I estimate my radiation dose for my day as ...
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Answering less than a bunch... (Score:5, Informative)
...is just not possible. One banana is about 0.01 mrem. According to the NRC's annual radiation dose calculator [nrc.gov], I get about 301.016 mrem per year. On a daily basis, that means 0.8247 mrem, or about 82.5 bananas per day. That makes for quite a large bunch (at least, by grocery store standards - Wikipedia says they grow in 3-20 tiers per cluster, with up to 20 fruits per tier).
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At time of writing - the poll is showing most people have chosen 0-3 bananas...
(sigh) I weep for our children.
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(sigh) I weep for our children.
well be thankful that the people who are grossly underestimating how much radiation they are getting probably won't capable of having any children!
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Well, truth is unless they have a reason to care, they are probably fine.
Most people who have a reason are (supposed) to be educated in its safety. It's been my experience that most people who work around radiation have generally received some kind of mandated "radiation and you" style training.
Receiving the training does not mean understanding or absorbing the training.
A dental hygienist has one of those jobs I absolutely would not want: digging around in someone else's smelly mouth. I'm sure it doesn't pay particularly well, she has to deal with squirrelly children and annoying adults, and among everything else she has to do, she X-rays people's teeth daily. The last time I went in for a dental X-ray, my hygienist aligned the tube with the plate in my mouth, stepped back to the entrance to th
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"(sigh) I weep for our children."
Yes, Somebody Think of The Children. We need a moratorium on banana sales for the sake of the children.
Re:Answering less than a bunch... (Score:5, Funny)
You let your children drink sake?
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Yes, but only banana free sake. And not based on brown rice which is known to contain relatively large quantities of potassium.
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I answered honestly, based on my exposure to eating bananas, which is accurately 0-3 per day.. Some days none, most days one, some days more than one, very rarely 3 or more. <grin/>
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All you need to know about relative radiation exposure: http://xkcd.com/radiation/ [xkcd.com]
(Though I agree that it should have been in the stem of the poll....)
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it might be a necessary lesson if we blow up a few more nuclear power plants.
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Have you never played Fallout? Have to keep an eye on those rads :p
Re:Answering less than a bunch... (Score:4, Informative)
Came here to post the same thing. I used the handy XKCD radiation chart [xkcd.com] to conservatively estimate that I'm receiving at least 100 banana's worth per day.
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Re:Answering less than a bunch... (Score:5, Funny)
Come Mistah tally-man, read me dosime-tah.
Daylight come and me wonda do i glow.
Six REM, Seven REM, Eight REM dose!
Daylight come and me wonda do i glow.
DAY! Me say day-ay-ay-glow.
Daylight come and me wonda do i glow.
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Well, now I don't trust the banana eating analogies. :(
I prefer Brazil Nuts Equivalent (Score:2)
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Re:Answering less than a bunch... (Score:5, Funny)
But do you eat the entire banana? I would imagine that most of the radiation lodges in the peel, a protective coating specially designed to absorb radiation and keep it away from the edible banana core. So the true danger here is for clowns, street mimes and their ilk, who are more likely to come into close contact with the dangerous radioactive peel.
---
Contrite, to say the least.
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I would imagine that most of the radiation lodges in the peel, a protective coating specially designed to absorb radiation and keep it away from the edible banana core.
The radioactivity in a banana isn't caused by irradiation from external sources, it's in the potassium, which has a naturally-occurring radioactive isotope.
Of course, your comment is obviously a joke, so maybe I just spoiled it by explaining something you already knew. Oh well.
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Re:Answering less than a bunch... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Answering less than a bunch... (Score:4, Insightful)
That may be true for an uneaten banana, but once you eat it you put that radiation inside your body where it does far more harm [...]
That's completely false. As explained in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org],
According to Bowes and Church's nutrition guide, the dose equivalent of eating a banana is about 0.01 mrem (or 0.1 Sv). [my emphasis]
So, just standing near a banana has no real measurable effect on your health, you have to eat it to get the 0.01 mrem. Furthermore, it also says:
When you eat a banana, your body's level of Potassium-40 doesn't increase. You just get rid of some excess Potassium-40. The net dose of a banana is zero.
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Getting the prefix or scaling wrong seems to be happening all over the place. NHK said that the two firefighters standing in the water got between 2,000 and 6,000 mSv in one of their news stories, I'm hoping that was a misprint.
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Yep, apparently Slashdot ate the "mu" character when I pasted the text from Wikipedia (the WP article is correct). I should have paid more attention when I posted.
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Also 0.01 mrem is not 0.1 Sv (try 0.1 uSv). Given that 1 Sv starts to cause nausea, 0.1 Sv per banana would be bad. ;-)
I'm pretty sure I'd feel nauseous if I ate 10 bananas in one sitting, radioactive or not.
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Actually, the body sheds excess Potassium-40 when you ingest more, so the net change in radioactivity from eating a banana is zero, therefore BED [wikipedia.org] doesn't really mean much. If the radiation from a banana worries you, avoid avocados and beets - they have 3x the potassium.
Without potassium, we can't survive. It is essential for heart functionality, protein synthesis, conversion of blood sugar into glycogen (long term energy storage), etc. Our bodies also naturally transform solar radiation into vitamin-D, so t
Errors, Errors everywhere... (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow, we've found a poll with worse numbering than the one that assumed most people were born within 20 miles of their current home. [slashdot.org]
At least it was possible for someone to live within 20 miles of home. Here, though, the only option that's possible to select is the last. That is, unless a "bunch" is defined as "all of the bananas found in a typical large grocery store."
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Truly this will go down in history as THE worst poll. Until the next one.
Not only does it make no sense and show about 3 minutes of thought, but it's also hilariously, almost autistically, insensitive. I can only figure that they were trying to spark some kind of discussion about radiation measurement systems, like this was an episode of xkcd or something. This is easily the laziest news publication that anyone takes even halfway seriously.
They have a tremendous and valuable readership and a brand name,
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Goddammit!
How can I delete my account?
You can't. The system needs to keep track of the users, so accounts are permanent. Don't sweat leaving unused accounts hanging around. It doesn't hurt anything.
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Here, though, the only option that's possible to select is the last. That is, unless a "bunch" is defined as "all of the bananas found in a typical large grocery store."
Wrong. The question isn't "How much radiation do you get in a day", the question is "How much radiation do you estimate you get in a day". I estimate my radiation dose to be between 3 and 6 bananas. My estimate is way off, but at least I'm not some loser who wikipedias radiation doses before answering a Slashdot poll.
You missed my favourite unit... (Score:5, Funny)
The 'TSA': the level of radiation received from an airport body scanner. As in, you have the 'freedom' to opt to receive a TSA rub-down or a TSA of radiation on each and every flight.
The only potential problem with this unit is that nobody has any idea of its size.
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opt to receive a TSA rub-down
I prefer the colloquialism: Freedom Grope
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Can you choose to take that line? I ended up in that line last time I flew, but the guy looked at my passport and told me to go there. I didn't even know where the lines went when he told me either...
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"I would like to opt out of the scan" and they send you on your way to get groped. The fella I had was super professional about it and would have no qualms about doing it again.
banana eating Tokyo:ite (Score:2)
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If your calculations are correct you don't have anything to worry about.
I'm not worried, I was complaining about insensitive clods, you insensitive clod.
Radon (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in an area with lots of underground granite that emits radon. The background radiation here is estimated to be around 12 mSv/year. That's around 32 uSv/day, i.e., 320 bananas. More like a crate than a bunch, I'd say.
Banana equivalent dose (Score:3, Informative)
and
i might loose some carma points for pointing this out on a /., though.
missing option (Score:2)
"I live in a stone, brick, or concrete building, you insensitive clod!"
According to the radiation dose chart, that gets you 70 uSv, equivalent to about 2 bananas.
http://xkcd.com/radiation/ [xkcd.com]
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Yeah but that's per year. That's under 2 extra bananas per day.
Tops out at 12? (Score:2)
I estimate my daily dose of background radiation to the equivalent of well over 100 bananas.
3 Bananas / day (Score:2)
I've been eating, on average, 3 bananas per day for most of my adult life. They are an excellent source of potassium, fructose, and fiber.
After a 100 mile bike ride, electrolytes are usually in short supply, so a banana replaces lost potassium quickly. Also, fructose repletes lost glycogen in the liver more quickly than glucose. The fiber ensures I crap regularly.
I find it really stupid that one of the most healthy foods on the planet is being demonized because a minuscule amount of the potassium in them is
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Actually... all the potassium in them is isotopic.
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Um.. everything is isotopic...
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Obligatory (Score:2)
CowboyNeal (Score:2)
1 Million Bananas (and a hat).
This is a terrible, trivializing poll (Score:2, Interesting)
This poll wrongly lumps all "radiation" together into the trivial effect that a banana has. The is a gross overgeneralization, and a severe distortion of the facts -- this is nearly as bad as people who claim that microwaves, radio waves and ultraviolet radiation are all also radiation, and therefor, since we use ultraviolet radiation to get vitamin D, a little radiation might actually be good for us.
This is very wrong. Not only are some kinds of radiation more hazardous than others (eg, alpha vs neutron ra
Rads, dude (Score:2)
The Banana Nuke Song (Score:5, Funny)
Day-oh Day-oh
Daylight come and me wanna go home (x2)
Work all night with uranium
Daylight come and me wanna go home
Set the fuel rods 'til morning sun
Daylight come and me wanna go home
Come, Mr. Manager, count up the megawatts
Daylight come and me wanna go home (x2)
It's 6 rem, 7 rem, 8 rem boom!
daylight come and me wanna go home (x2)
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I plead hastiness and fall on the mercy of the moderators of the redundancy mods.
40 mSv (Score:2)
I average between 40 and 45 mSv per year. Considering that a banana is 0.1 microSv, that's a hell of a lot of banana equivalents.
That being said, I am a physician that works in a cardiac cath lab. Even with adequate (including eye) shielding, I expect to get early cataracts due to my exposure. I'm not complaining. I get paid enough to deal with it. :)
And if you're worried about the techs and nurses that work with me: None of them are *ever* closer to the active radiation source than me during a case, u
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Ops. I was looking at my yearly dose. Daily is probably 1/365th of that, or ~110 microSv.
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It sounds like a lot, given that radiation workers have a dose limit of 50mSv per year, and 100mSv over a year is positively correlated with cancer...
I measure my radiation in units of... (Score:3)
I measure my radiation in units of mutant superheroes.
Japan is currently at 3 Fantastic Four, 8 Hulk
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Handy Chart (Score:4, Informative)
Courtesy of XKCD here is a handy chart of exposure levels:
http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/03/19/radiation-chart/
1 banana = 2x sleeping next to someone who would have known ?
I am in a chemistry lab frequently, (Score:2)
I'm in a chemistry lab frequently, and deal with a guy whose primary research interest is ornanometallic complexes involving actinides, especially those of uranium (depleted, but still).
So probably "many" bananas.
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Then again, you jumped at shadows as the person with "coal is full of radioactive carbon OMFG" (carbon14 half life 5730 years - coal age hundreds of millions of years). You didn't apologise for a blatant lie about fly ash toxicity either but that's a different topic.
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Yes, hence my "many" bananas comment, and the general issue with simplifying radiation exposure down to simple units like this (and yes, on the Banana Equivalent Dose scale, living 50 mile from a coal plant is 3 bananas per year, while living 50 miles from a nuclear plant is 1 banana per year - because coal is radioactive, like I have been saying all along - albeit *slightly*, partially due to C14, and partially due to other elements in it like uranium, thorium, etc that are also present in minute quantitie
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How the fuck do you expect that to happen in amounts worth mentioning after hundreds of millions of years? Don't tell me you think the earth is only 6000 years old or some weird shit about radioactive decay changing over time.
Yes - "processing" as in getting a lot of it together, squashing it into a brick and applying a bit of heat to get it t
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How do I expect it to happen? Oh who knows! But put a piece of coal in front of a counter and you can observe that it is radioactive! Oooh! Bill O'Riley style "You Can't Explain That!!" shock horror.
It has a 6000 year half life, and tends to build up in plants due to its formation (neutron capture by nitrogen > oxidation into CO2 > uptake by plants), so either it's there in trace amounts via contamination (eg, due to water taking organic matter into the rocks that contain the coal), or via other mecha
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"coal is full of radioactive carbon OMFG" (carbon14 half life 5730 years - coal age hundreds of millions of years).
You're correct about the carbon-14. However, coal is full of radioactive thorium. In fact, if you extracted the thorium and put it in a (suitably designed) nuclear reactor, you'd get more energy out of it than you would by burning the coal it came in.
Cultivar? (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Cultivar_Groups [wikipedia.org]
A metric banana or an imperial banana?
One banana, two banana, three banana four (Score:2)
Of course danger depends on the type of radiation instead of the amount but if all you've got to measure stuff is fogged film or geiger counters what can you do? A volkswagen full of bananas of x-ray radiation would be ignorable while a neutron source emitting at the same rate as a few bananas would have a non-trivial chance of giving you cancer after a while.
The Ann Coulter plan (Score:2)
I'm on the Ann Coulter plan.
Dead Spocks per 113 minutes is best (Score:2)
Six foot, Seven foot, Eight foot..... (Score:3)
Re:You know I lost a friend to banana allergy (Score:5, Funny)
you insensitive clods! Why are we joking about such serious things?
Did he slip on one?
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What about pointed sticks with a few bananas speared on them? I shudder to think of the possibilties.
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Buuuzziiiiiiiiiiing!
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Argh, I checked it too but replied "wrong" because I didn't pay attention to the micros and the millis properly.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, etc.
Re:A Whole Bunch (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right - XKCD Banana Radiation Table [xkcd.com]. The poll's ranges are WAY outside the actual exposure for a typical human. I live in Norway on top of a bunch of decomposing granite that just oozes radon gas and ionizing radiation. So I figure my daily dose is closer to 12 uSv which is about to 120 bananas.
I think the only way you can get to 0 Bananas is to transfer your consciousness into the cloud and ditch the body all together. Just being alive exposes you to around 11 bananas worth of ionizing radiation (1.08 uSv/day on average) from decaying potassium found throughout your body.
It's too bad the media links all radiation exposure to death and destruction. This poorly informed idea of what ionizing radiation is and is not lead to crazy statements from the Nevada governor stating that zero radiation exposure is the only acceptable level. Obviously, it's not a great idea to hang out around sources of ionizing radiation, but it's part of life and life has adapted to some background radiation. As long as you're not snacking on uranium laced bananas, you're probably going to be OK.
By the way, slashcode chokes on the mu ---- symbol. I'm sure this has been noted before, but I never paid attention.
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Slashcode chokes on any Unicode symbol outside of the characters on the standard alphanumeric keyboard and a limited set of HTML entities that automatically get converted (most accented letters, e.g. é, the curly quotes and long dash characters). And it strips out any HTML entities that it doesn't recognize, so even if you know the entity you still can't use it - the … entity, for instance, just disappears when you preview/submit.
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And it stores passwords as cleartext (or at the very least with reversible encryption), and doesn't use HTTPS for logins.. not good.
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And it stores passwords as cleartext
But at least if you type in your password into a comment, it replaces it with asterisks when anyone else views the comment. For example, my password is ***********. When I post this, it will appear as aterisks to you, but to me I can still see the password in the comment.
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Hmm so you mean when I type gidrawOkFudNusebugnivRemBukBop3, all you see is asterisks? Cool! gidrawOkFudNusebugnivRemBukBop3 you!!!
*wonders how many people will actually try it out :p *
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Bad chart.
The average radiation level in Tokyo is about what they're calling the average radiation level in a town near the plant [wsj.com], even though Tokyo is 150 miles away. Tokyo is at 3-4x their normal background radiation right now. Fukushima City is at 100 times their normal background radiation. Residents of Fukushima City are collectively getting an extra 1 1/2 chest X-rays per year from external radiation. Fukushima City is itself 30 miles away from the reactor, and it's to the west (against the preva
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I would have expected better tha this fear-mongering from you, Rei. Here's an online Geiger counter in Tokyo [wakwak.com] that shows level for the past few days, and 3 months ago. Background radiation levels are about 1/3 higher than normal now. They peaked at 2x normal, which is still lower than normal in Denver.
The worst health risk was from the contaminated iodine, and very young children should not be driking tap water this week, but I-131 has an 8 day half-life and levels are already well off their peak.
The expe
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I'm not sure what you're trying to show with your link. Are you claiming that the WSJ is wrong? Looks like they're averaging 15CPM, which is .125 uSv, which is slightly below the official total as reported by the WSJ. Or are you mistakenly assuming that Tokyo's normal background radiation is higher than it actually is? Any comments about the fact that Tokyo is *150 miles away* from Fukushima #1? Or that this is comparing external exposure to inhaleable/ingestable dust?
You're talking about half lives as
Re:A Whole Bunch (Score:4, Interesting)
You can see Tokyo's pre-quake radiation level on that same page.
2011/03/05: mean 21.54 CPM
2010/12/05: mean 14.00 CPM
So, admitedly that's a 50% increase, not a 33% increase now that I look at the numbers instead of eyeballing it, but it's still a tempest in a teapot.
You can estimate average deaths indirectly cause by exposure to nuclear material by the estimated increased risk and the number of people involved. Are you really saying that there's any chance that the long term deaths here will be within 2 orders of magnitude of the long term death toll from the tsunami? Why obsess over "scary scary nukular scary" instead of comparing the risks mathematically to other risks - you know, dangerous things like household accidents.
As my friend in Tokyo wrote recently about the water risk "For us, we think (a) these amounts shouldn't matter and (b) our activated carbon filtration systems will take care of this, but carefully consumed wine and beer this evening just to be safe"
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Ah, I misread their charts. Well, their background radiation number for Tokyo's contradicts the official one from the WSJ. So if I have to choose between some random person's geiger counter mounted who-knows-where and the WSJ's reporting of an official number... well, do you really have to ask which one I'm going to go with?
Please re-read what I wrote again. Nuclear disasters are disasters in slow motion. You can't (usually) run away from a tsunami. You can (usually) run away from a nuclear disaster.
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Ah, I misread their charts. Well, their background radiation number for Tokyo's contradicts the official one from the WSJ. So if I have to choose between some random person's geiger counter mounted who-knows-where and the WSJ's reporting of an official number... well, do you really have to ask which one I'm going to go with?
Have you read the WSJ much in recent years? 5 years ago I wouldn't believe them if they were reporting local weather. I've heard Rupert Murdoch really cleaned the paper up, but when that's the best you have to hope for, I'll belive the local news station (this is part of someone's local weather station, but i don't read Japanese so i don't know who). In any case, these are all very low numbers. Denver is around 75 CPM this week (normally around 50 I think), and 100 CPM is alert-worthy.
In terms of econom
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The estimate for how much Chernobyl cost all together for the Soviet economy is $235 billion. In 1986 dollars. And they lost a lot smaller amount of power generation. And the disaster, while bigger, was in a far less wealth-concentrated area. This disaster will put northeastern Honshuu in rolling blackouts until summer. Trying to fathom the cost of that alone is just mind-boggling.
If the Japanese used the US's 50-mi evacuation zone, by the way, there would be several million refugees from Fukushima; Ja
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I got a lovely bunch of coconuts....
Aww shoot, wrong fruit.
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It already is... [wikimedia.org] that's the joke :)
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It's also highly flawed. The radioactivity of bananas comes from potassium. But the human body controls it's potassium content.. if there's too much, it gets flushed out. So eating bananas will not increase the amount of radioactive material in your body.
This is completely different for e.g. radioactive iodine, which adds to the body's inventory of radioactive material.
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You would never have allowed a joke poll like this only a few days after 9/11.
No, but non-american sites would and probably have.
I definitely agree It's poor taste, but that's just human nature: as long as you're not a victim it's OK to make jokes. The minute it affects oneself, it's an entirely different matter...
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You would never have allowed a joke poll like this only a few days after 9/11.
No, but non-american sites would and probably have.
I definitely agree It's poor taste, but that's just human nature: as long as you're not a victim it's OK to make jokes. The minute it affects oneself, it's an entirely different matter...
A friend has family in Morioka, Sendai and coastal villages. He has been in touch with family trying to locate relatives, most of whom have by now been located and are safe, if low on water, food and heating energy.
Still he could laugh at a references to changes I recommended for the Empire Builder game Nippon Rails - it needs a new Tsunami/Earthquake event, where every player loses their train, all loads, most of their track and as soon as they get up and running again, there are new load cards for moving
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Don't know, it just doesn't feel right to make jokes so soon about a disaster that killed so many. And between you and me, I don't think you'd have cracked that same joke had you learned that your friend had lost loved ones over there. Not that I'm judging you though; on the whole pot/kettle scale I'm just as black as you are. But there's a difference between sharing some jokes with friends or coworkers who weren't affected and posting a poll about it on a high traffic website that may be visited by people
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12 bananas per day?
I don't know where you shop, but I'd estimate that the bunches of bananas I've seen ranged between 6-9 bananas.
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I hate those things.
It's like getting 90 x-rays in 2 minutes. Because that's pretty much what it is.
About time we banned them and mandated MRI or PET scans instead, and limit the price of those to the time it takes.
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You were in fact the 7th or 8th person to post it. Thanks for playing.