Earthquake has hit Japan

[rancor]

address plz. Sounds like a blast. I've got a karaoke machine and a margarita mixer on wheels at my house. We can party like its the end of the world..

[GaijinPunch]

We can party like its the end of the world..[/img]

What do you mean "like".

[moozooh]

Japan has officially promoted the accident to INES level 7, the highest level (same as Chernobyl). It doesn't mean anything new per se, but it does indicate they're being more honest on the matter. It also doesn't mean the situation is anywhere as bad as it was in Chernobyl, but unfortunately we haven't seen the end of the story yet.

Slightly less depressing news is that environment radiation levels, according to every monitoring chart I can find, have been on the decline for the past two weeks. (Except the seawater, obviously.) As such, background radiation level in Tokyo is barely above the norm nowadays.

[sven666]

Japan has officially promoted the accident to INES level 7, the highest level (same as Chernobyl). It doesn't mean anything new per se, but it does indicate they're being more honest on the matter. It also doesn't mean the situation is anywhere as bad as it was in Chernobyl, but unfortunately we haven't seen the end of the story yet.

just saw this on the news here aswell, they also claimed it was reported that thankfully the radiation leakage is only 1/10th of that of chernobyl...

.. yeah thank fuck for that, chernobyl only screwed over half of europe north of sweden still has hazardous levels of fallout on a bad day.

[dcharlie]

What do you mean "like".

yeah, let's just get our 'mutant' on !

[greg]

Fortunately you'd never see anything like this at the Japanese family restaurant Denny's

Dude, bacon rocks. OK, maybe bacon ice cream is a gross concept, but come on. Bacon makes most everything better.

What sucks about Denny's in Japan is that they don't have Grand Slam breakfasts. At least not since the last one I ever went to.

[GaijinPunch]

What sucks about Denny's in Japan is that they don't have Grand Slam breakfasts. At least not since the last one I ever went to.

What sucks is that Denny's is a family restaurant... not a truck stop grease pit like it is in America, where rednecks and young punks go after concerts/clubbing/bar hopping assuming they've not ingested tons of stimulants.

However, on that note, we used to go to Jonathan's on Sunday mornings about 9 to 10AM and fucking pound beers after a big night out. I'm sure we scarred a few children.

[greg]

What sucks is that Denny's is a family restaurant... not a truck stop grease pit like it is in America, where rednecks and young punks go after concerts/clubbing/bar hopping assuming they've not ingested tons of stimulants.

Ah yeah, I'd forgotten about that element. I used to be a part of that, to an extent, disassociating myself with those associated with my crowd being refused service and getting kicked out of Denny's.

However, on that note, we used to go to Jonathan's on Sunday mornings about 9 to 10AM and fucking pound beers after a bit night out. I'm sure we scarred a few children.

Ah, Jonathan's is awesome. Way better than Japanese Denny's. Gusto/Skylark has quality hamburgers. Gosh, two more weeks. I'm homesick for Japan.

[GaijinPunch]

being refused service and getting kicked out of Denny's.

Every time I go to Denny's it's nothing but a bunch of characters... and my family. I think once the 50 year old version of Flo from Alice (that looked 70 thanks to a lifetime of smoking) waited on us. Caked on make-up included.

[greg]

Every time I go to Denny's it's nothing but a bunch of characters... and my family. I think once the 50 year old version of Flo from Alice (that looked 70 thanks to a lifetime of smoking) waited on us. Caked on make-up included.

Well kiss my grits!

For those in the USA, right now the National Geographic channel is showing a documentary on the earthquake. It will repeat an hour after it finishes.

[GaijinPunch]

The Nova special is worth watching as well, even though a bit disconcerting.

[rancor]

FFFFUUUUUCCCKKK that was just a big quake we had... Honestly I think I have this earthquake disease thats going around..

"Earthquake Drunk"

[GaijinPunch]

Earthquake Du Jour: Tochigi 5.9

As you were...

EDIT: Haha -- you beat me to it. Yeah, my wife thinks I'm an idiot for grabbing my helmet every time it shakes. "He who laughs last...", no? Also, notice how it's he who laughs last, not "she".

[GaijinPunch]

How on Earth did I miss this gem? Nancy Grace is a cunt ball and always has been. I never knew she pulled her typical bullshit with the radiation issue.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/ ... r-science/

[GaijinPunch]

Here's another (recent) one of Michio Kaku, still taking on the very end of the spectrum:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrxKqLeZ ... ded#at=408

Thoughts?

[dcharlie]

Thoughts?

i'm baffled why a doctor of nuclear physics is surprised that the containment of a reactor is ten years.

Oh, and Nancy Grace is a horrible thick cunt.

[moozooh]

Here's another (recent) one of Michio Kaku, still taking on the very end of the spectrum:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrxKqLeZ ... ded#at=408

Thoughts?

His position is in fact rather close to what I felt coming from austere at the beginning of this thread, given that they both have background in physics and thus both do understand some of the nuances that general populace doesn't due to (forgivable) lack of insight. However, this also means they tend to exaggerate the problem relatively to anything else, rather than explicitly helping to put things into perspective, just because they know its dangers better. Such as, for instance, when talking about the levels of radiation exceeding legal limits by a factor of a million close to the site, it needs to be said that the levels that are actually reaching an average person not happening to be leisurely swimming around the outlet are much smaller. And, since these levels in no way guarantee anything with a 100% confidence, we are seeing a picture roughly close to the following: in case you are to have a cancer/leukemia, if previously you had a 0.000001% chance of getting a case of it as a direct consequence of being at a certain distance from the Fukushima station, now you have a 1% chance (a factor of million working for it!). That is, in case you are to actually have cancer instead of dying to a gazillion of other things that are not really any less likely to kill you or harm you in some way.

It all comes to deciding how big of a chance you're willing to take, and, unless you are receiving really high doses of radiation that only the cleanup and maintenance workers currently engaged at the site are exposed to, the chance is realistically too small to have any kind of statistical backup to help you make a decision not based on hunches, guesses, and whatnot. Tom Tuohy, who has basically stared into the open reactor undergoing a criticality incident while putting out the Windscale fire has received a dose of radiation more than pretty much any one of us here receives during our entire lifetime. He died of old age at 91. Maybe the radiation he received has reduced his life span from potential 120 years to just 91, we wouldn't know that. But to die at 91 is not something to be ashamed of either. Most of us aren't expecting even that much, and personally, 91 years is even more than I would like to have to myself (being old for so damn long is not very pleasant at all). But then there are young people who die to skin cancer from being exposed to something as trivial as afternoon sun. You won't tell which group you belong to until you live to see for yourself. You can, and should, be careful and take precautions (like, if you can do without eating the sea products from the eastern coast of Japan, it's a good idea to do so), but without exaggerating the significance of any given danger relatively to any other one. Such as, if you smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, aren't in a good shape, have a tendency to cross streets without waiting for a green light, or live in a neighborhood where criminals can be found, you probably have a lot more to worry about than a few more unstable atoms entering your body. After all you have no less than several thousands of them inside yourself at any given time already, and they're all doing the exact same things as those fission products spewed by melting reactors.

So when Kaku is talking that the general public (the taxpayers) is not receiving the full truth about nuclear power stations, it may help to know that they aren't receiving the full truth about any other way of harvesting energy either! This should be mentioned explicitly to avoid coming to an uninformed conclusion that there is some sort of information concealment that is exclusive to nuclear energy. The moratorium he's talking about has to deal with that in the first place.

[GaijinPunch]

I can see most of that, and agree for the most part. I guess his analogy of it being as stable as someone hanging on to a cliff by their finger nails is what doesn't settle with me. Certainly if a secondary Earthquake is a risk to this plant, a primary Earthquake is a risk to any other plant in Japan.

[greg]

I did not know who Nancy Grace was until I read about her in this thread. What a pinhead.

So apparently Japan copied my idea for sending in badass robots into the nuclear reactor.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110418/ap_ ... earthquake
Japan should have at least thanked me for my genius idea.

[GaijinPunch]

I did not know who Nancy Grace was until I read about her in this thread. What a pinhead.

Go buy some popcorn and type her name in to Youtube. She is a cunt... no more, no less. She only has a job so CNN can get a handful of Fox News viewers. She is "execute first, try later".

Robot quote.

I think someone on every geek-related forum on the planet had that idea. I know someone did at Assembler at least.

[Barrakketh]

What I find most disturbing about Nancy Grace is not her fucked up view of the justice system in the States and how she thinks it should work, but that she has a Master's degree in law and a J.D. and still holds those views.

[dcharlie]

What I find most disturbing about Nancy Grace is not her fucked up view of the justice system in the States and how she thinks it should work, but that she has a Master's degree in law and a J.D. and still holds those views.

could be part of an ever growing set of people looking to pander to the ill-informed masses by appearing to be thicker than they actually are....

Oh no wait , she is just a cunt - my mistake :

Suicide of interviewee Melinda Duckett

In 2006, 21-year-old Melinda Duckett committed suicide following an interview conducted by Grace concerning the disappearance of Duckett's 2-year-old son Trenton.[17]

Grace interviewed Duckett less than two weeks after the child went missing, questioning her for her alleged lack of openness regarding her son's disappearance, asking Duckett "Where were you? Why aren't you telling us where you were that day?"[18] Duckett appeared confused and was unable to answer whether or not she had taken a polygraph test. When Grace asked her why she could not account for specific details, Duckett began to reply, "Because I was told not to," to which Grace responded, "Ms. Duckett, you are not telling us for a reason. What is the reason? You refuse to give even the simplest facts of where you were with your son before he went missing. It is day twelve." According to the CNN transcript, Duckett replied, "(INAUDIBLE) with all media. It's not just there, just all media. Period." Grace then moved on to a media psychologist who asserted that Duckett was "skirting around the issue."[17][18]

The next day, before the airing of the show, Duckett shot herself, a death that relatives claim was influenced by media scrutiny, particularly from Grace.[17][19] Speaking to The Orlando Sentinel, Duckett's grandfather Bill Eubank said, "Nancy Grace and the others, they just bashed her to the end. She was not one anyone ever would have thought of to do something like this."[17] CNN has also been criticized for allowing the show to air in the wake of Duckett's suicide.[20] Police investigating the case had not named Melinda Duckett as a suspect in the case at the time, but after her suicide the police did say that, as nearly all parents are in missing-child cases, she was a suspect from the beginning.[17]

In an interview on Good Morning America, Nancy Grace said in reaction to events that "If anything, I would suggest that guilt made her commit suicide. To suggest that a 15- or 20-minute interview can cause someone to commit suicide is focusing on the wrong thing."[21] She then said that, while she sympathized with the family, she knew from her own experience as a victim of crime that such people look for somebody else to blame.[22]

While describing it as an "extremely sad development," Janine Iamunno, a spokeswoman for Grace,[17] said that her program would continue to follow the case as they had a "responsibility to bring attention to this case in the hopes of helping find Trenton Duckett." Grace commented that "I do not feel that our show is to blame for what happened to Melinda Duckett. The truth is not always nice or polite or easy to go down. Sometimes it's harsh, and it hurts."[17]

During the Elizabeth Smart case, when suspect Richard Ricci was arrested by police on the basis that he had a criminal record and had worked on the Smarts' home, Grace immediately and repeatedly proclaimed on CourtTV and CNN's Larry King that Ricci "was guilty," although there was little evidence to support this claim. She also suggested publicly that Ricci's girlfriend was involved in the cover-up of his alleged crime. Grace continued to accuse Ricci, though he died while in custody.[28]

It was later revealed that Smart was kidnapped by Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee, two individuals with whom Richard Ricci had no connection.[29]

When CourtTV confronted Grace seven months later to ask whether she was incorrect in her assertion that Ricci was guilty, and whether or not she felt bad about it in any way, she stated that Ricci was "a known ex-con, a known felon, and brought suspicion on himself, so who could blame anyone for claiming he was the perpetrator?" When Larry King asked her about the matter, she equated criticism of herself with criticism of the police in the case. She said: "I'm not letting you take the police with me on a guilt trip."[30]

so who could blame anyone for claiming he was the perpetrator? - you'd hope someone with a fucking law degree would be able to answer their own question. Jesus, do they give out degrees with boxes of Cherrios or something now?

[Blackbird]

How do I put this... some colleges in the US are encouraged to limp students through if they are exerting even minimal effort. After all, an enrolled student can still pay the tuition fees...

Maybe this is why my Bachelor's degree isn't worth anything to my potential employers.

[ZOM]

http://eclinik.wordpress.com/vital-issu ... ford/japan

[Udderdude]

Crazy people on the internet? Who would've thought.

[Blackbird]

He missed April Fools by a couple of days.

[burgerkingdiamond]

Can anybody give any info about the current radiation/contamination levels in Tokyo? I'm supposed to go on a work trip to Sasebo, which is far south. I'm not worried about that part, but we are supposed to fly to Narita and then take bus to Haneda then fly to Fukuoka. Most people who are supposed to go are refusing to fly to Tokyo because it is relatively close to Fukushima. I don't think that it should be that big a deal because we will likely only be there for a few hours. But they are making me doubt the decision to go.

Unfortunately the Government red tape BS will not allow for any other travel accomodations outside of Narita/Haneda.

[moozooh]

Background radiation in Tokyo is normal atm (might even be lower than where you are now).

[rancor]

Can anybody give any info about the current radiation/contamination levels in Tokyo?

Isn't even an issue here. You can check these two sources.

This one is updated every 20 minutes:

http://park30.wakwak.com/~weather/uploa ... iation.jpg

This one is updated daily, but the scan is a bit more intense I think:

http://metropolis.co.jp/quake/quake-201 ... on-levels/

[originalz]

Metropolis also posts daily readings of radiation and water contamination in a fairly easy to understand format:

http://metropolis.co.jp/quake/

As you can see, absolutely nothing to worry about.