If correct then that rate is far, far lower than the level of radiation in Californians. The tiny amount of potassium-40 in the human body produces 4,400 disintegrations per second. Then there are other isotopes such as carbon-14 to consider so the actual rate of decays will be even higher. In fact if we assume the average Californian has a mass of 80 kg and a density roughly equal to that of water then the decay rate per cubic metre of Californians is just under 55,000 decays/second or 6,875 times your background rate just from potassium-40.

However you typically only get about about 10% of your annual radiation exposure in the US from the potassium-40, carbon-14 etc inside your body so I expect that your background radiation estimate is on the low side.

Do you realize that there is more than one definition of 'subject'?

subject (noun) a person or thing that is being discussed, described, or dealt with.

I thought "creative geniuses" were expected to think laterally and not be confined to rigid, linear thinking? Not everything you learn at school has a special academic lesson devoted to it...which again is something a creative genius should know.

The value of a degree is in what it lets you do not in how much it costs to get it. The skills you acquire are valuable both to the individual and to society.

I utterly fail to understand this point. Your statement is as logical as arguing that governments should not fund vaccination programs because some people are allergic to vaccines and can't have them. The reason degrees should be free is the same reason why school education should be free: society as a whole benefits from having highly skilled people available for employment or even who can create new employment.

I would not go that far but I would agree that there are some degrees which are more valuable than others. However this is the great thing about making degrees free: governments can choose how many slots to fund for each program based on the need. The university then selects the best students for those funded slots. Too many english graduates then fund fewer spaces. Not enough teachers then increase the funding for education degrees etc.

This is far better than the current system where many students pick subjects for less sound reasons such as which subject they think is easiest.

You are missing the point. Yes they can afford to pay the amount but the problem is that the loan comes with interest. Someone in a job like teaching gets a reasonable but certainly not high, salary. Given that the interest rates on the load is RPI+3%. On a 36kGBP loan that's just under 2k interest per year which is 166/month. So your person paying 66/month will never, ever pay off their loan. Essentially they will have a permanent extra 9% marginal tax rate throughout their life.

Compare this to those entering a high paid job in finance. They will have a 9% marginal tax rate for a few years until their loan is paid off and then it's over. This means that the loan not only discourages graduates from taking lower paid jobs but the interest means it acts as a regressive tax where those earning less pay more.

In the previous system we had higher rates of tax for high earners and this was used, in part, to fund the university system. Not only was this clearly fairer it did not dissuade people from important jobs with lower pay scales and it reduced the grumbling about tax of those earning a lot because they could see that they had benefited from taxes.

Thanks to this video probably not anymore.

Ah but when they do you will be glad you took that pre-school computing science class won't you!

Clearly modesty was not one of the subjects you covered.

Yes they can, at least for some plastics and I would bet that if we started to run out of oil based plastics the chemists woudl start to come up with replacements for the rest as well.

That would probably be a good idea because if we had to replace all our fossil fuel plants today it would involve building a lot of nuclear fission plants.

Actually not according to the linked article. The pilots followed the correct procedure which was a slow climb with flaps open but the engine falling off the wing severed the hydraulic lines and caused a partial power failure which meant that the slats retracted on the one wing and the warning indicators both for stall and asymmetric slats did not work. The crash might have been avoidable given hindsight but I would not call it pilot error by any stretch of the imagination and again according to the Wikipedia article neither did the NTSB.

I agree that it might be easier, quicker and cheaper with a drone. However I don't really care. As a passenger I'm far more interested in whether it is just as effective as spotting problems as the human eyeballs it replaces. On the plus side images can be zoomed and you might see more detail than a human eye. On the downside the image is probably not going to be 3D and it sounds like the person taking the pictures with the drone will not be the engineer who inspects them.

In that case if you are still around then clearly the beeping did not wake you up so perhaps the sound of the exploding battery might. See, it's really just an extra safety measure.

The problem with this, and to some extent student loans in general, is that now you are selecting university students based on wealth and not merit. If you don't have enough collateral to secure the loan - or your parents are not willing to take the risk - then you do not get to go to university no matter how intelligent you are. Society then not only potentially loses out on the next Einstein but also it also becomes less fair leading to all sorts of problems with social unrest.

There is also another issue which the UK is now facing having introduced massive tuition hikes and an increase in loans. Some essential jobs which require a university degree, like teaching, are suddenly experiencing a huge shortfall in new graduates. The reason is that a teachers salary takes decades to repay a large loan while someone going into finance can repay it in a matter of years.

This is why university education should be funded by taxes and the funded positions awarded to the best and brightest. Those who earn more will pay more for their degree through taxes while those whose earn less will pay less. The alternative is that society will need to start paying e.g. teachers a whole lot more money in order to attract sufficient numbers and to do that it will have to raise taxes so ultimately everyone will be paying anyway but in the meantime the affected professions will be in severe trouble.

Not entirely correct. If he is the architect behind the subprime mortgages then he did not directly con an old lady out of her savings but his actions indirectly wiped half the value off those savings. He deliberately designed an extremely risky investment vehicle to look to the banks like a low risk, high return investment and they did not spot the trick. It might have been entirely legal but it bears all the hall marks of a con and in such a case, while the mark takes some blame for letting their greed overcome their common sense, the person who devised the con takes most of the blame.

The problem is not starting to affect physics. The reluctance to let go of Supersymmetry is nothing new and in any case I would argue it as extremely premature given the currently available data.

Take a look over a century ago at the Michelson-Morley experiment. While we regard it as the killing blow to the aether theory of light at the time the first explanations it engendered were suggestions of 'frame dragging' where somehow the Earth was dragging the aether along with it. This was hard to reconcile with astronomical observations but, as always, the first instinct of many is to adapt the existing theory to see whether it can account for the new data. What shifted the field after Michelson-Morley was Einstein coming up with a far, far better theory to explain the data than any aether based model.

Another example is the superweak theory which was invented to explain CP violation in kaon decays. As experiments put ever tighter limits on it theorists dialed down the strength making it weaker. What killed it was the Standard Model providing a better explanation via a complex phase in the CKM quark mixing matrix.

Reluctance to let go of the best theory you have is nothing new. As these theories become more and more constrained fewer people think them likely and start to look for better ones. When someone finds that better explanation and it is confirmed by experiment then the old theory is abandoned. Since Supersymmetry was invented to explain the huge difference between the planck scale (where gravity is important) and the mass of the higgs. Until there is a better explanation for this it is unlikely there will be a consensus to drop SUSY as a candidate theory.

Sorry but that is completely wrong. It has lots of explanatory power. For example it explains how the electron can have a mass without breaking essential symmetries of physics (via the Higgs mechanism), it explains how the EM and weak forces are two aspects of the same thing, it explains the existence of the different types of mesons and baryons which was such a mystery before the SM that one Nobel prize winner suggested that there should be a fine for discovering anymore particles before we explained those we had found! etc. (and there is a lot more!)

The problem is that we no longer talk about what the Standard Model did explain because we now know the answer so it is not so interesting anymore and we focus on the things which it does not explain. This is the nature of human inquisitiveness. Indeed the Standard Model is an astounding success. It took Particle Physics out of the 'particle zoo' era of stamp collecting and moved it to the forefront of fundamental physics research. It's certainly true that it contains some major holes and because of that nobody thought it would stand up this long to experiment. However it has survived over 40 years and is still the best model we have although some extensions, such as neutrino masses, have been needed.

As for making observations you clearly fail to grasp how science works. The way you find something beyond the SM is that you make a measurement of some process where new physics predicts X and the Standard Model predicts Y and you see which your measurement agrees with. The fact that for 40+ years every time we come up with a new measurement we get Y and never X is because that's the way the universe works. If you are unhappy with it then don't blame the physicists - it's not like we got a say in how the universe was put together!