I have an outstanding hypothesis that suggests that even if the opoid epidemic went totally away tomorrow, this is not the steepest increase, and the increase will continue for the next 20 years.
The suicide rate should bump itself up substantially above 50 per 100k, especially for younger demographics. It should then plateau for the foreseeable future.
I really really really really hope that I am wrong. We have folks with no vision in charge, and they drove a big ship into the rocks: my hypothesis is that this is onset/ramp-up of body count.
I wonder about auto-correlation and repeated sequences of runs. If it isn't totally random, then it is partly not random. What is the nature of the non-randomness?
The f*ed up part is the impact on the fetus. The dosage level before harm or death for kids is 10x smaller than for adults. For babies in the womb it is way smaller than that.
These folks may have covered up something that resulted in the miscarriage, or birth defects of the child of any pregnant woman who stood near that closet for just a few minutes.
I think the folks who covered it up for 8 months, or the morons who (threw the rocks in a hole and brought the nuclear-contaminated buckets back) should lose all their power and position. That is an amazingly bad decision.
Lucky thing some kid walked around with a geiger counter. He recorded the levels, so the numbers that officials are hiding, he knows them. His counter can be tested and certified by a decent national lab, and the exact and calibrated level of the radiation determined. And those contaminated buckets tell something about the material that was in them.
Ore shmore. It is a radioactive substance that gives off dangerous levels of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, as well as nuclear byproducts like radon and other gaseous nuclear isotopes.
Get more than the "top paragraph summary" that NPR did on the original AZ Central article by reading it in its entirety.
> Lucky thing some kid walked around with a geiger counter. He recorded the levels, so the numbers that officials are hiding, he knows them. His counter can be tested
Neither the linked article nor your's said anything about what kind of "geiger counter" this kid had; whether it was something picked up off ebay, an old civil defence unit, or some kit or custom made thing from Electronic Goldmine (a native AZ electronics surplus and education kit supplier - https://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/)...
It's very well possible that the kid has no real numbers; that is completely unknown.
I'd be willing to bet you could walk into an old mining bar in Flagstaff and have more exposure to natural radiation used in the building materials than you'd experience from these buckets of old ore. Natural radiation sources like these are all over the place in Arizona.
The only real danger I could see and understand, though, is whether these buckets were covered or open; could someone or a kid have "dug through them" with their hands, or been in closer proximity to the material inside - where the dust or whatnot could be left on their hands to be ingested or inhaled in some manner.
That would be a much different situation than merely being near it for a small amount of time.
> where the dust or whatnot could be left on their hands to be ingested or inhaled in some manner.
This by far would be my number one concern. Proximity doesn't seem to be much to worry about (238-Uranium has an alpha decay and doesn't travel far in air). But inhaling or ingesting radioactive material completely changes the danger level.
> Natural radiation sources like these are all over the place in Arizona.
Or... Grand Central Station. But... you have to consider context, which a lot of reporters don't. Consider this quote.
"It's worth noting that if Grand Central Station were a nuclear power plant, it would be shut down for exceeding the maximum allowable annual dose of radiation for employees."[0]
Yikes! We can trace down the dosage level to 120mrem/yr[1] (1.2mSv), which we can indeed see is on the order of average dosages for radiation workers [2] or 1/20th of the allowable dosage! BUT we can look at [2] more and see that 100mSv is "Lowest annual level at which increase in cancer risk is evident (UNSCEAR)" (threshold model).
So when I see articles like this I'm always a tad hesitant to even read them. They frequently focus on the first part of the last paragraph and give no indication to what these things mean. Or even worse, are misleading like that gizmodo article (I would in fact call this dangerous reporting). Radiation quotas are purposefully (and I agree with this) put to be far below what one might also call "safe" (I'd _upper bound_ "safe" as <100mSv/yr but think most would agree 20mSv is "safe"). Yeah, we should pay attention and not expose ourselves to radiation unnecessarily, but let's also be realistic about the danger (especially when we're in such dire need if we're going to solve our climate problem).
Hysteria like this is why it's almost impossible to have rational conversations about things like radiation or nuclear power.
> ...something that resulted in the miscarriage, or birth defects of the child of any pregnant woman who stood near that closet for just a few minutes.
If we really are talking about a couple of buckets of uranium ore, then no, standing near them for a few minutes will not cause miscarriages or birth defects. Even the AZ Central article, in the midst of its fear mongering, says, "Just 5 feet from the buckets, there was a zero reading." The rest of the article is no more helpful, giving not nearly enough context to the cited measurement for readers to draw any conclusions.
> It is a radioactive substance that gives off dangerous levels of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, as well as nuclear byproducts like radon and other gaseous nuclear isotopes.
Radon yes, and as I learned from another HN thread regarding this same story, radon can be generated at much higher rates than I ever realized. However this is highly unlikely to affect anyone who didn't spend extended periods of time in an enclosed (or sub-grade) space with the ore.
Gamma radiation here wouldn't be significant. Alpha radiation is stopped by mere inches of air. As with alpha, beta radiation is only hazardous if the material is inhaled or ingested. And aside from radon, there are no gaseous elements in uranium's decay chain.
I suppose, if the rocks were chalky and they were taken out the bucket and played with frequently, there could be some kind of inhalation risk. On the other hand, mineral dust is heavy, and typically settles out of the air too quickly to be a significant inhalation hazard. We see something similar with lead, where leaded dust from paint and vinyl mini-blinds is mainly a hazard to babies and little kids who can get their faces right in it, or eat things off floors and window sills.
Otherwise, it's hard for me to imagine how this material could have posed a health hazard to visitors.
Using a wavelength transformation to send this through the non-absorption windows means more energy hits the ground and you aren't hacking terrestrial albedo in a bad way. That global warming is about absorption of sunlight, so putting a lot more sunlight on the same absorption percent means more heat retained. It doesn't do any good to cut gwp materials in the air, then increase sunlight hitting the atmosphere in a way that makes heat retention higher.
If you have "fusion in a bottle" and don't want to share, this is a decent way to make it harder to steal/damage/use-for-terrorism.
Also, giant beam transmission facilities and giant beam weapons aren't so different from each other. There are going to be detectable critical differences, but with some modifications one can be made into the other.
Radiation damage is going to be a challenge but satellites do with solar for a long time. Onboard robots?
this is good that they are there.
It means that the radioactive material can be sequestered.
It means that the radioactive material can be inventoried, and escapee content determined.
There is a lagged autoregressive technique used in forensic analysis that allows 3d reconstruction using 1d (mic) sound.
A CNN should be able to back that out too, and do other things like regenerate a 3d space. In the right, high-fidelity, acoustic tracks could be the spatial information to reconstruct a stage and a performance. It would be neat/beautiful/(possibly very powerful) to back video out of audio in that way.
I love how commercials "follow you around". If I search for diamond rings in a browser on one computer, they suddenly materialize everywhere.
I tried it with Duck-Duck-go, searching for something I nearly never search for, something such that the ads follow you around. I just searched in DDG, but did not go to the end website. I then resumed non-DDG browsing, and those came up as ads. I don't know if they are looking at image caches, or loading javascript libraries.
You know, there are illegal cell phones in prisons. If the prison folks have the ability to determine whose voice is speaking, then they can related an outgoing cell signal at the prison to a particular incarcerated person.
It would be like a wire-tap without a warrant. Do they need a warrant for someone already in prison?
It is going to be funny/ironic when the "Social Credit" system in China has voice-fingerprints of nearly every person under surveillance, so that words heard by any listening device would be admissible to analysis. They could then detect someone saying things of folks in power, both in adherence to political norms, and also in detection of fraud.
The suicide rate should bump itself up substantially above 50 per 100k, especially for younger demographics. It should then plateau for the foreseeable future.
I really really really really hope that I am wrong. We have folks with no vision in charge, and they drove a big ship into the rocks: my hypothesis is that this is onset/ramp-up of body count.