Posts by linger
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Field Theory: Not doing enough, in reply to Hadyn Green,
Deciding not to act is an action.
Which was my point, too. There wouldn't be a need for after-the-fact "collective responsibility" PR (extending well beyond those present, which I think was your criticism of it?), or "not like us" messaging, if anyone had just sent a more timely "Don't be a dick" message in the moment.
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Field Theory: Not doing enough, in reply to Hadyn Green,
“Collective responsibility” doesn’t mean they all actively participated – more that nobody in the room spoke out and stopped this.
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Hard News: Housing NZ keeps digging the…, in reply to Russell Brown,
It also has to be asked how much of that "better maintenance" is actually directed at making state houses more habitable (having already been deferred to a point where houses were unfit for purpose), rather than at preparing "assets" for sale.
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Yep; basically, all the article demonstrates is that "most people" don’t read carefully enough. Possibly because they’re trying to skimread too much crap in a day (e.g. that article).
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It’s also an evidential limitation: we don’t have good evidence (in human models) to estimate the numbers of mutations that don’t give rise to cancer, or that cause cancers that are detected and destroyed by the body’s own defences, or cancers that grow too slowly to become a cause of death or illness. In attributing causes for cancer, we’re mostly limited to evidence about cancers that cause obvious symptoms (and therefore come to medical attention) within about 10 years of exposure to some known risk.
The thing about radiation industry workers is they are subject to more thorough medical checks than the general population, and so we have a better evidence base both for their total radiation exposure and for the possible effects. “Well protected from radiation” is true within limits. Radiation industry workers’ safe exposure limit is set at 50 mSv/year (more than 10x higher than normal exposure), and is sometimes reached (leading to mandatory stand-down), even under normal working conditions. -
get used to being wrong a LOT
Yes; and that’s one of the hardest things to learn. As I keep reminding my grad students: getting results you didn’t expect is a good thing. You’ve either just found a problem with your method, or else a limitation to the theory driving your prediction. Either way, it gives you a lot more to write about.
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Hard News: LATE: From #Slacktivism to Activism, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth […] It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it [….].
Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is the paperwork.—Terry Pratchett, Thief Of Time (p11)
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Aha! I had a niggling feeling we’d covered models of radiation dose effects before – and yes, it's back in this thread.
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Speaker: After the Apocalypse, in reply to Bevan,
He’d certainly have received several years’ normal radiation dose (of the order of 10 mSv) within a few days, but the effect on life expectancy probably isn’t as much as you’d think … not least because there are many possible causes of death that are not affected by radiation exposure. (Cheery thought, eh!)
Normal background exposure from all sources is about 4 mSv/year.
For adults, the lowest dose directly linked to an increased cancer risk is 100 mSv/year. (Though it’s not just dosage that’s important: the shorter the time period, i.e. the more intense the exposure, the greater the risk.)Reference: XKCD’s rather helpful visualisation of radiation doses
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Speaker: After the Apocalypse, in reply to Hilary Stace,
have often wondered whether it had an influence
Over 10,000km, the short answer has to be, no.
Not that that ever stops parents worrying :-/
(For comparison: I was 300km from Fukushima in 2011 … fielding calls from my parents in which I had to point out that hopping on a flight back to NZ would expose me to more additional radiation than staying a year in Tokyo.)