nuclear redux

Slashdot's carrying a story referencing the debunking of Elena's motorcycle rides through the Chernobyl area. Curiously enough, the thread with the debunking seems to be fixated on the revelation that Elena is married. This prompts the quip on slashdot: So, the lesson to be learned from this is that hot single science chicks with motorcycles and coolness to bike through radioactive deadzones on their own don't really exist except in the dreams of the slashdot collective mind.


The veracity of Elena's story aside, it is interesting to think about the downstream effects of the chernobyl disaster. The Vanderbilt study seems to indicate that the effects of the radiation release have been largely exaggerated. The primary statistically relevant effects over time are an increase in Thyroid cancer in those who were young children at the time of the incident. Children born six months after the incident report no ill effects traced to Chernobyl. Furthermore, it was found that the early high dose fatalities were primary linked to skin lesions covering greater than 50% of the body's surface, and also some quantity due to radiation induced altered functionality of the intestines. This would seem to indicate that some of the most vulnerable cell types are skin tissue and intestinal tissue, understandable due to the large rate of cell division (referred to with the term mitotic index). One possible therapy may be to treat high radiation dose survivors with drugs with strong antimitotic properties, that however do not induce apoptosis or more dangerous mitotic abnormailities, across the board (or more specifically in skin and intestinal tissue). The argument would be that tissue is able to repair damage from radiation, but it must be given time to do so. Rapidly dividing cells may not have the opportunity to do enough repair, and thus have too many unrecoverable errors. A preliminary google and scirus search indicate that much research is being done on such compounds, albeit with strong cytotoxicity. Perhaps drugs that have been abandoned for cancer research because of their low cytotoxicity should also be targeted at radiation exposure survivors.

If indeed, Chernobyl is a worst case scenario of a nuclear accident, from the most dangerous/unstable type of nuclear power plant, then we may have even less to worry about than previously thought. The epidemiological effects are better understood.

This thought comes to mind. If radiation exposure is understood and treatable in a public health context, and systems are in place to deal with such exposure, does that make nuclear theater weapons more humane?

For fun, google the phrases "theatre weapons" and "theater weapons".

We are Art

Or so it was declared by the members of the not not fabulous Magnetic Fields at their concert tonight, somewhere between melodies from their current album, the Pieces of April soundtrack and favourites from 69 love songs, and accidental eulogies for the not quite dead Tony Bennett.

For the record, I've never seen an audience converted so fast from clapping to hissing and snapping fingers upon the request of the band. So if you go to one of their concerts, dare I say hiss and snap - and you will get smiles.

It was also announced that Daniel Handler (a good friend of Stephen Merrit) has today finished The Grim Grotto. So yes fans, he has now turned it up to eleven.

Democracies are supposed to be led by intellectuals

One notable event this week is the selection of a Sikh economist as the new Prime Minister of India - also the first non-Hindu Prime Minister of India.

Sikh !=Hindu.

This kingmaking almost twenty years after the Prime Minister to be, Sonia Gandhi's mother in law Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation for the storming of the Golden Temple. That Sonia gives up the Prime Ministership in the face of primarily BJP and Hindu fundamentalist opposition over her status as somebody not born Indian - and to somebody from a minority group that has bad blood with her family - says something about her party's willingness to heal old wounds, and speaks of a country comfortable with diversity.

Chekov gets Punked

Ok, it's the other way around. I was there, but sadly am not in any of the pictures.

Blogger users are getting gmail invites...

Consequently, I no longer need an invite.

Cybrid Vigor

I want a gmail account. If anybody has a spare invitation, I would me much obliged.

I sat in Borders and read several magazines today. And people wonder why libraries are dying.

Wired had a reference to dodgeball.com - a social networking site for mobile networking. I'm skeptical as to the utility of a social networking app that requires you to manually enter your location - it seems like a clone of upoc.com's "mobile community site."

Or to put it other terms, upoc:dodgeball::sixdegrees:friendster. I am sure if this becomes popular, we are going to have another orcit.

So I'm signed up anyways. sheesh.


A certain friend I find is using a AIM handle referencing a poem from the early nineteenth century. That (among other things) makes me think of cybrids.

-=-

The UN Security Council passed a resolution 14-0 (with the US abstaining) that criticized Israel for activities currently underway in Gaza.

Meanwhile, a genocide continues in Sudan.
I'm thinking right now we're in a PAX HELP WANTED.

Dream thou - and from thy sleep

Then wake to weep.

Getting old

I have recently been unable to get this song from my childhood out of my head.

The only part of the song I can remember is the refrain.

What would you do if you saw someone now humming along to "That crazy old man from China?"

codemonkey codemonkey give me a clue

For quite a while now I've been trying to find an "easy" way to parse the data I have in iCal, modify it, and then upload it to a server. I have several work calendars, and I would like to combine the work calendars into one calendar, that I could put up on the web, appropriately filtered to remove sensitive information (client names for instance).

I think I've found two sources of information for this endeavor - one using perl, and the other using python.

Python I could use to interface with ical on my mac, but that just feels really icky, as I want to maintain platform independence as much as possible. Sample code is however included. That's useful.

The Perl solution would involve a gaggle of in development modules, which offers a similar dependency problem, though notably independent of Apple.

Why Do I worry about apple? Notes like this, which comment on current bugs that have been fixed for months in internal code repositories, but haven't been pushed out yet. Which in and of itself makes me wonder if an appropriate metaphor for software development should be checkpointing - namely doing releases on a fast time based schedule as opposed to a feature based schedule. OpenBSD's got this down. Microsoft has - Microsoft has some obscene amalgam of a feature and date based release schedule. Then there's Apple. The yearly release schedule for major software they currently have for their system, coupled with random major code drops - quicktime, safari, iApps, is getting irritating. Here's my solution:

Have a major release of OS X twice a year.

Charge for one, make the second a free update. Make it one significant kernel upgrade per year if necessary (though I'm not convinced even that level of conservatism is necessary), but DO update the userland (the apps for instance) twice a year.

that is all.

an ode to that white powder I found in my drink one morning

A study finds that caffeine provides the best effects over a day by being taken slowly, and with more as the day comes closer to an end.

This probably means that a slow release caffeine pill, set to release more and more caffeine towards the end of the day, should work particularly well.

Better Living Through Sophistry

Alan started using the word "clubbing" in a non-dance context, and we simultaneously thought of baby seals.

Graffiti on buildings is more interesting when interspersed with stencils of Hitchcock.

Golden Unicorn has the best fried taro cake I've ever had. The wall carvings looked suspiciously like dragons, not unicorns.

It has been mentioned that Hawai'i has an excellent dish made from taro that looks purple. This dish is also sold in a day old variety, at the same price.

It is said that New York City somehow draws violence to it. This is why: I was in a diner in the village, and heard the seventh consecutive rendition of Jeremiah had a bullfrog come out of a broken jukebox.

After a year, I see Antonia again, for two hours, on the dance floor.

The Maitre d' at the Dim Sum place had one answer to the question of when we were going to be seated, regardless of when or how often any of us asked, "Ten minutes." Then we had Annie go ask her. She got the response, "Go upstairs [to the dining room]."

The Future King of England alerted me to a video circulating on livejournal of a german forklift training video. Very old school Peter Jacksonesque.

India's next Prime Minister will be a white woman originally from Italy - who married into a family that is often spoken of in the same breath as the Kennedys. Arnold, are you listening?

Alan also pointed out the curious ability to identify favorable character traits in aficionados of red bean paste.

The juxtaposition of bacon, shrimp, and mayonnaise is the clear sign of an advanced civilization.

A lament to brushing my teeth before noticing that the glass with Tang wasn't empty yet.