Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:So, about 1 grocery banana display (Score 1) 65

But as has been pointed out numerous times here, the banana scale is flawed because your body regulates the amount of potassium it absorbs, and keeps it away from areas where it could do damage. That's very, very different from something in the environment causing a random wasps nest to experience this amount of exposure.

Ok, so think of it as one banana tree with a normal, non-radioactive wasp nest up in the bananas. That's the same threat, from both radiation and stings.

Yes, they should figure out where the exposure is coming from.

No, it does not even make my top 100 list of "things to panic about in the US in 2025".

Comment So, about 1 grocery banana display (Score 4, Interesting) 65

a wasp nest with a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations

Disappontingly, that is not a specific federal regulation for radioactive wasps.

Digging into the actual measurement a bit more... The linked report claims 100,000 dpm/100 cm2 beta/gamma. If the wasp nest is about 10x10cm, that would be 100,000 disintegrations/minute = 45 nanocuries, or about the same as 100 bananas (~0.5 nanocuries/banana). Which is about what was on the shelf at my grocery store when I bought bananas yesterday.

If there were four radioactive wasp nests in my grocery store, the problem isn't the radiation. It's the wasps.

Comment Are grocery stores making you unable to farm? (Score 1) 196

Are calculators making you less able to do basic math in your head?

Do anti-lock brakes and lane assist make you less able to pay attention to the road?

Does religion or any other similar belief system (for example, those of the far-left or far-right) make it harder for people to think critically?

Well, yes. Or more precisely, they allow people who can't do those things well anyway to get by. The average American adult functions at a middle school level academically. (And I'm pretty sure socially, too.)

Take away all of that assistance, and we're not going to make everyone smarter. The wetware in our skulls evolved to solve the problems we had 10,000 years ago. We've done amazingly well with better education methods and better nutrition and better healthcare. But the average person today is simply not capable of handling the average problems of today.

The bigger question is whether we will use GPT as helpful assistance, to enable people to do more than they otherwise would be capable of? Or will we simply use it as this century's opiate of the masses.

Comment Workers don't want to be as productive? (Score 1) 173

From Nature:

The study’s authors had wondered whether a condensed working week would add to employees’ stress. “When workers want to deliver the same productivity, they might work very rapidly to get the job done, and their well-being might actually worsen,” says lead author Wen Fan, a sociologist at Boston College in Massachusetts. “But that’s not what we found.”

I assume that means they didn't find workers want to deliver the same productivity.

Comment Just don't typo Anker's form (Score 1) 25

So, I have one of the power banks. And I'm not 100% sure I'm reading the serial number properly, because it's years old and the writing is rubbing off the power bank.

I would have expected the form to have 3 outputs:
- Yes
- No
- Invalid serial number

But the form is apparently only looking for exact matches, and saying ANYTHING else isn't effected. If you put in "NoSuchSerial", it'll say "not affected".

This gives me very little confidence my unit is not affected. And makes me very hesitant to buy anything Anker again.

Does anyone have a list of affected serial numbers?

Comment I have altered the deal (Score 1) 122

Yeah, the government investing in this would so totally be "big brother watching" heh....

Can't tell if sarcasm.

Step 1: Provide funding for free and interoperable social networks.
Step 2: Wait for those networks to become dependent on said funding.
Step 3: Attach strings to funding, or cut it off if they don't comply with government demands.

See "Corporation for Public Broadcasting" and "Harvard".

Slashdot Top Deals

"An open mind has but one disadvantage: it collects dirt." -- a saying at RPI

Working...