaucracy consumes about 30% to 40% of my bill.
To put it another way, if there are 5 people delivering health care (doctors, nurses, office managers), there's 1 person in the insurance company generating paperwork and 1 person in the doctor's office dealing with insurance company paperwork.
I would like to see a simplification and reduction of administration in the government, but when you try to eliminate something specific, it usually turns out that it was there for a reason. For example, during the Clinton Administration, a bipartisan Congress thought it would be a good idea to cut out some of the FDA red tape, and require them to approve drugs faster. I'm reading articles in medical magazines about how the drugs that were approved faster were more likely to have safety problems and be recalled.
Sometimes government is more efficient than private industry. In Canada, health care costs about half as much (in taxes) as it costs in the U.S. (in insurance premiums). Medicare is more efficient than Medicare Advantage. The VA hospital system, despite what you may have heard about scheduling problems, actually has better outcomes than the private systems, and they're cheaper.
Humans evolved in small democratic groups.
With the invention of agriculture, we got a secure, efficient food supply, but we also developed hierarchical societies.
With the industrial age, factories, research, and financing, our society got really complicated. We have ways of distributing power, feedback mechanisms to control that power, and parasites who exploit that system to gain more power.
It reminds me of the immune system, where we have very efficient mechanisms to destroy parasites, but we also need increasingly complicated feedback mechanisms to control those destructive mechanisms, and we're in an endless war with clever parasites who keep learning how to subvert our system.
In the air force during WWII they used to say that we need 1,000 men on the ground to keep 1 man in the air. Maybe it's like that in technological societies. We need 1,000 bureaucrats to keep 1 scientist working in the laboratory.
And it's not that different in private business. Managers move back and forth between government and private industry, so they know how to do things.
That's why a lot of corporations effectively outsource their R&D to startups, and acquire the startups if the project is successful. But then the corporation need an acquisitions bureaucracy, and the startups need a venture financing bureaucracy. Once you go beyond two guys in a garage, management gets complicated.
It's easy to manage a group of people about the size of the original hunter-gatherers. Once you get bigger than that, it's complicated to manage people.
We're still dealing with shit bush set in motion so while he is enjoying his retirement and not being tried for war crimes, bringing him up is legit.
At least ww2 actually ended with a surrender and Hitler committed suicide.
GWB wanted to be the Republican Truman. You know, create democracy in our conquered enemies.
It turned out to be harder than GWB (and his handlers) thought it would be.
The irony is that he went to Yale, which has one of the best political science departments in the country, where they teach you how governments are run, and GWB spent it getting drunk with the frat boys instead.
Then he went to Harvard Business School, where they teach you how to manage things, and he spent that getting drunk with the frat boys instead too.
There were very few professors who would flunk George H.W. Bush's son.
And you lose.
Sorry, but any time a statement is made about the current president being evil/lazy/bad or whatever, if you bring up Bush at this point, you lose. Yes, Bush was a terrible president, that doesn't justify it for Obama.
You would like to create a new Godwin's law for GWB? Pardon me while I ignore you. You would like to put Bush's entire career down the memory hole, wouldn't you? That would conveniently help you avoid the difficult problem of dealing with facts, like his "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.
Bush got us in to the Iraq war, the worst American policy disaster in the 21st century. We lost $3 trillion (according to Nobel laureate economist George Stiglitz), 4,000 American lives, between 150,000 and 650,000 Iraqi lives (which you don't care about), destroyed the economy, and turned the country over to an Islamic movement which is even worse than Saddam Hussein.
GWB signed off on a policy of torturing prisoners, even if they turned out to be innocent cab drivers. His interrogators literally used the same interrogation methods that the North Korean Communists used on American prisoners, according to testimony by the interrogation instructors before Congress. So GWB was actually using Communist torture. I knew Communists who turned against Stalin when they had to face the facts. They had more integrity than the Bushies.
GWB became dictator of Iraq, able to set up the military and economy any way he wanted. We saw what the world is like when we give the Republicans a free hand. The first thing they did was turn over the management to Republican party hacks, who took a well-running economy and couldn't keep the electricity running. The second thing GWB did was reach out to the thugs and murderers in each minority, arm them, and let them kill everybody else. Under Republican rule, we can have that here too.
Remind me again why we went to Iraq in the first place. After Bush's intelligence sources told him exactly where Saddam was hiding his WMDs, and Saddam let the UN inspectors inspect whatever they wanted, and the inspectors reported that they weren't there.
And of course there is GWB's stellar record of military service. When the other stupid right-wing American patriots were rushing to Vietnam to fight (and lose) last century's policy disaster, GWB was rushing in the opposite direction, using his dad's connections to land a safe berth in the Champagne brigade of National Guard (until other priorities came up and he went AWOL).
Obama is another disaster and sellout, but not of GWB's magnitude. At least Obama got through Princeton and Harvard law with his own hard work, not with his father's alumni contributions. At least Obama could speak in full sentences. At least Obama held a job in the private sector for a while, and demonstrated his competence, unlike GWB who never made a living until his dad's friends cut him into a multi-million dollar stadium deal built with taxpayer's money. Unlike GWB, Obama was not an alcoholic until the age of 40 when he found religion and an arranged marriage to a wife who could keep him out of trouble. Unlike GWB, Obama doesn't believe that God speaks to him.
The Iraq war is an impossible mess. Obama is going to come up with a bad solution, whatever he does, because GWB left us with nothing but bad solutions. Tell me again, whey did we go in?
There's a lot of legitimate uses for elements and isotopes, and I can see people not wanting to get all mixed up with government red tape. Do we have a very good reason to ban trade or ownership of THE BASIC BUILDING BLOCKS OF MATTER? I mean, I could see restrictions on the few isotopes that could be used to make nuclear weapons, but other than that it's just another hazardous material.
The main "legitimate" use of radioactive isotopes is in medical tests and cancer treatments. In the U.S. breast cancer patients with a good prognosis can avoid chemotherapy by using radiation instead, and prostate cancer patients can avoid surgery. It's also used to treat painful metastases.
The U.S./U.N. boycott of Iraq created a lot of problems in Iraq for Iraqi doctors who were trying to treat cancer patients. Iraqi doctors (most of whom were trained in the U.K. and hated Saddam Hussein) were complaining in the British Medical Journal and The Lancet that they couldn't get radioactive isotopes, because the people who were running the embargo didn't know the difference between medical isotopes and weapons isotopes. (The "humanitarian exceptions" to the boycott were a cynical farce. The Wall Street Journal once sent a reporter down to the Iraq border where the embargo inspectors were arbitrarily rejecting things like batteries in childrens' toys.)
So the doctors were writing that they had to give patients much longer exposures because of the short half lives of medical isotopes. With weak isotopes, a breast cancer patient would have to spend an entire day on an operating table, rather than half an hour or an hour as we do in the U.S. Eventually the medical isotopes wouldn't work at all.
A few of the medical journals calculated that the embargo cost about 500,000 Iraqi lives, mostly children. One of the biggest hits was that they weren't allowed to import chemicals for water purification, such as chlorine, at all. So they didn't have clean drinking water and the incidence of infant deaths caused by diarrhea soared to third-world levels, where it's a major cause of infant death. As you may recall. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that the deaths were worth it. http://fair.org/extra-online-a...
Iraq used to have the best health care system in the Arab/Persian middle east, free to Iraqis, and patients used to come from around the Arab world. The Iraq war destroyed it. George W. Bush appointed a right-to-life Republican as head of the Iraqi health care system, and his idea of de-Bathification was to privatize it and charge fees. I think Bush also fired all of the doctors who were members of the Bathist party. Bush's appointee did more harm to the Iraqi health care system than the bombs. After security broke down, the Shiites started killing the Sunni doctors and vice versa.
If there is a just God, Bush will go to Hell for destroying the Iraqi health care system. And his torment will be spending eternity with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
I dunno. I looked over the Wikipedia page for Stenotype and I didn't see anything that looked that difficult. It's a new keyboard with chorded keys, like the piano. I'd have to learn a big new vocabulary, but the abbreviations have a system. I never had any way to try it out without investing a couple of thousand dollars.
It seems as if you could create a stenotype keyboard on a tablet. I wonder if the Raven works on a tablet.
I learned Gregg shorthand without too much trouble, with probably 50 hours of applied work. Once I got to the point where it actually made my note-taking easier, it was easy from there. After I started using it, my speed and accuracy picked up.
If you get a list of the 30 or 100 most frequent words, and make unique 1- and 2-letter abbreviations for each one, you can type pretty damn fast. It get a little complicated to figure out unique abbreviations (do I use "t" for "to" or "the"?). It also gets complicated to figure out prefixes and suffixes (do I use "g" for "go" or for "ing"?).
You can even put them into auto-correct.
There was a company that wrote a small shorthand program for the qwerty keyboard. It was basically a text expansion program for a big vocabulary of common words. I forget the name.
They first sold it for $50, which was a reasonable price, and I meant to get it to try it out.
Then they raised the price to about $300, which was out of the impulse buy range.
Then they sued XyWrite with a patent claim for XyWrite's (obvious) auto-correct, so fuck them.
Is the closed-captioned news created by software, or do they still have stenographers doing it?
In my understanding, transcription software like Dragon is acceptable for many purposes if it's trained on one voice, but it can't transcribe voices that it's not trained on. And Google messages is not too accurate and takes an enormous amount of cloud processing.
Is that still true? Or am I out of date?
many courtrooms do not allow recording or electronic devices. thus, the courtroom sketches and transcribing of proceedings in realtime.
Last time I was in federal court in New York City, (a while ago), they let people take notes on laptops.
I was wondering whether by now they've given up on trying to ban smartphones too, like the museums did (for photos).
If you're sitting there with an iPhone or laptop, it's impossible for the court officers to know whether you're secretly recording the proceedings.
I suppose lawyers could be barred from doing it, because they wouldn't risk a judge's sanction or the possibility of getting disbarred.