101–110 of 118 posts
Think about how all our nuclear tests actually raised carbon 14 levels to such a high point it can actually be used as a marker to determine the age of an object anywhere in the world. Then think about our crazy high cancer rates.
What I'd like to know is why the recording equipment kept functioning -- isn't an EMP supposed to wipe out sensitive electronics? At least that's what the movies tell me...
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If you read up on the history of the era and combine that with a study of the real effects of nuclear bombs, it becomes evident that there was an uncoordinated, but nevertheless systematic, effort to grossly overstate the dangers of nuclear war. A game of "Telephone" [1] was played, where at each step the nukes got more dangerous. If nukes were as dangerous to the world as popular culture today imagines, there would…
War Games like visualization http://www.visualnews.com/2011/05/06/visualized-nuclear-expl...
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See chart 1. http://www.ispub.com/journal/the-internet-journal-of-infecti... The case for the major vaccines is open and shut. In the past fifteen years the roster has been populated with some stuff that's less clear, but targetting diseases that are much less dangerous. If you are going to make arguments against vaccines like measles, polio, diphtheria, tetanus you _really_ must do more homework. These are very seri…
Thanks, I am aware of Measles being useful. How about Hep A/B/C, Meningitis and others? More importantly, illnesses and syndromes correlating with increased vaccine usage? That's 1 illness and 1 paper. I don't think vaccine usage is an open and shut case at all and there are many sub-issues and I'm not getting into a micro-discussion now on this thread.
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Just because on popular pseudo-scientific theory was successfully debunked doesn't imply that all theories can be debunked. Arguing with the vaccination case here boggles my mind, it's so misguided.
OK let your mind boggle. Mine's fine. Some guys stand 10,000 or 18,500 feet away (depending on whether taken from text or video) from a nuke explosion then drive off. How much ionizing radiation were they exposed to? Probably very little. I'm not sure. Over the years in their job.. who knows. From my understanding, it's the fallout and contaminated food that is dangerous. As to vaccinations, I think it's an apt analo…
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but causation DOES lead to correlation obviously.... and the reason those vaccines are done, idealistically, is because they've been proven to work. Epidemics of non-vaccinated people wiped out entire cultures.... The only reason we don't hand out smallpox vaccines is because it's considered by health authorities around the world to be eradicated..... the last known naturally-occurring case was in 1978. At that point, vaccination is more dangerous that not vaccinating - but if smallpox were to arise again, you want to vaccinate as many people as possible to protect everyone.
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OK let your mind boggle. Mine's fine. Some guys stand 10,000 or 18,500 feet away (depending on whether taken from text or video) from a nuke explosion then drive off. How much ionizing radiation were they exposed to? Probably very little. I'm not sure. Over the years in their job.. who knows. From my understanding, it's the fallout and contaminated food that is dangerous. As to vaccinations, I think it's an apt analo…
Got kids? Travelled or live outside of the well-developed world? Correlation doesn't imply causation, but causation DOES lead to correlation obviously.... and the reason those vaccines are done, idealistically, is because they've been proven to work. Epidemics of non-vaccinated people wiped out entire cultures.... The only reason we don't hand out smallpox vaccines is because it's considered by health authorities aro…
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See chart 1. http://www.ispub.com/journal/the-internet-journal-of-infecti... The case for the major vaccines is open and shut. In the past fifteen years the roster has been populated with some stuff that's less clear, but targetting diseases that are much less dangerous. If you are going to make arguments against vaccines like measles, polio, diphtheria, tetanus you _really_ must do more homework. These are very seri…
Thanks, I am aware of Measles being useful. How about Hep A/B/C, Meningitis and others? More importantly, illnesses and syndromes correlating with increased vaccine usage? That's 1 illness and 1 paper. I don't think vaccine usage is an open and shut case at all and there are many sub-issues and I'm not getting into a micro-discussion now on this thread.
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Fallout is of course dangerous. It just isn't as dangerous as it is commonly thought. We actually had a recent demonstration of this fact courtesy of Fukushima, and people in California being worried about the fallout. These worries were many, many orders of magnitude away from being well-founded.
The Fukushima accident demonstrates nothing at all about the use of nuclear weapons. High yield thermonuclear weapons detonated above ground turn large quantities of soil and dust radioactive and throw it up into the atmosphere. Nothing in any way comparable to this happened at Fukushima. It is instructive that the US, UK and USSR were able to agree, at the height of the Cold War (this was less than a year after the…
This is sort of what I'm getting at when I said people will have a hard time reading my post as being something other than pro-nuclear advocacy. justinatjustat is also providing a vivid demonstration. People simply can not help but collapse "It's not as dangerous as you think" to a claim that "It's not dangerous", no matter how obviously illogical that is once plainly stated. Even here on HN, talking about it rationally is a challenge. There's something deep, deep inside of us that is just utterly freaked out by radiation. I wonder if it's part of our disgust instinct (which is, evolutionarily, a relatively recent development and nearly isolated to humans, almost nothing else on Earth can be "disgusted" as we can).
This is amazing, but it's not exactly "Hacker News", is it.
I found it interesting and the discussion was even better, I've regularly had a low-grade curiosity about nuclear testing, the effects on people, etc, and a lot of that was brought up (with references true HN style) in the comments. So it is exactly hacker news.
Much like in real life as a programmer - it's not always editors, programming languages etc, sometimes it's just fun. Not too long ago, the whole dev team ended up roped into a heavy discussion one afternoon, we were debating and calculating the observed effects of some hypothetical phenomenon, full whiteboard and math style. The boss comes in and tells us problems with our math and helps us whip up a quick simulation to figure it out. (this is at a university, the bosses are pretty smart cookies, professors and the like) After a couple hours for us (an hour for him), he says, "ok, I guess I should probably suggest you get back to work, but this was fun!". Amusingly 2 of the devs got modules back on schedule the next day, apparently we all just needed some hard but fun and unrelated problem. HN can have that too :)
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The Fukushima accident demonstrates nothing at all about the use of nuclear weapons. High yield thermonuclear weapons detonated above ground turn large quantities of soil and dust radioactive and throw it up into the atmosphere. Nothing in any way comparable to this happened at Fukushima. It is instructive that the US, UK and USSR were able to agree, at the height of the Cold War (this was less than a year after the…
You seem to keep thinking I'm talking about the real effects, when I'm talking about perception. The perception is flawed. No amount of pointing out that the dangers are non-zero will change the fact that the dangers are generally badly overstated; you need to show that fallout really is as dangerous as people think , which I gotta tell you, is going to be quite a challenge. This is sort of what I'm getting at when I…
My points are simply that: you cannot derive a conclusion about the danger of fallout from the large number of nuclear tests that have occured, since the majority of those tests were underground and many of those that weren't were of relatively modest yield; and that the real danger of fallout was significant enough to bring arch foes to the negotiating table during the height of the Cold War. I'm sure their respective nuclear scientists were well aware of the real dangers.