Re: [math-fun] flame oops
Gene writes: << There are also wonderful resources hidden away in books; the problem is identifying the few good ones among all the trash. Something we could do to help the bright students stuck in lousy schools is to prepare reading lists of good books and post them on the internet. The lists should include politically incorrect material, not only because much that is scientifically correct is politically incorrect, but also because then the schools might then try to have the lists banned, and that would generate publicity that no amount of money could buy.
I'm totally in favor of trying to improve the education of T.C. MITS (the common (hu)man in the street) and like the direction Gene's thought are running in. I am strongly against trying to maintain political correctness merely for the sake of not offending anyone. But let us suppose that, repeatedly, unbiased and well-performed studies of individuals of group A (e.g., an ethnicity or gender) showed them to be statistically less innately able to do task X than individuals not in group A. Perhaps that would be interesting information, but it strikes me as something that could far more likely do more harm than good if widely publicized. In particular, it would prejudice the easily-prejudiced (and that includes a lot of people) against anyone of group A, despite the fact that a very large number of group A may be vastly well-qualified at task X. * * * And I'm against "demonizing" plutonium or anything else, yet it is a very dangerous substance (I've heard convincing claims that a millionth of an ounce of Pu in one's lungs is virtually certain to cause lung cancer within 20 years). And as of about 1980, there were about 20 pounds of the stuff unaccounted for from our stockpiles of nuclear material. Now, with the breakup of the U.S.S.R. and Iraq behind us, who knows how much more is also unaccounted for. Without "demonizing" anything, I am realistically concerned that some rogue individuals or groups would gladly accumulate dangerous materials and use them to harm innocent people. And even non-rogue individuals are susceptible to bribes, threats, and simple mistakes. --Dan
Bernard Cohen, Professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh and sometime President of the Health Physics Society, offered to eat a gram of plutonium oxide or breathe a liter of plutonium oxide particles that could stay suspended in air for one minute. He said the additional hazard would be equivalent to taking a six month sabbatical in Denver. Note that about 7 1/2 tons of plutonium were dispersed in the atmosphere by the atmospheric bomb tests of the US, USSR, Britain, France and China.
Mensaje citado por: John McCarthy <jmc@steam.Stanford.EDU>:
Bernard Cohen, Professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh and sometime President of the Health Physics Society, offered to eat a gram of plutonium oxide or breathe a liter of plutonium oxide particles that could stay suspended in air for one minute. He said the additional hazard would be equivalent to taking a six month sabbatical in Denver.
Denver has enough plutonium of its own, thank you! For many years the Rocky Flats Arsenal near Boulder used to make triggers for thermonuclear weapons, but in recent years they have been trying to clean the place up a little bit. There also have been people willing to eat DDT for breakfast, just to show it's harmless. There is this unfortunate tendency to exaggerate all kinds of real or perceived dangers, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. If I recall, there were some experiments at Rochester University (maybe somewhere else) where studies were made on the matabolism of plutonium. I think the conclusion was that it is dangerous. But the Internet is loaded with literature for anyone who wants to do a survey, of varying degrees of reliability, of coures. - hvm ------------------------------------------------- Obtén tu correo en www.correo.unam.mx UNAMonos Comunicándonos
Plutonium is definitely poisonous, as are all heavy metals when they are in a biologically assimilable form. Mercury in the liquid form is so little assimilable that we handled it freely when I was in high school, and I'll bet some people swallowed some. On the other hand, the Minimata disaster killed a few tens of Japanese when methylated mercury got into Minimata Bay. Cohen's offer to eat a gram of plutonium oxide was based on the oxide being not biologically assimilable. In the 1950s experiments were made with dogs, and the level of poisonousness of plutonium was well calibrated. Whether the contamination of the Rocky Flats area is significantly harmful to human health is questionable if it depends on the "linear hypothesis" that the harm from radiation at low levels can be determined by linear extrapolation from high doses. The evidence is against it, but the regulators persist in using it. Cohen mentioned Denver because its 5,000 foot altitude means that people there are exposed to more cosmic radiation than people closer to sea level. If the linear hypothesis were correct Denver would have a high rate of cancer, and it doesn't. How does the amount of radiation in the vicinity of Rocky Flats compare with the radiation in the same area from cosmic rays?
Mensaje citado por: John McCarthy <jmc@steam.Stanford.EDU>:
How does the amount of radiation in the vicinity of Rocky Flats compare with the radiation in the same area from cosmic rays?
Having spent my childhood near Denver (altitude 5000 feet), I have now spent a comparable or longer time living in Puebla (altitude 7000 feet) and in both cases there were worse things than cosmic rays to worry about. The studies have even extended to Lake Titicaca (altitude 13,000? I'm not sure); by and large the varying radiation dosages at different altitudes haven't seemed to have had gross effects. The Rocky Flats story has never been fully public, activists have certainly used it as a pretext, and the furor has more or less died down. One of the complaints was that they were transporting the finished pits in piper cubs relative to who knows what regulations governing the movement of hazardous materials. Of somewhat more serious concern, although mostly to the health of the employees, were the occasional plutonium fires which covered the laboratories with plutonium oxide which had to be mopped up. The area has never been much good for pasturage (or anything else except scenery, which is why the plant was located there in the first place}, so there shouldn't be too much concern over concentrating plutonium from grazing. But the area is a target for housing development, which makes plutonium-bearing soil a possible source of higher than normal radiation. The metal as a simple soil contaminant is otherwise probably negligible. It is one thing to say that all heavy metals are toxic (some may have held mercury in their hands or put in their mouths, but in chemistry we sometimes de-amalgamated silver coins by heating them in a Bunsen burner; you sure couldn't do that in a chemistry lab nowadays), but some are more toxic than others. As I understand, plutonium likes to settle in bones along with or instead of calcium. Being radioactive (an alpha emitter?) its physiological effects are surely different than those of lead, which makes neurons malfunction or whatever. Another problem from which Colorado has suffered is the tailings from all those mines. It must have been quite a problem; every farm roundabout where we lived had its little settling pond to get the mud out of the irrigation water. In the 30's they had fallen into disuse, but the water was still pretty murky. When I was in college, they dynamited the smokestack of the Globe Smelter, which had been a prominent Denver landmark. Well, we got the runoff, but most of the tailings lay where they were dumped, containing all kinds of unrecovered minerals. And, emitting radon, which was later a problem when people started levelling off the terrain and setting up housing developments. Of course towns grew up around the mines, and as population grew and mines were abandoned, it was a temptation to use the vacant land. In any event, this carried with it more radiation than the cosmic rays were delivering. Or, rather, in addition to them. Still, I don't like that professor's declamation. Cosmic rays irradiate the body uniformly, whereas ingesting plutonium procedes by an entirely different mechanism; it concentrates internally and persists. Hence the proposed experiment seems to lack planning and controls. Today he might find an assortment of worthwhile universities at which to spend his sabbatical, but had he offered to do this experiment a hundred years ago he could have died of boredom, not radiation. - hvm ------------------------------------------------- Obtén tu correo en www.correo.unam.mx UNAMonos Comunicándonos
As a person who actually owns some plutonium (it occurs naturally in beryllium-uranium deposits, and can thus be owned), I'm not all that afraid of it. As a part of periodictabletable.com, we have perhaps a microgram or more of it, as part of a rock, in foam, sealed, behind lead. I check the whole area around the table with the geiger counter regularly, just to make sure nothing is above background levels. The element we are most afraid of is actually our non-radioactive Cesium sample. It's also the most beautiful, a wonderful liquid gold. If it even broke loose of the capsule it was in, we would have to deal with fantastically corrosive Cesium Hydroxide after the fires and explosions had stopped. We keep it locked up under Lexan plate. If you want radioactive danger, look no further than a smoke detector. The Americium inside is just as lethal as Plutonium. You can top that, though, by getting a static brush from a photography shop. The key ingredient of a static brush is Polonium. It's the most toxic thing you can buy in a store -- 250,000,000,000 times more lethal than hydrogen cyanide. Theo does extra research on the table, and he looked up the government standards at the NRC for many elements, including polonium, about various shipping standards. The NRC recommended that no more than 22 grams of polonium be shipped at a time. A calculation showed that they had erred... the actual safe shipping amount is a 1000th of that. Polonium is so radioactive that a 0.50 gram sample will reach temperatures greater than 500 degrees all by itself. The NRC sent Theo a nice note of thanks for catching the error in their official standards. On the other end of the scale, there are radioactive elements that have very, very long half lives. Bismuth was recently added to this list. Carbon and Potassium are much more radioactive. (John Walker wrote a nice article on Potassium at http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/k40.html) Calcium 48 .187% 6E+18 yr http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/Ca.html Chromium 50 4.3% 1.8E+17 yr http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/Cr.html Zinc 70 .6% 5E+14 yr http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/Zn.html Selenium 82 8.73% 1.08E+20 yr http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/Se.html Krypton 78 .35% 2.0E+21 yr http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/Kr.html Rubidium 87 27.8% 4.75E+10 yr http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/Rb.html Zirconium 96 2.8% 3.9E+19 yr http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/Zr.html Molybdenum 100 9.63% 1.2E+19 yr http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/Mo.html Cadmium 113 12.22% 9.3E+15 yr http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/Cd.html Indium 115 95.71% 4.41E+14 yr http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/In.html Tellurium 128 31.6% 7.7E+24 yr http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/Te.html Xenon 136 8.9% 9.3E+19 yr http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/Xe.html So ... Tellurium 128 31.6% 7.7E+24 yr ... that isn't very radioactive at all. However, if tiny amount gets into your system, you'll suffer from months of dreadful smelling breath and appalling body odor if the dose is sublethal. So many things to worry about. Still, the next time you're near a blazing building, and the smoke detector has stopped going off, don't run into the flames! The cloud of vaporized Americium might kill you. --Ed Pegg Jr, www.mathpuzzle.com
I thought Denver was mentioned because of the risk of being slaughtered. During a 3-month sabbatical in Boulder, 20 tears ago, it seemed that the news mentioned a homicide there each week, with remarkable regularity. R. On Sun, 11 May 2003, John McCarthy wrote:
Plutonium is definitely poisonous, as are all heavy metals when they are in a biologically assimilable form. Mercury in the liquid form is so little assimilable that we handled it freely when I was in high school, and I'll bet some people swallowed some. On the other hand, the Minimata disaster killed a few tens of Japanese when methylated mercury got into Minimata Bay. Cohen's offer to eat a gram of plutonium oxide was based on the oxide being not biologically assimilable. In the 1950s experiments were made with dogs, and the level of poisonousness of plutonium was well calibrated.
Whether the contamination of the Rocky Flats area is significantly harmful to human health is questionable if it depends on the "linear hypothesis" that the harm from radiation at low levels can be determined by linear extrapolation from high doses. The evidence is against it, but the regulators persist in using it.
Cohen mentioned Denver because its 5,000 foot altitude means that people there are exposed to more cosmic radiation than people closer to sea level. If the linear hypothesis were correct Denver would have a high rate of cancer, and it doesn't.
How does the amount of radiation in the vicinity of Rocky Flats compare with the radiation in the same area from cosmic rays?
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--- mcintosh@servidor.unam.mx wrote:
Mensaje citado por: John McCarthy <jmc@steam.Stanford.EDU>:
Bernard Cohen, Professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh and sometime President of the Health Physics Society, offered to eat a gram of plutonium oxide or breathe a liter of plutonium oxide particles that could stay suspended in air for one minute. He said the additional hazard would be equivalent to taking a six month sabbatical in Denver.
Denver has enough plutonium of its own, thank you! For many years the
There was another side to this offer. Ralph Nader or Amory Lovins or some such would have to ingest an energy equivalent amount of fossil fuel. Would you rather drink 1 µg of plutonium or 5 g of gasoline? It has been known for over a decade that small amounts of radiation are beneficial, the optimum exposure being about 10 rem/year. The reason may be the stimulation of DNA repair mechanisms, which then go on and continue to repair DNA damaged through other causes.
Rocky Flats Arsenal near Boulder used to make triggers for thermonuclear weapons, but in recent years they have been trying to clean the place up a little bit.
Has anyone even tried to clean up a coal ash waste dump? It seems like the disposal of nuclear waste is far more tightly regulated than the disposal of coal waste, even though the latter contains heavy metals that remain toxic forever, compared to fission products which have a half-life of a few decades. Burning coal releases its embedded radon (from the decay of the 1 ppm uranium it contains); a coal burning plant releases more radiation than a properly functioning nuclear plant. If the Nuclear Regulartory Commission were in charge of Grand Central Station, they would have to shut it down; the uranium in its granite structure exposes to public to unpermissible amounts of radiation. Reference: Petr Beckmann, "The Health Hazards of not Going Nuclear".
There also have been people willing to eat DDT for breakfast, just to show it's harmless.
Arthur Robinson asserts that in fact DDT is harmless, and that the allegation that it is responsible for the death of birds due to thin egg shells is bogus. He claims there is no scientific evidence for this. Challange: Prove Robinson is wrong by providing citations to the primary scientific literature.
There is this unfortunate tendency to exaggerate all kinds of real or perceived dangers, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. If I recall, there were some experiments at Rochester University (maybe somewhere else) where studies were made on the matabolism of plutonium. I think the conclusion was that it is dangerous.
Every chemical is toxic. For sucrose the LD50 (the dosage which kills 50% of the subjects) for a 170 pound rat is 5 kg. Even too much water (1 gal is too much) causes death by hyponatremia. There doesn't seem to be a problem with public exposure to plutonium. But I remember Cambridge MA from 26 years ago. The air was full of awful smelling industrial effluents. [That's one place I hope never to visit again.]
But the Internet is loaded with literature for anyone who wants to do a survey, of varying degrees of reliability, of coures.
- hvm
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Not math, but maybe fun:
=Eugene Salamin Every chemical is toxic. For sucrose the LD50 (the dosage which kills 50% of the subjects) for a 170 pound rat is 5 kg.
And I thought the one I killed in my garage this weekend was big! (Maybe they should lay off the sugar?<;-)
I just returned from two weeks away from email to discover yet another treasure-trove of right wing political flamage (rhymes with "fromage") in my math-fun mailbox. Each time this happens I practically have to restrain myself physically, but I guess I've finally been provoked into making some comment. Stop reading now if you don't want to be bothered. The so-called "politically correct" point of view is not the only point of view that occasionally conveniently construes facts to fit an agenda. There's plenty of evidence of this from other locations in the political universe, e.g. creationism to name an obvious one. I take it as practically axiomatic that "political reasoning" almost always works this way. The purpose is to convince people of the correctness or righteousness of a particular point of view, so it is pretty rare that in doing so the proponent gives adequate consideration to the legitimate concerns of differing points of view. In my book a truly scientific way of proceeding doesn't seek to convince, particularly by bludgeoning, it just seeks to propose and question. If you want to question whether, e.g., there's enough evidence to demonstrate a causal connection between DDT in the environment and egg shells becoming thin, that's great, but starting with the conclusion that there isn't and that there's some kind of vast "lefty" conspiracy to cover it up doesn't seem all that productive, or especially likely. There are legitimate questions about the best course of action when facts support theories less than completely conclusively. This depends on the potential consequences of acting or not acting in some particular way, and even those consequences are usually impossible to predict at all accurately. So does that mean inaction is always best? Probably not. Should DDT not have been banned, or should no action have been taken to reduce CFCs or be taken to reduce emission of greenhouse gasses just because there are multiple interpretations of the existing evidence and not everyone is in complete agreement? I don't think so. Should production of materials that can be fashioned into nuclear weapons be encouraged in a world where human motivation and behavior are as unpredictable as they are, and the stability of any institutions that might safeguard such materials cannot be guaranteed? We all have our opinions. Without detailed knowledge of underlying mechanisms, it is awfully difficult to establish causal connections, but that is what people and all kinds of institutions have to do every day. Without predictive abilities that vastly exceed what is possible for humans, it is impossible to exclude consequences and side effects that may seem unlikely based on a superficial analysis of current temporary conditions. We have to act (or not act) on partial information and on statistical correlations, and on some risk-weighted model of what outcomes may occur. Sometimes it will turn out that people/organizations/countries react to something that turns out to have been based on a theory that is difficult to support later. (I might mention the supposed presence of WMD in a certain middle eastern country as an example). Whether everyone supports such action or not, or whether the action (or inaction) turned out to be appropriate is not the question. What's real is that people and organizations have to put their best foot forward on the basis of partial and frequently faulty information, and in the case of organizations, whoever the de facto leaders are are the ones who get to (or have to) make those decisions. Things get ugly and more complicated when people start selectively using or even fabricating "facts" to fit their agendas. Twas ever thus. Even in math, proof is a matter of convincing fallible people (onesself included) of the correctness of an argument. Luckily this usually doesn't occur by intimidation, name-calling and insult. Flaws in supposed proofs do turn up from time to time, and who is exempt from resorting to trusting the reasoning of others they suppose to be more competent than themselves sometimes, or from making mistakes themselves? Shel
--- Shel Kaphan <sjk@kaphan.org> wrote:
I just returned from two weeks away from email to discover yet another treasure-trove of right wing political flamage (rhymes with "fromage") in my math-fun mailbox. Each time this happens I practically have to restrain myself physically, but I guess I've finally been provoked into making some comment. Stop reading now if you don't want to be bothered. ...
Your message goes beyond requesting members of math-fun to refrain from posting political content, and proceeds to provide considerable new political content, although perhaps not of the right wing sort. Gene Salamin __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com
At 12:54 PM 5/28/2003 -0700, Eugene Salamin wrote: ...
Your message goes beyond requesting members of math-fun to refrain from posting political content, and proceeds to provide considerable new political content, although perhaps not of the right wing sort.
Gene Salamin
To be clear about this, I am not personally opposed to the posting of political content on math-fun, but I have been resisting responding to it for several years, because many members prefer not to see it. If there's an agreed ban on politically oriented posts, and people make such posts anyway, that just makes those posts even less attractive because even though one may disagree intensely with them, responding in kind is discouraged. I admit to having violated that norm in response to what I perceived as considerable provocation over a long period of time. I also find it somewhat irritating when people request no political posts while at the same time posting their own, and I have previously pointed out that self-contradiction (while attempting not to fall into the same trap). What I was reacting to (one thing, anyway) is well characterized by one of several out-of-band replies I received to my first message that concurred with what I said:
What drives me nuts is the way things like this are so often phrased in an implicit "...as all of us right-thinking people believe" context, as though silence in reply will be taken as agreement. The lack of recognition that reasonable people can disagree is what makes these posts so unpleasant.
Shel Kaphan
--- asimovd@aol.com wrote:
And I'm against "demonizing" plutonium or anything else, yet it is a very dangerous substance ...
But not as dangeros as botulin toxin, which is much likely to be encountered, say from spoiled food.
Without "demonizing" anything, I am realistically concerned that some rogue individuals or groups would gladly accumulate dangerous materials and use them to harm innocent people. And even non-rogue individuals are susceptible to bribes, threats, and simple mistakes.
--Dan
But these threats are from nuclear materials in countries other than the United States, so they cannot be mitigated by our avoidance of nuclear energy. In response to proliferation threats, the Energy Department is proposing reactor systems in which the fuel is reprocessed on-site. Non-weapons grade uranium enters the facility. Fission products leave the facility. Transuranics remain at the facility, and are consumed in the reactor. ( http://energy.inel.gov/gen-iv/ ) Gene __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. http://search.yahoo.com
participants (8)
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asimovd＠aol.com -
Ed Pegg Jr -
Eugene Salamin -
John McCarthy -
Marc LeBrun -
mcintosh＠servidor.unam.mx -
Richard Guy -
Shel Kaphan