I don't think the fear about Fukushima is the *current* state, but the possible future states. I would also say that there are worse outcomes than deaths. Generations of birth defects, rare cancers and cell mutations, toxic metals accumulating in a localized food chain; I tend to think of those things as being worse than death.
Worse case scenario: another series of 7+ magnitude quakes causes fissionable material to fall into some roughly hemispherical configuration, just enough to cause a critical mass to develop, destroy that hemispherical configuration but not the containment, and then fall back into that critical shape again, and oscillate like that for a while.
Possibly even worse, but much simpler: An enemy of Japan, i.e., North Korea, taking advantage of the relative lack of security around the plant or off the shore of Sendai, finishes off the containment of one or more of the reactors using light artillery. The situation that has been mildly contaminating food and water suddenly wipes out Tokyo. (The fact that this hasn't happened actually raises my impression of North Korea.)
If you have a concrete that can set in that environment, and maintain integrity versus the decay heat that under that blanket of concrete, you should be up for a Nobel Prize.
The big surprise to me is that other governments appear willing to be lied to. I'm surprised China hasn't threatened to take over the operation. I'm surprised North Korea hasn't taken the opportunity to finish off Fukushima with light artillery, which would be a better dirty bomb against Tokyo than anything they could make and deliver. I'm surprised the USA hasn't taken the diplomatic gloves off.
I had a court confiscate the book I was reading (it was Dostoevsky, The Idiot, but I actually don't think it was based on the content.) I didn't mind being chosen for jury duty, provided I would be allowed to read during the incredibly long, boring downtime you get where there is nothing to do but wait. But once they took away my book, it set me on a path of trying to get out of serving. (This was easy, they asked me what magazines I read, and without even lying I have a pretty subversive list:-)
Well you might worry about those, if you don't have anything between you and the source for the radiation to bounce off. You also might worry about ingesting trace amounts of heavy metals, regardless of whether they are radioactive. And you might not worry about that, but I dare you to raise your own child from infant to adulthood on a diet consisting solely of fish, produce and water from Northeastern Japan. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million people don't have any real choice except to be part of that experiment.
I wish I had mod points, but I'm tired of getting into arguments about it.
I would be far more concerned about the health and environmental effects of the big refinery fire that we didn't hear much about, than the Fukushima reactor so far.
I would choose a Windows laptop based on the availability of Linux drivers for every chip in the thing. Yes, this does mean that I have not bought a Windows laptop since 1997.
In the late 80s, early 90s, I used to make a little game of finding old newspaper ads for grocery stores (from the 60s) and then finding things at the same prices or lower. It was easier to do this than you might think.
In some ways this is good, because we end up spending less total time watching television. I enjoy the rare times when a commercial is actually more entertaining than the program. On the other hand, I don't think I ever buy anything as a result of being exposed to it by TV or radio advertising. I have attended events that I only became aware of through advertising, but that's a different thing. It scares me that there are people out there who can be persuaded to buy a product, or even to choose one brand over another, by a television ad.
You wouldn't need a whole lot of signals. It could very easily be as simple as "yes or no" signals. At this level of play you are far beyond "wondering which piece to move where." Problems are much more likely to present themselves in terms of "does this line lead to some tactical trouble that I don't see?" Chess has some pretty weird aspects that stem from its simplicity.
>Let me start by saying, flat out, that I'm not trying to troll or start a war here, but what exactly would you have them cut?
To start with, for the duration of the war, no contract for the military would be payable in cash. Beyond operating expenses, profit would be paid strictly in the form of War Bonds which would be redeemable at a good rate of return but only *after* the war. These million dollar bombs you hear about would be much closer to the actual cost of raw materials and the actual cost of labor, paid at a subsistence level (there is a war on, after all), and if it *still* "costs a million dollars each", there is a REAL problem with that which is putting the country at a military disadvantage to begin with!
Anyway that's exactly where I would start. More on topic, there would be a whole lot of other things as a result of being at war, such as very strict rationing of fuel, non-commodity foods, and raw materials for civilian enterprise.
The availability of sea water has certainly been a major mitigating factor in this incident. How would you cool down Palo Verde? Import sea water from the Sea of Cortez?
Or an enemy of Japan could take advantage of the fact that there is no military defense of that part of Japan's coast and finish off one of the reactors with light artillery... No need for a meteorite.
The "absolute worst case scenario" would include stuff like another series of 7+ quakes at the site, or a military and/or terrorist attack against the site, or a sequence of monumental human error events, or even worse cases that I'm not able to consider.
Oh you're not being imaginative enough in your worst-case scenarios.
The material could just happen to melt into a very precise spherical configuration.
Or an enemy of Japan could use this opportunity to really mess up Tokyo with a light artillery attack on what's left of reactor #3 (I was actually surprised this didn't happen.)
All the money in the world won't magically become a liter of water, four forkfuls of rice, a tarp, some twine and a blanket. If you have a ship that can cross the Pacific, then by all means load it up with necessities, take it to Japan, and distribute these things. But don't complain about the people who are actually *doing something* that they are *taking too long*.
If you are over there and working in a relief effort, what specifically do you need, and what resources do you have to get it there?
Yeah that was a lot of fun, knowing that people were selling the stock of chips *they already had* at outrageously high prices. I understand about replacement cost and all that, but it really was *nuts* for a while, and that time happened to coincide with a local maximum for my own individual need for memory chips. I basically learned how to do more with less RAM and infrequent upgrades. When the bottom fell out of the chip market it kind of caught me by surprise... I needed, I guess, 128M simms or something, and the first place I checked had them for maybe 1/4 the price I was expecting. A bit of a revolution started that for me, marks the transition between the time that mostly nerds had computers to where *everybody and their dog* had one.
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I don't think the fear about Fukushima is the *current* state, but the possible future states. I would also say that there are worse outcomes than deaths. Generations of birth defects, rare cancers and cell mutations, toxic metals accumulating in a localized food chain; I tend to think of those things as being worse than death.
Worse case scenario: another series of 7+ magnitude quakes causes fissionable material to fall into some roughly hemispherical configuration, just enough to cause a critical mass to develop, destroy that hemispherical configuration but not the containment, and then fall back into that critical shape again, and oscillate like that for a while.
Possibly even worse, but much simpler: An enemy of Japan, i.e., North Korea, taking advantage of the relative lack of security around the plant or off the shore of Sendai, finishes off the containment of one or more of the reactors using light artillery. The situation that has been mildly contaminating food and water suddenly wipes out Tokyo. (The fact that this hasn't happened actually raises my impression of North Korea.)
If you have a concrete that can set in that environment, and maintain integrity versus the decay heat that under that blanket of concrete, you should be up for a Nobel Prize.
The big surprise to me is that other governments appear willing to be lied to. I'm surprised China hasn't threatened to take over the operation. I'm surprised North Korea hasn't taken the opportunity to finish off Fukushima with light artillery, which would be a better dirty bomb against Tokyo than anything they could make and deliver. I'm surprised the USA hasn't taken the diplomatic gloves off.
Ok, if you have a material science background, can you describe the concrete that would work in this application and how it would be applied?
I had a court confiscate the book I was reading (it was Dostoevsky, The Idiot, but I actually don't think it was based on the content.) :-)
I didn't mind being chosen for jury duty, provided I would be allowed to read during the incredibly long, boring downtime you get where there is nothing to do but wait. But once they took away my book, it set me on a path of trying to get out of serving. (This was easy, they asked me what magazines I read, and without even lying I have a pretty subversive list
Well you might worry about those, if you don't have anything between you and the source for the radiation to bounce off. You also might worry about ingesting trace amounts of heavy metals, regardless of whether they are radioactive. And you might not worry about that, but I dare you to raise your own child from infant to adulthood on a diet consisting solely of fish, produce and water from Northeastern Japan. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million people don't have any real choice except to be part of that experiment.
I wish I had mod points, but I'm tired of getting into arguments about it.
I would be far more concerned about the health and environmental effects of the big refinery fire that we didn't hear much about, than the Fukushima reactor so far.
I would choose a Windows laptop based on the availability of Linux drivers for every chip in the thing.
Yes, this does mean that I have not bought a Windows laptop since 1997.
In the late 80s, early 90s, I used to make a little game of finding old newspaper ads for grocery stores (from the 60s) and then finding things at the same prices or lower. It was easier to do this than you might think.
The DVDs have commercials, sometimes for other DVDs, sometimes for completely unrelated products. Most consumer players don't let you skip these ads.
In some ways this is good, because we end up spending less total time watching television.
I enjoy the rare times when a commercial is actually more entertaining than the program.
On the other hand, I don't think I ever buy anything as a result of being exposed to it by TV or radio advertising.
I have attended events that I only became aware of through advertising, but that's a different thing.
It scares me that there are people out there who can be persuaded to buy a product, or even to choose one brand over another, by a television ad.
>I live in Belgium
Plenty of people would pay a tax, or give their left nut, to live in a place as nice as Belgium.
"Everybody was doing it because it was simply the way it was done."
I can assure you that everybody was not committing fraud.
You wouldn't need a whole lot of signals. It could very easily be as simple as "yes or no" signals. At this level of play you are far beyond "wondering which piece to move where." Problems are much more likely to present themselves in terms of "does this line lead to some tactical trouble that I don't see?" Chess has some pretty weird aspects that stem from its simplicity.
>Let me start by saying, flat out, that I'm not trying to troll or start a war here, but what exactly would you have them cut?
To start with, for the duration of the war, no contract for the military would be payable in cash. Beyond operating expenses, profit would be paid strictly in the form of War Bonds which would be redeemable at a good rate of return but only *after* the war. These million dollar bombs you hear about would be much closer to the actual cost of raw materials and the actual cost of labor, paid at a subsistence level (there is a war on, after all), and if it *still* "costs a million dollars each", there is a REAL problem with that which is putting the country at a military disadvantage to begin with!
Anyway that's exactly where I would start. More on topic, there would be a whole lot of other things as a result of being at war, such as very strict rationing of fuel, non-commodity foods, and raw materials for civilian enterprise.
The availability of sea water has certainly been a major mitigating factor in this incident. How would you cool down Palo Verde? Import sea water from the Sea of Cortez?
Or an enemy of Japan could take advantage of the fact that there is no military defense of that part of Japan's coast and finish off one of the reactors with light artillery... No need for a meteorite.
The "absolute worst case scenario" would include stuff like another series of 7+ quakes at the site, or a military and/or terrorist attack against the site, or a sequence of monumental human error events, or even worse cases that I'm not able to consider.
Oh you're not being imaginative enough in your worst-case scenarios.
The material could just happen to melt into a very precise spherical configuration.
Or an enemy of Japan could use this opportunity to really mess up Tokyo with a light artillery attack on what's left of reactor #3 (I was actually surprised this didn't happen.)
All the money in the world won't magically become a liter of water, four forkfuls of rice, a tarp, some twine and a blanket.
If you have a ship that can cross the Pacific, then by all means load it up with necessities, take it to Japan, and distribute these things.
But don't complain about the people who are actually *doing something* that they are *taking too long*.
If you are over there and working in a relief effort, what specifically do you need, and what resources do you have to get it there?
Is there an actual Earth science textbook that puts forth a young Earth creationism theory? (ISBN please?)
>Complete and utter rubbish. Who got this wrong, Apple or the submitter?
Stallman, for not anticipating the huge effect that certain biases and short attention spans would have in the long run.
That stops *emigration*. *immigration* isn't really a problem when your country is a shithole even by the standards of other shitholes.
Yeah that was a lot of fun, knowing that people were selling the stock of chips *they already had* at outrageously high prices. I understand about replacement cost and all that, but it really was *nuts* for a while, and that time happened to coincide with a local maximum for my own individual need for memory chips. I basically learned how to do more with less RAM and infrequent upgrades. When the bottom fell out of the chip market it kind of caught me by surprise... I needed, I guess, 128M simms or something, and the first place I checked had them for maybe 1/4 the price I was expecting. A bit of a revolution started that for me, marks the transition between the time that mostly nerds had computers to where *everybody and their dog* had one.