Timelies all!

Quiet Sunday here. After groceries, I'm getting a trim.(one or two inches off my hair, just to even things out.)

I am quite pleased with my cheesecake so far, now to see how it handles freezing. Quite a lot to do today, but I feel pretty energetic and it's not supposed to be hot, so maybe I won't leave too much undone...

Egad. HPF has asked for an astronomy party for her ninth birthday. I guess we're doing something right? Now what do we do?

Her birthday is the night of the Leonids, which will start after the 5 or 6 nine and ten year olds go to bed. And it will be cold with a full moon. We have one decent telescope. And a bunch of star cookie cutters.

I say outsource. [link] or [link]

Are we back?

I'm back. I don't know about the rest of you.

Definitely having a CFS day. I got out early and did some very necessary food shopping, but my get-up seems to have gone.

YOLO.

Well, yeah, especially if you're drinking plutonium.

YAY BACK.

the BEIR VII lifetime risk model predicts that approximately 1 person in 100 would be expected to develop cancer (solid cancer or leukemia) from a dose of 0.1 Sv above background, while approximately 42 of the 100 individuals would be expected to develop solid cancer or leukemia from other causes.

Er, wait, am I reading that right? 42% of people are going to have cancer? And if you give them all .1 Sv above background....43% of them will?

(I was posting this when we went down. I may have broken the board.)

Do I need to worry about the cousins (kinda cousins anyway, by marriage--step-cousins?) who are in Japan because the husband is a nuclear engineer in the US Navy working at Fukushima?

I'm sorry I worried you, Burrell. I meant the opposite -- that the CEOs over the nation's nuclear power plants would never visit Fukushima if it was as dangerous as the article implies. Apparently my sarcasm font was broken. If he's working there, he'll have an instrument on him that measures his exposure constantly. There are very conservative annual and lifetime limits on the amount of exposure people working with radioactive materials are allowed to receive. On the unlikely event he reaches his yearly limit, he'll be pulled out of there and not allowed to work anywhere he could be exposed.

Typo, we use the linear threshold model because it's the safest thing to do, and I'm not suggesting we stop acting as if it was true. Things like the annual and lifetime exposure limits I just mentioned are based on it. There are no reliable data, though, and what data we have leans towards the self-healing model you mention. As you've probably read, there are reputable researchers who claim a little radiation is good for you.

I remember it being listed as the most poisonous substance back when I read Guiness records for entertainment.

Plutonium's reputation as the deadliest substance on earth apparent dates back to the early days of the nuclear navy, when they we trying to make sailors treat nuclear materials seriously. Albert Stevens [link] was injected with a large amount of plutonium as part of a highly unethical experiment. He lived 20 more years.

I may have broken the board.

Nuh uh! [link]

It's weird that wanting to repost buffistas.info may make me actually register with tumblr, isn't it?

WHEW so glad to be back! Just in time for me to run off and try to accomplish some errands before it's time to watch football...