Does anyone know if people in these areas have genetic differences that help them survive the higher local radiation?
Well, I'm not an expert in radiation medicine but it seems that they are indeed less susceptible to radiation. I found an article where they radiated lymphocytes from the blood of Ramsar's inhabitants and observed that "inhabitants of high background radiation areas had about 56% the average number of induced chromosomal abnormalities of normal background radiation area inhabitants following this exposure".
However, although it is possible that those people are selected by generations of exposure, it is also possible that this is similar to physical training, i.e anybody can be "radiation hardened" by chronic exposure.
Another story (warning PDF file):
"An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan.
Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 (half-life:
5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180
buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They
unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sv--a
"collective dose" of 4,000 person-Sv.
Based on the observed seven cancer deaths, the cancer
mortality rate for this population was assessed to be 3.5 per
100,000 person-years. Three children were born with congenital
heart malformations, indicating a prevalence rate of 1.5 cases per
1,000 children under age 19.
The average spontaneous cancer death rate in the general
population of Taiwan over these 20 years is 116 persons per
100,000 person-years. Based upon partial official statistics and
hospital experience, the prevalence rate of congenital
malformation is 23 cases per 1,000 children. Assuming the age and
income distributions of these persons are the same as for the
general population, it appears that significant beneficial health
effects may be associated with this chronic radiation exposure.
I agree that the theory of the beneficial effect of small doses of radiation is controversial and not proven yet. It is a subject of ongoing debate and more research is necessary. But based on the molecular repair mechanism it is not that far-fetched theory.
I didn't discuss the effects of the dose people received just after the catastrophe. There is still debate about the number of deaths that can be attributed to the accident. But even this number of deaths is not astronomical. Even though the pictures of deformed children make a good emotional journalistic story, they can be found in any hospital anywhere and they are not a proof of anything. An the UNSCEAR report linked in my post above does not show evidence of increase in deformities.
Another story is how safe is living in the zone right now. And based on the natural level of radiation around the world, it is safe. Or put in another way, there are places around the world that are much more "contaminated" by natural radiation and no journalists care. Apart from Ramsar which bears the world record in natural radiation there are large areas with elevated background radiation larger than the Chernobyl zone. And "people living in these HBRAs [high background radiation areas] do not appear to suffer any adverse health effects as a result of their high exposures to radiation".
Come on. Is anybody really surprized? Scientists for years were questioning the necessity of Chernobyl evacuations and creation of the excluded zone (some evacuations were necessary but the zone was generally too broad). The stress due to evacuations was more harmful than the radiation. In the official
UNSCEAR report, these voices were included. People can safely live there now so why not the animals? The radiation level in the "zone" is no more than 10mSv/year. Although it is above the average world natural background radiation (2.4 mSv/year), there are a lot of places where people receive larger radiation doses without ANY harmful effects including Ramsar in Iran, where the doze is 260 mSv/year, 26 times larger than in the Chernobyl zone.
It is known (although ignored in strict radiation regulations) that the same dose received in short time is much more harmful than the dose received during longer times. It is probably because the cells have repair mechanism that can cope with small damage over long time while cannot efectively repair large damage in short time. There are even indications that small doses can be beneficial by "training" the repair mechanism.
The problem evolution is having now is that in order for the primary mechanism of evolution to "work", a significant portion of the members of a population have to die. (not survive long enough to reproduce) In today's modern human socity, life is valued and society helps people to survive that without help would not have made it.
This is not true. The natural selection does not require anybody to die. Only that this particular gene has smaller probability to be passed on further generation. I'd say that even now people with genetical diseases have less children and are less likely to survive than people without those deffects and it is enough for the natural selection to work. The modern medicine can only rise the equilibrium level of the faulty genes penetration but unless they are beneficial (and they are not), they would not become dominant.
I'm reading The Corporation, a book which basically shows that a corporation when treated as a person should be considered a psychopath. It is a result that maximizing profits is the only goal of the corporation.
A lot (if not all) big corporations stresses their ethics or enviromental resposibility only as a way of improving their image and hence maximizing their profits. The only exceptions are when the corporation is purely private and the sole owners can do what they want. When the company is publically traded, the pressure of shareholders means that 'don't be evil' is OK when is giving profits but when it means loses (or less profits) then 'be evil' is the motto.
For Google 'do'nt be evil' might have been genuine before IPO (but I still doubt it). But now, it is naive to think that is anything more that I nice image.
Maybe I should not complain because the guy did a great job and his library is available free of charge but I hesitate to use this library because it is closed-source. I benchmarked it and found it fast and started to use it in my scientific codes. I once found a strange problem in a parallel code I was developing. The program crashed for one specific system I was calculating. It was something weird because it worked for many other systems I tested before. I spent a lot of time trying to find the bug in my program when finally I replaced libgoto with standard blas and the problem disapeared. I knew that the crash was when entering blas but I thought it is because I messed with the arrays that are used as parameters. If libgoto were open-source, I would be able to have a version with debugging info compiled and debug the program and the library. I would probably not fix the bug but I would likely figure out more quickly the problem is in the library and not in my code. After I had known the problem is in libgoto, I dowloaded a new version of libgoto and it worked so the bug has been fixed. There is no changelog on libgoto web page so I don't know what was the problem and how it affacted my previous caclulations.
Atlas is open-source and is a pretty good alternative. It is only a few percent slower than libgoto in most cases.
I've recently installed Linux on an iBook. No 3D acceleration, no wireless, no modem. All three drivers seem to exist (for Broadcom wireless in an ndiswrapper form) as a binary driver in the i386 world. But for PPC you are out of luck. ATI drivers and Broadcom wireless are being developed independently but they are not finished yet.
In my opinion, binary drivers are worse than no drivers at all because they release the pressure on the manufacturer. They can say they support Linux which in case of binary drivers is simply not true.
That's so true. I switched completely from Windows in 1998 when I realized after a few months of using dual boot configuration that thanks to LaTeX I don't need Windows for anything anymore. MikTex was not that bad but teTeX was better.
Without reading the article, I'm going to make some assumptions. (Like "thrashed" means 10% faster.)
Well, I RTFM and it seems the difference is definetely more than 10%. There are some benchmarks like, MPEG to WMV encode where the fasters Opteron is 100% faster than the fastest Xeon. In MP3 encode, Opteron is 50% faster.
Your examples are, well, strange. North Korea is orders of magnitute worse than South Korea while they started from similar level. Actually saying that people in North Korea are well (even compared to Bangladesh) is the worst troll ever. There are more examples: East Germany was worse than West Germany. I can also think of a few examples on top of my head of countries that were on limilar level before communism and the ex-communist country is worse: Czechoslovakia and Austra or Poland and Spain.
Spread is NOT proportionally equal to an angle. 30 degrees is 1/4 and 60 degrees is 3/4
So it is basically a square of a sine. So it is useless in measurement. You rotate something by 60 degress in two parts 30 degrees each. With spread they are not equal. Explain it to a car mechanic:)
Come on. Distance and angle are intuitive and physical. Quadrance and spead are not.
quadrance is the square of the distance
spread is the square of the sin angle
It is not only silly, it breaks common sense and physical meaning. It maybe useful for properies of a triangle but nothing more. Now if you you have two intevals on a straight line, the total distance is a sum of two distances. It is no longer true with quadrance. Imagine a ruler with quadrance! The same with spead instead of angle. Spread are no longer additive.
Considering that the US trade deficit was nearly $700 billion last year, a better question would be, does the rest of the world give away goods and services to us?
So US consumes even more and if not the trade deficit, the US CO2 production would be higher.
The US makes a lot, consumes a lot, and if the rest of the world objects, they can always stop buying and selling to us
Foreign trade is good for everyone. Stopping trading with the USA would be stupid. But my point is that the USA produces 25% of the CO2 having only 5% of the global population. It does not matter that the USA produces 25% of the global output because it is them who consume this output (and not counting the trade deficit). Imagine 20 people who share a common resource. One of them takes 1/4 of it. Don't you think the rest would think that this person is "unfair"?
Exactly what you'd expect, considering that the US makes about a quarter of the world's stuff
But also consumes roughly 25% of all the output. Does it give the goods and services away to the rest of the world? And by maintaining its lifestyle, produces 25% of CO2. It doesn't sound fair to me...
1. Paper shows a theory that predicts X. Experimentalist confirm X. 2. Paper shows a theory that predicts X. Experimentalists confirm X. Other theorists show that this theory also predicts Y which does not happen. 3. Paper shows a theory that predicts X. Other theorist confirm that this theory predicts X but experimentalists show X does not happen. 4. Paper shows a theory that is supposed to predict X but is full of mistakes and does not predict anything.
In my opinion only paper 4 is wrong. Paper with theory that is found afterwards as incorrect is still good scientifically.
I didn't read the article but I don't believe the conclusions of the summary. Maybe in epidemiology it is true but not in physics where usually the results are reproducible and I very rarely find papers that are just wrong. I might agree that most of the papers are not 100% right (small mistakes in formulas happen quite frequently) but it does not impair the usability of a paper.
However, peer review does not solve all the problems. Most of the research takes a lot of time and effort and referees just read the papers. They do not reproduce the experiments or calculations. So peer review can weed out only obviously bad papers but not papers that looks OK but are wrong.
Come on. The linked article is a joke. It's from "The Journal of Irreproducible Results". At the end, they have a reference to other "instructional articles"
PREVIOUS MONTH'S COLUMNS
1. Let's Make Test Tube Babies! May, 1979
2. Let's Make a Solar System! June, 1979
3. Let's Make an Economic Recession! July, 1979
4. Let's Make an Anti-Gravity Machine! August, 1979
5. Let's Make Contact with an Alien Race! September, 1979
I tested an Itanium2 machine against an Opteron box for scientific applications and the LINPACK score ratio (which is measured for the top500) was the absolute limit of what you could get from Itanium. Only for highly optimized code with simple repeated floating point calculations (like matrix multiplications which are the main task in LINPACK) 1.5GHz Itanium was much better (more than 70%) than Opteron 2.2GHz. Any branches in the code or integer calculations resulted in a relative slowdown of Itanium and for some of the codes it was slower than the Opteron.
For LINPACK type calculations Itanium2 is probably the best what you can get and is price competitive. For a lot of other tasks it is not.
That's because pro-sw-pat MEPs realized that they will not win and that amendments that will explicitly ban them may be intruduced. So they changed their position for keeping the status-quo. It's only a small defeat for them now.
The real majority of anti-sw-pat MEPs was very small.
You won't turn the diamond into graphite at room temperature
Thermal fluctuations can give enough activation energy but they are extremely rare at room temperature. So it's true it's a terribly slow process in room temperature but "forever" can take care of it. Diamond is thermodynamically unstable and it is enough.
Thin glass pane also conducts significantly. In colder countries double or even triple pane windows are used and it is the air (or sometimes even vacuum) that is a good insulator and it would work with diamond panes as well.
I doubt diamond will ever be as cheap as glass, though
So how on earth is a watch manufacturer or repair person going to say "alright, the cesium atom vibrated 9,192,631,769... 9,192,631,770 times. That's a second."
The original definition of second was much much more difficult to measure (1/86400 of a mean solar day). Can you imagine a watch manufacturer making astronomical observations throughout the year to get the mean solar day? Now it is quite easy. The atomic clocks use caesium atoms for getting the accurate resonance frequency. Just get the atomic clock (or a clock synchronized with an atomic clock) and you get accurate time measurement.
In a corrupt state (like Poland), you cannot register a company, build a house, get the electricity/gas connected without giving stuffed envelopes to several people. You also can choose between giving a bribe to get a place in a hospital now or to maybe get it in six months.
I must have lived so many years in a paralell universe because I have never needed to give a bribe to anybody. Corruption in Poland is bad, but come on, not that bad.
You can't really blame people for wanting to live semi-normal lives. Refusing to pay those corrupt officials is not really an option.
I think the grandparent post is right. At least a part of the problem is in the people who give bribes. Sure, I would give a bribe if my life depended on it. But usually, those who give and receive bribes benefit from that in the expense of all the rest.
While Fortran 77 is ugly and I saw terrible programs written in Fortran 77, Fortran 90 or 95 is a pretty modern and nice language and if you know C, it is easy to learn Fortran 90. It is not that much different from anything else. It is great in numerical programs (especially linear algebra) as the matrix handling is nice and fast. The only problem is that only recently free (as in speech) Fortran 90 compilers has become available and they are still in beta stage. However, for Linux, Intel Fortan Compiler is free (as in beer) and works fine. It includes also documentation of the language so you may try it.
There is already a precendent. The firmware of Canon Digital Rebel has been hacked enabling most of the features that are present in a more expensive 10D. Aparently Rebel is a crippled version of 10D and most of the functionality is already there. The hack is available here. It's a great thing for Rebel owners.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm not an expert in radiation medicine but it seems that they are indeed less susceptible to radiation. I found an article where they radiated lymphocytes from the blood of Ramsar's inhabitants and observed that "inhabitants of high background radiation areas had about 56% the average number of induced chromosomal abnormalities of normal background radiation area inhabitants following this exposure". However, although it is possible that those people are selected by generations of exposure, it is also possible that this is similar to physical training, i.e anybody can be "radiation hardened" by chronic exposure. Another story (warning PDF file):
"An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan. Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 (half-life: 5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180 buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sv--a "collective dose" of 4,000 person-Sv. Based on the observed seven cancer deaths, the cancer mortality rate for this population was assessed to be 3.5 per 100,000 person-years. Three children were born with congenital heart malformations, indicating a prevalence rate of 1.5 cases per 1,000 children under age 19. The average spontaneous cancer death rate in the general population of Taiwan over these 20 years is 116 persons per 100,000 person-years. Based upon partial official statistics and hospital experience, the prevalence rate of congenital malformation is 23 cases per 1,000 children. Assuming the age and income distributions of these persons are the same as for the general population, it appears that significant beneficial health effects may be associated with this chronic radiation exposure.
I agree that the theory of the beneficial effect of small doses of radiation is controversial and not proven yet. It is a subject of ongoing debate and more research is necessary. But based on the molecular repair mechanism it is not that far-fetched theory.
Another story is how safe is living in the zone right now. And based on the natural level of radiation around the world, it is safe. Or put in another way, there are places around the world that are much more "contaminated" by natural radiation and no journalists care. Apart from Ramsar which bears the world record in natural radiation there are large areas with elevated background radiation larger than the Chernobyl zone. And "people living in these HBRAs [high background radiation areas] do not appear to suffer any adverse health effects as a result of their high exposures to radiation".
It is known (although ignored in strict radiation regulations) that the same dose received in short time is much more harmful than the dose received during longer times. It is probably because the cells have repair mechanism that can cope with small damage over long time while cannot efectively repair large damage in short time. There are even indications that small doses can be beneficial by "training" the repair mechanism.
This is not true. The natural selection does not require anybody to die. Only that this particular gene has smaller probability to be passed on further generation. I'd say that even now people with genetical diseases have less children and are less likely to survive than people without those deffects and it is enough for the natural selection to work. The modern medicine can only rise the equilibrium level of the faulty genes penetration but unless they are beneficial (and they are not), they would not become dominant.
A lot (if not all) big corporations stresses their ethics or enviromental resposibility only as a way of improving their image and hence maximizing their profits. The only exceptions are when the corporation is purely private and the sole owners can do what they want. When the company is publically traded, the pressure of shareholders means that 'don't be evil' is OK when is giving profits but when it means loses (or less profits) then 'be evil' is the motto.
For Google 'do'nt be evil' might have been genuine before IPO (but I still doubt it). But now, it is naive to think that is anything more that I nice image.
Atlas is open-source and is a pretty good alternative. It is only a few percent slower than libgoto in most cases.
In my opinion, binary drivers are worse than no drivers at all because they release the pressure on the manufacturer. They can say they support Linux which in case of binary drivers is simply not true.
That's so true. I switched completely from Windows in 1998 when I realized after a few months of using dual boot configuration that thanks to LaTeX I don't need Windows for anything anymore. MikTex was not that bad but teTeX was better.
Well, I RTFM and it seems the difference is definetely more than 10%. There are some benchmarks like, MPEG to WMV encode where the fasters Opteron is 100% faster than the fastest Xeon. In MP3 encode, Opteron is 50% faster.
Your examples are, well, strange. North Korea is orders of magnitute worse than South Korea while they started from similar level. Actually saying that people in North Korea are well (even compared to Bangladesh) is the worst troll ever. There are more examples: East Germany was worse than West Germany. I can also think of a few examples on top of my head of countries that were on limilar level before communism and the ex-communist country is worse: Czechoslovakia and Austra or Poland and Spain.
So it is basically a square of a sine. So it is useless in measurement. You rotate something by 60 degress in two parts 30 degrees each. With spread they are not equal. Explain it to a car mechanic :)
Come on. Distance and angle are intuitive and physical. Quadrance and spead are not.
It is not only silly, it breaks common sense and physical meaning. It maybe useful for properies of a triangle but nothing more. Now if you you have two intevals on a straight line, the total distance is a sum of two distances. It is no longer true with quadrance. Imagine a ruler with quadrance! The same with spead instead of angle. Spread are no longer additive.
It makes the things that are easy now difficult.
So US consumes even more and if not the trade deficit, the US CO2 production would be higher.
The US makes a lot, consumes a lot, and if the rest of the world objects, they can always stop buying and selling to us
Foreign trade is good for everyone. Stopping trading with the USA would be stupid. But my point is that the USA produces 25% of the CO2 having only 5% of the global population. It does not matter that the USA produces 25% of the global output because it is them who consume this output (and not counting the trade deficit). Imagine 20 people who share a common resource. One of them takes 1/4 of it. Don't you think the rest would think that this person is "unfair"?
But also consumes roughly 25% of all the output. Does it give the goods and services away to the rest of the world? And by maintaining its lifestyle, produces 25% of CO2. It doesn't sound fair to me...
What is a wrong paper?
I can imagine a few situations
1. Paper shows a theory that predicts X. Experimentalist confirm X.
2. Paper shows a theory that predicts X. Experimentalists confirm X. Other theorists show that this theory also predicts Y which does not happen.
3. Paper shows a theory that predicts X. Other theorist confirm that this theory predicts X but experimentalists show X does not happen.
4. Paper shows a theory that is supposed to predict X but is full of mistakes and does not predict anything.
In my opinion only paper 4 is wrong. Paper with theory that is found afterwards as incorrect is still good scientifically.
I didn't read the article but I don't believe the conclusions of the summary. Maybe in epidemiology it is true but not in physics where usually the results are reproducible and I very rarely find papers that are just wrong. I might agree that most of the papers are not 100% right (small mistakes in formulas happen quite frequently) but it does not impair the usability of a paper.
However, peer review does not solve all the problems. Most of the research takes a lot of time and effort and referees just read the papers. They do not reproduce the experiments or calculations. So peer review can weed out only obviously bad papers but not papers that looks OK but are wrong.
PREVIOUS MONTH'S COLUMNS
1. Let's Make Test Tube Babies! May, 1979
2. Let's Make a Solar System! June, 1979
3. Let's Make an Economic Recession! July, 1979
4. Let's Make an Anti-Gravity Machine! August, 1979
5. Let's Make Contact with an Alien Race! September, 1979
For LINPACK type calculations Itanium2 is probably the best what you can get and is price competitive. For a lot of other tasks it is not.
That's because pro-sw-pat MEPs realized that they will not win and that amendments that will explicitly ban them may be intruduced. So they changed their position for keeping the status-quo. It's only a small defeat for them now.
The real majority of anti-sw-pat MEPs was very small.
Thermal fluctuations can give enough activation energy but they are extremely rare at room temperature. So it's true it's a terribly slow process in room temperature but "forever" can take care of it. Diamond is thermodynamically unstable and it is enough.
Thin glass pane also conducts significantly. In colder countries double or even triple pane windows are used and it is the air (or sometimes even vacuum) that is a good insulator and it would work with diamond panes as well.
I doubt diamond will ever be as cheap as glass, though
The original definition of second was much much more difficult to measure (1/86400 of a mean solar day). Can you imagine a watch manufacturer making astronomical observations throughout the year to get the mean solar day? Now it is quite easy. The atomic clocks use caesium atoms for getting the accurate resonance frequency. Just get the atomic clock (or a clock synchronized with an atomic clock) and you get accurate time measurement.
I must have lived so many years in a paralell universe because I have never needed to give a bribe to anybody. Corruption in Poland is bad, but come on, not that bad.
You can't really blame people for wanting to live semi-normal lives. Refusing to pay those corrupt officials is not really an option.
I think the grandparent post is right. At least a part of the problem is in the people who give bribes. Sure, I would give a bribe if my life depended on it. But usually, those who give and receive bribes benefit from that in the expense of all the rest.
While Fortran 77 is ugly and I saw terrible programs written in Fortran 77, Fortran 90 or 95 is a pretty modern and nice language and if you know C, it is easy to learn Fortran 90. It is not that much different from anything else. It is great in numerical programs (especially linear algebra) as the matrix handling is nice and fast. The only problem is that only recently free (as in speech) Fortran 90 compilers has become available and they are still in beta stage. However, for Linux, Intel Fortan Compiler is free (as in beer) and works fine. It includes also documentation of the language so you may try it.
There is already a precendent. The firmware of Canon Digital Rebel has been hacked enabling most of the features that are present in a more expensive 10D. Aparently Rebel is a crippled version of 10D and most of the functionality is already there. The hack is available here. It's a great thing for Rebel owners.