People who live in farming communities tend to own machinery. They don't need advance notice any more than a typical suburbanite needs advance planning to drive a car somewhere.
EU is chucking subsidies to farmers to (among other things) spend on this kind of stuff all the time, around here it's not uncommon to see totally unproductive small farms with hundreds of thousands in tractors and machinery.
It's like social spending to keep people living in rural areas.
Is it relevant? It's writing about a pool for storing spent fuel, which is not a part of the actual reactor system.
This incident report says that the worker fell into a "reactor cavity" containing water and that there was a measurable amount of radiation detected in their hair after the initial clean-up. The two situations don't seem remotely compatible to me.
Yeah, no shit. But, come on, don't play dumb. By measurable, I obviously meant "above normal background". Something that shouldn't have been possible if, as described in the xkcd post, the water should have had less radioactivity than normal background. Combined with the fact that the post was literally about a different kind of pool than the one involved in the accident, it was reasonable to question whether the post was actually relevant.
I agree this was not a serious incident, and I never really though it was. (I'm extremely pro-nuclear, for the record.) But at the time I posted, the comment section was about 8 people posting the xkcd link at once (with no additional commentary), and few others reading it and saying "oh, no problem then", with literally nobody pointing out the discrepancies, or explaining exactly what a "reactor cavity" means in this context.
Completely separate companies, both called Yamaha. One was spun off from the other, but I don't think there was ever a time when the same company sold both. (Basically, the musical instrument company was redirected to making war materiel during WWII. After the war, they didn't want to just throw away all of their new industrial capacity so they spun off a company to make use of all their new equipment and expertise and then went back to making instruments.)
Not sure about the meaning of your asterisk, but the Nokian Tyres corporation is not related to Nokia the telecoms co, other than being founded in the same town.
Nokia did manufacture rubber boots though, before they spun off the footwear division in 1990 and went all in on electronics.
This changed in 1988 with the formation of an LLC, in 1995 they went public and in 2003 shares still held by the parent company were sold off to Bridgestone.
>I had no idea you've never heard of it. Thanks for keeping us informed.
I see.
In that case, you'll appreciate the fact that the Three Musketeers chocolate bar bears no relationship to Alexander Dumas, the author of the famed book series featuring D'Artagnan and three musketeers.
You might also be interested to learn that Zenit launch vehicles are not made by the organization that produces Zenit optics and cameras.
Most crucially, Lucky grocery store chain in California turns out to be completely different from the Korean Lucky chemical products and electronics conglomerate (known as "Lucky GoldStar" after merging its chem and electronics wings, and, currently, "LG").
I didn't realize when I was a kid that the Yamaha music company came first.
I remember being confused when looking at high end saxophones that one was made by an old French company (that made sense, France makes many fine luxury goods including instruments) and the other was (in my mind) made by a motorcycle company. How could a motorcycle company possibly have compiled the expertise to make high end musical instruments when most musical instrument companies were chasing the low end of the market at the time?
But Yamaha music (1887) was started only 2 years after Selmer (1885). They got their start making reed organs. Reed organs (1) are technical, (2) make sound with reeds, and (3) are luxury items. So their expertise in sax (a reed instrument) and synthesizers (technical keyboard instruments) makes a ton of sense.
It even says in your link "The former motorcycle division was established in 1955 as Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd., which started as an affiliated company but has been spun-off as its own independent company. "
It would be nice if you explained what you're talking about, rather than just assuming everybody knows. Whatever it is, you come off as someone "protesting too much" by taking a simple reference to WWII as being an attack on Switzerland. Apparently over some sort of alleged Nazi collaboration? That's kind of a stretch.
For what it's worth, I took them to mean "Did not suffer significant population losses, widespread physical devastation, and exorbitant military expenditures during WWII, and so found themselves in a much stronger economic position than all the other major European countries in the decades that followed". I don't understand why you seem to have a different interpretation, especially one that you yourself describe as "baffling" and "not relevant" to the question of national wealth.
As I recall from coverage at the time, Starbuck's's board specifically wanted him, they rolled out the red carpet to lure him away from Chipotle, and he insisted on the jet arrangement as a condition of taking the job because he didn't want to move his family to Seattle.
Interesting. Now I have a question about that video, and I think I'm more likely to get a good answer from someone here than in the comments there, so here goes:
Tom says that because that's the only radon cave that can turn the flow of radon on and off at will, it's the only place where you could (in theory) run a double-blind experiment on radon exposure therapy.
My question is: would it not be just as possible to do that in a laboratory setting? Surely there are already lab facilities in the world that are set up for double blind "exposure" experiments of that sort, with easy control of dosages, flow rates, etc. Is the problem that radon gas too expensive to harvest or store safely? Why is that cave the only feasible option?
EDIT: It now occurs to me that the answer could be "because the half life of radon is to short to transport it, so you would basically have to generate it in the lab by getting an enormous amount of uranium in one place and letting it decay and find some way of filtering the byproducts to isolate the radon in a way that putting it under a huge layer of bedrock does naturally." Sounds plausible to me, but does anyone know if that's the case?
That was my first instinct as well, but I thought through it a little more and now it seems intuitively correct to me.
-First of all, it's intuitive to me that the "candidate" points generated in the cube are randomly distributed without bias throughout the volume of the cube. That's almost by definition.
-Once you discard all of the points outside the sphere, you're left with points that are randomly distributed throughout the volume of the sphere. I think that would be true for any shape that you cut out of the cube. So this "discard" method can be used to create randomly distributed points in any 3d volume of arbitrary shape (other than maybe one of those weird pathological topologies.)
-Once the evenly distributed points are projected to the surface of the sphere, you're essentially collapsing each radial line of points down to a single point on the sphere. And since each radial line has complete rotational symmetry with every other radial line, each point on the surface of the sphere is equally likely to be chosen via this process.
That's not a rigorous proof by any means, but I've satisfied myself that it's true and would be surprised if it turned out not to be.
To me, it seems like there would be less likelihood of points being generated near the surface of the sphere, and that should have some sort of impact.
OK, look at it this way. Imagine that, after you generate the points randomly in the cube, and discard those outside the sphere, you then convert the remaining points into 3D polar coordinates (AKA spherical coordinates [0]). This doesn't change the distribution at all, just the numerical representation. So each point is described by three numbers, r, theta, and phi.
You're correctly pointing out that the values of r won't be uniformly distributed. There will be many more points where the value of r is close to 1 then there will be where the value of r is close to 0. This is a natural consequence of the fact that the points are uniformly distributed throughout the volume, but there's more volume near the surface than there is near the center. That's all true.
But now look at the final step. By projecting every point to the surface of the sphere, you've just overwritten every single point's r-coordinate with r=1. Any bias in the distribution of r has been discarded. This step is essentially saying "ignore r, all we care about are the values of theta and phi."
