While this is much, much better than what the (german) media has on this, I still miss the one thing I would really want: To actually know what this means for the people living near the plant, or just somewhere in Japan. Will everyone living under 10km away get cancer and die? Will eastern Japan have to be evacuated? Will nothing change at all, except for a small rise in cancer rates for people who live next to the plant?
Will nothing change at all, except for a small rise in cancer rates for people who live next to the plant?
Nothing will change at all, even for people who live right next to the plant.
Someone sitting at the front gate of the plant for the past week would have absorbed approximately 100 mSv of radiation. This is a significant amount -- equal to the recommended annual limit for radiation workers -- but too low to cause radiation sickness (symptoms of acute radiation sickness start at between 250 and 500 mSv).
The cancer risk from radiation is roughly 0.01 cancers per Sievert, so this individual would have a 0.1% increase in his chance of getting cancer. People living further away would naturally have even lower probabilities of developing cancer.
Based on the population density of the surrounding area, there is a low probability of any cancers being caused by the Fukushima nuclear incidents, even if the residents had not been evacuated.
(Does this mean that the residents should not have been evacuated? No. It means that the evacuations were a precautionary measure to keep them safe in case the situation got worse than it has in fact gotten.)
It would have been helpful to get that number on that chart - just because it would help dispel bad information about the backscatter x-rays as well. The regular amount of radiation emitted by one of those machines is 0.1µSv (according to the chart - equivalent to eating a banana). The supposed mistake would have made the emissions 10 times higher (couldn't find a real µSv reading, just the 10x statement[1]) which would be 1µSv, or the same as using a CRT monitor for a year.
Nobody is living within 10km, however as of right spending one month living nearby would be approximately the same radiation as taking one flight from NY to Japan.
"Making iPods is better than giving to charity."
"Making iPods is more important than caring for your children."
"I want to be a pescetarian just because Steve is one."
"He stole from his partner, no problem though. He still is the greatest."
"He became so cool by doing drugs and getting into eastern religions."
Really, this HAS to be satire.
What really helped me understand the way Steve Jobs (probably) is was reading the memories of early Apple employees at http://folklore.org/.
I am really passionate about this topic. I am double majoring in Japanese studies and CompSci and try to mix the two as best as I can. I wrote a web app for collaborative translation of classical Japanese texts for one my courses and it was a complete success (a book partly produced by the program via a TeX template will soon be release). I also wrote several other web apps, for dictionaries and handwriting recognition, for example. One thing I usually hear from teachers and other students is that they love these programs, but have no idea how to get them. They usually don't want to learn programming themselves, but would like to have someone who can program something simple if they tell them to. Maybe this problem is restricted to my case (German University of Tübingen), but there is no one here in the faculty (of the Asian studies department) who could teach simple programming, or even state why it is needed. Instead, I have seen people ignoring technological helpers (morphological parsers, programming languages like Perl, Python or Ruby) because they are "too complicated". These people will still do everything by hand (or sometimes with word macros) that could be done by a simple program, and will waste months of time.
Another aspect I like about introducing programming to the humanities is that it can act as a grounding element to the sometimes lofty ideas that people tend to have. A lot of things in the humanities (like the interpretation of a medieval Japanese texts) seem extremely vague, but are actually only extremely complicated. Quantitative analysis of a text can give you the means to pass qualitative judgments.
As Ruby instance variables are private, you need a getter to read them. Doing it this way (making everything private, but giving you simple methods for creating getters and setters) gives you the best of both worlds: Encapsulation and simple and concise code. attr_accessor simply creates the boilerplate code you would write yourself or use an IDE for in other languages. If you want to change a getter, just write a new method with the name of the variable and do whatever you want. This makes it easy to change your class logic later, but won't fill your classes with generic getter/setter code.
I love OpenID and use it as much as possible. The only problem I have with it is the URL-as-username approach it takes. When a site asks me for the URL, I don't use OpenID as I always forget it. If the site asks me to "log in with Google using OpenID" or something similar I will use it. I don't see how people say that OpenID is a solution in search of a problem: I DO have the problem that I don't want to create a new account for every site I use. The problem is there, and some uses of OpenID really do solve it.
The reason for the URL as username is that OpenID originated on Livejournal, where users have their own URL (i.e. mine is andrewducker.livejournal.com)
It therefore made sense to use URL endpoints as identifiers, as you could bounce people to their authorising server incredibly easily. Doing it via email address would be much harder (where would my email, andrew@ducker.org.uk, be authorised by?).
It's caught on amongst people who have URLs (bloggers, journallers, etc.. It hasn't caught on amongst people who don't (everyone else).
seconded: login proliferation is a real problem that i face all the time. i've been on the web for very nearly 15 years at this point, and there's no numbering the accounts i've created in that time, let alone all the ones i actually still use. OpenID isn't be perfect, but most of the really egregious issues i've seen with it have revolved around sites not being willing to commit to it.
I have Galaxy S I9000 (european version) and installed a custom rom on it a few days ago. It was not that hard, at least not much harder than installing roms on my G1. You just root the device by flashing some special kernel, then put some files on the sdcard, boot into recovery and you're done. If you are still on 2.1 you can even skip the rooting part.
