That's why I ended up with a Nook first edition. Unfortunately, it got smashed on my current trip, but I've had it for years.
That happened to my first Kindle. I wised up and picked up a Pelican hard case for the second. IIRC, it was $40 off of Amazon, but well worth it, since I can now throw the kindle into any bag or case without too much worry.
Yes, let's poison the inner core of the world until plates move around enough to fuck shit up really really good...
Technically, the earth is already "poisoned".
Radioactive elements are in the earth's crust and mantel, and contribute to earth's geothermal heat.
However, even if we buried nuclear waste deep inside the earth's crust, as far as I can tell, it is unlikely to make its way to the inner core of the earth. From what I can tell, most of elements in nuclear waste is lithophilic - that is, it tends to stay in the mantle, or so states several webpages I checked on geology.
To compare the radiation from radon gas to the insanely toxic radioactive isotopes that were released into the air, water, and soil is retarded. (e.g.: Caesium, Plutonium, Strontium, Iodine, etc) It has gotten into the food they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe. And when it gets into the body, it will cause cancer.
Shouldn't you say "it may cause cancer"? After all, at low enough doses, the radiation a victim is exposed to is probably unlikely to cause cancer. I base this assumption on the naturally occurring radioactive isotopes in our body that also expose people to radiation. For example (using numbers from Wikipedia), we have 140 grams of potassium in our body, which naturally would dose us with about 4 kBq. (31 bq per g of potassium,
Presumably, considering that many people do not suffer from cancer in their life-times, exposure at low enough levels of radiation is not guaranteed to cause cancer.
Also, I just want to point out again: 4 kBq. That's 4,000 atoms decaying every second. In the 2 minutes or so it took me to write this post, my body had about half a million atoms decay. And I survived. It sounds rather impressive, doesn't it?
Right now I have a Kindle Keyboard. The screen may be too small if you read books with a lot of diagrams or illustrations. The Kindle DX would be better in this regards, but it is a tad spendy.
Regardless of what you get, I'd recommend Calibre for managing your library, and I would strongly suggest checking out your local library system's ebook lending. It is extremely convenient to be able to borrow books at any hour of the day or night. If you have access to different library systems, check out the ebook lending offers at each - sometimes one system will have a wider selection.
See the discussion on whether or not sexual harassment is ingrained in hacker culture...
Well, heteronormativity seems to be.
(No, I don't know the gender orientation or preferences of the individuals who selected this image. I'm just pointing out the assumption being made.)
And if we built a few modern reactors (i.e. something less than 20years old) a lot of that waste would become a source of fuel. But we sure as hell can't build a new reactor. We have wind power!
I really do like the potential wind, geothermal and solar power has. They aren't bad things to develop.
But it seems that the purpose of a wind turbine is to make us feel green, while we generate most of our electricity from coal.
There's also the issue that monocultures are bad. We should have a diversity of energy sources. And we should have more electricity. Electrical use should be to replace fossil fuel heating, for example. It should be used to power our transportation, either directly or indirectly.
By "kill" do you mean that 1) on one day, someone was just walking down the sidewalk, happy-go-lucky, prime of life, sunny day, and the next day just died? Or 2) It's estimated that a person who hasn't done too much excercise or is a smoker might have lived to 73 and actually died at 72.5 years?
I'm guessing it's somewhere between the two, but I don't see the details needed.
I did some digging, and for lung cancer, it seems the average age of diagnosis is 71. Considering that life expectancy is about 78 years in the US, and assuming 1 year average between diagnostic and death (the 5 year survival rate of lung cancer is pretty low, so lets err on the side of overstating the impact), that gives an estimated 6 years lost per victim, or the equivalent of 215 full lifetimes lost per year.
Not sure what the expected Fukushima cancer death toll will be. It looks like the median age is about 45 years in Japan. Guess about 10 years between exposure to low-lying radiation and cancer. Say it's as deadly as lung cancer, and on average kills the person 1 year later. Life expectancy in Japan is 83. That's 83 - 56 = 27 years lost per victim. So if Fukushima, on average, would cause about 510 additional (Japanese) deaths each year due to cancer, it would be the same amount of years lost as is due to lung cancer via coal power plant pollution in the US. (Presuming no other nasty nuclear accidents in Japan at the time.) Admittedly, we're comparing apples and oranges, somewhat, since the population of the US is 2.6x that of Japan. So really, 196 additional cancer deaths each year would be needed to put the Japanese nuclear industry (including Fukushima) on par with the US.
First google search for estimated Fukushima deaths from cancer puts the most likely number at 130 total. (Not per-year.)
All of this post is admittedly a back-of-the-napkin calculation with several guesstimates. There's also some flaws in the methodology. I'm also comparing a smaller country with a higher population density but smaller total population to a much larger country with a lower population density but higher total population. But it seems that for the risk of cancer deaths, the Japanese nuclear industry is far safer, including the meltdown, than the US coal power industry, unless one of my guestimates was wildly out of line. Even if I'm off by a factor of 10 in underestimating the risk of Fukushima, or overestimated the risk in coal, Fukushima-catastrophes would have to strike about once a decade in Japan to have a similar amount of years lost in proportion to the total population.
There's a few other factors involved as well. I ignored the 600 evacuation deaths from Fukushima. That's a one time event, but it does up the amount of deaths from Fukushima significantly. On the other hand, I haven't considered the majority of estimated deaths from coal power is not due to lung cancer. Assuming that the non-cancer deaths from coal are similar to the cancer deaths (6 years lost per victim), and figure that the evacuation deaths are evenly spread out among the Japanese population (39 years lost per victim). We'll go with about 10,000 dead from coal power that isn't lung cancer (going with the later study that shows a lower death toll), and that gives us 60,000 years of human life lost each year. While Fukushima's 600 evacuation deaths are at around 24,000 years of human life lost. But remember, US has 2.6 times the population, so Fukushima so it actually works out as slightly more years (60,840 years vs 60,000 years) of human life if the populations are equalized.
There's also the environmental and economic effects. Fukushima took out a few hundred square miles of land due to fallout. That's going to have a real cost. OTOH, we could estimate the land lost to global warming, and figure out carbon power plants in the US's share of the pie, and that's going to have a real economic cost as well. No comparison will be perfect. And we could redo all of the above calculations with more accurate figures, but I strongly suspect the result will be in the same ballpark.
I'm rather disturbed by the result I have. Unless I've made a horrible mistake that throws off the result of the calculations, in terms of years of life lost when compared to the total population size, coal in the US is more or less on on par with a Fukushima-event happening every year in Japan.
[1]: Safer because it doesn't conjure up the radioactive boogyman, even though some statistics say coal plants toss up more radioactive crap in the air on an annual basis than nuclear reactors even use.
According to a study done by under the Bush administrator, coal power plants kill 24,000 a year, including 2,800 lung cancer deaths, in the US alone.
A more recent source "only" blames coal for 13,000 deaths a year in the US.
We would be outraged if normally functioning nuclear power plants caused even a tenth of that death toll in the US each year. Why do we tolerate non-nuclear power plants that kill literally thousands each year?
Dick Cheney even said that "nobody" would build a plant without that protection, because they don't want to take on the potentially unlimited liability if something really bad happens. But why would you be worried about a risk of an accident that basically can't happen due to modern safety protections?
Even a hypothetical foolproof reactor will not prevent a class action lawsuit if disease rates go up in the vicinity of the reactor.
Nuclear is such a boogyman that correlation may equal causation for a jury.
Would you want to take that risk?
Car manufacturers seem intent on specifically requiring special tools for their cars, and use patents to protect them.
The closest I get to a "special tool" for a car is when I borrow the auto parts store code reader to pull the trouble codes from my automobile. Considering that the car is a 2002 model, and I've done everything from changing the oil to replacing the timing belt and water pump, I think I've covered many repairs.
As for the topic on hand, I would place the blame on increased wealth (people tend to not want to work), more access to entertainment (there's better things to do) and greater urbanization (when you're 30 miles from the nearest large town, you're far more apt to try to learn how to do something instead of waste the time driving to town.
Which is a shame, since this is an amazing age to live in for information. In the old residence where I'm at, I had to replace a rotting floor under a toilet. It was a job I never did before. Had no idea about the "proper" way of doing it. Spent some time online reading, watched a few tutorials, and I was ready to go. End result looks professional and works perfectly. Even for more minor jobs the internet is amazing. Want to learn how to replace those screens in your house? Go online. Want to figure out how to install a used window air conditioner? Go online.
Which might hint at another problem, a lot of people seem to be pretty bad at researching problems and finding information. I don't know why. Laziness? Lack of skills? Maybe we've been focusing so much on test scores in school that we've dropped the ball when it comes to research skills.
You could just bring women and a bunch of frozen sperm.
Does this work assuming you *don't* sterilize male children?
We'll focus on the men (women can get frozen sperm).
First generation ignores their siblings, marries the children of one of the other three colonists.
Second generation ignores their cousins, marries the children of one of the other two colonists.
Third generation ignores their second cousins, marries the children of the last remaining colonist not related to them. (Assuming frozen sperm is used, they could marry their half-third cousin, or even a more distant relationship (assuming their third cousin has only a matrilineal descent from their most recent common ancestor, and frozen sperm was used for each generation).
Each generation beyond that continues marrying someone who shares common ancestors. This may make recessive genes crop up.
Admittedly, if you sterilize all the male children, then you can use frozen sperm until it runs out. Although how many generations using only frozen sperm to conceive until you have enough genetic diversity to ensure the continued survival of humanity through normal means would be an interesting question to work out.
Trying it out with a route from my house to a friend's, it takes me the 4.4 mile road route along the A36 rather than than the 5.6 mile route through the new forest that avoids the main road and is a peaceful cycle. Putting my route to work in, it takes me along a main road rather than along the cycle-path that is about 10m parallel to the road for about a mile (that it has marked on it's maps but chooses to ignore).
When google first had bicycling directions for my city in the US, it had a few very screwed up routes. IIRC, some limited-access roads were considered bikeable. But you can report the errors on the website (or at least you used to be able), and they will fix it.
Google cycling directions tend to be fairly good. Not great, and not bad, but it really depends on the cyclist and their priorities.
IMO the most interesting thing about settlement of the Americas is the whole haplotype X thing, which strongly suggests a genetic relation between the early peoples of northern North America and Europe or the Middle East. Though that fact is well established, I recommend skepticism when reading interpretations of what it means, because a lot of people take that ball and run a long way with it. However, as best I can tell it can't simply be dismissed as a parallel mutation, because of the way X is embedded down at a specific point in a whole tree of haplotypes.
Have the possibilities of an early European people moving east and then over Bering been ruled out? After all, Caucasians have been found everywhere from western Europe, to southern India, and Xinjiang.
Then again, I suppose movement over the sea ice across the northern Atlantic is more probable.
Could even be that the Europeans weren't as advanced as the Siberians. Say early Europeans went over the sea ice across the north Atlantic, settled in northeast North America. Later came people from Siberia with slightly better technology/organization/whatnot, came in conflict with the Euro-americans, vanquished them and allowed the women to live, while killing the men. (Not an uncommon occurrence in history.) Hence the X-haploid mtDNA survived.
Then again, there are records of native Americans washing up on European shores. Why can't the reverse happen (although the currents don't favor it as much). Or perhaps its contamination from the Viking settlements. Who knows. Perhaps the European traits ended up having some sort of mystical or exotic appeal that made them more likely to be passed on.
Its really interesting what DNA can and cannot tell us. Obviously genetics isn't everything, but it can help us track the flows of people. Combined with archaeological evidence, it also can give us a slightly clearer picture of what happened. Then again, it can open up a lot of unresolved questions.
It calls into doubt the idea that global warming itself is a catastrophe. It suggests that humanity thrived on a significantly hotter world than any living person has known.
Well, I'm not sure saying a Roman level of civilization is exactly "thriving" by the standards we'd use in the Western world. But yes, humans can survive a significantly hotter world.
However, society does seem impacted greatly by climate changes. When farmlands change to too hot, too dry, too wet or too cold, there's been a problem in the past. These climate changes have coincided with the downfall of societies. With our modern societies that rely on a more technologically complex world, the cost of adapting is going to be high. If a population moves due to climate factors, that's a vast amount of infrastructure that needs to be replaced. If we seek instead to mitigate, that is going to also require a large investment in infrastructure - for example, perhaps sea walls for coastal cities, or large irrigation projects for a new drier climate, etc.
It's not the end result of the predicted change that is the problem, it's the speed of that predicted change, and the costs of mitigating and adapting to that change.
"It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes." -- Rick Obidiah
