41–50 of 108 posts
What, did Medium just copy over Stanford's alumni magazine? Here's the original story.[1] [1] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-bikini-atoll-looks-lik...
> We’ve moved! Read this article and new stories from STANFORD on Stanfordmag.org.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's no way we're going to convince the middle classes of the central economies to reduce consumption to that level, or even to convince people in that class of development economy to stop aiming for more. What if there is 200% tariffs on junk they shouldn't be buying anyhow? What if a new car becomes so expensive that the idea of having to replace it in 3-5/years induces outrage and class action lawsuits? What…
Is this the "Climate Authoritarianism" tree in a 4X game
Yes, there is a need to stop the small minority of humans that will not be good stewards of the planet, the people and creatures on it, and its atmosphere. I'm fine with being labelled an authoritarian.
oh and to answer a possible question about "what is 'good science'", i'd start with looking at scientists that have been doing science for at least a couple of decades, with no factual retractions on their record, or on the record of those they mentored (those who actually wrote the papers?). As an ancillary - their work must be reproducible, ideally by an competing institution - and it should go both ways. if Harvard always poo-poos UC Davis' research publications, then they shouldn't be surprised if the CSU and UC systems scrutinize Harvard's work especially.
to analogize to something i often hear, "We already have laws about that, just enforce them" - we already know what outstanding, excellent science looks like. Reinforce that.
on https://www.mapmypolitics.org/ i show as a lower left centrist, maybe 1 question away from "social Libertarian". I answered as though i were running the country, not as though i were living under the country i was describing. So questions where an answer is my ideal, but is impossible under the current system i answered that way. "Trade should be regulated to prevent unfair competition" was my answer, because "we pay our slaves - er... workers - 5 cents a day and don't care if they die" is unfair competition, to my reasoning. so is "we can provide cheap goods because we pollute the air, land and water, and ship cheap stuff to other countries they 'want' and pollute their air, land, and water, too." A couple examples, there.
I only learned last year that you can dive the atomic fleet [1][2]. What is the atomic fleet? As part of the nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll, they dragged a bunch of WW2 ships (from both the US and Japan) and detonated bombs above them to test how effective such weapons were at sinking ships. As part of this, you can often get to set foot on Bikini Atoll, something normally not possible AFAIK where you can only stay…
…do we?
“The method has been used for everything from measuring the age of ringless trees in the Amazon to examining whether humans generate new olfactory bulb neurons into adulthood” …do we?
We do but the extent is limited compared to other mammals, brain mass normalised.
There's a historical overview here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK55966/
I'd have to dig around for comparative mammal brain regen rates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Medium is a publishing/hosting platform for authors. This Medium account is (or purports to be) the official account of the Stanford alumni magazine.
It appears that it was published on medium and subsequently added to the standfordmag site, hence the 2 links to it they're and the notice that new articles are published there. It probably just remains because they have no control over medium, so they can't turn the page into a permanent redirect, and they don't want to just take it down and break links.
What, did Medium just copy over Stanford's alumni magazine? Here's the original story.[1] [1] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-bikini-atoll-looks-lik...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you look only at deaths yes. But radioactive contamination can lead to a lot more damage to health and nature than just deaths. As an example, Fukushima caused 1 death but its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic. Yet usually only deaths are factored in. And the biggest issue is that one incident can cause so much of it. Add to the fact that we tend to rely on the lowest bidder who will then inev…
Being detectable isn’t very interesting. Modern technology can detect vanishingly small concentrations of weird isotopes. No harm came to anybody on the other side of the ocean from that stuff. Now consider a pollutant like mercury. It goes far beyond being merely detectable. There’s so much mercury in the oceans that it’s unsafe to eat seafood too often. Most of that came from human activity. A huge chunk of it came…
The radiometric procedure here was (IIRC) replace a large number of air filter mats in a large number of HVAC units and after a week to cycle them back and then reduce the "contaminated" mats down to samples that sat within highly sensitive high crystal volume spectrometers for 72 hours or more.
The 'normal' environmental radiation event count level in 40 litres of doped Sodium Iodide scintillation Crystals (if that's what was used) at some 80m above ground level is between one and two thousand events per second.
The Fukishima signature gamma events came to a few thousand in 72 hours (again, IIRC) whch had to be teased out from a flood of other events many magnitudes greater in count.
Absolutely not enough to be concerned about, but a seriously interesting bit of detection work.
I wonder why "extinction rebellion" types don't love nuclear power more. When it works right we have unlimited clean energy. And when it goes wrong you have a 50,000 year nature preserve.
> a 50,000 year nature preserve that begins with none of the existing lifeforms that were there beforehand.
Bikini Atoll was blasted with 23 (or 24, there's an edge case) separate nuclear explosions in the air, at sea level, and underwater, one a thousand times more powerful than either of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons.
Not comparable to a nuclear power station accident.