John Cuthber

Why read the Daily Mail?

One interpretation would be that none of them is an expert.

The one who says he's a security expert is a liar; if he were then he would know about fire doors that can only be opened from the inside and have an alarm. An expert in nutrition would tell you that the merits of margarine and butter are not fully sorted out. If the expert's solution is too expensive then what you asked for is too expensive. (Or broadly equivalently, you didn't remember to include price in the specification.- sometimes the expert will tell you what you want is impossible)

By whom?

Like I said, tell them what you want and rely on them knowing how.

Allowing anyone in, then selectively banning theists is, effectively, an admissions' selection policy.

What would be the point? An actor has to look real. If his expressions changed faster than the rest of us they wouldn't look right.

What would you say about a club that let anyone join, but threw out the ones who were black? Is that OK, because it's not an admission policy?

He could exist. Or he may be a composite of various real people who existed, or he could be made up. a) is true, but unhelpful b) is tautology or begging the question,(depending how you look at it) , and thus unhelpful c) is unsubstantiated so, unless you can show it's true it's unhelpful d) is also begging the question e) is fairly nearly redundant- from the point of view of one (rather loose) definition, almost everyone in the Middle East at that time was Semitic. In any event it doesn't get us any closer to the answer to the question. f) The Islamic texts are too late to be any use- all they show is that the author of those texts believed in Christ, that's not evidence that He was real. g) Where is this documented? Is it written by someone independent and contemporary? if not, it's not evidence. h) the Bible isn't trustworthy as evidence here as it would be begging the question.

In principle, no. Of course the level of discussion depends on how much you know about their field of expertise. If there's anything you need to discuss, it's because you didn't specify what you wanted properly. And, if they are the expert, what's the point of the discussion? You are just going to end up agreeing with them because they are the ones who know what they are talking about.

Our rules require that people justify their claims. that's pretty much a debarment to most religion. On the other hand, anyone taking action against us would probably also be in breach of the same rules on the basis of our non- belief. A rule that says "all welcome unless you are under 6 feet tall" is discriminatory on grounds of sex. A rule that says "all welcome unless you can't justify your beliefs" is discriminatory on grounds of religion. The fact is that we (probably) turf out more theists than atheists and that puts us in a legally awkward position. We might be asked to explain why. Saying "they break the rules more often" isn't necessarily a valid excuse because our rules are (almost) bound to affect theists more than atheists. It's like saying that we debarred a lot of women- not because they were women, but because they weren't 6 ft. the best defence would be to point out that nobody needs to mention religion; if they did so, and can't support their case then they, knowingly, broke the rules.

I think that's the period during which most of the stuff was lost. Check google. I don't think they will change the fact that 1 it was a monumental cockup 2 the ecosystem will survive- it will probably hardly "notice"

We do have a "selection" process- albeit after we let people in. If they don't follow the rules we throw them out. While we don't throw people out for their religious beliefs, we might be open to a challenge on the basis of indirect discrimination. A "tall people" club might be in trouble if it had the same entry height requirement for men and women because , while it doesn't exactly stop women joining, it would make it more difficult. This sort of thing is never simple once the lawyers get involved.

It's very difficult to make assessments like that- after all, it doesn't matter much how radioactive the ground is if the material is an alpha emitter and the range of those particles is only an inch or so in the air; the radiation will never get past your ankles- but if you breathe thee material in, it's suddenly a whole lot more of a problem. Lets make a comparison and, once again I will use potassium. About 2.5% of the earth's crust is potassium. It's reasonable to guess that Central park is near to that average. Let's also assume that, simply because the ground isn't mirror smooth, the caesium they spread gets mixed into about the top 1 cm of soil. (The first shower of rain will probably pretty much ensure that anyway). So there's something like 1600 by 1600 square metres in a square mile. That's 2.56 million square metres. A 1 cm depth of soil is 0.01 metres so the volume of the top layer is 25600 cubic metres. Typical soil density is about 1.2 tonnes per metre cubed so that's about 30,000 tonnes of soil. At 2.5% potassium that's 770 tonnes of potassium or so. Which means it has an activity of 770 times a million to convert to grams times 31 to get Bq That's 24 G Bq or so of potassium. And they are talking of adding 2 grams of Caesium which is about 6 T Bq. So, the additional radiation from the added Cs would raise the background from potassium by a factor of 250 or so. That's clearly not good. Of course, potassium isn't the only source of background radiation. Now we need some idea of how bad that radiation is for you. This has lots of figures. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Safety-and-Security/Radiation-and-Health/Radiation-and-Life/ For example they say the typical gamma ray dose from "terrestrial an house" is of the order of 600 µSv per year Now that includes the effects of the potassium in the environment; there are other contributors. So the effect of the Cs cloud would be about 250 times bigger than that. That's about 0.15 Sv per year. Undoubtedly, that's quite a lot; roughly twice as much a the upper bound for radiation therapy or about half as much as the workers at Fukushima were exposed to (though that was a short term dose so it's not strictly comparable). There are a lot of assumptions and uncertainties about all those calculations but it seems to be the right ballpark. A couple of grams of Caesium would make a square mile or so of land pretty undesirable as a place to live (though I'd not worry much about walking across it). However Fukushima lost most of its material to the sea rather than the land surface,so it got mixed not just into the top cm or so, but into the whole depth of the ocean. That's a big factor. Also, even if it were spread across land 8 kilograms could contaminate about 4000 square miles- an area about 60 miles square. By an amusing coincidence it seems that we live about 60 miles apart. have a look at google maps, zoom out as far as you can (I don't think it will let you see the whole earth). 60 miles square isn't very big. There's a lot to be said for not contaminating 4000 square miles, but we do have about 60 million to choose from.

Not that it matters much to the point... The indices are often nearly integers (or "simple" fractions like 1/2 or 2/3). But the equilibrium constants have units of concentration raised to some power. You can get constants of things like [(square root of kilogram) per (metre to the power one and a half)]. They look weird- but, as Bignose points out, they wok just fine.

Tell them what you want done; let them decide how to do it.

In my opinion, he's dishonest. In clear point of fact it's wrong. On a like-for-like basis i.e. the same number of nuclear disintegrations per second, potassium does slightly more damage. It's true that, on a gram for gram basis caesium is much more dangerous- but that factor was already accounted for in the figures I gave, If the figure here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster is right then "Between 21 March and mid-July around 2.7 × 1016 Bq of caesium-137 (about 8.4 kg) entered the ocean". The mass of the ocean is something like 10^20 kg and it holds something like 10^16 kg of potassium. That's quite a dilution. 8 vs 10,000,000,000,000,000. Incidentally, I just realised, I made a mistake in my calculation earlier- I will correct it. Also, at the risk of looking like an intellectual snob, have a look at what it says directly under the video on TY. "Steven Starr is a medical laboratory technician [MT ( ASCP) ] , scientific program director of the clinical laboratory at the University of Columbia, Missouri. He obtained his degree at the School of Health Professions in 1985 and has worked in many hospitals for 27 years." The guy is a lab technician; fair enough- but it's no reason to suppose that he knows anything about nuclear physics. If you search for his name and the word Fukushima, google gives you this warning "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe. Learn more" Why has he asked Google to remove records of what he has said in the past?

He does make that assertion (at about 4:10 if anyone wants to look at it) He doesn't show that it is true. And he's rather missing the point. He points out that a gram of potassium is about a zillion* times less radioactive than a gram of caesium- which is true. But since the comparisons I have made already take account of that difference the point isn't relevant. If I wanted to be sensationalist, I could have said that urine is roughly a thousand zillion times more radioactive than the Fukushima plume (the ratio of the masses of the radioactive materials). In the same way, I could then go on to say he's talking about the difference between a thousand zillion sticks of dynamite and an atom bomb. That's roughly 25 million billion tonnes of dynamite vs an atom bomb (The only nukes used in anger have been about 15000 tonne equivalent) What we are talking about are two materials that are chemically fairly similar, tend to get mistaken for one another by biological systems and are both beta emitters. The big difference is that the beta emission from potassium actually carries more energy (1.33 MeV (and sometimes 1.46) as opposed to 1.18 MeV) so it would do (slightly) more damage. * In this case, I'm using the term zillion for the ratio of specific activities of caesium potassium. It's roughly a tenth of a billion trillion. 3.2TBq/g vs 31 Bq/g [oops, got the prefix wrong]

"What does it feel like to die of slow blood loss?" Obviously, nobody knows (or,at least, those who know can't tell you).

OK, for a start, it's a misuse of the word diaspora. Also, have you seen children playing games? They too, "pout, squirm, wretch at a moment's notice." So it's hard to believe it's all that difficult. However, the existence of stage schools suggests that at least some of their ability is learned.

Not always.

I think Phi pretty much nailed it. Also http://news.rutgers.edu/feature/letting-go-soul/20150310#.VQSwpY6sWSr

why no capital B in LaTeX? Because then it would be laBtex

Ok, Seawater contains about 400 ppmn of potassium. So a cubic metre contains about 200 grams. At 31 Bq per gram that's 6200 Bq/m^3 So the natural radioactivity of seawater (from just the potassium- there are other radioactive materials present) is about a hundred times more than this "plume" I presume that, since the life in the ocean is used to the radiation present, adding a percent or so to it won't make much difference. Do you think that there's some means by which the biology can cope with 6200 Bq/tonne, but not 6300?

OK, show me a test that was scientifically valid and showed that it worked. While you are at it, you might as well claim the million dollars here. http://web.randi.org/the-million-dollar-challenge.html